Birth Of A Second Amendment Activist

The looting in New Orleans is like something from "Day After Tomorrow" - it seems so sensational as to be unreal.

Thieves commandeered a forklift and used it to push up the storm shutters and break the glass of a pharmacy. The crowd stormed the store, carrying out so much ice, water and food that it dropped from their arms as they ran. The street was littered with packages of ramen noodles and other items.

Looters also chased down a state police truck full of food. The New Orleans police chief ran off looters while city officials themselves were commandeering equipment from a looted Office Depot.

Armed looters also broke into a children's hospital - some reports said "besieged" the hospital.

Central New Orleans, in the flood zone, is in a state of anarchy - and when anarchy holds sway, the natural advantage goes to the young, the strong, and those who feel they have nothing to lose. The losers? The old, the weak, women, children - and anyone who can't convince the looters that it'd be a bad idea to try to steal the supplies they are depending on to survive.

Twenty years ago, I was a gun-controller. Not an extremely committed one, and far from an absolutist - but I would have fit in with most Minnesota Democrats, eschewing handguns and the like. I changed my mind, naturally, for a variety of reasons.

But among those reasons - before the Madisonian belief in an armed populace as the ultimate safeguard of liberty, before my commitment to deterring crime, before the sheer joy and stress relief I felt when busting caps into paper targets, and before the pure existential relief I felt when I deterred a burglarly in my own house (in 1988), my conversion to second-amendment constructionism started with the vision of the nightmare we're seeing in New Orleans today.

Bruce Clayton, in the classic survivalist bible "Life After Doomsday", estimated (purportedly from sources) that in a crisis and a complete breakdown of order, one in ten people will steal for food; one in a hundred will kill for food. One in a thousand will resort to cannibalism, said Clayton, while one person in ten thousand would actively hunt humans for food.

We're seeing the first two in spades in New Orleans today.

The situation in the Big Not So Easy today - like that in the LA riots, only much, much worse - flies in the face of many of the left's traditional blandishments about the relationship of the individual to society.

• "Let the professionals take care of things"- But in LA in 1992, and in New Orleans today, the professionals can't take care of things. They're stretched far beyond their limits trying to conduct search and rescue; defending law and order is way down the list of priorities. What is the law abiding citizen to do? Especially the type of citizen who tried to...
  
• "Follow official directions; you'll be safe" - If the LA riots, 9/11 (where the PA system in the Towers advised people to go back to their desks as the fires ate away at the towers' skeletons) and now Hurricane Katrina tell us anything, it's that official direction, even the best-meaning (by all accounts, the evacuation of New Orleans was ordered adequately early to prevent a much worse disaster) aren't enough. Stories tell of many families who tried to hit the road, but became ensnarled in hopeless traffic, and opted to ride the storm out in the city. Stuff happens - but now, they're the ones in the city trying to defend what little sustenance they have against the human jackals while they wait for help to arrive.
  
• "What are you? Paranoid?" - For what - pondering that I and my family could be caught in a situation where law and order are gone and I have to defend my family's lives against the worst of human and mob nature? I think this past few days have shown that it's not paranoid in the least.
  
• "Guns only make the situation worse" - In the hands of the bad guys? Sure. But I'm not the bad guys. If the bad guys have to think there's someone like me sitting in the attic window of the next house they're going to try to ransack, maybe they'll think twice. Twice is all they'll get.I'm coming around to the belief that it's not just a nice to have thing, but rather the duty of every citizen who values the rule of law and order, to say nothing of their families' safety, to be prepared to secure their little corner of the Republic against this sort of a disaster, until the beleaguered authorities can make it official. That means things like storing enough food and water to get through an immediate crisis - and having the means immediately at hand to defend themselves.

  You know - all that "paranoid" stuff that, in New Orleans today, isn't.

  Posted by Mitch at September 1, 2005 05:30 AM | TrackBack