A parting shot (and a remembrance)

Author's note: This column was the author's final piece in The Hays Daily News, where he worked as a reporter from 2005 to 2007. It is not the final column on this blog, but rather it is re-printed printed here in remembrance of the victims of the massacre 10 years ago at Columbine High School.

Some of my friends have those stupid "Make Art, Not War" bumper stickers. Each time I see one I bristle. Art has never ever ever freed a slave. War has.

Years ago, I stopped — whenever possible — doing business with companies that paste idiotic "no guns" signs on their doors, as if a homicidal maniac on a rampage would see the sign and walk away, dejected. Those signs came into style after the Legislature legalized concealed weapons for those who can pass a background check, and they make about as much sense as it would to replace the walls at every prison in the country with banners that read "no escaping." Rules have never ever ever prevented a murder. A good guy with a gun has.

But this, my parting shot, is not a column about how evil (and that is not too strong a word) gun control is, or about how dumb (also, not too strong a word) anti-war-ism is.

This, my parting shot, is about the pervasive nonsense we see these days, the nonsense that teaches John Q. American to cooperate with muggers so as to avoid further harm, to give them what they want and let the authorities sort it out, to keep his seat on a hijacked airline in hopes of avoiding violence, to not fight.

Last week I read a story about Mark Beverly, an overnight gas-station employee in Roseville, Minn. Beverly was fired after a March 26 incident in which a masked robber entered the store where he worked and attacked a co-worker. Beverly jumped the robber, slammed the bad guy against the counter, and chased him off the premises.

He, evidently, violated company policy because he did not "cooperate" with some guy who was beating up a friend. Resistance to a thief, even to protect an innocent victim, is a firing offense.

At risk of offending the delicate sensibilities of certain Democratic presidential candidates, that is the kind of thinking that led to Hitler invading Poland. Let the Nazis have the Sudetenland. They'll be content with that, and nobody will get hurt. Peace in our time.

Simply put, passivity is going to get us all killed.

On 9-11, when Americans were passive toward their hijackers — doing what they were told to do — their plane crashed into the World Trade Center, killing some 3,000 innocent people. When they fought back the plane crashed in a Pennsylvania field; all aboard died but no others were harmed.

This is why I joined the National Rifle Association about a year ago. Each month, the NRA publishes three magazines — one related to hunting, one about sport shooting, one describing legal and legislative action regarding gun rights — to serve three major factions of its membership. But each magazine shares an identical page, called The Armed Citizen. It's a set of news briefs from the last month, from across the country, detailing examples of Jane Q. American defending herself from a burglar, a rapist or a murderer. Sometimes Jane merely brandishes her gun. Sometimes she shoots and kills. But each time, the perpetrator flees or is gunned down, and Jane — the real victim in a real crime — ends up the better for it.

If good people lose the ability or the will to defend themselves from bad people, the world is lost. The stakes are no lower than that.

I've regularly written columns for six years now. And in this one, my parting shot, I say if I've convinced just one person in all that time of just one thing, I hope it's that we must never ever ever be content to let the authorities sort it out. We must never ever ever refuse to fight back, no matter what company policy is. We can never ever ever afford to sit in our airline seat and hope the hijackers won't use the plane to blow up the World Trade Center. We must always be prepared to fight back and crash the plane into an uninhabited field instead.

Yes, a few people could get hurt. But if we let the bad guys have free reign, the consequences will be far worse.