USS Clueless              Voyages of a restless mind

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Stardate 20011218.1114 (Crew, this is the Captain): I had dreams last night about Flight 93. I don't remember what they were, but I ended up getting up for a couple of hours because of them. And I was thinking about the people on that doomed flight, and how they fought back. Three jets hijacked and used to hit major targets, one jet hijacked which hit a field in Pennsylvania, because the passengers fought back.

I started thinking about the Second Amendment. There is probably no provision in the Constitution more despised by Europeans, who have never fully understood what it is about. And it occurred to me that every right granted to us in the Constitution also places a duty on us.

For instance, the First Amendment rights of freedom of speech and the press and of free assembly are there primarily to protect political speech, so as to permit the voters of the United States to rationally discuss the issues of the day and to vote responsibly. But it also lays a duty on the citizens to vote conscientiously.

The Second Amendment is more up front about its duty than any of the others:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

So we have the right to own firearms. But the reason we do is because we all have a duty to defend this nation when it becomes necessary. That's what the founders meant by "a militia"; an ad-hoc collection of armed citizens in time of emergency to augment the regular armed forces. When you take away the right to bear arms, you also tell people that they are not responsible for defending their nation.

And that obligation doesn't end when we're not carrying weapons, and Flight 93 proved it. We'll never know exactly what happened, but we know that the passengers on the plane learned of previous attacks, knew that their own plane was intended for another such attack, and decided to prevent it from happening. The cockpit voice recorder has sounds of a struggle and voices speaking both in English and in Arabic, and the best guess is that the passengers really did come close to prevailing and were on the edge of regaining control when the terrorist pilot put the plane into a steep dive and hit the ground. Surely an open field was not their target, so whatever their target actually was intended to be was spared because the civilians on that jet fought back. Which was their duty. They didn't have guns, but they had hands and feet and dedication and that was enough. The hijackers didn't have guns, either. It's possible that some of the passengers were wounded or even killed in the fighting; all we know is that they were prevailing. They didn't have to be told to do this; deep down they knew. Ultimately all of us know that we bear this burden, and when called on we all must defend the nation, even at the cost of our lives.

"What good can a handful of men with rifles do against a foreign army?" That's the rhetorical question often posed by Europeans who wish that we'd repeal the Second Amendment. Well, sometimes the threat isn't an army, and what citizens can do is to actually be there at the right time and place. We citizens are everywhere; the US Army isn't. Sometimes time and place matter more than anything else. There weren't any Army troops on that jet, but there were citizens who knew their duty and fulfilled it. And that was sufficient, and something important like the Capitol or the White House was spared. (discuss)