Get your own Free Home PageThe easiest way to resolve, in your own mind, the gun-control debate is to take this little test.
1. Do you believe that you have a right to live?
2. Do you believe that your spouse and children have a right to live?
3. If someone is threatening to kill you and your family, do you think that you have a right to defend yourself?
That's the objective, yes-or-no part of the quiz. Now here is one final essay question:
How will you defend yourself and your family if you are confronted by an armed intruder or intruders?
You could call 911 unless, as often happens these days, the intruders have taken the trouble to cut your telephone wires before they kick your door down. But if you did get the call off, you still have a problem:
The intruders are there in your house, and the police aren't.
The sad fact is that, because of logistics, police can't protect you. In more than 99 percent of the cases, by the time the police even get called -- and certainly by the time they arrive -- the crime has already been committed.
The hard truth is that, when you are confronted by a criminal, you're in the same situation today you would have been in if you had lived alone on an isolated ranch on the American frontier. There's nobody at the dance but you and the criminal. You have to fight. You win, you live; you lose, you die. Simple as that. No alternative unless you want to depend on your begging and some thug's mercy. But in serious encounters, by the time the cavalry gets there, there will be dead and wounded lying around. The question you have to answer is: Do you want to be among the dead or among the living?
Now you may suppose that you are a glib talker and when some crack-crazed thug sticks a gun in your face, you can reason with him. That's a very far-fetched supposition. I would bet on the thug. Any honest street cop will tell you that the predators roaming today are far more dangerous than even mob hit men of the past. The hit men would never kill without a reason. Today's thugs kill on a whim for no rational reason at all. And many of them will kill everyone there, including babies and children.
The neo-totalitarians -- sometimes known as the gun-control crowd -- will repeat the big lie that a gun kept for self-protection is more likely to injure you or your family than a criminal. The flawed study that is based on was discredited years ago.
If you take a gun to a gunfight, you may not win; if you don't, you will surely lose. Credible studies by respected scholars with no bias show what common sense tells you -- that thousands of Americans every day save themselves from criminal harm by using a firearm, most of the time without having to shoot.
To me, there is no more outrageous insult or bigger example of stupidity than a government that is such a gross failure at preventing criminal, armed attacks on the population that it would take the position that the answer is to disarm the future victims. I take it as a given that any politician who proposes to deny honest people the means to defend their lives and the lives of their children is too evil or too stupid to tolerate in public office.
Some guy once wrote that a characteristic of Southerners is that they take things personally. I know that's true in my case. When I hear some politician talk gun control, I think, ``You (expletive deleted), you're endangering my children.''
You have a right to own a firearm. Don't let anyone take that right away from you. Use it.
It's hard for me to generate interest in most of the legislation pending before Congress. Nearly all of it is un-Constitutional. And neither party is sincere.
Take the flap over health maintenance organizations.
Democrats are in a quandary over whether to try to solve the alleged problem or put something up the Republicans will kill so they, the Democrats, can campaign on the issue. Republicans have put up a bill just to head off the Democrats' ploy. Neither, I think, gives a darn about any real problems.
And both solutions would inject the government into private contracts.
To hear the politicians yapping today, you would think that they have forgotten that the purpose of a health maintenance organization is to save money by rationing medical care to its members. When you join an HMO, you sign a contract, and the contract spells out what the HMO will pay for and what it won't pay for.
Not long ago, the same politicians who are now yapping about the sins of HMOs were saying HMOs were the answer to rising sick-care costs. (We should stop using the incorrect term, health-care costs; health is cheap. It is sickness that costs money.)
The government is the reason you can't get sick on the cheap anymore. It has screwed up what was once a fine, private medical system. The system bungling politicians at all levels have succeeded in creating has all the worst features of socialism and capitalism -- high costs and bureaucracy -- and none of the benefits of either.
