The only reason government exists is to protect the innocent--and its corollary, to punish the guilty. But government is failing it its responsibility.

Since government cannot defend us, we will defend ourselves. After all, self-defense is the strongest passion in the human breast.

A sweet little old lady in Chicago pulls a knife on a mugger, and the scumbag scurries into the subway. She should get applause and approbation, not accusations.

An "easy mark" on a New York subway is approached by four punks, pulls a gun, and drops them in a flurry of shots heard from coast to coast. It was his way of saying, "If the law can't defend me and my property, I'll do it myself."

I say cheers for Bernhard Goetz and jeers for his persecutors and prosecutors!

Drug dealers are selling their wares openly on the streets of major cities, and the law does little or nothing to stop it. While politicians prate on about the horrors of drugs, our children are dying, our cities are decaying, and civilization is disintegrating.

But politicians prate on. Those who have helped spawn the problem are quick to campaign for re-election against the problem that their own ineptitude spawned!

Crime will never be eradicated since there will always be parasites who want to live and prosper at the expense of the producers. However, accelerating crime can be slowed when it becomes more painful and more dangerous than honest work.

That has not happened in the USA, where 90 percent of all crimes go unpunished, and those who are punished go in and out of cushy prisons with regularity.

We taxpayers have a right to be angry. We have a right to walk our streets unafraid, without being accosted by pimps, prostitutes, perverts, pushers, and plunderers. Government has been too concerned with the rights of criminals, convicts, communists, and moral cripples.

I don't owe the bums anything except a chance at defending themselves. That's more than most of them gave their victims.

Both taxpayers and accused criminals have every right to expect justice. But everyone knows taxpayers have not been getting it.

So when we defend ourselves, don't start whining about "constitutional rights," "law of the jungle," "frontier justice," and the like. We are simply drawing upon a God-given instinct to survive. We are fed up. Uncaring and unhearing politicians had better get our message, or they will also become unemployed

Copyright 1986 Don Boys, Ph.D.