{"id":57019,"date":"2016-01-13T12:00:08","date_gmt":"2016-01-13T18:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=57019"},"modified":"2016-01-12T10:23:26","modified_gmt":"2016-01-12T16:23:26","slug":"why-we-fight-part-iii-the-public-good","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=57019","title":{"rendered":"Why We Fight, Part III: The Public Good"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Charles C.W. Cooke’s fantastic piece in National Review last week on the power of emotion in the gun debate<\/a>, he made an excellent point; facts and statistics aren’t enough to really win this battle. \u00a0There’s a real, living, breathing emotional case to be made for the Second Amendment. \u00a0And while Real Americans have been winning the factual, statistical and legal case for decades, we need to win the emotional case – the case that speaks to America’s heart and gut and liver – before we can really relegate gun control to the shallow intellectual grave it belongs in.<\/p>\n

History Repeats<\/strong>: \u00a0A longtime friend of this blog,\u00a0long known as “Buddhapatriot”, \u00a0a charter\u00a0MOB member, sent me a poem the other day<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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“Community Organizers” in Mongol-run China<\/p><\/div>\n

It’s from a post he wrote a couple years back:<\/p>\n

Last year the edict forbidding us to ride horseback;
\nThis year another edict saying we cannot carry a bow.
\nYet we still hear about all those robbers who by the light of day
\nRide their horses and shoot people on the empire’s highway.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Technology aside, it looks like it could have been written by anyone in Chicago, slaving away under a\u00a0de facto\u00a0<\/em>gun ban as hoodlums shoot up his neighborhood. \u00a0It could even have been Otis McDonald himself<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But it was written in China, under Mongol occupation, in the 1300s.<\/p>\n

Some things never change.<\/p>\n

Numbers<\/strong>: \u00a0When America was founded, there was really no such thing as a municipal police force. \u00a0County sheriffs – with their strictly limited powers, and their volunteer posses – were often days away if trouble sprang up.<\/p>\n

And yet crime in America, as a general rule, was exceptionally low<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Murder<\/p>\n

That changed, somewhere along the way, of course. \u00a0About 100 years go, a variety of factors – urban crime, Prohibition and the concomitant explosion in organized crime and turf-protection murders – and then the War on Drugs and the 1968 Gun Control Act\u00a0all correlated with massive surges in criminal homicide.<\/p>\n

Do It Yourself<\/strong>: \u00a0Real Americans have always had an organic sense of law-enforcement; civic responsibility is part and parcel of\u00a0participatory democracy<\/em>.<\/p>\n

And it’s by no means a given everywhere in the world. \u00a0Attitudes of civilians and citizens toward “law enforcement” vary widely, even wildly, around the world<\/a>\u00a0– and for good reason, since “enforcing the laws” (or engaging in a sham version of it) is often accompanied by brutal tactics, unaccountable power, and stunning, stunting corruption. \u00a0Worse than Chicago, even.<\/p>\n

Even in “democracies”, the role of the citizen versus “law enforcement” is sometimes – for lack of a better term – brain-damaged<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As, indeed, it was in the United States. \u00a0At the nadir of the gun debate in the late seventies and early eighties, as major cities were enacting de facto<\/em> or de jure<\/em> gun bans, the individual right to self-defense was very much on the ropes.<\/p>\n

I remember reading advice to people living in major cities in the seventies, urging people to carry a “mugging” wallet, with a little money – not too much to break you, not so little that the mugger would get angry – to give to muggers when you got stuck up. It was an abdication of our streets to our criminals – the smarter among us knew it.<\/a><\/p>\n

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Some New Yorkers are nostalgic for the Lindsay and Dinkins years. I suspect they may be the type of people who look forward to colonoscopies and tax audits.<\/p><\/div>\n

And at the very nadir of that awful period came Bernard Goetz – who, sick and tired of the regular mugging, carried a gun. \u00a0It was against the law, of course – unless you had the political clout to get a carry permit, which many media and business figures did for the asking.<\/p>\n

But not Goetz. \u00a0The humble electrical engineer, mugged one time too many, shot his way out of a jam in the New York subway in 1984.<\/p>\n

The police arrested him, and New York’s pencil-necked, pasty, pusillanimous prosecutors, operating at the behest of an administration that figured armed criminals was better than safe people, prosecuted Goetz to the fullest extent of the law.<\/p>\n

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And a funny thing happened; America – even New York City’s cowed, pseudo-European subjects – feted Goetz as a folk hero. \u00a0Oh, the establishment media reviled Goetz, of course;\u00a0What’ll happen if regular schnooks kill\u00a0<\/em>all\u00a0the criminals,<\/em> they gasped.<\/p>\n

But Real America looked at Goetz, I think, and they saw…<\/p>\n

…themselves.<\/p>\n

In the early eighties, at the nadir of the American right to keep and bear arms, and the peak of the urban crime wave that only started to break 20 years ago, it was very easy to identify with Goetz; robbed over and over, first by street thugs, and then by thugs with law degrees or working for newspapers, Goetz’ situation reflected a lot of peoples’ fears – and his response sparked a lot of imaginations.<\/p>\n

It may be uncaused correlation, a complete coincidence, that on the day Bernard Goetz shot his muggers, exactly eight states had “shall issue” laws, requiring states to prove one should not<\/em> have a permit to carry a firearm; \u00a0by 1990, it was 15; by the 10th anniversary of his trial, 20; today, 42 of the fifty states have either “Shall Issue” or “Constitutional Carry”.<\/p>\n

Was Bernard Goetz the\u00a0cause celebre<\/em> that led, slowly and circuitously, to the state we’re in today, with Real Americans in the ascendant?<\/p>\n

I like to think they’re related. \u00a0Prove me wrong.<\/p>\n

Beyond The Stats<\/strong>: \u00a0The statistics of civilian gun ownership in combating crime have been part of the diet on this blog since Day 1` – literally.<\/p>\n

But beyond the numbers and the charts and the books?<\/p>\n

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Americans (of Korean descent) protecting their property and lives during the LA Riots. If this doesn’t make you proud to be an American, then you need both heart and brain transplants.<\/p><\/div>\n

There might be people in this country who don’t crack a smile when a typical schnook with a gun saves dozens of lives<\/a>; whose step doesn’t quicken\u00a0when the little woman with the kids repels the big bad robber<\/a>; whose hearts don’t well up with pride when regular American schnooks seize order from disorder, as Los Angeles’ Korean shopkeepers did during the 1992 riots; They might exist.<\/p>\n

But they’re not\u00a0my\u00a0<\/em> countrymen.<\/p>\n

We are a nation, historically, that treats “keeping order” as a community activity. \u00a0And the message is getting out to The People, a majority of whom now believe<\/a> that civilian carry makes us all safer.<\/p>\n

May it ever be so.<\/p>\n

That’s why we’re here.<\/p>\n

To Sum It Up In A Sentence<\/strong>: \u00a0 Americans were never intended to be helpless in the face of evil.<\/p>\n

This Series:<\/strong><\/p>\n