If you want something done right...

...it's best to do it yourself. That would appear to apply to protecting home and hearth, too:

Last week, residents held a town-hall meeting in Fort Hancock, Texas — a sleepy agricultural town on the border, about an hour southeast of El Paso, that looks like the bleak set of No Country for Old Men.

A couple hundred people crowded into the grade-school gym to hear a chilling message from Hudspeth County Sheriff Arvin West.

"You farmers, I'm telling you right now, arm yourselves," he said. "As they say the old story is, it's better to be tried by 12 than carried by six. Damn it, I don't want to see six people carrying you."

His warning was prompted by the killing of the Arizona rancher, and the spiraling violence a couple of miles away in Mexico in a region known as the Valley of Juarez. The notorious smuggling territory is being fought over by the Sinaloa and the Juarez cartels.

"One of the men that works for me had five people killed in front of his house over there [in Mexico] this past weekend," says Curtis Carr, who is a farmer and county commissioner. "And he's moving his family over here this week. It's serious over there. Whether or not it's gonna spill over here, I don't know."

Nobody knows.

That's because we haven't bothered to defend that particular border since, oh, about 1917. We've taken it for granted we have nothing to worry about regarding our two land neighbors. Maybe that's why we think nothing of sending the bulk of our Department of "Defense" -- and the National Guard -- halfway around the world on various fools' errands.

The Federal government's primary responsibility and reason for being is to provide for the common defense--not of Iraqis or Afghans, but of Americans. If even National Public Radio is taking note, it's safe to say the job isn't getting done. Guess Uncle Sam is too busy nationalizing health care and generally ignoring the creaking sounds of a society threatening to unravel in the face of colonization and economic lunacy.