Good for Carol Ruth

I like Carol Ruth Silver, I always have. But my respect for Carol has increased substantially. Carol Ruth was a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. And while there were many issues where Carol Ruth and I would be on opposite sides I never once questioned her motives: her conclusion, perhaps, but not her motives. She was elected the same year as Harvey Milk and was still on the Board when I meet her.

Carol Ruth, while on the political Left, has long been a supporter of Second Amendment rights. When I first met her it was after she penned an article (a wonderful article) entitled “Self-Defense, Handgun Ownership, and the Independence of Women in a Violent, Sexist Society.” Carol Ruth is still a vocal defender of gun rights and is a member of the Pink Pistols. Carol and her friend, Don Kates, an ACLU attorney, co-wrote many articles defending Second Amendment rights over the years.

Carol was good friends with Harvey Milk and served on the Board of Supervisors with him and Dan White, his murderer. That November day, in 1978, when White crawled through a basement window at city hall, in order to avoid the metal detectors, he intended to kill Harvey Milk, San Francisco mayor George Moscone and Carol Ruth Silver. White told a fellow police officer, years after the killings: “I was on a mission, I wanted four of them. Carol Ruth Silver, she was the biggest snake...”

In recent years Carol was the directing attorney for Prisoner Legal Services of the Office of Sheriff. But she resigned her position effective today. Carol has said: “I was participating in a system that made me feel criminal.” She told of one experience where a woman, who was in jail, needed Carol’s help to place her children in foster care. The woman was is in prison for pot charges. That upset Carol: “She should not be prosecuted, she should not be in jail, and here I was helping to place her children.” Silver announced that she was joining Law Enforcement Against Prohibition and would campaign to end the war on drugs.

I have excerpted some of Carol’s resignation letter below.

This is my letter of resignation and retirement, effective the 21st of February 2009.

In serving as the Directing Attorney at Prisoner Legal Services, I have found myself having to bite my tongue in talking to some prisoners about their charges -- at least half of them with nonviolent drug charges. I find it difficult to discuss the financial or child custody problems of a prisoner, when I cannot look them in the eye and justify their being in jail. His or her incarceration is as a result of their own actions, but much more so as a result of a mistaken, unfair, and unjust set of laws which criminalize drugs in our society, based on the failed model of Prohibition of alcohol which we enacted and then repealed.

Each of such prisoners is in our jail only because of our bad politics of drug regulation. It is this set of policies which is the most direct cause of the continued excessive incarceration rates in the US.

I find myself even more particularly distressed at prisoners incarcerated with charges of felony possession of marijuana for sale. Other charges are often added, to be dismissed before trial, just for the sake of pressuring the prisoner to plead guilty and accept a prison sentence for – what?

When it comes down to it, he or she is in jail for possession of marijuana, a substance scientific evidence shows definitively to be less harmful than alcohol or tobacco. The most dangerous attribute of marijuana is the US criminal justice system.

...I am anxious to have the opportunity to speak out against our present drug laws, and to work on the campaign for Repeal of Prohibition, Again – for repeal of the set of laws of Drug Prohibition which is as foolish, ineffective and counterproductive as was alcohol prohibition.

Photo: This photo shows Carol Ruth the day Harvey Milk was shot. On the left is then acting mayor Dianne Feinstein. Quiet honestly I'd rather have seen Carol be the one of the two to end up in the Senate, instead of Feinstein. But Carol was too principled for that. (Which is not to say I thought her principles were always right.)

How to get conservatives to support gun control.

It isn't very difficult to get conservatives, especially in Congress, to support gun control measures. This is because they are thick as bricks intellectually and react emotionally to their "hot" issues and don't bother reading the crappy legislation that they pass. Consider the vile Adam Walsh Act which conservatives loved. This was bill sponsored by conservatives and promoted by conservatives. But since it mentioned sex and claimed to protect children the brainless conservatives lined up behind the bill. You can lead a conservative to legislation but you can't make him think.

Among the things this law did was say that anyone who is charged (not convicted) of possessing "child pornography" can not possess a firearm.

Now consider the cases we have discussed. Under the sex panic that has kept Christians awake at night fantasizing a lot of things qualify as child porn. Some of it is obvious but when people think of child porn the lurid images they think of are actually rarely involved in the cases.

Remember the teens who were discussed here who took nude or semi-nude photos of themselves -- that was considered child porn under the law. Individuals who clearly appear to their 20s, who claim to be in their 20s, who have produced bogus ID have been filmed in adult videos. Tens of thousands of people still own those videos. NO ONE KNEW the performers were under 18 years of age. All those videos are legally child porn.

Marian Rubin was 65-years-old, a doting grandmother and a social worker. She took some photos of her two granddaughters where they were naked -- something that was long considered a normal practice. She was arrested and charged with child pornography. Police, of course, gave lurid, obscene and grossly false descriptions of the photos.

Ejlat Feurer was 45 when he took some nude photos of his daughter. They claimed it was child porn of course. It cost him $80,000 to defend himself and he was found not guilty. But he was charged and under the Walsh Act that is all that it takes.

Popphoto.com warns readers: Your family photos could get you arrested. And it's true.

I remember when an assistant for photographer Jock Sturges was arrested. Sturgis had taken photos at a nudist beach of various families together. The Neanderthals in the police department and the FBI decided nudity equals pornography. For some reason only the assistant was arrested, and after much uproar nothing came of the charges. But he was arrested.

Matt Bandy didn't know that his surfing the Internet opened the family computer to viruses that could use the computer to store images that their owners could later retrieve. The first he found out was when the teen was arrested for child porn. The bottom-feeding local prosecutor, a fanatical member of the Religious Right, Andrew Thomas, wasted a vast sum of public money prosecuting the boy. The Bandy family spent hundreds of thousands defending their son. He was eventually found not guilty but only because his father could afford to mount this defense. Otherwise Thomas would have easily out-spent the family to send this boy to prison for life -- yes, the sentence, if convicted, would have been 200 years in prison.

Jesse McBride was five when the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe was asked to take his photo by Jesse's mother. Jesse was running around naked and Mapplethorpe took a photo which he gave to the mother. It was a photo the family treasured. Later Mapplethorpe became famous and the photo became valuable. When the photo appeared in an art exhibit in Cincinnati the curator was arrested for child porn. Jesse was not pleased. Now 19 he posed for the Village Voice in exactly the same pose as he had 14 years earlier in protest.

In the 1980s thousand of Americas suddenly discovered that they were owners of child porn merely because Attorney General Ed Meese quietly changed the definition. Previously a child was considered to be anyone under 16. Meese moved it to 18. Magazines that were previously legal became illegal and Ed Meese and crew complained about the "rise" in child porn cases. A redefinition of the term can, of course, change the numbers. Of course they played down the role that the redefinition had in the increase.

Now none of these people are criminals in any real sense of the word. Most of this was over-zealous police acting stupidly -- as police are known to do. But under the Walsh Act merely charging someone with this crime strips these people of the right to self-defense. A constitutionally protected right is stripped away, not because they were convicted of anything, but because they were charged with it.

Under the Walsh Act the curator of the museum in Cincinnati would have lost his right to self-defense because his museum hung a photo that local fundamentalists found offensive. And remember that conservative Republican politicians lined up to vote for this law.

Now people may think that the sex panic pushed by the fundamentalist Right and two-bit conservative politicians doesn't impact their rights. But it can. Lots of people, who have never been near child porn in their lives, have been "charged" with the crime. It's very easy as the definition of "porn" is vaguer than most badly written laws. Even images that may reside in the dark recesses of your hard drive, unbeknownst to you, are sufficient. And Republicans happily voted to strip you of your Second Amendment rights because of those images.

Luckily some judges have said this section of this badly drafted, hysterical piece of legislation is a violation of constitutional rights. And I suspect some conservatives will attack those judges as "activist judges" -- of course they are activist judges protecting the Second Amendment. So it will be interesting to see how the Right responds to that.

