In this age of increased awareness of police brutality, one must ask the question, "Why are police necessary?" The short answer is a simple one. They are not. When asking the question, "What do police do?" you'll find the standard answer is an odd one -- "Why, they protect us, of course." You can take that answer at face value, or you can ask yourselves two things -- "Who are they protecting us from, and why?"
The idea is that the police protect us, the citizenry, from criminals. That it is their responsibility to protect us, and that we should be grateful for it. My question to you is -- why on earth would my protection, or security, be the responsibility of any other human being?
Short answer -- my security is not the responsibility of any other human being. My security is my own responsibility.
However, we've reached a point in society where the majority of the citizenry would choose to outsource this responsibility, at a fee crowd-funded by us all -- whether we prefer to outsource this responsibility or not. As a result, there are quite literally over twenty states with legislation regarding how we are allowed to defend ourselves. By limiting our means of self-defense, our reliance on individuals without these limitations (i.e., police) is a foregone conclusion.
This "duty to retreat," as it is often called, is one of the grossest misuses of perceived authority we bear witness to. As a populace, we are effectively saying, "The individual is unable to protect oneself, but that group of individuals is definitely able to protect themselves as well as me and all other individuals." This logic is obviously ludicrous, but we'll diagram it out to really drive home the point.
You see, there is no logical reason that a group of individuals, regardless of what shirt they put on before work, or what piece of metal they pin to said shirt, would have more rights than the individuals themselves. Human rights do not operate by mob rule.
When examining the United States' presidential candidates, not one is interested in empowering the individual to defend him/herself. This widespread refusal to accept the responsibility of self defense is possibly the greatest act of cowardice inflicting our population.
As Doug Stanhope once famously said, "You are born free, you get [screwed] out of half of it, and you wave a flag celebrating it!"
I ask you, ladies & gentlemen, to put down the flag.
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Wade Williams is a voluntaryist from Orlando, Florida, covering wide-ranging topics from ethics, finance, primitive survival techniques, combat sports, Major League Soccer, the National Basketball Association, morality and anarchy. You can follow him on Twitter at @ThenWadeTweets.