65% See Gun Rights As Protection Against Tyranny (US)

Rasmussen Reports ^ | January 18, 2013 | NA

Posted on Friday, January 18, 2013 2:55:00 PM by neverdem

Two-out-of-three Americans recognize that their constitutional right to own a gun was intended to ensure their freedom.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 65% of American Adults think the purpose of the Second Amendment is to make sure that people are able to protect themselves from tyranny. Only 17% disagree, while another 18% are not sure. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

Not surprisingly, 72% of those with a gun in their family regard the Second Amendment as a protection against tyranny. However, even a majority (57%) of those without a gun in their home hold that view.

Many gun control advocates talk of the right to gun ownership as relating to hunting and recreational uses only.

While there are often wide partisan differences of opinion on gun-related issues, even 54% of Democrats agree with 75% of Republicans and 68% of those not affiliated with either major party that the right to own a gun is to ensure such freedom.

As Americans search for answers to the Newtown shooting, attitudes on gun ownership are “not likely to change in a nation where six out of 10 adults would rather live in a neighborhood where they can own a gun and most would feel safer if their children attended a school with an armed security guard.” Scott Rasmussen explains in his latest weekly newspaper column that if Congress is “not willing to go as far as the president wants on gun control, perhaps they… might take stronger action on mental health issues or increase the penalties for crimes committed with a gun.”

In the wake of last month’s horrific elementary school massacre in Connecticut, 51% favor stricter gun control laws. There is strong support for background checks of gun owners, but a plurality believes dealing with mental...

(Excerpt) Read more at rasmussenreports.com ...

Gun Violence is Not a Republican Problem, It's a Democratic Problem

Front Page Magazine ^ | January 18, 2013 | Daniel Greenfield

Posted on Friday, January 18, 2013 1:17:47 PM by CharlesMartelsGhost

Forget Wal-Mart and skip your local gun show. The murderers of tomorrow will not be found wearing orange vests at your local sporting goods store. They won’t have NRA memberships or trophies on their walls.

You won’t find them in America. Look for them in Obamerica.

67% of firearm murders took place in the country’s 50 largest metro areas. The 62 cities in those metro areas have a firearm murder rate of 9.7, more than twice the national average. Among teenagers the firearm murder rate is 14.6 or almost three times the national average.

Those are the crowded cities of Obamerica. Those are the places with the most restrictive gun control laws and the highest crime rates. And many of them have been run by Democrats and their political machines for almost as long as they have been broken.

Obama won every major city in the election, except for Jacksonville and Salt Lake City. And the higher the death rate, the bigger his victory.

He won New Orleans by 80 to 17 where the murder rate is ten times higher than the national average. He won Detroit, where the murder rate of 53 per 100,000 people is the second highest in the country and twice as high as any country in the world, including the Congo and South Africa. He won it 73 to 26. And then he celebrated his victory in Chicago where the murder rate is three times the statewide average.

These places aren’t America. They’re Obamerica.

In 2006, the 54% of the population living in those 50 metro areas was responsible for 67% of armed killings nationwide. Those are disproportionate numbers especially when you consider that for the people living in most of those cities walking into a store and legally buying a gun is all but impossible.

Mayors of Obamerican cities blame guns because it’s easier than blaming people and now the President of Obamerica has turned to the same shameless tactic. The NRA counters that people kill people, but that’s exactly why Obamerican leaders would rather talk about the guns.

Chicago, the capital of Obamerica, is a city run by gangs and politicians. It has 68,000 gang members, four times the number of police officers. Chicago politicians solicit the support of gang members in their campaigns, accepting laundered contributions from them, hiring their members and tipping them off about upcoming police raids. And their biggest favor to the gang bosses is doing nothing about the epidemic of gang violence.

80% of Chicago’s murders are gang-related. But in 1999 when a bill came up in the Illinois State Senate to charge anyone carrying out a firearm attack on school property as an adult, a law that would have largely affected gang members, the future leader of Obamerica voted present. Had he not voted present, it is doubtful that he would have been reelected in an area where gang leaders wield a great deal of influence.

The majority of murders in the cities with the worst homicide rates are gang-related. And while it isn’t always possible to be certain whether a killing was gang-related, the majority of homicide victims in city after city have been found to have criminal records.

In 2010, there were 11,078 firearm homicides in the United States and over 2,000 known gang-related killings, over 90% of which are carried out with firearms. Since 1981, Los Angeles alone has had 16,000 gang related homicides. That’s more than twice the number of Americans killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This is what Obamerica looks like. It’s a place where life is cheap and illegal guns are as available as illegal drugs. It’s the war that we aren’t talking about, because it’s easier to talk about the inanimate objects being used to fight that war.

There are, as John Edwards said, two Americas. America is a country that runs pretty well. And then there’s Obamerica. Not all of Obamerica is broken, but a lot of it is. America does not have a gun violence problem. Obamerica does. And Obamerica has a gun violence problem for the same reason that it has a drug problem and a broken family problem.

Democratic leaders and machines, combined with social workers and justice crusaders have run Obamerica into the ground. Obamerican cities used to be the homes of industry and progress. Now they’re places where young Black and Hispanic men kill each other in growing numbers.

America does not need gun control. It is a mostly law-abiding place. And gun control cannot help Obamerica. Not when its murder rate is driven by gangs who have no trouble obtaining anything; whether it’s legal in the United States or not.

This country does not need to have a conversation about how many bullets should go in a clip. It does need to have a conversation about how many parents should go in a family. It needs to talk about the ghettos of Obamerica and have a serious conversation about broken families and generational dependency.

Obama has become a role model to millions of people in the black community. If anyone can address these problems, it’s him. But instead of trying to solve the problems of Obamerica, instead of doing something about the high levels of unemployment, the broken families and the glamorization of drug dealing and violent crime, he wimped out and picked a fight with rural America.

