The "Death Wish" Question

However, the statistics suggest otherwise. After examining data from the Department of Justice National Crime Victimization Survey from 1979 through 1987, Gary Kleck found that the best way to survive a criminal attack was to resist – with a gun.

Women were 2.5 times more likely to suffer serious injury if they offered no resistance than if they resisted with a gun. Having a gun made the crucial difference. Women who resisted without a gun were four times more likely to be seriously hurt than those who resisted with a gun. "In other words," writes John Lott in More Guns, Less Crime, "the best advice is to resist with a gun, but if no gun is available, it is better to offer no resistance than to fight."

In the case of men – no doubt, because of their greater physical strength – having a gun made considerably less difference in the success rate of their resistance and in the likelihood of their being injured. But it still proved advantageous. Men who offered no resistance turned out to be 1.4 times more likely to be seriously hurt than those who resisted with a gun. Men who resisted without a gun were 1.5 times more likely to be injured than those resisting with a gun.

Kleck’s study is compelling. But these dry statistics tell only part of the story.

There is another reason for people to think twice before engaging in "active compliance." Victims who choose passivity risk far more than mere injury or death.

On December 14, 2000, a young schoolteacher – identified in the press only as "H.G." – went to visit her boyfriend Jason Befort, 26, at his townhouse in northeast Wichita, where he lived with two other men. As Jason and H.G. lay in bed, the porch light came on and they heard one of the roommates Aaron Sander, 29, talking to someone.

The next thing they knew, "the bedroom door burst open," the woman later recalled in court. "A tall black man was standing in the doorway. He ripped the covers off of me, and I don't remember what he said. Right after that, Aaron was brought in by another black male. He was kind of just thrown onto the bed."

The two men pointed guns at their prisoners and demanded to know who else was in the house. When all occupants – three men and two women, all single, white professionals in their twenties – had been rounded up, the intruders demanded that they strip naked.

It has been alleged that the intruders were Jonathan and Reginald Carr, two brothers, ages twenty and twenty-three. They ransacked the house for booty. At one point, they found an engagement ring. "That’s for you," said Jason Befort to his girlfriend H.G. "I was going to ask you to marry me."

Befort’s girlfriend has reported that, during the course of the night, she and the other woman Heather Miller, 27, were repeatedly raped. She also said that the bandits forced the prisoners to perform sex acts on each other.

The intruders then asked for the car keys and began driving the prisoners one by one to the ATM, to make withdrawals, leaving the others back at the house, under guard, locked in a closet. At one point, two of the men were in the closet together.

Befort’s fianceé recalls, "Aaron asked Brad [Heyka, 27] if we should try to do anything, if they were going to kill us. Brad didn't respond."

Finally, the thieves drove their prisoners to an empty soccer field and told them to get out. "I turned to Heather and said, 'They're going to shoot us.' " remembers the schoolteacher.

She was right. All five prisoners were made to kneel in the snow. The bandits shot them, one-by-one, execution-style, in the back of the head, then ran over the bodies with their truck.

Only Jason Befort’s fianceé survived to tell the tale. Naked, bleeding and shot in the head, she managed to walk more than a mile through the snow to get help.

Those five young people in Wichita, Kansas chose "active compliance." They did exactly as they were told. Perhaps if more people understood the sorts of things that can happen when you choose this course, they might weigh other options more seriously.

Unfortunately, the general public usually does not find out about crimes such as the Wichita Horror. They are reported only in local papers, and often with the most horrifying details edited out. When it first occurred, only the Wichita Eagle paid attention to the alleged crimes of the Carr brothers. Our webzine, FrontPageMagazine.com discovered the story about a month later and published it on the Internet, whereupon it rapidly became a cause celebre – but only on the Internet and in conservative papers such as The Washington Times. You will not see Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather or Peter Jennings talking about this crime.

The reason such crimes are covered up probably has a lot to do with race. As previously mentioned, news organizations routinely ignore most crimes that occur within minority communities. Any newspaper or TV station that tried to report every black-on-black murder, in all its gory details, would be accused of "racism." They would be charged with presenting minorities in a negative light.

Covering interracial crimes – crimes between people of different races – can also be politically risky for journalists. In approximately 90 percent of all interracial attacks, white people are the victims and black people the perpetrators. If these crimes were all given equal weight in the press, once again, journalists would be accused of "racism" for portraying African Americans as the villains in so many cases.

The safest sort of crime story for a journalist nowadays – and the type of story most likely to win him praise or awards – deals with a relatively rare sort of crime, one in which a white person attacks a black person (or some other protected "minority"), as in the beating death of gay student Matthew Shepard or the dragging death of James Byrd, a black man killed by white bigots in Texas.

Focusing on "hate crimes" committed by white people might be good for a journalist’s career. But it gives the public a very inaccurate view of what is actually happening on the street. We journalists are often accused of focusing on bad news. But, in some ways, the news we present is not as bad as it needs to be. Sometimes people need to hear the worst, in order to wake up to real dangers. Many of the "racially sensitive" crime stories that journalists censor happen to be exactly the sort of stories that people of all races need to hear, in order to be aware of the dangers inherent in "active compliance."

For instance, on July 21, 1997, three white Michigan teenagers, in search of adventure, decided to jump a train. Unfortunately, they got off in the wrong neighborhood. A gang of armed, black youths surrounded them. They killed Michael Carter, 14 and shot Dustin Kaiser, 15, in the head (miraculously, Kaiser survived). The third victim, a 14-year-old girl, was pistol-whipped and forced to perform oral sex on the gang, after which she was shot point blank in the face. The six gang members were later captured and prosecuted. The outrage was reported locally, but did not receive national attention.

Then consider the case of Terrell Rahim Yarbrough and Nathan D. Herring. On May 31, 1999, they kidnapped Brian Muha and Aaron Land, two white college students at Franciscan University in Ohio. According to the suspects’ own statements, the students were beaten, robbed and – in what is fast becoming a familiar scenario – forced to perform oral sex on each other, before they were shot with a .44 revolver. Yarbrough and Herring were convicted and sentenced to death. Their case has been largely ignored by the mass media.

In each of these cases, "active compliance" resulted in suffering and indignity far beyond mere injury or death. Since the victims were unarmed, it is hard to say what might have resulted had they attempted to fight back. Perhaps they would have died anyway. But they would have died with their dignity intact. And their struggle might at least have given the bandits something to think about next time.

In past generations, girls and boys alike were taught to prefer death to dishonor. Rape was called "a fate worse than death." Girls were expected to defend their chastity, even at risk of their lives. How far we have come from our forefathers’ thinking. In the 1970s, feminists actually began suggesting that women ask their rapists to please use a condom.

