Criminals take the path of least resistance

It never ceases to amaze me how much faith gun banners have in gun control laws.

They accept that there are already laws against all of the ways that people can misuse guns, like armed robbery, aggravated assault, and murder. They very clearly realize that those laws are broken with impunity by criminals. Somehow, though, they think it will be different when just the right gun control law is enacted (and have no doubt about that-- the one they want is a total prohibition of all guns of all types... they have passed thousands of "common sense" measures over the years, and all it does is whet their appetite for the grand prize).

Gun haters like to cite the statistic that 2/3 of murders are committed with guns, and leap from that observation to the conclusion that banning guns would cut our murder rate, if not by two-thirds, then at least by some other large percentage.

They seem to think that the people who are defined by their disobedience to laws (criminals) are going to obey the law that says they can't have a gun-- when most of them (having felony records) ALREADY are not allowed to possess a gun.

It boggles the mind-- yet a lot of people still make the argument. It's a kind of fuzzy logic that leads them to make statements like "There are already too many guns on the streets, as anyone who reads the newspaper can see. Anything we can do to reduce this will be a good thing."

That's all the justification they need to pass any gun control laws they can ram through. They don't ever stop and consider that the only people who will be disarmed by a gun law are the good people who would only use a gun to defend themselves or others. They have the idea that any steps they can take to even incrementally reduce the number of "guns on the street" will be beneficial, even if those "guns on the street" they're eliminating are all from people who only want to protect themselves from criminals.

I don't like it any more than the gun haters do, but the truth is that armed criminals are here to stay. That genie is simply not going back into the bottle. If you want to stop armed criminals, the only way to do that is to put them in prison for a long time. It is not possible to make them into nice people by writing law after law until, finally, guns simply cease to be.

The gun grabbers like to point out that most criminals get their guns by stealing them from lawful gun owners (or buying them from the burglars who have). This, they think, is evidence as to why those lawful gun owners must be disarmed: If they didn't own the guns, they could not be stolen and end up on the black market.

In truth, there are countless ways the criminals can and do get guns. Stealing from lawful people is one of those, but by no means the only one. Even if it is by far the biggest source of guns for criminals, that does not mean that if there were a change in laws that affected the supply line to criminals, that one of the other sources would not expand to fill the void.

Any cop who has worked in drug interdiction will tell you that it's an endless fight. There may be one big drug lord who controls most of the drug market. The cops can spend a ton of resources going after him, and finally they manage to arrest some key people and that drug cartel falls apart. And as soon as that happens, another one pops up to take its place. The disruption in supply will barely be felt. As long as there is money to be made in selling something, then someone will be there to make that money.

With drugs, it's like the "Whack A Mole" game you may have played. You can cut off the main supply, and the instant you do, one or more of the lesser supply chains immediately grows to take up the slack.

It's not just like that with drugs. The supply chain of guns (which, like drugs, are illegal for criminals) is the same way. You can observe that the main source TODAY is from this or that, and the second you close it off, another supply appears. It's like trying to stop water from seeking the lowest level.

The war on drugs has been a complete failure. People who want drugs can still get them, despite decades of total prohibition and many billions spent on enforcement. But the criminals always find a way, don't they?

The armed criminals in America have gotten used to doing "business" the way they do. They want guns, and as history has shown us, if a criminal wants to get something, he will get it. Since it is already illegal for criminals to possess guns, there is already an established black market for them in the US. Banning guns would not make them go away any more than Prohibition made alcohol go away, or drug banning has made drugs go away.

How else could criminals get guns, if not from burglaries and straw purchases?

They could import them. From China aboard a giant container freighter (China manufactures a huge number of guns, and I don't think their government would have any issue with them being sold to our criminals, as long as they could deny knowledge), or perhaps from Central America via Mexico.

Despite what the media has been trying to tell people, the vast majority of guns and other arms being used in the drug war in Mexico have not come from America. (The "90%" figure you may have seen in the media refers to the percentage of guns that Mexico has asked the BATFE to trace for them which end up being of American origin. The Mexican authorities don't ask the US to trace the origin of the arms that are clearly from their own military, or the military of Guatemala or Nicaragua.)

The arms being used in the Mexican drug war are machine guns, rocket launchers, mortars-- the kinds of things you don't see in gun shops in the US. Corruption in the Mexican army and police forces, and other governments in South and Central America, leads them to sell military and law enforcement arms to gangsters. Government officials are often given the choice of taking a bribe or taking a bullet; it's not hard to see why many of them opt to play along with the gangsters.

In Jamaica, it apparently is not uncommon for thugs to ambush and kill police officers in order to steal their guns. This has thankfully not happened (or not happened enough for me to read about it) in America, since criminals don't have to go to such extremes to get guns. But think about the things criminals have killed for that we've heard of in the news-- they have killed for a nice set of shoes! Does anyone really think criminals would not stoop to this level if they could not get guns through other means? Shoes make your feet look good, but guns, for the armed criminal, are a necessity. I think they'd go at least as far for a gun as for a pair of shoes!

And if that ever did happen here, imagine how much more often the police would end up shooting innocent people who turned out to be holding a cell phone or glasses case, because those officers were so terrified that they were about to be killed so some criminal can take their guns.

In Los Angeles, many members of the famous Crips and Bloods gangs managed to infiltrate the LAPD, and it is also known that gangs have had their members join the US armed forces as well. If it became necessary to their operations, they could use this as a source of guns, by stealing them from the armory or the evidence room.

Or maybe the enterprising criminals would just make their guns. There is a Youtube video floating around of a Pakistani arms bazaar, including footage of them manufacturing copies of various guns. Using crude tools, under a tent, they make fully functioning machine guns, rifles, and handguns. And the average home hobby machinist has better tools than these Pakistanis!

