If you've been watching Glenn Beck then you know who Frances Fox Piven is. She's the aging socialist co-architect of the progressive strategy for destroying the American system by overloading the welfare state. She's openly called for rioting in America, and has bemoaned that the American unemployed aren't as prone to violence as their Greek or British brethren.
Glenn Beck called special attention to her in a recent TV broadcast, and it's got the left all rattled. Now they're circling the wagons around her in an attempt to normalize her image as a grandmotherly academic instead. They are doing their best to re-brand her and her message and to minimize her calls for violent overthrow of the government (for which she has tirelessly campaigned for the last 40 years).
So now the Op-Ed pages of the LA Times are jumping into the fray. And in the process they are describing America as a "Tyranny of the Heavily Armed". Barbara Ehrenreich has no problem with Piven hoping that the American unemployed start to riot just like the Greeks did, (who by the way actually killed a pregnant woman and two other people in their little 'protest march') but she has enormous trouble with Glenn Beck fans turning that same sort of specifically violent rhetoric back on Ms. Piven.
Rather than detailing the idiocy of her position, let me grant it as an axiom, and then speak for my own little slice of heavily armed America.
Ms Ehrenreich, you say that because I'm armed that I am by definition, a tyrant. You claim that your fear of my firearms makes you too terrified to riot on my street, burn my house, and harm my family. By being able to defend myself, I interfere with the 'right' of you and your socially disgruntled brethren to sack or destroy my belongings. And that by rejecting the claim of the collective on myself, my family, and my property, I'm infringing on your 'rights' to the same.
Well if owning firearms makes me a tyrant, then you should take comfort from the fact that I am a benevolent tyrant. Leave me alone, leave my family alone, and leave my property alone and you'll never even know I have firearms. If the simple fact that I have them makes you afraid to disagree with me, then I think you should find a way to address your irrational fears, but it's no real business of mine.
Being a firearm owner doesn't make me any more violent than anyone else. On the contrary, it proves that I've been considerably less violent than many. And that can be easily confirmed by the vigorous criminal background checks I undergo in order to remain a firearm owner.
While my firearms don't make me any more violent than anyone else, you should be aware that they do raise the cost of violence committed against me. Riot on my street, assault my house with Molotov cocktails, or threaten my family in any credible way, and I make no promises for peaceful dialog.
Put me in a position where I believe that I or my family are facing imminent harm, and however noble you think the motives of the mob, I will absolutely respond with violence. And I believe that any free man rightly would. So if it's a tyranny to proclaim that I am a free man and that I do not recognize the right of anyone (let alone a mob of protesters) to commit violence against me or my family without responding in kind - then yes, I am absolutely a tyrant. And I will remain one to the day I die.
If that frightens you for whatever reason, then I think the world is a better place while people like you remain frightened.
3 comments:
Bravo.
Somehow I had missed this...Wow. That Piven piece did, however, contain an extremely telling line:
Losing a job is bruising; even when many other people are out of work, most people are still working. So, a kind of psychological transformation has to take place; the out-of-work have to stop blaming themselves for their hard times and turn their anger on the bosses, the bureaucrats or the politicians who are in fact responsible.
What a sad way to go through life...
Bravo. Thank you for your ongoing and vigorous defense of the rational and true.
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