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We Must Not Disarm in the Face of Evil

“Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them,” says the English Standard version of The Holy Bible in Ephesians 5:11. The King James version, which I mostly prefer for its poetic language, uses the word “reprove” instead of “expose.” Whatever the closest translation might be, I prefer “expose,” as reproving can be a quiet or loud thing, but exposing is always public.

Both exposing and reproving, of course, can only occur when we know what the works of darkness are. This is no fine point. None of us can completely know what is right and wrong in every moment and situation, as the context and outcomes of human decision-making are complicated—this is why not rushing to judgment is so key to getting or administering actual justice—but most can immediately recognize evil when we see it. And, yes, then we can follow the evil deed back into a person’s motives, intent and actions to find the missed opportunities to see the evil coming so that we might better prevent such a thing in the future.

The recent actions of a mass-murderer in Maine were clearly evil. One reason it is important to say this aloud is that gun-control advocates often refuse to apply the word “evil” to people and choices. Yet they apparently see evil in inanimate objects, beginning with guns.

This, again, is no small point. When these political actors are forced to explain how steel, wood and polymer are guilty of the vilest of crimes, they shift and imply that guns empower the worst in us.

That’s a semantic dodge designed to take the emphasis off the individual who is responsible, but I’ll let that slide for a moment as I agree to the obvious point that guns, as tools designed for self-defense and sport, can be used to do good or evil—or they can just be used to shoot skeet.

Indeed, as any armed citizen can attest, guns empower the vulnerable to live alone; they empower the elderly to retain some cherished independence; and they empower every other good and decent person to potentially protect their families and themselves until help arrives. According to the 2021 National Firearms Survey, conducted under the supervision of Georgetown professor William English, guns are used 1.67 million times per year by Americans to stop threats—and, in most cases, armed citizens do this without firing a shot.

But this dodge of the use of “evil” from gun-control advocates is revealing. And not only because they want all the blame to be on guns as a justification for bans and other gun-control laws, but also because a refusal to delineate these things in terms of good and evil is designed to diminish the individualistic nature of these decisions. Whether someone decides to follow the Golden Rule or whether a person decides, step by step, to follow a path to evil is, however you try to explain it away, a series of individual decisions. Stopping and redirecting a person on the path to evil begins with clearly articulating what is good and what is evil.

Given that they don’t see this critical distinction, it is easier to understand how gun-control advocates can get behind so-called “bail reform” to let caught violent criminals right back onto the streets. And it explains how a “woke,” often George Soros-backed, district attorney can feel justified in declining to prosecute violent offenders.

So, what do we do about those in public office who think there is no evil person, but that guns are nothing more than instruments of evil?

In this democratic republic, we expose them and vote them out.

No One Should Be Forced To Confront Evil With Empty Hands

Faced with mortal danger to their citizens, Israel and Ukraine are restoring the God-given right of self-defense to the people, by removing the roadblocks to lawful arms ownership and carry.

Yet here in the United States—the only nation with the right to arms enshrined in its Constitution and exercised in reality by its citizens—with violent crime soaring in many cities, politicians are trying to further disarm more potential victims. Practically, politically, legally and morally—that’s wrong. And it’s up to us to do our part to stop it.

A common misconception in the West is that the Israeli population is armed to the teeth. Not so. The young men and women carrying rifles on Israeli streets that we often see in media reports—uniformed or not—are actually members of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). With few exceptions, serving in the IDF is mandatory for all Israelis.

Israel’s security and intelligence services are rightly considered the foremost in the world. So, Israel’s political leaders likely saw no need for civilians to be routinely armed and thus put many restrictions on owning or carrying a gun. Thus, last October, when Hamas death squads flew in on paragliders and attacked a music festival near Gaza, and then began a campaign of murder, rape and other unspeakable atrocities against Israelis, only about 2% of Israelis legally owned a gun. In other words, 98% of them were effectively defenseless.

For decades, those who oppose the Second Amendment have told us that we don’t need guns for protection. The authorities will protect us, they promised.

In the 1990s, the then-president of NBC News, Michael Gartner, said, “There is no reason for anyone in this country except a police officer or a military person, to buy, to own, to have, to use, a handgun.” In 2022, Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney said that only the police should have guns.

American leaders could learn from their counterparts in Israel and Ukraine.

But the tragedy we saw in Israel shows the mortal danger of that kind of complacency. And you have to ask yourself: If a country with as much military, law enforcement, intelligence and security apparatus as Israel couldn’t protect its people, what country possibly could?

The good news for Israelis is that their government is now lifting some gun restrictions “to allow as many citizens as possible to arm themselves,” as Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir put it. “I want more weapons on the streets so that the citizens of Israel can defend themselves,” he said last January.

Ukraine authorities did much the same thing in 2022. Faced with Russia’s invading army—along with similar atrocities committed against civilians—in February, the Ukrainian parliament approved a new law allowing citizens the right to carry firearms in public for self-defense. “We will give weapons to anyone who wants to defend the country,” Ukraine President Zelenskyy said, and the government distributed 25,000 rifles to civilian defenders.

In both countries, armed citizens made a decisive difference. In Ukraine, almost 100 civilians mustered—some armed with hunting rifles—to defend bridges spanning the Mertovod River and forced Russian invaders to retreat. Armed volunteer civilians pushed the Russians out of four other towns, as well.

In Israel, while Hamas attackers executed people in their beds, murdered infants, burned down homes and massacred nearly 200 Israelies in Kfar Aza and Be’eri alone—with at least 1,200 reported overall at the time of this writing—in a third kibbutz called Nir-Am, armed defenders stopped them cold. There, a 25-year-old woman named Inbar Lieberman opened the armory, distributed guns to residents and set up ambushes against the attackers. Together, over a four-hour siege, they killed 25 Hamas terrorists before they could carry out their grisly plans. Thanks to Inbar Lieberman, Nir-Am was the only settlement bordering the Gaza Strip where no Israeli was killed that day.

Americans may not currently need to fight off hostile terrorists, like Israel, or invading armies, like Ukraine, but evil comes in many forms. It could appear at any time—as three gangsters kicking down your door at 3 a.m., as five masked robbers at your local restaurant or as the lone rapist waiting in your parking garage when you leave work to go home.

All that stands between that evil and any one of us is our Big R God Given Constitutionally backed Right and ability to defend ourselves. And the only thing that secures that freedom is our Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms and so, we must never surrender it—not now; not ever.