OUR MISS BROOKS DOESN’T HAVE TO BE A STONE KILLER – II

After the massacre in Parkland, Florida, on 14 Feb., 2018, the predictable hysteria about gun control flared into near-blinding intensity.  At the same time, the call for arming teachers or administrators rose in response.  As I write this, on the 23^rd, the fury of the rhetoric and vitriol has not abated.  I’m dead certain no one on the control side of the fence will read this, and if, by some miracle, one does, it will be dismissed as, “NRA talking points,” or, “Republican propaganda.”  Therefore, this is written to provide some ammunition to those stalwart, beleaguered proponents of allowing school staff the opportunity to defend the lives of our children.

In December, 2013, a student murdered another at Arapaho High School, in Centennial, Colorado. [1] When the murderer was approached by the armed deputy Sheriff who was on duty as a Resource Officer, he shot himself.  He had been carrying a bandolier of shotgun ammunition and three Molotov cocktails, clearly intending the body count to be higher.  At the time, I read an article in an on-line news source, and checked out some of the comments.  Several remarks from readers pointed out that the deputy was trained professional, and highly skilled in the use of arms, as opposed to teachers and janitors who are hopelessly and irremediably unskilled.   Precisely the arguments we are being assaulted with today.

Before I write another word, I want it understood that I am not impugning the dedication, integrity, or courage of police officers, in general.  Yes, there are a few who shouldn’t be in uniform, but that is only because we are limited to choosing our officers from the human race, a notoriously unomniscient population, which is actually trenchant to this essay.

In the incident at Arapaho High, the officer never fired a shot, so his skill or lack of it is not even a matter for discussion.  In fact, the very presence of an armed person stopped the attack.  Just the presence of an armed person.  How much skill and training are required to be present?  This fact is actually consistent with another statistic you won’t hear in the news:  Americans use firearms in defense of themselves or others 2.5- 3 million times a year. [2]

If we were to shoot 2.5-3 million of our neighbors every year, it would be noticed and reported.  Since it has not been, I hope it is obvious that we don’t.  That means that in millions of instances every year, firearms are used in the defense of life without a shot being fired!

Firearms are used millions of times a year without a shot being fired.

I have been in at least a half-dozen situations in which my being armed prevented an assault or worse, without having to fire a shot – usually without even having to draw my weapon.  Just having it gave me the presence and the confidence to stand firm in the face of a threat.  No, that’s not true.  Just having a weapon did nothing, and if that’s all there were to me, I’d be a hazard to myself and others.  A more accurate statement is that having a weapon and knowing that I know how to use it effectively gave me the presence and confidence, and I got that knowledge by spending a lot of time on the range with some great coaches.

I can hear it now: “But the police are professionals, highly trained in the use of arms.  No citizen, especially a teacher, has that skill.”  (There seems to be some stereotype of the teacher as a doddering milquetoast or flower child, inept, clumsy, and habitually scared of the world.  I say that stereotype is baloney.)

Police officers are not a specific sub-species of humanity.  Police officers have neither a gene nor an implant that gives them superlative powers of perception and tactical sense.  Nothing makes them infallible in any way.  They are just men and women who have a fully-developed sense of duty and honor, and most people could achieve that with the requisite effort.    Cops make mistakes of judgment.  They make mistakes in tactics. They make mistakes when firing their weapons.  (How many times in the last few years have NYPD officers shot innocent bystanders?)

Returning to my personal experience: I started shooting a Colt 1911 pistol when I was 17 and borrowed my mom’s .38 Super.  I continued to learn in the Marines, and even though the pistol wasn’t officially my standard arm, I qualified expert with it.  Since I got out of the Marines, I have probably fired 15,000 rounds in concentrated practice.  I could count on one hand the number of state or city police officers whom I have met who have fired half that much.

The training plans for metropolitan departments devote orders of magnitude more time to filling out reports and sensitivity training than to focused marksmanship and gunfighting.  (And there’s a huge difference between marksmanship and gunfighting!)  I personally know career officers who fire their weapons less than 100 times a year.  I have seen them turn their backs on potentially armed suspects.  I saw one take a pistol from a homeowner who had called about a burglary in progress, then lay the pistol on the hood of his car, without even unloading it, in full view of that woman, and walk away!  I have shot next to officers at target ranges, and observed that a lot of them couldn’t hit a bull in the butt with a bass fiddle.  I have heard them utter absolute nonsense about how guns and bullets work.

