Oh, Pahrump.

I first visited Pahrump in 1994 when I was 14. My mother drove us there from Ventura that summer in a no-frills Subaru Justy (no air conditioning, no radio and sticky vinyl seats) because her boyfriend had picked up a construction job there. Having never been to Pahrump, we had no idea what to expect. We also had no map. She pulled the car into a gas station at the first stoplight we found to ask directions.

“How much farther until we get to Pahrump?”

“Ma’am, this is Pahrump.”

At the time, Pahrump was a one stoplight town, and we were parked next to it.

After about a month and several trips to and from Pahrump in the back seat of the Justy, we moved. I immediately began planning my escape from that hot, dusty, depressing place. After I graduated high school, I enrolled, sight unseen, at the most distant university with in-state tuition Nevada had to offer — and never looked back.

Explaining everything that was wrong with Pahrump would require several miles of electronic column space. It would be easy — and lazy — to describe it as a sweltering valley full of Cousin Eddies from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, but that truly doesn’t begin do the place justice — and it’s an unfair knock to Cousin Eddie.

Cousin Eddie, to his credit, never molested anyone.

In the four years I attended high school there, Pahrump wasn’t hit by just one sexual harassment scandal, but many. Just before we moved there, a teacher was arrested for repeatedly raping a student; he was later sentenced to life. Toward the end of my freshman year, we discovered my history teacher, who was also the girl’s basketball team coach, had sex with one of his players. Toward the end of my senior year, a substitute teacher was convicted of transmitting HIV to one of my classmates. There were other cases, as well, though finding their digital remains now is tricky.

Pahrump is a big part of the reason why I’m a Libertarian.

It is full of people that categorically refuse to govern themselves, yet we demand they elect people from amongst themselves to govern. So, of course they’re going to declare English is the “official language”. And of course the Washington Post wrote a story about a Pahrump woman’s earnest addiction to satirical fake news — fake news that she’s certain is real and serious. Of course draining the local aquifer — an aquifer that stopped supporting the natural artesian wells that sustained Pahrump’s alfalfa farms up until the 1970s because it was overtaxed even then — was a winning campaign issue there. And of course they elected Dennis Hof, who partially ran on a promise to allow Pahrump’s shortsighted, sun-stroked residents to do just that.

Did their sheriff also leave her gun in a casino bathroom? Of course she did.

And yet, for all of Pahrump’s myriad and sundry faults, the people who live there absolutely, unapologetically, and unreservedly own them. Sure, they’re ungoverned and ungovernable — they know it. That’s why they don’t trust anyone else to govern, either.

It’s fun to laugh at Sheriff Wehrly’s overwrought comparison of Hitler and a slightly broader application of background checks. Pahrump is not full of eloquent people. They’re not going to elect an eloquent sheriff. However, the people of Pahrump do understand something intuitively that a lot of us pretend to forget from time to time:

Humans write our laws, and humans are responsible for carrying them out.

Trouble is, some of the humans outside of Pahrump aren’t any better than the humans inside Pahrump these days, even if we prefer to pretend otherwise. Say what you will about Dennis Hof or James Oscarson, they both knew which account was their checking account and which account was their campaign account. Yes, Hof’s relationship with women was unnecessarily checkered, but at least he had more self-awareness than my assemblyman, who signed an anti-harassment petition while simultaneously sexually harassing the people around him. Then there’s the laboratory-grade chutzpah of posting the photographs of sexual harassment victims to defend the harasser.

Those are just some of the people writing the laws. What of the people responsible for carrying them out? Are they paragons of virtue and conscientiousness?

Sometimes, but nowhere near often enough.

Historically, gun control has resulted in taking guns from those who need them most more than it has protected anyone. With that in mind, who do you think Nevada’s law enforcement personnel, whether rural or urban, would most often end up enforcing it against? And do you think they would do so fairly and judiciously in every case?

We already know how Washoe and Mineral County law enforcement treats unarmed people in their custody. If Storey County’s embattled sheriff had the power to disarm his accusers, what would he do with it? Or what about Elko or Humboldt County, which both profited egregiously from civil asset forfeiture? Would better gun control increase or decrease the likelihood of legal highway robbery? Who would Las Vegas Metro disarm — a black NFL player watching a boxing match or an elderly white tourist from Florida? Who do you think Nevada’s law enforcement would be more likely to seize guns from — worshippers at a mosque or an extremely online white guy? Who do you think needs them most?

Until Nevada comes to grips with the rampant incompetence — and occasional corruption — of our local, state, and yes, federal government employees, it’s no wonder many Nevadans don’t trust them to decide who should have the right to defend themselves and who shouldn’t.

David Colborne has been active in the Libertarian Party for two decades. During that time, he has blogged intermittently on his personal blog, as well as the Libertarian Party of Nevada blog, and ran for office twice as a Libertarian candidate. He serves on the Executive Committee for both his state and county Libertarian Party chapters. He is the father of two sons and an IT professional. You can follow him on Twitter @DavidColborne or email him at [email protected].