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Things I've Been Thinking About Lately

This past year marked the twentieth anniversary of me and my family having to flee Sarajevo. Needless to say, I've reflected on those events a lot over the years. One aspect of it that I've thought about a lot lately is the fact that our part of the city was overtaken by the Serbs without a single shot being fired. They just rolled into the town, mounted a bullhorn onto a car, and declared the "Independent Serbian County of Ilidža." (Or words to that effect.) They didn't have to worry about having some "crazy" Croat or Bosniak opening fire at them. It was a "safe" community with no guns.

I don't ever want to bein a similar situation again. Since I've moved to America I've come to apprecaite its many blessings, but even more the liberties that it provides to everyone, even those who just reside here. I've come to see how those liberties are firmly rooted in the idea of personal soeverignity that no government has any rigtht to usurp. And I view the citizens' right to bear arms as the ultimate symbol and guarantee of that soevereignity. The freedoms of speech, association, and religion are all very precarious as it is, and I've seen many of those gradually and not so gradually being curbed all over the western (civilized?) world. I don't think that we are in any danger of having those freedoms complately taken away any time soon, but I would hate to be proven wrong completely. After all, most of us growing up in former Yugoslavia could not have imagined the kind of carnage that place plunged into in the early nineties either.

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