End the War on Freedom

Metal detectors were installed at the entrance, a precaution we were told, because five athletes were shot on campus several years ago (none fatal thank God), which was a motivator for the conference in the first place. I’ve seen this before -- pro-rights gun conferences, walk right in. Anti-rights conferences, bristling with armed security and pat downs. What’s wrong with that picture?

I counted at least 14 crisply uniformed campus police, bearing 9 millimeter semis with a pair of double-stack extra mags on their duty belts. We had some great conversations, though the other speakers seemed to avoid these people. I had them laughing about all the guns in this anti-gun conference. As more showed up I kept telling them that now I REALLY felt safe. We swapped gun talk, war stories, a few thanked me for being there. I knew I had at least a few people on my side -- the ones with the guns.

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The university asked me here, I told them, so you could have some measure of balance, so you could see that this conference is only half the equation. I’m here, and I held up the sign I had used at the Supreme Court case a few weeks ago, to make sure you keep in mind that Guns Save Lives too. Guns Stop Crime (and another matching sign). Guns Protect You. Look how many guns there are in this room. You know why they’re there -- because guns have a purpose, a social utility that’s important and should not be overlooked.

Their emotions had been played upon all afternoon, so I continued the trend. I told of a woman awakened to find a knife-wielding, ski-masked intruder in her home, and how she had to shoot him while crouched behind her bed, after having called 911. She had to keep firing until the big guy finally collapsed. The police arrived only nine minutes later. You could hear a pin drop.

Would you deny this woman her right to live, by taking her gun away? Isn’t the message, “If it saves one life...”? Do you have the moral authority, or a sense of self righteousness that says she must die because you think guns are bad? I pressed on.

Yesterday I had to go to my daughters' high school soccer game in the eastern part of Alabama. I got an early start and stopped at gun stores and military surplus stores along the way. I was looking for some small items, but I was also taking a survey -- checking the lay of the gunnie land as we find it in this turbulent political season. All along the way I asked this question: "Do you have any SKS strippers in stock?" And you know what? Nobody did. Everybody I asked had stocked them. And each and every one of them were out. "You must be the fifth or sixth guy who been in here this week looking for 'em," one store owner told me. "I can't keep 'em in stock." In the past month he's sold several hundred of the little metal strips, maybe a thousand, he said. In case your math skills are weak, that's 10,000 rounds of 7.62x39 rifle ammunition being put back -- out of just one small gun store in a sparsely populated section of Alabama. The great grandsons of yeoman farmers are buying lots of SKS and AK-47 ammunition these days and combat packing it like there's no tomorrow.

Understand from the very beginning that, even if TSA were sincere about protecting airline passengers from terrorist nipple rings and similar dire threats, they would still be an abject failure. The simple, inescapable fact is that self-defense is an individual bodily function -- like eating, sleeping, making love, or going to the bathroom -- that cannot be delegated to anybody else. Every attempt to evade or override that fact invariably winds up in tragedy. Sometimes the tragedy is of monstrous proportions, as it was on September 11, 2001.

That's a very important concept, so I'm going to state it again: self-defense is an individual bodily function that cannot be delegated. The very notion is absurd. Every attempt to do so ends in tragedy.

"What's the alternative?", I pretend to hear you ask. Well to begin with, for the sake of preventing any further violations of the rights and dignity of individuals -- and to avoid any more tragedies like 9/11 -- the TSA must be abolished, and for some reasonable interval, its budget diverted to compensate its many thousands of victims.

Before they are entirely released from service, each TSA employee must be individually investigated, scrutinized, charged, and tried for his or her crimes against the Constitution for which the excuse -- exactly as it was established at the Nuremberg Tribunals following World War II -- that "I was just following orders" will not be acceptable.

Under the terms clearly mandated by the Fourteenth Amendment, no former TSA employee will ever be employable at any level of government again (no government pensions should be payable to any of these people), nor will he or she be permitted to run for or to hold public office. Moreover, because many of their crimes closely resemble (or actually are) sexual offenses, the residences of former TSA employees, in any neighborhood, will be a matter of public record, and whenever they move, their new addresses will be duly reported to their new neighbors.

Furthermore, anyone who ever referred to the infamous "No-Fly List" to deprive Americans of their right to travel, or who helped to compile that list, will be subject to exactly the same sanctions as former TSA employees. Substantial rewards will be offered to those willing to turn fellow government or corporate employees over to the law.

The ownership or use of weapons-detecting technology by any agency or employee or government at any level, or by any corporation, or by its corporate personnel, will be treated as an equivalent to felonious assault. Aside from the presence of unobtrusive, totally transparent "bomb-sniffing" devices, no searches of passengers or their belongings (including the use of X-rays, multispectral cameras, or any similar mechanism) will be permitted at America's airports by anyone, ever again.

