Illinois Governor Arrested

Today's biggest news story, across town and across the country, is the arrest of Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich for some fairly spectacular corruption charges.
The centerpoint of those being reported is that Blagojevich allegedly demanded compensation for the appointment to the seat in the US Senate vacated by the President-elect.
In reality, the charges are far more wide-ranging than that, and include criminal acts already accomplished, and not just planned as the Senate allegation is.

Rod Blagojevich is yet another Cook County Democratic Machine operative, and as such, most close observers of Illinois politics not attached to the Machine already assumed that Blagojevich was on his way to join many another of recent Illinois governors. Just in Your Correspondent's lifetime, three have gone to the Big House: Otto Kerner, Dan Walker, and George Ryan. Certainly, if Blagojevich should join that muster, it would have to be some sort of record somewhere.

Actually, northeastern Illinois politicians take the long ride to Oxford (Wisconsin Federal Pen) in rather large numbers. The most well-known of the recent convicts is actually not a politician, per se, in that he has not been elected. But Tony Rezko's position in the Machine, called a "fixer", is just another job opportunity for the people who've been "sent".

Your Correspondent could never hope to catch up to Chicago Tribune stalwart, political feature columnist John Kass. In some ways, a successor the wonderful Mike Royko, author of the Chicago explication "Boss", Kass has been on the point of all journalists, local and national, in keeping track of all the ins and outs of the Machine. His columns tell a decades-long tale of connections and corruption, of Outfit (as the Mafia is known around here) and Big Labor attachments and infiltrations that defy human comprehension.

The current governor, now in his second term (yes, he got re-elected... a cause for wonder, too), is a typical Machine product manufactured for national consumption.
Glib and photogenic, Blagojevich married the daughter of long-time Machine alderman Richard Mell, Patty, and was quickly started on the now-familiar path. First an Illinois State Representative, with a campaign platform that consisted of little more than stringent gun-control proposals, he was then inserted into the second point of his career path, the governorship.
Almost from the moment he took office, he was being systematically "mentioned" for the US presidency. Given his photogenic appearance and ability to speak in public with a modicum of apparent intelligence, he fit the familiar profile of Daley sendees being dispatched Washington-ward in order to do the bidding of the Mayor.

Other recent operatives issued forth along with Blagojevich include former US Senator Carol Moseley Braun, a repeated Presidential mentionee who skulked from office after a large amount of stupid and conflcited public behavior got enough headlines that the Machine threw her overboard.
The most obvious of this cohort is of course, President-elect Barack Obama, who, similarly equipped with with charm, charisma, and that same ability to speak seemingly intelligently, with added bonus feature of being half-black, went on to the White House in order to help keep his Mayor out of prison, and swimming in a large pool of federal money to save the failing City and County.

Already obvious as Blagojevich's replacement is Illinois State Attorney General Lisa Madigan. The daughter of the imperious Illinois Senate President Michael Madigan and a dutiful Machine operative, she is placeholding in the Springfield equivalent of Press Release Heaven.

The state AG really doesn't have to do much besides get on television. It goes without saying that the staggering corruption and criminality of Cook County rolls merrily along without the slightest thought of the AG intruding in any way. I can't recall a single instance of the State Attorney General's office even presenting so much as a single word about pursuing corruption on the northeast corner of the state.

Madigan is frequently mentioned as Obama's successor, too, and not "just" in the US Senate. With a clear path to the Illinois Governor's Mansion about to open before her- the current Lt. Governor, Pat Quinn, is hard to imagine as holding on to the governorship once Daley settles upon Madigan- she should be able to continue her constant stream of press releases about child-safety initiatives and senior-assistance programs as the media horde is carefully prepped and assembled into the same sort of juggernaut that placed Obama on Pennsylvania Avenue.

More will come out about Blagojevich's misdeeds, alleged and accomplished, but, mysteriously, those around him are somehow being treated in the media as surprised, and innocent, bystanders.
Already, Richard Daley's gotten on the radio to say "these things happen", and "it's just an individual thing", as if the environment in which Blagojevich's sort of activities are just ordinary, every-day, business as usual. Obama will portray himself as surprised and saddened, and Madigan will be nowhere near the investigation or the charges.

What, one wonders, an Attorney General is for, but apparently an Illinois AG need not be able to detect the sort of doings that propel the likes of Moseley Braun, Obama, Bloagojevich, and Madigan towards national eminence.

One wonders if the non-Chicagoans on the national scene who believe that the Machine's new President is something new and special will be able to make the logical connection. We will just submit that these folks should just remember Obama's predecessors like Moseley Braun and Blagojevich.

