It’s too bad we didn’t accept the woke’s offer to defund the police. They never thought their slogan through, and we should have closed with them before they had the chance.
Just you think about it.
Those two “teens” who, for fun, ran over the man in Vegas (not their first victim, incidentally), who ended up in court laughing and flipping off their victim’s families? Well, they might have still killed for gruesome glee, but they would not have had the chance to be disrespectful after.
One day after the precincts and sheriff’s offices are shuttered, the mass lootings plaguing American cities would cease. Or perhaps it’s better to say one week. It would take that long for people to realize what they all along should have known: that they are responsible for their own defense.
These examples are admittedly somewhat fanciful, but you will now be able to think of many more realistic ones.
We have outsourced our defense to Experts—the police—in the hopes they would see to justice, and remove from us the burdens of enforcement, investigation, arrest, and punishment. In many ways, this worked well, especially when we had a more homogeneous high-trust society, as is well known. For instance, feuds and vendettas were far rarer.
Yet we have paid a very great price for this leisure.
Especially since military service is only voluntary, because there are only Expert law enforcement, men have forgotten not just how to defend themselves, but they have lost the mindset. Like in everything else, they defer to Experts and let themselves become weak. Worse, as I’ll prove to you, we are forced by law to be weak.
Michigan requires a license to carry a concealed pistol, and part of the procedure is to get fingerprinted at the sheriff’s. When I had mine taken I asked the deputy his opinion of citizens carrying. This, I thought, was necessary knowledge, because in the state you have a legal obligation immediately upon any interaction with the police to announce you are carrying. I wanted to know if those interactions would be, well, difficult.
The deputy chewed on the question a moment and said, “If it were up to me, I’d make it mandatory.” He thinks, and he said his brother officers think, as I think, and as you should, that defending yourselves and your loved ones is a duty.
Now I live in a very “red” area (most of Michigan is; only a couple large cities and university towns are woke). People have Trump signs on their lawns, some of them crudely creative. Many hunt; guns are not rare. The attitude of the police reflect this.
But this attitude is not everywhere, and is growing rarer and rarer, as Richard Greenhorn (a lawyer) reminds us.
In Republican Georgia, the right to citizen’s arrest was eradicated following the Arbery case. The basis for citizen’s arrest lay with the fact that the law is universal. The government may give this universal law concrete application, but it does not create the law out of whole cloth. This is a weak statement of natural law, such that all Christian jurists believed, such that Blackstone noted and all lawyers implicitly understood into the Twentieth Century. Even men like Holmes, in recognizing the common law’s defects and absurdities, could not argue against the premise that justice predates the state. And yet with the eradication of citizen’s arrest, we arrive at the conclusion that only the state can make and give the law effect. This is a complete upending of the basic premises of our law and all real republican government. But who has even noticed?
As proof the defense mindset is fading, by habit and by decree, not one person was armed in the Maine “mass shooting”, except the (certifiable) bad guy. The attitude was call the Experts and wait. Maybe you’ll get lucky. Or stay locked in your homes (“shelter in place”), shivering in fear.
After these incidents, we hear calls for “gun control”, which means only that the Regime should and would control all use of violence. You would be allowed none. Including that of defending your own person. Under “gun control” there would not only be no duty for self defense, there would be no excuse for it.
As Greenhorn reminds us, we’re already well down this road. Need more evidence? The law, here anyway, says you can only use violence if your person is endangered. Not your property. If a group of thugs were to, say, try to burn down your house, knowing nobody was inside, or the same with you car, or your business, all objects it takes years of your life to own, you cannot use violence to stop them. You must call the Experts.
We used to shoot looters. When we were civilized.
If it were strictly illegal for any but Regime employees (like the IRS, Department of Agriculture, D of Education, DNR, police, etc.) to have guns, then people in our Expertocracy would still suffer violence. But it would be seen as a kind of natural phenomenon, like a bad storm. It would be sad that people died in a robbery, but you wouldn’t hear of the means. Guns, in these stories, would fade into the background. Like you now don’t hear of the race of the bad guy. “Shootings” would disappear.
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Imagine then how much worse it is in European states where the conditioning has been at play for longer.
In Britain they began to outlaw guns in the early 20th century in response to the Bolshevik revolution. But they only finally succeeded in the 1990s.
People now find it inconceivable they would own a weapon. You must not let this happen to you and your arguments above, that you are responsible for your own safety, are the right way to go.
In his Foundations of Distributism, Chesterton makes the argument that in order for there to be real democracy crimes must be punished in public. He suggests that the will of the people began to be thwarted as soon as executions began being conducted out of their sight and without their participation.
I think that that is much the same thing that you are suggesting. We hired people to do the nasty bits of governance for us and they took the nice bits as well. We farmed out the responsibilities and found that we had lost the power and privilege. Which is pretty inevitable in hindsight. We all want to eat sausage but nobody wants to make the sausage.