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We should all be ready to do our duty as American citizens and, when duty calls, each of us should embrace our inner Rooftop Korean.

The year was 1992, 27 years ago right about now, and the city was Los Angeles. Several police officers who got into a videotaped brawl with a petty criminal named Rodney King were acquitted of beating him up. The city exploded. It was chaos.
I was a first-year law student, back a year from the Gulf War, and I had just joined the California Army National Guard. My unit was the 3rd Battalion, 160th Infantry, and we got called up early the first night and were on the streets for three long weeks. Making it even more delightful was the fact that the unit was in Inglewood, which was pretty much on fire. They burned most everything around, except our armory – that would have gone badly for them – and the Astro Burger.
My battalion commander grabbed then-First Lieutenant Schlichter, and we went all over the city in his humvee as he led his deployed and dispersed troops. Our soldiers came, in large part, from the areas most effected by the riots, and they were notably unpleasant to the thugs and criminals who quickly discovered our guys had no patience for nonsense. One dummy discovered that the hard way when he tried to run over some Guard soldiers from another battalion; he had a closed casket funeral.
The city went insane. Order simply ceased to exist. It was Lord of the Flies. I remember a cop totally breaking down because everything was completely out of control.
But I had a M16A1 – a real assault rifle – and I had a bunch of buddies with M16A1s. The regular folks … not so much. The decent people of LA were terrified, and with good reason. See, the dirty little secret of civilization is that it’s designed to maintain order when 99.9% of folks are orderly. But, say, if just 2% of folks stop playing by the rules…uh oh. Say LA’s population was 15 million in 1992…that’s 300,000 bad guys. There were maybe 20,000 cops in all the area agencies then, plus 20,000 National Guard soldiers and airman, plus another 10,000 active soldiers and Marines the feds brought in. Law enforcement is based on the concept that most people will behave and that the crooks will be overwhelmed by sheer numbers of officers. But in the LA riots, law enforcement was massively outnumbered. Imposing order took time.
And until then, our citizens were on their own, at the mercy of the mob. Betting that the cavalry was going to come save you was a losing bet.
LA’s Korean shopkeepers knew that. They operated many small businesses in some of the least fashionable areas of Los Angeles, and they were already widely hated by activists, being scapegoated for problems and pathologies that long pre-dated their immigration to Southern California. So, they became targets for the mobs.
Bad decision by the mobs.
See, most of these Koreans had done their mandatory service in the Republic of Korea’s Army. Those ROK soldiers are the real deal – the Norks are not a theoretical threat and the South Korean army does not spend a lot of time talking about feelings. They were some solid dudes. So, when the local dirtbags showed up for some casual looting, they noticed the rooftops were lined with hardcore guys packing some serious heat, including the kind of scary rifles that the Democrats want to ban.
The Rooftop Koreans.
It did not take long for the bad guys to realize that the Rooftop Koreans were not playing games – they were playing for keeps. The mob went away in search of softer targets.
There’s a lesson there.
Our first responders are awesome, but it takes nothing away from their heroism to point out that the title “first responder” is a misnomer. The citizens on site are the first responders. And they should be ready to respond. We all should. Personally.
Some duties of citizen should never be outsourced. If you are an able-bodied adult, it’s your duty to know how to stop the bleeding and give CPR until the pros who do it for a living arrive. And it’s your duty (and right) to defend yourself, your family, your community and your Constitution. With guns – effective guns, which sometimes means your concealed pistol and sometimes means the guns that those who want you defenseless call “assault weapons.”

Ban them? We should insist non-felon adult, able-bodied citizens own them and become proficient with them because all that law and order you see around you can disappear in a heartbeat. I watched it happen up close and personal, in one of America’s biggest cities. And as the Rooftop Koreans recognized, groups of citizens with (preferably) semi-auto rifles with 30-rounds mag is the only thing that is going to keep a mob in check.
It’s your duty to be prepared to defend our community. Your duty. Yes, being a citizen of a free country is sometimes hard. Too bad. Tighten up and be ready and able to pick up a weapon. Whether it’s a riots and disaster, or whether it’s some scumbag who decides to shoot up your house of worship or a shopping mall, it’s on you.
You have a job to do when chaos comes – no shirking your responsibility and outsourcing it to the local police or the Army. Being a citizen is not a spectator sport.

