John Wayne is still my hero. From the early days of my youth, I began idolizing the Duke and his roles in The Searchers and The Quiet Man. And just like Sgt. Stryker in Sands of Iwo Jima, I wanted a gun. I wanted to hold a real Thompson Submachine gun – my favorite gun – and be a hero, just like the Duke.
But now, as a conscientious objector to private ownership of automatic weapons, I have a hard time justifying myself owning or even shooting a submachine gun. But it’s tempting, it’s nostalgic, and it’s my right – so why shouldn’t I?
Oddly enough, a similar reasoning goes for conceal and carry laws for firearms. It would make sense that we should defend ourselves, and self-defense is a God-given right every human has, so why not?
Because public safety isn’t a personal issue, it needs to be governed. The principles of conceal and carry are correct: I should be able to defend myself and those around me from threats. But the conclusion that we have to do it ourselves is not. Americans can’t take an issue like self-defense into their own hands, otherwise it becomes entirely subjective. Once I consider myself justified in having a weapon on me at all times, then comes the ultimate question: when do I whip out the heat I’m packing?
If each person decides for his or herself which situation warrants pointing his or her piece, then where are the standards? Therein lays the gray matter of this argument. If diversity legislation has taught us anything, it’s been that everyone comes from a different background, and we all have a different set of morals. Most of the people reading this newspaper are probably trustworthy with a firearm, but am I? How do you know?
You don’t, and that’s the point. The odds of conceal and carry laws encouraging more violence or a great, Dirty Harry-like shootout in Milwaukee are pretty slim. There’s even a chance that crime may dip temporarily, as it did in Florida when conceal and carry laws were first passed. Quite possibly, the opposition may be right and conceal and carry laws may make Wisconsin a safer place. At least for now.
But that wouldn’t change the fact that we would all be at the mercy of individual justice. Handing citizens guns for their own protection is like giving them a gavel, and I am not going to hand my right to justice over to a bunch of Packer Fans. Guns empower people; when you hand someone a gun, you’re giving them a weapon that was designed to kill. You’re giving them power over other human lives. It is the role of the government to determine and deal out justice, not the individual. Courts decide the law and what is just, police enforce it and that keeps justice objective.
Without objective justice, we’re placing our rights, our privileges and our lives in the hands of other citizens – citizens packing heat. Police lose their purpose when we reach that point, and we begin to place this country on a system of vigilante justice. As much as I’d like to have a Thompson around for my own protection, in the end it really doesn’t make any sense when I already live in a country with laws and a police force to protect me. In The Green Berets, the Duke’s last movie, “due process is a bullet.” But as for me and shooting my Thompson, I think I’ll have to wait.