DL Tolleson.com

Movies inspire me: Especially adventure/action/thriller/spy films, which motivate self-education necessary to discern fact from fiction (not surprisingly since my life is one of writing, rewriting and editing). It then follows that I like action movie stars: Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, John Wayne, Harrison Ford, Pierce Bronson, Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Chuck Norris, Steven Seagal, Tom Cruise and Liam Neeson (among others).

Okay, so it is true enough that Neeson is only portraying a character in his movie. He has rightly pointed out that such a thing is, “a fantasy,” and that viewers aren’t necessarily going to, “go out and go, ‘Yeah, let’s get a gun!’”

But that obfuscates the issue. Neeson is associating a moral dilemma (the behaviors that lead to murder) with the ownership of inanimate objects (guns). This association is no more valid than saying that kids have been killed because, “there are too many knives out there.”

What I am writing about might be called, behavioral weaponry. It is the behaviors that lead to murder (terrorism, greed, guilt, envy, mental illness, etc.) and they are no more circumnavigated by the absence of guns than they would be by the absence of knives. In other words, if we could wave a magic wand and eliminate the existence of guns, murder would become the result of perpetrators wielding knives, or ropes, or rocks, or anything else—even bare hands—on which a murderer or terrorist can, and in some cases already do, rely.

Yes there are gun-related accidents, just as there are knife-related accidents. Or vehicle-related accidents. That’s the nature of accidents. They aren’t intended—they’re, well, accidents.

In the real world, where magic wands are not waved, heavy gun regulation—or even banned guns—does not stop murder or terrorism. Check out the high rate of gun-related murder in Chicago: It is one of the most stringently gun-regulated places in the United States. And as we’ve seen in France, the absence of guns is no protection for the unarmed. Do an Internet search on the stoning of people in the Middle East—there’s no guns involved with that.

When our framers set forth the foundations of a government with limited and enumerated powers, they knew that such freedom was possible only when citizens were made equal to the task of insuring it. And that meant voting citizens, citizens able to amend the Constitution through their State Legislatures and then, finally, citizens with guns.

It is not the weapon or the number of weapons about which to ever be concerned. It is the behavioral weaponry—the behavior and nature of the person (or the government) that determines life and death. You cannot regulate the behavior: Experience illustrates you may not even know of murderous or terroristic behavior in the case of a person. And you have irrefutable cause to anticipate it in the case of government.

But you can be prepared—by being armed to face it.