AIDS prevention was sabotaged by the claim that the disease was a general problem spreading through the population. It wasn’t. Neither is gun violence.

Adam Lanza is as much of a poster boy for gun violence, as Ryan White was for AIDS. A better poster boy for gun violence might be Jay-Z, who boasts of having been a drug dealer and claims to have shot his brother at the age of 12. The drug dealer to millionaire rapper is the Horatio Alger story of Obamerica. And Jay-Z can be seen partying with Obama.

If Obama really wants to get serious about gun violence, then all he has to do is turn to the man standing next to him. But Obama, like every Chicago politician before him, don’t want to end the violence. The death toll is profitable, not just for rappers writing bad poetry about dealing drugs and shooting rivals, but for the politicians atop that heap who score money and gain power by using the problems of Obamerica as some sort of call to conscience for the rest of the country.

That’s what Obama is doing now. Hiding behind Newtown and adorable little kids is the grim specter of Obamerica’s death toll. It’s buried inside the gruesome figures of how many Americans are shot each year issued as an indictment against the entire country in general and gun owners in particular. But those numbers are not an indictment of America. They are an indictment of Democratic mayors and liberal social policy. They are an indictment of Obama.

We need to set aside the same old tired social justice rhetoric and have a serious conversation about what is wrong with New Orleans, Detroit and Chicago. And we need to do it before it’s too late.

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The Gun Is Civilized

self | 1/18/13 | Maj L. Caudill, USMC (Ret)

Posted on Friday, January 18, 2013 11:52:16 AM by Jerrybob

"The Gun Is Civilization" by Maj. L. Caudill USMC (Ret)

Human beings only have two ways to deal with one another: reason and force. If you want me to do something for you, you have a choice of either convincing me via argument, or force me to do your bidding under threat of force. Every human interaction falls into one of those two categories, without exception.

Reason or force, that's it. In a truly moral and civilized society, people exclusively interact through persuasion.

Force has no place as a valid method of social interaction and the only thing that removes force from the menu is the personal firearm, as paradoxical as it may sound to some.

When I carry a gun, you cannot deal with me by force. You have to use reason and try to persuade me, because I have a way to negate your threat or employment of force.

The gun is the only personal weapon that puts a 100-pound woman on equal footing with a 220-pound mugger, a 75-year old retiree on equal footing with a 19-year old gang banger, and a single guy on equal footing with a carload of drunken guys with baseball bats. The gun removes the disparity in physical strength, size, or numbers between a potential attacker and a defender.

There are plenty of people who consider the gun as the source of bad force equations. These are the people who think that we'd be more civilized if all guns were removed from society, because a firearm makes it easier for a [armed] mugger to do his job.

That, of course, is only true if the mugger's potential victims are mostly disarmed either by choice or by legislative fiat— it has no validity when most of a mugger's potential marks are armed.

People who argue for the banning of arms ask for automatic rule by the young, the strong, and the many, and that's the exact opposite of a civilized society. A mugger, even an armed one, can only make a successful living in a society where the state has granted him a force monopoly.

Then there's the argument that the gun makes confrontations lethal that otherwise would only result in injury. This argument is fallacious in several ways.

Without guns involved, confrontations are won by the physically superior party inflicting overwhelming injury on the loser. People who think that fists, bats, sticks, or stones don't constitute lethal force, watch too much TV, where people take beatings and come out of it with a bloody lip at worst. The fact that the gun makes lethal force easier works solely in favor of the weaker defender, not the stronger attacker. If both are armed, the field is level.

The gun is the only weapon that's as lethal in the hands of an octogenarian as it is in the hands of a weight lifter. It simply wouldn't work as well as a force equalizer if it wasn't both lethal and easily employable.

When I carry a gun, I don't do so because I am looking for a fight, but because I'm looking to be left alone. The gun at my side means that I cannot be forced, only persuaded. I don't carry it because I'm afraid, but because it enables me to be unafraid. It doesn't limit the actions of those who would interact with me through reason, only the actions of those who would do so by force.

It removes force from the equation... and that's why carrying a gun is a civilized act.

The Obama Hat Trick: Three Hockey Sticks (American Thinker)

 

By Greg Richards

While the solution to cutting spending is going to be tough, our spending problem is not hard to understand. Chart I shows federal spending as a percent of GDP from the Eisenhower administration through estimated numbers for fiscal 2012, which ended in September. The Eisenhower administration is a good starting point for post-war budgets because it is the first period of budgetary normality following World War II, demobilization, and the Korean War. Spending as a percent of GDP gives a crisp number which is comparable over long periods of time.

Average spending for the federal budget as a percent of GDP from Eisenhower through Bush was 20.0%. In its first year, the Obama administration blew out the budget to 25% of GDP. That was when the Democrats controlled both Houses of Congress. In order to lock in the 2009 level of spending, which included the allegedly temporary stimulus, the Senate has not passed a budget since April 2009, even though the Budget Act of 1974 requires it to do so every year (making Harry Reid a scofflaw).

The government has been funded with continuing resolutions, which means that the current services budget is approved for the next year. The current services budget does not mean that the same money will be spent next year as this year, but rather that the same level of services will be maintained, including increased claimants for entitlements, pay increases, inflation adjustments, and, for many programs, built-in increments based on population growth. Expenditures for fiscal 2012, which ended September 30, 2012, came down to an estimated 23.1% of GDP, but it is not clear that that is a trend. We will have to see when we get estimates for spending in the current fiscal year and for the GDP over the same period.

Obama did not run in the last election as "the 25% man." He certainly did not run on restructuring spending, instead qualitatively expanding the relative size of the federal government from its post-war baseline and commensurately reducing the relative contribution of the private sector in the composition of GDP even though it is the private sector that must carry the load of government.

Want to see something that will curl your hair? Chart II shows federal borrowing as a percentage of the federal tax revenues, meaning how much borrowing we are doing each year as compared to how much revenue we are raising from taxes.

