Collectivism is based on a central authority for planning and execution of all economic tasks and elimination of the individual choice and responsibility inherent in capitalist systems. Collectivism doesn’t work because it is impossible to scale a decision making process to every economic transaction.

In a way, our system of reliance on the current design of law enforcement for personal protection is strikingly similar to a collectivist system with the same limitations. Rather than retaining personal responsibility for our own protection, we have ceded that responsibility to centralized law enforcement authorities and have determined that individual reaction to threats is unacceptable.

The saying is true – when seconds matter, the police are minutes away but that isn’t their fault – we have given them an impossible task. The International Association of Chiefs of Police report that the average ratio of police to citizen is about 2.5 officers per 1000 citizens. This is simply a game of numbers in a country of 315 million people covering 3.8 million square miles.

The Second Amendment isn’t a license to kill as the progressive left believes. It is part of a philosophy going back to John Locke’s 1689 “Second Treatise of Civil Government” and beyond that posits that an individual has a right to his own person and property and therefore has a right to protect them:

“Though the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature hath placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other men: for this labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others.”

There is a reason that murders and terrorists, even the insane ones, attack schools and not police stations. It is because they know that there will be no resistance in “gun free zones” and maximum resistance in “gun mandated zones”. The progressive talking point is that a civilized society does not “need” to have firearms – that may be true within such a society – but a civilized society needs firearms to protect itself from uncivilized entities acting in asymmetric and random ways.

The fact is that centralization of individual protection will always be ineffective against this type of threat – the only way to answer random, asymmetric threats is with an equally random, asymmetric response – individual ownership and open carrying of personal weapons by all citizens who so choose.

This doesn’t mean that we should seek to become the Wild West but we must recognize that the Wild West was tamed by men with Bibles and guns.

God may have created men but Samuel Colt made them equal.