Armed Americans could turn tide of border war

By Jon E. Dougherty
doughertyj@earthlink.net

March 30, 2004

KeepAndBearArms.com -- American military might has never lost a war. Politicians, on the other hand, have lost a few wars on behalf of the American military. The generals and privates were blamed, but the blow-dried polished suits in D.C. were responsible.

Americans are set to lose another war, too, if Washington's ruling elite doesn't collectively grow a spine. Only this war isn't being fought 10,000 miles away. This war is being waged along the U.S. southwest border, and the ramifications of losing it are extreme.

Granted, it's not the kind of traditional war, where armies face off against each other across a battlefield. But it is just as deadly, and it is growing in intensity year by year.

This war is being fought between ordinary Americans living in these border regions and elements of Mexican police, military, drug lords and human smugglers—the latter group literally invading our country at will because there is no serious effort to stop them.

The Border Patrol is woefully understaffed and politically restrained. Washington's elite, you see, care more about what a few Hispanic lobbyists think than what 70 percent of the American public thinks regarding open borders and immigration.

Some Americans have tried to arm themselves against this growing threat, but between political and legal pressure, most of those efforts have fizzled. 

That leaves individual families to face Mexican-borne threats alone, like one American who had his home shot up and burned near Douglas, Ariz. this week because he fired on armed drug smugglers muling dope across his property for the one-thousandth time.

Some of Washington's elite and Hispanic sympathy groups will say this man deserved what he got. Seventy percent of the American public, however, disagrees and thinks something more ought to be done about the dope and human smuggling traffic along the border.

The family of 28-year-old Park Ranger Kris Eggle thinks so. Eggle was gunned down by AK-47-toting drug smugglers in Arizona in 2002 fleeing from Mexico.

The one answer that makes sense—deploying U.S. troops to patrol and protect our border—has been taken off the table by Washington's ruling elite. You see, even though Mexican troops patrol their border, our leaders think the Defense Department is really the "Offense" department, and that our military isn't "permitted" to defend borders unless they belong to another country.

So that leaves Americans all alone to handle this themselves—along with a few local law enforcement agencies and a handful of Border Patrol agents who still remember they serve the public that pays them, not the other way around.

The rulers of the former Soviet Union were rumored to have once said invading the United States would be a sure loser because Americans were fortunate enough to be preceded by founding fathers who wrote the Second Amendment.

Without a right to keep and bear arms, the Soviets would have faced a relatively unarmed American population; instead, they would have faced the most powerful Army in the world, backed up by 80 million gun owners who possessed something like 190 million firearms. 

This principle could easily be applied to border security—that is, if most leaders in Washington and in the statehouses along the border stopped playing identity politics and remember that 70 percent of Americans would support their decision.

Will there be bloodshed along the border if Americans, en mass, took up armed positions along the border? Probably—but there is bloodshed now, and much of what has been spilled belonged to American citizens.

In the end, however, Mexico's leaders, it's drug runners and human smugglers would get the message unmistakably—that 70 percent of Americans are fed up with the incursions, the violence, the flagrant law-breaking, the tons of trash and destruction, the threats, and the damage caused by corrupt elements south of the border.

If it takes and "army" of Americans to defend their own soil, Washington should lead them, follow them, or get out of the way.

Jon E. Dougherty is a reporter for NewMax.com and author of the book, "Illegals: The Imminent Threat Posed by Our Unsecured U.S.-Mexico Border."