What Chart II shows is that we borrowed over 40% over taxes raised in fiscal 2012! This means that taxes would have had to be 40% higher than they were last year to balance the budget. And remember, we are not at war in the sense of World War II, nor are we building a stairway to heaven -- meaning investing in some great national enterprise. This is just the day-to-day spending of the government -- just a day at the office.

What does the Obama administration plan to do about it? Denounce the Republicans for wanting to get it under control and increase the pay of the federal workforce, which Obama just announced.

Want to see the effect of all this spending? Chart III shows the increase in gross federal debt (there is another calculation for federal debt, netting out the Social Security Trust Fund, which the government calls "debt held by the public," but we are not using that here).

As Will Hunting says in the movie Good Will Hunting, "you like apples? How 'bout them apples?"

What will become of us? Nothing good if this continues. The mechanism of financial ruin will be a collapse in the value of the dollar, perhaps occasioned by a return of the rate of interest the government pays on its debt to a normal level. Currently, due to the unique circumstances of the slow growth world economy, the continued safe haven status of the U.S., and the Fed's quantitative easing, interest rates are at the abnormally low level of about 1.8% on the total federal debt. Every 1% increase in the interest rate the federal government pays on its debt would add $125 billion to the budget. An increase of 500 basis points, which would be large but not unprecedented, would add about $600 billion to federal expenditures simply to service the debt. That could push the deficit to $2 trillion a year.

It will not happen right away, because we are not in extremis -- yet -- and the world has no good alternative to the reserve and transaction status of the dollar -- yet. But if that terrible day should ever come, it will come suddenly, and then Humpty-Dumpty will not be able to be put together again -- meaning the currency, not the U.S. of A, which would stumble along in some form, but not the one we know now. The government would issue a new currency, effectively default on these debts, and the game would start over, but with tumbleweeds blowing through a lot of streets. Also by that time we would have finished dismantling our military, a project which the administration is embarking on now in order to grab all federal spending for welfare programs in their various forms -- i.e., abandoning its one true constitutional duty to chase the socialist mirage that destroyed so many countries in the last century and saved none.

The question with the Obama administration is always (1) does it know what it is doing or (2) doesn't it? And then wondering which answer is worse. The effect is the same.

But let's not fool ourselves. A lot of people in the country have come to depend on this spending. Cutting it back will not be pretty, nor can it be done all at once. In round numbers, spending needs to be brought back to 20% of GDP, which is historically what the tax base has supported through both the high tax rates of the Eisenhower era and the much lower tax rates of the Reagan era.

The "easiest" way to bring the country's finances under control is to hold the absolute dollar spending -- not the "current services budget" with its built-in increases, but actual dollar spending -- flat for eight years. With reasonable economic growth, that would more or less balance the budget. The only problem with that program is that 10,000 baby-boomers are retiring a day, with their claims on Social Security and Medicare plus the increasing cost of medical care itself.

Getting spending under control would mean at the least means-testing those programs. That would be only a down-payment, perhaps solving 30% of the problem. The rest would have to be done with a sharp pencil. The right mental image is that the administration clears out at least one floor of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next-door to the White House, turns it into cubicles, and brings in an army of accountants to go over every item in the budget.

There are three major battles over the next two months on the financial future of the country: (1) the debt ceiling, (2) the second round on the sequester, and (3) the continuing resolution to keep funding the government, given that the Senate won't pass a budget. Since the administration refuses to concede that we have a spending problem, the debt ceiling is really the only tool the Republicans have to get its attention -- the proverbial club to hit the mule on the head. The Dem strategy is to pretend that there is no problem and denounce the Republicans for bringing it up.

This budget battle is a turning point for republican government as significant as Caesar crossing the Rubicon and ending the Roman Republic. Or, as Lincoln put it, determining whether "government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth."

Are Guns the Problem?

Townhall.com ^ | January 16, 2013 | Walter E. Williams

Posted on Wednesday, January 16, 2013 6:49:27 AM by Kaslin

When I attended primary and secondary school -- during the 1940s and '50s -- one didn't hear of the kind of shooting mayhem that's become routine today. Why? It surely wasn't because of strict firearm laws. My replica of the 1902 Sears mail-order catalog shows 35 pages of firearm advertisements. People just sent in their money, and a firearm was shipped.

Dr. John Lott, author of "More Guns, Less Crime," reports that until the 1960s, some New York City public high schools had shooting clubs where students competed in citywide shooting contests for university scholarships. They carried their rifles to school on the subways and, upon arrival, turned them over to their homeroom teacher or the gym coach and retrieved their rifles after school for target practice. Virginia's rural areas had a long tradition of high-school students going hunting in the morning before school and sometimes storing their rifles in the trunks of their cars that were parked on school grounds. Often a youngster's 12th or 14th birthday present was a shiny new .22-caliber rifle, given to him by his father.

Today's level of civility can't match yesteryear's. Many of today's youngsters begin the school day passing through metal detectors. Guards patrol school hallways, and police cars patrol outside. Despite these measures, assaults, knifings and shootings occur. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, in 2010 there were 828,000 nonfatal criminal incidents in schools. There were 470,000 thefts and 359,000 violent attacks, of which 91,400 were serious. In the same year, 145,100 public-school teachers were physically attacked, and 276,700 were threatened.

What explains today's behavior versus yesteryear's? For well over a half-century, the nation's liberals and progressives -- along with the education establishment, pseudo-intellectuals and the courts -- have waged war on traditions, customs and moral values. These people taught their vision, that there are no moral absolutes, to our young people. To them, what's moral or immoral is a matter of convenience, personal opinion or a consensus.