There is no reason in the world why any citizen, even a teacher, possessed of normal intelligence, physical strength, and coordination could not be as tactically savvy as the vast majority of police officers, and a hell of a lot  better shot.

Of course they will need training!  That’s a wonderfully remedial need! In fact I’ll bet you a dollar to a donut the NRA and local clubs would provide it for free.  I know I would gladly participate in that effort!

There is no question that it takes a special breed to become a hardened professional gunfighter.  There is also no question that few police officers fit that description.

But it doesn’t matter.  It’s not necessary.

First of all, I have never heard a syllable from anyone wishing to force teachers to take up arms.  Not one word.  It isn’t even an issue, so don’t even try to debate it.  The US hasn’t even had a military draft in decades.  The plan is to ask for volunteers, and to vet them thoroughly.  I’m not talking about the farce that is called vetting of applicants for immigration!

I’m talking about a real, professional background check and psychiatric examination.  They may not be held to the same standard as police recruits, but we should be able to weed out the freaks.  For the record, we’ve been doing it for more than 80 years for those who wish to purchase machine guns, and they are almost never used by their legal owners in crimes of any kind.  (When the NICS was activated, it could not check for some types of criminal records or psychiatric histories because those things were sealed by the privacy act!  The system didn’t say, “There’s something sealed in this guy’s file.”  It said, “I see nothing.”  That was soon corrected, but the NICS remains the bare minimum vetting.)

Not all teachers will care to apply for training, and that’s fine.  Having a few teachers carrying concealed firearms actually turns the entire faculty into wild cards.  A lunatic has no way of knowing which ones are armed. He literally antes up his life and asks for a card.  This is precisely the chilling effect on criminal ardor demonstrated by allowing citizens to carry concealed on the streets; if any citizen may be armed, a criminal must assume they all are.

We aren’t talking about turning Our Miss Brooks into Bonnie Parker or Annie Oakley.  We are talking about giving her enough training to protect herself and her students one time in her life, and the odds of any one teacher being called upon to do that are nearly zero.  We have the resources to train them.  Front Sight, in Nevada, has a 4-day defensive handgun course that would make any graduate a better, more savvy, more skilled gunfighter than the majority of professional police officers, and there are many such schools.

Here it comes again:  “But teachers aren’t heroes!”

How do you know?  My junior high algebra teacher had a lovely German Luger he took out of a Tiger tank he destroyed during the Battle of the Bulge.  Battlefield heroes rise from the general population, often with no prior indication of extraordinary courage.  Teachers come from that same population.  Besides, experience has shown that, in the flash-bang instant of conflict, most of us will do as we’ve been trained.

Shooting someone, especially if they die, is a horrible, traumatic experience. However, we have the resources to comfort and nurture and heal teachers if they ever have to shoot someone.  I submit that the resources we have spent on therapy for Sandy Hook survivors would have paid many times over for the training of a single teacher who might have put a stop to that outrage, and for any counseling or therapy she might need afterward.

I rather suspect that getting roses and apples and hugs from all those little children she kept safe would probably help as much as anything.

Here’s another little contradiction in the hoplophobe’s vast array of contradictions:

they say the lack of training prevents average citizens from competing with criminals in gunfights, but… wait a minute… who trained the blasted criminals?  Mass murderers are, for the most part, mentally unstable.  That’s sort of axiomatic for anyone willing to commit mass murder.  They are not gifted with superlative skill at arms any more than are police officers.  The great majority of them are not trained, at all.  Typically, they will fire dozens of rounds for every hit.  Some, like the Aurora theater shooter, have gained some skill by playing violent video games for thousands of hours, but that doesn’t make them infallible.

Most significantly, it doesn’t make ‘em bulletproof, and THAT is where we can defeat them.

 

[1]  (Arapaho High School, Centennial, Colo., 13 Dec., 2013 – https://www.cnn.com/2013/12/14/us/colorado-school-shooting/index.html)

[2]  Kleck-Gertz study on defensive gun use – http://www.gunsandcrime.org/dgufreq.html#results

 

Wess Rodgers – Albuquerque – rebsarge.wordpress.com

KILKENNEY ON GUNS AND HONOR

This is one of the best passages from Louis L’Amour I’ve read in a long time.  Sometimes, he got a little preachy through his characters, and some might think this in that category, but if it is, I’m okay with it.  It’s one heck of a good sermon!

