I don’t think we’ve ever articulated it that way (Schrödinger’s Gun), but we’ve certainly inferred it. New Hampshire’s continued status as one of the safest states in the country is, in part, a result of our respect for law-abiding citizens and their right to self-defense. If you don’t know whether someone is armed but they might be, the prevailing perception created by this conscious consideration is that they might be the victim if they attempt to commit the crime.
The corollary is also true. The left’s common-sense gun laws only make sense to criminals. The more restrictions they pile on law-abiding citizens, the more targets there are in that environment, the higher the crime rate seems to go.
Into this debate comes Ooana Trien, whose parents immigrated from Eastern Europe and who grew up in New York City but moved to Florida. She has two rather incredible X posts in which she explores her relationship with crime, firearms, and the natural right to self-defense, and it is moving in ways I can’t explain, and I’ve been in the pro-2A camp for quite a long time. You’d think I’d have heard some of this, and perhaps I have, but not like this.
Someone came up to her asking for money for gas. You know the scam. She didn’t yet, but then did. You can read the lead-in here, but this was the part I wanted to share [reformatted].
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But sitting there in that Florida parking lot, listening to this stranger talk, I suddenly understood deterrence in a way I never had before. Not as military theory. Not as constitutional law. As something intimate.
My body. My life. The few feet between one person and another.
For years I had thought about guns primarily as objects: who had one, who shouldn’t have one, what laws should govern them. Suddenly I understood the question from the other direction.
What changes when another person cannot simply assume that I am defenseless? I felt taller. Not because I had a gun. I didn’t.
But because, for the first time, I understood that someone approaching me could not automatically assume that being physically stronger meant having power over me.
There was uncertainty. There was a boundary around my body that had to be taken seriously. Then his story began to fall apart.
I told him I didn’t have cash, but offered to help another way. I could put some gas in his car. He took off. So apparently, yes, it was a scam. But by then I had already understood something much larger than the scam.
The phrase natural right finally made sense to me. The Constitution had not given me ownership of my body. It had not given me my life. It had not invented my right to protect either one.
Those things came first.
What I understood that afternoon was the thing underneath them. I had once been completely helpless while another human being held a gun against my temple. Years later, without a gun in my possession at all, I understood what it meant for the person approaching me not to know whether I was helpless.
That uncertainty changed the space between us. And that was the moment I finally understood the natural right behind the Second Amendment: My life is mine, and the right to defend it has to exist before anyone gives me permission to do so.
Schrödinger’s gun was her alliteration for the state in which a would-be attacker, mugger, whoever, can’t know for certain if or how you are armed, whether you are trained, and that is the state of nature up until the government interferes with it.
In New York City, Chicago, every blue city, and most or every blue state, they try to teach you that rights come from government and then do everything they can to undermine any notion of what Oona just discovered on her own. Had to uncover on her own.
The phrase natural right finally made sense to me. The Constitution had not given me ownership of my body. It had not given me my life. It had not invented my right to protect either one.
Those things came first.
The founders created a government whose sole purpose was to ensure that it nor anyone else denied you those natural rights and little else.
The Democrat Party, the progressive project, Democrat Socialism, and the DSA all exist to deny that truth and give the power to the government. And everywhere they have succeeded, the people live in fear of their government and each other, helpless and beholden to anyone who is bigger or stronger or often just more motivated to improve their own circumstances at the expense of another.
The Democratic Party is just a political crime family looking for a way to legalize theft, extortion, and to silence any opposition to their cartel. This truth is at the heart of why we have a Second Amendment in the first place, and we welcome Ooana into the light, along with everyone and anyone she inspires with her story.
Elections have consequences, and even the nicest democrat is going to vote to take your property, your rights, and every liberty they can strip from you to defend the ever-expanding power of the state.
