*Μολών λαβέ. Greek, from a Spartan dare meaning “Come and Take Them.”

By Mike Cronin

One of the roots of modern liberal thinking seems to be the premise that we are all “our brother’s keeper.”  Under such a proposition, the idea that the individual might be responsible for his own safety and security, rather than “his brothers” (i.e., someone else, such as the police) is anathema, therefore it is worrisome when someone who does believe he is responsible for his own self protection takes those responsibilities seriously and arms himself – and in so doing also gives himself an increased ability to hurt and destroy (even though he has no such intent).

One of the roots of leftist thinking is that the collective (family, tribe, identity group, clan, ethnic group, party, race, state, religion, etc.) is the primary unit of existence, and individuals and individuality are lesser considerations. Here also the armed individual is to be feared. How dare he think himself worthier of protection than his fellow collective members? Take his weapons and cast him out!

Note the overlap in the two positions: The armed individual and his weapons are a threat to be feared, and protection is either someone else’s job, or it’s a collective responsibility applied only to the collective as a unit. In essence, the individual member of the collective is not responsible for himself, the collective is.

The majority of the mainstream media, academia, and international political bodies are either liberal or leftist. Even their most factual, “non-fake” news and research about mass shootings, murder rates, and guns usually begins from one of these collectivist premises, so of course they will generate, locate, and/or manipulate statistics that lend credence to their arguments. It is confirmation bias on an industrialized scale.

Nor are they alone. The rarer elements of the media, academia, and political bodies that lean right are just as likely to engage in confirmation bias. It is nearly impossible to find gun crime data untainted by either bias.

But here’s the thing: The United States of America was not founded on collectivist premises. It was founded on individualism.  The attitude the founders enshrined in the Charters of Freedom (The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights) boils down to this premise: An individual is sovereign over his own life, so long as he does not violate the rights of others. The price of such individual freedom is individual responsibility.  The individualist believes himself to be responsible for everything he does and everything he fails to do. That includes defense of self and of loved ones.

A collective built around the liberal or leftist premises outlined above looks at a mass school shooting and is predisposed to blame the feared object, or the Congress, or the President, or the NRA, or “society,” for the horrors. They are blaming institutions, iconic figures, or inanimate objects, not the individual perpetrator, because a collective can’t conceive of an individual as a unit of volitional action that goes against the collective.

The collective cries, “When will we pass a law banning these scary weapons?” “How many kids have to die?” And so on. This, despite the fact that laws already enacted for the very purpose fail to stop the perpetrators: It is illegal to commit murder; that doesn’t stop homicidal maniacs.  It is illegal to take a firearm on to (most) school grounds (i.e., there is already a total gun ban on most school campuses); that doesn’t stop armed crazies from doing so. Certain firearms are, or have been, illegal to possess; that hasn’t made such guns magically evaporate.

Rational laws don’t stop mass murderers, especially when the murderer means to die in the commission of his crimes. But they do provide the basis for prosecutions and punishment, should the murder(s) be arrested, tried, and convicted.  On the other hand, enacting more laws, each to prohibit lesser acts than those already illegal, in order to somehow make them more illegal, or to somehow deter the demonstrably un-deterrable, is absurdity.  Adding laws on top of laws is not a rational strategy designed to actually prevent mass murders or enable more effective judicial proceedings. It is the panic response of a collective which can only serve to temporarily comfort the collective.

Even scarier? The worse mass-murders in US history weren’t committed by lunatics with guns, they were committed by by terrorists using airplanes (9/11) or trucks full of fertilizer and diesel fuel (Oklahoma City) as bombs, or even worse, by the very body the collective turns to for comfort and assurance: The government itself (Sand Creek, Wounded Knee, Waco).

The individualist sees the problem through a vastly different frame:  People who are dangerously incompetent to exercise the responsibilities attendant in being free – must not be free. Such people should not have unsupervised access to the public. That would mitigate part of the problem.  Of course, not all mass school shooters were known to be dangerously incompetent beforehand, but they all demonstrated a singular preference to target locations where it is highly unlikely they will meet any armed resistance: the “gun-free” zone.  Ergo, the response of the person who has built their life around the individualist premise is that there shouldn’t be any such “gun-free zones,” and if some lunatic or terrorist disregards the risk to themselves and starts shooting up the place? SHOOT BACK!