Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

Each and every individual possesses an undeniable human right to believe any kind of nonsensical jabberwockey he wishes. But it was with an odd mixture of pity and frustration that I read about a French schoolteacher, Samuel Paty, who was beheaded by a violent Muslim religious zealot for teaching his classes about the famous caricatures of the prophet Muhammed published by Charlie Hebdo magazine, the French equivalent of National Lampoon a few years ago. The same kind of mindless animals had murdered twelve innocent people at the satirical weekly and wounded eleven others for no better reason than that they believed they had some kind of divine right to limit the freedom of other human beings. Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani has recently warned Westerners that freedom of speech “ends on contact with Islam” (Minnesotans take note), and that it is no defense against insulting Islam. We must all submit and obey.

I was a bit surprised, the other day, when France’s Whimperer-In-Chief, the Continental answer to Justin Trudeau, Emmanuel Macron, basically told Rouhani to go finger himself. I greatly enjoyed reading what he had to say. In the end, however, it was talk, all talk, and nothing but talk, and unless Macron straps on a piece himself, somebody else—some young soldier or policeman or cartoonist—will end up paying for his “courage”.

By contrast, around the same time as the magazine massacre, two brutish thugs of the same type who brought AK-47s with them to assert their control over freedom of thought and freedom of expression in Texas—of all places—were blasted into the next dimension by one guy with a big iron on his hip. He was an off-duty cop, as I recall, but he could have been virtually any Texan. They don’t say, “Don’t mess with Texas” for nothing.

The conspicuous difference in the two cases, of course, is that most Americans are relatively free to exercise the absolute natural right of every individual ever born to own and carry weapons. The identical natural right of the French people has been savagely curtailed for decades by a long string of sketchy governments. There once was a time—I remember it well—when France designed and manufactured some of the spiffiest weapons of personal defense in the whole wide world. I owned a rotary-locking, high-capacity MAB PA-15—a very pistol advanced for its day—that I was extremely fond of and to this moment deeply regret having traded off. They also made a couple of extraordinarily interesting .32 “magnum” automatics which would market well today.

But, like power-swollen government authorities practically everywhere on our sorry, battered planet, French politicians are clearly more terrified of an armed native population than they are of vicious alien fanatics. You have to ask yourself why. There are neighborhoods in Paris now where Parisians are deathly afraid --and virtually forbidden—to go. Exactly the same is true of what many people are referring to as “Londonistan”, once the principal city of the world. But London could go back to being the great English city it once was, and Paris could be French again, if the U.K. and France had something like our Second Amendment. I think, if they fail to adopt such a measure, if they refuse to help themselves, the United States should withdraw all aid and support from them. Not another franc or farthing to appease terrorism. In fact, you both owe us a few billion dollars.

Get this through your tiny little solid wooden heads once and for all, froggies: Western Civilization is in a global struggle to the death with international forces of brutality, ignorance, and chaos. If you can’t learn to fight back, if you continue to deny your own people the means of self-defense, before you know it, the primary language spoken in your capital city will be Arabic—or Mandarin.

But maybe that’s what you really want.

As for the rest of us, hand me my yellow vest. Where We Go 1, We Go All.