It should be abundantly clear that a criminal who wants a gun will get a gun. Making laws to ban guns will only prevent good people from defending themselves-- it won't stop the criminals from arming themselves.

Every criminal who wants a gun has one, and that won't change. The best we can do is lock the criminals up for a long time, and support the right of the good people to own and carry guns to defend themselves. Going after the guns rather than the people who think it's okay to murder has never worked. It's not the gun that's the problem... it's the criminal. Even if we could make guns disappear forever, the people that are so full of hate, who think murder is okay, would still not be safe for us to have in our society.

American Exceptionalism and Gun Control

America is unique among nation-states in that it is the only one founded on an ideal-- liberty. From its first colonial days, the people of America fled their home countries in order to find an existence without oppressive governmental control.

When the colonists could no longer tolerate the tyrannical control of a monarch on the other side of the Atlantic, they did the unthinkable: They went to war to overthrow the existing colonial government under the Crown of England. These men were (quite literally) revolutionaries, and they formed the first government of the United States of America, and drafted and ratified one of the most remarkable and perfect political documents of all time, which we now refer to simply as "The Constitution."

All of the philosophy of the founders of this great nation is encapsulated in the Constitution. It is the distilled essence of their wisdom and ideas on governance. It is more than the law of the land. The Constitution IS America.

The Constitution is a document that exists not to empower goverment, but to restrict it-- severely. The founders recognized that power is inherent within every person; that no person, by virtue of bloodline or any other cause, has any more inherent or natural power than any other. This is in direct contrast to the monarchies that were in place across Europe, where a king or queen inherited total power, and where the people had only those rights (more properly called privileges) that the sovereign (the monarch) decided to allow them.

The founders recognized that this was unjust, and that no person had any more right to rule than any other person. The new government they formed, as described by The Constitution, was one where specific powers were delegated to the government by the people-- the reverse of a monarchy.

Under the Constitution, the government had only those specific enumerated (listed) powers that the sovereign people (which was all citizens) allowed it. All other powers were and are strictly off limits to the federal government. Those powers not listed as belonging to the federal government are the exclusive property of the people-- or the states, if the people of that state should decide to delegate those powers to their state of residence.

In a monarchy, the people are the servant of the monarch. Under the Constitution, the government exists only to serve the people, who have delegated specific powers to that government toward that end.

The government described by the Constitution was a very radical thing when it was ratified. It still is-- and even though the republic is one that has spread throughout the world, the concept that rights, as well as all political power, is/are inherent within the people and exist independently of any government, is still a uniquely American idea.

This idea, as codified by the Constitution, has led to America's position as a beacon of freedom throughout the world, and is directly responsible for the country's growth from a piece of some other country's empire to the sole superpower in the world.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of people that see the Constitution not as the distilled wisdom of the founders and the essence of everything that is America, but as a document that has quite a number of very serious flaws. And even though the Constitution has a very specific procedure for correcting such errors (the amendment process), there are those who wish to change its meaning without going through the necessary process.

The people who think this way are easy to spot. They're the ones who use a key phrase when they describe the Constitution: "A living, breathing document." These words are poison to the liberty within the Constitution, and anyone who uses them should be immediately suspected of being a usurper of liberty that belongs to the people whether or not the government recognizes that it does, or a person who has been duped by such a usurper into believing that the Constitution doesn't necessarily mean what it says, but instead means whatever the Justices of the Supreme Court decide it should mean.

It is the Legislative Branch that has the sole power to propose and enact laws, and to amend the Constitution. This power was delegated by the people to the Congress, and to the legislatures of the various states. The power to decide what the Constitution should mean belongs to Congress and Congress alone.

That's why the "living document" idea is completely, totally wrong. The power to reinterpret the Constitution and change its meaning was never delegated to the court at any level. The job of the Supreme court is to act as a referee when it is not clear whether a certain law passed by Congress was within the specific limitations imposed by the Constitution. A referee does not change the rules of the game!

What all this means is that the Constitution means exactly what it meant when it was ratified. Any amendments mean exactly what they meant when such amendments were ratified. There is absolutely not one iota of leeway in this. The Constitution was written by a group of men who had just overthrown their tyrannical government, and who instituted a new government with one purpose in mind-- to cripple the ability of that government to ever become tyrannical again.

It is self-evident that such people never would have intended for Supreme Court Justices, who are in fact agents of the federal government, to decide that the main limitation on the federal government's power doesn't mean what it says. If you read the many writings of the founders, you will see that the idea that the judiciary could change the meaning of laws or (heaven forbid) the Constitution was unthinkable to them.

What all of this means in terms of gun control is that not one of the many federal gun control laws is Constitutional. This is true even if the Second Amendment is ignored. In many ways, the argument about what the Second Amendment means misses one very important point, and that is that the federal government was never delegated the authority to regulate guns in any way, shape, or form.

The Bill of Rights was seen by the Federalists (the group of people who supported the Constitution) as unnecessary. Since the federal government had not been given the authority to establish a national religion, regulate free speech or expression, to regulate the bearing of arms, et cetera, it was held that a Bill of Rights specifically protecting these rights (which the people, sovereign as they are, did NOT delegate to the government) was repetitive and unnecessary.

Ultimately, the Bill of Rights was included as a compromise to convince the states which were uneasy to ratify the Constitution. If any of the founders had been able to predict the degree to which the federal government has usurped powers that it is not allowed to have, the Bill of Rights may have been longer than the unamended Constitution.

For much of the 20th century, there has been controversy about the meaning of the Second Amendment. (Before that, it was absolutely uncontroversial; it was universally held to protect the right of citizens to own and carry state of the art military firearms.) People who wished to limit or eliminate the right of the people to keep and bear arms began to argue that the prefatory clause limited the scope of the protection to actual militia service (which they have then described in various ways.)

