A recurring theme in western movies as I grew up was the ‘hired gun.’ Perhaps one of the best was the classic movie The Magnificent Seven — appraised as one of the greatest films of the Western genre.
Released in 1960, it includes an ensemble of stars led by Yul Brynner, Eli Wallach (as the villain), Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, Robert Vaughn, Brad Dexter, James Coburn and Horst Buchholz.
They portray a group of seven gunfighters hired to protect a small village in Mexico from a group of bandits who repeatedly raid their poor village for food and supplies.
Little known is that The Magnificent Seven was a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 Japanese film Seven Samurai.
In another movie, High Plans Drifter, Clint Eastwood doesn’t need six other guns to get the job done. In this movie, he plays a gunfighter who, after entering the small settlement of Lago, is hired to bring the townsfolk together in an attempt to hold off three outlaws.
In other Western movies, the hired gun becomes the town sheriff. That is the subject in the comedy starring James Garner — Support Your Local Sheriff. This film parodies the story of a hero who tames a lawless frontier town.
In truth, that is what all lawmen are — hired guns. Police are men and women the state, county and town or city hire to protect their citizens and property from lawless thugs.
Three things are happening in America today that have never occurred before.
1. Crime is surging to historic levels.
2. Left-wing prosecutors are reducing incarceration, and sometimes refusing to prosecute criminals.
3. Democrat politicians are fueling anti-police sentiment across the country with the defund the police movement.
Recently, Democrat Progressive Ilhan Omar — who pushed to defund and even eliminate the Minneapolis Police Department — blamed the police for a spike in crime.
During a town hall event, she accused the Minneapolis PD of “not fulfilling their oath of office.”
All of this rhetoric has brought anti-police sentiment to its highest level in decades.
Now history is starting to repeat itself. When a community does not protect its citizens against criminals, there are just two options.
Citizens are forced to protect themselves, or they have to resort to hiring outside protection — hired guns, if you will.
That is exactly what 150 families living in San Francisco — one of the most liberal cities in America — are doing. These families, who no longer feel safe in their own homes, are hiring private security to patrol their neighborhood from 8 p.m. to 5 a.m. for protection.
Living in the Marina District in San Francisco, these residents have seen crime go from almost nonexistent to being scared in their own homes at night.
“We don’t feel safe in our neighborhood,” one local resident told the CBS San Francisco affiliate. “And we have an alarm, we have cameras on our property, but we want the extra security of having someone have eyes on our place.”
Other areas of San Francisco — the tourist hot spot of Fisherman’s Wharf and Chinatown — saw an unbelievable increase of 753 percent in car break-ins from May 2020 to May 2021.
By hiring private security, the rich can afford to compensate for the failed policies of Democrat politicians. I’m confident that this new thriving business, if not already, will be coming to other Democrat controlled cities in the near future.
The middle class and poor, on the other hand, are left to defend themselves.
Defending yourself against criminals has its problems, courtesy of Democrat prosecutors. Just ask Mark and Patrica McCloskey.
They are the couple who were shown on video last summer carrying guns outside their home in St. Louis after a group of protesters reportedly broke down an iron gate, ignored a ‘No Trespassing’ sign and entered a private street where they lived.
The McCloskeys pleaded guilty to misdemeanors and had to give up their weapons and pay nearly $3,000 in fines.
As with many problems in society today, it can be solved at the ballot box. Until then, buy stock in security businesses.
