COLUMN: Disagreement does not justify bombs, bullets

“We all have a First Amendment right to speak out, but we don’t have a right to force people to listen. Terrorism, whatever the ideology, is about forcing people to listen to your message.” — FBI Agent Mike German.

Too many Americans believe that if government doesn’t do what they want, that entitles them to kill people.

In our history, bombs have been thrown and bullets fired by labor activists, anti-union enforcers, Puerto Rican separatists, black militants, white supremacists, segregationists, radical leftists, anti-abortion militants and lone wolves such as Timothy McVeigh, Jim Adkisson and the Unabomber. All believing their oppression was so great it justified murder.

Unfortunately, that belief isn’t going away. Consider:

•Author Orson Scott Card wrote in 2008 that if gay marriage remained legal in California, heterosexuals should vow “to destroy that government and bring it down, so it can be replaced with a government that will respect and support marriage.”

•In response to Timothy McVeigh’s 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, columnist Walter Williams wrote that the important thing to remember was all the unjust government policies that drive people such as McVeigh to terrorism.

•Columnist Joseph Hunt recently wrote in The Log that “despite the horror” of anti-immigrant killer Dannie Baker’s attack on a local group of Chilean students, “it clearly reflects the mounting frustration that most taxpaying Americans are feeling regarding the trampling and curtailment of our constitutional rights and freedoms by too much immigration.”

•Blogger Terresa Monroe-Hamilton said this month that while James von Brunn — the neo-Nazi who attacked the Holocaust Museum recently — was a “rabid dog,” the next killer would probably be some “hard-working stiff” pushed too far by Obama’s “crushing of Americans under his fascist heel.”

•Pundit Megan McArdle defended the murder of abortion doctor George Tiller by arguing that “when the law is powerless, people are entitled to kill in order to prevent other murders ... If you think that someone is committing hundreds of gruesome murders a year, and that the law cannot touch him, what is the moral action?”

All these writers claim outrage at the violence, but they also seem to endorse it: Sure, killing people is bad, but when average Americans are being oppressed, it’s totally understandable. That might actually have some merit as an argument if the government had suspended elections and forced the population into labor camps, but in case you haven’t noticed, that’s not the case.

As the blogger Hilzoy pointed out, McArdle is wrong because the law isn’t “powerless” — the law has decided that abortion is not murder and that women have the right to decide whether to complete a pregnancy or not. The only powerlessness is the right-to-lifers who can’t get their will imposed on others.

But the fact is we don’t get everything we want from the government, no matter who “we” are: We pay taxes we don’t like, we see our tax dollars spent on activities we oppose, we get presidents in office we despise, policies we don’t accept are imposed on us and policies we do accept are not enacted.

That doesn’t make the government a dictatorship, it doesn’t mean democracy has failed, and it doesn’t mean taking up arms against the government puts us on the same moral plane as the American Revolution.

Anti-abortion activists have no more right to execute doctors than I have to go around executing them to protect doctors. Nor would people who believe the death penalty is murder be justified killing prosecutors and others involved in sentencing and executing the condemned.

As for Hunt’s argument, I know plenty of people are frustrated about immigration, but plenty of people in Destin are frustrated with speeding; if people start gunning down speeding drivers, would Hunt defend this as expressing “mounting frustration” over failure to enforce the traffic laws?

Thousands of people in Iraq are dead because of Bush’s unjustified and needless war, but I’d be no more entitled to resort to terrorism to stop it than anti-war protesters were justified doing so 40 years ago.

We’re never going to have a free country where the government’s policies satisfy everyone. There are many ways to deal with that: Campaign for new candidates, run for office, preach our views to the electorate, protest peacefully.

If that doesn’t work, a murderous temper tantrum is not a good alternative.