The Vultures Fly High

by Victor Milan
[email protected]

Exclusive to The Libertarian Enterprise

           And so they come out again to haunt us: those who uphold the right of rapists to rape without let or hindrance; who support the right of abusers to injure, mutilate, and kill without fear; who insist that the weak must be placed immovably at the mercy of the strong.
           The gun grabbers. The victim disarmers. The aggression empowerers.
           A child is killed in Michigan. That is tragedy.
           It's a tragedy when the Bush-Clinton embargo of Iraq kills a thousand kids a month. But they're not Americans, so evidently they don't count.
           It's a tragedy when a NATO rocket incinerates children riding a civilian bus. But they were only Serbs, and therefore subhuman in the eyes of our true arbiters of right and wrong, the traditional media.
           It's a tragedy when an inept and corrupt prosecutor with a history of child abuse burns, suffocates, and crushes to death around twenty children in a religious retreat outside Waco. But she and her boss, the most luridly corrupt and fascist president in American history, blamed the victims and -- in large part through a concerted government effort to destroy all evidence as quickly as possible -- got away with it. So that must not matter either. I mean, Katie Graham and Tom Brokaw were cool with it; how can you kick?
           The death of a child does matter. But does it necessitate turning all our lives upside down and inside out? Does it mean placing ourselves, men and women -- and yes, children -- utterly at the mercy of predators, surrendering ourselves to the violent fancies of the stronger or simply more numerous?
           No.
           Bathtubs, medical misadventure, and cars all kill far more young children than guns do. Do we ban baths, doctors, and cars? Does the Washington Post editorialize, wondering what we want to be clean, healthy, or mobile for?
           If the whole country must be disrupted because one child dies, why weren't the US Marshals disarmed if not disbanded when three of its agents, in a cowardly, perverted act of child-murder, shot Sammy Weaver in the back?
           The District Attorney where the Michigan shooting occurred -- who will not be named here, since such vampires batten on publicity -- blithely announced that the child could not be held responsible by reason of being a minor.
           Why, by the way? The kid was competent to premeditate and execute murder. What difference does his age make?
           Since someone must be blamed -- and if you want to reap headlines, you have a good idea whom, or what, that is -- the DA then proclaimed the killing the fault of our "fully-armed society."
           Laying aside that the implication we have a "fully-armed society" is as ludicrously untrue as most prosecutorial utterances, if the murderer is not accountable for murder, how in the hell do you reckon that I am?
           It's absurd. As a gun owner who has never shot any kids nor anybody else I will not be held accountable for the action of another. No one should be penalized for somebody else's misdeeds.
           A child is dead not because there are guns, but because evildoers do evil.
           Even if they're only six.
           Yes, a child died by gun -- a stolen gun. And let me ask those of you who smugly desire that gunowners be held liable for any misuse of guns stolen from them -- will you enjoy it when that legal precedent is applied, as inevitably it will be, to your car?
           By that standard the mother of the child recently dragged to death in Missouri would be as guilty of the boy's murder as the carjacker.
           No.
           Bill Clinton, himself a rapist, murderer, and war criminal, announced that the tragedy could have been prevented by requiring safety locks on guns. Sure, a criminal dad will be careful to put safety locks on all his stolen guns before he heads off to jail.
           Safety locks and "smart" guns can only encourage violent criminals, since they amount to de facto disarmament of prospective victims: their purpose is to kill gun owners.
           If I'm wrong, Mr. Clinton, then surely you will lead the way by requiring your Secret Service and Marine Presidential Detail guards to install safety locks on all their weapons, and keep them locked until such time as you are actually physically threatened.
           I mean, safety locks do work. Who can doubt they would have saved Amadou Diallo?
           As I wrote after Columbine, the problem is not that we have too many guns, but too few. We are not as fully armed a society as we should be. The environment is still too rich with prey -- which very fact calls predators into existence.
           If we want our children to be safe, what sense does it make to send them off to government indoctrination camps where the most ludicrously Draconian "zero tolerance" measures inevitably fail to protect them? It should be apparent to anyone with eyes and a brain that in depriving our children of the means of self defense, we put them at the mercy of bullies and gangs -- including school-sanctioned athletes, who were largely above the law when I was a student in the Sixties and Seventies, and manifestly remain so today.
           We must remember: men don't need guns to rape or abuse women. Adults don't need guns to kill kids. The strong don't need guns to kill the weak, nor do the many against the lone or few. Guns, handguns in particular, confer advantage primarily to the defense.
           Perhaps we should ask why the Washington Post and the political class whose interests it serves are so assiduously -- indeed explicit -- in desiring we be stripped of the means of self-defense.
           Reset: no "perhaps" about it. When guns are outlawed, the ones who obey will be meat.
           If you would be safe, learn to defend yourself. The most efficient means of doing so is with guns. If you want your child to be safe, home-school her and teach her well in gun safety -- any five year old of normal intelligence can be quickly taught all she needs to know to be safe around guns.
           Doubt that? Do you have a stove? Did you manage to teach your child not to go grabbing at the blue flame or the orange-glowing element? Maybe not, because fire kills more kids than guns too.
           And if you don't wish to do these things, don't send your hired thugs to attempt to disarm those of us who do choose to act responsibly.
           It interests me to see how this immorality play runs politically. In the wake of the Columbine slaughter of the helpless the tsunami of gun-grabbing laws the media and politicians called for...didn't happen. The polls all said the American people overwhelmingly cried out for gun control; they were of course made up or rigged, as virtually all opinion polls are. But the politicians seem to have had some means of testing what real Americans really thought, because in a very bipartisan manner they dropped all the proposed repression as if it glowed hot, mumbling attempts to blame one another.
           What actually happened seems clear to me: they feared to face insurrection, at the polls or in the streets, if they attempted to go against the wishes of what is, if not already a majority, a huge plurality of Americans who will not be disarmed.
           In the only meaningful sense, Americans were already voting in the wake of Columbine: buying a million guns a month. It wasn't all Y2K hysteria, folks.
           To the armed I say: stand fast. If you consent to be disarmed the results will be worse than I suspect you remotely imagine.
           To the disarmers I say: I can speak only for myself when I say that I will not accept blame for an act, however atrocious, which I did not commit and over which I had no control; and I will never consent to being disarmed. But if you vultures are minded to go ahead and try, you may be disagreeably surprised to learn just how many tens of millions of Americans agree with me.

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