RightWingProf has posted Jeffrey Snyder’s essay A Nation of Cowards in its entirety. Written in 1993, it still serves as a powerful argument for the rights of individuals to protect themselves and their loved ones.

This paragraph, in particular, shows why the grassroots efforts to fend off erosion of our rights is so vitally important:

But since we live in a society that by and large outlaws the carrying of arms, we are brought into the fray of the Great American Gun War. Gun control is one of the most prominent battlegrounds in our current culture wars. Yet it is unique in the half-heartedness with which our conservative leaders and pundits—our “conservative elite”—do battle, and have conceded the moral high ground to liberal gun control proponents. It is not a topic often written about, or written about with any great fervor, by William F. Buckley or Patrick Buchanan. As drug czar, William Bennett advised President Bush to ban “assault weapons.” George Will is on record as recommending the repeal of the Second Amendment, and Jack Kemp is on record as favoring a ban on the possession of semiautomatic “assault weapons.” The battle for gun rights is one fought predominantly by the common man. The beliefs of both our liberal and conservative elites are in fact abetting the criminal rampage through our society.

Little has changed since ’93: Frist would gladly grab our guns and Bush II said he would sign an assault weapons ban.

I often argue against allowing police, active or retired, to carry handguns where the general public is disarmed by the state. Allowing an off-duty cop to carry a gun on a plane (or a restaurant, or a city park) but not a law-abiding permit holder creates a dual class society; it says that a cop is more trustworthy than you and I. Consider this:

Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck, using surveys and other data, has determined that armed citizens defend their lives or property with firearms against criminals approximately 1 million times a year. In 98 percent of these instances, the citizen merely brandishes the weapon or fires a warning shot. Only in 2 percent of the cases do citizens actually shoot their assailants. In defending themselves with their firearms, armed citizens kill 2,000 to 3,000 criminals each year, three times the number killed by the police. A nationwide study by Kates, the constitutional lawyer and criminologist, found that only 2 percent of civilian shootings involved an innocent person mistakenly identified as a criminal. The “error rate” for the police, however, was 11 percent, over five times as high.

Now consider that police have an elevated suicide rate, high rate of Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), high rate of domestic abuse and marital failure, high rate of drug abuse, and a stunningly high alcoholism rate. Compare those rates to those of carry permit holders, which have to undergo background checks and whose permit can be revoked at the merest hint of impropriety, and ask yourself: who would you trust?