Frontiers In Defenselessness

It's been clear for some time -- long before the federal courts said so -- that the police cannot and will not be held responsible for protecting you from aggressors or aggression. Your protection is in your own hands. Therefore, you'd better see to it without illusions about anyone coming to your aid.

That impels most Americans to employ risk minimization tactics. They strive to refrain from behavior that's likely to bring them into contact with the predatory classes. They avoid regions where such persons are likely to congregate. They travel warily, if at all, after dark. Some buy alarm systems or other security services for their homes and businesses. There are other applicable tactics as well.

But some Americans, mindful of the ubiquity of the threats to life and property in our time, go armed. They carry guns, and work to stay abreast of the laws pertinent to violence wielded in self-defense. Though this is a Constitutionally protected right -- indeed, a right inseparable from the right to life -- the authorities are implacably hostile to it. They perpetually maneuver to suppress the exercise of that right: sometimes by law, and sometimes by intimidation.

Here's a case in point:

A West Virginia man is facing charges after he allegedly fired a warning shot when a group of nine men surrounded him and his girlfriend and threatened to cut him and rape her.

Chris Harris and his girlfriend, CC Roxby, were walking home from church on the evening of Sept. 27 in Wheeling, after teaching a Saturday night “Sunday school” class when they say were approached and circled by the nine men, at least one of who was armed with a knife.

“They surrounded me saying some pretty vulgar things like they were going to rape my wife in front of me, cut me,” Harris told WTOV.

Roxby, who said the incident was “one of the most scariest experiences” she had ever been through, called 911. While still on the phone, she pulled out her legally concealed pistol and aimed it at the suspects. But Roxby’s hands were shaking, so Harris took the gun from her.

Harris hoped the sight of the gun would be enough to deter the men, but it wasn’t. They continued to advance toward the couple, make threats and act in an aggressive manner.

“The kid kept advancing on me, saying it wasn’t a real gun,” Harris said.

So Harris, not wanting to have to shoot anybody, fired a warning shot into the air.

“The cruisers were coming down the street at that point and the young men ran away,” Roxby said. “Instead of them following the gang, the officers arrested Chris for firing a shot into the air.”

Harris was charged with "wanton endangerment," a serious offense that could deprive him of his right to own firearms. As for the thugs who'd menaced him and his fiancee, the police didn't even bother to pursue them.

Who out there thinks the proximity of the police cruisers to that roving gang of thugs -- say, what race were they? I ask purely out of curiosity -- might have been a wee bit more than sheer coincidence?

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The State wants you to live in fear.

It's beyond serious dispute that America is suffering a plague of violent aggression against innocents. If you haven't been keeping up, the "knockout game" is still in progress. Blacks have been rioting in Ferguson, Missouri since the Darren Wilson / Michael Brown event, and is likely to intensify now that evidence has emerged that appears to exonerate Wilson. Just about anywhere the flood of illegal aliens has touched is enduring an elevated rate of violent crimes and crimes against property. Our large cities, with few exceptions, have become zones of significant risk to life and limb.

All this suits our political elite very well. When people fear, they automatically look for a protector. However deceitfully, the State represents itself as that very thing. But as the bumper stickers have told us, the State hates competition. The armed citizen, prepared to defend himself and his loved ones with his own hands and resources, is the worst competition the State could ever face, because he's effective.

Recent Supreme Court decisions have dealt the gun grabbers severe setbacks. However, they're not without a certain adroit cunning. That craft is being employed to drain the right to keep and bear arms of its utility by imposing massive costs upon it... such as the costs Chris Harris will face for defending his fiancee from rape by a gang of random thugs.

Some of the rationales for these actions to suppress rightful self-defense are beyond ludicrous. Get a load of this comment at this post from the esteemed Joe Huffman:

The Second Amendment doesn’t protect the use of weapons. If it did, murdering someone with a gun would be legal.

If that doesn't pin your Idiocy Meter, I can't imagine what it would take.

So the police arrested and charged Chris Harris, who faced a gang one of whose members brandished a knife, whose fiancee was under a credible threat to her life, and who acted in a fashion that harmed no one. Harris, in the eyes of the Omnipotent State, is a deviant from the desired social norm of pervasive fear. Private citizens simply can't be allowed to rear up on their hind legs and defy useful fear-engendering agents; it would unacceptably disturb The Way Things Are And Must Be. He has to be taught a lesson, made into a warning to others that the attentions of the State are more to be feared than merely being raped and mutilated by a roving gang.

There is no slightest possibility, given the exploding tide of violence against private citizens, including ever more rampant police violence, that this is all merely a coincidence. Nor is there any possibility that it will correct itself. We The People must correct it. There is no one else -- and there's only one method that will serve.

Think it over.