What is a prefatory clause? Simply, it is the clause (the chunk of the single sentence that comes before the second comma) that acts as a preface. The other clause, the operative clause, is the one that actually does the work.

The Second Amendment is as follows:

"A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of the free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

The prefatory clause tells the reader why the Second Amendment exists: because the founders thought that a well-regulated militia (description of what that means below) was necessary to the security of a free state. While the inclusion of a preface in the Bill of Rights is unique, it is by no means unusual as far as laws go. It was common practice at the time to preface a law with a "finding" by the legislature that serves to justify the operative portion that follows. The preface didn't have any force of law itself; it was merely an explanation and a context for the law that followed.

To this day, many bills (proposed laws that have not yet been passed, if that's not already obvious) still contain a preface that describes the reason for the law. This is no secret to most of the people who disingenuously try to tell us that the Second Amendment is obscure or hard to comprehend. They want us to believe that it is obscure or murky in meaning so that we will accept the gun control schemes they wish to pass, even though the operative (legally binding) part of the Second Amendment is quite clear in stating that "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

Such usurpers have chided freedom enthusiasts for only considering the second (operative) clause of the Second Amendment when it comes to gun laws. They insist that the prefatory clause limits the bearing of arms to an official state militia, such as the National Guard.

This is wrong on many levels. First of all, the National Guard was not created until more than 100 years after the Constitution was ratified. The militia the founders referred to in the Second Amendment was the unorganized militia-- the whole of the people, excluding some government officials.

So even if the prefatory clause meant that only members of the militia could own guns (and it doesn't-- it's an explanation which has no force of law itself), it would still prohibit all gun control schemes, because all of us are members of the militia.

Recently, the usurpers have latched on to the "well-regulated" wording as a justification of gun control. That's wrong, too, because "regulated," at the time of the ratification of the Constitution, did not mean limited by a series of laws. Rather, a well-regulated militia would be well disciplined and competent with their arms (and the best way to accomplish that is to have those arms be the private property of the members of the militia).

The thrust of all of this is that the 2008 U.S. v. Heller decision was right insofar as it said that the Second Amendment does protect an individual right. While the usurpers have cried foul and accused the Roberts court of legislating from the bench (usurping the power delegated strictly to the legislature), it was clearly the only decision that could be reached by anyone who believes that the Constitution means what it says.

The fact that 4 of the justices voted against the Heller decision is direct evidence that they have no business on the bench at all; they are trying to amend the Constitution by judicial fiat because they don't like the right the Second Amendment protects. If they want to ban guns, there is a means by which the Second Amendment can be repealed-- and it's not by having the Supreme Court saying that it doesn't mean what it clearly says.

President Obama has made some statements, prior to his election, that ought to make every American very suspicious. He stated that it was unfortunate that the Supreme Court did not, in any of the civil rights related decisions of the past, allow for redistribution of income.

There is clearly nothing in the Constitution that allows the federal government to take money from someone who earned it and to give it to someone who did not. The founders would have been mortified by such a suggestion. The Supreme Court never put income redistribution in any of its decisions because there is no such mention of that power having been delegated to the federal government.

No person who respects the Constitution can possibly support the idea that nine justices, uneelected and not accountable to anyone, would be allowed to amend the Constitution in any way they please. The process for amending the Constitution is very difficult, and that was intentional. Certainly, there was no intent for it to be as simple as a popular vote of 5 of the 9 justices!

Further, it almost goes without saying that anyone who loves America and thinks that it means anything at all cannot condone the desecration of that document that defines all that America stands for. Anyone who wants to change the Constitution by judicial fiat is supporting an idea that is thoroughly unamerican and repugnant to all that America stands for. That would be true even if the thing that the usurper wished to "read into" the Constitution was something that was completely non-controversial and agreed upon by every American as just and right. If it is just and right (such as the abolition of slavery), then there should be no problem amending the Constitution accordingly!

What all of this means is that unless and until there is a Constitutional Amendment that repeals the Second Amendment AND grants the federal government the power to prohibit guns, all gun restrictions at the federal level are wholly unconstitutional. It doesn't get any simpler than that.

In my next post, I'll get more into the practical issues of why gun control is unworkable in America.

Wishing for an Obama failure

Talk show host Rush Limbaugh has been at the center of a firestorm recently over his comments that he wants President Barack Obama to fail. While the leftist media has taken this out of context (as always), the comment Limbaugh made regarded Obama's plans to turn the country into what Obama sees as a socialist utopia.

I agree with Limbaugh. I want Obama to fail too.

Now I am sure if I had posted that over on Politico (and with over 1000 comments already, I didn't bother-- I am sure it's all been said), I would be painted as someone who hates the country and puts politics over country. They've already said that about Limbaugh-- and if they had ever bothered to listen to or read what Limbaugh thinks, it would be evident how wrong they are.

They miss the point entirely. I want Obama to fail because I love the country. I hate what Obama wants to do to the country-- America is not a socialist country with a huge, all-controlling government (at least it was never supposed to be). Of course I want him to fail in his goal of making the country worse, less free, less the beacon of liberty it has always been (though that beacon has dimmed more with every passing year, thanks to the actions of both Democrats and Republicans).

And before anyone tries to bring up Bush (under the bizarre idea that a person must agree with everything that either the Republicans or Democrats do): I would have liked for the efforts to invoke the PATRIOT act to fail as well. I wish that Bush had failed in his efforts to hand obscene amounts of money to banks that made terrible decisions (unlike leftists, I don't like subsizidizing failure). Bush made a lot of mistakes, too... like Obama, he is a big government authoritarian. Obama simply brings to a higher and more terrifying level than Bush did.

