Cuban Exile Testifies Against Gun Control: ‘You People Don’t Know What Freedom Is Because You Never Lost It!’

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At a hearing last week in Salem, Oregon, local resident Manuel Martinez testified against gun-control measures. The Cuban-born Martinez spoke calmly but firmly about the dangers of gun control, incorporating his experience in Communist Cuba.

Martinez began by noting: “I oppose any manipulation, any regulation, elimination, or disruption of the Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States.”

Drawing upon his experience in Cuba, he recalled: “In 1959, a revolution with individuals, malicious individuals, masquerading as Democrats… established a regime, a dictatorial regime, in my nation, called Communism, Socialism, Stalinism, Marxism and whatever other ‘ism’ you want to [call] it.”

Martinez noted the regime stripped the populace of its arms, even though:

[The right to bear arms] is a God-given right – it is not given by anybody, it’s not given by any group. It’s the same thing as freedom, which is a God-given right, and no one, absolutely no one, has the authority to take it away. To cease to defend the Second Amendment, and my God-given right of freedom, will cease only with my death.

Martinez then recalled his own first-hand experience, choking up and holding back tears:

I’ve been through it, I’ve been there. You people don’t know what freedom is because you never lost it! You haven’t been tortured, you haven’t seen the assassinations, you haven’t [seen] mothers begging for the lives of their sons not to be killed because [their sons] want to be free. And they killed the mothers and they killed the sons.

He also warned that infringing on the Second Amendment would “open” this nation to the possibility of a dictatorial state, noting:

If we tangle with the Second Amendment, we are open the same way that Cuba was open for Communism, [as well as] China, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Venezuela, on and on…. Gun control does not protect anybody – does not protect the citizens, does not protect the people. The only reason for gun control is for the government to protect [itself from] the citizens, so that the government can… manipulate the people and subjugate them. That’s what happened in Cuba….

http://www.mediaite.com/online/cuban-exile-testifies-against-gun-control-you-people-dont-know-what-freedom-is-because-you-never-lost-it/