L’Amour repeats the beloved myth that it was Colonial frontiersmen, sneaking from tree to tree who won the Revolution.  We now understand that there were but a few instances where such forces were a factor – Lexington and Concord, of course, and King’s Mountain, to name three.  Nonetheless, the analogy is valid, and L’Amour’s use of it takes nothing away from the moral validity of this piece.

The setting is in the mountains of Idaho in the late 1870’s.  A man named Trent has just found the corpse of one of his neighbors, murdered by local hoodlums.  The man’s children have taken refuge in Trent’s house – a boy, 14, and a girl, 16.  This exchange takes place he morning after he has discovered them at his place.

From “The Mountain Valley War,” by Louis L’Amour, Bantam, 1978, pp 12-13

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When breakfast was over, he took them to the saddled horses.  Then he walked back inside, and when he returned, he carried an old Sharps rifle.  He held it in his hands for a moment, looking at it, then he held it up to Jack.

“Jack,” Trent said, “when I was fourteen I was a man.  Had to be. Well, it looks like your father dying has made you a man, too.

“I’m giving you this Sharps.  She’s an old gun but she shoots straight.  I’m not giving this gun to a boy, but to a man, and a man doesn’t ever use a gun unless he has to.  He never wastes lead shooting carelessly.  He shoots only when he has to and when he can see what it is he’s shootin’ at.

“This gun is a present with no strings attached except that any man who takes up a gun accepts responsibility for what he does with it.  Use it to hunt game, for target practice, or in defense of your home or those you love.

“Keep it loaded always.  A gun’s no good to a man when it’s empty, and if it is settin’ around, people aren’t liable to handle it carelessly.  They’ll say, “that’s Jack Moffit’s gun and it is always loaded.”  It is the guns people think are empty that cause accidents.”

“Gosh!” Jack stared at the Sharps.  “That’s a weapon, man!”  He looked at Trent with tears of gratitude in his eyes.  “I sure do promise, Mr. Trent!  I’ll never use a gun unless I have to.”

They ride off into the woods, and a while later, Trent says,

“You know, Jack, there’s a clause in the Constitution that says the right of an American to keep and bear arms shall not be abridged.  The man who put that clause there had just completed a war that they won simply because seven out of every ten Americans had their own rifles and knew how to use them. They wanted a man to always be armed to defend his home or his country.

“Right now there’s a man in this area who is trying to take away the liberty and freedom from some men.  When a man starts that, and when there is no law to help, a man has to fight.  I’ve killed men, Jack, and it’s a bad thing, but I never killed a man unless he forced me into a corner where it was me or him.

“This country is big enough for all of us, but some men become greedy for money or power and come to believe that because they have the money and the power, whatever they do is right.  Your father died in a war for freedom just as much as if he was killed on a battlefield.

“Whenever a brave man dies for what he believes, he wins more than he loses.  Maybe not for him but for men like him who wish to live honestly and decently.”

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When a man reads a legend, and takes it into the depth of his character, it is no longer just a legend, but flesh and blood.

~Wess Rodgers

SECOND THOUGHTS ON INSANITY AND GUN RIGHTS

(The ideas expressed in this article make reference to the two items linked here.  If you don’t read the other two, this one will probably make even less sense than my usual product.)

https://rebsarge.wordpress.com/2015/10/03/the-dangers-of-making-mental-health-a-qualification-for-self-defense/
https://rebsarge.wordpress.com/2018/02/09/laws-cant-prevent-crime-dammit/

Having thought much about this subject, and having written a short essay titled, “Laws Can’t Prevent Crime,” something has occurred to me that sort of overrides the concerns expressed in this essay.  To wit, what is to keep the government from declaring its enemies or opponents mentally ill whether or not the law allows it?  The Constitution as presently worded would forbid such an outrage, but so what?  Could the Constitution be any more effective at preventing a crime than could a simple city ordinance?

I think not.  A very carefully worded law that provides for restrictions of individual rights based on mental health could give the government a tool for dealing with egregious cases of mental illness.  We might presume the majority of law enforcement agencies and courts would obey the letter and spirit of the law, but there is no doubt, whatsoever, that some would not.  Okay.  So what?  What is to prevent such abuses today, in the absence of such statutes?

Perhaps we’d be better off to take our best shot at writing a law that very explicitly establishes the criteria of mental illness, the procedures which law enforcement must follow in dealing with such cases, and a process for appeal. I confess it scares me to death to contemplate putting such power and authority in the hands of a government that has proven, over and over, its willingness to do as it bloody well pleases in any case.

