To Protect and Serve
To Protect and Serve
It usually happens within the first week that your second child learns to talk in complete sentences. (And will happen again when each succeeding child likewise learns to speak in sentences.) You enter the room to see the two children going at it like The Rock and Stone Cold Steve Austin. You separate the combatants, and seek an explanation for the rapid retreat of the goddess of peace from your home. Then from both young mouths comes that oft-repeated bit of wisdom, "He started it." Hearing their sibling make the ludicrous assertion that he started it causes each sibling to up the ante by upping the volume. Finally you intervene like the UN, "I don't care who started it; I'm finishing it."
Maybe I'm just not yet sufficiently mature, but I still think it does matter who started it. The debate, at least inside the church, over the war with Iraq is not over whether Saddam is a Boy Scout, not even over whether he loves the USA. Rather, at its best, it is a debate over jurisdiction, and just war, which in turn means it's a debate over what constitutes an immanent threat. Even I, the dove that I am, would not have waited for the Japanese air force to actually open their bomb bays before I started shooting at Pearl Harbor.
Preparing for war that we nnght enjoy peace doesn't just mean stockpiling weapons of mass destruction if you are the U.S., and stockpiling pea shooters if you're a nation they want to be able to kick around in the future. It includes also the capacity to gauge the threat level of various potential enemies. That is, the feds not only have mass weapons of mass destruction, but they have the mass of them pointed toward Russia and China, and only a few pointed at France. No doubt this time around the army didn't have to repaint all their vehicles from jungle green to sand white. I think they had a notion they'd be headed out east again.
In like manner we don't start shooting because some tin horn politician rattled a sword at us, or some two bit thug with a quarter billion man army won't give us our spy plane back. Neither, however, as W. wisely pointed out, must we wait for those who would pretend to be our boss, to tell us its okay to shoot. We can protect ourselves.
Which is why I have a gun, one the government knows nothing about. The wacky left, of course, believes already that only crim- inals have guns. That I own a gun is proof' positive that I am a menace to society. And in some sense they are right. The National Society of the Sitting Down When We Make Winky Girly Men should feet threatened by me. But not because I own a gun, but because I am a man.
The wacky right, on the other hand, is perfectly comfortable with the fact that I own a gun. Some of those on the wacky right even went so far, in Kennesaw, Georgia, to pass a law requiring every home to have a gun back in the 1980's. (This, for those of you keeping score at home, is the local version of neo-conservatism. Like you I'm surprised they had the imagination to have a local version.) If we all have guns, then we can all be the government. These folks rightly point out that bad guys who break into our homes don't often have the courtesy to wait for the gendarmes to arrive with their weapons. They rightly recognize a real and present danger- bad guys.
What they miss, however, is the second part of my planned response. Yes I have a gun, but I have one that the government knows nothing about. Because I face two different types of potential dangers. Not only are there bad guys around, but there are bad guys wearing badges around. Not only does the loony left think me a criminal because of my gun, but the loony left, both those who work for the state and those who merely cheer it on, likewise are tempted to see me as a criminal because I don't hand my children over to the state. I have my gun, that the government knows nothing about, to protect me from the government.
Which is the real reason we have the second amendment. We have the National Retreat, I mean, the National Rifle Association taking their stand on the right of the sportsman to go out and plunk a buck or two, which utterly misses the point. Then on the left the argument focuses on the militia clause. "Surely," they manage to say with a straight face, "when the fathers wrote this they didn't mean for regular Joes to have guns. They just meant for those in the Guard, or the Reserves." Both miss the point.
The Second Amendment defends the right to keep and bear arms not first so that we can shoot deer, nor so we can shoot criminal bad guys, nor so we can shoot invading bad guys but so that we can be a viable threat to the state. We keep the guns SO that they won't run us over. Better to be North Korea, than it is to he Iraq, or Panama, or Grenada.
I am prepared on all three fronts, against aggressors foreign, domestic and federal, for the sake of the peace in my home. Which brings us back to "who started it'?". I don't have the gun so that I can march on Washington. I have it to keep them from treating my family like Sherman treated the citizens within his path. I keep it not to make war, but to prevent it. Those who refuse to arm themselves, who ask the state to protect their families, might consider that foxes aren't well qualified to guard hens. They are not lovers of peace, hut slaves of the state.
What do we fight for? Freedom. And what is its cost? Eternal vigilance. And which enemies are we to watch out for'? All of them. I'm not starting anything, but I will stop it, whatever the cost.