During the '50s and '60s, the education establishment launched its agenda to undermine lessons children learned from their parents and the church with fads such as "values clarification." So-called sex education classes are simply indoctrination that sought to undermine family and church strictures against premarital sex. Lessons of abstinence were ridiculed and considered passé and replaced with lessons about condoms, birth control pills and abortions. Further undermining of parental authority came with legal and extralegal measures to assist teenage abortions with neither parental knowledge nor consent.

Customs, traditions, moral values and rules of etiquette, not laws and government regulations, are what make for a civilized society. These behavioral norms -- transmitted by example, word of mouth and religious teachings -- represent a body of wisdom distilled through ages of experience, trial and error, and looking at what works. The importance of customs, traditions and moral values as a means of regulating behavior is that people behave themselves even if nobody's watching. Police and laws can never replace these restraints on personal conduct so as to produce a civilized society. At best, the police and criminal justice system are the last desperate line of defense for a civilized society. The more uncivilized we become the more laws that are needed to regulate behavior.

Many customs, traditions and moral values have been discarded without an appreciation for the role they played in creating a civilized society, and now we're paying the price. What's worse is that instead of a return to what worked, people want to replace what worked with what sounds good, such as zero-tolerance policies in which bringing a water pistol, drawing a picture of a pistol, or pointing a finger and shouting "bang-bang" produces a school suspension or arrest. Seeing as we've decided that we should rely on gun laws to control behavior, what should be done to regulate clubs and hammers? After all, FBI crime statistics show that more people are murdered by clubs and hammers than rifles and shotguns.

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Gun Control Down Under

Crime and Disarmament

Sultan Knish ^ | Jan 10, 2013 | Daniel Greenfield

Posted on Friday, January 11, 2013 7:41:44 AM by expat1000

In Washington D.C., the office of the Honorable Joseph Biden was busy phoning up everyone from Mothers Against Pointy Things to the Gay Communist Gun Club of America to Wal-Mart to invite them down for a serious no-holds-barred discussion about doing to the Bill of Rights what his boss had done to the economy.

Meanwhile over in Chicago, the 13th corpse was being scraped off the sidewalk. In just nine days, Obama's hometown, one of them anyway, was already 15% ahead of last year's whopping murder rate. East of Second City, in the city that would be Chicago if it wasn't for a lot of money and a Republican mayor, one of the city's liberal judges gave civil rights activists a late Christmas present with a verdict against the NYPD's 'Stop and Frisk" program in the Bronx.

The Bronx is the part of New York City voted most likely to be Detroit. An ironic fate for a borough that built the city's biggest zoo and botanical garden as a way of keeping the riffraff out of what was once an exclusive area. It's the place where you are mostly likely to shoot or be shot at. The Bronx is the fourth smallest borough of the five, but it's number one in murders, rapes and robberies.

New York's Finest commute to work from Staten Island, where the homicide rate is less than half that of the Bronx. In the 40th Precinct (you may know its neighbor, the 41st Precinct from the movie, Fort Apache, The Bronx) last year there were 12 murders, 21 rapes, 476 robberies, 387 felony assaults, 1,337 misdemeanor assaults, 62 shooting victims and a partridge in a pear tree.

That's not too bad considering that there were 72 murders there in 1990. In 1998, after 4 years of Giuliani, 72 murders had become 15. The two forces that transformed the 40th from a really bad place to just a bad place were aggressive policework and gentrification. The aggressive policework wasn't pretty, but it made the gentrification possible and kept New York City from turning into Newark or Chicago.

Stop and Frisk, which is just what it sounds like, allowed police to stop suspects and frisk them just on suspicion that they might be up to something bad. It's one of those programs that upsets people on both sides of the aisle, but it happens to work because it lets police stop gangbangers before they bang and lowers the murder rate to something you can actually live through.

Civil rights groups have been protesting against Stop and Frisk for years because it's racist, in the sense that it tends to take place outside dilapidated Bronx apartment buildings rather than Upper East Side high rises. For the 40th Precinct, civil rights group statistics show that 17,690 stops were made, and of those stopped, 9.200 were black, 6,039 were Hispanic, 119 were white, 63 were Asian and 15 were American Indians. Considering the lack of major tribes in the five boroughs, it is a testament to the NYPD's dedication to diversity that they were able to find and frisk that many Native Americans.

Since the only white people in the 40th are hipsters who think Williamsburg is over and went looking for somewhere edgier to set up their metal working studios, these numbers are not too surprising. But to professional civil rights activists who wake up in the morning to the soothing sounds of WBAI's hosts screaming about racism and drones (and racist drones) in between commercials for send us money, this, like everything else, including the sun rising in the morning (followed by Al Jazeera English News on WBAI 5:30 to 6 AM Monday through Friday, on Sunday stay tuned instead for Cosmik Debris), is proof of racism.

Water dripping down eventually bores a hole in a rock. Civil rights lawyers suing and screaming long enough eventually dismantles a police force. Crime is rising again in New York City, which makes it more dangerous to move to some formerly dilapidated part of the city and set up shop in an abandoned warehouse while constructing giant jagged metal figurines as a protest against capitalism that will one day decorate the lawn of a corporate office park.

Bronx crime, like most urban crime, is driven by gangs. The Black Assassins, Majestic Warlocks and the Black Muslim Five Percenters are one of the 70 street gangs in New York's own Detroit. While civil rights activists call for fighting gang violence with peace treaties and afterschool programs, there are really only two things that work. Either a police state of the kind you will find in the Bronx where the cops monitor the Twitter and Facebook postings of gang members, and their text messages, or an armed population that is capable of defending itself against them.

Liberals invariably choose none of the above.

What goes on in the 40th isn't just a New York issue. It's nationwide. Even while Obama preps a new nationwide gun ban, as if the rest of the country were Chicago or the Bronx, his Justice Department has waged a private war against local law enforcement. The NYPD and its Stop and Frisk policy was just one of the targets.

