pvtbuddie
Hard To Imagine
It’s Hard To Imagine
It’s hard to imagine, today, the evils of yesterday; it’s hard enough to fathom the evils of today. It’s even harder to believe that different evils can come to us in the future than those we’re dealing with now; or that the evils of the past can recur, or that we could be faced with some different version of them; that the laws we pass now, to try to deter an attack from a particular front, could hinder us from protecting ourselves in the future.
We don’t really want to talk about what “could happen,” and it even sounds ridiculous to worry about some of the maybes, that only *possibly*, *might*, be. So we make it sound like a game, or at least we try to be non-specific, and we talk about things like “zombies.” Because we don’t want to imagine what we might need this or that for, but we know they might be useful someday. Or maybe we can imagine, or we’ve taken seriously the warnings of those who have imagined, but we don’t want to sound crazy. We don’t want to say things like “when the commies land,” or “if a whole section of the country suddenly floods, *after* a single, big storm passes.” Now that would be ridiculous, wouldn’t it?
Today, when we are concerned about what one or two people can do with a few high capacity magazines, or with access to explosives and the materials to make them, it’s hard to imagine that we may ever have to worry about what a large crowd can do to only one or two people. Or that, God forbid, instead of us worrying about what a terrorist can do to our government buildings, our lives and liberty will ever be in danger from our government, or some faction thereof, with no civil remedy with which to answer our attackers. But it is possible. And it’s even harder to imagine, because unfortunately it’s historically proven unlikely, that those in danger from the powerful will be able to reverse, in time to protect themselves, the laws that we have put in place to restrict the liberty of evil men, while in fact restricting the liberty of all men.
We’d like to limit power to wield a sword to those whose job it is to wield the sword of justice, but while we can limit the power to fight to our government, and to our paid fighting men, we cannot endow those men with the omniscience or the omnipresence needed to, in all ways and at all times, protect us. Neither can we guarantee that those in power are and will remain who we’ve known them to be, or that their successors will be as trustworthy as we believe they are. The best and safest protection the law can afford us is to first allow everyone the right to protect and provide for himself. After that we can worry about giving our government the power to further protect us - as long as we don’t give such unanswerable power to our government as we would be afraid to have fall into the hands of our enemies.
Hard To Imagine
It’s Hard To Imagine
It’s hard to imagine, today, the evils of yesterday; it’s hard enough to fathom the evils of today. It’s even harder to believe that different evils can come to us in the future than those we’re dealing with now; or that the evils of the past can recur, or that we could be faced with some different version of them; that the laws we pass now, to try to deter an attack from a particular front, could hinder us from protecting ourselves in the future.
We don’t really want to talk about what “could happen,” and it even sounds ridiculous to worry about some of the maybes, that only *possibly*, *might*, be. So we make it sound like a game, or at least we try to be non-specific, and we talk about things like “zombies.” Because we don’t want to imagine what we might need this or that for, but we know they might be useful someday. Or maybe we can imagine, or we’ve taken seriously the warnings of those who have imagined, but we don’t want to sound crazy. We don’t want to say things like “when the commies land,” or “if a whole section of the country suddenly floods, *after* a single, big storm passes.” Now that would be ridiculous, wouldn’t it?
Today, when we are concerned about what one or two people can do with a few high capacity magazines, or with access to explosives and the materials to make them, it’s hard to imagine that we may ever have to worry about what a large crowd can do to only one or two people. Or that, God forbid, instead of us worrying about what a terrorist can do to our government buildings, our lives and liberty will ever be in danger from our government, or some faction thereof, with no civil remedy with which to answer our attackers. But it is possible. And it’s even harder to imagine, because unfortunately it’s historically proven unlikely, that those in danger from the powerful will be able to reverse, in time to protect themselves, the laws that we have put in place to restrict the liberty of evil men, while in fact restricting the liberty of all men.
We’d like to limit power to wield a sword to those whose job it is to wield the sword of justice, but while we can limit the power to fight to our government, and to our paid fighting men, we cannot endow those men with the omniscience or the omnipresence needed to, in all ways and at all times, protect us. Neither can we guarantee that those in power are and will remain who we’ve known them to be, or that their successors will be as trustworthy as we believe they are. The best and safest protection the law can afford us is to first allow everyone the right to protect and provide for himself. After that we can worry about giving our government the power to further protect us - as long as we don’t give such unanswerable power to our government as we would be afraid to have fall into the hands of our enemies.