Airforce veteran weighs in on ‘sanctuary county’ debate

To the editor:
I would like to address the issue of the recent resolution passed by the Iron County Board of Commissioners’ meeting on March 14.
I’m a combat veteran, having fought in the mountains and valleys of far eastern Afghanistan, and I retired back to my hometown of Crystal Falls in 2018. Admittedly, I also moved back to get away from the potential for gun violence, which I experienced both abroad and here in the United States.
On July 19, 2011, I was on a combat mission in Kunar Province. I was especially fearful of dying that day; it was my daughter’s first birthday, and I worried that my death on that day would scar her emotionally and mentally for the rest of her life, knowing that her father perished on her birthday. A lot of shooting took place on that mission, and we had mortars slamming into the ground near our vehicle. My partner and I were even shot at directly on the last night of the mission while we were dismounted, but fortunately the rounds fell a few feet away and I laughed in spite of myself, knowing that I survived my daughter’s first birthday.
Fast forward to her second birthday in 2012, I was stationed at Buckley Air Force Base in Denver. My son had just been born in June and I took a couple days of leave to enjoy her birthday. Friends came over, we had fun, and I finally got some quiet, quality time with my daughter. Everyone else was asleep. I laid my daughter on the couch next to me as I watched TV into the night. Around 1 a.m., I started hearing a siren. Then several others, and they didn’t stop. I couldn’t help but wonder what had happened, but we lived at the end of a cul-de-sac and I reasoned that it was probably some kind of crazy police chase. After about 45 minutes, I put her to bed and went to bed myself.
My cell phone rang within hours. I was a Flight Chief for about 28 Airmen, so I was ordered to initiate a “real-world” recall and tell everyone to report to work immediately. We had to account for everyone, so off to work I went despite my leave status. What I heard throughout that weekend was horrendous; a young man, wearing body armor and a protective mask and using tear gas, had opened fire in the Aurora Cinema with an AR-15 loaded with 100-round drum magazines and a pistol. He shot people inside the theater like fish in a very black, very noisy barrel.
The shift crew that I had worked on prior to deploying to Afghanistan — six military friends of mine — were all there to watch Batman and scrambled to the exits under fire. The one Navy E-6 among them, Petty Officer John Larimer, the man who had replaced me on crew when I deployed in 2011, was shot in the head and killed instantly while covering his girlfriend. Eleven other people were killed and 72 more were wounded that night, including one Airman from my flight who developed severe PTSD and suffered from knee injuries so bad that he had to be medically discharged from the military. A weapon jam was the only thing preventing the murderer from killing several more, possibly hundreds, including my friends.
Two weeks later, I attended the memorial service for Petty Officer Larimer. I met his parents, who were devastated by their loss, and I couldn’t bring myself to tell them that he was my replacement; that, maybe, it should have been me instead; that, despite having survived combat, I came home to a country that was almost as dangerous.
Nobody could have stopped that gunman, armed or unarmed, in that theater that night. He had bought everything legally, had passed background checks, and had a clean mental health history. The entire system had failed, and hundreds of people now suffer with the knowledge they were witness to one of the most horrific peacetime crimes committed in our country. Hundreds of others live with the loss of a family member, a friend, a loved one. And it could have been much, much worse.
Is this the kind of country we want to live in?
The resolution the county board passed, however non-binding, is a slide toward anarchy, where the rule of law — decided by people we elect as (hopefully) an informed electorate — takes a back seat to paranoid and fearful delusions, fed by extreme bias and a deluge of disinformation. The sanctuary we think we would create would instead become a haven for those who would do us harm and create a permissive environment for the kind of violence I saw elsewhere.
The Second Amendment was drafted to ensure we had a well-regulated militia — our modern-day military — as well as grant us the ability to bear arms, even though it doesn’t specify which types of arms we could bear. But the amendment was written in the time of single-shot muskets and pistols, when reloading a single ball took a long time, and when farmers had to defend their property against raiders as well as be possibly called up as part of a militia in the event of an invasion. But had the Founders seen how we would grow in technology to the point where one person had the power to quickly slaughter dozens of people at once, such as in Las Vegas, Sandy Hook, Uvalde or Aurora, among literally hundreds of other mass shootings both before and since, I’m sure they would have been far more specific in their choice of words.
The Supreme Court has done everything it could to interpret the Second Amendment in a way that protects our rights as well as our way of life since 1787. Marbury v. Madison set the precedent for judicial review early in our history, and that one decision gave the Court the right to strike down laws that they found violated the Constitution. Since then, the Supreme Court has heard many cases, especially recently, that have refined the definition of the amendment.
The current, conservative-leaning Court has itself passed several decisions since 2008 that both allow for individuals to carry firearms, which had never been previously defined, as well as strike down or uphold laws that municipal, state and federal legislatures have passed. That is to say, they more clearly defined the Second Amendment themselves, and have asserted that only the courts can determine if a law is unconstitutional. And there is good reason for that. Ignorance of the law by local legislatures is dangerous, and ignoring the law and its constitutional authority intentionally is a crime.
The one thing that we Americans tend to forget is the maxim that we cannot have freedom without responsibility. When we act irresponsibly, such as when we enact laws or resolutions that contradict laws passed at higher levels and validated by the courts, we set a dangerous precedent that opens up a Pandora’s Box of even bigger problems. Each of us has the responsibility as Americans to understand our country’s laws as well as seek truth upon which to base our decisions, because it is our societal imperative to be properly informed. Thomas Jefferson said in a letter to a friend in 1789, “wherever the people are well informed they can be trusted with their own government.” Are we worthy of governing ourselves if we are misinformed? 
-s- Blair J. Anderson, 
Master Sergeant, USAF 
(Retired)