[High Praise! to According to Hoyt]
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…if government at whatever level were the only thing keeping any normal average Joe from pulling out a gun and mowing down passersby from his car window during his morning commute, we’d already all be dead.
There is no government large and powerful enough – not even China, not even North Korea, where you need a permit to breathe out and they tell you when to breathe in – to keep that sort of mayhem at bay. There is no police force large enough. One per citizen wouldn’t be enough, because policemen have to use the bathroom sometimes. And, as has been mentioned in book after book, if someone is absolutely determined to kill you, you WILL die, no matter how many bodyguards you hire, or whether you immure yourself in a walled compound.
Also – and this is the gaping flaw – if human beings are that inherently out of control and ill-intentioned, then surely either the police and other government services are from Mars (or heaven) or how come there aren’t police to watch over them TOO? How come they don’t kill everyone in THEIR path? It can’t be the magical power of groups, because in the end, it’s the individual officer, out there, on the street.
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There is a maximum degree of precision to which government can function, say by acting on an organization or a neighborhood. Smaller than that, most especially on an individual, the best it can do is punish transgressions after the fact. All interactions between individuals are anarchy except that most people act civilized because we can get more done with less effort. An armed citizenry is the surest way to make life suck for those who think they can make anarchy work for themselves.
All of the above: points well stated.
In Boston this morning, on Patriots’ Day, there were numerous police personnel and Army Reservists all along the route of the Marathon and at the finish line. Those uniformed police carried firearms [gasp! gasp!], and the Reservists and Guardsmen had ready access to weapons and were near the armory.
None of this did a thing to stop the sequential explosions of IEDs, and the placement of others which were discovered by LEOs, along the marathon route.
All the might of the municipal, state and federal law enforcement in the Boston area were unable to thwart these attacks upon American citizens and prevent their injury and deaths.
All in all, a major failure of intelligence efforts on the watches of such earnest Leftist lights as Gov. Patrick, Janice Napolitano, Eric Holder,and Barack Obama.
All of whom will, no doubt, seek to treble their efforts at gun confiscation and further heighten the nation’s image as a toothless paper tiger.
Has the fearless reader blamed the explosions on a youtube video yet?