With the Supreme Court opening this week the first extensive examination of the constitutional right to bear arms in nearly 70 years, now seems a pretty good time to ask a question that’s been perplexing me for nearly as long: Why is that American Jews are so overwhelmingly anti-gun?

I’ve been stumped by this communal aversion to firearms ever since I was a 6 year old, back in 1947. While flipping through old Life magazines one day in my grandparents’ living room in the Bronx, I came across photographs taken at the liberation of concentration camps. I saw the pictures of bodies stacked like cordwood, and was stunned.

“Mommy, why are all those people dead?” I asked.

My mother, a brilliant and subtle woman, thought for a moment and said, “The bad Germans called Nazis killed them.” To which, of course, I asked, “Why did the Nazis kill them?”

“They killed them because they were Jews,” she replied.

Although I was only 6 and not yet sure of my identity or its meaning, I asked, “We’re Jews, aren’t we?”

“Yes,” answered my mother.

“Mommy,” I asked, without missing a beat, “do you and Daddy have a gun so we can protect ourselves if the Nazis come for us?”

“This is America,” my mother reassured me. “That can’t happen here.”

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Israelis, in short, have learned a lesson that far too few American Jews have yet to grasp: For Jews, the phrase “assault rifle” is a misnomer — the correct term, once the shtetl mentality has been transcended, is “Jewish defense rifle.”

As usual, the Times editors seem unaware of how silly their argument is. To them, the choice is between "carefully controlling guns" and "arming everyone to the teeth." But no one favors "arming everyone to the teeth" (whatever that means). Instead, gun advocates favor freedom, choice and self-responsibility. If someone wishes to be prepared to defend himself, he should be free to do so. No one has the right to deprive others of the means of effective self-defense, like a handgun.

As for the first option, "carefully controlling guns," how many shootings at schools or malls will it take before we understand that people who intend to kill are not deterred by gun laws? Last I checked, murder is against the law everywhere. No one intent on murder will be stopped by the prospect of committing a lesser crime like illegal possession of a firearm. The intellectuals and politicians who make pious declarations about controlling guns should explain how their gunless utopia is to be realized.

While they search for — excuse me — their magic bullet, innocent people are dying defenseless.

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It's impossible to know exactly how often guns stop criminals. Would-be victims don't usually report crimes that don't happen. But people use guns in self-defense every day. The Cato Institute's Tom Palmer says just showing his gun to muggers once saved his life.

"It equalizes unequals," Mr. Palmer told "20/20." "If someone gets into your house, which would you rather have, a handgun or a telephone? You can call the police if you want, and they'll get there, and they'll take a picture of your dead body. But they can't get there in time to save your life. The first line of defense is you."

LESSON NO. 1: If a bureaucrat, or a soldier sent by a bureaucrat, comes to knock down your door and take you someplace you do not want to go because of who you are or what you think -- kill him. If you can, kill the politician who sent him. You will likely die anyway, and you will be saving someone else the same fate. For it is a universal truth that the intended victims always far outnumber the tyrant's executioners. Any nation which practices this lesson will quickly run out of executioners and tyrants, or they will run out of it.

LESSON NO. 2: If a bureaucrat, or a soldier sent by a bureaucrat, comes to knock down your door and confiscate your firearms -- kill him. The disarmament of law-abiding citizens is the required precursor to genocide.

LESSON NO. 3: If a bureaucrat tells you that he must know if you have a firearm so he can put your name on a list for the common good, or wants to issue you an identity card so that you be more easily identified -- tell him to go to hell. Registration of people and firearms is the required precursor to the tyranny which permits genocide. Bureaucrats cannot send soldiers to doors that are not on their list.

I look at our public servants as just that – "the help." And so I consider government gun grabbers just as I would a yard man or maid who had the audacity to demand my gun. – Mark Gilmore

Stupid me, I should have realized two things. First, it is not only liberals who can extrapolate from their own cowardice. And second, the folks who were responding to my writing negatively are not representative of the people I expect to "get" my stuff anyway. I use the medium at hand to broadcast my message, the Founders' message, forgetting that the folks who will best understand it are not tuned in. In a "blinding flash of the obvious" to use John Wesley Rawles' phrase, here is what I finally figured out: most rednecks (and most gunnies) are not keyboard commandos. They do not sit in the dark trying to make sense of the electron-borne winds of modern information (or disinformation). They are too busy with the exigencies of life to trade intellectualisms on the Net. The folks I'm talking about (and those I'm trying to reach) are rather more like the Kentuckians that Hank Messick described in the forward to his book King's Mountain: "One thing about the fellows back home -- when they say they're going to kill somebody, they kill him."