But what is to prevent that, anyway?  Perhaps if we had such a law, it would at least let the legitimate officers of the law and court to take the necessary action to reduce the number of lunatics running around.  Oh, lawsy!  I just realized how close I am to saying, “If it only saves one life…” and that, in itself, scares hell out of me!

I don’t have the answer, I’m afraid, but perhaps someone else does.  Is this not something we should discuss openly?

 

Wess Rodgers

RESPONSE TO THE CULTURE OF VIOLENCE

It seems that almost everyone on either side sees one, single cause, for which they see one, single solution.  I see many causative factors, but also a number of things that have enabled or given strength to those factors.  Hence, I can’t see how there could possibly be a single solution.  The difficulty of the task does not excuse us from attacking it, though.

The United States was founded on and by force of arms.  Early settlers enforced their claim to the land with firearms.  The Indians contested their claim with the only weapons they had, but they adopted firearms as quickly as possible.  That pattern was repeated from the Atlantic coastal forests to the brushy thickets of the Pacific coast.  I will not go into the right or wrong of either side.  That’s just what happened.

Whether it was the soul-slamming concussion of naval 24-pounders, the waterfall roar of furious musketry, or the spiteful snapping of individual rifles and pistols in single combat against predators, the lullaby of our culture was the clash of arms.  Even the unique, English-based patois (and you Brits probably have a less charitable term for it) that we speak is rife with firearms terminology:  “Lock, stock, and barrel,” “Shoot the moon,” “Take your best shot,” “Fire in the hole,” “Put the hammer down,” “Going off half-cocked,” “Primed and ready,” quarterbacks “rifle” passes, unfocused solutions are “the shotgun approach,” career soldiers have, “ramrod-straight backs,” key elements in systems are, “Linchpins,” an overnight success that goes nowhere is, “a flash in the pan.”    Many of those figures of speech have become so common most people have no idea of their smoky, loud origins, but that, in itself, is an indication of the depth to which the use of firearms has been absorbed into the DNA of American culture.

That isn’t going to change, and I’m not sure it should.

The heart of Progressive educational theory is that the group is more important than the individual – that no individual could be as smart or as moral as a group.  Ever heard, “So you think you’re right and everyone else is wrong?”  One of the natural products of such epistemology is the isolation and alienation of any individual who doesn’t go along with the group.  Oh, the Progressives go on and on about the glories of “valuing differences” and multiculturalism, but in practice, those principles are traps.  “Valuing differences” teaches the victims of Progressive education to accept any moral or epistemological perversion that comes down the pike because those are just differences, and, after all, “there is no right or wrong; there’s only difference.”  At the same time similarities in others, such as an aversion to murder, rape, incest, or cannibalism, is hounded and shunned as “bigotry” or “prejudice.”  When taken in the context of William James’ profoundly anti-life philosophy of Pragmatism, no individual can have any grasp, whatsoever of reality, truth, or morality.  Those things can only be associated with a group, or, more specifically, a culture.  The one difference they will not tolerate is that of independent thought.

“Multiculturalsim” has been sold as the philosophy of inclusion and tolerance, but in reality, it is the institutionalization of the most rigid, hateful, and violent discrimination. If what is real, true, or moral can only be determined by the cultural group, and it is obvious that there are many cultures, then reality, truth, and morality must be different for each one.  By extension, no two cultures can hold the same things to be real or true or moral, hence each culture is isolated from all others.  Those outcast from each culture naturally draw near each other and form a culture of their own, with their own view of real, true, and moral.

This has led us to a type of philosophical, intellectual balkanization, with borders as rigid and fiercely defended as any geographic border ever was.  The outcasts, having banded together against those who cast them out, are no less rigid and xenophobic than any other, more “socially acceptable” culture.  They find expression in embracing anything the other groups deplore: rudeness, crudity, violence, drugs, and anything else that can express how different they are.   Although their parent cultures can’t possibly admit the outcasts into their folds, the principle of valuing differences forbids them to say, “That’s wrong.  Period.”

Progressivism and Pragmatism have infected pretty much the entire free world, but only in America have they come in contact with the cultural predisposition toward firearms, and only in the last few years have the outcasts found an indescribably powerful tool of self-expression and unity:  the internet, especially social media.