Every rule and regulation government imposes costs money to implement. Government-mandated paperwork alone costs a bundle. And all costs, of course, are passed on to the patients. Actually, you pay twice for government regulations. As a customer, you pay the cost of implementing and complying with them, and then you pay for them again in taxes to cover the costs of the bureaucracy that imposes and enforces them.
Insurance companies can no longer offer different policies to fit different budgets because the politicians, responding to special interests, mandate that the companies cover everything.
There is a law now that if a doctor accepts a private-paying patient, he can't accept a Medicare patient for two years. What totalitarian rot that is. What business is it of the government what kind of patients doctors serve?
The best thing Congress could do would be to get out of the health business completely, repeal every law it ever passed on the subject, including Medicare and Medicaid. Both systems are hopelessly corrupted and abused by everybody involved with them, including the beneficiaries. Both systems face the alternatives of bankruptcy or severely rationed health care at a very high cost. The only question for the politicians is how they can hide from their responsibility and blame their bad work on someone else.
Having lived before and after Medicaid and Medicare, I can tell you the medical safety net provided by private charity and local governments was better than the mess created by the federal government.
Of course, true reform won't happen. I have begun to believe that once a government passes a certain point away from liberty toward authoritarianism, away from competence toward incompetence, reform becomes impossible short of collapse or revolution. The vested interests in the current system overwhelm any opposition. And we may have passed that point of no reform a long time ago.
So, we just have to see how the game plays out. Eat your cake if you've got any.
I attended an all-day seminar on killing hosted by the Orlando Police Department. It was terrific. It was conducted for local police special weapons and tactics officers and critical-incident debriefing teams by retired Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, author of a most excellent book On Killing (Little Brown and Company).
I can summarize three of many interesting points made by Grossman (a paratrooper, Ranger, psychologist). He has decided to make killing his special field of study, which he has dubbed killology. The three points can be classified as good news, bad news and even worse news.
The good news is that the human species is as reluctant to kill a member of its own species as any of the other animal species.
The bad news is that armies now know how to do a crackerjack job of conditioning people to kill people.
The worst news is that the television and video-games industry are applying the same conditioning techniques to children. This is the only reasonable explanation for the worldwide increase in violence which, according to Grossman, is unprecedented in human history.
The increase in violence, by the way, is occurring not just in the United States but also in Europe and Canada.
Reducing natural reluctance to kill involves several techniques. Desensitization, which is what movies and television do to children, by exposing them to the infliction of pain and death as a form of entertainment. Conditioning people to see violence as a solution to a problem. Group and authority approval (the gang factor). And establishing distance between the killer and the victim, which can be cultural and emotional distance. It's the old technique of dehumanizing the targeted victim. Some video games even provide what Grossman calls operant conditioning by training the game player to fire at humanlike targets as soon as they appear.
He related a chilling incident in which a young teenager, robbing a store, shot a clerk the instant the clerk turned toward the cash register to comply with the boy's demands. The boy later professed, apparently truthfully, to be mystified by what had happened. He had not intended to shoot the clerk; he had not felt threatened by the clerk; and he knew he was being videotaped. He simply did not know why he had shot the clerk.
As it turned out, however, this boy had spent hundreds of hours playing point-and-shoot video games. Apparently, under the stress of the robbery, when the clerk moved, the boy did what he had done thousands of times while playing the video games -- he fired reflexively.
Grossman pointed out that when confronted with a high-stress situation, the thinking part of the brain shuts down; the heart rate goes up; the blood vessels constrict; tunnel vision develops; and we operate on our primitive brain.
It is under these circumstances that conditioning takes over. The conditioned response will take over without any conscious direction.
By writing about only these three points, I am misrepresenting the seminar because the bulk of it and the aim of it is to help people who are forced to kill in the line of duty to deal with the psychological effects of killing that come to all normal people.
In other words, it was not about how to kill people but what you will experience when you do and how to get through it without ruining your own life and your family's life. There also was practical information directed specifically at law enforcement and law-enforcement training, such as psychological factors that might keep an officer from firing and thus cost him his own life or the life of his partner.