I want Obama to fail in his plans to revive the economy too. This does not mean that I want the recession to turn into a depression (to score political points or for any other reason)! Far from it. I want the economy to recover as quickly as possible. So why would I say I want Obama to fail in this?

Simply put: Obama's plans to "stimulate" the economy with a wild spending spree won't help the economy. It will only make things worse. The government can't put more money into the economy, since every dollar they pump in had to be taken out first.

I know that no one wants to accept this, but the real estate market was monstrously overvalued and credit was way, way too easy to get by people who had little qualification. That was a recipe for disaster, and it simply could not have continued on as it had. The house of cards came crashing down. It had to. And now it is going to take a while to get things back on track. There's not a lot the government can do to fix this... except get out of the way and let the people that make the country work do so. The only real way for the government to help with this is to cut corporate taxes (ours are already among the highest in the industrialized world) effective immediately and get out of the way and let the market work.

I know we tend to like politicians who promise silver-bullet solutions, but not every problem has a neat and tidy fix like that. Most don't, as a matter of fact, but that does not stop politicians from trying to sell their snake oil.

FDR's misguided efforts to spend his way out of the Great Depression only served to extend what probably would have resolved in two years into a seven year debacle. Keynes was wrong, wrong, wrong. We're not going to spend our way out of this recession, and the more that Obama spends in the effort, the more that future generations are going to pay the price for Obama's folly. All the Democrats (and the Republicans who forgot why they are Republicans) will succeed in doing is running up the national debt, thus increasing the amount of taxes we all will have to pay to cover the interest.

Of course, many of the people that were screaming at Bush for spending up the deficit and the national debt (and rightly so) are now the biggest cheerleaders for this spending orgy that Obama wants (and wrongly so). Increasing the national debt with a Democrat in the White House is no less damaging than increasing it with a Republican in the White House.

So do people like Rush Limbaugh and me hate the country when we want Obama and his plans to fail? Obama failing in his efforts to socialize the US and to spend a trillion dollars on pork would be the best thing we can hope for at this point if we care at all about what America is to be.

Conservatives (and libertarians like myself) believe in small government, not to mention fiscal restraint and responsibility. It's only natural that they would want plans to the contrary to fail. And that's all Obama has... plans for even bigger government and spending that would make Bush look like he understood what "fiscal responsibility" meant.

Consider Bill Clinton's presidency. After his election, he immediately tried to push an economic stimulus plan to address the recession at the time, and to nationalize health care ("HillaryCare" as it had been dubbed). Both measures failed, even with a Democratic Congress.

Americans, disturbed by the socialistic bent of Clinton, and especially by his ramming through of unconscionable gun control measures, voted the Democrats out of both houses of Congress. Newt Gingrich and the new Republican majority implemented a great deal of their "Contract with America" agenda.

Clinton was concerned about the conservative renaissance he had helped to bring about with his leftist overreaching. Dick Morris developed the strategy of "triangulation," which basically meant to jump to the right of the Republicans and steal their positions from them, thus making their popular issues into his, and insulating himself from any criticism about his leftist bent.

It worked, and Clinton began his second term. And the economy flourished.

To this day, people tend to credit Clinton for the economic growth during his terms, even though it is evident that if he had not failed in his efforts to socialize the economy, the economy would have been much worse than it was. I hoped that Clinton would fail when he first took office and was planning his big-government socialism, and fail he did! And because of that failure, his presidency ended up being viewed as a success. It would not have if his leftist impulses had not been curtailed by Congress (including his own Democratic Congress for the first two years).

So wishing Obama will fail does not mean wishing that his entire presidency will be viewed as a failure. I know what Obama stands for, what he wants to do, and he's very close to being wrong on every single issue. I want him to fail miserably, unequivocally, and totally in every one of those things. If he does not fail in those things, he could very well be a one-termer, because succeeding in the things he wants to do means more socialism, more government, more control by him and his cronies.

If Obama does fail, as Clinton did, to advance his ambitious left wing agenda, he may well win a second term and be remembered as a good President. And that, in fact, is the only way he will be remembered as a good President, because the policies he touts now are complete duds, having failed every single time they have been tried across the world. Socialism does not work, and it never has.

Now... some may ask why I have posted this on a gun related blog. It does relate to guns in several ways, though. First, part of Obama's big government plans include more gun control, and we don't need that. We already have way, way too much gun control; we need less, not more.

Socialist ideologies always require big government, because only a big government has the power to steal money from people that earn it and give it to those it deems more worthy. As such, a big government is never the servant of the people as the founders of this great nation envisioned. A big government is the caretaker of the recipients of its largesse and the taskmaster of those from which it takes. And to any government that is the master of its people rather than the servant, the prospect of an armed populace is terrifying.

That means that a big government will always seek to disarm its people, in its own interest and against the interest of the people themselves, who will no longer have the means to cast off a tyrannical government-- a founding principle of the country. A government that serves the people would never seek to disarm them, since all power is inherent within the people, not in the government. A just government only has power that has been delegated from the true sovereigns, who are the citizens themselves.

A government that has usurped power never delegated to it by the people will always act to further its own power and control over the people. There can bedno doubt that the U.S. government acts primarily in its own interest, and considers itself to be a ruler of the people rather than a servant of them. Obama is clearly the worst we have seen in this way during my lifetime. And like all would-be despots, he supports massive gun control.

I want him to fail in that too.

Grasping at Straws

There has been a change in the rules regarding the carry of handguns in America's National Park system. For years, it was illegal even for holders of concealed-carry permits to carry their lawful arms into a National Park, National Monument, or National Wildlife Refuge.

