The senseless murder of Iryna Zarutska on a light rail train in Charlotte, North Carolina, should remind us that for a long time now, the American Left has been sending the public this message:
We aren’t really that interested in protecting you and don’t think that gives you the right to protect yourself. Nobody should be subject to capital punishment just for attacking you; you should just let it happen.
That doesn’t really seem to be a winning message, but it is playing out in the real world every day.
The ongoing theme is that the murderers get a pass if they are black, homeless, mentally ill, or gender confused, even if they have a frequent flyer card with the justice system. You better not touch them, and if you deign to protect yourself or others, especially if your assailant belongs to a certain protected class, you will be punished.
Just ask Daniel Penny.
This perspective is also the root of the attacks on the Second Amendment. You don’t “need” a firearm, says every Democrat in Congress. You are just supposed to let it happen and hope for the best. Maybe the defunded, demoralized, understaffed police will get to you in an hour or two to memorialize the circumstances of your injury or death — that is, if the prosecutors haven’t preemptively decided they aren’t going to prosecute.
The paradox here, of course, is that the people who are claiming the individual has no right to be armed, much less protect themselves, their families, or their property, are the very people who want police defunded and certain behaviors decriminalized in the name of equity and social justice. They have even said out loud that looting, ransacking, and arson are equivalent to reparations, and in the words of former Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, we must give “those who wished to destroy the space to do that as well.”
In a way, our system of reliance on the current design of law enforcement for personal protection is strikingly like a collectivist system with the same limitations. Rather than retaining personal responsibility for our own protection, we have ceded that responsibility to centralized law enforcement authorities and have determined that individual reaction to threats is unacceptable.
All of this made me think about why I carry a firearm.
The Second Amendment isn’t a license to kill, as the progressive Left would have people believe. It is part of a philosophy going back to John Locke’s 1689 “Second Treatise of Civil Government” that posits an individual has a right to his own person and property and therefore has a right to protect them:
I should have a right to destroy that which threatens me with destruction: for, by the fundamental law of nature, man being to be preserved as much as possible, when all cannot be preserved, the safety of the innocent is to be preferred: and one may destroy a man who makes war upon him, or has discovered an enmity to his being, for the same reason that he may kill a wolf or a lion; because such men are not under the ties of the common law of reason, have no other rule, but that of force and violence, and so may be treated as beasts of prey, those dangerous and noxious creatures, that will be sure to destroy him whenever he falls into their power.
Locke clearly recognizes a natural right of self-defense, even though “the aggressor … be in society and a fellow subject.”
I would also note that in a civil society, individual citizens not only have a right to protect themselves, but by extension, they also have a duty to protect others who cannot protect themselves.
As much of a problem as I have with the murderer of Iryna Zarutska, I am shocked by the absolute complacency of the people on that train. Depraved indifference was once prosecutable — apparently no longer.
The old bromide is true — when seconds matter, the police are minutes away. That isn’t their fault, of course — we have given them an impossible task. The International Association of Chiefs of Police reported a few years ago that the average ratio of police to citizens is about 2.5 officers per 1,000 citizens. This is simply a game of numbers in a country of 330 million people covering 3.8 million square miles.
There is a reason that murderers and terrorists, even the insane ones, attack schools, malls, and not police stations. It is because they know that there will be no resistance in “gun-free zones” and maximum resistance in “gun-mandated zones.” The progressive talking point is that a civilized society does not “need” to have firearms. That may be an ideal within such a society, but a civilized society needs firearms to protect itself from uncivilized entities acting in asymmetric and random ways.
The fact is that centralization of individual protection will always be ineffective against random threats. The only way to answer random, asymmetric threats is with equally random, asymmetric responses — meaning individual ownership and open carrying of personal weapons by citizens.
This doesn’t mean that we should seek or want to become the Wild West, but we must recognize that in the Wild West, where law enforcement was corrupt or absent, lawlessness was tamed by men with Bibles and guns.
As the old slogan goes, “God may have created men, but Samuel Colt made them equal.”