Social media has allowed the outcasts to find each other, bond, and share ideas.  It has been said that the growth of technology in a society is directly proportional to the rate of communication in that society.  We can see this in the symbiotic synergy with which technologies are spread and built upon.  By the very same means, the cultural identity of the outcasts has grown and become stronger.  We have, in a word, seen the on-line balkanization of a segment of society, and along with the other forms of rebellion and spit-in-the-face contempt that identifies this formerly isolated segment, a passion for violence reigns supreme.

Social media has also brought about a revolution in bullying, which, as always, is just a crude, local form of balkanization.  As it has given the outcasts a medium for gathering, it has also given them a medium for slashing and crushing anyone who doesn’t fit their group, just as they were treated by the groups from which they were driven.

What can be done to stop it?  I can name a few things, but they are at least as terrible as the disease they are meant to cure.  Progressive/Pragmatist epistemology is at the root of the problem, but it is so firmly entrenched that to banish it would require an unthinkable effusion of blood.  Professors, teachers, and writers who subscribe to those two destructive ideologies are so numerous and have such status and power nothing short of a noose will ever silence them.

As far as controlling guns of any sort, forget it.  The belief that there are only 300 million guns in America is preposterous.  There were probably close to that number when we started keeping even the most casual track of purchases in 1968.  Even if stopping the manufacture and proliferation of new guns could be accomplished, and the necessary expenditure of blood tolerated, guns are amazingly easy to make.  By the time you cleared western Tennessee, Eastern Tennessee would have rearmed itself.   Guns are just too good an idea to ever banish them.  “The genie is out of the bottle.”  “The toothpaste is out of the tube.”  Think about trying to dig a hole in the water.

We might ban some of the causative factors, such as video games, music and movies that glorify violence and mayhem, but that will only drive them under ground.  I do not believe that any ban of anything will do the trick.

It think it would be helpful if we stopped glorifying these murderers.  Call them what they are; they aren’t gunmen or shooters.  They are murdering scum.  Quit plastering their faces all over, and putting up memes and posters comparing them to their predecessors.  They tend to seek the fame and recognition denied them by multicul-turalism.  Deny them that.

Start calling evil evil, instead of whining, “Who can really say what’s right or wrong?”  We need to become judgmental, in spite of political correctness.  There damned surely is right and wrong, and human beings are capable of knowing that difference.

Make self-defense with deadly force socially acceptable.  Eliminate the soft, juicy targets that our schools and churches have become.  Tear down every gun-free zone in the nation and replace them with “Anytime, Baby” zones.  Stop relying on the police and other law enforcement entities to protect our children.  Without demeaning or disrespecting the courage or dedication of our police, the simple fact is that they can’t be everywhere, and their response to crime can come only AFTER it has been committed.  There are only two people who are present before and during the commission of a crime:  the criminal and the target.

None of us can make our society more responsible, or more cognizant of the connection between liberty and responsibility, but all of us can become teachers and examples of that connection.  I can’t touch every kid in the country, but I can touch some of them.  I can watch for signs of alienation and isolation among those I know, and reach out to them.

As for religious precepts, one need not believe in God to be a decent human being, but one must do what He taught.  The Ten Commandments, even without the Biblical wording, are a darned good place to start.

Take charge of your kid’s lives.  When they are young, stay on them like white on rice, and teach them principles of right and wrong.  Teach them the efficacy of their own, individual minds, and the responsibilities that go with being a free-thinking person.  Most people take the approach that, “Kids will be kids, so let them be irresponsible, foolish kids while they’re young.”  Then, the day after the little booger’s 18^th birthday, all of a sudden they are held up to standards of behavior they have never even heard of, and are too often crushed without mercy by the weight of those norms from which they had been protected.  Their natural and predictable response is anger and rebellion.  To my way of thinking, that is child abuse.  Stay on them when they are young, then, as they start trying to spread their wings, you can afford to let them go.

It took the Progressives four or five generations to get us to this point.  Even if we could begin a coordinated, cohesive, and consistent response today, it would take longer than that to eradicate their influence.  That’s not going to happen, but we are not excused from the battle.

Personally, I think we’re screwed.

 

Wess Rodgers – rebsarge.wordpress.com

SCHOOL SHOOTINGS – NO EASY WAY OUT

“We have to do something about these shootings!  I don’t know what, but banning/limiting/controlling guns would be a good start! The problem is, the bad people won’t turn them in!”

How many times have I heard those words.

