Should Illinois allow concelled carry?

Defending ourselves: the constitutional strategy
Lessons from Virginia Tech shootings

April 19, 2007
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.

Sadly, the clamor for gun control cooperates with the official desire to escape close scrutiny for the inexplicably lethargic response to the emergency. Why did the gunman have so much time to coolly prepare his second assault and pursue his victims after it began? Surely police should have entered Norris Hall to confront him within moments after he fired his first shot there. Reports suggest, however, that they entered the building up to half an hour later, scant moments before he ended his own life. Reports also suggest that in the meantime, he fired scores of rounds, which means he had to reload many times to fulfill his deadly intention.

Lessons

Far from suggesting that we should restrict or ban possession of firearms, the Virginia Tech killing spree illustrates two points often made by supporters of the Second Amendment: 1) Disarming the population leads to a higher death toll from violence. 2) The police cannot or will not protect people from deadly assault. They are organized mainly to enforce the law, not to protect our persons from harm.

The trite clamor of the anti-gun forces should ring especially hollow in this age of terror. Their aim is to eliminate gunmen by eliminating their guns, but is there any sensible person who believes that even the strictest, most pervasive gun-ban laws will prevent terrorists from obtaining weapons? We can't be sure they won't obtain weapons of mass destruction, so how could we ever prevent them from obtaining handguns or automatic rifles?

Given the very real likelihood of terrorist infiltration and action, nothing we do by law can eliminate the gunmen. They will always be a threat. Instead of pretending to do what we can never achieve, we should concentrate on doing what is certainly within our power. We can make sure that our population is enriched with a leaven of defenders, so that no gunmen, lone or otherwise, could ever again act with the calm assurance that he is in no danger from his intended victims.

The Virginia Tech killings expose the illogic of the anti-gun forces, allowing us to realize that disarmament does not create the conditions for peace, it prepares the population for slaughter. It's as if we should propose to protect the body from infection by reducing or eliminating the antibodies that can immediately attack and destroy an infection before it does much harm. The truth is that as the threat of violence in all its forms increases, we need to increase the presence of antibodies throughout our population. Since we will never completely prevent predators from swimming in our stream, we need to make the water more dangerous to them.

Constitutional remedy

Our Constitution already provides the concept we need to achieve this strategic objective — the militia. In its proper constitutional sense, the term means all the able-bodied people who can be trained and disciplined to act in the community's defense when it's attacked. Since it encompasses every able-bodied person, it does not refer to those — such as the police, the military, or even the National Guard — who formally compose the official defense forces of the nation. Every citizen able and willing to act in an emergency becomes a potential defender against attacks aimed at the general population.

Unfortunately, because of the anti-gun folly of the leftist media and politicians, we have lost sight of this vital element of our defense. We make no provision for its training and discipline. In the early days of our republic, the able bodied citizens would meet periodically, bringing their own weapons, to train on the village green. We need to adapt this concept to the realities of contemporary life.

I would propose that every state government institute a program to organize the militia, developing a uniform curriculum of training and discipline that could be offered at the local or enterprise level throughout the nation. This would mean that at an institution like Virginia Tech, people could volunteer for militia certification. After their training (which would include components intended to identify and weed out unstable or otherwise unsuitable people), and appropriate screening and background checks, they would be certified as militia volunteers with the right to openly bear arms as they went about their everyday business.

Imagine the different course of events at Virginia Tech if such a militia certification program had been implemented instead of the stupid general disarmament that actually took place. When the first shots were fired at the dormitory, there might have been one or more certified militia volunteers who could have confronted the killer before he left the building. The moment he opened fire in Norris Hall, a few certified militia volunteers would have positioned themselves to return his fire, pinning him down while others escaped and the police rallied to the scene.

Of course, the moment we begin to visualize this reaction, we understand why it would be important that certified volunteers be known to local authorities, openly bear arms so that their fellow volunteers and citizens know who they are, and wear some identifying marker (an armband for instance, supplemented by electronic means so that the whereabouts of volunteers could be tracked and coordinated) during an emergency situation. All this could be provided for in the organization and training of the volunteer corps.

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.

© 2007 Alan Keyes