A friend of mine in high school had one of those cheap black light posters in his room. It depicted a menacing looking eagle swooping down on a rather cartoonish looking mouse. The mouse had its hand outstretched and was clearly flipping the eagle a bird. Below was a caption that listed Webster’s definition of Defiance. The mouse was sure to die, but he was defiant until the end.
Senator John Ensign recently talked at a high school:
Ensign spent an additional 30 minutes taking questions from students on a variety of topics. He said he intends to vote to repeal a ban on assault weapons, which he called “the stupidest law that was ever written.
“Without the Second Amendment, you might as well throw away the rest of the Bill of Rights. It sounds like kind of a radical statement but I don’t know if there is a truer statement,” Ensign said.
“Every dictatorship that has ever existed, the first thing they do Saddam Hussein, Adolph Hitler, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot in southeast Asia the first thing they do is disarm the citizenry.
“Because if you disarm the citizenry, then you can trust them. If they are armed, you can’t trust them. That is why our founding fathers recognized the right to keep and bear arms is so critical,” he said.
Ensign said the assault weapons ban is ineffective because it allows some guns that look like and function in the same way as other prohibited guns.
“All you need to know about gun control is to look at Washington D.C., which has the strictest gun control laws in the country and it is one of the least safest cities. All the criminals have guns and none of the law-abiding citizens have guns,” he said. “It is just too easy to get guns illegally to ever ban them.”
I do respect and appreciate the gist of Ensign’s sentiment, however gun ownership was quite prevalent in Iraq. Each family was allowed one gun for self defense (mostly AK47s). This does beg the question: Why didn’t Iraqis revolt? They had guns. My conclusion is that they lacked the quality our little mouse mentioned above had: displaying defiance.
Of course, you can’t blame them. Spending decades with a government that commits night time raids, rapes of family members, torture, gassing people, and a whole other list of atrocities may have lead the Iraqis to develop learned helplessness. After all, seeing a friend or family member dragged off never to return would likely have the desired effect of crushing dissent.
In short, guns are useless without the will to right wrongs and take risks. Sadly, I think America is at the point where most of us are unwilling to take risks, stand up for what’s right, and speak truth to power.
We sit by while our courts restrict speech; politicians authorize government agencies to snoop through citizen’s records without warrants; police randomly harass motorists; indoor plumbing justifies why police no longer have to knock and announce their presence before entering a suspect’s home; dissenters are quarantined to First Amendment Zones; judges tell people they can’t sell their book; local governments abuse eminent domain; men armed with machine guns parade around our large cities; people are detained without access to legal counsel, sometimes in secret; and the list goes on and on.
As long as Michael Jackson is in the news, Paris Hilton is sucking dick, and the latest reality TV shows are popular, we don’t notice. Or we don’t care.
Or we’re forced to pick two losing sides. Democrats and Republicans have equally deplorable records regarding civil liberties. It just depends which particular civil liberty you’re talking about. We often vote for the lesser of two evils.
It’s up to us to change it by holding politicians responsible. If we can’t do that now with our vote, we won’t have the will to do anything if our last hope turns out to be AK47s.
Are we Iraqis or mice?