The lesson from the Walsh Act is that it that when people panic about an issue they pass bad legislation. I don't care if the issue is terrorism, crime, drugs, children, or immigration, when the predominant mood is one of fear then people will stampede to destroy the very rights which they claim they defend. Conservatives voted for this gun control measure merely because John Walsh invoked the image of his dead son and prattled about child porn. That was all it took for them to dispel with any skepticism about a gun control measure. All these issues do the same thing. This is why fear, when pushed into the public arena is dangerous to human liberty. Those who use fear should be condemned for it because they are ultimately enemies of individual rights and human freedom. When fear waxes freedom wanes.

The insanity of the gun control fanatics.

Alandis Ford is a 10-year-old boy. And, as 10-year-old boys are known to do, he wanted to show off his cap gun to some friends at school. It was just a toy, a cowboy six-shooter that made some noise but nothing else.

But the police in Georgia have charged the boy with "possessing a weapon on school property and with terroristic acts and threats." The police are assholes. A team of armed Sheriff's Deputies from Newton County raided the boy's home and arrested him.

How do the morons at the Sheriff's department explain their actions: "In this day and time, we do not take anything lightly, whether it's a toy gun or a real weapon, for the safety of the kids and everyone involved, the safety of the school. That's our main concern." As I've said before "the sake of the children" is one of the most popular slogans of the mindless authoritarians.

But really, are these guys serious or just plain stupid? They don't take "anything" lightly? Does this mean that any "threat", no matter how absurd, is taken seriously? Are they going to set up armed patrols to stop aliens from kidnapping children and subjecting them to anal probes? (No priest jokes please.)

Of course, if you want abject dumbness you have to go to the educational bureaucracy, the dunderheads who actually use the government school system to wipe out any intellectual curiousity in our children. Sherri Viniard, who has the unwarranted bureaucratic position of "Director of Public Relations" for the local school system, said: "Although this was a toy gun, it is still a very serious offense and it is a violation of school rules. We will not tolerate weapons of any kind on school property."

Can someone tell the woman that cap gun is not a weapon, at least no more so than a bicycle, a book or a fist. It is not real. It does not shoot bullets. It makes noise, sort of like unnecessary bureaucrats do. But unlike bureaucrats it doesn't do any damage. You can't call that a weapon without streatching the meaning of weapon to such extremes that is has no objective defintion whatsoever.

So, a little boy was arrested, fingerprinted, expelled from school, faces a long sentence in a juvenile detention center, and all for doing what kids in my day did on a routine basis. Of course back then we didn't have the antigun hysteria and our cops were smart enough to tell the difference between a toy and "the real thing".

Your right to bear arms ends at my property line.

This blog doesn’t take second place to anyone when it comes to defending the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. I go further. I argue that the right to self-defense precedes the Constitution and no Constitution can strip citizens of their natural rights. Even if the Second Amendment were abolished, the right to keep and bear arms is not legitimately subject to state restriction.

But we must remember that all rights exist within the context of property. That means that one may surrender some rights voluntarily when one enters the property of other people.

My First Amendment right to free speech gives me no claim on your property. You are not required to provide me a podium, a microphone, a printing press, or even a spot to stand and proclaim my views. I have the right to use my own resources, and those that are freely made available by others, but I can not have the right to the property of others.

My freedom of religion doesn’t mean you have to give me a ride to the church of my choice. My rights exist within the framework of my property. Your obligation is to leave me alone, but not to provide me with the property, or resources, that I need, even if I need them to exercise some right I have.

My rights cannot create any unwanted claim on you. It merely requires you to NOT use force or fraud against me or my property.

This is true with the right to keep and bear arms as well. I have no right to go into your home and take your guns merely because they cause me discomfort. If you threaten me that may be a different matter. If you attack me, it is most clearly a different matter. But, if you are minding your own business, on your own property, then my disarming you is a violation of your rights.

What is equally obvious is that if you are on my property then I have every right to make requirements for admission. I may required you to leave your weapon at home. I am under no obligation to grant you entrance except on terms that suit me. And if you don’t like the terms you are free to go elsewhere. I can’t force you to enter on my terms and you can’t force me to admit you on your terms. Mutual agreement is how it works.

Some people get baffled when the private property is a business. One reason for this is that socialistically inclined politicians have tended to treat private businesses as if they were public property. For instance, the no smoking laws regulate smoking in public, but always defines public space as including private property.

Malls, offices, restaurants, etc., simply are NOT public property. They are open to members of the public on terms and conditions set by the property owner. And this applies to firearms and cigarettes both.

Just as a private business has the right to ban smoking on their property, or not, it also has the right to ban firearms on its property, or not. Politicians, however, have NO rights in the matter. They don’t own the property. They can’t rightfully forbid smoking anymore than they can forbid firearms -- not when it comes to private property.

Conversely they are not empowered to mandate smoking or to mandate firearms either.

When antismoking legislation was being pushed, mainly by Democrats, Republicans were rightfully screaming about the violation of property rights involved in such a ban. Of course, when it comes to principles the Republicans are, shall we say, very flexible.

In Florida they recently stripped companies of the right to restrict what happens in their own parking lots. A parking lot is private property. That is clear since entry is often restricted to customers, or employees only, or to those who pay a fee, for instance.

But Republicans in Florida passed a law saying that the legislature, not the property owner, may determine whether or not a person can park their car with a firearm inside it, in those private lots. Some employers allowed it and some didn’t.

Republican state senator Durell Peaden was one who seemed upset when he heard that a loophole in the law was allowing Disney World to forbid employees from bringing weapons into their private parking lot.

The new Florida law makes it a crime to exercise one’s rights of control over one’s own parking lot, when it comes to firearms. No employer may forbid customers, or employees, from using the lot and having a firearm in their car.

When it comes to smoking I am vehemently antismoking, but I don’t want public smoking bans effecting private property. It’s not my property, it’s not my business. Similarly, I don’t want the state ordering property owners to admit firearms to private property when said owners don’t wish to do so. Both are a violation of the fundamental right to property.

If it is socialistic for the Left to ban smoking on private property, then this Republican legislation is just as socialistic. Both violate property rights, and do so in exactly the same manner. Both apply the same principle just in different ways.

The difference between the Left and the Right is not one of principles. They hold exactly the same principles. The only difference is over which issues they are willing to club you over the head. The Democrats want to club you to prevent you from allowing smoking on your property. Republicans want to club you to force you to allow guns on your property.

The reasons are immaterial. The principles are identical. The one big difference is that Democrats don’t pretend to support private property rights; to them everything is public and subject to control. The Republicans, however, pretend they support property rights. Both are statists, but Republicans are hypocritical statists to boot. That just means the Democrats are more honest about their bad intentions while the Republicans lie about theirs.

That is one reason we need a libertarian alternative, and one reason why it is such a tragedy that no such alternative exists any longer.

Armed killer brought down by would be victim.

Earlier this week I was in the region of Winnemucca, Nevada. I went through the city but didn’t stop there. But I did stop nearby and saw a local newspaper with an article about a shooting in a local bar. Three people were killed. I didn’t have time to stop to read the paper, but I did notice the headline. Only now have I had a chance to look a little closer at the incident.

According to KTVN-Reno, from a AP wire story, three men “were fatally shot and two other people were injured”. They believe the incident was another in a “long-standing feud between several local families”.

One man entered the bar and shot two other men to death. No police were present. According to a police statement the killer “stopped and according to witnesses reloaded his high capacity handgun and began shooting again.”

At this point a patron of the bar responded. The Reno resident “produced a concealed handgun and proceeded to fire upon” the killer “who succumbed to his wounds.” In other words the bastard was killed. “The Reno resident was in possession of a valid Concealed Carry Permit issued through the Washoe County Sheriff’s Office.”

Witnesses confirmed the incident and the Reno man was released by police, with no charges filed, because his action amounted to justifiable homicide.

To recap: one man pulls a gun and kills two members from a family with whom he is feuding. He reloads his weapons and again begin firing in a crowded bar, with 300 patrons present at the time. A Reno resident who was in the bar at the time pulls his concealed weapon and fires on the gunman killing him and putting an immediate end to the shooting spree before any police had a chance to respond.