During World War II, parents who lost a son at the front would display a gold star in their window, for each child lost. A "Gold-Star Mother" was honored in her community. She displayed the star proudly as a token of her sacrifice for the greater cause.

Society changed during the 1960s. The anti-war spirit that swept America during the Vietnam conflict wiped out any notion that death could be honorable. "Make love, not war," said the hippies and protesters. Nothing was worth dying for. All that mattered was staying alive.

On July 14, 2000 a woman named Glenda Renee Hull entered a 7-Eleven store in Martinsburg, West Virginia, brandishing a rifle and demanding money. Store clerk Antonio Feliciano jumped her and held her down until the sheriff’s deputies arrived. In another time, Feliciano would have been hailed as a hero. But in this age of "active compliance," he was fired for his action.

``No asset in a 7-Eleven store is worth defending with an employee's life,'' said company officials in a statement explaining Feliciano’s firing. The 7-Eleven chain requires employees to hand over the money quietly during robberies.

Feliciano remarked that company regulations had not been his top concern during the crisis. "I just wanted to be sure that I was coming home that night,'' he said.

Did those 7-Eleven officials have a point? Is it right to risk your life or to take someone else’s life, simply to prevent money from being stolen? Attorney Jeffrey Snyder says it is. In his now-famous 1993 paper, "A Nation of Cowards," he explains why:

Snyder went further. He concluded that, "Crime is rampant because the law-abiding, each of us, condone it, excuse it, permit it, submit to it. We permit and encourage it because we do not fight back immediately, then and there, where it happens ... The defect is there, in our character. We are a nation of cowards and shirkers."

Few would deny that the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe had the right – even the obligation – to take up arms against their oppressors. After all, their lives were at stake. Yet, at the time, most Jews had no way of knowing, up until the moment they were killed, that death would be the final result of their "active compliance" with the SS. Most hoped they would survive if they just quietly did as they were told. And, indeed, many did manage to escape with their lives, even after years of imprisonment in death camps such as Auschwitz and Treblinka.

But those we call heroes were the ones who fought back, in suicidal gestures such as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Their resistance may have ended in death. But at least they died fighting. From the safe distance of 60 years, we admire their conduct. Yet, we do not seek to emulate it in our own lives.

In the 1974 film Death Wish, a Manhattan architect played by Charles Bronson comes face to face with the emptiness of his liberal ideas when intruders kill his wife and rape his daughter, leaving her a mental vegetable. He becomes a vigilante, prowling the streets and subways of New York, gunning down anyone who attempts to mug him.

In one scene, the Bronson character and his son-in-law Jack debate the ethics of taking the law into one’s own hands.

"What are we, Jack?" Bronson responds. "If we’re not pioneers, what have we become? What do you call people who, when they’re faced with a condition of fear, do nothing about it – they just run and hide?"

The question Bronson asked in that 1974 film haunts our society still. Who are we? What are we? What have we become? What do you call people who sit and do nothing while their loved ones are raped and butchered? What do you call people who fear death so deeply that they will accept any dishonor in its stead?

Those who push for gun control say that Americans no longer need guns to defend themselves. After all, we are no longer threatened by Indian raids. And we’re not facing a Nazi extermination effort, such as the Jews faced in World War II.

But their complacency is unjustified. Those five young people in Wichita, Kansas are just as dead as if they had been scalped by Indians on the frontier, or machinegunned at Babi Yar. What difference did it make if the intruders were marauding Indians or marauding street thugs? The result was the same.

Like the Jews in World War II, the Wichita victims faced a choice. They could fight or obey. Until the very end, they placed their hope in obedience. And, like the Jews in Nazi Europe, their "active compliance" led them to catastrophe.

When we first published the story of the Wichita Horror on FrontPageMagazine.com, a number of readers posted comments on our message board, asking why the victims had not fought back. It is not my purpose to raise that question here. The dead must rest in peace.

We can no more judge the actions of the Wichita Five than we can judge the 34,000 Jews who perished at Babi Yar in September 1941. Whatever choices they made seemed right to them at the time. None of us can say what we would have done in their place, because we were not there.

I earlier quoted Abram L. Sachar in The Redemption of the Unwanted, who wrote of the slaughter at Babi Yar, "This, the most appalling massacre of the war, is often alluded to as a prime example of utter Jewish helplessness in the face of disaster. But even the few desperate attempts, almost completely futile, to strike back served as a reminder that the difference between resistance and submission depended very largely upon who was in possession of the arms that back up the will to do or die" (emphasis added).

So it was with the Wichita Five, none of whom possessed the arms they needed to "back up the will to do or die."

The question of resistance is both moral and practical. The moral dimension can be resolved only in the privacy of our hearts. The practical question can be determined only in the moment of crisis, depending on the situation one faces.

I offer this chapter not as a facile prescription for action, but as a spur to soul-searching. It is worth pointing out that the one time in my life that I was held up at gunpoint, I handed over my wallet instantly. I do not know, any more than do my readers, what I would have done at Babi Yar or in that deserted soccer field in Wichita. Until the crisis is upon us, the question yawns unanswered like a black and empty abyss.

Scott Harris, "Call Me Blockhead, Take Your Best Shot," Los Angeles Times, January 28, 1997, Part B, page 1.

³ Valerie Richardson, "Kansas Tries to Keep the Peace By Keeping Murder Case Quiet," The Washington Times, May 7, 2001; Ron Sylvester, "Survivor Tells of Grisly Night: Woman Recounts Her Friends’ Final Hours," The Wichita Eagle, April 17, 2001; Valerie Richardson, "Wichita Horror Fuels Debate Over Hate Crimes," The Washington Times, February 11, 2001; Scott Rubush, "The Wichita Horror," FrontPageMagazine.com, January 12, 2001;

⁴ Walter Williams, "What About Hate Crimes By Blacks?" Cincinnati Enquirer, August 22, 1999, p. D-2.

⁵ David Horowitz, Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes, Spence Publishing Company, Dallas, Texas, 1999, page 26.

⁶ Richard Poe, "Priests in the Temple of Hate," FrontPageMagazine.com, July 27, 2000.

ACCORDING TO UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, Berkeley criminologist Franklin Zimring, the best way to survive a robbery is through "active compliance." In other words, do exactly what the criminal says, as quickly as possible.

However, the statistics suggest otherwise. After examining data from the Department of Justice National Crime Victimization Survey from 1979 through 1987, Gary Kleck found that the best way to survive a criminal attack was to resist – with a gun.

Women were 2.5 times more likely to suffer serious injury if they offered no resistance than if they resisted with a gun. Having a gun made the crucial difference. Women who resisted without a gun were four times more likely to be seriously hurt than those who resisted with a gun. "In other words," writes John Lott in More Guns, Less Crime, "the best advice is to resist with a gun, but if no gun is available, it is better to offer no resistance than to fight."

