Carpe Momentum: Communities Must Seize the Right to Protect Themselves

When Washington dithers and children die, local sovereignty is not a request for permission but a fundamental right from resisting federal occupations to enacting common-sense gun reform.

The Trump regime is trying to march federal troops and agents into American cities as if democracy were a nuisance to be bulldozed. Chicago’s mayor, Brandon Johnson, just signed his Protecting Chicago Initiative, demanding that federal officers wear body cameras, display badges, and obey city laws if they set foot in his city. Philadelphia’s district attorney, Larry Krasner, has gone even further, threatening to prosecute rogue ICE agents or even U.S. military personnel if they commit crimes against his residents. These are not empty words, these are desperate attempts to remind Washington that communities are not occupied territories.

For all their defiance, Chicago and Philadelphia still stop short of saying the quiet part out loud: communities have fundamental rights, the right to life, safety, and self-governance. Instead, their strategies lean on privileges disguised as protections: FOIA requests, court challenges, and appeals to the 10th Amendment. These are procedural privileges granted or withheld at the pleasure of higher authorities, useful but inherently reactive. Fundamental rights are different, they do not require permission; they do not expire when politically inconvenient; and they do not vanish under Dillon’s Rule.

Dillon’s Rule is the 19th-century legal doctrine that treats cities and towns not as sovereign bodies, but as administrative “creatures of the state,” able to act only when the state explicitly grants them power. Neither in the US Consititution, nor codified into law, it is one reason local bans on polluting industries or stricter gun laws are so easily overturned. Both Chicago and Philadelphia, for all their defiance, have constrained themselves into this cramped shadow, relying on privileges dressed up as protections.

Years ago, on the Southern Oregon coast, I learned the same lesson in a very different fight. Battling to stave off a harmful industrial development, I discovered that true sustainability was illegal. Communities could not say “no harm, period.” They could only negotiate permits that legalized approved levels of harm. Corporations had “rights.” The community, at best, had opinions. When communities believe they are limited to fighting harmful development only in the regulatory realm, they are already doomed. But what if we change the playing field?

The hearings, the comment periods, the environmental reviews, these so-called opportunities for participation are what I call free speech zones. They let people vent, but they don’t shift power. Every rule in that arena is designed not to prevent harm, but to permit it. Permits are the language of legalized damage: air permits, discharge permits, drilling permits. Federal regulators like FERC, the FDA, and the USDA don’t stop destruction; they legitimize it. And looming over it all is the Commerce Clause, which ensures that whenever local resistance threatens interstate trade, federal authority steps in to swat it down.

The result is ritualized failure. Communities pack into gyms and city halls, pouring their hearts out at microphones, while regulators nod politely and check boxes. At the end of the process, corporations walk away not chastened, but armed with permission slips, government permits to trespass on our air, our water, and our health with toxins. What looks like democracy is really a pageant staged to legitimize decisions that were already made.

A peer-reviewed paper, Phoenix from the Ashes: Resurrecting a Constitutional Right of Local, Community Self-Government in the Name of Environmental Sustainability, co-authored by Thomas Linzey and Daniel E. Brannen, Jr., puts it plainly: the right of local community self-government is as old as the republic itself. Colonial towns revolted not simply over taxation, but because Parliament stripped them of the authority to govern for their own safety. The Declaration of Independence does not belong to Congress or statehouses; it belongs to communities. It affirms that when government becomes destructive of life, liberty, and safety, “it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.”

This is why Linzey and Brannen argue that the fight must move out of the regulatory arena and into the constitutional one. As long as communities play only in the sandbox of permits and comment periods, the outcome is preordained: corporations win, and residents lose. But when the issue is reframed as a question of fundamental rights, the right of people in a place to decide what harms they will or will not endure, the balance of power shifts. No longer is it about how much pollution can be “reasonably” allowed; it is about whether outsiders have the authority to violate a community’s most basic right to protect its health and safety. That is not a question of policy or process. It is a question of sovereignty.

And the same reframing applies to gun violence. Debating regulations about magazine sizes, background checks, or waiting periods is the equivalent of arguing over the terms of a pollution permit. It assumes the harm is inevitable and our only role is to manage it. But communities have the same constitutional right to say: enough. We have the authority to protect our children, our schools, our churches from being slaughtered by legally purchased AR-15s. That is not about tinkering at the edges of policy; it is about asserting that the right to life and safety belongs to the people in a place, and it cannot be bargained away to satisfy a gun lobby’s notion of privilege.

That right is not abstract. It applies here, now, in the streets of Minneapolis, where last week a 23-year-old with a semiautomatic rifle, shotgun, and handgun opened fire on children during morning Mass. Two never got back up. Seventeen more, most of them kids, were carried out bleeding. Every one of those weapons was legally purchased. And that is precisely the problem: the law elevates the privilege of gun ownership over the fundamental right of a child not to be shot during prayer.

In every other democracy that values life, mass shootings prompted immediate reform. Australia banned assault-style weapons in less than two weeks after Port Arthur. Britain outlawed most handguns after Dunblane. New Zealand passed sweeping restrictions after Christchurch. Meanwhile, the United States averages nearly two mass shootings a day, shrugs, and buys bulletproof backpacks for schoolchildren.

The statistics are brutal. Nearly 47,000 Americans died from guns in 2023. That’s more than die annually on our highways. Guns are the leading cause of death for American children and teenagers, surpassing car accidents. Compare that to our peers: Canada loses around 800 people a year to guns; Australia, about 200; the UK, fewer than 100; Japan and South Korea, often fewer than 20. In Britain, the U.S. gun homicide rate is almost one hundred times higher. Only in places wracked by cartel wars, Brazil, Mexico, do the raw numbers approach ours. But among wealthy democracies, America stands alone in choosing this carnage.

And here is the core truth: gun ownership is not a fundamental right. It is a privilege, already restricted for felons, abusers, and those deemed mentally unfit. Life is a right. Safety is a right. Childhood itself is a right. Communities have both the authority and the obligation to enact higher standards to defend those rights. To wait for Congress is to wait forever. If Chicago can demand federal troops to keep their masks off and their cameras on, if Philadelphia can threaten to put ICE agents in handcuffs, then Minneapolis, or any town, should be able to say: in our community, AR-15s are not welcome.

The lives of children are not bargaining chips in a broken two-party system. Communities are not branch offices of state legislatures or beggars before Washington’s throne. They are sovereign actors with the constitutional right to defend themselves. Until we embrace that truth, we will keep digging graves for children while politicians recite excuses.

The authors of Phoenix from the Ashes are clear-eyed about what comes next. A constitutional right of community self-government will never be acknowledged voluntarily from above; it has to be claimed from below. That means more communities must begin enacting rights-based ordinances, asserting their authority not just to comment on harm but to forbid it outright. These ordinances will be challenged. They may be struck down in lower courts. And eventually they will force their way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the central question will finally be asked: do communities in America have the right to protect life and safety at a higher standard than corporations or state legislatures allow?

It is a daunting prospect, but it is also the only honest path forward. Until that claim is tested, communities will remain trapped in the regulatory maze, condemned to ritualized failure while their children breathe toxins or bleed in school pews. Minneapolis, Chicago, Philadelphia, they are already showing us the outlines of resistance. The next step is to turn that resistance into a constitutional demand.

Because at bottom the choice is simple: either the right to life and safety belongs to communities, or it does not. If it does, then common sense gun reform is not just good policy. It is the most urgent expression of our most fundamental right.

The right to live is older and more sacred than the privilege to kill. It is time for communities to act as if that truth were self-evident.