So consider the same incident but without the Reno man present to put a stop to the shooting spree. Or consider a scenario where he was disarmed and unable to return fire on the killer. The police statement does not say how long after this it was before they responded to the incident. But even if it were less than a minute the number of additional victims could have been substantial.

Once again we see proof that when an armed killer shoots on a large gathering of people the fact that one of them is also armed, and able to return fire can put the incident to a quick end.

I have highlighted numerous such cases in the past. The gun control crowd argue that such shooting would escalate the number of dead. Oddly they show no case where that happened. In all the cases I have found, where armed victims were able to return fire on the killer in a crowded situation, the results were a termination of the killing spree not an escalation. Arming would-be victims saves lives.

Of course the gun control crowd will add the two victims to the list of those killed. But there is no way to keep track of how many lives were saved. We simply don’t know what would have happened had one victim not resisted. It is possible that the gunman, who was clearly not finished firing on the crowd, might have continued on for sometime and simply have failed to shoot anyone else, possible but unlikely. It is also possible that he could have killed another dozen people before the police arrived. What is likely is that there would have been further victims. How many more is not possible for us to know. And for that reason we can never get an accurate total for the lives saved because some victims offer armed resistance.

What we do know is killers who meet armed resistance have a hard time taking the lives of more innocent victims. We know they are often stopped cold in their tracks, often surrender immediately or are killed by their victim, or become so caught up in defending themselves from attack that they don’t have time to seek further unarmed victims. What we do know is that lives are saved even if we can never know how many.

We have no reason to believe making the bar a "gun free" zone would have stopped the killer. It might have encouraged him. What such legislation might do, however, is prevent any patron from putting an end to the killing as happened in this cae.

Better the meek inherit a handgun.

One of the virtues of guns is that they are the great equalizer. In situations of disparate power where one individual can dominate, control or hurt a weaker individual the presence of a handgun, in the hands of the victim, can end the domination by equalizing things or by giving the victim the upper-hand. This is a virtue to the downtrodden of the world whether or not one is comfortable with the existence of firearms.

This news story illustrates the point. In Visalia, California Joe Martinez was violent man. He had two felony convictions of for assault. One of his neighbors said that the man was abusive toward his family. In addition to these acts he was convicted of threatening witnesses and for owning a firearm though he was a convicted felon.

The news story is itself poorly written but I assume from it that his common-law wife was trying to leave the home permanently -- and who can blame her? Neighbors described what happened. They say that Martinez tried to stop the move “drew a gun and threatened to shoot everyone, including kids.”

One of the kids he threatened to kill was a 13-year-old boy. The boy emerged out of the house with a gun and shot Martinez stopping the assault in it’s tracks. Police say it was “a clear case of self-defense” and won’t be pressing charges.

From the sound of it this boy would have had no chance against a armed, bigger, violent man. He could try the “passive” response that some people suggest. The kids in the Amish school house did that and virtually all of them died because of it. Or this boy could equalized the situation, or in this case turn it in his favor, by using a handgun. There is an old saying: God made men, Sam Colt made them equal.

Some may lament that this boy will face a lifetime of knowing he killed someone -- and it sounds like he killed his father but the news report is unclear. No doubt he will experience some emotional trauma. I’m doubt that sparing him trauma by having him dead is a better alternative.

Marvin Horton was intent on invading someone's home. He first climbed a six foot chain-link fence to enter the yard. He fought off three dogs and then forced open the front door of Brenda’ Glover’s home. Her two sons, 17-years-old and 18-years-old were fighting the invader when Brenda entered the room. She and her sons tried to evict the man but couldn’t. She threatened to get her handgun if he didn’t stop. He refused.

She got her handgun and shot the man in the butt. That didn’t even stop him. The woman fired two more times. At this point the man fled the scene but amazingly ran across the street, climbed another fence and kicked in the door of that house. The homeowners there fought him off. He then invade a third home which is when police finally showed up and apprehended him. Glover said she got the gun when her sons were little as a means of self-defense but never thought she’d have to use it in her own home.

A six foot fence didn’t stop him. Three dogs and a locked door didn’t stop him. Two hulking teenage males, weighing in at 385 pounds between them, didn’t stop him. But one woman with a handgun forced him out of the house.

Terri Gavinski was recently home alone. Her husband was at work. She was suddenly confronted by a large man who had broken into to her home. She pleaded with him not to hurt her and said she’d give him anything he wanted. He forced her upstairs and started ransacking the house. While he was searching for valuables she spotted a loaded handgun belonging to her husband and put it in the pocket of her housecoat. He forced her to help him carry valuables downstairs but didn’t notice she now was armed. In the kitchen she pulled the gun and fired and the invade fled in terror. Terri said: “I am not a gun person. My husband is.” I bet she’s glad about that now.

Recently in Brighton, Tennessee a man broke into the home of two women at 3 am and began assaulting them. He tied them up and was trying to rape them. One woman managed to get loose and fled to the home of a neighbor who armed himself and went to the home to help the second woman. When he entered found the intruder attacking the second woman. The intruder attacked the man who shot him. When police arrived they found the rapist on the front porch dead.

Eighty-year-old James Pickett heard someone knocking at his door. As he opened the door to see who was there two armed men pushed into his house and started attacking him. What they didn’t know was that Pickett had a pistol in his pocket and wasn’t happy to see them. He pulled his gun and shot one of the intruders. The two fled and eventually called an ambulance because the bullet had done some real damage. Without that handgun what chance would that 80-year-old man have against two armed attackers?

All these stories are recent cases that took place over the last couple of weeks. They are cases where a violent individual with evil intentions thought he had the upper hand because his victims were unarmed, too old, weaker than himself, etc. In each case a handgun brought equality to the situation and the aggressor came out the worse because of it.

Of course I wished we lived in a world where the elderly, or children, or women home alone didn’t have to fear for their lives. We don’t live in utopia however. Nor are we likely to. Even if we managed to take firearms away there will always be power disparity between groups and individuals, between the young and strong and the elderly and feeble, between men and women, or men and children. No amount of “gun control” will ever change that. All such measures will manage is to disarm the weaker victims and guarantee the attackers a safety zone to conduct in which to commit their crimes.

Once again gun free zones lead to killings.

Sadly I must report that the gun-free zone initiatives have once again taken their toll with a mass shooting at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois. As a native of the state this is a bit disturbing. It has been confirmed that an armed man entered a lecture hall and started shooting. As of the last reports five students were killed and the gunman then inflicted justice on himself by taking his own life. Pity he didn’t start there.

Northern Illinois University is basically a gun-free zone. The policy on campus states: “Students who wish to bring firearms to the campus must obtain written permission from the chief security officer of the university. Firearms must be stored at the University Security Office except with written permission of the chief security officers of the university. At no time will any of the above dangerous weapons be allowed in the university residence halls.”

I guess this means the killer must have had written permission! Otherwise he was breaking the code of conduct for the university. Apparently that didn’t worry him. He could count on most students obeying the conduct code and thus was assured that the chances of any of his victims being able to resist was minimal. Once again the gun-free zone mentality painted targets on the backs of students.

This blog has documented how gun-free zones are magnets for deranged lunatics who realize that these zones allow them to find unarmed victims, in large quantities, in a confined location. It is perfect hunting territory for some loser intent on killing lots of people.

We have also documented numerous cases where gunmen unexpectedly faced armed resistance at schools or other areas. In these cases the shootings ended quickly with no, or few, casualties. When gunmen meet armed resistance their ability to slaughter people drops dramatically.

If you wish to see an index of many of our articles on gun control and gun free zones go here.

Bush Administration sells out the Second Amendment.

