Defending ourselves: the constitutional strategyLessons from Virginia Tech shootings

by Alan Keyes: Right now, the American people are understandably caught up in the emotional reaction to the horrifying events at Virginia Tech University. Leftist pols and media manipulators around the country and the world fanatically clamor that we should round up the usual "suspects" -- that is, the guns responsible for all this violence. They want to distract us from the issues of human responsibility that are at its core. The responsibility of the killer. The responsibility of the police and university officials. The responsibility of gun-ban advocates whose success at Virginia Tech made certain that no one in Norris Hall was armed to interrupt the killer's methodical spree by forcing him to defend himself, or slow down in fear of his own life. . . . [Read more]

Professional fallacy: I can already hear the chorus of objections from people who have been duped into believing that the defense of a free society can be left to professionals. They reject the constitutional concept of the militia because in the end they do not believe that people have the capacity to govern themselves. They want us to treat firearms the way peasants treated the weapons of the medieval era, as things reserved for the use of a privileged few on whom everyone else had to rely for their safety, and who of course ultimately defined the limits of their freedom.

The anti-gun crowd seeks to establish a modern version of this lordly domination, a kind of bureaucratic feudalism, in place of the republican self-government established by our Constitution. Just as the income tax eliminates the people's control of its own resources, they want a general gun ban to eliminate the people's capacity to defend itself. They will pretend that our safety requires it, even though our tragic experience proves just the opposite.

The truth is, we can have both safety and liberty if we return to the common sense concepts of our Constitution, and step forward to resume our responsibility as a people for the safety and defense of the communities in which we live. The answer is not gun control, but self-government, self-defense, and self-control. We must act to live as free people, else like sheep for the slaughter, we will die, and freedom with us.

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