In the case of men – no doubt, because of their greater physical strength – having a gun made considerably less difference in the success rate of their resistance and in the likelihood of their being injured. But it still proved advantageous. Men who offered no resistance turned out to be 1.4 times more likely to be seriously hurt than those who resisted with a gun. Men who resisted without a gun were 1.5 times more likely to be injured than those resisting with a gun.

The Wichita Horror

Kleck’s study is compelling. But these dry statistics tell only part of the story.

There is another reason for people to think twice before engaging in "active compliance." Victims who choose passivity risk far more than mere injury or death.

On December 14, 2000, a young schoolteacher – identified in the press only as "H.G." – went to visit her boyfriend Jason Befort, 26, at his townhouse in northeast Wichita, where he lived with two other men. As Jason and H.G. lay in bed, the porch light came on and they heard one of the roommates Aaron Sander, 29, talking to someone.

The next thing they knew, "the bedroom door burst open," the woman later recalled in court. "A tall black man was standing in the doorway. He ripped the covers off of me, and I don't remember what he said. Right after that, Aaron was brought in by another black male. He was kind of just thrown onto the bed."

The two men pointed guns at their prisoners and demanded to know who else was in the house. When all occupants – three men and two women, all single, white professionals in their twenties – had been rounded up, the intruders demanded that they strip naked.

The Horror Unfolds

It has been alleged that the intruders were Jonathan and Reginald Carr, two brothers, ages twenty and twenty-three. They ransacked the house for booty. At one point, they found an engagement ring. "That’s for you," said Jason Befort to his girlfriend H.G. "I was going to ask you to marry me."

Befort’s girlfriend has reported that, during the course of the night, she and the other woman Heather Miller, 27, were repeatedly raped. She also said that the bandits forced the prisoners to perform sex acts on each other.

The intruders then asked for the car keys and began driving the prisoners one by one to the ATM, to make withdrawals, leaving the others back at the house, under guard, locked in a closet. At one point, two of the men were in the closet together.

Befort’s fianceé recalls, "Aaron asked Brad [Heyka, 27] if we should try to do anything, if they were going to kill us. Brad didn't respond."

Finally, the thieves drove their prisoners to an empty soccer field and told them to get out. "I turned to Heather and said, 'They're going to shoot us.' " remembers the schoolteacher.

She was right. All five prisoners were made to kneel in the snow. The bandits shot them, one-by-one, execution-style, in the back of the head, then ran over the bodies with their truck.

Only Jason Befort’s fianceé survived to tell the tale. Naked, bleeding and shot in the head, she managed to walk more than a mile through the snow to get help.

A Massive Coverup

Those five young people in Wichita, Kansas chose "active compliance." They did exactly as they were told. Perhaps if more people understood the sorts of things that can happen when you choose this course, they might weigh other options more seriously.

Unfortunately, the general public usually does not find out about crimes such as the Wichita Horror. They are reported only in local papers, and often with the most horrifying details edited out. When it first occurred, only the Wichita Eagle paid attention to the alleged crimes of the Carr brothers. Our webzine, FrontPageMagazine.com discovered the story about a month later and published it on the Internet, whereupon it rapidly became a cause celebre – but only on the Internet and in conservative papers such as The Washington Times. You will not see Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather or Peter Jennings talking about this crime.

Our Censored News

The reason such crimes are covered up probably has a lot to do with race. As previously mentioned, news organizations routinely ignore most crimes that occur within minority communities. Any newspaper or TV station that tried to report every black-on-black murder, in all its gory details, would be accused of "racism." They would be charged with presenting minorities in a negative light.

Covering interracial crimes – crimes between people of different races – can also be politically risky for journalists. In approximately 90 percent of all interracial attacks, white people are the victims and black people the perpetrators. If these crimes were all given equal weight in the press, once again, journalists would be accused of "racism" for portraying African Americans as the villains in so many cases.

The safest sort of crime story for a journalist nowadays – and the type of story most likely to win him praise or awards – deals with a relatively rare sort of crime, one in which a white person attacks a black person (or some other protected "minority"), as in the beating death of gay student Matthew Shepard or the dragging death of James Byrd, a black man killed by white bigots in Texas.

Untold Stories

Focusing on "hate crimes" committed by white people might be good for a journalist’s career. But it gives the public a very inaccurate view of what is actually happening on the street. We journalists are often accused of focusing on bad news. But, in some ways, the news we present is not as bad as it needs to be. Sometimes people need to hear the worst, in order to wake up to real dangers. Many of the "racially sensitive" crime stories that journalists censor happen to be exactly the sort of stories that people of all races need to hear, in order to be aware of the dangers inherent in "active compliance."

For instance, on July 21, 1997, three white Michigan teenagers, in search of adventure, decided to jump a train. Unfortunately, they got off in the wrong neighborhood. A gang of armed, black youths surrounded them. They killed Michael Carter, 14 and shot Dustin Kaiser, 15, in the head (miraculously, Kaiser survived). The third victim, a 14-year-old girl, was pistol-whipped and forced to perform oral sex on the gang, after which she was shot point blank in the face. The six gang members were later captured and prosecuted. The outrage was reported locally, but did not receive national attention.

Then consider the case of Terrell Rahim Yarbrough and Nathan D. Herring. On May 31, 1999, they kidnapped Brian Muha and Aaron Land, two white college students at Franciscan University in Ohio. According to the suspects’ own statements, the students were beaten, robbed and – in what is fast becoming a familiar scenario – forced to perform oral sex on each other, before they were shot with a .44 revolver. Yarbrough and Herring were convicted and sentenced to death. Their case has been largely ignored by the mass media.

Death Before Dishonor

In each of these cases, "active compliance" resulted in suffering and indignity far beyond mere injury or death. Since the victims were unarmed, it is hard to say what might have resulted had they attempted to fight back. Perhaps they would have died anyway. But they would have died with their dignity intact. And their struggle might at least have given the bandits something to think about next time.

In past generations, girls and boys alike were taught to prefer death to dishonor. Rape was called "a fate worse than death." Girls were expected to defend their chastity, even at risk of their lives. How far we have come from our forefathers’ thinking. In the 1970s, feminists actually began suggesting that women ask their rapists to please use a condom.

During World War II, parents who lost a son at the front would display a gold star in their window, for each child lost. A "Gold-Star Mother" was honored in her community. She displayed the star proudly as a token of her sacrifice for the greater cause.

