Michael Swickard
To preserve liberty it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them. – Richard Henry Lee, one of our country’s founding leaders
Every few weeks there is a new outrage where otherwise law-abiding, defenseless people are suddenly killed by a psychopath without the victims having any recourse for self-defense. When these attacks happen, the victims stand like sheep at slaughter, nervous but compliant to these one-way shootings.
The perpetrators of the massacres count on their victims being defenseless, and society delivers that defenselessness because our society has made it quite hard to be armed. While there are laws that allow concealed carry of firearms, the first thing someone trying to get a conceal carry permit realizes is that there are many places that are off limits for guns to everyone but murderers with guns. In fact, there are really many ways that a conceal carry person may break the law about where they can carry a firearm.
Why not arm yourself against attack? Some people thinking about defense have to recognize that in trying to protect themselves they may run afoul of the political agenda of a completely defenseless society. These political people think it better for a society to just suffer death rather than fight back.
Harder to buy and carry a firearm
You can see that agenda at the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. They proclaim that in one year guns murdered 17 people in Finland while guns murdered 9,484 people in the United States. They imply that the gun deaths in our country are because of those legal and illegal guns.
More so, they do not give voice to the notion that legal guns could prevent deaths by allowing victims to fight off attackers. They do not admit that guns are useful for citizens to protect themselves.
Through their actions and other “disarm America agendas” it has become much harder, though still possible, to buy and carry a means of defense. Forty years ago I had a rattlesnake problem at my grandfather’s ranch, and so I went to town to buy a pistol I could carry. I laid 38 bucks and change down on the counter in a White’s Auto store in Carrizozo. The only thing the clerk asked was, “Want some ammo for that .22?”
Today it is quite problematic to use guns for defense because of all of the constrictions. Legal weapons cannot be close to schools or government offices – a law that is ignored by murderers but means lawful owners of guns cannot help protect people when murderers run rampant.
A means to resist attacks
Look at the rules against guns in Mexico and then look at the number of AK-47s used every year to kill thousands of Mexicans. The law-abiding citizens have no means of defense. If they try to defend themselves they violate the law. They are instructed by their government to allow themselves to be murdered rather than have a means of defense. It is just one-way, fish-in-the-barrel killing by the criminals in Mexico.
The country of Norway is still in shock from the recent attack that killed most of a hundred innocent children, but there is no talk of increasing defensive procedures. Rather, it seems they are concentrating on putting a happy face on this tragedy by saying this sort of thing only happens once in a while and not every day. For those in Norway the one-way, fish-in-a-barrel shooting is treated as a regrettable but necessary part of society.
How can society stop these outrages? First, there is a plan that will not work. Society could destroy anything that could be used as a weapon so that the entire society has nothing that could cause injury. Not possible to do so. Or, the society could allow potential victims a means to resist the attacks. The second method is most controversial since the typical way to stop attacks is to be armed. Not all weapons are equal, not all defenders are equal, but the one thing we know is that a society that defends itself has fewer attacks.
New Mexico is among many states that allow concealed carry of weapons for the purpose of self-defense. Imagine if, when the perpetrator of the Virginia Tech massacre had started shooting, some students in the audience had shot back. Think hard, would there have been more deaths or fewer? Or in Norway, if some of the students were armed, could the perpetrator have casually gone from group to group killing? Of course not.
Two directions
Our country has two directions. One direction is to arm the citizens more robustly so that innocent citizens have a means to repeal attacks. The second direction is to try to get all firearms away from the citizens. There is no data supporting taking the means of self-defense away from citizens as a way to make them safer. Rather, the data suggests strongly that an armed society is much safer.
Even more troubling is that with all of the concealed carry licenses, when, not if, the society makes a grab for those weapons, I suspect it will be a bloodbath since many Americans, myself included, feel it is a birthright of have firearms. More and more people are getting guns to protect themselves, so if the government decides to confiscate those guns, I feel certain many people would fight to the death to retain their means of defense.
Over the last century the ability of citizens to own and use weapons has decreased, while the way that government tries to disarm the citizens looks certain to be central to the desire to take weapons out of the hands of citizens and have weapons only in the hands of police. We are fast coming to a day when each person with a gun must decide to surrender it or fight.
Swickard is co-host of the radio talk show News New Mexico, which airs from 6 to 9 a.m. Monday through Friday on KSNM-AM 570 in Las Cruces and throughout the state through streaming. His e-mail address is michael@swickard.com.