Caracas Chaos: Disarmed people can’t fight back

The unfolding chaos in Venezuela’s capital city of Caracas underscores the value of private gun ownership, a fact that was essentially acknowledged by an MSNBC news contributor during a live broadcast.

According to Mediaite, MSNBC “contributor” Kerry Sanders made a startling observation while speaking with host Andrea Mitchell as he was covering the violent outbreak in Venezuela this week.

You have to understand,” Sanders said, somewhat tepidly, “in Venezuela gun ownership is not something that’s open to everybody. So if the military have the guns, they have the power.”

Venezuela does not have a constitutional provision that protects the right to keep and bear arms.

Gun ownership was outlawed under the late dictator Hugo Chavez, Mediaite noted.
Bloomberg News was reporting that the apparent effort to topple Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro, who claims he won the presidential election last year while at least 50 different governments recognize Juan Guaido as the nation’s president, was a failure. But on Wednesday, there still appeared to be unrest in the country.

Guaido calls this effort “Operation Liberty,” but without the ability to take on the Maduro loyalists by force of arms, liberty may be a long time coming.

Fox News, referring to Sanders’ report at MSNBC, said efforts to oust Maduro “are taking longer than expected.”

As this unfolded, shocking video of an armored vehicle running mover protesters in Caracas swept across social media. One journalist mistakenly referred to the armored vehicle as a tank. Some shooting has broken out in Caracas, but Maduro still appears to be in power.

Outlawing private gun ownership is a prickly subject in the United States, where Democrats now running to replace President Donald Trump have uniformly said they would push for additional gun controls including bans on so-called “semiautomatic assault rifles.” While some candidates, such as Sen. Bernie Sanders, espouse a socialist philosophy, it is not lost on Americans that the troubles in Venezuela began when socialist Chavez took over years ago. Venezuela used to enjoy a thriving economy and was a destination for refugees from other South American nations. That has all changed under Chavez and Maduro.

In its coverage of the Venezuela crisis, Mediaite had this observation: “In the immediate sense, it’s a distant concern for Americans to ponder being powerless before a renegade dictatorial force (although you wouldn’t know it reading #Resistance Twitter). However, in the philosophical sense, on the moral question and in view of fundamental rights of human beings, what Sanders said and Mitchell did not challenge was that the ownership of power is critical to resistance of power, and that specifically the personal ownership of guns is power to the people.”