The big government policies of the Bush administration have once again shown their face. Lots of conservatives don't mind that Bush has shredded the First Amendment and the Fourth Amendment, etc. But they have comforted their little pea brains with the idea that King George and his lackeys were good on the Second Amendment. They don't mind spying on people, warrantless searches, suspension of writ of habeas corpus but they start to have fits over the thought that their guns might be touched. Unlike the Left, or the Right, I happen to support all ten amendments of the Bill of Rights, including the "Forgotten Ninth" and the Tenth.

For the first time, in a very long time, the Supreme Court will be hearing a case, DC vs Heller, regarding the outright ban on owning handguns in the Disctrict of Columbia. I've been collecting the amicus briefs that have been filed with the Supreme Court on the case. And the pro-rights side have filed some good material. In addition the Congress on Racial Equality and the gay group, Pink Pistols, have filed briefs defending the rights of gun owners (gee, I'd love to see the day when conservative gun owners file briefs in court in defense of the rights of racial minorities and gays). Some of the usual suspects on the Left have filed briefs defending the gun ban And now Bush's Department of Justice steps in and basically sabotages the rights of gun owners.

Libertarian attorney Robert Levy, who is involved with the case has written about how the Bush Administration is working to undermine the pro-rights position in this case. The Bush people are basically trying to get the Court to send the case back to the lower courts. Levy writes:

Rather than a foursquare pronouncement that the D.C. handgun ban is unreasonable by any standard, the Justice Department has essentially endorsed years of depositions and expert testimony, and a rerun before a less hospitable Supreme Court.

In effect, a conservative administration has thrown a lifeline to gun controllers. Following the DOJ blueprint, they can pay lip service to an individual right while simultaneously stripping it of any real meaning. After all, if the D.C. ban can survive judicial scrutiny, it is difficult to imagine a regulation that would not.

Levy concludes:

Supporters of the Constitution can only hope that the Supreme Court will embrace an individual-rights view of the Second Amendment while rejecting the notion that legislatures can treat the amendment as if it did not exist. Regrettably, the Bush administration — supposed proponent of gun rights and devotee of the Constitution — has added one more breach of promise to its growing list.

As I see it this gives Bush a perfect record. He's ten for ten when it comes to vandalzing the Bill of Rights. My one disappointment with the upcoming election is that it is likely to take place without Mr. Bush facing a trial for treason to the Constitution. And in the case of the Moron in Chief I could be easily persuaded to reconsider the death penalty -- at least that would give his body a chance to catch up with his brain.

Armed resistances saves lives in would-be mass shooting.

This blog has argued that “gun free zones” attract individuals who want to kill numerous people. If a would-be killer wants to kill a number of people for his own warped reasons it is best for his plans if the potential victims are unarmed. So gun free zones are perfect hunting grounds. The second component that they want are large numbers of people in a relatively confined space.

With these criteria in place you can almost name the potential locations for such mass killings: schools, shopping malls, and churches are all potential targets. I would suspect many churches discourage or ban members from carrying weapons into the church.

In Colorado Springs a gunman opened fired on members of the church. Reports say the man entered the foyer of the massive church and started shooting. He killed one person and wounded five but his shooting spree came to an abrupt end when a church security shot and killed the man.

The church in question was previously pastored by Ted Haggard who resigned amidst a drugs/sex scandal. Rev. Brady Boyd of the church said he saw the shooting from his office window and he said that the armed security guard saved “many, many” lives by killing the gunman before more individuals could be hurt.

There is little information available but it is thought the killer might have been involved in a shooting at a missionary outfit the previous night. Under “gun free” circumstances this shooting had the clear potential of leading to the deaths of many more people. Disarming potential victims of mass shooters doesn’t save lives.

In a previous post we outlined numerous other cases where armed resistance to would-be mass killers ended the shooting spree quickly saving many lives.

Handgun claim by DC officials highly dubious.

The Los Angeles Times has a story about the case headed for the Supreme Court dealing with the draconian handgun laws in Washington, D.C. The District has some of the strictest antigun laws in the nation and, in a related matter, some of the worst crime in the country.

The Times reports “District of Columbia officials say their ban on easily concealed handguns dates back to 1858. And they argue handguns are involved in most violent crime...”

Interesting. Obviously that 1858 ban is what was responsible for saving the life of President Lincoln. Without it he might have been assassinated. Or perhaps I misremember.

I do wonder, however, if reporters feel any compulsion to check facts or not? It appears to me that as long as some official states something is true the reporter feels his job is done provided he attributes the claim to source, regardless of the accuracy. In this story the issue is the claim that handguns are involved in “most violent crime.”

According to the Department of Justice’s Crime Victimization Survey there were 4,718,330 violent crimes in the United States. The weapon of choice is over 67% of them was no weapon at all. In two-thirds of violent crimes no weapon is involved. So what percentage of violent crimes do involved a handgun, the weapon in question in the D.C. ban? A surprisingly low 7.8%.

Not only are handguns NOT used in the majority of all violent crimes they are not used in the majority of cases in any single type of violent crime. Based on the crime victimization survey here are some interesting facts. (Homicide is categorized differently.)

In rape cases only about 2% involve a handgun and 3% involve any gun. In other words an armed woman has about a 33 to 1 chance of being better armed than her assailant. Even in an aggravated assault an armed victim has a 3 to 1 chance of being better armed than his attacker.

The one exception to this trend is homicide. Here about half of the crimes involve handguns. And approximately 17% involved another type of firearm. But approximately one third of all homicides involve weapons other than a firearm. So how would adding these homicides to the total number of violent crimes change the statistics? Hardly at all. There were 16,692 murders in 2005 (the latest data available). Add those in with all other violent crimes and the total number of violent crimes in the United States increase to 4,735,022. There were approximately 53,000 other violent crimes commited with a firearm of some type (not just handguns). Adding in homicides committed with all firearms brings that number to 69,700. That means that under 15% of all violent crimes, including homicide, involve a firearm of some type -- less if you look at handguns alone.

If you are armed and victimized in a violent attack of all kinds, the chances are about 7 to 1 that you will be better armed than your assailant.

The most charitable interpretation I can give to this report is that D.C. officials meant that most violent crimes in the District are conducted with a handgun -- although I have heavy doubts about that as well. But if we grant them this possible reprieve their case for banning handguns is even weaker. In most the country handguns are not banned and guns are used against victims in less than 10% of all cases of violent crimes. This "reprieve" would mean that in D.C., where handguns are banned, the number of guns used against innocent people is more than five times as prevalent. That would imply the handgun ban may have actually increased the prevalence of armed attacks which is precisely the opposite of the case they are wishing to make. Either way the claims of the D.C. officials are in trouble.

Note: the chart showing the number of violent crimes associated with handguns is taken directly from the Department of Justice.

A Question for the New York Times

First watch this 14 second video. An armed man tries to rob a store only to find a very small woman with a very big ax and she ain't afraid of using it.



The woman, an immigrant from Turkey, did exactly what any good American would do -- she defended herself against an armed thug. Her family has owned this store for four years and it has been held up four times already.

The New York Times ran the story at their website. They even included the video you see here. What I am curious about is whether they would have run this story with video if the woman had a licensed handgun that scared away the robber instead of an ax. I suspect the story would have never seen the light of day in that case.

Unarmed monks disappearing by the hundreds.

The situation in Burma looks hopeless. Monks, who have lead peaceful protests against the military dictatorship, have been beaten and killed. Hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands, of them have vanished. Buddhist Temples are instead patrolled by military thugs.

And pressure is mounting on Communist China, a major supporter of the military regime. China wants to pretend that their own dictatorship is a wonderful place to live. And while economic reforms toward liberal policies have been beneficial the Communists have not yet given the people of China real freedom.

I was astonished to see the BBC actually quoting one local man on the issue. He said: "I really want change, but they have guns and we don't, so they'll always win."

The reason the Founding Fathers enshrined the right to keep and bear arms in the U.S. Constitution was as a means to try and help keep the likes of George Bush under control. One never knows when a government will be become so tyrannical as to warrant an armed revolt. The time came to Burma long ago. But the people are disarmed and the military is slaughtering them.

