The right to keep and bear arms is important, but the First Amendment was what our Founding Fathers deemed as the most important. The Second Amendment is more of an insurance policy. The right to speak freely is the first resort. The right to keep and bear arms is the last resort, for when all else fails.
But the two are linked by more than just that in this day and age. It seems that the modern versions of our public square don’t respect either, especially when the speech is about guns.
This, of course, is nothing new. Most who follow gun politics have seen how the right to speak freely about guns has been under a particular type of attack, especially on social media through the years. For one couple, though, it got a little more personal than that.
hil and Gennifer Hesseling knew they’d have to defend their Second Amendment right to bear arms when they got into gun sales and customizations eight years ago.
The owners of Hesseling & Sons Firearms & Gunsmithing on Elida Road in Lima never expected a fight over the First Amendment right to free speech.
They certainly didn’t plan it over a pair of Facebook posts announcing they’d be closed for Easter and the Fourth of July last year.
“Facebook has very clear community standards,” Gennifer Hesseling said. “We at no point ever violated any community standards of Meta Corp. However, we were suppressed, and they accused us of violating their standards. When we would send their standards right back to them and say, ‘Tell us where we violated this,’ they didn’t even answer.”
The offending post for Easter was an Easter Bunny — with no guns in the image, they emphasized — saying the store would be closed for the holiday and sharing the Friday and Saturday hours. That led to a three-day suspension of their Facebook account.
For the Fourth of July, they posted a flag, along with a message they were closed for Independence Day.
“That triggered our page to be completely taken down,” Gennifer Hesseling said. “And that’s when we reached out to Congressman Jordan’s office and said, ‘Please help.’”
While Facebook told them it lifted the ban, its own metrics showed the company wasn’t reaching all of its followers anymore, a tactic nicknamed the “shadow ban.” Their congressman, U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Urbana, intervened. Within a day of his office’s assistance, things returned to normal for the retailer, which follows Facebook’s extensive rules for brick-and-mortar firearms dealers with great success.