No more playing defense! Time to stop killers, terrorists

Do you remember the 3-year-old girl who won our hearts during the Vietnam War by asking her father, "What if they gave a war and nobody showed up?" It seems that little girl had a 6-year-old brother who asked, "Daddy, is there some rule that says the good guys are allowed to play only defense?"

San Bernardino, Orlando, Charleston, Sandy Hook, Istanbul, Baltimore, Ferguson, Baton Rouge and now the French Riviera – quite a few names there, but not enough to catalogue the full extent of the random mass murders of innocent victims in recent history. And after each catastrophe comes the word-for-word pious lamentation from on high about guns and bad guys and how often and how easy they wind up together.

There's an old song, "I Never Promised You a Rose Garden!" It would make good background music if you care to read further.

We get it! We got it dozens of mass murders ago. It's a damnable rotten shame that so many incomplete people acquire guns and use them to murder the rest of us. Must this continue with absolutely no change in the narrative? The French have at least put a new wrinkle in the narrative. The anchorman told us the French people are angry. Following the Bastille Day massacre in Nice, they're putting pressure on President Francois Hollande to protect them better.

That's an interesting complaint. Let's examine it.

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The misery of mass murder is compounded by the fear and fury of those of us who so far remain un-murdered. Pretend our leader is a weak, indecisive character who watched a hostile neighbor grow his army and navy while our leader merely bragged about our beautiful beaches. If that hostile neighbor loaded his big army aboard his big navy and stormed ashore onto our big undefended beaches, yes, we'd have good reason to complain about our level of protection.

Please tell me, however, what can a French president – or anybody else – do against a jihadist with no apparent attachment to any terrorist group (but a jihadist, nonetheless) who commandeers a big truck and speeds it up and slams into the crowd along a promenade in such a way as to kill as many random people as he possibly can, knowing and even hoping he'll die in the melee?

No leader of a democracy could survive taking this position, but a columnist just might.

Do we accuse "Monsieur-le-President" of being soft on "truck-control"?

You say French intelligence could do a better job! French intelligence has a subsection that could tell within 30 seconds which of 27 sub-dialects of Algerian Arabic was on the recording! French intelligence is OK. German is better. Israeli is best!

At some point we peace-loving, life-loving, violence-hating citizens of democratic countries must face the reality that a large and possibly growing group of people here on earth want us dead. So, what do we do? We don't complain as though an unmolested life is one of our civil rights. We do more of what the British did during the Battle of Britain, when Hitler gave the U.K. another 9/11 every single night. You acknowledge that you're under attack, and you don't stutter when asked who the enemy is. You take your family into what is probably a new hobby for you, namely marksmanship. The instant a nation acquires a good-guy citizen who can defend himself and his family, that nation instantaneously becomes stronger.

You'll never get guns away from the bad guys. The next best thing is to make the good guys less vulnerable. What ever happened to all those stories about tragedy being averted because a good guy with a gun happened to be passing by? They're still happening. You just don't hear about it because the media despise those stories. A Midwestern editor admitted, "We don't run such stories!" Why not? Simple. Those stories make guns and gun owners look good. Much of the media don't want guns and gun owners to look good. One Midwestern editor had the guts to say it out loud.

Take a moral sledgehammer and smash that rule that insists the good guys play defense only. Unleash your military capabilities. It's amazing what a merciless bombing can do to the "Kill Thy Neighbor" enthusiasm of young religious fanatics.

Raise military pay to send the message to those in uniform that we love and appreciate them. Spend more getting the message across to the good people in bad countries that the bombing stops when the terrorism stops. Those people have a role to play.

Install and instill a love for America approaching that which carried us to a very difficult victory in World War II. Make sure every student has a copy of the Constitution and the incentive to read it and understand.

When Justice Hugo Black was on the Supreme Court, New York columnist Sid Zion spotted him searching through his pockets and his briefcase on the Supreme Court steps.

"Did you lose something, Justice Black?" asked Sid.

"Yes, I seem to have left my copy of the Constitution on my dresser this morning," replied Justice Black.

The justice then looked up at Sid and asked, "May I borrow yours?'

Media wishing to interview Barry Farber, please contact [email protected].