The Right and Wrong Way of Kicking the Brits Out.

An unwanted, imperial British government exercised its rule over a foreign land. Protesters against the government were fired upon in a bloody massacre. The people took up arms to send a clear message: Kick the British out!

Is this the best way to achieve independence from Britain?

And, um, they were not successful.

Dolours Price, an unrepentant member of the Irish Republican Army got her own write-up in the New York Times this weekend after she passed away this Thursday. Price participated in and later served prison time for a London bombing that injured one and left one person dead from a heart attack. 

What happened to Ms. Price, and the movement of which she was a part of, is perhaps best e summarized in her New York Times obituary:

Ms. Price spoke often of the personal toll of her terrorist activities: years of depression, alcohol and drug abuse, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Among the suspected informers she drove to their executions, she said, was a longtime family friend. In prison, she staged a 203-day hunger strike in which her jailers force-fed her every day through rubber tubing.

Suffering from tuberculosis and other ailments, Ms. Price was released from prison on humanitarian grounds in 1981 after serving seven years of a life sentence.

Ms. Price told interviewers that she might have spared herself and her victims had she known that the struggle would end with a peace that left Northern Ireland’s Catholic majority, in her view, where it had started: under British rule.

“When we starved together on hunger strike,” she wrote in a 2004 essay in Fortnight, an Irish journal, “it was not to ‘move the process forward,’ it was not for seats in a British government.” It was, she said, “to rid this land of any British interference.”

Her life and death serve should serve as a reminder that the American Revolution was not a band of "minuteman" waging guerrilla warfare against the British. On the contrary, most members of the militia were veterans of the French and Indian War. The battles of the American Revolution were fought with contemporary military tactics. And it wasn't until the French were kind enough to supplement General Washington with 6,500 soldiers that the Continental Army was able to deliver a decisive enough defeat to end the war.

Fighting on a battlefield between soldiers is far, far different than the car bombings, kidnappings and forced executions that Belfaster's refer to "the troubles" that plagued Northern Ireland from the 1970s to the 1990s. Although the Good Friday agrement in 1998 failed to address once and for all whether or not Belfast would remain under British rule or finally join the rest of Ireland, the condition of peace was better than the condition of war.

That should be the bottom line. Public disputes are best resolved through the political process. Saying that any person, anywhere, should have whatever gun they choose to keep the government from doing things they dislike essentially advocates domestic terrorism.