The EU says they are prepared to impose sanctions, this on a country that has nothing to trade with, but more than sanctions are needed. I still believe that people in the West should be working to smuggle weapons to the people of Burma. And governments in the free world should do nothing to inhibit that. As for those governments they should make it clear that all members of Burmese occupying government are subject to international arrest warrants with one government after another saying they will enforce said warrants if any member of the Burma junta enters their territory.

The Chinese Communists are the ones who hold the keys. And they want to use the upcoming Olympics much the way Hitler used the 1933 Olympics -- as a propaganda tool. Hey folks, maybe it is time to spoil the party for the Chinese. I don't support governments interfering with the Olympics and forbidding athletes from attending. But I do support athletes and teams refusing to compete as long as China refuses to rein in their lapdogs in Burma. I also support world leaders and dignitaries announcing that they will boycott the Chinese Olympics individually.

The time to pressure China is now. I don't want trade sanctions, I think they are counter productive. But China deserves to be humiliated until they insist loudly and openly that the Burmese military leaders step down.

Truth about Burma hard to come by.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to find out what exactly is happening in Myanmar, or Burma as it was known before it was taken over, where the authoritarian military dictatorship has faced mounting protests led by Buddhist monks.

Certainly there has been a heavy military crackdown and soldiers have been sent to beat and kill the monks and other protesters. The regime has cut telephone lines ending internet connection, one of the means by which news was reaching the free world.

But the reports that are trickling out, while horrific, are encouraging. There are numerous stories of soldiers refusing to comply with orders. And there are reports of troops defending, not attacking, the protests, contrary to orders. There have even been rumors that a coup within the military has taken place and that coup leaders are seeking to end the dictatorship. One can only pray this so.

Allegedly General Maung Aye, second in command, has overthrown Than Shwe. He has supposedly sent troops to protect the home of dissident San Suu Kyi and has set up meetings with her.

There is nothing so honorable as a man who refuses to obey a government that is doing evil.

It has been reported that when soldiers have attempted to attack monestaries that residents living in the surrounding area would start banging pots and pans as a warning. Reports say that the Buddhist monks are being protected by Muslims and Christians as well. In other areas the unarmed residents, using slingshots and sticks, stood up to soldiers and forced them to retreat. Ah, the virtue of gun control have certain made sure the Burmese people are unarmed and guess who benefits from that!

If outside forces want to help the people of Burma free themselves from this repressive regime the best they could do is smuggle arms to the people. A disarmed populace is at a clear disadvantage when facing armed dictators. It certainly is possible that the people can still win, we’ve see that before. But the tipping point will be if more and soldier defect to the cause of the people and bring their arms with them.

I would also think it appropriate for nations of the world to announce that they are issuing arrest warrants for the leaders of the regime for crimes against humanity. The announcments should make it clear that the individuals named in these indictments will be arrested if they set foot in any of the countries that issue the warrants or which announce they will honor them. It is one thing to use the polite language of diplomacy and call the situation “grave” and “troubling”. It is entirely a different matter to declare the Burmese leaders to be criminals and issue warrants for their arrest.

And those nations that don’t issue the warrants will find pressure mounting to do so. Eventually even China will capitulate.

Meanwhile we wait and hope for the best for the Burmese people.

Company fires man for helping wounded woman.

Colin Bruley was dozing off in his apartment late one night when he heard a young woman screaming for help. He grabbed his shotgun and ran toward his apartment door. He put the gun against a chair by the door, in case he needed it, and went outside to see what had happened.

The woman yelled that she had been shot. At this point Bruley returned for his gun and ran to see if he could help her. He was joined by other neighbors who found the woman bleeding from the wounds inflicted by a boyfriend. Bruley gave the gun to a neighbor to hold while he administered first aid to the woman, while waiting for police and emergency medical personnel to arrive.

When it was all over Bruley was covered in the woman’s blood but had done much to save the her life. Word got to his employer; the first thing the next morning he was called to the office and fired.

Bruley was a leasing agent for the Oaks at Mill Creek, an apartment complex owned by Village Green Companies. He also lived in the complex. The excuse used by the company was that Bruley had violated employee rules which forbids “weapons in the workplace”. Apparently the company wanted to pretend that Bruley’s private apartment and that of his neighbor are part of his “workplace” -- something tenants might find a bit disturbing.

In addition this sort of ruling implies that Bruley actually has no private home of his own since his apartment was leased from the company. This could make life interesting. I would suppose employees aren’t supposed to be naked at work either which would make it difficult for Bruley to shower at home since that is apparently considered his workplace. Actually, this sounds more like some lame excuse made up by people to try to justify a stupid decision.

To say the least the firing resulted in lots of bad publicity for the company.

Originally the company said they couldn’t comment on their dismissal of Bruley because it would violate his right to confidentiality. But when the bad publicity piled up they threw out any concerns about confidentiality and started smearing Bruley in public with lots of accusations. Apparently the confidentiality excuse was a lie as indicated by their public smear job.

George Quay, president of the company which is located in Michigan, was inundated with angry emails. He now claimed that Bruley was fired because “he owed back rent and was facing eviction.” He said that Bruley was supposed to report incidents like this immediately -- conveniently ignoring the fact that it was 2 a.m. when the shooting took place and that Bruley told the office about the incident the morning. And while the victim called Bruley a hero, Quay was trying to make it out that Bruley had put her life at risk by using a tourniquet to stop the bleeding. Any accusation in a storm. Quay complained that Bruley’s rent check had bounced but more on that in a moment.

Consider that Bruley was not at work but in his private residence. Also consider that at the time he was on medical leave from work and so not actually working for the company at all. He had eye problems which caused severe problems in sunlight -- good thing the shooting took place in the middle of the night.

Bruley was told he had done a bad thing. He was not supposed to treat the woman first and then call police. He was supposed to first call the property manager and then call the area director and only then was he to call the police. After he called the police he was to wait in his apartment, while the victim was bleeding from the wound, and wait until the police arrived. Bruley noted that the property manager doesn’t live on the property and the area director actually lived in Ohio.

Oddly a few months earlier Bruley was commended when there was a fight on the property. Bruley intervened and stopped the fight and treated a man who had head wounds from being hit by a baseball bat. There was no reprimand for refusing to wait in his apartment until the police arrived then.

And the gun that Bruley carried had one shell of bird shot in it. It might scare someone but was unlikely to do much harm. In addition Bruley had some training in emergency first aid. He had taken a first responder training course, took some nursing courses at college and had worked in a hospital transferring patients to the emergency room. Witnesses, the victim’s family, and the victim, all believe Bruley saved the woman’s life. His employer wanted him to wait and do nothing.

Now let’s move to the accusations that were leveled by the weasel at Village Greens. Bruley had worked for the company in Michigan. He was transferred to Florida. And he had just recently moved. It was recent enough that he didn’t have a lease with the complex. They didn’t mind such things since he worked for him. They only decided he needed to sign a lease the same morning they fired him. First they gave him the lease, then they fired him.

Bruley had been given a $1,500 moving allowance to take the job in Florida, which also included a $400 per month pay cut. His moving expenses were higher than the allowance and with less money coming in he asked if he could “play catch up” on the rent and was told this was acceptable -- after all he was staff.

The rent/bounced check issue was for the May rent. He says he was told he could pay it by the 25th of the month. He gave them a check on the 9th. They then told that since it was after the beginning of the month they could only accept a money order and couldn’t take the check. He withdrew the funds from the checking account and then purchased a money order which he gave them. The company took the money order. But they also deposited the check, which was no longer good since the funds had been withdrawn to give them the money order they demanded. So the checked bounced and then the company tried to charge Bruley $50 for a bounced check as well.

As for the eviction excuse it seems employees receive a reduced rent for living in the complex -- little do they know that their apartments are considered the “workplace”. An employee who loses his job is asked to leave the apartment because they get the reduced rent. That appears to be the eviction notice.

