Jeff Jacoby has a superb article on Jewish World Review about a woman’s right to defend herself:
But what if some of those women did want to protect themselves with guns? If they walked into a police station and applied for a license to carry a firearm for their personal protection, would they get one?
“They would not,” says Mariellen Burns, the Boston police spokeswoman.
What if they lived in the North End and two of their friends had been raped and they were terrified that they might be next?
Tough luck, says Burns. “Living in a high crime area is just not enough of a reason to get an unrestricted license to carry.”
Now, it is not news that Boston and Brookline — and Massachusetts generally — are frequently out of step with most of America. But it ought to be news when public officials increase the risk to life and limb of the people they are sworn to serve. And make no mistake: Those who prevent law-abiding women from arming themselves with guns make it easier for rapists and other predators to attack them with impunity.
Read the whole article as it is terrific stuff. But the fact is, it is not news that “public officials increase the risk to life and limb of the people they are sworn to serve”, it is actually the norm – for it to be otherwise, now that would be (good) news.
The state will nearly always try to place whatever its functionaries perceived to be its own narrow institutional interests before those of its subjects. The very nature of modern governance is about management, which is usually interpreted to mean control, and keeping weapons out of the hands of private individuals is pretty much the perfect manifestation of the desire to have the ability to easily impose management decisions on people who might not see that decision as being in their interests.
Yet the reality is that what makes management decisions by the state different from management decisions by a company or individual is that the state backs its decisions with the threat of force and does not think twice about intermediating itself into a person’s life without consent. The fact that very real threats to your personal safety are trumped by the state’s desire to maintain exclusive control over the means of self defence pretty much proves that the state regards its ability to impose management decisions as manifestly more important than a person’s right to life and limb, let alone private property.
In reality, the principle threat to most people in high crime areas are not so much the muggers but the state which make you easy prey for them and requires you to live in fear for its own convenience.
The state is not your friend.
