Carey On... The Criminal's Gun
A bad neighborhood. The streets are filled with crime. The people huddle in fear. Everything hangs on the whims of the gang leaders. There’s blood in the gutters every day.
A policeman is a rare sight in this neighborhood, but one is here today. He knows the names and faces of those who rape, pillage, steal, and extort.
This morning he spotted one of the worst, a known murderer who killed just to make people afraid of him. When the policeman appeared, the criminal pulled out a gun and aimed it at the cop.
The cop reacted. He drew his own gun and shot the man down. The neighborhood cheered. They don’t even know how to live without fear.
On examination, investigators discovered that the criminal’s gun was empty. It had powder stains and evidence that it had been fired plenty of times before, but this particular day there weren’t any bullets.
The policeman is being excoriated. He’s accused of using his gun too freely, not waiting long enough, not checking to see whether the criminal’s gun was loaded. Some people are calling him names, saying he “should’ve known,” and that he was arrogant to take things into his own hands. Many critics are well known to just dislike cops in general.
Public sentiment is turning against the cop. Investigators can’t even find bullets in the criminal’s house. Did he flush them down the toilet? Had he reformed? If so, why did he aim his gun at the cop? Maybe he felt threatened by the policeman’s presence.
The neighborhood is a brighter place as law and order takes hold, but the cop haters continue to chisel away at the success. They’re blurring the lines of distinction between the criminal’s gun and the policeman’s gun. Now the cop is on trial.
Sound familiar? It should. The criminal is Saddam Hussein. The cop is George W. Bush.
Saddam Hussein slaughtered his people, his family, his friends, anybody he pleased, on a scale of thousands. He threatened his neighboring nations and the free world. Were there weapons of mass destruction? I don’t know. I don’t care. We know he had them, we know he used them, and he pointed the threat of them at us. Were we supposed to wait until he pulled the trigger?
We Americans have to get over this silly 1960’s idea that any government is a legitimate government, that there’s no moral difference between a policeman’s gun and a criminal’s gun. The criminal’s gun threatens free people going about their business. The policeman’s gun defends free people.
A representative government is a moral government. If the people don’t like it, they replace it bloodlessly. America is the most powerful nation in the world, economically and militarily, yet every four or eight years we have a bloodless revolution. It works.
Saddam was never the “chosen leader” in Iraq. Nobody chose him but him. Saddam and his kind hold power only through force. Anyone who tries to remove them is jailed, exiled, or killed. These are criminal governments.
Representative governments don’t threaten each other. I don’t like the French, they don’t like us, and we bicker like siblings, but their government is morally legitimate. If they were attacked, we’d be right there defending them. They may never like us. It’s not a popularity contest. We have to stop worrying about being liked.
Does that mean we have to attack every illegitimate government, like the North Koreans or the Chinese? No, but if they threaten the free nations of the world, we have no obligation to stand by and respect them. We can morally kick them off of this planet and feel fine about it.
We have no obligation to respect criminal governments. In fact, when you’re the strongest, you have a moral obligation to act. Dare I say it ? . . . We’re better than they are.
Saddam created the situation by being a barbaric despot who threatened us. George Bush drew his gun—the U.S. military—and he fired it. Whether Saddam’s gun had bullets or not doesn’t matter. He acted as if it did. We had every right to attack.
Did Saddam have WMD’s? It doesn’t matter. The policeman shouldn’t have to wait until the known criminal opens fire.