Society changed during the 1960s. The anti-war spirit that swept America during the Vietnam conflict wiped out any notion that death could be honorable. "Make love, not war," said the hippies and protesters. Nothing was worth dying for. All that mattered was staying alive.

Not Worth Fighting

On July 14, 2000 a woman named Glenda Renee Hull entered a 7-Eleven store in Martinsburg, West Virginia, brandishing a rifle and demanding money. Store clerk Antonio Feliciano jumped her and held her down until the sheriff’s deputies arrived. In another time, Feliciano would have been hailed as a hero. But in this age of "active compliance," he was fired for his action.

``No asset in a 7-Eleven store is worth defending with an employee's life,'' said company officials in a statement explaining Feliciano’s firing. The 7-Eleven chain requires employees to hand over the money quietly during robberies.

Feliciano remarked that company regulations had not been his top concern during the crisis. "I just wanted to be sure that I was coming home that night,'' he said.

A Nation of Cowards

Did those 7-Eleven officials have a point? Is it right to risk your life or to take someone else’s life, simply to prevent money from being stolen? Attorney Jeffrey Snyder says it is. In his now-famous 1993 paper, "A Nation of Cowards," he explains why:

Crime is… a commandeering of the victim's person and liberty… It is, in fact, an act of enslavement. Your wallet, your purse, or your car may not be worth your life, but your dignity is; and if it is not worth fighting for, it can hardly be said to exist.

Snyder went further. He concluded that, "Crime is rampant because the law-abiding, each of us, condone it, excuse it, permit it, submit to it. We permit and encourage it because we do not fight back immediately, then and there, where it happens ... The defect is there, in our character. We are a nation of cowards and shirkers."

A Safe Distance

Few would deny that the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe had the right – even the obligation – to take up arms against their oppressors. After all, their lives were at stake. Yet, at the time, most Jews had no way of knowing, up until the moment they were killed, that death would be the final result of their "active compliance" with the SS. Most hoped they would survive if they just quietly did as they were told. And, indeed, many did manage to escape with their lives, even after years of imprisonment in death camps such as Auschwitz and Treblinka.

But those we call heroes were the ones who fought back, in suicidal gestures such as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Their resistance may have ended in death. But at least they died fighting. From the safe distance of 60 years, we admire their conduct. Yet, we do not seek to emulate it in our own lives.

The "Death Wish" Question

In the 1974 film Death Wish, a Manhattan architect played by Charles Bronson comes face to face with the emptiness of his liberal ideas when intruders kill his wife and rape his daughter, leaving her a mental vegetable. He becomes a vigilante, prowling the streets and subways of New York, gunning down anyone who attempts to mug him.

In one scene, the Bronson character and his son-in-law Jack debate the ethics of taking the law into one’s own hands.

"We’re not pioneers anymore," his son-in-law objects.

"What are we, Jack?" Bronson responds. "If we’re not pioneers, what have we become? What do you call people who, when they’re faced with a condition of fear, do nothing about it – they just run and hide?"

"Civilized?" Jack suggests.

Bronson shakes his head. "No."

Who Are We?

The question Bronson asked in that 1974 film haunts our society still. Who are we? What are we? What have we become? What do you call people who sit and do nothing while their loved ones are raped and butchered? What do you call people who fear death so deeply that they will accept any dishonor in its stead?

Those who push for gun control say that Americans no longer need guns to defend themselves. After all, we are no longer threatened by Indian raids. And we’re not facing a Nazi extermination effort, such as the Jews faced in World War II.

But their complacency is unjustified. Those five young people in Wichita, Kansas are just as dead as if they had been scalped by Indians on the frontier, or machinegunned at Babi Yar. What difference did it make if the intruders were marauding Indians or marauding street thugs? The result was the same.

Like the Jews in World War II, the Wichita victims faced a choice. They could fight or obey. Until the very end, they placed their hope in obedience. And, like the Jews in Nazi Europe, their "active compliance" led them to catastrophe.

Judge Not

When we first published the story of the Wichita Horror on FrontPageMagazine.com, a number of readers posted comments on our message board, asking why the victims had not fought back. It is not my purpose to raise that question here. The dead must rest in peace.

We can no more judge the actions of the Wichita Five than we can judge the 34,000 Jews who perished at Babi Yar in September 1941. Whatever choices they made seemed right to them at the time. None of us can say what we would have done in their place, because we were not there.

I earlier quoted Abram L. Sachar in The Redemption of the Unwanted, who wrote of the slaughter at Babi Yar, "This, the most appalling massacre of the war, is often alluded to as a prime example of utter Jewish helplessness in the face of disaster. But even the few desperate attempts, almost completely futile, to strike back served as a reminder that the difference between resistance and submission depended very largely upon who was in possession of the arms that back up the will to do or die" (emphasis added).

So it was with the Wichita Five, none of whom possessed the arms they needed to "back up the will to do or die."

The question of resistance is both moral and practical. The moral dimension can be resolved only in the privacy of our hearts. The practical question can be determined only in the moment of crisis, depending on the situation one faces.

I offer this chapter not as a facile prescription for action, but as a spur to soul-searching. It is worth pointing out that the one time in my life that I was held up at gunpoint, I handed over my wallet instantly. I do not know, any more than do my readers, what I would have done at Babi Yar or in that deserted soccer field in Wichita. Until the crisis is upon us, the question yawns unanswered like a black and empty abyss.

End Notes

Scott Harris, "Call Me Blockhead, Take Your Best Shot," Los Angeles Times, January 28, 1997, Part B, page 1.

2 John Lott, 1998, page 4.

3 Valerie Richardson, "Kansas Tries to Keep the Peace By Keeping Murder Case Quiet," The Washington Times, May 7, 2001; Ron Sylvester, "Survivor Tells of Grisly Night: Woman Recounts Her Friends’ Final Hours," The Wichita Eagle, April 17, 2001; Valerie Richardson, "Wichita Horror Fuels Debate Over Hate Crimes," The Washington Times, February 11, 2001; Scott Rubush, "The Wichita Horror," FrontPageMagazine.com, January 12, 2001;

4 Walter Williams, "What About Hate Crimes By Blacks?" Cincinnati Enquirer, August 22, 1999, p. D-2.

5 David Horowitz, Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes, Spence Publishing Company, Dallas, Texas, 1999, page 26.

6 Richard Poe, "Priests in the Temple of Hate," FrontPageMagazine.com, July 27, 2000.

7 "7-Eleven Hero Clerk Fired," Associated Press, August 2, 2000.

