Drizzt
Member
The Gazette (Montreal, Quebec)
July 5, 2003 Saturday Final Edition
SECTION: Editorial / Op-ed; Pg. A31
LENGTH: 546 words
HEADLINE: Law now favours robbers and oppressors: Right of self-defence. Shop owners are morally right to defend their property and themselves
SOURCE: Freelance
BYLINE: PIERRE LEMIEUX
BODY:
By welcoming the prosecution of Harjeet Singh Saini on charges of aggravated assault against a burglar inside his depanneur ("Vigilante Policing No Way to Fight Crime," July 2, 2003), The Gazette is insulting common sense, violating morality, ignoring economic and criminological research and negating a few centuries of Western tradition.
The moral argument was already in John Locke's Second Treatise of Civil Government, a seminal book in the history of Western liberty, published in 1690. Locke explained that it is "lawful for a man to kill a thief who has not in the least hurt him, nor declared any design upon his life, any farther than by the use of force, so to get him in his power as to take away his money, or what he pleases, from him; because using force, where he has no right to get me into his power ... I have no reason to suppose that he who would take away my liberty would not, when he had me in his power, take away everything else."
"The law," Locke continued, "where it cannot interpose to secure my life from present force, which if lost is capable of no reparation, permits me my own defence and ... a liberty to kill the aggressor because the aggressor allows not time to appeal to our common judge, nor the decision of the law, for remedy in a case where the mischief may be irreparable.
"If the innocent honest man must quietly quit all he has for peace sake, to him who will lay violent hands upon it, I desire it may be considered what kind of peace there will be in the world, which consists only in violence and rapine; and which is to be maintained only for the benefit of robbers and oppressors."
Indeed, economic arguments also support our traditional right of self-defence. When citizens yield to criminals, the latter's risk and costs decrease and more crimes are committed. There is much criminological and economic evidence to that effect.
As things are going, Canada will soon be like Britain, where honest citizens are forbidden to defend themselves, where only criminals have guns and where the population lives in fear, including fear of reporting criminals.
Not only has the Canadian population gradually been disarmed by three major pieces of firearm-control legislation over a quarter of a century - the last act being played now - but the right of individuals to defend themselves, even with baseball bats, is now openly under attack. Indeed, the two issues are closely related. One of the first weapons to be declared prohibited just after the 1978 firearm-control law was Mace, a self-defence tool.
In half a century, we have gone from a society where the cop was only a specialized servant of the citizen, with basically no more power than his master, to a situation where powerfully armed praetorians claim the monopoly of our protection, demand that we submit to criminals when they cannot intervene and arrest us when we exert the traditional rights of free men. All this, to the benefit of robbers and oppressors.
Protecting the aggressor and prosecuting the victim, favouring the criminal over the honest citizen, is not the mark of a civilized society but the imprint of a quiet tyranny.
Pierre Lemieux is co-director of the Economics and Liberty Research Group at the Universite du Quebec en Outaouais.
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Wow! Now, don't hold back Pierre....
July 5, 2003 Saturday Final Edition
SECTION: Editorial / Op-ed; Pg. A31
LENGTH: 546 words
HEADLINE: Law now favours robbers and oppressors: Right of self-defence. Shop owners are morally right to defend their property and themselves
SOURCE: Freelance
BYLINE: PIERRE LEMIEUX
BODY:
By welcoming the prosecution of Harjeet Singh Saini on charges of aggravated assault against a burglar inside his depanneur ("Vigilante Policing No Way to Fight Crime," July 2, 2003), The Gazette is insulting common sense, violating morality, ignoring economic and criminological research and negating a few centuries of Western tradition.
The moral argument was already in John Locke's Second Treatise of Civil Government, a seminal book in the history of Western liberty, published in 1690. Locke explained that it is "lawful for a man to kill a thief who has not in the least hurt him, nor declared any design upon his life, any farther than by the use of force, so to get him in his power as to take away his money, or what he pleases, from him; because using force, where he has no right to get me into his power ... I have no reason to suppose that he who would take away my liberty would not, when he had me in his power, take away everything else."
"The law," Locke continued, "where it cannot interpose to secure my life from present force, which if lost is capable of no reparation, permits me my own defence and ... a liberty to kill the aggressor because the aggressor allows not time to appeal to our common judge, nor the decision of the law, for remedy in a case where the mischief may be irreparable.
"If the innocent honest man must quietly quit all he has for peace sake, to him who will lay violent hands upon it, I desire it may be considered what kind of peace there will be in the world, which consists only in violence and rapine; and which is to be maintained only for the benefit of robbers and oppressors."
Indeed, economic arguments also support our traditional right of self-defence. When citizens yield to criminals, the latter's risk and costs decrease and more crimes are committed. There is much criminological and economic evidence to that effect.
As things are going, Canada will soon be like Britain, where honest citizens are forbidden to defend themselves, where only criminals have guns and where the population lives in fear, including fear of reporting criminals.
Not only has the Canadian population gradually been disarmed by three major pieces of firearm-control legislation over a quarter of a century - the last act being played now - but the right of individuals to defend themselves, even with baseball bats, is now openly under attack. Indeed, the two issues are closely related. One of the first weapons to be declared prohibited just after the 1978 firearm-control law was Mace, a self-defence tool.
In half a century, we have gone from a society where the cop was only a specialized servant of the citizen, with basically no more power than his master, to a situation where powerfully armed praetorians claim the monopoly of our protection, demand that we submit to criminals when they cannot intervene and arrest us when we exert the traditional rights of free men. All this, to the benefit of robbers and oppressors.
Protecting the aggressor and prosecuting the victim, favouring the criminal over the honest citizen, is not the mark of a civilized society but the imprint of a quiet tyranny.
Pierre Lemieux is co-director of the Economics and Liberty Research Group at the Universite du Quebec en Outaouais.
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Wow! Now, don't hold back Pierre....
