It’s not (ever) about guns

Just as state schooling is not about education, but about the state, gun control is not about guns: It’s about control. A citizen who can fend for himself when the predators come or the schools fail is less inclined to look to the state for sustenance and oversight in other areas of life. …To the men who wrote the Second Amendment, it was a condition of citizenship in a free republic. It’s what free men did, and do.

~ Kevin Williamson

National Review first published this article by Kevin Williamson in its print edition before giving it the Steyn spot Saturday morning on their website. I’m very glad they did, because it’s an excellent article on many counts.

For one thing, the opening bit in particular is rather personal (all of it is, really, to a free people, but read on), because we’ve had coyotes in our neighborhood since the fall; in fact, they have slain not only at least one large deer, but a small neighborhood dog. That knowledge combined with the fact that there are plenty of small children running around their yards and streets, often after dusk, and that there is an elementary school a block behind us, makes me even more aware of the fact that the life my pistol save may not necessarily be my own. Consider, too, that some have spotted what appears to be a small pack of former canine pets—and that this past winter, several of these dogs went into pack-hunting mode against my own husband and my own large dog, in a quiet West Virginia suburb. Sometimes, waving arms and throwing rocks just won’t do.

Westchester County has a problem more often seen in rural, Republican-leaning jurisdictions: coyotes. These canine predators are a real menace, a fact that was dramatically illustrated in late June by the case of young Emily Hodulik, age six, who was attacked by a pair of coyotes on a leafy suburban street in the quaint town of Rye. …Miss Hodulik suffered serious bite wounds but escaped without life-threatening injuries. She’s undergoing a series of rabies shots, doesn’t like to sleep alone, and is afraid that there are coyotes in the basement of the family home.

…Coyotes like to attack the little ones, human or otherwise. That was the case for one unfortunate coyote that attacked a puppy out for a jog with his master in Travis County, Texas, in the suburbs of Austin, where coyotes have it a little rougher than they do in suburban New York. That particular coyote had the bad luck to set his gaze on a puppy owned by Gov. Rick Perry, who produced a laser-sighted .380-caliber automatic pistol, loaded with hollowpoints, and sent it to the Happy Hunting Grounds.

As Williamson notes, the left was predictably horrified by Perry’s audacity when it came to defending his pup, though of course the hysteria was most notable regarding Perry’s actually carrying a pistol (gasp!). This made me chuckle; typical lefty pansifists worrying about ‘why they hate us’ and even more terrified by the idea that law-abiding citizens are going about their daily business while fully armed. Armed, able, and willing to defend themselves and others from whatever may try to harm them.

Williamson quotes a WaPo writer who says he’s not worried about criminals having guns so much as he fears his law-abiding neighbors, co-workers, and family members being able to simply apply for a permit to own a gun, much less own one. Either the writer lives, works, and conducts all business in a suitably gentrified part of town where he needn’t worry about riffraff, or he thinks that the people who keep this country going are not intelligent enough to own and operate firearms. The mere idea of every citizen applying to own a gun (?!) that frightens him.

Thus we get back to that good, old-fashioned progressivism Hillary Clinton was so proud of, the eugenicists and administrators who know better than we do.

In matters ranging from financial derivatives to education to gun control, the Left believes that we face a choice between a masterful state and a Hobbesian war of all against all. For all of the smart set’s vaunted and self-congratulatory nu ance, it is this absolutist vision, this Manichean horror, that forms the foun dation of progressivism.

This, and not the threat of uncontrollable crime, is really at the heart of the subur ban progressives’ abomination of firearms. Coyotes may be an occasional menace, but the predators most commonly stalking Central Park, Westchester County, or the Austin suburbs go on two legs, not four. Just before the Supreme Court handed down its ruling in McDonald v. City of Chicago, there were in one weekend 50-odd shootings in the Windy City, at least ten of them fatal.

…But the idea that individuals might use firearms lawfully to defend themselves is either anathema to progressives or inconceivable to them.

Progressives, liberals, leftists, socialists, communists, fascists, call them what you like, but they ultimately want total control of your life, and that includes your ability to defend yourself, your family, and your property—an ability which they will take away from you if they can. Statists all, those bearing the labels above wish to be the ONLY ones capable, or at least allowed, to use lethal force (never mind the Almighty, they’re clearly not concerned with what HE thinks).

Violence is traditionally something upon which the state maintains a monopoly, and the application of lethal force is the state’s most jealously guarded prerogative. It is treated as a kind of holy office, which is one of the reasons that American executions are such strangely ritualized ceremonies.

…To use lethal force in self-defense is the ultimate declaration of independence, a kind of momentary secession from the authority of the government whose laws and prisons and police officers have, in that moment, failed the citizen. To acknowledge the right to self-defense — and the concomitant right to be forearmed against aggressors — is to acknowledge that some things are outside the state and its authority, or at least that some moments are outside the state and its authority.

To acknowledge this right and be armed against aggressors also means acknowledging that the state cannot and will not be everywhere “in time” (thank God). In the multiple minutes it will take for the local police squad to reach your home, should you be so lucky as to be able to get to the phone and actually call 911 (unlikely), your wife or daughters have been brutalized and possibly killed, the men of the house are dead, the house has been ransacked, the neighbors are groggily asking each other if that was screaming they heard. The police become nothing more than a well-dressed cleanup crew, and that is not the America God or our Founders intended. Yet, because they lust after control over every aspect of our lives, this IS the America the statists, including Barack Obama, want.

Chilled yet?