In our own Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson said that when a government becomes destructive of the right of the people to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, “it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.” When, I wonder, did this become a right that Americans reserved exclusively to themselves?

The reports from Iran suggest that the people have just about exhausted their non-violent means of taking back what has been stolen from them. I would not call what was offered to them an election so much as a selection of evils, and the extension of a fraudulent choice of the lesser of them. When the Iranian people realized that even this would be denied them, they went to the streets, probably in the millions. Today, the regime has just about completed the process of plucking the uprising’s leaders from their homes, working its way from the bottom up, seizing the best-known leaders only after the people are too cowed to protest any more. The bravest of the people, those who dared to face the Basij thugs in the streets, are paying for it with their lives. Many more will probably die in dungeons like Evin Prison in the coming weeks.

It is easy for us to urge Iranians to practice non-violence from the peace, freedom, and safety of places we’re incalculably fortunate to inhabit. We revere the man who briefly stopped the tanks in Tienanmen Square and the thousands of courageous Burmese monks whose names we will never know. In a metaphorical world, these people occupy what is known as “the moral high ground.” In the physical world, they occupy what are known as “unmarked graves.” What has been made graphically and tragically obvious to us is that non-violence is of little use against people who are willing and able to gun you down on the street. The dead have no use for our admiration, and the subjugated draw less comfort from it that we’d like to think.

There is a theoretical universe that parallels our own that sleeps under a cozy blanket of transnational laws, in which violence is never justified. Iran is just the latest proof that we do not live in that universe. If the oxymoron known as the “international community” can do nothing else for the people of Iran, can’t it least give them the means to resist? Might the regime think twice about loosing the Basij to shoot down young women on the streets if it crossed their minds that they might face well-aimed return fire, or perhaps even a few well-placed explosively formed penetrators?