No more. Orlando should put an end to inaction. When American citizens are murdered by assault-rifle toting terrorists and told by their government that gun regulation nevertheless remains politically impossible, but maybe we will give it another whirl a bit later, it's time for a real revolution. It's time for cities and their mayors to say NO. No guns in our towns. No guns in our sports arenas. No guns in our clubs. No guns period. Like Dodge City under those intimidating sheriffs in the bad old days, tell folks to park their weapons at the city limits. Or stay out of town.
Yes, some cities have tried that. Washington D.C., for example. And the courts came down on them like a ton of AR 15s: "You can't do that! It Infringes the Second Amendment. You lack the standing to ban anything."
Enough. No more casualties as witnesses to the stupidity of craven federal and state officials. I wrote a book with the rhetorical tittle "If Mayors Ruled the World." Time for mayors to make it real. Let mayors in Washington, New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Seattle and Orlando - let hundreds more in the heartland in between -- let them say to the courts: "Sue us. Fine us. Put us in jail. We will not permit guns in our cities. You have defaulted on your sovereignty, defaulted on the protection of our lives that our obedience was supposed to secure. You have broken the social contract, and now it is up to us to protect our citizens. With or without you."
Say it loud and clear: "Time to rehearse the logic of our earlier revolution: no assassination without representation! You can't go on letting us be murdered in the name of protecting our Second Amendment rights!" This isn't posturing. Democracy is on our side: 70% of Americans want gun control, 75% of the population live in cities.
Democratic theory is on our side too. The social contract strikes a simple bargain among citizens and the sovereign state: we constitute and agree to obey you, you: secure our lives and liberties, take us out of the state of nature which as Thomas Hobbes said long ago is little more than a "war of all against all" where the life of man is "nasty, brutish and short." We surrender our natural liberty, you secure our civic safety.
Yet today we face an urban war of some against the rest, and the federal state won't disarm the ideological bandits and the terrorists for whom 'nasty, brutish and short' is a way of life -- and death. If the state can't protect us, it forfeits its right to obedience and at least in this domain forfeits its sovereign legitimacy. Call it a sovereign default.
Obeying federal laws (or their absence on guns) is getting 33,000 people killed every year and inviting terrorists to haul their heavy weapons into town after town - or to buy them locally with the government's complicity - to massacre our children and families and neighbors.
We've been bandying about the term revolution recently to distinguish campaigns for the Presidency whose candidates will no more be able to act on guns if elected than President Obama was. How about this for a revolution? Refuse to obey laws preventing cities from disarming lunatics, criminals and terrorists bent on mayhem, refuse to let your neighbors be mowed down in the name of a principle that amounts to letting folks who want to keep an AK 47 around the house for target practice do as they please.
Let's go, Mr. Mayor, to the barricades, Madame Mayor, cities too can do civil disobedience. Get together, make a new social contract, keep your citizens safe. Take on the Feds, take on the courts, take on those craven legislators bought or cowed by the NRA, and tell them there will be no more guns in our cities. Period.
No need to wait for a paralyzed and gridlocked Federal government where the few tell the many that their archaically interpreted Second amendment rights are more important than their lives. Confiscate the guns. Outlaw their sale. Bar them from coming in. Regulate carry and conceal. Ban the assault rifles.
That's what every other civilized nation in the world does. No more Orlando's. If the Feds can't do it, cities can. If the Congress won't, mayors must. If it takes a revolution, well then it takes a revolution. Let Orlando become our Lexington: shots heard around the world that finally put an end to our murderous gun culture which has become an ideal setting for the flourishing of domestic terrorism.