John Robson: Institutions Must Trust Citizens

Commentary

If you’re startled half-awake at 3 a.m. by an armed intruder, can you fight back or must you submit to whatever outrage they have in mind? Oddly, opinions are divided here, with most citizens on one side and the chattering classes on the other. We must push back.

It’s front of mind because a guy in Kawartha Lakes seriously injured an armed, wanted intruder and was charged with assault. The authorities sneered at the rabble’s “negative commentary about the officers and their actions” and insisted we all just passively let the system operate. Trussssst us.

Including this classic sentence: “It is important to remember that charges are not convictions; they are part of the judicial process, which ensures that all facts are considered fairly in court.” Yeah. The process that drags on for years, bankrupts you, and half-kills you with stress. Their handiwork.

Of course, the law does not and should not give us blanket permission to use any amount of force regardless of circumstances. Someone too hammered to talk cannot be beaten to a pulp for staggering into your yard. And due process must give officers some discretion, based on initial impressions, to lay charges later found to be unjustified. But liberty under law also requires the right of self-defence, and a judicial system where the process is not the punishment.

Some of us still cherish the maxim of British Prime Minister William Pitt the Elder a quarter-millennium ago: “The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the force of the Crown. It may be frail, its roof may shake, the wind may blow through it. The rain may enter. The storms may enter. But the king of England may not enter. All his forces dare not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement.” And a few remember that he was channeling Edward Coke’s commentary on established English law a century and a half earlier: “That the house of every one is to him as his Castle and Fortress as well for defence against injury and violence, as for his repose.”

Not anymore. And it’s part of a general effort by the state to render us helpless based on deep, offensive distrust of us. Including an example that has stuck in my craw for years, discussed in my 2016 documentary “A Right To Arms” about the constitutional protections we once enjoyed here, inherited from Britain and entrenched in the United States, but by no means invented there.

In Canada, if a woman carries a knife in her purse for protection, she is a criminal. Not just if she uses it wrongly. For having it at all. Likewise, if she douses a rapist with pepper spray, she will be charged and convicted unless she somehow establishes that she had a legitimate fear of four-legged beasts and by sheer happenstance was able to protect herself against the two-legged kind. And it’s true of anything she might carry, even a corkscrew.

The long and short of it is that the state wants us to be helpless. Thus, the infamous incident where a Toronto cop told a community meeting that the solution to car-theft home invasions was to leave the keys by the front door so they didn’t have to beat you to get the vehicle, or maybe molest or kill you while they’re inside and in control. It caused revealing consternation because we were shocked that they said it, and they were shocked that we were shocked.

It did not use to be this way. In 1877, Sir John A. Macdonald told the House of Commons he opposed handgun concealed-carry bans as tending toward “the effect of disarming the person who ought to be armed, and arming the rowdies.” Very much in the spirit of Robert Peel’s principle that “Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.”

As with facilitating pro-Hamas protests, police working hard to render us helpless before violent offenders destroys that relationship by destroying our faith that they’re on our side. As the whole dangerous modern decline in our trust in institutions is driven by their pre-emptive distrust of us.

They think we’re idiots, that a woman who pulls a knife on a rapist will just hand it to him and a homeowner with a gun will shoot his wife. They do not trust us on economic decisions, hateful words, immigration, or teaching our kids to swim. But we have the right to self-defence, starting with subduing and expelling bad ideas that invade our heads.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.