Yes, Virginia, It Is Possible To Babble On About The Second Amendment Without Once Mentioning The Phrase 'Well Regulated Militia.' By Jeff Smith FOR AS LONG as I've been a thinking participant in American culture, during which time I have been a political and social liberal and for practical reasons a registered Democrat, the matter of gun control has been a literal no-brainer for most of my demographic allies. Here they could give their intellectual energies a rest and let knee-jerk reactions handle the work of answering any gun-related questions. It seemed pretty simple, almost syllogistically perfect, if you didn't dissect the argument along logical principles: peace good, war bad; flowers good, guns bad; Frodo good, Bubba bad. All through the '60s, when my generation was advocating and applying every aspect of individual liberty it could find, from the U.S. Constitution to the Anarchist's Cookbook to The Monkeywrench Gang to the Kama Sutra, the one fundamental right and responsibility of free people conspicuously ignored was the right of self-defense. That's right: self-defense. Not offense. Not the right to menace one's neighbors, terrorize Unitarians or machine-gun wide-eyed fawns and bunny rabbits, but the right to keep and carry the means to defend oneself against threat to liberty and safety from whatever source. The people who led this nation into rebellion, through revolution and into freedom as an independent federation of states were thinkers and actors on a plane unsurpassed before or since, and they clearly understood the essence of freedom. It's born in each of us, with each of us, and resides in the mind and spirit as the Word that founded creation in the Book of Genesis. Thus, the first of the freedoms guaranteed in the Bill of Rights was the freedom to express the mind and spirit, through free speech, free press, free assembly and free practice of religion. But the founders were pragmatists, too. They understood that while free thought is the last holdout against tyranny, physical liberty is pretty essential to practical applications of independence. Therefore they made the people's right to keep and bear arms the second of the essential freedoms set out in the Bill of Rights. It amounts to a practical acknowledgment that a free people cannot be disarmed, and conversely, that a disarmed people cannot ever count themselves free. As a student and practitioner of liberty, I have always rather stood in awe of the beautiful simplicity and logical perfection of these constitutional principles. They always seemed so inextricably rooted in the nature of animal existence. I could almost hear the stirring strains of "Born Free" as I pictured Jefferson and Franklin and the boys huddled around the desk with quills and ink and parchment, and intellectual horsepower fairly crackling in the air. So why did my liberal buddies, who would pitch a class nine hissy-fit every time Richard Nixon or Spiro Agnew or even a Democrat like Richard Daley so much as hinted at suppressing their right to march in the streets and chant "One, two, three, four; we don't want your fucking war," just smirk and turn their backs when anybody brought up the Second Amendment? Because it was about guns. And guns belonged to the pigs. And the Army. The National Guard like at Kent State. The good guys carried flowers instead of guns, and went limp when the pigs came with their weapons. Mahatma Ghandi beat the imperialist oppressors in India with passive resistance, man. He was cool. Yes he was. But few casual students of Ghandi know that given the choice between ultimate oppression and armed resistance, Ghandi said he would take arms. He was a pragmatist. The British already had disarmed and subjugated the native Indian people: Ghandi simply used the best means left available to him, not because it was "pure" but because it worked. It was a public relations coup. Most of us have missed that point. Most of us, like most of any group, are only interested in philosophical positions that fit our practical preferences. We fight for free speech because we like to shoot off our mouths. We don't give a damn for the Second Amendment unless we like to shoot guns. And when it comes to defending hearth and home against danger...well, they know there are misguided individuals in this stressful urban world of ours, but we have paid police to protect us from them. That takes care of the domestic threats, and as to foreign dangers, well there's the Army. One way or another the government will keep us safe from harm. And as to the idea that our paid protectors might not do their job...or that they themselves might pose a threat...well that's just right-wing paranoia. Oh, really? Remember the Nixon Administration? Watergate? The Pentagon Papers, the Plumbers, the Enemies List, the Chicago Seven? Oh, but that was Nixon and the Republicans. That was 25 years ago. Uh huh. And 25 years before that, disarmed Jews were being murdered by the millions by their own government. Nobody is safe from tyranny except by his own hand. Nobody. Never. Nowhere. Think about it.

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