It bears repeating what Tom Fleming, a director of the League of the South, said when he was asked if the analogy between the fall of Rome and the current United States is valid.
``Yes, it is,'' Fleming said, ``but with this difference -- the United States today is in worse shape than Rome was in 476 A.D.'' Fleming's degrees are in classical studies.
I thought about this when I saw the national news media getting in a fever about two exhibitionists in California who intend to lose their virginity on the World Wide Web. I suspect that even the Romans had better taste than this.
Rome still had plenty of legions, but it had rotted from within. Napoleon, who knew something about war and power, said, ``There are only two forces in the world, the sword and the spirit. In the long run, the sword will always be conquered by the spirit.''
How do we define spirit? Well, an American historian who read all the letters written by Americans in the Revolution that he could get his hands on said four distinct themes emerged in all those letters -- love of God, love of family, love of country (note country, not government) and love of liberty.
These loves were so genuine that patriots of that generation were not only willing to sacrifice their material well-being but their lives. That's spirit, and, as the British discovered, people with that kind of spirit are tough to whip.
Unfortunately that spirit is lost today. Let me be more precise. It is lost largely among the elite who run American institutions, both public and private. It is still found among more humble Americans. If you are looking for people who love God, family, country and liberty, you are much more likely to find them on the assembly line, the farm, the small town, the police and fire departments than you are on the alumni lists of Yale, Harvard and the other elitist universities.
The American elite it seems to me love self, money, position and comfort. Those who love God, family, country and liberty will sacrifice themselves for what they love; those who love self, money, position and comfort will sacrifice others for their own benefit.
But these kind of people are vulnerable. They can be bought or frightened. That's why the United States is in decline. The United States bullies Panama and the Serbs but not China. The United States wanted to keep its bases in the Philippines, but the Philippines, despite economic hardship, turned down billions of U.S. dollars and told us to get out. Iran and India didn't flinch when the United States frowned and fussed at them about nuclear weapons.
Iraq, despite murderous sanctions, hasn't offered to kiss anybody's rear end in Washington. Fidel Castro still sends his contempt from across the Florida Strait. Even Moammar Gadhafi in Libya, a very small country, has stood fast against U.S. demands to extradite two Libyans. And a warlord in Somalia ran us out of that ratty country.
If the United States is the last superpower and the self-appointed leader of the world, why are so few willing to follow? Because they can see the weakness, the staggering public and private debts, the hypocrisy, the corruption and the vacillation.
Look at the economic crisis in Southeast Asia. U.S. strategy has been to beg Japan to cure its economic problems so Japan can save Southeast Asia. The United States can't do it and is frightened by it, even though U.S. officials continue to whistle past the television cameras.
We need a new elite. Otherwise, as we say in the South, the United States is cruisin' for a bruisin'.
The odd thing about post-modern America is that many people have rejected both religion and reason. Superstition and illogical thinking are the chief characteristics of public debate in America.
Pro-abortionists, for example, wish to be called pro-choice, though the child to be aborted is denied both choice and life. They state that a woman has a right to control her own body, but it is not her body that is killed at the abortion clinic. It's her baby's body that ends up in the dump. Abortion is infanticide.
To show you how illogical the law is, a pregnant woman who uses drugs can be charged with child abuse by the justice (?) system, which says it is OK if she hires an abortionist to kill the same child. Laws should, at the least, be logical. Apparently killing is not considered abuse. The last government that advocated death as therapy took power in Germany in 1933.
The U.S. Senate has passed a resolution declaring the president of Yugoslavia to be a war criminal. By the time you read this, the House of Representatives may have done the same.
The question is where in the Constitution does it state that American politicians can sit in judgment of foreign heads of state? And how can 535 American politicians, most of whom don't even know what's going on in their own country, determine that a foreign head of state is a war criminal? I suspect because some Washington public-relations firm, representing the man's enemies, suggested it and probably even drafted the resolution, which is, of course, pointless to begin with.
