Black people are almost the only people in the United States with any history of being enslaved, and almost all of them belong to the party working desperately hard to rush us back into slavery.  It's a masterstroke of irony fit for the movies.  The one thing every free man's got to have is the one thing he openly wishes he hadn't got.

I say this because a free man's really got only one defense, and it's that if you mess with him too much, it could cost you your life.  Constitutions are paper, as England found out with King James I and King Charles I and King Charles II and King James II – four kings in a row who believed they had every right to trample Englishmen's rights, ending in a Glorious Revolution of an angry rabble and a foreign prince.  Nobody can appeal to a tyrant with anything but a threat of arms.  Nobody can appeal to a riot or a criminal at all.  Our ability to out-war our criminals is our only defense against criminals.  Our ability to match American infantrymen in arms is our only defense against our infantrymen.  Black men complain more than anyone else about the police being brutal, and our blacks are the same people who vote to give the police an extreme and eternal advantage in brutality.

It's only fair to have a certain kind of sympathy for black Americans in the Democratic Party.  They've rarely tasted the best benefits of liberty, while suffering many of the indignities of tyranny – the indignities known as a lack of hope and an experience of violence.  White Americans, on the other hand, have no excuse for disarming themselves.  White Americans are some of the safest people in the entire world – and they would be safer if it wasn't for the weakest of white Americans.  They fight to give their guns away without ever having experienced any reason to give away their guns.

White men claim it's about suicide but keep their tailpipes and garden hoses.  They claim it's about accidents but then let us all ride cars.  They claim it's about mass shootings, but never rally against the overwhelming masses of shooters (because the overwhelming masses of shooters aren't currently white).  A Black Lives Matter activist is almost respectable in comparison, because he's at least got enough balls to go to war for his cause.  The reason white men want to give up their guns is because they're convinced nobody has to go to war.  They're almost convinced that nobody ever has to die in order for others to live.  They believe that our guns will bring us death.  Their weakness will be responsible for bringing death to us – and sooner, and in a much more degrading way, than they imagine.

Whites have traded the feelings of free men for the sentiments of slaves.  I say this because liberty isn't a feeling, but it always has to begin with one.  It begins with the conviction that you're responsible for yourself and the safety of your family.  It originates in the idea that the only men we ought to fear should be our best men.  A manly spirit of danger, ignoring all the statistics and overriding every media endeavor to tell us otherwise, accepts the fact that violence is either our threat or our future.  A man who refuses danger is refusing not danger, actually, but liberty.  A man who refuses liberty isn't actually refusing liberty, but courting slavery.  A man who refuses adequate weaponry isn't refusing a fight.  He is only refusing his ability to fight adequately.

The arguments from statistics are arguments against our healthiest sentiments.  The reason we have guns has nothing to do with statistics.  It has everything to do with our principles and with the eternal inevitability of violence.  And there may come a time when Americans become so lawless that they'll fear their own neighbors even more than their government.  Black America is largely already there, and the government has done nothing (and, so long as leftists are in charge, will never be able to do anything) to alleviate their suffering.  But when the time comes for white Americans to fear our government more than our neighbors, to whom will any of us make an appeal?  Black Lives Matter is appealing to the majority in their marches.  When the majority is oppressed, whom can we petition?

Death with dignity is a common slogan among the left.  We have yet to see any of them go out in a blaze of glory.  We have yet to see, from their lewd parades or their stupid protests or their spineless disregard for the value of weaponry, whether any of them believes in dignity at all.  A life with dignity is one of the sublimer ironies of our existence.  And that is because a life with dignity can be purchased at only one price, which is a willingness to die for the things you couldn't live without.  One of those things is the principle of liberty.  The other one is our almost immortal love for our families.

What we want isn't the impossible, to get rid of violence itself.  We want the liberty to personally protect our families from violence, and for everyone to know that we're willing to do it.

Jeremy Egerer is the editor of the troublesome philosophical website known as Letters to Hannah, and he welcomes followers on Twitter and Facebook.