By Dan Gifford
Given the number of times governments have mass murdered their own people in parts of the world most Americans have never heard of, that subject line admonition of my attached “Firing Line” magazine article is something immigrants often understand better than native born Americans.
Perhaps that was the motivation behind Fabio Lanzoni’s recent comment that “The day you give up your weapon in the United States, the United States is going to be history.”
The model and actor is a man I’d only exchanged social pleasantries with several times so his comments are somewhat of a surprise. I don’t know how in demand Fabio is in Hollywood these days, but I do know that it’s a career ender to say such things in public here.
Even so, Fabio’s comments indicate he is a man willing to stand up for an essential principle that too few native born Americans understand save those from past generations like Supreme Court Justice and Harvard law professor Joseph Story in his 1833 book, Commentaries on the Constitution:
“The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been
considered, as the palladium of the liberties of a republic; since it
offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power
of rulers; and will generally, even if these are successful in the first
instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them.”
Fabio’s comment indicates he not only understands that principle, he also understands its everyday application as expressed by University of Texas law professor Sanford Levinson:
Keep Your Gun And Live” … just as ordinary citizens should participate actively in
governmental decision-making, through offering their own deliberative
insights, rather than be confined to casting ballots once every two or
four years for those very few individuals who will actually make the
decisions, so should ordinary citizens participate in the process of law
enforcement and defense of liberty rather than rely on professionalized
peacekeepers, whether we call them standing armies or police.”
