Are you a Protector or demand to be Protected? - Granite Grok

Are you a Protector or demand to be Protected?

The chasm between gun owners and gun grabbers is as wide as the Classic Western Liberal (which has nothing to do with the current Democrat Party) and Socialists / Big Government / Collectivists (which is, pretty much, the Democrat Party.  The former says “*I* am responsible for me and mine – just give me the Freedom to do so and leave me alone” while the latter says “Outsource your self-responsibility to us and we will protect you – but we will take your Freedom away as well“. Anything else is political spin.  This is the underlying point that the New Castle Promise folks here in NH or the national Moms Demand Action, groups that fit into that second group, just don’t understand – and are willing to deny anyone else to be in the first group.  David French’s response to David Frum captures this well (emphasis mine, reformatted):

In my experience, those individuals who carry do so because they very consciously do not want to belong to the class of citizens that is inherently helpless — totally reliant upon the state to protect not just themselves but their family, friends, and neighbors. If the choice is between protectors and protected, they choose to be protectors.  This identity is often inseparable from the notion that there is no set of government policies — no utopia — that can eliminate from human society the need for immediate protection. People can and will try to hurt others — using whatever means immediately available — and it strikes us as utterly reckless to be unprepared for this reality.

The protected class has a different view. The protected class is a dependent classnot economically dependent of course, but dependent on the state in perhaps a more fundamental way (for their very lives) – and like members of other dependent classes, they are terrified of flaws in the state’s protective apparatus. Walled off from gun culture, they read the occasional, aberrant story of (legal) gun-owner stupidity or recklessness and cower in fear of a nonexistent threat. (While of course blithely sending their kids off to far more dangerous activities, like swimming in neighbors’ pools or riding in neighbors’ cars).

To the protected class, private ownership of firearms is the flaw in the system that makes them feel vulnerable. It’s the barrier to the safety they crave but can’t provide.  Thus the irreconcilable cultural divide: The very thing that provides security and safety for the gun-owner and his or her family frightens their non-gun-owning friends and neighbors, but the root of the problem is not the gun but the protected person’s very sense of themselves.

He closes his post with an anecdote of a friend that went from being in the Protected Class to the Protector Class – because he realized that his need for immediate protection could not be met by anyone other than himself – not even by the State.

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