After several years of work by the pro-liberty grassroots, the rule has changed. Now a person who has a concealed-carry permit may carry his handgun into a National Park as long as he obeys all laws in effect in whichever state the National Park is located.

All that means is that if a person who is licensed to carry his handgun in a grocery store, movie theater, fast-food place, et cetera, in a state that recognizes his permit, then he is allowed to carry in a National Park within that state as well.

Of course, the anti-gun people are upset about this... and once again, the arguments against lawful carry are spurious.

In 1987, Florida passed a law allowing anyone who did not have a criminal record to obtain a permit to carry a concealed handgun. The need for some "authority" figure to subjectively decide if the applicant really deserved to receive a permit was removed. Anyone who passed the background check (and met certain objective requirements like passing an approved gun safety class) would be issued a permit, period.

The anti-gun people went nuts; there were predictions that arguments about parking places or the number of groceries in the express line would erupt into gunfights. They called Florida the "gunshine state," and made all sorts of dire predictions of blood running in the streets if ordinary people were allowed to carry guns for their own defense. Histrionic comparisons to the "wild West" were in newspaper editorial pages nationwide.

Of course, none of that never happened. The worst fears of the gun-phobes never materialized; in fact, the record of safety and lawful gun use in permit holders was impressive. And despite rising violent crime in the rest of the Southeast, Florida's fell.

Other states took notice of the success, and liberalized concealed carry swept the nation. State after state enacted "shall issue" concealed carry laws, and in each case the gun haters reacted the same as they had when Florida enacted their law. It apparently never occurred to any of them that their predictions of impromptu gunfights over trivial reasons had never materialized in any of the growing list of states that had enacted such laws.

The trend of states adopting such laws has continued right into the present. In 2006, Nebraska and Kansas joined the "shall issue" club, leaving a total of 39 states with liberalized concealed carry laws. None of the states to have passed such a law has repealed it, further emphasizing how well these laws have worked.

Even with that record, though, we still get the same old arguments every single time there is a proposal to remove one of the arbitrary "no gun" zones. If one were to take these arguments seriously, he would have to believe that a person who carries safely and responsibly as he goes about his everyday business will suddenly flip out and do something stupid when he crosses into one of the areas in which those guns are not allowed.

Some states prohibit people with concealed-carry permits from carrying into a church. Other states allow this, and it simply has never been a problem. That, though, does not stop the gun haters from opposing extending carry into churches in this state (whatever state that may be). They would have us believe that a responsible person who carries safely everywhere else would be a danger in a church-- but only in the state in question, and not in others, where he could walk into a church and still be quite safe.

The same old anti-gun arguments have been recycled for city parks, state parks, public gatherings, sporting events, restauraunts, schools, colleges, and just about any other place which has been arbitrarily made into a victim disarmament zone in a given state. The absurdity of thinking that people who carry safely won't be able to do so in certain other arbitrary areas never seems to dawn on them.

National Parks are just the most recent additions to the list of places where some would have us believe that people inexplicably can't carry guns safely as they do everywhere else (it wasn't even an issue until the rule changed to allow lawfully concealed guns provided the state in which the park allows it). Any time the government (at any level) realizes that good people don't undergo a change of character and become bloodthirsty killers because they have walked into a certain area, we hear about how it would be a bad idea.

The people who oppose lawful carry in National Parks assure us that the parks are safe, and that concealed guns are not needed. This is just a variation on the same old argument against concealed carry (in whatever area is in question at the time)-- that the danger is not sufficient to allow people (even those licensed by the state) to carry the only truly effective means of self-defense.

If it were possible to know when and where an attack would take place, any rational person would simply make sure he's not there at the time. If it were that easy, we would not need concealed guns. We can't see the future, though, and history shows us that an unexpected attack can happen anytime, anywhere. How many times have you watched on TV as the reporters interview witnesses that are in absolute disbelief that such a thing could actually happen to them here, in such a safe area?

People that ask why a permit holder would want to carry into a given place miss the point-- it's not about strutting around like Roy Rogers. It's about having the means to defend themselves (and others around them) if an unexpected attack were to happen. And while it's natural to think "that can't happen to me," the fact is that it can. It has before to many others who thought the same thing. It's happened to people who thought they were in a safe place.

That's why the arguments of the gun haters who insist that National Parks are safe enough, and that the right to effective self-defense can and should be denied there, fall flat. It's not "safe enough" if someone decides to attack you at the time you happen to be there.

If a person chooses not to have the means to defend himself because he thinks it won't be necessary in a given place, that's certainly his prerogative. He does not, though, have the right to make that choice for others. Who is to say what is "safe enough?" Attacks have happened in places that were "safe enough" on many, many occasions. The fact that some person far removed from the situation has declared that it is "safe enough" to justify prohibiting effective self-defense is cold comfort to the person who is attacked and who finds himself helpless, as required by law.

Concealed weapon permit holders have proven to be responsible and safe. They're not the ones to worry about misusing guns, inside a National Park or not. The people to worry about are the ones that disregard the law and the safety of others. They very happily bring their guns into whichever place you don't think guns should be, regardless of the rules or laws. They already bring their guns unlawfully into places where guns are prohibited! That is why ordinary people need to be able to effectively defend themselves against these criminals, anywhere they go.

An even sillier argument against allowing concealed handguns into National Parks is that (get this) it will increase POACHING!

This is so ridiculous that it hardly deserves a response. Poaching? They can't be serious.

Poaching is illegal. The people that poach do it because they want to, and they don't care what the law says. (Obviously.) If they don't poach in parks (and in some cases, they do), it's not because the law says they can't bring their concealed handgun to the park! It's because they fear being caught.

If you think someone who is willing to break a law against poaching in a National Park, but not against bringing a handgun into a park, you obviously don't get the whole concept of "criminal." Such people would not go through the trouble to obtain a concealed handgun permit any more than they would bother with a hunting permit.