It’s not just that the bad people won’t turn them in, which is certainly true, but a lot of the good people won’t turn them in, either, and that could lead to some really awful violence. I really appreciate the admission of ignorance of a solution, but a lot of people don’t let that stop them from demanding certain things. I’d like to throw out a few points, though I don’t know that I have all the answers, either.

First, the people who do these terrible things are an almost invisible minority of gun owners. Their actions, of course, aren’t invisible, and I certainly don’t mean to imply that they are insignificant, but we’re talking about a few dozen out of 30-50 million, at least. It is estimated that the American public uses firearms 3-4 million times a year to prevent crimes, IN INSTANCES WHERE NO SHOTS ARE FIRED. I, personally, have prevented a number of assaults simply because having the pistol on my hip empowered me to tell the thugs to go away. I’ve drawn it a time or two, but have never flashed it.  I have fired it twice, but spilled blood only once.  In any proposed solution, I think we need to remember that harsh restrictions or confiscation will dramatically impact the number lives saved by armed citizens, especially when no shots are fired.

Second, guns are ridiculously easy to make. The year New York City banned “assault weapons,” more than 70% of all guns taken by NYPD during the commission of crimes were homemade. In the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial, at Angel Fire, NM, there is a zip gun made of bamboo and what looks like baling wire. It was taken from a Viet Cong who had used it in a firefight. If we were to wave the proverbial magic wand and get rid of all guns in civilian hands, within a week there would be thousands more in circulation. The sad fact is that the gun is just too good an idea to ever think we could go back to the pre-gun age.

Third, with the increasing number of gangs in America, the odds are increasing that any citizen might find him- or herself facing upwards of a dozen violent attackers. It doesn’t matter whether they have guns.  Could you, personally, defeat an attack by even one or two very young, strong, possibly doped-up savages carrying chains, clubs, or knives? I certainly could not, and any law that would restrict my ability to carry a defensive firearm would say, in essence, “If you find yourself in such a situation, we hereby declare your life forfeit for what WE consider to be the PUBLIC GOOD. Too bad about you.” It’s not just the mobs and gangs, either. Individual predators can wreak havoc. Are we willing to tell anyone who is unable to defend themselves with their bare hands that we don’t care if they are killed?  I’m certainly not.

Fourth, sadly, certain people feel they are justified in committing acts of violence against other people. They have no respect for the lives of others. We didn’t get to this state overnight, and we won’t get out of it overnight. I honestly think, though, that our only solution is to attack the real problem, which is a mental and moral one. Silencing and disempowering racist, fascist thugs like Barack Obama and his gang, closing our borders to the influx of horribly savage gangs from all over the world, and abolishing political correctness would be a good start. Obviously, that ain’t happenin’ anytime soon. In the meantime, we must understand that, as a society, we have placed utterly amoral behavior above the safety of our loved ones, and when a Roseburg happens, we can only hope that someone with a grasp of moral fundamentals and a gun will stand ready to do what must be done.

There are no easy solutions; we got where we are now by taking the easy way out.

 

NOTE –

The Roseburg, Oregon school shooting:   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umpqua_Community_College_shooting

LAWS CAN’T PREVENT CRIME, DAMMIT!

With the New Mexico legislature in session, about 15 times every day I hear some jackleg hack squalling about how this law or that law will, “…make our children safe.”

(Have you ever noticed how, when statists want to pass a law no sane person would want, it’s always, “For the children,” with a little tremble of the lip around the phrase. Even if those laws were “For the children,” which none of them are, those same children would be screwed, blued, and tattooed as soon as they reached adulthood, because no politician in captivity is ever going to propose a law, “For the grownups.”)

But, back to my original rant:  when anyone says any law will make anyone safe, or prevent any sort of behavior, you know that person is lying through their teeth – or whatever bodily orifice they happen to be lying out of.

NO LAW CAN PREVENT ANY BEHAVOR!   PERIOD!  Are there laws against drunk driving?  Are there laws against robbery?  Are there laws against murder?  Are there laws against rape?  Jaywalking?  Speeding?  And yet – and YET – those behaviors are still very much with us.

The only thing any law can do is define an action, usually in excruciating detail, expressed in horridly ungrammatical and often contradictory terms.  Having made it damned nearly impossible to understand what action is being outlawed, the law can then set a penalty for committing it.  The only person who will be constrained from committing the action will be the person who actually gives a flying rat’s empennage about The Law, in the first place.  Further diluting the anemic deterrent aspect of a law is the fact that even the threat of the penalty is meaningless if the criminal isn’t caught, convicted, and sentenced.  In New Mexico, the judges are far more likely to assign the very minimum allowable penalty, anyway.

