France riots reinforce the genius of the Second Amendment

The images emerging from France and Italy offer a grim preview of what happens when a society surrenders its right to self-defense to an incompetent state. In Paris, a viral video captured a man pouring a pot of boiling water off a third-floor balcony onto a violent mob of Muslims and far-leftists looting and rioting on the street below. In a disarmed nation, a citizen watching his neighborhood burn is reduced to tenth-century improvisations while waiting for a police force that is overwhelmed, politically paralyzed, or worse.This physical helplessness mirrors a broader civilizational collapse across Western Europe. In Great Britain, thousands of young girls — some estimates claim the figure to be in the hundreds of thousands — were subjected to systematic grooming, assault, and rape at the hands of gangs of Muslim immigrants over recent decades. This horror was enabled not only by police inaction, with the goal of avoiding being called “Islamiphobic,” but also a legal system explicitly designed to disarm the innocent.Under U.K. law, carrying any object, even pepper spray, for the purpose of self-defense is strictly illegal, and British citizens who use force against barbaric predators face aggressive criminal prosecution under subjective “proportionality” standards. Outside of a few disarmed and demoralized Democrat-run metropolises, the situation would look far different in the United States if Muslim rape gangs landed on our shores. If American fathers learned that their daughters were being targeted by a predatory ring of savages while the cops looked the other way, they would not be forced to choose between passive submission and facing prison time for taking up arms.An armed citizenry, protected by strong self-defense doctrines, ensures that predators face an immediate, lethal deterrent. If Muslim migrants attempted to mass rape girls here in America, coroners from sea to shining sea would conclude that the perpetrators’ vitals had joined the Periodic Table.The American Founders understood what modern European elites refuse to acknowledge: The ultimate guarantor of life, liberty, and property is not a bureaucratic police force, but the individual citizen endowed with the God-given right to self-defense. The Second Amendment was designed both as a bulwark against tyrannical government and a civilizational circuit breaker against the willing or unwilling breakdown of state authority.A hat with embroidered assault rifles in support of the Second Amendment is seen in the expo hall during the Conservative Political Action Conference, CPAC 2024, at National Harbor in Oxon Hill, Md., Thursday, Feb. 22, 2024. (AP Photo) History repeatedly validates this constitutional framework. When law enforcement abandoned Koreatown during the 1992 L.A. riots, armed Korean-American business owners, the famous “Rooftop Koreans,” took up positions with rifles and handguns to protect their livelihoods from arson and looting. During the race riots of 2020, armed citizens stood guard over their communities, providing the physical deterrence that disarmed European shopkeepers lack. One Kyle Rittenhouse with an AR-15 is worth ten thousand gallons of boiling water.If groups of anti-Christian arsonists attempt a mass burning of churches in America, similar to what has happened across Canada over the last half-decade, armed parishioners would make quick work of the anti-civilization barbarians.The legal philosophy of the West has split into two competing visions. European legal regimes enforce strict limits on civilian resistance, penalizing law-abiding victims who dare to arm themselves while treating violent rioters and criminal networks with institutional leniency. Our constitutional order, by contrast, recognizes that property represents the fruit of one’s labor and that defending one’s family, home, or business against a violent threat is an inviolable human right.ALLEGED LEFTIST MILITANTS CHARGED WITH GUN CRIME JUST BEFORE TRUMP STOPPED ENFORCEMENTAs Western Europe descends into chaos, the Second Amendment stands out not as an anomaly of American history, but as an essential pillar of a functioning society. When the state fails, or worse, an armed citizenry is the only thing that stands between the wolves at the gate (or more accurately inside the gates), and civilization itself.Private American citizens own more firearms than every military on the planet combined, and today is the perfect time to add to your (I assume already quite formidable) collection. As the wise philosopher Suga Free once said: “if you stay ready, you don’t got to get ready.”Brady Leonard (@bradyleonard) is a writer, musician, and host of The No Gimmicks Podcast.