Second: Who poaches with a concealable handgun? The change in the law is for concealed carry, and rifles and shotguns just don't lend themselves to concealed carry. The rules regarding long guns are not in question.

Nothing bad is going to become of this rule change in National Parks. The same arguments against the rule change have been made dozens of times over the last 22 years, and they have been wrong every time. There's nothing supernatural about a park that is going to make an otherwise responsible permit holder start behaving differently when he passes the park's welcome sign. He's still the same person who was responsibly carrying before he entered the park.

Histrionic, irrational fears of guns don't trump Constitutionally-protected civil rights. The facts speak for themselves, if one is inclined to look for them. The people arguing against concealed-carry in National Parks obviously aren't.

The Lessons of the Past

In 1992, Presidential candidate Bill Clinton ran against incumbent Republican George H. W. Bush. Like most modern Presidential candidates from the anti-gun Democratic Party, Clinton made an effort to convince skeptics that he was in favor of gun rights.

Clinton won the election, of course. What followed was an avalanche of gun control laws, with the 1994 "Assault Weapon" ban being the most notable.

That year, during the midterm election, the Republicans swept the Democrats out of control of both houses of Congress for the first time in decades. President Bill Clinton credited (or, from his perspective, blamed) the National Rifle Association for the drubbing the Democrats had received at the hands of the voters.

The Republicans kept control of both houses of Congress until disapproval of Republican President George W. Bush resulted in the Democrats recapturing their majorities in 2006.

Fast forward to the 2008 Presidential campaign. Democrat Barack Obama is running against Republican John McCain.

Like Clinton and Kerry before him, Obama makes a point of assuring the American people that he is in favor of gun rights. Specifically, he endorses the individual rights decision of the Roberts Supreme Court in the Heller decision. Obama's running mate Joe Biden states that if Obama wants to take his Beretta (shotgun), he's going to have a problem. Factcheck.org (a site run by the Annenberg Foundation, which has been associated with Obama and Bill Ayers) bashes the National Rifle Association for stating that Obama would support gun confiscation if elected.
Various media pundits and bloggers assure us that Obama's position on gun control is the same as McCain's; that is, he's against it.

In November, the supposedly pro-gun Barack Obama wins the election, and the Democrats expand their majorities in both houses of Congress. Anti-gun groups are giddy; Sarah Brady states that she has never been so confident that they can push their agenda. The Brady Center uses the example of the election as proof that gun rights is a losing issue (how that squares with Obama nearly doing backflips to convince people he's pro-gun to be elected is anyone's guess).

The Brady Center has reason to be enthusiastic about the Obama victory. While Obama's supporters bashed the NRA for suggesting that Obama wanted to ban guns, his own web site shows that indeed, he does (scroll down about two-thirds of the way to "Address Gun Violence in Cities").

The anti-gun lobby is telling their supporters that now is the time to strike, that the Republican party is in disarray and unable to mount much of a defense. The American people are more concerned about the economy now, so to them it's a great time to strike.

I wonder why, if they think that gun rights are a losing issue, they are being so sneaky about pushing their agenda when the opposition party is weak and while the people are looking elsewhere? If it is a losing issue, those things ought not matter!

Obama and the Democrats would do well to ignore the Brady Center and other gun-ban lobbies. It does not take much thought to see the strong parallels between the present time and the first two years of Clinton's first term. The Republicans were in disarray after their incumbent President was defeated by Bill Clinton, too... and nothing brought them, and the gun owners of America (whom the NRA and other "gun lobby" organizations represent at the grassroots level) together more than this wholesale assault on a Constitutionally-protected civil right.

In many ways, Obama could even pay a higher price for supporting gun control than Clinton did. Obama and his spokespeople went much further in trying to convince Americans that he was pro-gun than Clinton did. Obama even stated, on the record, that the surge in gun sales since his election was unnecessary, since he was not going to push for gun control.

A lot of people say that while Obama does favor gun control, he has much bigger issues to deal with, like the economy. That may well be true, but some members of Congress, like the author of the new, even more egregious "assault weapon" ban, Democrat Carolyn McCarthy, don't have more important issues with which to deal. McCarthy is pretty much a one-issue legislator, and that issue is banning guns.

All she needs to do is submit her bills and have the sympathetic Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, push them through. With the Democrats firmly in control of both houses of Congress, it is very possible that McCarthy's bills would land on Obama's desk for signature-- and it won't take much time at all out of Obama's efforts to spend his way out of this recession with money we can't spare, with money borrowed from China that will dry up as soon as the Chinese realize how bad an investment further lending would be.

If Obama signs a gun control bill now, even a fairly innocuous one, he will be proving the NRA right, and making himself and his supporters into liars. Given the number of right-leaning people who voted for Obama out of disgust with President Bush, that could be a very bad thing for the Democratic party. It would use a considerable amount of Obama's political capital, and make it more difficult for him to push his extremely questionable economic policies through.

Things in America have changed since Bill Clinton pushed through the original "Assault Weapon" ban in 1994. Since then, the number of states that allow any person without a criminal record to obtain permits to carry concealed handguns in public has grown significantly, and as such, there is a whole new group of people who have familiarity with firearms and who understand that gun bans only disarm people like them who wish to defend themselves.

For some people, guns are larger-than-life things. They're not inanimate objects; they are symbols of power and violence, like talismans that make their wielder turn into some sort of Rambo. If you read the op-eds they write in opposition to gun rights, you can see how deep this runs. They portray gun owners as wannabe Matt Dillons or Wyatt Earps. References are made to "packing heat" or "packing a roscoe." There are too many examples to list, but they're all drenched in sarcasm and contempt, and they are all lifted from movies or television (their primary source of information and opinion about guns and gun owners, apparently).

