“I SAY WE BLAST!”

6/17/10

“Disarming people and leaving them naked, particularly where security is thin, you have to be pragmatic about this.”

Those were the words of British Major General (Okay, how many of you immediately think of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance whenever you hear the term “British Major General”? Just checking, and digressing, but doing so parenthetically.) Philip Jones used when explaining a new policy of allowing Afghan insurgents to keep their weapons if they sign on to the latest “peace” plan concocted by the Afghan “government.” Though on its face, the policy looks foolhardy, with even a moment’s reflection, it makes eminent sense; Afghanistan is not a place where one wants to be unarmed. To force those who want to cooperate to disarm assures a total lack of cooperation.

General Jones, clearly a more sound military man than the aforementioned Gilbert and Sullivan character, could just as easily, though, been talking about the streets of Chicago and Mayor Daley’s beloved gun ban that looks about to be deep-sixed by the Supreme Court. What sense does it make to prohibit otherwise law abiding citizens, three of whom in recent weeks have been able to dispatch armed home or business invaders to the next life because those citizens had the good sense to defy Daley’s law, from defending themselves from the armed thugs who control so many of this, or any, city’s neighborhoods?

One might argue that, given that the Chicago Police Department is, with the exception of its very highest echelon, perhaps the best police force in the country, security is not “thin” in Chicago. But the police can’t be everywhere and they, at least for now, lack the speed of, say, Flash or Superman. Further, the courts, given their continuing propensity to see criminals as sociology projects rather than, in most cases, unreformable blights on society with nothing but mayhem, or worse, to contribute, do nothing to make the typical cop’s job easier but plenty to make criminals feel more or less invulnerable. So, in many cases, the only thing that stands between the citizen and the designs of the latest sewer carp to land on his property is that citizen’s gun.

It makes no sense to force Afghans who want to cooperate with the “government” we installed to give up their guns; to demand that they surrender their weapons would assure only their utter vulnerability to the tender mercies of those who would never even dream of cooperation and thus continued defiance of allied forces by all parties to that convoluted conflict. Similarly, it makes no sense to force law abiding citizens of Chicago, or of this entire country, to give up their guns; to demand that they surrender their weapons assures only their vulnerability to those for whom laws mean nothing but a minor inconvenience in their pursuit of all manner of thuggery.