​Commander’s Post   --   March 2024

Fighting Decent People
by
Historian Lewis Smith
 
Letter to the Editor of the
McDuffie Progress Newspaper
March 14, 2024

​Here is a true story that might make you think.   My wife and I celebrated our birthdays last week. We are both enjoying our middle 70s in good health.  Each year we travel to Florida to meet two other couples from Augusta who are older than we are and have birthdays near ours.  Three couples. Six people.  Four of the six birthdays are on February 22 nd, 23 rd,  24 th and the 25 th.  Three people are liberal, three aren’t.

One morning, as we watched the news, the murder of Laken Riley in Athens was being discussed on the TV.  When it was over, I said, “I wish she had had a pistol. She wouldn’t be dead now.  She was a fighter and would have used it.”

The ladies looked at each other and started in on me.  “I don’t,” my wife said.  “I’m glad she didn’t have one.”  When I asked why, she said, “Because I wouldn’t want her to go through life knowing she killed someone.”
         
“Oh,” I said.  “You mean if our granddaughter was in the same situation, you would rather have her go through life knowing she’d been raped than knowing she had killed a rapist.”
 
She said, “Thou shall not kill.”  The three women looked at each other and nodded in agreement.
 
See, that is our problem in this country today.  Before you can start the fight with the criminals and corrupt people, you have to fight the supposedly good, decent people.   The self-righteous, the hypocrites, the enablers.  Before you can punish anyone’s crimes and misdemeanors, you have to listen to all the excuses why they unfortunately turned out the way they did. It was not their fault.  They are innocent.  They’ve been cheated by society.
 
Senator Tom Watson defended Postmaster John Barnes in the 1910s when Barnes shot and killed his brother-in-law on the Thomson city railroad tracks.  Barnes had a shriveled arm and was small and weak.  His adversary was large and healthy.  During a silly scuffle over politics, Barnes pulled a gun and shot his brother-in-law, who died.  During the trial, Watson’s main defense was that a gun, a pistol, a weapon, made the small man the equal of the large man.  Watson and Barnes, of course, won because Watson could have gotten Judas a suspended sentence.  If Laken Riley had had the pistol John Barnes had, she would be alive today and the illegal invader would be in a hospital, in a jail or dead.  Laken could then have enjoyed her life and eventually taught her kids how to protect themselves.  She was not a sheep, she was a sheepdog.
 
Lewis Smith, Thomsonian