8 Jeffrey R. Snyder, "A Nation of Cowards," The Public Interest, Fall 1993.

Old also but to the point:

A NATION OF COWARDS

Jeffrey R. Snyder

OUR SOCIETY has reached a pinnacle of self-expression and respect for individuality rare or unmatched in history. Our entire popular culture -- from fashion magazines to the cinema -- positively screams the matchless worth of the individual, and glories in eccentricity, nonconformity, independent judgment, and self-determination. This enthusiasm is reflected in the prevalent notion that helping someone entails increasing that person's "self-esteem"; that if a person properly values himself, he will naturally be a happy, productive, and, in some inexplicable fashion, responsible member of society.

And yet, while people are encouraged to revel in their individuality and incalculable self-worth, the media and the law enforcement establishment continually advise us that, when confronted with the threat of lethal violence, we should not resist, but simply give the attacker what he wants. If the crime under consideration is rape, there is some notable waffling on this point, and the discussion quickly moves to how the woman can change her behavior to minimize the risk of rape, and the various ridiculous, non-lethal weapons she may acceptably carry, such as whistles, keys, mace or, that weapon which really sends shivers down a rapist's spine, the portable cellular phone.

Now how can this be? How can a person who values himself so highly calmly accept the indignity of a criminal assault? How can one who believes that the essence of his dignity lies in his self-determination passively accept the forcible deprivation of that self-determination? How can he, quietly, with great dignity and poise, simply hand over the goods?

The assumption, of course, is that there is no inconsistency. The advice not to resist a criminal assault and simply hand over the goods is founded on the notion that one's life is of incalculable value, and that no amount of property is worth it. Put aside, for a moment, the outrageousness of the suggestion that a criminal who proffers lethal violence should be treated as if he has instituted a new social contract: "I will not hurt or kill you if you give me what I want." For years, feminists have labored to educate people that rape is not about sex, but about domination, degradation, and control. Evidently, someone needs to inform the law enforcement establishment and the media that kidnapping, robbery, carjacking, and assault are not about property.

Crime is not only a complete disavowal of the social contract, but also a commandeering of the victim's person and liberty. If the individual's dignity lies in the fact that he is a moral agent engaging in actions of his own will, in free exchange with others, then crime always violates the victim's dignity. It is, in fact, an act of enslavement. Your wallet, your purse, or your car may not be worth your life, but your dignity is; and if it is not worth fighting for, it can hardly be said to exist.

The Gift of Life
Although difficult for modern man to fathom, it was once widely believed that life was a gift from God, that to not defend that life when offered violence was to hold God's gift in contempt, to be a coward and to breach one's duty to one's community. A sermon given in Philadelphia in 1747 unequivocally equated the failure to defend oneself with suicide:

He that suffers his life to be taken from him by one that hath no authority for that purpose, when he might preserve it by defense, incurs the Guilt of self murder since God hath enjoined him to seek the continuance of his life, and Nature itself teaches every creature to defend itself.
"Cowardice" and "self-respect" have largely disappeared from public discourse. In their place we are offered "self-esteem" as the bellwether of success and a proxy for dignity. "Self-respect" implies that one recognizes standards, and judges oneself worthy by the degree to which one lives up to them. "Self-esteem" simply means that one feels good about oneself. "Dignity" used to refer to the self-mastery and fortitude with which a person conducted himself in the face of life's vicissitudes and the boorish behavior of others. Now, judging by campus speech codes, dignity requires that we never encounter a discouraging word and that others be coerced into acting respectfully, evidently on the assumption that we are powerless to prevent our degradation if exposed to the demeaning behavior of others. These are signposts proclaiming the insubstantiality of our character, the hollowness of our souls.

It is impossible to address the problem of rampant crime without talking about the moral responsibility of the intended victim. Crime is rampant because the law-abiding, each of us, condone it, excuse it, permit it, submit to it. We permit and encourage it because we do not fight back, immediately, then and there, where it happens. Crime is not rampant because we do not have enough prisons, because judges and prosecutors are too soft, because the police are hamstrung with absurd technicalities. The defect is there, in our character. We are a nation of cowards and shirkers.

Do You Feel Lucky?
In 1991, when then-Attorney General Richard Thornburgh released the FBI's annual crime statistics, he noted that it is now more likely that a person will be the victim of a violent crime than that he will be in an auto accident. Despite this, most people readily believe that the existence of the police relieves them of the responsibility to take full measures to protect themselves. The police, however, are not personal bodyguards. Rather, they act as a general deterrent to crime, both by their presence and by apprehending criminals after the fact. As numerous courts have held, they have no legal obligation to protect anyone in particular. You cannot sue them for failing to prevent you from being the victim of a crime.

Insofar as the police deter by their presence, they are very, very good. Criminals take great pains not to commit a crime in front of them. Unfortunately, the corollary is that you can pretty much bet your life (and you are) that they won't be there at the moment you actually need them.

Should you ever be the victim of an assault, a robbery, or a rape, you will find it very difficult to call the police while the act is in progress, even if you are carrying a portable cellular phone. Nevertheless, you might be interested to know how long it takes them to show up. Department of Justice statistics for 1991 show that, for all crimes of violence, only 28 percent of calls are responded to within five minutes. The idea that protection is a service people can call to have delivered and expect to receive in a timely fashion is often mocked by gun owners, who love to recite the challenge, "Call for a cop, call for an ambulance, and call for a pizza. See who shows up first."

Many people deal with the problem of crime by convincing themselves that they live, work, and travel only in special "crime-free" zones. Invariably, they react with shock and hurt surprise when they discover that criminals do not play by the rules and do not respect these imaginary boundaries. If, however, you understand that crime can occur anywhere at anytime, and if you understand that you can be maimed or mortally wounded in mere seconds, you may wish to consider whether you are willing to place the responsibility for safeguarding your life in the hands of others.

Power And Responsibility
Is your life worth protecting? If so, whose responsibility is it to protect it? If you believe that it is the police's, not only are you wrong -- since the courts universally rule that they have no legal obligation to do so -- but you face some difficult moral quandaries. How can you rightfully ask another human being to risk his life to protect yours, when you will assume no responsibility yourself? Because that is his job and we pay him to do it? Because your life is of incalculable value, but his is only worth the $30,000 salary we pay him? If you believe it reprehensible to possess the means and will to use lethal force to repel a criminal assault, how can you call upon another to do so for you?

Do you believe that you are forbidden to protect yourself because the police are better qualified to protect you, because they know what they are doing but you're a rank amateur? Put aside that this is equivalent to believing that only concert pianists may play the piano and only professional athletes may play sports. What exactly are these special qualities possessed only by the police and beyond the rest of us mere mortals?

One who values his life and takes seriously his responsibilities to his family and community will possess and cultivate the means of fighting back, and will retaliate when threatened with death or grievous injury to himself or a loved one. He will never be content to rely solely on others for his safety, or to think he has done all that is possible by being aware of his surroundings and taking measures of avoidance. Let's not mince words: He will be armed, will be trained in the use of his weapon, and will defend himself when faced with lethal violence.

