The intent of this ordinance is to protect people’s liberties and the small businesses who are really just families trying to make a living. There seems to be 3 categories of people who are strongly opposing us:
- Those who live in fear – These people believe that the only way we can be safe is for the government to make everyone do what they believe is best, applying a one size fits all approach, such as wear masks, take vaccines based on new, unproven technology, or keep us out of public places or from gathering.
- Those who are opposing it as a partisan issue – These people are opposed to the ordinance simply because it is backed by conservative republicans who believe in freedom. The group of people who oppose this conservative group do so mostly because of our support for the former US president whom they still hate so badly.
- Those who like power – This group is the people who currently work in government or did previously and maybe plan to do so again or they have connections to people in power who they use for their benefit. These people can’t live with the thought of giving up any power or influence. It is especially unbearable to these people that the county may have more power than they do because of the unspoken rivalry and power struggle between the city and county.
All of these groups are really stretching the imagination to come up with scenarios where this may “backfire” and they are mostly appealing to the fear group – saying that we need the city government to be able to keep us safe. The problem is that they are using dishonest interpretations of the ordinance. Read the ordinance for yourself and you can see that it does not have anything to do with first responders, it does not affect funding at all, and it doesn’t keep the city from being involved in emergency response. The only effect it has is that they cannot use a declared state of emergency as cover to take away our freedoms. Regardless of what any government thinks, our freedoms are God-given and they are not granted nor can they be taken away by the government. In fact, it is a more important role for the government to protect our freedom than try to find ways to protect their ability to infringe on them just for the sake of flexing power or in order to push some agenda.
So, since we are using example scenarios to attempt to sell one side of this, how about this one:
Currently, the City could use any number of emergencies to say that “for our safety”, they need to suspend the buying and selling of all firearms, or worse yet, they need to confiscate them all “temporarily”, but don’t worry “we’ll give them back”…
There are protections against the County doing that in the Kansas Emergency Management Act, but the City currently has a loophole. This ordinance would prevent that.
Vote Yes for your freedom!
Kevin Korb
Salina