In the 90s, the Democrats learned that they could be tough on crime or they wouldn't even be elected dogcatcher. It was a lesson that the humiliation of Michael Dukakis drove home, and no matter how often Democrats denounced the Willie Horton ad, they took its lesson to heart. At least until now.

While Obama pitches gun control, his Attorney General has undermined local law enforcement at every turn. It would seem that the only crime that Obama wants to fight is the crime of owning the type of rifle that those experienced hunters, Barack Obama and Diane Feinstein, have decided that no hunter needs. But the idea that gun control is a substitute for law enforcement is laughably insane, even by Chicago standards.

Urban mayors like to believe that cracking down on rural sporting goods stores will end the killing. It won't. The real gun culture isn't at gun shows and Wal-Marts, it's down in the 40th where kids grow up listening to 50 Cent and where pointing your own gun sideways is a rite of passage. There's no place in the United States where you can legally sell heroin, but heroin use is still off the charts in the Bronx. Gun control nationwide will be just as effective as heroin control in the Bronx.

Gang members go to school, deal drugs, step outside, recover a gun from an underage female groupie, shoot down a rival, and then the process repeats. You can crack down on it with a police state where cops make arrests to keep down reports and match a Compstat quota. Or you can shut down enforcement and hope that terrorizing rural gun owners will somehow fix what's wrong with the Bronx. That's Obama's Plan A. If there's a Plan B, we haven't heard it yet.

When you scuttle both law enforcement and gun ownership, then what remains is the hell that the country descended into in the seventies when civil rights lawyers got their way and major cities, including New York City, became unlivable.

In 1965, there were 836 murders in New York at a rate of 4.5 per 100,000 people. In 1976, the number of murders had increased to a grisly 1,969 to a rate of 7.2. By 1993, the last year of David Dinkins, New York City's first black Democrat mayor, they peaked at 2,420 at a 13.3 rate. Only a little below Chicago's current 15.65 rate. By Giuliani's second year in office, the city was down to 1,550 murders, a low that it hadn't seen since 1970. By the time he left office, there had only been 960 murders at a rate of 5.0 per 100,000 people. Giuliani had taken the city back to 1965 and its murder rate today is, incredibly, at the national average for the northeast.

The New York City success story was the triumph of prosperity and the police state. With enough cops on the street, given a free hand, New York City could have the murder rate of liberal paradises like Austin or Seattle. Giuliani made it safe for liberals to move back to New York City and play artist, uptown banker with social justice commitments, aspiring actress, foodie, tech guru or random trendy urbanite. And once they were there, the golden fountain began to flow, crime rates continued falling and the city could be taken off life support.

Reagan cleaned up the economy and allowed liberals to begin safely getting rich again. Giuliani cleaned up the city and allowed liberals to safely walk its streets. Both men fulfilled the traditional function of the Republican as the paternal figure who steps in when baby makes a mess and cleans it up while allowing baby to believe that it was done by magic.

Liberals cannot come to terms with what happened in New York City, because it would force them to acknowledge that their lifestyle is made possible by either right wing suburban cops violating civil rights or by fleeing to sheltered cities with low minority populations. And with a new Carter in office, the cycle of the seventies is coming full circle again, not just militarily or economically, but also when it comes to crime rates.

Urban liberals like to believe that it was unthinking city planners and the automobile that destroyed the city, when it was actually them. The city planners are still unthinking and the automobiles are still motoring, but the cities are back only to the extent that law enforcement has undone some of their worst mistakes. Now with an urban liberal in the White House, the mistakes are being repeated again, backed once again by the power of the Federal government.

The rural area is protected by the 2nd Amendment and the urban area by the police state. The liberal, who is only interested in enforcing laws against real criminals like people who fill in swamps or make politically incorrect jokes, would like to take away the firearms of the rural gun owner and dismantle the law enforcement defenses of the urban area. Taking away the guns will not fix the problem. All it will do is allow the gangs, who will always have the guns, to dominate urban and rural areas.

Down in the 40th, the boys in blue still walk the streets as they do in so many other cities. It's a thin line here and everywhere else where everyone wants more cops, but can't afford to pay them. And you can't put a cop on every single block of every single city and town, not to mention farmhouse. Gangs, many of them even more dangerous than the ones you'll find in the Bronx, are spreading across the country. Stopping them will take more than the police state that Bloomberg still oversees.

The old urban lesson of the seventies is that the difference between civilization and the jungle is security. And there is no substitute for security, whether it's the security of one man with a gun, or a very expensive police department of men with guns carrying out the marching orders of statistical analysts.

The political left has forgotten the lesson of Willie Horton in its arrogance and its base of metal working artists in converted warehouses has forgotten the lessons of that old Times Square that they never visited, but still nostalgically pine for. And as they work to disarm the people and dismantle police forces, it is inevitable that it is a lesson that they will be forced to learn again.