Now, the left does not see things that way. The mere idea of a good guy with a gun makes them wet themselves. The left hates the notion that we citizens might take personal ownership of, and responsibility for, the security of our own country – that we might act like citizens. See, citizens are unruly. Stubborn. Uppity. We’re hard to control at the best of times. Armed, 300 million of us are impossible to control, unless we consent to it.
Now, the Founders, who enshrined the natural right of free men to keep and bear arms in our Bill of Rights preceded only by the rights of free speech and freedom of religion, knew this. To them, an armed citizenry that is prepared, mentally and logistically, to respond to threats to the people is a feature.
To the liberal elite, it is a bug.
The elite wants serfs, not citizens. It recognizes the threat in our possession of modern weaponry. But it’s not a threat of us causing evil but of us quelling it. An armed people is a free people, and a free people demands its rights and its say in its own governance. Liberals talk about “gun control,” but what the really want is total control.
Of us.
There are two models to which Americans can aspire. One is to be citizens, armed and sovereign. The other is to be serfs, disarmed and obedient to their liberal elite overlords. Choose wisely.
Choose to be a Rooftop Korean.

The Democrats are said to be the party of Jim Crow, black codes, and the Ku Klux Klan—but it’s the GOP that’s racist, or something. These historical debates get the Left and Right going on social media. Yet, a new study just slays the whole notion that liberalism is averse to racism. It’s the seat of irony. The report found that white liberals dumb themselves down while interacting with minorities in order to get along with them (via Yale Insights):
Racial bias can put people of color at a disadvantage when interviewing for a job, buying a house, or interacting with the police. New research suggests that bias may also shape daily interactions between racial minorities and white people, even those whites who tend to be less biased.
According to new research by Cydney Dupree, assistant professor of organizational behavior at Yale SOM, white liberals tend to downplay their own verbal competence in exchanges with racial minorities, compared to how other white Americans act in such exchanges. The study is scheduled for publication in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
While many previous studies have examined how people who hold racial bias behave in multi-racial settings, few have studied how whites who are more well-intentioned interact with people of other races. “There’s less work that explores how well-intentioned whites try to get along with racial minorities,” Dupree says. “We wanted to know their strategies for increasing connections between members of different social groups—and how effective these strategies are.”
Dupree and her co-author, Susan Fiske of Princeton University, began by analyzing the words used in campaign speeches delivered by Democratic and Republican presidential candidates to different audiences over the years. They scanned 74 speeches delivered by white candidates over a 25-year period. Approximately half were addressed to mostly-minority audiences—at a Hispanic small business roundtable discussion or a black church, for example. They then paired each speech delivered to a mostly-minority audience with a comparable speech delivered at a mostly-white audience—at a mostly-white church or university, for example. The researchers analyzed the text of these speeches for two measures: words related to competence (that is, words about ability or status, such as “assertive” or “competitive”) and words related to warmth (that is, words about friendliness, such as “supportive” and “compassionate”).
[—]
The team found that Democratic candidates used fewer competence-related words in speeches delivered to mostly minority audiences than they did in speeches delivered to mostly white audiences.
Gee—I wonder why white liberals feel the need to dumb themselves down in front of non-whites. Is it because they find them—incompetent? That appears to be the case (via Washington Times):

“It was kind of an unpleasant surprise to see this subtle but persistent effect,” Ms. Dupree said. “Even if it’s ultimately well-intentioned, it could be seen as patronizing.”
The study flies in the face of a standard talking point of the political left—that white conservatives are racist—while raising questions about whether liberals are perpetuating racial stereotypes about blacks being less competent than whites.
[—]
The researchers then set up an experiment in which white liberals were asked to respond to hypothetical individuals named “Emily” and “Lakisha.”
“[L]iberal individuals were less likely to use words that would make them appear highly competent when the person they were addressing was presumed to be black rather than white,” said the release. “No significant differences were seen in the word selection of conservatives based on the presumed race of their partner.”
Ms. Dupree said the “competence downshift” could indicate a greater eagerness by white liberals to connect with those of other races.
“My hope is that this work will help include well-intentioned people who see themselves as allies but who may be unwittingly contributing to group divides,” said Ms. Dupree. “There is a broader need to include them in the conversation.”
Still, a white liberal making him (or her) seem dumb because they find the non-white they’re interacting with less competent. That seems—pretty racist.