By Charles C. W. Cooke
Wednesday, June 03, 2020
‘Only the cops need guns” simply could not live forever
alongside, “The cops are racist and will kill you.” And so, at long last, the
two circles of the Venn Diagram have filed for an amicable divorce. In the end,
the differences proved irreconcilable.
At least, they proved irreconcilable without descending
into farce. I have been told more times that I can count that “if you want to
own an AR-15, you should join the army or the police.” Oh, really. Why?
So that I can be pulled back when the rioting starts, lest I inflame those
wielding bricks and Molotov cocktails? So that I can be called a fascist, acting
in the service of a dictator? So that I can be part of the problem? In light of
the new fashions, these old injunctions look rather silly, don’t they? “You
don’t need 15 rounds; you’re not a cop! Also, the police are
corrupt from top to bottom, and should probably be abolished.”
Pick one, perhaps?
In The New Republic, Matt Ford argues that the
police were a mistake per se. They have, Ford writes, “become the standing
armies that the Founders feared.” As it happens, unreconstructed small-r
republican that I am, I have more sympathy for this idea than many might
expect. But I’m sure as hell not going to entertain it at the same time as I
subordinate my unalienable right to bear arms to the personal prejudices of the
bureaucracy and commentariat. Don’t call the cops! Also, wait
three months for a gun permit! Again: Pick one.
In any case, the idea that the existence of police
officers in some way negates the right to bear arms has always been a
ridiculous one. Police are an auxiliary force that we hire to do a particular
job — there to supplement, not to replace, my rights and
responsibilities. Every time we debate gun control in the United States, I am
informed that the Sheriff of Whatever County is opposed to liberalization. To
which I always think, “So what?” My right to keep and bear arms is
merely the practical expression of my underlying right to self-defense. That,
as a polity, we have decided to hire certain people to take the first shot at
keeping the peace is fine. But it has no bearing on my liberties.
And how could it, given that I do not live in a
police station? The old saw that “when seconds count, the police are minutes
away” is trotted out as often as it is because it is unquestionably true.
Whether the average police department is virtuous or evil is irrelevant here.
What matters is that no government has the right — and in America, mercifully,
no government has the legal power — to farm out, and then to abolish, my
elementary rights. It would not fly if the government hired people to speak for
me and then shut down my speech; if would not fly if the government hired
people to worship for me and then restricted my right to exercise my religion;
and it will not fly for the government to hire a security agency and then to
remove, or limit, my access to weaponry. This is a personal question, not an
aggregate question: I have one life, and I am entitled to defend it in any way
I see fit against those who would do me harm. If there is a single principle
that has animated this realm since the time of the Emperor Justinian, it is
that.
Happily, defending their lives and their property as they
see fit is exactly what those who have been abandoned by the authorities are
doing in droves. Like father, like son, we have seen the return of the Rooftop
Koreans — supplemented, this time, by Rooftop African-Americans, Rooftop
Hispanics, Rooftop Pakistanis, and the rest. The NAACP is helping to
organize armed patrols of minority-owned business. Gun sales are up by a
staggering 80 percent over this time last year. During the coronavirus
lockdown, there was a public debate over whether gun stores should be deemed
“essential.” During this outbreak of rioting, such an inquiry seems quaint.
Now, as ever, there is no greater prophylactic against a criminal on the
rampage than a loaded firearm in the hands of a free man.
Underlying most of the arguments that are leveled by the gun-control movement is the assumption that the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution is historically contingent: upon a time, upon a people, upon a place. They are wrong. The Second Amendment is as relevant today as it was during the totalitarian 20th century; as it was when Ida B. Wells was observing that “the only case where [a] proposed lynching did not occur, was where the men armed themselves”; as it was in the revolutionary era; as it was when all roads led to Rome. There will be no age in which it becomes unnecessary, nor any transmutation of the human character that renders it moot. This is History. Right now. And Samuel Colt ain’t abandoning anyone.
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