For People who Wonder Why Grown Men Fear the Government

OVERVIEW OF THE DAVIDIAN MASSACRE
by Carol Moore

I was one of millions of Americans who, after seeing the April 19, 1993 burning of the Branch Davidian church outside of Waco, Texas wondered: Did these people really commit mass suicide, as the government alleged, despite the clear evidence on television that the fire started after a tank crashed into one part of the building? Were they really as insane as the government claimed? Why did they have to be attacked with massive, military-like force 51 days earlier? What is the truth?
After two years of research I came to the following conclusions, documented in my book The Davidian Massacre published in late 1995. After the book came out more evidence surfaced that back up allegations -- and answer questions -- presented in the book. I review both below. See the links above for the book's online version and other information.
On February 28,1993 overly aggressive and highly militarized agents of BATF set out to put on a "big show" to increase their budgets and prestige by attacking the Branch Davidian religious group outside of Waco, Texas. Six months earlier, agents had spurned David Koresh's attempts to cooperate with their investigation of his gun business by inviting them to see his guns. On February 28, when he came to the front door and tried to cooperate, reckless agents shot him and mortally wounded his father-in-law. Other agents started shooting from helicopters, killing four Davidians. Agents probably assassinated another Davidian who approached Mount Carmel later that day. And so began a 51 day standoff.
Davidians and their on-site attorney made it clear to FBI negotiators that evidence of illegal gunfire in the highest roofs and walls of Mount Carmel would lead to prosecution of agents for murder. One of the Davidians' motivations for refusing to surrender was their demands for assurances this evidence would not be destroyed by BATF investigators after they left the premises. It was not until the end of March that outside attorneys told them that Texas Rangers, who they trusted, and not BATF, would be investigating.
FBI Hostage Rescue Team member hearing of these claims, and bent on revenge for the deaths of four BATF agents killed by Davidian defenders during the February 28th BATF attack, did their best to sabotage negotiations. They escalated harassment of Davidians every time individuals left Mount Carmel, turning off power, faking tank attacks, turning on bright lights and loud music. Finally, distrustful Davidians stopped coming out at all.
At the same time agents began a campaign of lies to Attorney General Janet Reno about the status of negotiations, the alleged beating of children, the safety of CS gas, the rules of engagement, and other issues, tricking her into approving their gas and tank assault. They set it up to make sure that the attack would lead to the destruction of the building, its incriminating evidence–and scores of inconvenient Davidian witnesses to BATF crimes.
On April 19, 1993, as the tank assault began, FBI agents falsely claimed that Davidians broke their phone, making negotiations impossible. Davidians believe a tank broke the line. They claimed Davidians shot at them, giving them an excuse to speed up their plan to massively gas Davidian and rip apart Mount Carmel with tanks. Davidians pleaded with gestures and signs to have their phones fixed--they were terrified of being shot or run over by tanks if they started exiting. For even as tanks rammed the building, the FBI lied, calling out over loudspeakers, "This is not an assault."
After six hours of tank attacks, a fire started, probably by the last tank attack knocking over a lantern–but possibly by an FBI incendiary device at the front of the building. Infrared (FLIR) video evidence strongly suggests an agent in an FBI tank lobbed an incendiary device into the back of the building after the first fire, starting a second fire. Wind whipped fire swept through the tinderbox of a building. Most Davidians were trapped by debris and collapsed stairwells on the second floor or inside the concrete room. There is evidence on FLIR video that FBI or Delta force personnel shot at least 70 shots at the back of building during the fire, probably to stop Davidians trying to escape. There even is evidence, dramatized convincingly in the new film “Waco: A New Revelation” that FBI or Delta Force personnel sneaked into the building and placed a shaped charge on top of the concrete room to kill Davidian leaders who they believed were hiding there. Nineteen men, thirty-four women and twenty-three children died that day.
The trial of eleven survivors was a travesty of prosecutorial and judicial misconduct. Nine Davidians received a total of 243 years in sentences. The Supreme Court has agreed to hear their appeals on the 30 year sentences the judge meted out to them for carrying a gun during the commission of a crime–even though the jury found them innocent of that crime, murder of federal agents. He also failed to tell the jury they could find the Davidians innocent of aiding and abetting voluntary manslaughter by reason of defense, something some jurors declare they would have done! On June 4, 2000 the seven Davidians still imprisoned, aided by noted Second Amendment attorney Stephen Halbrook, won their Supreme Court appeal and their sentences were cut to a total of 105 years. Six of the seven were released from prison in 2006, one in 2007.
In 1995, after two weeks of hearings, Congress announced it had gotten out all the truth –and promised it had gotten federal agents under control. My book reviews many reasons that was not true. For details about continuing revelations until the end of the year 2000 see Waco News.
In 1999, pushed by evidence from Davidian civil suit investigators and attorneys, as well as film-makers, "Waco" made the headlines again. “Ex-agent says device fired at Waco compound,” “[Texas Rangers] official says Army force present at Waco siege,” “Reno Says FBI Misled Her About Waco Arms,” “Reno and Freeh Agree on New Independent Probe of Waco” and “Independent Counsel and Congress Investigate Waco” blared across newspapers front pages and web pages of America. Of course these weren’t “revelations” to most Waco researchers, government critics and Davidian attorneys–or to people who had seen the Academy Award-nominated and Emmy winning film “Waco: the Rules of Engagement.” Congress promised yet another round of Waco hearings but in the end only a few Senators took the matter seriously.
Then President Bill Clinton appointed former Senator John Danforth to investigate. Danforth believed the FBI, conducted questionable forensic tests, and his year 2000 report again exonerated FBI agents. The only prosecution Danforth brought was against the federal prosecutor who allowed a Waco investigator too free an access to evidence, prompting the 1999 revelation that FBI agents had used pyrotechnic devices on April 19th, despite their previous denials. (The prosecutor earlier had engaged in coverups of evidence of BATF agents' crimes against Davidians, so we shouldn't feel too badly for him.) He claimed to be a whistleblower -- thereby making sure the government knew he could expose a lot more cover ups -- and received only probation after plea bargaining.
Why has there been such a cover up of the truth about Waco? Simply put, the truth is too terrible for the American people to hear: federal agents twice attacked and murdered a total of 82 civilians, mostly women, children and the elderly–half of them people of color. And the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches of our “Constitutional Republic” let them get away with it. All branches have a vested interest for finding federal agents innocent of all crimes–protection of their own perks and privileges.
The truth would undermine Americans’ faith in their political system. Waco film-maker Michael McNulty has revealed some in Congress fear “The truth would just inflame the crazies.” Americans must demand prosecution of all responsible agents and financial reparations to the Davidian prisoners who spent more than a dozen years in prison, victims of government crimes against them.