Fortunately, there is a weapon for preserving life and liberty that can be wielded effectively by almost anyone -- the handgun. Small and light enough to be carried habitually, lethal, but unlike the knife or sword, not demanding great skill or strength, it truly is the "great equalizer." Requiring only hand-eye coordination and a modicum of ability to remain cool under pressure, it can be used effectively by the old and the weak against the young and the strong, by the one against the many.

The handgun is the only weapon that would give a lone female jogger a chance of prevailing against a gang of thugs intent on rape, a teacher a chance of protecting children at recess from a madman intent on massacring them, a family of tourists waiting at a mid-town subway station the means to protect themselves from a gang of teens armed with razors and knives.

But since we live in a society that by and large outlaws the carrying of arms, we are brought into the fray of the Great American Gun War. Gun control is one of the most prominent battlegrounds in our current culture wars. Yet it is unique in the half-heartedness with which our conservative leaders and pundits -- our "conservative elite" -- do battle, and have conceded the moral high ground to liberal gun control proponents. It is not a topic often written about, or written about with any great fervor, by William F. Buckley or Patrick Buchanan. As drug czar, William Bennett advised President Bush to ban "assault weapons." George Will is on record as recommending the repeal of the Second Amendment, and Jack Kemp is on record as favoring a ban on the possession of semiautomatic "assault weapons." The battle for gun rights is one fought predominantly by the common man. The beliefs of both our liberal and conservative elites are in fact abetting the criminal rampage through our society.

Selling Crime Prevention
By any rational measure, nearly all gun control proposals are hokum. The Brady Bill, for example, would not have prevented John Hinckley from obtaining a gun to shoot President Reagan; Hinckley purchased his weapon five months before the attack, and his medical records could not have served as a basis to deny his purchase of a gun, since medical records are not public documents filed with the police. Similarly, California's waiting period and background check did not stop Patrick Purdy from purchasing the "assault rifle" and handguns he used to massacre children during recess in a Stockton schoolyard; the felony conviction that would have provided the basis for stopping the sales did not exist, because Mr. Purdy's previous weapons violations were plea-bargained down from felonies to misdemeanors.

In the mid-sixties there was a public service advertising campaign targeted at car owners about the prevention of car theft. The purpose of the ad was to urge car owners not to leave their keys in their cars. The message was, "Don't help a good boy go bad." The implication was that, by leaving his keys in his car, the normal, law-abiding car owner was contributing to the delinquency of minors who, if they just weren't tempted beyond their limits, would be "good." Now, in those days people still had a fair sense of just who was responsible for whose behavior. The ad succeeded in enraging a goodly portion of the populace, and was soon dropped.

Nearly all of the gun control measures offered by Handgun Control, Inc. (HCI) and its ilk embody the same philosophy. They are founded on the belief that America's law-abiding gun owners are the source of the problem. With their unholy desire for firearms, they are creating a society awash in a sea of guns, thereby helping good boys go bad, and helping bad boys be badder. This laying of moral blame for violent crime at the feet of the law-abiding, and the implicit absolution of violent criminals for their misdeeds, naturally infuriates honest gun owners.

The files of HCI and other gun control organizations are filled with proposals to limit the availability of semiautomatic and other firearms to law-abiding citizens, and barren of proposals for apprehending and punishing violent criminals. It is ludicrous to expect that the proposals of HCI, or any gun control laws, will significantly curb crime. According to Department of Justice and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) statistics, fully 90 percent of violent crimes are committed without a handgun, and 93 percent of the guns obtained by violent criminals are not obtained through the lawful purchase and sale transactions that are the object of most gun control legislation. Furthermore, the number of violent criminals is minute in comparison to the number of firearms in America -- estimated by the ATF at about 200 million, approximately one-third of which are handguns. With so abundant a supply, there will always be enough guns available for those who wish to use them for nefarious ends, no matter how complete the legal prohibitions against them, or how draconian the punishment for their acquisition or use. No, the gun control proposals of HCI and other organizations are not seriously intended as crime control. Something else is at work here.

The Tyranny of the Elite
Gun control is a moral crusade against a benighted, barbaric citizenry. This is demonstrated not only by the ineffectualness of gun control in preventing crime, and by the fact that it focuses on restricting the behavior of the law-abiding rather than apprehending and punishing the guilty, but also by the execration that gun control proponents heap on gun owners and their evil instrumentality, the NRA. Gun owners are routinely portrayed as uneducated, paranoid rednecks fascinated by and prone to violence, i.e., exactly the type of person who opposes the liberal agenda and whose moral and social "re-education" is the object of liberal social policies. Typical of such bigotry is New York Gov. Mario Cuomo's famous characterization of gun-owners as "hunters who drink beer, don't vote, and lie to their wives about where they were all weekend." Similar vituperation is rained upon the NRA, characterized by Sen. Edward Kennedy as the "pusher's best friend," lampooned in political cartoons as standing for the right of children to carry firearms to school and, in general, portrayed as standing for an individual's God-given right to blow people away at will.

The stereotype is, of course, false. As criminologist and constitutional lawyer Don B. Kates, Jr. and former HCI contributor Dr. Patricia Harris have pointed out, "[s]tudies consistently show that, on the average, gun owners are better educated and have more prestigious jobs than non-owners.... Later studies show that gun owners are less likely than non-owners to approve of police brutality, violence against dissenters, etc."

Conservatives must understand that the antipathy many liberals have for gun owners arises in good measure from their statist utopianism. This habit of mind has nowhere been better explored than in The Republic. There, Plato argues that the perfectly just society is one in which an unarmed people exhibit virtue by minding their own business in the performance of their assigned functions, while the government of philosopher-kings, above the law and protected by armed guardians unquestioning in their loyalty to the state, engineers, implements, and fine-tunes the creation of that society, aided and abetted by myths that both hide and justify their totalitarian manipulation.

The Unarmed Life
When columnist Carl Rowan preaches gun control and uses a gun to defend his home, when Maryland Gov. William Donald Schaefer seeks legislation year after year to ban semiautomatic "assault weapons" whose only purpose, we are told, is to kill people, while he is at the same time escorted by state police armed with large-capacity 9mm semiautomatic pistols, it is not simple hypocrisy. It is the workings of that habit of mind possessed by all superior beings who have taken upon themselves the terrible burden of civilizing the masses and who understand, like our Congress, that laws are for other people.

