Freedom Quote by Lyn Nofziger

Nofziger’s line is less a safety argument than a legitimacy argument: it reframes private gun ownership as a standing vote of no confidence in the state. The first clause nods to the familiar, almost household rationale (crime), then briskly demotes it. The pivot - “more importantly” - is the tell. The real audience isn’t the burglar; it’s the citizen who suspects that today’s public servant could become tomorrow’s oppressor. Guns, in this framing, aren’t tools so much as political hardware: a decentralized veto.

The rhetoric works by smuggling an extraordinary claim inside a commonsense one. “Protect us from criminals” is mundane; it invites agreement. Once you’re nodding along, the sentence escalates to “the ongoing threat of government,” which treats suspicion of democratic authority not as a fringe fear but as a permanent condition, like weather. “Ongoing” is doing heavy lifting: it implies that tyranny isn’t an aberration but a default setting the state must be perpetually deterred from.

Context matters. Nofziger was a Reagan-era Republican operative, speaking from a political moment when post-Vietnam mistrust, post-Watergate cynicism, and the rising power of the New Right made “government” an easy antagonist. The subtext is also strategic: if the government is a latent threat, then regulation itself can be cast as proof of hostility. The quote doesn’t just defend guns; it reorders civic life so that citizenship begins with armed skepticism, and governance becomes something to be endured under watch, not trusted and contested through institutions.