The woman who was shot is shocked at how the company, her landlord, has responded to this man. She told the Jacksonville paper that she told Bruley, “I thought you were going to go back to work as a hero and here you’re fired. That’s really crazy.” The paper said that the article with this story received 485,000 on-line hits and they were inundated with over 300 e-mails, all but one were supportive of Bruley.

Bruley says people were offering him money, which he was refusing. Meanwhile the morons at Village Green issued a statement saying they “don’t condone residents or employees jeopardizing their safety or the safety of others by intervening in police matters.” The term assholes comes to mind. There was a time when people who didn’t help others were attacked. Now you have jerks like this company attacking him for helping.

The victim says Bruley saved her life and that she no longer wishes to live in the complex because of the owner’s actions.

Mill Creek, which claims it respects confidentiality clearly doesn’t do that. They are lying about that. They publicly released a timeline that includes confidential information and distortions.

For instance they claim a property manager “had discussions with Colin Bruley about his delinquent rent” and about the bounced check. No doubt they did, what was discussed or agreed upon is not noted. And they fail to mention that the check bounced only because they took payment twice: once as the check they refused but then cashed and once as a money order. That is dishonest of them.

They also claim that on June 7, Bruley was told a lease had to be signed “because the initial lease could not be found.” That is another lie. There was no initial lease according to Bruley. The lease they gave him, the same day they fired him, was the first he had received from them. They also misreport things by saying “Colin attempted to administer first aid.” The use of the word “attempted” implies he did not do so or failed to do so for some reason. They really want to downplay how he helped save this woman’s life. They have to demonize Bruley and this means downplaying the actual aid he did give.

They get real fuzzy as to details. They say they gave Bruley a “three-day notice” “sometime in the morning” due to the previous check bouncing, which was their own fault. Then “sometime in the afternoon” Bruley was called in by the property manager and at 5:30 he was fired. They note that the next day Bruley asked for copies of the company handbooks and his personnel file but he was told he could not use the copy machine to get copies for himself. Apparently they didn’t want him to have copies of these things. And then the next day the company filed an eviction notice.

So what do I think happened from reading this? I think that the head office in Michigan got very upset because Bruley came to help this woman while carrying a firearm -- even though it was not one that could do much harm. I think they had a panic attack about the gun and fired him for that. I also think they are moral cowards who don’t want to say they fired an employee for that reason so they concocted excuses. They had him sign a last minute lease so they could say he was in violation of the lease for the bounced check, even though they were the ones who caused the check to bounce through their own stupidity. It the end I suggest the reason for all this stupidity is that the company president doesn't like individuals owning firearms for self defense.

They filed an eviction notice against Bruley only after they fired him. To claim they fired him because they were evicting him is another dishonest statement from the company. They reversed the order and are trying to cloud the issue to justify their actions.

Contact details for this company of morons can be found here.

You can reach George Quay at gquay@villagegreen.com. Other people to contact are jhotzman@villagegreen.com; aroebkerr@villagegreen.com and mjoy@villagreen.com

Note: This is the most up-to-date information that I could find regarding this case, which took place in June. This was not reported in the mainstream press I read normally and being outside the US means I sometimes get information like this later than I would like.
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England's streets too dangerous for cops.

The BBC has an interesting report which questions how dangerous the streets of England have become for police officers. The report says:

Research carried out by the Police Federation for England and Wales last year found 40,000 officers had been faced with a knife and 7,000 threatened with a gun during the past two years. Paul Tonks, chairman of the West Midlands Police Federation, said that during his 28 years' service there had always been colleagues injured, but the job had become more dangerous recently. Police constable Norman Brennan says: “Britain is very violent and the increasing violence against police mirrors that faced by other people in society.”

This rise in violent crime in the UK has caused an increase in the debate over arming police with many police saying the streets are too dangerous and they are unarmed while criminals are not. What needs to be remembered is that firearms are nearly completely illegal in the UK. But as we’ve reported here before since hard core gun control went into effect crime has escalated dramatically and the number of weapons in the hands of criminals went up, not down.

Now we have police officers lobbying for the right to be armed because of this sort of criminal violence. But as Pc Brennan stated what is happening to the police “mirrors that faced by other people in society.” So the question the advocates of arming the British police have to ask themselves is whether or not the other innocent people in the UK shouldn’t be able to protect themselves as well.

Total control of guns is total control of people.

Our discussion of the issues revolving around the horrific events at Virginia Tech has literally brought in tens of thousands of new readers. And in that mixture are a few who have advocated, as one of them put it, “total control” of guns. Their positions is that all weapons must be confiscated and severe penalties imposed on people who own firearms for self-defense.

There is a certain naive simplicity to that which is frightening. What they advocate is a zero tolerance policy akin to the War on Drugs, which itself was just a reincarnation of the previous total war on an evil commodity: alcohol. Obviously since both of those were such smashing successes they want to repeat the exercise.

England followed the same logic. In 1988 it first banned semiautomatic and pump-action rifles, short shotguns and a few others firearms. Law abiding citizens turned in their weapons. Criminals did not. With criminals feeling safer the number of crimes committed with guns escalated. Then the totalitarian idea of absolute control took hold. So for all practical purpose it is now virtually impossible to own a handgun in the UK. Following that ban the number of crimes committed by armed criminals jumped again.

Street gangs in various sections of the UK have no problem obtaining firearms even though they are entirely illegal. The Southwark neighborhood of London had 266 crimes committed with firearms that were reported in 2006. The Lambeth neighborhood had 239, Lewisham had 185. Apparently someone forgot to tell criminals they weren’t supposed to own firearms.

Det. Supt. Kevin Davis heads the Trident program to tackle youth/gang related crime in London. he says that more “teens are resorting to carrying or using guns.” Claudia Webber, an advisor to Trident says that in the gang culture guns are “an everyday accessory, a fashionable accessory, that young people want to be seen with.” This with what amounts to be an almost total ban. The very few loopholes that are left are not the source of firearms for gangs. Criminals almost never purchase guns legally.

Not long ago the British government conceded that one in three young criminals own or have use of a firearm. When guns were confiscated 162,000 weapons were turned in by law-abiding citizens. Apparently criminals didn’t join the queue. At the time police estimated there were 250,000 illegal guns in the UK. They now believe there are 3 million illegal firearms in the country and said “criminals are more willing than ever to use them.”

One result is that criminals in the UK are more brazen. In England 53 per cent of burglaries on homes take place while the residents are home, only 13 per cent in America take place under similar circumstance. British criminals don’t mind breaking in while people are home since they know that the residents have been disarmed. Criminals in the US are worried the homeower is armed. One result is that numerous elderly people in the UK get battered around by young thugs. A proud moment for the “total control” advocates. Yet the victim disarmament Gun Control Network calls the UK policies “the gold standard” of gun control.

The British Home Office has conceded: “We recognise there is a continuing problem with the use of guns by criminals and that it has increased over recent years.” Gold standard indeed.

The London Telegraph wrote that following the imposition of gun control “the total number of recorded crimes went up by almost 800,000 at a time when numbers in France and Germany were virtually stable and in America were falling dramatically.”

The ban on guns has meant that black market weapons smuggled into the country are plentiful. The left-leaning Guardian says that sawed-off shotguns “can now be bought illegally for between £50 and £200 according to Home Office research. A purpose-built 9mm handgun, which is easier to conceal than a shotgun, is available for £1000-£1,400 on the back streets of Britain while those wanting “a gangster image” can buy a machine gun for £800.” The paper also said “increasingly firearms had become a normal part of the systematic violence found in the street-level criminal economy. They had assumed a symbolic significance as they became associated with criminal affluence and were conflated with status and the potential for violence.” The gold standard, indeed.
British citizens are now routinely monitored by closed circuit cameras throughout their daily life. And gun crime is up, illegal weapons have increased, more people are being killed than before. If this sort of constant surveillance is not working then what sort of police state measures will be necessary to make a total ban on guns workable? Apparently the rise in crime following gun control brought about new control measures to undo the damage of gun control. The result is a society that is rapidly turning into a police state.

