"Don't come any closer, Dave!" Hickok's voice boomed. Tutt must have heard the warning; witnesses quoted Wild Bill verbatim and issued identical accounts of the next moment.

As blackpowder gunsmoke floated in the Springfield, Missouri square, Wild Bill Hickok, not yet the legend he would become, was arrested and charged with murder. Justice was swift in those halcyon days and within a fortnight, Hickok went to trial. Of that trial was born a hero and from the verdict grew a brave new philosophy which, until recently, defined our American personality and reinforced our American spirit. It is a belief that once was second nature to Americans: that any person in danger of being slain or injured may stand fast and kill, if necessary, in self-defense.

Hickok's charge was reduced to manslaughter, but the liberal judge resisted a plea of self-defense and invoked the ancient serf's "duty to retreat" in his instructions to the jury. Hickok was not entitled to acquittal, said the solon, sounding much like today's judges, "unless he had tried to avoid the fight and used reasonable means to do so." Why, he wondered, hadn't Hickok just run away?

The cowardly judge mis-read both Missouri law and the mood of the jury, which rejected as craven any notion of a duty to retreat and found Hickok not guilty. Soon, courts began citing this finding in the growing number of cases resulting from the invasion and exploitation of the frontier.

Like many of today's laws and pressures of "Political Correctness", the duty to retreat maxim is feudalistic in origin. Designed by rulers to keep the option of homicide the province of the state, it is a throwback to the days when the common man was forbidden to bear arms save in the service of his master. Sound familiar? The occasional murder of serfs and peons by each other was expected and few offenders were ever prosecuted. One was more likely to be hanged for poaching than for murder. The lives of common men were considered so worthless that they weren't even allowed to defend themselves unless they were fighting for the state.

Unfortunately, many still naively embrace the duty to retreat dictum, at least until they or a loved one is mugged, molested or murdered. Armored, as we think we are, by our techno-gadgetry, cell phones, pepper spray and dead-bolt locks, we're easily seduced by the facile cant and apostate supposings of pusillanimous politicians manipulating the piece-meal repeal of the Second Amendment. We don't need arms they say, the police or the government or somebody, surely, will protect us.

Our current revival of this run or die duty to retreat approach to security seems to have begun in the 1950's with the birth of pop psychology and our postmodern liberal urbanity. The baby boom -- a sappy euphemism for our worst population explosion so far -- brought with it a predictable increase in crime, particularly violent crime: between the late 1950's and 1973, for instance, the urban murder rate, growing with our population, ballooned by 250 percent. The results of our half-century of accommodation, acquiescence and retreat are coming home to roost in the form of appalling social behaviors, abysmally low moral and ethical standards and now, unimaginable body counts.

Our liberal "whatever" society has forgotten learned Justice Holmes's pithy apothegm, and we have been euchred out of our Constitutional inheritance, but the fact remains that the ultimate deterrent to violent crime and terrorism is still what it has always been; courageous and unflagging resistance. For even after we summon the will to address the "root causes" of terrorism and crime, the evil, the mad, and the stupid, like the poor, will be with us always.
 

Even after we spend as much on education and mental health as we do on drugs and pro sports, sociopaths will walk among our leaders, pedophiles will molest our children and murderers will stalk the innocent. Wild Bill was lucky; all he had to face was a simple man-to-man walk-down. With our borders open and undefended and our standard of living steeply sliding down into the Third World, we feed this Fall on the bitter fruits of forty years of folly.

The time has come to demand the restoration of the Second Amendment and tell terrorists both foreign and home-grown, not to come any closer. The only deterrent to the evil and mindless violence of today is an armed and resolute American citizenry whose representatives care only for American wishes and safety and not for the opinions of our primitive and uncivilized enemies. Fear of hurting our enemy's feelings, short sentences in crowded prisons at public expense and the secret, painless euthanasia of rare executions performed years after the fact have left us this embarrassing and dangerous legacy.
 

What began as tolerance has deteriorated into submission. What was once considered an enlightened system of justice has degenerated into the shameful infanticide of Waco on one hand and the shameless vaudeville of the O.J. Simpson show on the other. Now we must defend ourselves or surrender to the slavery of victimhood. Whether it's terrorists on an airplane, lunatics on a subway, or just your common, everyday thug in baggy pants with his hat on backwards, always remember: We have no duty to retreat before evil.

So until we refuse to retreat, demand restoration of our Second Amendment rights, and assume responsibility for our own behavior and safety, we are all peones and potential victims. Since 09.11.01 it has been copiously clear that we've listened long enough to the utopian social engineers of the liberal left and have already retreated far too far from our American freedoms and liberties. We must surely have learned by now that there is no security in the counsel of cowards. The time has come to stand our ground.