(Ex:  An Albuquerque man named Hidalgo was selling drugs at a city park to a man named Trejo.  Hidalgo said Trejo tried to rob him during the transaction but was scared off.  As he ran, Hidalgo admitted to shooting Trejo in the back, then walking up on him and popping him in the head.  Hidalgo copped a plea to 2^nd degree murder, which carries a MAXIMUM penalty of 10 years.  Now just what, in the name of…anything… is the deterrent effect of such a law?  Oh, and remember this happened at a city park?  A park that is frequented by [lip tremble] children!  So where’s the sanctimonious concern for the children in this scenario?)

There are only two ways any law can prevent any crime.  The first is if the certainty of capture, conviction, and sentencing is great enough to give pause to a meth-addled gang-banger, and if the punishment is harsh enough to outweigh the pleasure to be had from committing the crime.  If any of those three parameters – capture, conviction, or sentencing – do not happen with great regularity, the whole thing is of no value, at all, but even if they do, they cannot happen until AFTER the crime has been committed!

The second way is by getting the criminal off the streets so he can’t commit further crime, but again, this depends on capture, conviction, and sentencing, and that still ain’t gonna happen.

(It occurs to me that there is a third way The Law might prevent crime:  by arresting suspects before the crime has been committed.  If you know anyone who can read that last sentence without a shudder of horror, stay away from them!  They’re dangerous!)

The old song and dance about needing more police to keep [tremble] “The children” safe is baloney.  The only way a cop can prevent a crime is if he is right there, on the spot, and actually sees the start of the action.  Otherwise, all the police can do is take statements, mop up the blood, and file reports.  The detectives (who are not street cops) can get involved, and they might catch the criminal.  The only way the police can prevent crime is to be there when it starts, and the only way they can protect all of us is if we each have a cop tag us around.  Got that?  IF THE COP AIN’T THERE, HE CAN’T PREVENT SQUAT!

There’s one other person, besides the criminal, who is present at the beginning of a crime – the victim, and except in the most rare cases, the victim is the only person who can prevent a crime.  In order to prevent the crime, the victim must be physically able to overcome the criminal, or have a force multiplier to make up the discrepancy in size and strength.  If the victim lacks the means of preventing the crime, the police can get involved, BUT ONLY AFTER THE CRIME HAS BEEN COMMITTED!  Crimony!  Why is this so freaking hard to understand?

In the final analysis, the only practical way to reduce the incidence of crime is to reduce the number of criminals.  In any population, there are a certain number of people who will, when faced with sufficient temptation, commit crimes.  Assuming the percentage would remain fairly constant, as the population grows so will the number of criminals.  However, if the number of criminals entering the population exceeds the number leaving it, the crime rate will increase.  There are two sources for the increased population of criminals:  failure to capture, convict, and sentence them, or importing them from other countries.  Similarly, only two things can get criminals out of the population: The Law and armed victims, the former by incarceration or rehabilitation, the latter by accurate fire.

It’s like a sanitation strike in a major city; if no one takes out the trash, the city will get nasty fast.  But passing a thousand new laws – laws that are either criminally stupid or will be blatantly unenforced by the courts – will not get the trash off the streets.

It bears repeating (and I’ve been repeating it for 50-odd years) NO LAW CAN PREVENT ANY ACTION.

 

Wess Rodgers – Albuquerque, NM – rebsarge.wordpress.com

DEMOCRAT DOUBLE TALK ON THE WALL

Many Democrats are saying a border wall is stupid because it won’t keep anybody out.

They those same people turn right around and say such a wall would prevent people from being able to join their families on the other side of the border.

You can’t have it both ways, Democrats.

One other point to note is that the only border passage a wall would prevent is the illegal sort. There has been no – that’s ZERO – NONE – discussion of closing the ports of entry. People crossing the border at those legal points would have to provide some sort of identification and record their passage – just like you have to do when you enter a concert or a nightclub. You show your ID and your ticket, and the ticket-taker stamps your hand so you can prove you are there legally. The Democrat stand on this issue, alone, indicates a deep-seated hatred and loathing of the United States and its citizens.

Call me a reactionary, racist, deplorable, but I think we should be at least as careful with our nation as we are with sleazy honky-tonks.