The author knows that his sentiments on some subjects may meet with disagreement from those who enjoyed this book, but if you’ve come this far, perhaps you will consider whether the following notions carry any weight.
While the author favor gun control, the best approach begins is with the individual. Grip, stance, sight picture, responsible habits of gun ownership and respect for firearms would be sufficient—as they were when the country was young—but for the epidemic of violent crime, punctuated as it is by ever more frequent mass shootings. We must discover the root cause of this phenomenon. It is not the gun; it is something newer, something that has altered the psyche of thousands of people.
The great fictional character Robert Sand thinks that psychotropic medicines may play a role—the author agrees. Of course, Sand has seen the darkest side of the human psyche: for more on this, read the series Black Samurai from the 1970’s. The author prides himself on the friendship he had with the Marc Olden, the writer of that series who authorized the continued life of his lead character in this book. Thank you, Marc. You will never be forgotten.
Human beings with guns do things that are terrible and things that are heroic. Some fear justice; others deliver it. Those among us who are most evil, most insane and most tyrannical must not be allowed to roam armed among a population that has been disarmed and thus unable to defend itself. Disarming the criminal elements in our society would indeed be the ideal solution if it were not completely impossible due to the hundreds of millions of untraceable firearms that have been scattered throughout this country during the past 100 years.
Some genies can’t be put back in the bottle.
Defensive military forces are in scarce supply in movie theatres, classrooms, post offices and churches. The action of everyday citizens to fight back—with weapons—against evil is what is referred to as a “well-armed militia” in the second amendment. Nothing in the history of the Constitution suggests that only those in uniform are entitled to keep and bear arms. The phrase “shall not be infringed” means just exactly that. The second amendment states the reason, but no limitations whatsoever on the protection of that right are included, as none was intended. The words were not selected by happenstance, they were sculpted with great care and clarity. We were expected to read them with the same care and clarity.
This is not to say that we shouldn’t try to disarm criminals (Roady Kenehan is particularly good at this), but reality and the basic right of armed self-defense, as guaranteed by the Constitution and natural law, must persevere until better solutions are found. Gun control is necessary—starting and ending with the criminal—but if we pretend that the Constitution says that which it clearly does not, no matter how artfully our judges may justify doing so, then our legal precedent will turn back on itself and undermine the core document upon which it is built and we risk the systematic dissolution of the rule of law in western civilization. Thus, gun control can only be achieved legally if the Constitutional right to keep and bear arms is amended for the sake legal consistency and intellectual honesty.
While this book—among many others—aggrandizes and romanticizes the exploits of Tier One special forces, the heroic accomplishments and sacrifices of ordinary troops go largely unacknowledged. Rarely are the members of our military shown the deep appreciation they deserve. We allow them to board flights first, and we say, “thank you for your service” with the same automaticity that way we say “gesundheit” when someone sneezes, but our treatment of veterans who are in need of medical, psychological and financial help is appalling. We can, and must, do better for those who are willing to sacrifice everything to keep us safe.
How do we protect ourselves from the risks that our technologies, including guns, atom bombs, deadly microbes, and the much more powerful threats we are just now perfecting in order to protect ourselves from our ever-growing capacity for inadvertent self-destruction?
The sagacity to accomplish this task will come not from our scientists or industrialists, but from our courts, through reason enlightened by sophisticated advocacy.
This is why I made Mark Jensen a lawyer—and why I am a lawyer.
As we see in this book, private citizens, working with the right tools, can often accomplish what governmental agencies cannot. Many of our most powerful tech companies were started by individual persons. This is why we must, at all costs, protect individual liberty and free enterprise. Just as we seek to build a compassionate society, we must protect freedom within society. We must always strive to be worthy of our inalienable rights. We must behave as an enlightened people, which means that as individuals, we must each behave in a way that reflects positively on our status as members of free nations. Those who read these words who are not citizens of free nations must, like Mark Jensen, find a way to persevere and protect that which is most sacred. We must root out of our souls the urge to devalue our fellow man. Treating our brothers and sisters as enemies because of their race, national origin, color, sexual preference or other superficial considerations is evidence of nothing other than mindless barbarity.
Protecting our borders is utterly essential due to the tide flowing into America of human traffickers, drug-dealers, criminal syndicates, enemy state-agents, terrorists and others who would destroy our way of life. That said, losing our humanity in the process makes the protection of our great nation’s borders purposeless. We must earn the protections and freedoms that we demand. Many native Americans wish this land had been closed to outsiders two centuries ago; the ancestors of the rest of us entered into the land of liberty and made it what it is and what it yet could be, but in the process decimated cultures of no less intrinsic value than any other.
We are a species that is searching for a way out of darkness. We live in a world where the strong tend to prosper and the weak tend to perish. Idealism alone will not solve our problems, any more than will violence. We must learn to come together and work as one to build a society better than any that has come before. Or perish.
What we must have is not merely knowledge.
We require wisdom.
About the Author
Brett Godfrey is a trial lawyer who lives in Denver, Colorado. He is the founding partner of Godfrey | Johnson, P.C., a law firm that handles complex technological and scientific litigation throughout the US and eight other countries. Before becoming a lawyer, he was an Air Force officer, and before that, he was a practicing chemical engineer.
He is an experienced pilot, trained in several martial arts. He is also skilled in defensive pistol tactics and gunsmithing, and was a competition skydiver for many years.
He is also a painter of western landscapes. His paintings and custom 1911 handguns are viewable at http://www.brettgodfrey.com.
He is currently working on his next two novels: Convergence of Demons, a story about Roady Kenehan and Christie Jensen, and Kilik’s Detour, the first novel in a terrific new series about a great leader who traveled farther than any man in history and who shaped that history in the process.
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