The liberal elite know that they are philosopher-kings. They know that the people simply cannot be trusted; that they are incapable of just and fair self-government; that left to their own devices, their society will be racist, sexist, homophobic, and inequitable -- and the liberal elite know how to fix things. They are going to help us live the good and just life, even if they have to lie to us and force us to do it. And they detest those who stand in their way.

The private ownership of firearms is a rebuke to this utopian zeal. To own firearms is to affirm that freedom and liberty are not gifts from the state. It is to reserve final judgment about whether the state is encroaching on freedom and liberty, to stand ready to defend that freedom with more than mere words, and to stand outside the state's totalitarian reach.

The Florida Experience
The elitist distrust of the people underlying the gun control movement is illustrated beautifully in HCI's campaign against a new concealed-carry law in Florida. Prior to 1987, the Florida law permitting the issuance of concealed-carry permits was administered at the county level. The law was vague, and, as a result, was subject to conflicting interpretation and political manipulation. Permits were issued principally to security personnel and the privileged few with political connections. Permits were valid only within the county of issuance.

In 1987, however, Florida enacted a uniform concealed-carry law which mandates that county authorities issue a permit to anyone who satisfies certain objective criteria. The law requires that a permit be issued to any applicant who is a resident, at least twenty-one years of age, has no criminal record, no record of alcohol or drug abuse, no history of mental illness, and provides evidence of having satisfactorily completed a firearms safety course offered by the NRA or other competent instructor. The applicant must provide a set of fingerprints, after which the authorities make a background check. The permit must be issued or denied within ninety days, is valid throughout the state, and must be renewed every three years, which provides authorities a regular means of reevaluating whether the permit holder still qualifies.

Passage of this legislation was vehemently opposed by HCI and the media. The law, they said, would lead to citizens shooting each other over everyday disputes involving fender benders, impolite behavior, and other slights to their dignity. Terms like "Florida, the Gunshine State" and "Dodge City East" were coined to suggest that the state, and those seeking passage of the law, were encouraging individuals to act as judge, jury, and executioner in a "Death Wish" society.

No HCI campaign more clearly demonstrates the elitist beliefs underlying the campaign to eradicate gun ownership. Given the qualifications required of permit holders, HCI and the media can only believe that common, law-abiding citizens are seething cauldrons of homicidal rage, ready to kill to avenge any slight to their dignity, eager to seek out and summarily execute the lawless. Only lack of immediate access to a gun restrains them and prevents the blood from flowing in the streets. They are so mentally and morally deficient that they would mistake a permit to carry a weapon in self-defense as a state-sanctioned license to kill at will.

Did the dire predictions come true? Despite the fact that Miami and Dade County have severe problems with the drug trade, the homicide rate fell in Florida following enactment of this law, as it did in Oregon following enactment of similar legislation there. There are, in addition, several documented cases of new permit holders successfully using their weapons to defend themselves. Information from the Florida Department of State shows that, from the beginning of the program in 1987 through June 1993, 160,823 permits have been issued, and only 530, or about 0.33 percent of the applicants, have been denied a permit for failure to satisfy the criteria, indicating that the law is benefitting those whom it was intended to benefit -- the law-abiding. Only 16 permits, less than 1/100th of 1 percent, have been revoked due to the post-issuance commission of a crime involving a firearm.

The Florida legislation has been used as a model for legislation adopted by Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and Mississippi. There are, in addition, seven other states (Maine, North and South Dakota, Utah, Washington, West Virginia, and, with the exception of cities with a population in excess of 1 million, Pennsylvania) which provide that concealed-carry permits must be issued to law-abiding citizens who satisfy various objective criteria. Finally, no permit is required at all in Vermont. Altogether, then, there are thirteen states in which law-abiding citizens who wish to carry arms to defend themselves may do so. While no one appears to have compiled the statistics from all of these jurisdictions, there is certainly an ample data base for those seeking the truth about the trustworthiness of law-abiding citizens who carry firearms.

Other evidence also suggests that armed citizens are very responsible in using guns to defend themselves. Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck, using surveys and other data, has determined that armed citizens defend their lives or property with firearms against criminals approximately 1 million times a year. In 98 percent of these instances, the citizen merely brandishes the weapon or fires a warning shot. Only in 2 percent of the cases do citizens actually shoot their assailants. In defending themselves with their firearms, armed citizens kill 2,000 to 3,000 criminals each year, three times the number killed by the police. A nationwide study by Kates, the constitutional lawyer and criminologist, found that only 2 percent of civilian shootings involved an innocent person mistakenly identified as a criminal. The "error rate" for the police, however, was 11 percent, over five times as high.

It is simply not possible to square the numbers above and the experience of Florida with the notions that honest, law-abiding gun owners are borderline psychopaths itching for an excuse to shoot someone, vigilantes eager to seek out and summarily execute the lawless, or incompetent fools incapable of determining when it is proper to use lethal force in defense of their lives. Nor upon reflection should these results seem surprising. Rape, robbery, and attempted murder are not typically actions rife with ambiguity or subtlety, requiring special powers of observation and great book-learning to discern. When a man pulls a knife on a woman and says, "You're coming with me," her judgment that a crime is being committed is not likely to be in error. There is little chance that she is going to shoot the wrong person. It is the police, because they are rarely at the scene of the crime when it occurs, who are more likely to find themselves in circumstances where guilt and innocence are not so clear-cut, and in which the probability for mistakes is higher.

Arms and Liberty
Classical republican philosophy has long recognized the critical relationship between personal liberty and the possession of arms by a people ready and willing to use them. Political theorists as dissimilar as Niccolo Machiavelli, Sir Thomas More, James Harrington, Algernon Sidney, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau all shared the view that the possession of arms is vital for resisting tyranny, and that to be disarmed by one's government is tantamount to being enslaved by it. The possession of arms by the people is the ultimate warrant that government governs only with the consent of the governed. As Kates has shown, the Second Amendment is as much a product of this political philosophy as it is of the American experience in the Revolutionary War. Yet our conservative elite has abandoned this aspect of republican theory. Although our conservative pundits recognize and embrace gun owners as allies in other arenas, their battle for gun rights is desultory. The problem here is not a statist utopianism, although goodness knows that liberals are not alone in the confidence they have in the state's ability to solve society's problems. Rather, the problem seems to lie in certain cultural traits shared by our conservative and liberal elites.

One such trait is an abounding faith in the power of the word. The failure of our conservative elite to defend the Second Amendment stems in great measure from an overestimation of the power of the rights set forth in the First Amendment, and a general undervaluation of action. Implicit in calls for the repeal of the Second Amendment is the assumption that our First Amendment rights are sufficient to preserve our liberty. The belief is that liberty can be preserved as long as men freely speak their minds; that there is no tyranny or abuse that can survive being exposed in the press; and that the truth need only be disclosed for the culprits to be shamed. The people will act, and the truth shall set us, and keep us, free.