The people who, upon realizing that when seconds count, the police are only minutes away, go out and take advantage of the liberalized concealed-gun permit laws that have passed in the majority of states (many of them since the original "assault weapon" ban) may have delusions as described above when they step into the gun class, but they soon realize that (get this) movies and television are works of fiction.

When a person becomes familiar with guns and gun owners, he realizes that there is nothing mystical or "larger than life" about a gun. It's an object, one whose good or evil effect is entirely contingent upon the person who wields it. When one gets to know gun owners, or (heaven forbid) actually becomes a gun owner, the movie-inspired stereotypes become rather laughable and silly.

The concealed-carry movement has been a wonderful triumph, not only because of the incredible record of safety and responsibility by the millions of permit holders across the land, but also because it shows that people do understand that they need to take some responsibility for themselves rather than thinking they need to be completely taken care of by the government (which can never accomplish the task, but will happily steamroll every civil liberty we have in the attempt).

People who have obtained concealed carry permits are a lot less likely to buy the arguments by hysterical gun haters who are obviously so ignorant about the very civil liberty they wish to eliminate.

If anything, this is a particularly bad time to campaign on gun control. Perhaps that is why Obama and his supporters worked so hard to cast Obama as a pro-gun candidate.

Obama would be wise to continue the illusion, even to the point of vetoing any gun control bill that lands on his desk. Doing that would "prove" the NRA and the rest of the gun lobby wrong, and would lead many Republicans to "go along to get along" rather than giving them a rallying point with which to take back Congress in two years.

It looks very much like Obama may have to decide between the gun control he favors or the rest of his agenda. He may be able to suckerpunch the American people with a gun control bill when he ran as pro-gun, but that will seriously harm his credibility, and will give the gun rights lobby and the Republicans a "remember the Alamo" moment like nothing else.

US and UK murder, part 2

It is sort of amazing to me that considering all of the things I have written here, it is the comparison of the US and the UK murder rates that seems to interest the readers the most.

In that post, I noted that since the draconic gun ban in the UK (which is part of a broader campaign against the idea of self-defense), the rates of gun crime, violent crime, and murder have increased in the UK, even though they had been falling prior to the ban. I also showed that in the years since it became possible for any lawful person to carry concealed handguns in the majority of states in the US, violent crime and murder have fallen greatly.

I picked out a few cities in the UK where the rate of murder is as high or higher than many cities in the US, which shows that violence is a function of (get this) violent people, not a function of the gun laws in the place in question. I'll give you an example in just a moment.

The thrust of this is to show that you can't simply look at a country's murder rate and the national gun laws in place within that country and determine that one caused the other. America's neighbor, Mexico, has strong gun control laws, and their murder rate is several times higher than that of the US-- just for one example of many.

In both the US and the UK, the murder rate varies wildly from place to place; in some areas, murder and violence are nearly unheard of, and in some areas, you are risking your life simply to walk down the street. There are places in the UK where, despite the ten year old ban on handguns, you are far more likely to be murdered than places in the US where guns are readily available.

If America's murder rate is a function of our relatively easy access to guns, why is it that the areas with the most permissive gun laws are the ones that have the lowest crime rates, and the ones with the most restrictive bans are the ones with the worst rates of murder?

Let's take a look at one thing that happened in the "nonviolent" UK:

"Jack Brown was thrown down two flights of stairs, punched repeatedly in the head and body and slashed all over his face and neck.

He needed hundreds of stitches on his face and takes daily medication to numb the pain from the injuries he received."

"Mr Brown said the thug teared the skin off his face with a sheet of glass and tried to gouge out his eye.

He broke free and reached the metal railing outside the flats but could not grip the bars because his hands were covered in blood.

He was dragged back in by his feet and the thug then slit Mr Brown's throat and stabbed his neck."

Yeah, the gun control is working great, isn't it? There are no more violent people over there now that the gun ban went into effect, since we know that guns are responsible for violence, not people. It would have been a tragedy, I am sure, to the gun haters if Mr. Brown had shot the thug who mutilated him and tried to kill him. Better to have an innocent person mutilated and nearly killed than have a violent criminal's life cut short by the bullet of one of his victims.

Where were the police when Mr. Brown was being attacked? The article states:

After around 30 minutes a policeman arrived and pulled the attacker away.

Better late than never, right? The attack went on for a half hour and the victim was utterly defenseless, as required by law. He did what he was supposed to do, as a lawful citizen, and look at what he got for it.

You may say that while that did happen in the gun-banning UK, things like that are more likely to happen in violent America. You'd be wrong, though, because the violent crime rate in the UK is higher than the violent crime rate in the US, across the board, except for murder and rape, and the attack on Mr. Brown was neither.

An article from the UK's Telegraph states that "People living in England and Wales are at greater risk of falling victim to crime than citizens of most other industrialised nations."

To those of us who don't think that being helpless is a good way to discourage criminals from attacking us, that this would be the case is no surprise. The UK has criminalized self defense like no other western country, so the surge in victimization by sociopathic criminals really ought to be obvious.

To people who harbor the illusion that there is no difference between a brutal criminal and an upstanding citizen except for the weapons he possesses, it is utterly incomprehensible that violent crime could possibly be a problem in the UK. How could it be-- we banned guns there, and we all know that gun control fixes violent crime!

The anti-gun CDC, in a study of a variety of gun control laws, "found insufficient evidence to determine the effectiveness of any of the firearms laws or combinations of laws reviewed on violent outcomes." Another study published in the Harvard Journal of Law found that there is no link between firearm ownership rates and murder rates. The evidence is getting harder and harder to ignore, but (unfortunately) there are those who are up to that task.

