By David French
Tuesday, September 17, 2013
While the next few weeks will invariably bring out the
same cavalcade of charts, graphs, and statistics purporting to explain either
how the United States is the most violent nation in the world or how more gun
ownership actually helps make us less violent, the gun-control debate has moved
well past statistics and into much deeper matters of family, morality, and
political culture. We simply speak different cultural languages, and these
languages are rooted in choices that go far beyond the decision to own a gun.
Do you live in a rural or urban community? Were you raised around firearms? Do
you have military experience? What is your conception of government and the
rights and responsibilities of citizenship? Do you feel that you have the
primary responsibility for protecting your family?
Rather than launch into the battle of statistics, let me
explain three reasons why I “cling” (to borrow President Obama’s words) to my
guns.
First, the practical: My family will be less safe if
we’re not armed. We’re from Columbia, Tennessee, (actually closer to Mount
Pleasant than Columbia proper) and live well outside of town. In other words,
when seconds count, the police can be up to 15 to 20 minutes away. This is no
insult to the police. Our local sheriff’s deputies are fine people and good
officers, but they simply can’t cover the amount of territory they would have
to in order to be immediately available. And lest anyone think it’s far-fetched
that we’d ever face a personal threat, we faced one last year — when a threatening
man approached my wife and kids at home with law enforcement far away.
Simply put, my firearms are not anyone’s problem, but
they could be my family’s solution in a worst-case scenario.
Second, the moral: Beyond the practical problem of
safety, many of us have a profound moral problem with delegating our family’s
protection to the state. As a husband, a father — as a man — it is difficult
for me to understand the decision (absent compelling circumstances, such as
mental illness, criminality, suicidal ideation, or substance abuse) to disarm
and voluntarily do less than I lawfully can to protect not just my own family,
but also the people who come under my roof. If I disarm, I make the decision to
render those most valuable to me more vulnerable.
Third, the cultural: There is the critical matter of our
own liberty and independence — indeed, of our very national identity. The
American experiment rests on the idea that our rights don’t flow from the state
but are instead protected by the state. The government is created by “we the
people,” and “we the people” must retain authority over the state we’ve
created. The Constitution — and the ballot box – provide our first lines of
protection against government overreach, but an armed citizenry represents the
firewall — a deterrent against the kinds of grotesque abuses we’ve seen
elsewhere around the world. In fact, the certainty that a significant mass of
Americans would take up arms rather than submit to the kinds of governments
that took over such otherwise-developed and advanced nations as Germany and
Japan is one of the reasons why such governments are unthinkable here in the
United States.
In other words, I own firearms not just for
self-protection but also as an act of citizenship in a constitutional republic
of profoundly-limited government powers.
To be clear, I’m no “prepper” (though the zombie
apocalypse is inevitable), nor am I terribly concerned that our present
government (as flawed as it is) is in danger of crossing any red lines into
tyranny. I’m even a part-time government employee as an officer in the Army
Reserve. But the responsibilities and vital traditions of citizenship endure
nonetheless, and as a gun-owing veteran I’m standing in a long line of
more-distinguished family members, stretching all the way back to a long, cold
winter in Valley Forge.
So I’m not clinging, I’m preserving — doing my very small
part to preserve my family’s safety, our moral integrity, and the primacy of
the citizen over the state in our constitutional republic.
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