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Police Are the First Line of Defense, Citizens Are the Last

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When the subject of arming teachers comes up after a school shooting, the usual response is that only police officers are qualified to handle firearms in a risky situation. That response comes from the same people who otherwise claim that police officers are racist lunatics who can't be trusted with a gun around black people. But they're the only ones who can be trusted with a gun in the classroom.

(The left is never consistent in its spin, but is quite consistent in its malice and motives.)

But in Parkland, law enforcement from the FBI to the local cops to the surveillance setup failed badly. Everything went wrong and all the warnings were ignored. And 17 people died.

It's easy to blame law enforcement. And certainly some of the blame deserves to be spread around to the very people who make a point of insisting that ordinary people can't be trusted to defend themselves. But law enforcement is only the first line of defense. It's primarily a system for maintaining public order and pursuing the perpetrators of crimes that have already happened.

It's not really a tool for preventing imminent crimes. Nor is it supposed to be.

Preventing crimes that haven't been committed yet requires more of the tools of the police state. And it's still going to have a high failure rate.

The police can't be everywhere. Even when law enforcement is sure that X is dangerous, there's only so much they can legally do about it. 

But police aren't the last line of defense, ordinary people are. And that's the point. It's one of the tools of the 2nd Amendment. People are empowered to defend themselves by the right to bear arms, instead of bearing the cost of government incompetence.

Police are the first line of defense. People are the last line of defense.

 When order needs to be maintained, the police are a good tool. When people are under attack, they discover that they are the last line of defense.


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