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Well, the first thing I am going to say is that the author of the article is guilty of the same knee jerk reaction that is to be expected from the press in general. He is also guilty of pandering to the people that would deny us many of our rights, not just our right to bear arms. These same people would deny us of our right to freedom of speech and call it political correctness, deny us of our right to peaceable assembly for the same reason, and deny us of everything that they disagree with. The real problem with most so-called liberals is that they want to appear progressive in their beliefs when they fall back upon the same tactics of forcing others to bend to their wishes by legislating any speech, behavior or beliefs that they disagree with out of existence and making criminals of dissenters.

I will further state that these people are only liberals in name (thus the reason for calling them so-called) in the first place. There is nothing wrong with being a liberal; the founding fathers themselves were liberals to the bone. They put forth new ideas of government, new ideas of tolerance by the government and even more radical ideas about human kinds rights in regards to religion, speech and just about everything else. It was their liberalism that made them criminals in the eyes of the crown (a bastion of conservatism if there ever was one).

Let’s face it; the basis of this nation, the Constitution, is a liberal document to its very core. It is this document that makes me a liberal in every sense of the word. It is this document that allows people to believe and worship as they wish rather than bowing down to whatever dogma the crown or government forces upon us. It is this document that gives us very liberal freedoms in the way we are governed, elect our leaders and establish our system of justice. The idea that one is innocent until proven guilty is a liberal idea, especially when compared to the legal system of the founding father’s time as well as when compared to much of the world’s legal systems in which you are assumed to be guilty and given little chance to defend yourself.

So yes, I am a liberal in many things, in no small part, because of the very document that gives us our freedoms and established our nation. Liberal is not a dirty word, unless you believe that the liberals who wrote the constitution were evil men for bucking against the status quo and choosing to not be conservative in their beliefs.

No, the writer of this article is not a liberal in any sense of the word because he is not tolerant of those who believe differently than he does and does not value the very foundation upon which this nation was established. If anything, he is a mockery of the great liberal men who fought to establish a free nation made up of freethinkers who are not constrained by narrowness of thought and purpose. To call Mr. Plate a liberal is an insult to the great liberal thinkers who founded this nation as well as those who came even before them and established the liberal philosophies upon which our founding fathers based our version of government and the freedoms that it grants us.

So please stop referring to these fascist writers and sycophants who would force their beliefs upon us as liberals as they are not in any way shape or form liberal in their politics or beliefs. The definition of liberalism is, after all, a society with an emphasis on individual rights, that values freedom of thought, limitations on power, the rule of law, the free exchange of ideas, a market economy that supports free private enterprise, and a transparent system of government in which the rights of all citizens are protected. (All of these are embodied in the Constitution itself!) Most of the people who are referred to as liberals are really socialists and fascists, not liberals.