Some time ago I was engaged in a very specific combat oriented training, during that training my instructor relayed a story to me that I have never been able to forget. While in a training situation himself in a room of over 200 people, an instructor came to the podium and announced that a simulation was about to take place, and that when each individual in the room felt it was appropriate to defend human life they should stand up.

To the rear of the room a door was suddenly kicked open and a man entered with a shotgun screaming explicates at a woman near the center of the room and announcing that he was going to kill her. He approached the woman with his weapon, took hold of her physically and dragged her from the room while she screamed and begged for help.

The instructor then returned to the podium and made the following statement; " Many of you have spent thousands of dollars to be here for a week and attend this training, and the truth is none of you should be here, because according to what I just witnessed, none of you have made the decision to defend human life! Owning and especially carrying a weapon is useless unless you have made a clear conscious decision to defend human life."

I was reminded of that scenario yesterday when Ryan Bundy stood beside me and said one of the most profound things I had heard, "I made a decision years ago to live as a FREE man."

So the question to you this very moment as you read these words is Have you decided to live free?

I thought about the context of this, and I would say that most of us think we are free. But how do we know we are? Are we free because we live in the United States? Because we recite the Pledge of Allegiance or sing the Star Spangled Banner? Or perhaps even more importantly do we think we are free because someone else told us we are?

Consider the story of Juneteenth. On January 1, 1863 Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation freeing those enslaved in the US at that time. On June 19th, 1865 Union troops arrived in Galveston Texas to find slaves still working as slaves, two and a half years after the fact. So why were these slaves who had been free for 2 1/2 years still acting as slaves? The answer is astoundingly simple, no one told them they were free! Do you need someone to tell you your free? Or will you decide in your own mind, of your own volition, and most importantly in your own heart, that you are free?

The great William Wallace of Scotland said this; “I tell ye true, liberty is the best of all things; never live beneath the noose of a servile halter.”  Your freedom my friends must not exist in laws, policies, or mandates, your freedom must exist, it must live, it must breathe, inside of you! At this moment I lay hold of my own freedom, and I ask you to decide to do the same. We must prepare to defend ourselves, our families, and others, but none of us can defend anything until we have decided that freedom is that thing we hold dear, then we may proceed to the front, lock arms with our fellow brothers and sisters, and hold the line.

Don Smith

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