In the city of Nijmegen in the east of The Netherlands, My father was a hardworking baker,
when he was a conscripted soldier in the Dutch armed forces at the beginning of the Second World
War. The Nazis invaded The Netherlands.
As the son of a farmer who knew how to hunt, marksman. When he never missed. He had a
clear shot at the German soldiers who came to occupy a free country, He fired. No German soldier
fell to the ground. My father had been given an old gun that could not even reach the opposite
riverbank. Until the day my father died, He could have done something. But with an old gun, not
even the best marksman in the armed forces could have hit the mark. So this story stayed with me.
And that is why I took up the gun — not to shoot, not to kill, not to destroy, but to stop those
who would do evil, to protect the vulnerable,
Harvard professor Steven Pinker — and many other thinkers before him — concludes that one
of the main drivers behind less violent societies is the spread of the constitutional state and the
introduction on a large scale of the state monopoly on the legitimized use of violence — legitimized by
a democratically elected government, legitimized by checks and balances and an independent
judicial system. In other words, a state monopoly that has the use of violence well under control.
Such a state monopoly on violence, first of all, serves as a reassurance. It removes the