Race and crime

We have a problem with violent crime in America. As you can see by the comments on my "Comparing the US and UK murder rates" post, there is a significant contingent of people who like to compare the United States to countries that happen to have low rates of murder and low rates of gun ownership, and for them to try to establish a link between them.

Never mind that there has never been a credible study that has shown that gun control reduces crime-- they believe it. Even gun grabber Bill Clinton's government funded study could not prove that his gun control measures had reduced crime (and proving that was the whole point of the study).

Conversely, we now have several studies that show that gun control tends to elevate crime, and that reducing restrictions on private gun ownership tends to reduce crime. We have the example of the UK, which has one of the tightest gun bans in the western world, and has subsequently seen violent crime escalate rapidly.

This, though, is not enough for the people who stubbornly insist that it is America's refusal to ban guns that is responsible for our violent crime rate, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. But if its not guns, what exactly is it?

Analyzing this requires getting uncomfortably close to the third rail of crime, and that is discussion of differences between racial groups. Usually, anyone who attempts to even mention what I am about to discuss is accused of racism, and any conclusions are never heard. But there are differences, and we can't possibly hope to arrive at a solution without talking about the problem. This is one reason why urban politicians so often grasp at gun control laws-- it makes them look like they are "doing something" about the crime rate, without them having to get too close to the third rail of race in America.

People of different races commit crimes at vastly differing rates, despite the fact that gun control laws (which were originally enacted in America to keep guns out of the hands of blacks specifically) no longer discriminate on the basis of race. Black, white, Asian, indigenous-- all are subject to the same laws when it comes to buying a gun.

Official Department of Justice statistics show that black people committed 52.2% of murders for the year 2005 (the most recent statistics available at this time) despite being only 12.1% of the population. Whites (which under US law, includes Latinos), who represent 74.7% of Americans, committed 45.8% of murders.

If we assume a population of 300 million in America for 2005, that means that there were approximately 36.6 million blacks and 224.1 million whites that year.

The total murders by all races in 2005 was 17,029. 52.2% of those were committed by blacks, or 8,889 murders. 45.8% were committed by whites and Latinos, or 7,799 murders.

What this means is that the rate of murder (talking about offenders here, not victims) among all blacks in America is 8,889 in 36.6 million, or 24.7 murderers per 100,000 black people. The rate of murder among whites (including Latinos) is 7,799 per 224.1 million, which equates with 3.38 per 100,000.

The way that the FBI collects data makes it difficult to try to ascertain the differences in crime rates between "Anglo" whites and Latino "whites." In common usage, Latinos and whites are considered separate races. We can arrive at an estimate using the published California statistics for arrestees for murder.

In California, with an estimated 2005 population of 37 million, Latinos represented 35.9% of the population, or 13.3 million people. They were arrested for committing 48.4% of 2005's 1956 murders, which means that there were 946 arrests of Latinos for murder.

946 murders per 13.3 million people breaks down to a rate of 7.11 murder arrest per 100,000 Latinos.

Now for the white arrests. Whites in 2005 were 43.0% of the population of California, or 15,910,000 people. They represented 19.7% of the arrests for murder, or 386 arrests. That represents a rate of 2.42 per 100,000.

What this tells us is that any given Latino was 2.94 times more likely to be arrested for murder in California than was any given white.

Let's assume for a moment that the ratio between whites and Latinos is the same in terms of arrests for murder in California and convictions for murder nationwide, and apply that ratio to the above statistic for the murder rate of whites and Latinos combined. It may not be exactly correct, but for want of better statistics, it's the best estimate for the time being.

There were about 41.5 million Latinos in the US in 2005, and about 182,600,000 "Anglo" whites, and both groups combined committed 7799 murders. If the rate of Latinos murdering is 2.94 that of "Anglo" whites, that puts the white rate at 2.63 per 100,000, and the Latino rate at 7.73 per 100,000.

So there we have it. Latinos commit murder at a rate of nearly three times that of "Anglo" whites, and blacks commit murder at a whopping 9.4 times that of "Anglo" whites.

Now to the meat of the argument. Gun availability is the same for all of these racial groups. If gun availability has anything to do with propensity to commit murder, why is there a three times greater propensity for Latinos to kill than whites, and a nine times greater propensity for blacks to kill than whites?

Clearly, there is some other thing at work here. I don't pretend to know why this is, but it's not the availability of guns. It's certainly not going to slow the murders down by ignoring the vastly different rates of murder between different races and favoring things like gun bans that are proven to make things worse.

If you find these statistics hard to swallow... so did I when I first read them. If the much higher conviction rates for blacks and Latinos was a result of white racism against minorities, it would seem that the conviction rates for Asians (which includes individuals whose ancestry goes back to India as well as China, for example) would not be lower than that of whites, let alone blacks and Latinos, and it would also seem that the rate of conviction for Latinos would be much closer to that of blacks than it is.

There is some cultural or sociological effect here. I suspect that in the case of the blacks, it has to do with the lingering effects of our history of slavery. While blacks are more equal now than at any point in history, the subcultural legacy of having been brought to America as livestock remains. I don't think that asking people who never owned slaves for reparations to people that have never been slaves is the answer. I wish I knew what was.

It's clearly not the lack of gun control, though. It is going to be a lot harder than simply passing a law that says that no one can have guns. Clearly, murder is about people who choose to kill, not about the tool that they choose. People use guns to commit the majority of murders because they are efficient for that purpose... but that does not mean for a second that getting rid of guns (if that were possible, which it obviously is not) would solve the problem of more than ten thousand people a year (obviously, some of the murderers in 2005 were responsible for more than one of the 17,029 murders) deciding to kill.

That is the problem, and we need to be able to defend ourselves against people who don't value the lives of others.