“A Duty to Retreat”?

from The Gray Area:

Many articles were posted today on Attorney General Eric Holder’s speech Tuesday at the annual NAACP convention. Two are listed on this site, one from FoxNews and one from NBC News. The Attorney General speaks of the “dangerous, stand your ground” laws that need to be reviewed.

The debate here is certainly about gun control, but it gets at a much more basic axiom that this country is based on, individual responsibility.

The AG made the following statement: “There has always been a legal defense for using deadly force if — and the ‘if’ is important — if no safe retreat is available. But we must examine laws that take this further by eliminating the common sense and age-old requirement that people who feel threatened have a duty to retreat, outside their home, if they can do so safely.“

“A duty to retreat“. Really!

This “duty to retreat” concept is not knew, the left has pushed this for at least 2 generations as part of the overall theme that you don’t need to be responsible for your actions, the government, in this case the police and other authorities will take care of you. Your responsibility is to retreat and allow criminals free rein and access to whatever they desire.

Do most American’s believe that? This country was founded on freedom, which gives each of us individual, personal responsibility for our life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. A basic part of that is a duty to defend yourself against attacks of any kind. When you think about your duty in an attack on your home and family, is it a duty to run screaming from the scene or one to defend your home and family?

It is a laughable question when put that way. The answer is as obvious as when you raise from bed at 3am to a curious noise and go half dressed into the darkness to investigate. You have a duty, a natural drive to defend, pure and simple. How does retreating impact your sense of personal value? It affects it negatively. It destroys your confidence and makes you feel dependent. And, that is the bottom line of such thinking – dependency.

This concept of “duty” is very basic to the freedoms we enjoy in our republic. And pretty much lost on the generations of Americans since “the Greatest Generation”.

Think about what messages are sent when we retreat vs when we defend. One of dependency. You can see them in our society over the past 40 years. A dependent society. Dependent on government for income, housing, healthcare, and security.

Crime increases with dependency. Crime increases because criminals go to the areas of least resistance, not more. Why do killers go to schools – they will meet no resistance. Their objectives can be met unimpeded. Crime decreases, when society says enough and fights back in whole (police) and in part (the individual).

Think about the roaring twenties and the early thirties depression era. Criminals got a new military technology, “the Tommy Gun” (Thompson sub-machine gun). They outgunned not only private citizens, but the police as well. Common sense, not duty, tells you to retreat to fight another day when you are outgunned. In this example, only when the police got equivalent weapons was this crime spree slowed and eventually eliminated.

When then Candidate Barack Obama was running for President in 2008, his platform was based on two principles; to fundamentally transform America and redistribution of wealth. The theme of “a duty to retreat” is one of his fundamental themes of change. Let’s not allow the laughable “duty to retreat” theme to take hold in this country. By definition it will further weaken our collective will to stand for the individual, personal responsibility on which the country was established and leave us dependent on (government) whomever is in charge.