I am a Boomer. I grew up on a subsistence farm, where we didn’t have much money but what we had could not be bought with money. I slopped the hogs, fed the calves from a nipple bucket, collected the eggs, worked in the garden, helped cut our firewood, lived in heaven.
My father was a retired 30-year lifer in the Navy. He was a Chief Petty Officer and the Rifle & Pistol Team coach on board the USS Pennsylvania, when bombs fell on him and our nation on a Day of Infamy.
I grew up with firearms, and could not have had a better teacher. Safety, correct breathing, and becoming a stable platform were his lessons; shooting as a meditation. He was very political, a Republican but not a regressive. More than politics, he believed in civics, in understanding how 13 colonies united in a radical experiment: to be ruled by law rather than by dictate of individual men. Law is our ruler, and adherence to the law allows our democracy to endure.
That is what he taught me. If you disobey the law, you are committing a crime. If you don’t like a law, you work to change it, but while it is the law, you obey it. You can change it by suit within the judiciary, or by initiative election of “We the People.” But while it is law, you obey it. If you choose to not obey the law, you are a criminal, and subject to the censure of legal mechanisms. That’s what my father taught me, and that is why he put his life at risk: to ensure we endure.
Recently, I read of two officers of the law saying they have chosen to not enforce a particular law, created by a majority vote of our citizens, because they have decided it is unconstitutional. Police deciding which laws they will choose to enforce flies in the face of everything our Founding Fathers, and my father, stood for. We live under a government of law, not of men, and for a police officer to choose to not enforce a law is a betrayal of his oath of office. It is not his job to decide what laws are constitutional; that is for a court of law or a majority of voters to decide.
His job is only to enforce the laws. If he won’t enforce written laws, he should no longer be a law enforcement officer. Like it or not, it is the law, and we are a people governed by law rather than opinion. You don’t like this law? Work with all your heart to change it. If you succeed, more power to you! If you don’t succeed, you lick your wounds and perhaps try again. Personally, I choose to cast bullets, reload, punch holes in paper in my backyard. God help the predator who invades my home, but when it comes to I-1639, I am far more concerned with our changing climate.
Michael Croxton
Toledo
