Safer streets is a confirmation of a healthy self-rule. When we have a healthy self-determinative relationship with our public servants, safer streets will follow. The less violence goal of safer streets will not come as long as officials presume to be smarter than the electorate and quarrel with the people.
McDonald v. Chicago is a case of reversing a gun ban – and reversing one such quarrel with the people – reversed on the grounds that the second amendment applies to the states and cities as much as it applies to the federal government. But if more guns come into the hands of citizens, will there be more violence?
In Part III here, we’ll see that the answer is No.
Why not? Because there are already ‘more guns’, something on the order of 300 million in the hands of some 90 million people. Why are the crime stats concentrated in the gun ban zones and not everywhere there is high gun ownership? Something else is at work. Taking the people’s ability to resist is at work in the high crime zones.
Violence is not a matter of easy access to guns, it is a product of thugs’ easy access to society. Gun control and early release, for instance, collude in the same purpose: more chaos in order to cultivate more and more spending.
One of the things that I choose first to educate the electorate about is that the authority police have derives from the authority we have since the nation’s inception. We had the legal authority to stop a crime 90 years before there were police departments and 130 years before there was a National Guard. We give it to servants until we revoke it. Some places in California, whole police departments have been replaced.
Consequently, we do not arm our police for protection of the citizenry, but for their self-protection in their service to the people. Any person – policeman or not – has the right of self-defense, and we recognize that also for our officers. We do not arm officers to catch the bad guys – they use the authority we gave them to do that; we arm them for their protection when they take risks in using their authority in their enforcement of the law.
We reserve that same right and we retain that authority for ourselves when investigating a bump in the night or resisting a criminal encounter away from home. The authority we give police never diminished the authority we retain for ourselves to do the very same thing in the absence of police. Gun control hides knowledge of this authority from you: gun bans hide your authority, too. Gun owners and forty-eight states affirm it for you.
How are safer streets restored non-violently by more citizens armed with lethal force? Violence is stopped the moment it strikes by the only person who can really stop it, the one present. It means realizing that there is no one else. No one else who is armed with superior force and no one else in authority. Experts acknowledge that in the vast number of cases, the citizen is on their own. They state three reasons why. 1. Police cannot be everywhere. 2. Police have no duty to protect individuals from the criminal acts of others, and; 3. Realistically speaking, you are on your own. That is an observation that is passive. For an observation that is active, try this on for size: in the final analysis, the target is their own best first line of defense.
The armed citizen means safer streets non-violently, because the armed citizen is not hostile or anti-social as thugs are; the armed citizen is not aggressive, but defensive; the armed citizen brings superior force to bear which he elects to use if necessary, or not use the moment the threat is de-escalated. The armed citizen observes and adheres to the law and has a love of community thugs do not have.
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John Longenecker is an author of Safe Streets In The Nationwide Concealed Carry Of Handguns – Meeting Dependency And Violent Crime With American Spirit, Independence, And Citizen Authority [CONTRAST MEDIA PRESS]. Safer Streets Newsletter.
