I am always amazed — amazed — when anyone has the gall to dismiss, even laugh off, the suggestion that the right to keep and bear arms is a smart and necessary provision for a free society. Human history (not to mention current events!) is too chock-full of examples of nefarious regimes violently abusing and controlling their people, and the freedoms enjoyed by American citizens are the exception, not the rule. During a committee hearing of the Oregon state senate in considering their own state package of gun-control legislation last week, one testifier reminded the assembled lawmakers of one of the Second Amendment’s most crucial purposes, and of the real-world consequences of neglecting that purpose.

This guy.

In 1957 a Revolution … individuals … malicious individuals, masquerading as Democrats, revolutionaries, established a regime … a dictatorial regime … in my nation. Called Communism, Socialism, Stalinism, Marxism, and whatever other named -ism you want to put on it. The reason why it was done was to take away the guns from the People. The right of the People to wear guns. That is a God-given Right. It’s not given by anybody. It’s not given by any group. It’s the same thing as freedom, which is a God-given Right. And no one, absolutely no one, has the authority to take it away. To cease to defend the Second Amendment, and my God-given Right of freedom, will cease only with my death.

I’ve been through it. I’ve been there. You people don’t know what freedom is because you never lost it. You haven’t been tortured. You haven’t been [sic] assassinations, you haven’t been mothers begging for the life of their son not to be killed because the only reason is they wanted to be free. And they killed the mothers and they killed the son.

So my way to protest, the way to oppose, because if we keep tangling with the Second Amendment, we are open the same way that Cuba was open for Communism. China, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Venezuela, on and on. A dictatorial regime that will destroy this country, in the same way that it destroyed those ones that I mentioned to you.