Let us consider a community where there is total control and see if prohibition works. In prison one has extremely limited Constitutional rights. You can be searched at any time of the day. Armed guards can ransack your living quarters at will. You are constantly being monitored by agents of the government. You eat when they tell you to eat. You are allowed to have friends visit only under the most stringent of circumstances. Your every mover is under government control. You quite literally can’t sit on the toilet and expect privacy. Yet prisoners still use illegal drugs.

Billions and billions of dollars have been spent to impose total control on illegal drugs. Across American heavily armed SWAT teams routinely carry out raids on homes of suspected “drug dealers”. They shoot to kill. Every year innocent people who were wrongly targeted are killed. But it’s “war” and they are collateral damage. Penalties for drug possession in the US are bizarrely severe. Children are encouraged in state schools to spy on their parents and turn them in to the police. There is a constant barrage of propaganda. And drug use today remains almost the same as it was when the “War on Drugs” was started.

So precisely how much more severe will police monitoring have to become to impose “total control” on guns? How much of the Bill of Rights, beyond just the 2nd Amendment, will have to be shredded in order to obtain this control? And does total control mean stripping police of firearms?

Crime will escalate under total control. First, a nation that can’t prevent tons of cocaine from entering the country can’t prevent firearms from entering. The reality is that the most violent, anti-social criminals will have guns. Only their victims will be disarmed. Perhaps even the police will be disarmed. Crime will escalate. As in the UK criminals will become more brazen and more homeowners will be hurt or killed by thugs with superior strength or firearms. Certainly the weaker members of society,those least able to fight off a hulking criminal, will become prime targets.

And there is still the annoying issue of an unarmed population and an armed government. Governments have a tendency to become oppressive. Throughout history they have slaughtered hundreds of millions of people. More people have been killed by governments in the 20th century, or by agents of the state, than by run of the mill criminals.

Disarming a population only means that if a totalitarian state arises the people are defenseless and unable to prevent their own oppression. What is worse is that the “total control” measures that will be necessary to wipe out private firearms will go a long way toward establishing that very kind of society.

And this leads, not to a slippery slope, but a free fall. How do we prevent firearms from outside a country from entering the country? Ah, the “total control” advocates will tell you that we need international controls. So the dictatorial regime necessary to wipe out private firearms will have to be a global regime. It would require authority over all nation states. The powers necessary to impose “total control” mean that they increase in scope constantly and are centralized. The end result is a massive global government that is forced by the doctrine of “total control” to monitor and regulate people in ways never before seen on this planet.

The tendency is toward dictatorship. And with the people disarmed and the massive State having vast, monopoly powers you can kiss what few remaining freedoms you have good bye. And who do our Left-wing “total control” friends think will run this state? Some kindly, benevolent, gentle soul, a reincarnation of Ghandi perhaps? Or maybe the reborn Mother Theresa? History shows that the men who rise to the top of those kind of political systems are more similar to Alberto Gonzales and George Bush than to a Ghandi. It requires a world run by the Bushs of the world with legislation that makes the Patriot Act look like child’s play.

Of course the reality is that the police won’t be disarmed at all. They will become more and more militarized in order to deal with the millions of new criminals created by a total ban on guns. And they will become more and more likely to use excessive force. So expect more and more out of control police departments. Or do we centralize their authority as well? No doubt we will with only worse results.

Now the one time in my life that a criminal, with an illegal weapon, shot at me he was using a weapon that was not exactly a Smith & Wesson. He used a weapon that was literally home made. There is no shortage of instructions on how to make your own gun at home. And now we get the mission creep inherent in all state programs.

Under the war on drugs the government has increasingly made life more and more difficult for the vast majority of Americans who don’t use illegal drugs. Grow lights help grow plants including marijuana. So people with grow lights have had their homes raided even when the plants are tomatoes. One might take certain ingredients from cold medicines and use them in producing illegal drugs. So your ability to treat your cold is severely restricted. To prevent “drug abuse” hypodermic syringes were tightly regulated. Addicts didn’t disappear, they shared needles and they, and their sexual partners, the sexual partner of their partners, became a hot house environment spreading HIV.

“Informers” who don’t exist give cops, who do exist, the names of drug dealers and innocent elderly women are murdered by armed cops. All these things take place because the state finds it must do more and more to control drugs. It must control many aspects of human life which are only tangentially related to drugs.

So now we need a government that doesn’t just regulate firearms but also regulates the tools and the materials that can be used to produce firearms. Total control would have to mean censorship to stop people from learning how to produce home-made weapons. It would mean regulating lathes which can be used, piping which can be used and so on. Just as grow lights, bongs, and rolling papers are under increasing state control a war on guns would require censorship and state control of the materials and tools that can potentially be used to produce firearms.

When antigun activists talk about “total control” to stop guns that is precisely what they mean. They want the same kind of police state mentality created by the War on Drugs but bigger, better, more powerful, more deadly. They want a police state but a police state on steroids. Perhaps some don’t want that. I doubt when the War on Drugs started the supporters in the 1960s envisioned an America riddled with prisons, violent gangs with drug monopolies in the inner cities and innocent people being gunned down by paramilitary police squads. But that is the path they chose to follow. And if you get on a road that points to a police state then don’t be shocked when you wake up in a police state. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

The failure of the state and national tragedies.

The carnage witnessed at Virginia Tech induces pain in all rational people, it causes us to reflect and rethink. We ask for explanations. Long ago it was suggested that the most likely explanation is the simplest. This horror was caused because a mentally unbalanced individual was able to find a large body of defenseless people and shoot them while all the governmental bodies established to protect those people failed miserably.

“No gun zones” have acted like magnets to crazed killers. And I certainly understand the motivation and logic behind the idea. But good intentions are not enough and the logic is flawed. The only people who obey the rule are the vast majority of law abiding gun owners not insane individuals intent on making a name for themselves through mass slaughter. These zones leave people within them helpless and reliant upon the various agencies of government to respond in a timely manner.

There are two problems. One is that government often does not respond in a timely manner. Two, even when it does respond quickly a few minutes is all it takes to snuff out the lives of dozens of people. If we are to have a government that can respond as quickly as armed citizens could then we must have one where the policing agents are as pervasive as honest gun owners. And that, quite simply, would mean a police state.

Left-wing gadfly Alexander Cockburn is often right on issues, hence the term gadfly. I think his record is less than perfect but it’s good enough to warrant considering what he has to say on issues. He tells his fellow progressives that they better rethink how they have dealt with crime. There is much justified outrage on the Left (and some on the Right as well) about the role of SWAT teams. The American police force has become militarized. And with their tanks and automatic weapons and body armour they have become a threat to the life, liberty and property of every citizen.

This blog, and others, has regularly reported how these paramilitary forces have acted as if they were in a war. No surprise, that is how they are trained. The net result is that they destroy and kill and far, far too often the people they destroy and kill are innocent people. One of the most absurd claims of the victim disarmament lobby has been the cry that if citizens are allowed to defend themselves they will make mistakes and we ought to trust the police.

The same people, when they calm down, breath deeply for a while and then are asked to talk about the police launch into similar tirades about the treat of paramilitary police forces. Trust the police when we disarm you and once you are disarmed you aren’t supposed to the trust the police. Okay, that makes sense! Not.

Cockburn suggests the Left consider how these two issues are related.

“The left complains about SWAT teams, but doesn’t see that the progressives bear a lot of responsibility for their rise. If you confer the task of social invigilation and protection to professional janissaries -- cops--and deny the right of self and social protection to ordinary citizens, you end up with crews of over-armed thugs running amok under official license, terrorizing the disarmed citizens. In the end you have the whole place run by the Army or the federalized National Guard, as is increasingly evident now with the overturning of the Posse Comitatus laws forbidding any role for the military in domestic law enforcement.”

