Good For The Country: School Shootings Recommendation
By John Longenecker (04/21/07)
I want to elaborate a few principles in connection with how we will meet and manage future School Shootings, and the emphasis is to meet them.
Let’s talk a little bit now about the Constitution, about Rights and about Authority, three distinct concepts in this country.
Let us imagine our nation is a charitable Foundation. It’s purpose is to educate, or bring up the next generation and to pass down values. It is a charity because of its blessings shared, and it has other purposes of education in Liberty as a magnet to the world.
It is endowed: it is endowed by its Creator with inalienable rights in order that it carry out its mission. With me so far?
In America, we have only a small bundle of rights. They are granted us by our Creator, the ultimate founder of the nation, and memorialized in our Constitution throughout, and primarily within the first ten amendments, the bill of Rights. We have many, many limits on government, and this combination of the two is enough to live in freedom.
In Rights, the government may not grant human rights – it can only protect them – nor may it legally take them away, except under very special circumstances. It would go against the purpose of its Founder, the one who provided the original endowment.
But Government can make law, and in accord with public policy. When it comes to self-defense laws (with some exception where one has a duty to retreat) many laws are constituent-friendly and prevail over many so-called gun laws which run counter to this legal philosophy.
1. The authority by law to respond with lethal force when, in the reasonable apprehension of the target, one is facing grave danger. Whyis this obfuscated so in the examination of school shootings?
2. One may come to the defense of another. This is known as standing in the shoes of another. It means that one may reasonably act as if it were he or she facing the grave danger.
3. Citizens Arrest. This is a concept I wouldn’t monkey with until you understand it very, very well, but it does exist in law in recognition of your general citizen authority.
When it comes to self-defense, such as in a school shooting, many policies fly in the face of these established doctrines, hide them and generally make the campus or workplace what liberty nuts call Victim Disarmament Zones. These are cultivated by public policies and laws with a bizarre mentality of "Don’t do anything until the police arrive."
Image how the Paramedics view the identical problem in their profession. EMS does not advise citizens to refrain from stopping the bleeding, nor intervening in a choking situation, a cardiac arrest or other emergency where seconds are everything. Instead, volunteerism is encouraged and with the authority to do same.
In fact, EMS and the entire medical community are behind citizen training and citizen/volunteer intervention in First-aid, in the Heimlich Maneuver and Bystander CPR.
Does a citizen who is on scene require any further authority to save a choking victim? None.
Do they need to get permission to rescue-breathe for the man dragged >from the water? Ludicrous.
You would have to be out of your official elected or appointed mind to believe that citizen intervention should be discouraged in time of emergency. Medical or violent.
In the appraisal and planning of school shootings, an exquisite solution model already exists, and both citizen and officials have not regretted placing their trust in constutients in such matters -- placing their trust where it belongs.
In the weeks ahead, governments will be consulting themselves and each other, namely hearing from law enforcement. This freezes the citizen community out of the planning process, and confidence in officials is not very high right about now.
Will it change?
I urgently recommend – I insist – that officials bypass the ordinary advice >from their fellows in administration and hear only the input from constituents. After all, both officials and police are executives hired by us. If they have to re-confer for lack of a good plan already in place and then freeze the people out, that confidence should drop another few points. Officials haven’t proven to be the sharpest knife in the drawer.
We need to put an immediate end to the "Don’t-do-anything-until-we-get-there" ideation. Being a good witness is being witless.
The move to dependency on such agencies – to the exclusion of the citizen – is acting to the detriment of the nation. This cannot be their recommendation any longer. It's not a guns issue - it's a citizen authority issue. The only answer is to officially recognize that citizen authority, which means that if parents or students wish to be armed on campus, then officials have no legal choice but to affirm it. No legal choice.
Individual citizens have all the authority they need to act in self-defense when facing grave danger. Citizens have moral and legal authority to come to the aid of another. With lethal force, if necessary in their opinion at the moment. They may have to demonstrate this later, but they should never again be convinced that they can do nothing and they should never live more in fear of legal punishment than of facing the thugs who murder them.
This dependency-based don’t-to-anything policy is predatory. And when we grant authority to police, we never gave up any of our own, did we?
We did not.
John Longenecker is author of The Case For Nationwide Concealed Carry. Visit his website at www.TransferOfWealth.net
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