Breakfast Club -- Bullets

It was a hostile crowd this morning. Even normally placid diner regulars grumbled about cold toast, and new waitress uniforms.......pants now and skirts previously.

As such, the tone was set for reviving an old discussion. It was not likely to result in any revolutionary rhetoric........and Roscoe Bismark knew it.

He also knew that I couldn't resist the bait.

Didya see Law and Order last night?" he queried.

"Law and Order?"

"Yeah.....you know, that TV show."

No, I shook my head.

He detailed it, saying that a merchant....that is, a merchant who had already shot and killed a previous would-be robber, was on trial for shooting, not one, but two subsequent would-be robbers. The jury had found the merchant not guilty in the case of the first robbery, and in the death of the would-be robber. And not guilty regarding one of the robbers in the second robbery, but guilty of second-degree murder for the second robber because the merchant had reloaded his gun, pursued the man out of the door,and had shot him in the back.

The jury ruled the pursuit and subsequent shooting him in the back (and I'm assuming here) was not in the interest of self-defense, but rather was simply vengeance.

Roscoe finished his narrative, only to hear Silas McMarner issue the observation that the merchant should not only receive a medal "but we should buy him a new gun"

The discussion first began years ago during the celebrated Bernard Goetz subway shooting case. Goetz, a man who would be described as mild mannered in demeanor and appearance, and who was the object of numerous subway confrontations during which he would be hassled under veiled threat for money, decided to take matters into his own hands by taking a gun with him one day.

The hassling began. He fired the weapon. The rest is history.....with the paralyzed mugger filing a $50 million law suit against Goetz – and later being awarded $43 million – none of which Goetz paid.

Back at the Breakfast Club, the debate continues:

"The social contract of a rule of law has been broken long ago in New York City; therefore, citizens must dispense justice; therefore, Goetz was justified." Roscoe argues. He further suggests that citizens there should, in fact, carry guns and become judges and juries of one toward the end of self preservation, in his mind the only law in a lawless land being the law sanctioned by the need for self preservation.

"Agreed. Most thinking persons would agree that when and if the 'him or me' situation arises, it's going to be him, using whatever is at hand. But does that reality automatically mean that this reactive principle should be institutionalized?"

"What's the alternative?" Roscoe wonders. "Tell me...........what's the alternative?"

That question troubles me for days every time Roscoe asks it. And I always arrive at the same answer: We should not be prepared to accept vigilante committees-of- one who walk around with, as Bernhard Goetz did, the intent to take the law into his own hands. Or the merchant who decided that vengeance was his, and not that of the law.

We either are and will remain a nation of laws---predicated upon constitutional principles---or we are not and will cease to be. Otherwise we can turn it all over to the vigilantes, zealots and special interests of every stripe; we can give up the right to choose, believe, speak freely, be heard, and effect change.

And in doing so, give up the opportunity to be better than the wolves we would surely become..