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More on Guns and Violent Crimes

http://www.youtube.com/embed/Ooa98FHuaU0?feature=player_embedded

Schools Need to Change to be Safe

http://setourchildrenfree.com/blog.html

01/07/2013

I walked a mile to my elementary school when I was a kid, a mile home for lunch, a mile back in the afternoon, and a mile home after school. Four miles total every school day, rain, snow, or shine. No, I am not trying to say how tough it was when I was in school. I’m trying to illustrate that these days, no parent in their right mind would let their kids walk a mile to school by themselves in any neighborhood unless they had no choice. It would be considered dangerous and irresponsible to not either drive their child to school, or have a trusted adult hover over them until the school bus arrives. My point is that we can’t live in the past, and we have to change with the times as society changes. When I was a kid, there were no school shootings, even though kids brought guns to school and left them in the principal’s office so they could hunt squirrels on the way home. In fact, when I was in college, we kept handguns and rifles in our rooms with the full knowledge and permission of school officials, and not one round was ever fired on school grounds. We can argue all day about why we have so many evil wackos who decide to kill innocent children, but we’re stuck with them for the present, and pretending they’re not out there is playing a foolish and deadly form of Russian roulette. Yet that is exactly the game gun control advocates insist that we play by mandating that all schools be gun-free zones.
What has changed since I went to school? Not the gun. As I pointed out earlier, guns were even more prevalent in schools back then, yet there were no shootings. What has changed is the kinds of people that roam our society. It’s a fact that about 80% of these mass murderers were under the influence of psychiatric drugs – a fact that the news media tries to ignore. If we’re looking for a common factor in these shootings that was not present a generation ago, look no further than the over-prescribing of anti-depressant medications. So why are we trying to regulate the gun? The cities and states that have the strictest gun control laws also have the highest rates of gun violence, and the states with liberal concealed carry laws have seen the greatest drop in violent crime. That is the inconvenient truth, and the statistics are too often lost in this emotional debate. An armed populace is a deterrent to violent crime, not the reason for it.
And it should be clear to anyone who has a brain, that in every one of these shootings, the shooter broke multiple gun laws, which illustrates yet another obvious point – criminals don’t obey gun laws. All gun control laws do is disarm law abiding citizens, which makes the criminal’s job that much easier. Even many countries that prohibit gun ownership entirely have high rates of gun violence because (repeat after me) CRIMINALS DON’T OBEY THE LAW, and they will always be able to get guns just like they can always get illegal drugs. So if gun control is not the problem, they why do the usual suspects demand more gun control before the dead victims’ bodies are even cold? It’s because their real agenda is not child safety at all, but disarming the public. If you doubt that, just listen to what the leftist elites say when they’re being honest (a rarity), and they’ll readily admit this. Notice, however, that they don’t think these rules should apply to them, as evidenced by the bodyguards who regularly accompany the media anchors and Hollywood celebrities, and of course, the Secret Service agents assigned to our top government officials.
So what’s the answer? I’ll answer that by asking a simple question: Why do these shooters head for schools instead of police stations when they want to commit mass murder? The answer is obvious, although the news media will try to hide even the obvious. Case in point – Did you hear about the shooting in a San Antonio movie theater two days after the Sandy Hook shooting? Probably not, because it is one of many instances, including the Ft. Hood shooting, and the Colorado Springs church shooting, where a single armed good guy (or in these three instances, a good girl) with a gun, stopped a bad guy with a gun. Clearly, all of these mass murderers have one thing in common - they choose targets where they know they will meet no resistance, i.e. a gun-free zone. Arm and train school personnel and/or station private armed security/police in our schools and you will change the equation. Don’t tell me we can’t afford it, because most middle and high schools already have school resource officers there full time, and we spend much more federal money on other useless education nonsense like Race to the Top stimulus funds. Many school districts have already implemented this policy without any additional funds. And don’t tell me teachers and principals can’t defend their schools with guns, because they’ve been doing it very effectively for years in Israel and Thailand, where they face down determined terrorists, not just the occasional wacko.
Also lost in the emotion of this debate is why citizens need to be armed in the first place. The 250 million people who were killed by their own government in the 20th Century could answer that for us if they could talk. Thanks to Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Pol Pot, and other dictators who believed in gun control, those quarter billion folks will not be here to testify. That’s about five or six times as many people killed in all of the wars of that century by the way. In other words, citizens should rightly fear their own government more than a foreign invader. The Supreme Court has ruled that the Second Amendment recognizes an individual right to bear arms, but the right of self-defense precedes even the Constitution. However, the Second Amendment is not about self defense or even hunting, even though those are legitimate reasons for owning firearms. The Founders made it abundantly clear that the Second Amendment was about preserving freedom by assuring that the government of the people and by the people would stay that way. Guns were to be our insurance policy against tyranny by our own government, and no less a liberal than Hubert H. Humphrey admitted the same. Whenever this particular argument against gun control is raised, it is usually dismissed for the reason that gun owners wouldn’t stand a chance against the might of the American military. For those who believe this, I would simply submit two close-to-home examples: the American Revolution and the Vietnam War. History is filled with many other grass roots uprisings where a small, outnumbered and outgunned, but determined populace, overcame enormous odds to overthrow what they perceived as an unjust government. I am not suggesting we should start a revolution, because other options are available, and that is always the last option. But thanks to the Second Amendment, it is an option.

Why You NEVER Trust The Media On Guns (Karl Denninger–Market-Ticker)

 

Here you go folks -- proof, in their own words and deeds:

(Reuters) - A suburban New York newspaper that ignited a furor by publishing the identities of thousands of residents who hold gun licenses has hired armed security to guard its staff after receiving an intimidating e-mail, a police report said.

Among a "large amount of negative correspondence" that White Plains, New York-based Journal News has received since publishing permit holders' names was one e-mail in which the sender "wondered what would get in her mail next," according to a Clarkstown, New York, police report obtained by Reuters on Wednesday.

The police investigated and determined that the email did not contain a specific threat and therefore was not illegal.

However, the paper's editor decided to hire a private armed security firm because they were concerned about their safety.