History is not kind to this belief, tending rather to support the view of Hobbes, Machiavelli, and other republican theorists that only people willing and able to defend themselves can preserve their liberties. While it may be tempting and comforting to believe that the existence of mass electronic communication has forever altered the balance of power between the state and its subjects, the belief has certainly not been tested by time, and what little history there is in the age of mass communication is not especially encouraging. The camera, radio, and press are mere tools and, like guns, can be used for good or ill. Hitler, after all, was a masterful orator, used radio to very good effect, and is well known to have pioneered and exploited the propaganda opportunities afforded by film. And then, of course, there were the Brownshirts, who knew very well how to quell dissent among intellectuals.

Polite Society
In addition to being enamored of the power of words, our conservative elite shares with liberals the notion that an armed society is just not civilized or progressive, that massive gun ownership is a blot on our civilization. This association of personal disarmament with civilized behavior is one of the great unexamined beliefs of our time.

Should you read English literature from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, you will discover numerous references to the fact that a gentleman, especially when out at night or traveling, armed himself with a sword or a pistol against the chance of encountering a highwayman or other such predator. This does not appear to have shocked the ladies accompanying him. True, for the most part there were no police in those days, but we have already addressed the notion that the presence of the police absolves people of the responsibility to look after their safety, and in any event the existence of the police cannot be said to have reduced crime to negligible levels.

It is by no means obvious why it is "civilized" to permit oneself to fall easy prey to criminal violence, and to permit criminals to continue unobstructed in their evil ways. While it may be that a society in which crime is so rare that no one ever needs to carry a weapon is "civilized," a society that stigmatizes the carrying of weapons by the law-abiding -- because it distrusts its citizens more than it fears rapists, robbers, and murderers -- certainly cannot claim this distinction. Perhaps the notion that defending oneself with lethal force is not "civilized" arises from the view that violence is always wrong, or the view that each human being is of such intrinsic worth that it is wrong to kill anyone under any circumstances. The necessary implication of these propositions, however, is that life is not worth defending. Far from being "civilized," the beliefs that counterviolence and killing are always wrong are an invitation to the spread of barbarism. Such beliefs announce loudly and clearly that those who do not respect the lives and property of others will rule over those who do.

In truth, one who believes it wrong to arm himself against criminal violence shows contempt of God's gift of life (or, in modern parlance, does not properly value himself), does not live up to his responsibilities to his family and community, and proclaims himself mentally and morally deficient, because he does not trust himself to behave responsibly. In truth, a state that deprives its law-abiding citizens of the means to effectively defend themselves is not civilized but barbarous, becoming an accomplice of murderers, rapists, and thugs and revealing its totalitarian nature by its tacit admission that the disorganized, random havoc created by criminals is far less a threat than are men and women who believe themselves free and independent, and act accordingly.

While gun control proponents and other advocates of a kinder, gentler society incessantly decry our "armed society," in truth we do not live in an armed society. We live in a society in which violent criminals and agents of the state habitually carry weapons, and in which many law-abiding citizens own firearms but do not go about armed. Department of Justice statistics indicate that 87 percent of all violent crimes occur outside the home. Essentially, although tens of millions own firearms, we are an unarmed society.

Take Back the Night
Clearly the police and the courts are not providing a significant brake on criminal activity. While liberals call for more poverty, education, and drug treatment programs, conservatives take a more direct tack. George Will advocates a massive increase in the number of police and a shift toward "community-based policing." Meanwhile, the NRA and many conservative leaders call for laws that would require violent criminals serve at least 85 percent of their sentences and would place repeat offenders permanently behind bars.

Our society suffers greatly from the beliefs that only official action is legitimate and that the state is the source of our earthly salvation. Both liberal and conservative prescriptions for violent crime suffer from the "not in my job description" school of thought regarding the responsibilities of the law-abiding citizen, and from an overestimation of the ability of the state to provide society's moral moorings. As long as law-abiding citizens assume no personal responsibility for combatting crime, liberal and conservative programs will fail to contain it.

Judging by the numerous articles about concealed-carry in gun magazines, the growing number of products advertised for such purpose, and the increase in the number of concealed-carry applications in states with mandatory-issuance laws, more and more people, including growing numbers of women, are carrying firearms for self-defense. Since there are still many states in which the issuance of permits is discretionary and in which law enforcement officials routinely deny applications, many people have been put to the hard choice between protecting their lives or respecting the law. Some of these people have learned the hard way, by being the victim of a crime, or by seeing a friend or loved one raped, robbed, or murdered, that violent crime can happen to anyone, anywhere at anytime, and that crime is not about sex or property but life, liberty, and dignity.

The laws proscribing concealed-carry of firearms by honest, law-abiding citizens breed nothing but disrespect for the law. As the Founding Fathers knew well, a government that does not trust its honest, law-abiding, taxpaying citizens with the means of self-defense is not itself worthy of trust. Laws disarming honest citizens proclaim that the government is the master, not the servant, of the people. A federal law along the lines of the Florida statute -- overriding all contradictory state and local laws and acknowledging that the carrying of firearms by law-abiding citizens is a privilege and immunity of citizenship -- is needed to correct the outrageous conduct of state and local officials operating under discretionary licensing systems.

What we certainly do not need is more gun control. Those who call for the repeal of the Second Amendment so that we can really begin controlling firearms betray a serious misunderstanding of the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights does not grant rights to the people, such that its repeal would legitimately confer upon government the powers otherwise proscribed. The Bill of Rights is the list of the fundamental, inalienable rights, endowed in man by his Creator, that define what it means to be a free and independent people, the rights which must exist to ensure that government governs only with the consent of the people.

At one time this was even understood by the Supreme Court. In United States v. Cruikshank (1876), the first case in which the Court had an opportunity to interpret the Second Amendment, it stated that the right confirmed by the Second Amendment "is not a right granted by the constitution. Neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence." The repeal of the Second Amendment would no more render the outlawing of firearms legitimate than the repeal of the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment would authorize the government to imprison and kill people at will. A government that abrogates any of the Bill of Rights, with or without majoritarian approval, forever acts illegitimately, becomes tyrannical, and loses the moral right to govern.

This is the uncompromising understanding reflected in the warning that America's gun owners will not go gently into that good, utopian night: "You can have my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands." While liberals take this statement as evidence of the retrograde, violent nature of gun owners, we gun owners hope that liberals hold equally strong sentiments about their printing presses, word processors, and television cameras. The republic depends upon fervent devotion to all our fundamental rights.

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Scott Ostrander: scotto@cica.indiana.edu-nospam

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