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They are quiet fellows, mostly. But it is not the smartest thing in the world to make them mad, as British Colonel Patrick Ferguson found out when he called their ancestors in North Carolina "backwater men," "barbarians" and "mongrels" in 1780. He miscalculated his audience. The Scotch Irish pioneers came down out of the "backwaters," tracked Ferguson and his Tories to King's Mountain and killed him in a fight that proved THE turning point of the Revolution. One of my friends, a maintenance man at a local nursing home, a humble fellow who never went to college, a son of a coal miner and the descendant of men who fought Ferguson (and others who fought the Creeks, Abe Lincoln AND Jefferson Davis, and the Kaiser and Hitler and Hirohito) can tell you the story as if it happened yesterday with a comprehensive knowledge of the subject and an eye for detail that would put a professional historian to shame. One of the defeatist critics of Awkward headlined his piece "the revolution has been canceled." Try telling that to my friend. It lives within his soul. As another great Southerner once said, "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past."

The Germans, wholly indoctrinated in obeying orders, were incapable of acting without them. Because their would-be tyrants represented "the government" and cloaked their wolfish actions in "legal" sheepskin, because their own "leaders" could not or would not give the order, they all ended up in a concentration camp -- leaders and followers -- without ever having struck a blow.

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The Founders were people who believed in "preserving the spirit of resistance." To take Abbe Raynal's words to their conclusion, the Founders aimed to think AND act before they felt. Unlike the Germans, their "awkward stage" ended at Lexington green, and ultimately led to liberty. In the light of recent events such as the Olofson case, it seems plain that our own "awkward stage" may be perilously close to drawing to an end. There are those who still insist that such unconstitutional outrages perpetrated under color of law deserve nothing more than verbal condemnation or further attempts at legal redress in a "justice" system rigged against us (as if these thugs pay attention to the law anyway). Used to inaction and afraid of even voicing the threat of justifiable self-defense, these timid souls, these "summer soldiers and sunshine patriots," would have us wait for true tyranny before acting. This was not the way of the Founders. They understood that tyranny is best strangled in its unholy infancy, before it becomes a raging beast. They understood the threat, they prepared to meet it and, in the end, they defeated it. The Germans of the 1930s did not, and they were devoured.

The best self-defense tactic is to avoid putting yourself in a position where you will need to shoot. The majority of violent crimes are committed in certain neighborhoods. You know where they are. Stay out of them. Don't mope about looking vulnerable. Secure your home and secure your car. You don't have to be grim to be alert.

Two more points: Before you buy a gun for self-defense, make sure you are psychologically prepared to take a human life. That's not a minor thing. Death is irrevocable. There are always consequences. If you aren't prepared to deal with them, then you're better off buying pepper spray and a pair of running shoes.

Likewise, it ought to be a felony for anyone in the government (I consider corporations, in this context, to be extensions of the government; they would be subject to this law, as they ought to be made subject to the Bill of Rights) to possess or operate any device intended for, or capable of, the detection of weapons on an individual's person. Let's think clearly here: the Founding Fathers didn't want to play games about the definition of the word "search", they simply didn't want the government to know what we have in our pockets.

And if we're really serious about "the security of a free state", then perhaps we need to institute a death penalty for politicians who agitate for gun control or any other blatant violation of the Bill of Rights.

If any of this seems radical or extreme to you, never forget this basic truth: the only reason anyone ever has for wanting to steal your guns is that they're planning to do something to you your guns could prevent.

Anyone who thinks the Bill of Rights is either "out of date," "hokey" or "needs revising" - all of which I've heard from well-meaning but tragically ignorant and complacent Americans - should try living in a country which doesn't have one. I have been there and done that, and I don't want to go through it ever again - especially not in my own native nation. So I am dedicated to preventing today's government nanny from turning, as so often has occurred in history, into tomorrow's government despot.

Finally, I implore anyone reading this, particularly women, to likewise dedicate themselves to studying this issue carefully, and to likewise taking an active stance to preserve the Bill of Rights in general and the Second Amendment in particular.

Postscript: As of the latter part of August of this year (1998), it doesn't appear that the situation in Jamaica has changed much for the better. Many Jamaicans of all colors have immigrated to America to start businesses and to escape the hopelessness of the situation in their homeland. I recently spoke with a black Jamaican named Marcus, who has opened a wonderful Jamaican restaurant in Phoenix named Likkle Montego, where I can go and eat Jamaican food, and catch the latest news from my long-lost home. When asked how things are today in Kingston, Marcus simply shook his head: "Nottin' change attahl, y'know. Everyt'ing still de same. Crime is still bad, mon. Gov'ment still de same. T'ings dere is bad and terrible, mon. Bad and terrible."

Jeanne wasn’t a shooter. She didn’t practice regularly nor is she a part of the shooting community. Through her everyone can see that special expertise and extensive training are not necessary to prevent violent crime.