Intro To The Constitution (Part 11)
Previous article in this series: The 2 Year Limit On A Standing Army
One of the largest divides on the issue of guns is between {[city people] & [people who live out in the country]}. For people who have grown up in cities or the suburbs, and have spent their entire lives within the confines of urban sprawl, it is very difficult to get them to grasp the idea that that is not how the whole country lives. The common argument of “just call the cops!” is a perfect example of this misunderstanding. If you live in a city, or some middle-class suburbs, and you call the cops, if it takes them 20 minutes to get there, people are offended. But, here’s the thing: if you live out in the country, and you call the cops, and they manage to get there in 20 minutes, that’s great! You’re lucky. You’re impressed that they got there so fast; they must’ve already been in the area. It’s common for it to take literally hours for the cops to show up when you call them. There are huge swaths of this country, wherein calling the cops is basically just a formality to get everything documented. They’re not going to save you. They’re not even going to get there in time to watch the dust settle.
Bear in His Kitchen
I knew a guy who lived out in a pretty rural area in the mountains of Colorado; there were only 5,000 people in the entire county, only 500 in the nearest town. He lived alone in a small cabin up the mountain-side in the forest. One day, he woke up to some noise in his house. Since he lived alone, that was concerning. So, he gets up to investigate, and discovers that there is a bear in his kitchen. Apparently, he had left some food out on the counter, and the bear smelled it from outside, and broke down the door to get it. Now, think about the common city person’s advice, of “just call the cops”; remember: given where he lives, it could easily take the cops upwards of an hour to get there. What if he had been married with kids? What if his house had been designed in such a way that his daughter’s bedroom was on the other side of the kitchen? What is he supposed to do? Just go back into his bedroom, close that flimsy door, and hope that the bear doesn’t decide to eat his daughter, when she gets curious about the noise? Should he just call the cops, and wait for them to arrive in time to document what’s left of her cold body? Or, should he do what he actually did, which is go back into his bedroom, grab his shotgun, and take care of business? To people who have lived in cities their whole life, it is unimaginable to them, that there are Americans today, who actually live in circumstances wherein it is a genuine danger, on a daily basis, that at any moment, they might have to protect themselves with lethal force, against wild predatory animals. And yet, there are vast swaths of the country for whom that is their normal daily reality. And it’s not just an adult defending themselves, they also have to defend small children who may be attacked by smaller predators which usually don’t attack adults (like coyotes), and also livestock. Ranchers have to protect their herds from wolves, bears, cougars, all manner of threats. And if they don’t, then you won’t have any food to eat, because that’s where it comes from.
And now, once you understand that, try to put yourself in the mind of a guy living out in the country, with {grizzly bears, wolves, bobcats, mountain lions, wild boars, etc.}, and some city person comes over and starts telling you that you shouldn’t be allowed to own a gun, because you don’t need it, and you should just call the cops. Do you understand how insane that sounds to someone like that? And, moreover, do you understand how genuinely scary it is for someone like that who relies on guns to protect themselves, their family, and their animals from aggressive, dangerous predators, to hear {political-parties & politicians} genuinely advocating for taking away their guns, or handicapping the gun’s functionality?
Next article in this series: “Fully Semi-Automatic”
Citations
This entire Constitution series was written as a single big document over the course of several years; so, all the citations are mixed up together. When I went back to break it up into pieces, I wasn’t confident that I could redistribute all the citations & their reference numbers without screwing something up. So, I decided to leave all the citations together, and post them as the final article in the series.
