I read something today about the collective protected state.
If it is granted that the basis for any argument in favour of unrestricted possession of firearms has to depend on a discussion of the nature of the state, then it is problematical to hold that the right of individual citizens to possess firearms for the protection of the state in a state already duly protected is consistent.
So who is protected and who is not?
I find it difficult to believe that any of your commenters so far have lived in a neighborhood in which gang members possess guns for periods of years. I often chuckle at the politics over Intifada crimes knowing there are fewer than 4000 deaths over a period of decades whereas here in Los Angeles County, there were about 16,000 murders between Crips and Bloods and Latino gangs during the 80s and early 90s. I can't tell you what it's like in the Third World, but I know people who were murdered by gang members and I know of murdering gang members, as does everyone in my neighborhood, 90016.
I live about 10 miles away now in a community that has had 2 murders in 17 years. Something very different goes on here with regard to the collective protected state. Let's just call that difference RaceWealth. There are those with it and those without it. Those without it can go unprotected for years, which is why some of my friends who happen to work for the law firm of the late Johnnie Cochran were very serious in their attempts to sue the government under equal protection clauses. It cannot be very difficult to see that there are communities in which personal defense is required because of a failure of equal protection by the state. You can deconstruct the Constitution all you like, as is your post-modern prerogative, but people who have had family and friends killed appeal to a different sort of logic - of the sort from which simple declarations stand the test of time, or sometimes rap songs that just happen to become national hits.
There is a simple principle, simple when it comes from a member of a denied community, that I would invoke. If there is a proper way for an individual to operate a gun, in defense of his own life, or the lives of his family in a forsaken community, why should that propriety be denied an individual of a forsaken community? Ultimately one's fortune and sacred honor is judged by third parties at some point in the future and the value of some lives is weighed against the value of others. In the gap between some mercenary or police service is the individual faced with the question of the value of his own life and that accorded to him by the collective authority. But it seems to me that if RaceWealth or some other cause can be such an ongoing disruption to a reasonable expectation of equal protection under the law, the individual is obligated to protect himself by any means necessary.
If there is a 'secular' argument, then it must transcend the context of the cult opposing the right of the individual to use deadly force. Let it be a universal argument so as not to confuse it with evangelical atheism. Ultimately we are talking about a martial education, something bourgeois Americans have foregone and thus lost any sense of. It is why those formally ordained in the ministries of the martial arts, ie Military personnel and Law Enforcement officers speak a different language than bloggers who use every adjective about guns except 'my'. And so it comes as no surprise that their third party proclamations come lacking that which would be common sense, ie the experience of living amongst and dealing with predatory humans.
Education about protecting one's own life is more important than education about the context of laws passed and theories about collective states and militias. I have no spiffy analogy to offer illustrating the foolishness - but look to your own martial education and re-evaluate your position.
Sign me, the dude in the bar whom you want on your side if and when a fight breaks out, long before you're out there explaining to the cops.
Recent Comments