Why do you “need” an AR-15? Well:
When Sam Andrews awoke on Tuesday morning, he found his wife watching a television interview with a woman whose bakery had been vandalized during the violent unrest here on Monday.
“She said, ‘You’ve got to go help her,’ ” Mr. Andrews said in an interview on Saturday morning.
And so Mr. Andrews, a former Defense Department contractor who is now a weapons engineer in the St. Louis area, set to work. Under the auspices of a national group called the Oath Keepers, Mr. Andrews accelerated plans to recruit and organize private security details for businesses in Ferguson, which are receiving the services for free. The volunteers, who are sometimes described as a citizen militia — but do not call themselves that — have taken up armed positions on rooftops here on recent nights.
“It’s really a broad group of citizens, and I’m sure their motivations are all different,” said Mr. Andrews, who is in his 50s. “In many of them, there’s probably a sense of patriotism. But I think in most of them, there’s probably something that they probably don’t even recognize: that we have a moral obligation to protect the weakest among us. When we see these violent people, these arsonists and anarchists, attacking, it just pokes at you in a deep place.”
The group was eventually instructed to cease its action — and on pain of arrest. This it did. Per the New York Times:
the St. Louis County police, Mr. Andrews said, and other law enforcement officials have expressed misgivings.
“When we hear information that someone, or a group, is providing security without a license, our department has to investigate the issue,” a police spokesman, Shawn McGuire, said in an email on Saturday.
Mr. Andrews said that the warning on Friday was tantamount to a temporary shutdown order, and he said he did not expect his volunteers to defy it.
This reaction illustrates pretty much everything that is wrong with our attitude toward government, and with government’s attitude toward us. In the course of the story, the Times claims that the fact “that some business owners accepted aid from a group regarded by some as an antigovernment militia is a testament to the rawness of emotions here following a riot on Monday night.” St. Louis police, meanwhile, insisted that they are bound “to investigate” any outfit that seeks to protect the public. In both cases, one has to ask, “why?” When you need help and you need it now, what possible interest could you have in the politics of those offering it? When under attack, to what extent can you be expected to care who has a license and who does not? Indeed, providing that you are not actively hurting anybody, what exactly is so wrong with being in an “antigovernment militia” that volunteers to protect the weak and the underserved?
In the United States, police forces exist as a public service, not as a replacement for civil society. As the Supreme Court has made clear, police are under no obligation to help or to protect you. They can choose to, certainly. But they do not have to. And, even if they did have to, it would still be the case that they could not possibly be everywhere at once.
Nor are they intended to be. For much of American history, there was no serious distinction drawn between the citizenry, the militia, the military, and the police. Instead, there were a few elected or appointed roles — watchmen, constables, sheriffs, etc. — and then there was the people at large. Those people were expected to bandy together and to help one another, to be responsible for their own protection, and to help to keep the peace — both under the control of authorities and of their own volition. When standing police forces came into being, Americans did not give up this system; they added to it.
Which is to say that there is no reason whatsoever for us to abandon either our penchant for self-reliance or our preference for volunteerism simply because we have a series of professional police forces running in parallel to civil society. Nor, for that matter, should our out-of-control licensing systems and incomplete self-defense protections be permitted to become an impediment to our security. I’m no great fan of Oathkeepers as an outfit. But if they wish to help out during a protest, so be it. If a collection of black Ferguson residents wishes to protect a white-owned gas station from looters, so be it. If the Huey P. Newton Gun Club wants to march around Dallas protecting black citizens, so be it. If a spontaneous, unlicensed group of Korean Los Angelenos wishes to take up arms and protect their property from rioters, so be it. The United States represents a collection of free people who elect to have police forces — not the other way around. So some of our actors don’t much like the government. Who cares?