We Need To Respect Gun Rights Despite Fears Of Foreign Agents

In the last few days, I’ve been seeing a story pop up on social media and on gun forums, telling us that Chinese military personnel have invaded the United States and are preparing to shoot us.

To be completely fair, I wouldn’t doubt for a second that Xi Jinping is slipping people in to the United States to do things we wouldn’t want done. The United States does this, too, and for good reasons. So, yes, we must be very vigilant and watch out for these kinds of threats, because they are very much real.

But, at the same time, we shouldn’t forget the horrors of communism and other authoritarian -isms that people around the world are dealing with. China isn’t in the midst of a purge like the Cultural Revolution, with tens of millions starving to death, but it also isn’t the utopia the Chinese government would like us to believe it is. Freedoms that were gained in the 1990s and 2000s are now being stripped away, and the return to more of a command economy is causing financial ruin for many people in China.

So, it also makes a lot of sense that people would legitimately flee China today. Xi Jinping’s China isn’t the China many young Chinese people grew up in, and they’re really looking for greener pastures in the United States.

This presents the United States with a big, big challenge.

On the one hand, U.S. citizens want America to be the country our ancestors came to when they left other parts of the world that weren’t free and prosperous. Freedom-loving people who are willing to work hard and make a better life is what America was built on, and we want good people who can help us continue the American project. We also don’t want people to suffer under communism or whatever Xi Jinping Thought would rightly be categorized as.

We also need to keep in mind that Chinese people fleeing Xi aren’t safe when they get into the United States. It’s well known that the CCP engages in a lot of transnational repression, including threatening, attacking and kidnapping people who make the government mad. So, getting the means of self defense not long after moving in isn’t unreasonable at all!

But, with the stream of people legitimately fleeing Xi’s China, an easy opportunity for infiltration is there for the Chinese government to take advantage of. What better cover for lies than the veneer of truth? By mixing in a small number of bad actors in with honest, hard-working people, it’s a lot harder for American officials to weed them out.

In the midst of this challenge, videos like this one start popping up on the internet:

牛逼哈哈哈 pic.twitter.com/3awprVX9oR

— 天哥 (@tiange0018) June 22, 2023

But, when I looked into this deeper, it isn’t what the conspiracy people are claiming. Some of the people out shooting are recent arrivals, but they’ve moved in with a relative who has been here for quite some time. So, it’s not new arrivals with no money getting ready to kill as much as a guy who wants to share a new freedom with friends and family who just arrived.

As for legalities, this isn’t illegal, either. Once an asylum seeker checks in, they become a U.S. resident, and they aren’t barred from possessing firearms. Yes, that presents a security gap that can be exploited, but there’s no indicator that these particular immigrants (who don’t seem to be very well trained) are taking advantage.

Sticking To Our Guns

While these people probably aren’t up to no good and don’t seem to be breaking any laws, I have seen people disapprove in spite of all that. After all, the Second Amendment is for citizens! But, I think we need to remind ourselves that the Second Amendment doesn’t grant us crap. The right to keep and bear arms is a natural right that predates the formation of the United States and applies to all people. Those who think the U.S. government has any business deciding who has gun rights and who doesn’t are falling into a mental trap laid by the civilian disarmament industry.

Worse, going even more extreme and placing Chinese asylum seekers and citizens of Chinese descent in internment camps would play right into the hands of the Chinese Communist Party. They’d have the perfect propaganda opportunity if they got to tell the world about how America doesn’t respect human rights, including the right to keep and bear arms. If we ignore them and disarm asylum seekers, Xi sends agents to threaten, torture, kidnap and otherwise abuse them.

So, instead of taking the easy but wrong way out, we need to put the work in of vetting the stream of asylum seekers better. We don’t have access to Chinese military records, but there are other ways to check the truthfulness of people’s stories and we could sort people into higher and lower risk demographics, only detaining those who are more likely to be a problem (single young men) for a more detailed process.

It also shouldn’t be very hard for the NICS system to be used to flag sales to asylum seekers. This could give law enforcement an opportunity to watch out for unreasonably large sales that an asylum seeker likely can’t afford and give opportunities to check in on them and see what they’re up to.

It’s also important that we don’t spread the idea that any Asian with a gun is a threat. There are many, many Asian-Americans who are upstanding citizens, many whose families have been here for as long as people of European descent have. If we knee-jerk react and start treating all Asian-American gun owners like dirt, we’re no better than the CCP.