Every time a crime of the magnitude of a Virginia Tech or Columbine takes place police agencies and government bureaucrats make a raw grab for expanding their power. America is evolving into a police state at a frightening pace. And these expanded powers will not be restricted to only the cases that warrant them. They will creep into more and more aspects of daily living. When SWAT teams were organized we were told it was for situations precisely like the one we just witnessed. In the 1980s they were called out about 3,000 times per year. Even then you can see their use was not that widely warranted. Now they turn up about 40,000 per year. As Radley Balko notes: “Most ‘call-outs’ were to serve warrants on nonviolent drug offenders.”

From an “elite” groups of cops on call for the unusual we are instead seeing these teams used for routine policing. Balko notes: “Armed with free surplus military gear from the Pentagon, SWAT teams have multiplied at a furious pace. Tactics once reserved for rare, volatile situations such as hostage takings, bank robberies and terrorist incidents increasingly are being used for routine police work.”

One of the most openly fascistic police officials in the US is Joe Arpaio, who likes to call himself the “toughest sheriff in America”. He sent out his SWAT team, in their tank, to raid a Phoenix home. They first fired tear gas into the home. Then they managed to set the house afire somehow. A puppy inside the house tried to escape the flames and the police officers chased it back inside where it perished. And the reason for the raid: they were were arresting someone for traffic tickets. Meanwhile while burning down houses and killing dogs the tank they had parked in front of the house was rolling down the hill. The Einsteins had forgot to set the brake.

It rolled directly into a car where a mother and her young child had been sitting. She saw the tank rolling toward them and grabbed the child and escaped with seconds to spare. Don’t believe me? Here’s the photo of the incident.

I am not a person of faith, that is I am not the least bit religious. So I honestly don’t understand the religious mentality of some fundamentalist types in the political Left who have an undying, unalterable faith in big government.

When you strip people of the right to defend themselves the only protection they have left is government. But what happens when it is government from whom people need protection? Today the people of Zimbabwe need protection from the government, ditto the people of North Korea, Cuba, and still, China. Ditto for the people of Russia, most Islamic states and much of Africa. And, increasingly this applies to people in the US and England as well. Governments run amok, they do it all the time.

But let us pretend that never happens. Let us fantasize a world of benevolent, happy police agents on every corner. Still they fail to protect people well. In dangerous situations these SWAT teams set up a perimeter and tend to sit there and wait. Cockburn wrote:

When the mass murder session began in the engineering building the police cowered behind their cruisers till Cho Seung-Hui finished off the last batch of his 32 victims, then killed himself. Then the police bravely rushed in, started sticking their guns in the faces of the traumatized students, screaming at them to freeze or be shot. Similar timidity was on display in Columbine, where Harris and Klebold killed students in the library over a period of 15 minutes and then committed suicide. The police finally mustered up the nerve to enter the library over two hours late

Government is very good a waiting when situations are dangerous. I lived in San Francisco during the “big one” (1989 not 1906). When the Cypress viaduct of Interstate Highway 880 pancaked, trapping dozens of people and killing many, the government set up a perimeter and sat there debating what to do. People were dying and bureaucrats were discussing the costs and benefits of saving them. Private citizens were rescuing people, bureaucrats were having donuts and coffee and debating the issue.

The residents of the impoverished neighborhood surrounding the viaduct improvised ladders and climbed up to the trapped people. One by one they saved lives. The professionals turned up and halted this sort of “vigilante” rescues. They ordered the people to go home and let them “do their job” and then they did nothing! Angry residents sneaked around to the other side of the highway and continued their rescues surreptitiously.

Over and over, at times of national crisis we see the inertia of bureaucracy drag whatever good intentions exist down in a stagnancy that is deadly. The paranoid delusions of conspiracists aside the reading of the 9/11 Commission Report is a long discourse on ineptness and bureaucratic bungling. From the investigation of the terrorists, from security at the airports, to the response of the government during the hijackings we witnessed a lumbering dinosaur trying to respond to quick moving events. It couldn’t cope.

Who did respond? Who learned the lessons of that day quickly? The passengers of United Airlines Flight 93. They were the only ones who successfully stopped a hijacked plane from reaching its target.

Katrina was a perfect opportunity for government to prove it could efficiently and effectively save lives during a disaster. Few other disasters come with such advanced warning. Tracking a hurricane begins days, sometimes weeks before it hits land. And everyone knew Katrina was coming. And government failed miserably. Bureaucrats couldn’t offer protection to people left behind but ran around disarming law abiding people. Government couldn’t get aid and supplies to the victims but it made sure that no one else helped them either. It closed down and stifled every private relief effort it could find.

Government always wants to monopolize response to itself. And it always does a shitty job of responding.

The Virginia Tech massacre was a textbook example of the failure of government. The killer was a deranged individual. People who dealt with him were terrified of him. He was reported to campus police several times. Professors reported him, students reported him, and the government bureaucrats who run the school said there was nothing they could do. They were stifled by regulations and rules at every turn.

They couldn’t tell the parents of the killer, that would violate regulations on privacy. They basically couldn’t do very much. The killer was sent to a mental institution by a judge. But the school had to let him back on campus, regulations you know. Regulations did exist to forbid firearms on campus. That disarmed the victims not the killer. Lot of good that did.

Government regulations clearly say that someone who has been hospitalized for mental instability is not qualified to buy a weapon. And they have bureaucrats to make sure that doesn’t happen. If you pass a background check then you can buy a weapon. If it is shown you did time in the loony bin you don’t get the gun. The killer got his gun. Why? Well, it seems that the one bureaucracy that incarcerated the killer didn’t bother to tell the other bureaucracy, that does the background checks, that this man had mental problems.

We had government police who knew for several hours in advance that a killer was on the campus of Virginia Tech. They supposed he had left. They had no evidence he left, they just supposed it. Thirty of the victims died that day after the police arrived on campus. We had a university bureaucracy which took hours to send out an e-mail warning to the student body.

Over and over government failed to protect the people it had disarmed. And yet the faithful, with their hymns of praise, light their candles before the shrine of the state and call the supplicants to prayer. “Oh, mighty State, ye who we worship and adore, we beseech thee to bless thy servants and bestow thy hand of protection upon us.” And as so often is the case with this deity, it is deaf to their pleas.

There may well be some things that government can do, and do fairly well. Quick response is not one of them. What we have seen is that the agents created for quick response are poor at responding to those situations but good at killing unarmed, non-violent individuals. And what does the victim disarmament lobby want: more of the same!

A quick index to our articles on guns, gun control and gun free zones.

The reality is that thousands of people are currently coming to this site to read what we have to say about gun control, self-defense, etc. In light of that reality, brought on by the recent unfortunate results, I thought it useful to list below the specific articles we have and where they may be found. Most of these were written before this recent tragedy. And do remember we write about lots of other topics. Browse the archives or do a search on topics.

Total control of guns is total control of people. Some people now want total control of guns, much like total control of illegal drugs. And we all know how well that has worked. So exactly how much control is ncessary?

The failure of the state and national tragedies. Government is not able to respond quickly to tragedies, not as quickly as the civilian population can. Monopolizing response to the state is harmful in several ways. And we uncover a fifth case of a school shooting that ended by armed response on the spot.

Virginia Tech student's plea: Why was I disarmed? A student from the university who is qualified to carry a weapon discusses the helplessness of being left undefended. And we discuss a fifth case where a mass shooting ended due to armed intervention by someone on the scene.

Oppression, bigotry, dignity and the necessity of self-defense: This article discusses how the most marginalized in any society are often the very people most in need of being able to defend themselves.

When killers meet armed resistance: This discusses four cases of mass shooting where the killer unexpectedly found himself facing an armed victim. In all cases no further innocent victims were created.

Penn & Teller on Gun Control: This is a video of Penn & Teller presenting one view of gun control in their unique style.

The high cost of gun control: What happened when guns were outlawed in the UK. Gun crime escalated.

Gun free zones and mass shootings: laid out the argument that there is a link between mass shootings and gun free zones, a link sadly proven correct by recent events.

School shooting, blame evolution, ignore bullies: Discusses how some Right wing nuts were blaming shootings on teaching evolution but argued that bullying was rampant at schools and is often behind such shootings or at the very least a factor. A no bullying zone would be quite useful.