Four G Media’s Big Weekend: GOALS Conference Knoxville

This past weekend, FourG Media made its formal debut at the annual Gunowners of America (GOA) convention in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Sporting its largest attendance in years, thousands gathered at the gateway to the Smoky Mountains to test out the latest in firearm equipment, hear addresses from the most prominent Second Amendment advocates, and network across states for further political organizing.

Friday evening, at a private dinner held by the GOA on the eve of the convention, keynote speaker John Lovell, an author and retired U.S. Army Ranger, referred to the Second Amendment as “the failsafe of a dying republic.”

And in so many ways, our “republic” has been dead for generations.

In 1938, Saturday Evening Post columnist and Old Right polemicist Garet Garrett wrote his essay The Revolution Was, describing how Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal had superseded the constitutional framework of the Founding Fathers, and constructed the modern Washington bureaucracy on top of it.

Garrett skewered what were already developing conservative bromides, warning about the danger of future tyranny. “There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction,” he opened. “The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom.”

Today the American people live under the largest government apparatus in world history, mass surveilled by a globe-spanning military behemoth which flaunts its supposed laws and finances its imperial ambitions through chronic inflation and runaway debt. This is not a “free society” that would be recognized by our forefathers on this continent.

And yet, even Washington DC still feels the invisible presence of barriers preventing it from imposing complete totalitarian control over the day-to-day lives of Americans. Compare the situation in the United States to the rest of the Anglosphere.

“We have no individual rights recognized in our Constitution at all. So we’re really starting off the backfoot,” Australian native Kate Fantinel explained to our founder, FourG Dave—one of many interviews conducted with both activists and elected officials during the course of the GOA convention. With some of the strictest firearm laws in the world, the Australian government was able to build a series of internment camps during the COVID-19 pandemic, forcibly imprisoning their own people.

Or look to the United Kingdom, which has gone to ridiculous lengths to ban ownership of knives, and has outlawed domestic speech which dissents from the government’s Middle East foreign policy.

These degrees of difference exist because the United States has the right to bear arms codified, and has the highest rate of civilian gun ownership in the world. That is why Lovell referred to it as a “failsafe.” Recall that the Founding Fathers and even Andrew Jackson opposed the establishment of a standing army, believing an armed population was sufficient for defending American liberty from both foreign and domestic opponents.

Even while remaining (sometimes concerningly) placid, gun owners are the only remaining defense of even the public pretense of a limited government. These Second Amendment enthusiasts, among whom included many families and their young children, were exuberant at discovering the FourG brand which encapsulated their worldview: God, Gas, Guns, and Glory. (Several mentioned their pleasure at seeing God put first.)

Four G Media brings attention to the patriotism and optimism of the America First movement, but there must be awareness of the situation the United States finds itself in, and what direction is required to lead itself out. We must not seek the prevention of new gun control, but the repeal of all infringements on that natural right. We must not lose ourselves hyperventilating over tyranny which has already come to pass, but focus on restoring the liberty we were born deprived of.