Gee, so what do ordinary people do when they are concerned about their safety, but don't have the money to hire an expensive private security firm?

They go buy a gun -- or three.

So here we have the proof, in their own words and deeds, that this newspaper believes that arms deter violence without actually being fired.

And that, incidentally, is the entire point that those of us who are called "gun nuts" have made all along. The mere presence of a firearm in the hands of a good guy, without needing to be fired, deters crime.

It in fact deters crime over a million times a year by some people's statistics, and even if you accept the numbers of The Brady Center, which is a hard-core "no gun" advocacy organization they admit that ten times as many crimes are deterred as are murders committed!

And they're understating the case -- by 10:1 -- according to less-biased (or oppositely-biased, depending on your point of view) sources.

But let's put this in the proper perspective -- The Brady Center appears to be perfectly ok with 100,000 or more people being raped or murdered every single year simply because they hate guns. Incidentally, that's a city of roughly the size of Davenport Iowa or West Palm Beach here in Florida.

If you're a woman who might be one of those victims of rape if the Brady Center gets their way how do you feel about that?

And let's not mince words -- since you can only execute someone once, at the point a felon decides to commit murder all the other crimes, including the ones he commits to get the gun(s) he uses, are "free."

The paper has thus joined Mayor Bloomberg, who never has fewer than about a half-dozen heavily armed guards around him at all times, President Obama who has an entire branch of the military and a complete private police force around him at all times, Obama's family (who has something like 18 armed guards at his daughters' school -- not counting their Secret Service detail!) and Michael Moore who had one of his (armed) bodyguards try to carry a firearm into NY's JFK Airport (and get arrested trying to do so.)

People still want to argue about high-capacity magazines and "assault rifles", but the fact of the matter is that I'm reasonably sure that the paper's hired security firm isn't using single-shot derringers for their security. No, they are almost-certainly using modern high-capacity pistols -- all of which can accept magazines with more than 10 rounds in them.

And frankly, if you could conceal one, I suspect you'd rather carry an AR-15 than any of those. It's hard to conceal something like that, however, when you're walking through WalMart.

For those who say that "good guys don't need such a weapon" can you please explain the fact that all the cops seem to have those "evil black .223 rifles" in their patrol cars? And as for them being "overpowered" and the incessant questions as to "why you need all those rounds" go ask a cop about the jacked-on-drugs ******* who absorbs a half-dozen rounds and does not stop attacking.

See, the point of shooting someone (if you have to) is to stop them from doing whatever felonious thing led you to shoot them in the first place. And unlike the movies where people instantly die when they're shot it is rather common for you to have to shoot a bad guy lots of times before he ceases whatever he was doing that led you to shoot the first time, especially if he's jacked up on drugs. The only thing that frequently stops those assailants is when they run out of blood pressure -- and that either takes a lot of holes or a lot of time. Further, under the stress of an actual situation where you need to use that weapon in self-defense you're rather likely to miss at least some of the time.

If you want to know why anyone would "need" a 30 round magazine, here's one example (out of thousands.) This was a jackass who killed two police officers in this area and ultimately was stopped by the police. He took 15 verified rounds according to the autopsy report from police fire before shooting himself in the head, and the police fired many more that missed.

That's right -- after absorbing 15 rounds he still had enough fight left in him to commit suicide.

The real world is not as depicted in the movies.

Yes, the first shot (that hits) is often lethal -- eventually. Unfortunately "eventually" means 2, 3, 5 or 10 minutes later a good part of the time and the guy assaulting you can kill you several times over in those 2, 3 5 or 10 minutes.

The entire point of shooting a bad guy in the first place was to stop his attempt to make you dead. If you can't shoot him enough times to accomplish that then your attempt at self-defense has failed, irrespective of whether the guy assaulting you dies as well.

So if you ask me "how many rounds do you need?" my answer is "One more than it takes to stop, at this instant, however many felons are assaulting me."

And since I cannot predict how many bad guys are going to come at one time nor can I predict how many of them will be on PCP, crack, meth or god-knows-what-else it's none of your damn business how many rounds someone chooses to carry around and whether they're in one magazine or three.

The point here is rather simple: The logical and indeed God-given correct response to a perceived threat to your safety by a superior force is to acquire the means of equalizing that force and if that perceived threat turns into an actual assault you then use the means of equalizing that force as many times as are necessary until the assault ceases. The more-capable you are in that regard the less-likely the assault will succeed.

The device known to assist you in this matter with the highest degree of reliability is called A Gun.

People don't buy guns because they want to commit violence. A person who wants to commit violent felonies doesn't give a damn about the law and will steal or otherwise illegally acquire all the guns he wants to use -- and then use them. It is particularly outrageous to argue over "gun control" in the context of murderers, since you can only give a criminal the needle or lock him up for life one time. Further, it's also silly to talk about magazine restrictions because with a bit of practice a bad guy can change them in a literal second or so.

The bottom line is that any restriction on firearms will be ignored by someone willing to commit murder -- whether it's one murder, 20.... or 77.

If you think not go speak with the people of Norway, a nation with some of the toughest gun laws anywhere. With absolutely nobody able to resist (because they had no lawfully-owned guns) a madman showed up at a youth camp and killed 77 people with both guns and bombs, injuring over 200. 69 people were shot and killed in no small part because nobody was able to equalize the force that the assailant unlawfully procured and used.

People buy guns because they don't want to be helpless victims at the hand of someone who they perceive may break the law, whether that person happens to be an anonymous email sender, someone who hates them politically or is a member of a tyrannical entity, whether private or governmental in nature.

And, as the statistics show, the more guns they buy the less-likely it is that the buyer will ever need to use one of them for any purpose other than target practice.

This is what the paper in NY has now documented as their factual belief, despite what they printed in their worthless fishwrapper, exactly as has Mayor Bloomberg, Dianne Feinstein, Nancy Pelosi and President Obama.