How JP Sears Transitioned from Anti-Gun to Pro-Gun (Hint: Death Threats!)
It requires little elaboration to understand why receiving death threats might sharpen one’s opinions on the merits of gun ownership.
I would guess that somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 percent of my readers are familiar with JP Sears. He had a way of hilariously skewering crazy social trends without being overtly ideological. We weren’t even completely sure where he stood, but we knew he had to be at least in part on the side of sanity.
Recently, Sears has become much more open about his views. And it turns out that one issue on which from our point of view Sears had been unsound was guns.
He had a fairly rapid recent conversion on the subject. Here’s an excerpt from his episode in the forthcoming Firearms and Freedoms docuseries:
Sears: When I started seeing our freedoms getting eroded, my mind really started to pivot on guns, going from “I think we’d be better off without guns” to neutral to quickly “oh, no, no, guns are very essential to protect the sovereignty of the individual and truly the U.S. Constitution and what America is founded on, which is freedom.”
Interviewer: What made you start looking at that differently?
Sears: I started looking at the pandemic and the restrictions erosions of freedom. I think a couple of things. One is when the goalposts started to be moved.
Interviewer: Which was only two weeks.
Sears: Yeah, we we’re still in the first 15 days to slow the spread. Time is going slow, apparently. So the goalposts start getting moved. And I had my suspicions right from the get-go by goalposts getting moved, suspicions start to be confirmed, and I start using my own critical thinking about here’s what we know, here’s what’s being implemented; something doesn’t add up. So I would say the beginning of March 2020, I was fairly anti-gun. End of March 2020, I was pretty damn pro-gun.
Interviewer: Wow, that was fast.
Sears: It was fast. It’s a rebirth.
Interviewer: This switch happened really fast for you. You were not anti-gun, but like gun restrictions, all that made sense. Don’t need a gun in this country, you’re in a good area, to yeah, I need guns.
To me, it’s interesting you didn’t really mention self-defense. This is against a tyrannical government. You went there first?
Sears: I did go there first. And for me, self-defense is a part of it. And truly my biggest passion for guns is in fact to protect U.S. citizens from a tyrannical government — which honestly, part of me hears myself say that and it’s like, no, that’s crazy, because I spent the first 39 years of my life bathing in ignorance of tyrannical governments. They could never happen here.
Yet my own critical thinking says that’s very much happening here. It could certainly go further, but I see things as, tyrannical government corruption is happening here. So that was the biggest switch in my mind.
And then of course, you mentioned self-defense. That’s not insignificant in my mind. I’ve had being in the public eye to a degree, I’ve had death threats come in against me and my family.
Interviewer: Well, because you’ve chosen a side.
Sears: I’ve chosen I would say the epicenter of freedom. People rally against freedom because maybe communism will work this time. Never has before…. I don’t take myself too seriously, but I take my family’s safety extremely seriously. So the first time we encountered death threats, that was the the motivation to actually purchase my first gun.
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