U.S. politicians never declared Pol Pot a war criminal. He killed a third to a half of all Cambodians. They never declared Joseph Stalin or Mao Zedong war criminals, and they killed millions. What this shows you, this resolution about Slobodan Milosevic, is what a bunch of low-life posturers and demagogues we have in Washington at the current time. Their mouths, as well as their votes, are for rent.
But, of course, private character doesn't matter. This assertion, put forth to rationalize President Clinton's despicable behavior, is childishly absurd. Would you name a pedophile to run a government day-care center? Would you elect a serial killer as sheriff? Then why do you think that a man who lies and cheats on his wife and lies to avoid the draft will tell the truth about public matters? In fact, Clinton has been as unfaithful to the Constitution and to his promises to the voters as he has been to his wife.
Look at the contradiction between professed egalitarianism and group rights. If one group has rights another doesn't, then you obviously have discrimination and inequality. If all groups have the same rights, then all individuals within the groups have the same rights, and it's pointless to talk about group rights.
As a matter of fact, the basic premise of America is that rights, a gift of God, reside with the individual, not with the group. The Bill of Rights does, in fact, apply to every individual in the United States regardless of how you might wish to group them.
Today, people mistake privileges for rights. What most groupies clamoring for ``rights'' really are asking for are special privileges and favors denied other people.
And how about the intolerance of the tolerant? Those who preach tolerance of homosexuality are intolerant of people who disagree with them. Those who are tolerant of pornography, vulgarity and profanity are intolerant of those who object to those things. To sum up, it's called human regression.
The federal court's ruling against the Environmental Protection Agency on the subject of secondhand tobacco smoke being a cause of cancer is devastating. It says what should be obvious: The EPA under its current administration is as dishonest as a bank robber.
The EPA's assertion that secondhand smoke was a significant cause of lung cancer was exposed as flawed by a number of journalists at the time it was issued. Now, a federal judge, after considering expert testimony and reviewing the records, has confirmed its phoniness.
Here is what the EPA did:
1. It started with a conclusion.
2. It cherry-picked the studies it would include in its analysis.
3. When even the cherry-picked studies failed to show a statistically significant correlation, it changed its methodology from the standard 95 percent to 90 percent.
4. Even by the bogus 90 percent standard, the cherry-picked studies showed only a very small risk.
5. It hid from the public the information that it was supposed to make available.
6. It lied about why it changed the standard.
Now, regardless of how you feel about smoking (and feel, not think, is the correct word on this subject), you should be concerned at the politicization of science and what amounts to public fraud.
Why don't people trust the government? Because it lies to them. It lies to them. And when its lies are exposed, it lies some more. This has been the standard procedure of the Clinton administration: lies, exposed lies, more lies.
It used to be said that politics should stop at the water's edge, meaning that foreign policy should not be distorted by partisan infighting. Well, that long ago has gone by the boards.
And it certainly ought to be said that politics stops at the scientists' door. Well, forget that. Science is as politicized in America as it was in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. And this EPA is a prime example.
EPA Administrator Carol Browner ought to be fired over this fraud about secondhand smoke. She won't be, of course. Expecting the Clinton administration to care about honesty is like expecting Al Capone to care about people drinking too much.
I don't trust any information that comes out of the Clinton administration, no matter what department originates it. I don't trust labor statistics, economic statistics, promises, assertions about the environment, nothing. If ever an administration has earned the distrust of the American people, it's this one.
And that's the real political crisis in America today. We Americans ought to be able to trust our own government. We can easily live with policy differences so long as they are debated on the basis that everyone is honestly seeking the truth.
But when government resorts to lies and propaganda rather than facts and persuasion, then you really enter onto dangerous ground. A free society presupposes that everyone is seeking the common good, even if by different paths. It presupposes that, although they may be mistaken, people will not lie. But when government shows, by resorting to lies and propaganda, that the only recourse left is obedience, then you really no longer have a free society.
The question was tobacco, but the principle is much more important: honest government, respect for and desire to find the truth. Carol Browner's EPA flunks on both points.
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