Peggy Noonan has this column in the WSJ on the Shirley Sherrod kerfuffle. The whole article is well worth reading, but the portion that is "on topic" for this blog relates to the murder of Ms. Sherrod's father in 1965.

And this is what she said. Forty-five years before, to the day, her father's funeral was held. He had been murdered by a white man in Baker County, Ga. These were still the bad old days; lynchings had taken place in her lifetime. The man who murdered her father "was never punished," even though there were three eyewitnesses. The grand jury refused to indict.

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She was 17 when her father was killed, in 1965. After that, one night, a cross was burned on their lawn. Her mother had a gun, and black men from throughout the county came and surrounded the white men who surrounded the house. Shirley was terrified and hid in a back room, praying. That night something changed. "I made the decision that I would stay and work."

I've mentioned it here before, but it bears repeating. The most widespread abuses of prosecutorial authority in the "bad old days" were not wrongful prosecutions of the innocent on the basis of race but refusal to prosecute the guilty on the basis of race. Good thing that doesn't happen in America today, right?

The second paragraph illustrates the importance of the right of self-defense and the right to bear arms for the purpose of self-defense. The government cannot protect us all the time, even when it wants to. Much of the legal fight lately has been on the bearing-arms component, but we should not overlook the underlying right of self-defense. Too many people are still being sued or even prosecuted for using supposedly "excessive" force against the perpetrators of crime.