McPherson: Mr. President, Call Out the Militia!

Coordinated bomb and gun attacks in several Paris locations have left approximately 130 people dead and over 300 wounded. ISIS has struck, and hard.

The French government declared a state of emergency and closed the border, a symbolic but ultimately ineffective measure. Vainly believing that an agile enemy can be defeated if only bureaucrats are given more power, civil liberties will be further curtailed, and police will harass an already terrorized citizenry, one so helpless that it might even welcome the iron fist of a police state for the sake of promised order. Warplanes will attack targets in Syria with occasional but strategically irrelevant success, and politicians will promise advances against an enemy so elusive and highly decentralized that it cannot be contained.

How should people in the West fight this ”new style of war,” as William Lind dubbed it just one day before the Paris attacks?

First we must acknowledge that half a century (at least) of meddling in the Middle East has done nothing to promote the security of western liberal societies. “Security overseas means avoiding entanglement” in what Lind calls “Fourth Generation Wars,” which are conflicts involving large military operations against “non-state opponents.”

“Not only do America’s armed forces not know how to win such wars,” Lind writes, ”they have little interest in learning. Comfortable with their expertise in reducing the art of war to the mechanics of putting firepower on targets, they do not want to adjust to wars where the moral level is more powerful than the physical level.”

GOP presidential candidates and their (admittedly few) allies in the media are pushing the narrative that Obama has enacted ”historic cuts” to the military and put the US in a posture of “retreat” around the world, but nothing could be further from the truth. Our foreign policy has remained very aggressive for a long time.

The US would be better off adopting “a defensive grand strategy.”

“Instead of trying to give orders to the rest of the world, we would leave it alone, so long as it leaves us alone. We would stay out of other peoples’ business and quarrels. We would still engage with other countries and peoples, but we would do so through private means, trade, and serving as a moral example. That was America’s policy through most of our history, and it served us well. It is tailor-made for today’s world.”

Lind notes the limit of this policy. “The other half [of the challenge] is preserving security here at home. Keeping our nose out of other peoples’ business will reduce the incentive for them to attack us here. But attacks will still come, both as imports and from groups and causes whose home is America.”

“At present, we meet this threat through a continual expansion of the national-security state, to the point where getting on an airplane is like going through Checkpoint Charlie. The national-security state erodes our liberties, it costs immense sums, and it often does not work.”

“The answer to this challenge again comes from our past,” Lind rightly concludes. America needs a revitalized militia, one including all military age males (really all military age citizens) who pledge to fight terrorists with “whatever they have at hand: throwing rocks or chairs, tackling him, beating him unconscious, running over him with their car. If they happen to be armed, fine; if not, they attack anyway.” Lind is correct that fighting is the only way. If survival is the goal, submission in this scenario is absurd. Those who promote passivity – naively insisting that resistance “makes things worse” by “escalating the aggression” – are suicidal. A rape whistle won’t stop a rapist, and it sure as hell won’t stop a motivated terrorist.

In France, no one is allowed to own the kinds of firearms the ISIS terrorists used, and carrying handguns or other weapons for self-defense by the general population is legally prohibited. That didn’t stop several teams of terrorists from once again wreaking havoc there. Fortunately in the United States people have the right to keep and bear arms. About 30-40 percent of US households contain a firearm (typically more than one), and almost all 50 states have legally recognized a citizen’s right to carry a handgun. But according to the Crime Prevention Research Center only 5-7 percent of the US population actually carry. That needs to change.

One way to encourage the carrying of handguns would be to follow the example set by seven states – Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Kansas, Maine, Vermont and Wyoming – where anyone who may legally own a handgun may also carry it concealed, no license required. (New Hampshire could have been number eight.) Ideally every state in the union would pass a “constitutional carry” law.

In the meantime, national reciprocity should be enacted. A license to carry a handgun should be treated like a license to drive a car: Valid anywhere in the United States. If the Framers of our Constitution wanted gay marriage recognized throughout the land, it’s nothing short of anti-gun fanaticism to argue that they would have wanted citizens to be defenseless against maniacs just because they’ve crossed a state line. Teachers who wish to carry a handgun should be able to do so on school property and on class field trips; retired citizens looking for something to do could walk the school grounds with a shouldered long gun, preferably a military-style rifle, to discourage attacks there. ”Gun-free” zones should be abolished.

Trusting the citizenry will promote the martial virtues required to defeat terrorists, not the blustering, chest-thumping militarism currently peddled, or the weak-kneed pleadings of the pacifists, “progressives,” and pansies. It will also draw our citizens closer together, something essential at a time of conflict.

Is success guaranteed, if we pledge to fight? Of course not. The alternative is allowing ourselves and those around us to be helpless in the face of persistent violence, which is incompatible with a free and open society. A revitalized militia will send a message that Americans are prepared to survive the scourge of terrorism, by taking personal responsibility for ourselves, our loved ones, and our neighbors – and taking the fight to the bad guys.