Mumbai

The terror attack on the Indian city of Mumbai (or Bombay) of late November, 2008 is past and just now are some of the background facts starting to emerge from the fog of the war on the ground there.
One of the first things Americans might be inclined to ask, as are the pundits and journalists a-commenting apace, is whether the same attack can or will happen here.
I might as well cut to the chase and say "no".
There's no such thing as certainty, and a really bad judgment call on the part of a mid-level Al-Qaeda or other terror group manager might produce one anyway, but an open-air attack with small arms upon a metropolitan center? It would be hard to imagine anything stupider or more likely to fail.
There's one, simple, two-word refutation that could all by itself close down such a debate, but I shall save that for later.
The overwhelming characteristic of this attack was the dependence upon there being both an unarmed citizenry and an almost-unarmed, and unaggressive, local police and security apparatus. These attackers knew full well they faced no opposition whatsoever, a concept fully borne out in the real-life results. They were able to land, advance, control territory, move freely, and command local conditions with veritable ease. There was no opposition. They had practically nothing to fear, in terms of the success of the terror attack.
Possibly the nadir of the Indian resistance to the attack came from the moment described in the now-famous words of the photographer on the scene who lamented that the police there did not draw or fire the weapons they had, despite his urging them explicitly to do so. Further, viewing some of the local video footage that's starting to get around, it can be seen that nearly all of the police on the scene were more likely to remain behind cover than to present themselves.
All this, against a paltry score of attackers. I assume that many, as opposed to the stories that concluded there were only ten, since the implausibility factor escalates too fast to keep up with.
Historian and small-arms expert Col. Jeff Cooper once wrote about the advent of the repeating pistol that a man armed with two Colt's was a squad-level problem within a hundred yards.
In the descriptions of the Mumbai attack, we are being given to believe that a policeman armed with a 15-shot Browning HP could not at least impede somewhat a two-man fire team distracted by dozens of onlookers in a screaming mob. The final evidence, on the videos and sprawled across the sidewalks, says that this was indeed so.
The totality of the stories coming out suggest that virtually no resistance was offered to the attackers at any level once they had completed their raid on the police headquarters and up until the time the federal "commandos" completed wiping out the attack (after, shockingly, days' worth of time gone by).
Furthermore, no evidence whatsoever has suggested that any non-official Indian offered any resistance, either.
Simply put, this wouldn't happen in America. The differences between the American culture and the pallid remants of the British world could hardly be more stark. Our sophisticated Brit friends have, since the horror of the Second World War, gone far down the path of disarmament, and the consequent emasculation of their society's will to survive through self-defense.
English intellectuals and politicians boast of how they've installed peace and safety across their part of the planet, most loudly by amplifying the power and importance of the State at the consequent expense of the power and importance of the citizen. In England as in India, the official line is that there is no need for self-defense, and that the State will provide all the protection the citizen needs. Whether it be by usurping the individual's ability to choose and use medical care, to gun bans so stringent as to bring tears of joy to the eyes of Marxists and statists across the Western world, down to the actual criminalization of that most basic human right, that of self-defense, the rise of the State has sucked the self-reliance out of the people and left them helpless in the face of evil.
Ask the average American if it should be a felony including life imprisonment for using strong, and potentially deadly, force to resist a violent criminal attack inside one's own home, and you will be met with a blank stare. Yet, that is the reality of the British (and Indian) mindset, and law. Strike a rapist in your bedroom with a baseball bat, and you may expect to do serious time in prison.
With that in mind, the pictures of hundreds of helpless- in their own minds- Indian citizens, civilian and official alike, begins to be somewhat more comprehensible, if no less appalling.
America has been well-saturated with the same statism and more of it continues to pour down upon American heads every day. Enough of the old Americanism remains, though, that even the haughtiest of urban elites would, upon being assaulted in the manner of Mumbai, be calling for a reply with force.
Can anyone here imagine a group of ten ordinary American police officers standing, cowed, behind building corners and simply watching such a slaughter? I doubt it. There may be tactical considerations, and some reasonable self-preservation making a degree of caution possible, but a two-man team with AKs and grenades would not last long even in a place like Los Angeles. Transplant that same situation into most of the rest of America, that beyond the deep-urban elites, and the conclusion of the attack would be swift, brutal, and total, and not in favor of the attackers.
Let those same terrorists figuratively come ashore in a place like Pennsylvania, Texas, or Wyoming, and the police would be arriving only in time to distribute body bags and take pictures.
There's a reason the United States has never been invaded since it emerged from its infancy: Americans have a culture that still, despite all of the modernization (especially since the Television Age), prizes the individual citizen, enough to not just allow, but insist that Joe and Jane Citizen are actively responsible for both their own safety and the safety of the society at large. The preamble to the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights, so often misconstrued into nonsensical statist gibberish by intellectual leftists, clearly states that the purpose of the basic human right enumerated there is "the security of a free state".
Americans, on the whole, actually believe that, and believe that a free citizen is, as a part of his or her citizenship, charged with a certain amount of responsibility as a citizen to act towards the security of that free state. Indeed, one can imagine a pack of AK-wielding terrorists landing in boat upon the shore of Lake Michigan and wreaking some sort of death and destruction. But not for long, and should they have the temerity to go beyond the urban limits, they would be meeting their fates with shocking speed.
I promised the two-word proof to this attitude and here they are, still visible in the scarred forest floor of Shanksville, Pennsylvania: Flight 93.

The end of a lifelong habit

Your Correspondent has been reading a daily newspaper every single morning for nearly a half-century. Born in part of a habit developed as a paperboy (for the younger person out there, a boy employed by a news agency to deliver newspapers directly to homes) wrapping Tribs and Suns at 5am, and in part from an early-ingrained affection for reading, this habit is as crucial to a day-beginning as coffee or a shower.
But it's no longer the same thing. For most of that time, the words on the papers had a verity. It was non-fiction. It was technical, as might be described by the term "technical writing", a concept that holds much appeal to your correspondent, who would like to aspire to earning a living as such a scribe.
The stuff on the page, now, isn't non-fiction anymore. There may well be real facts, or at least factoids, sprinkled around, and they may indeed serve as legitimate points, topics, and stories.
But there's no way to be sure, not without checking. There may be declarative sentences in those columns of words, but taking them as the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, just can't be done.
Marveling at the breadth and depth of the impact of the internet, a favorite pastime here, can never escape the biggest impact of all: the access to information, far, far more than any ordinary citizen could have ever imagined before.
Recall the Tribune's coverage of the spring, 2008 Iraqi offensive against the Sadrist holdouts in Basra. Consistent with the Democratic Party's party line, accepting blindly at face value that the whole enterprise was a smashing failure, the Trib ran two articles by their correspondent Aamer Mahdani depicting the whole effort as a near-catastrophe. There were a few sprinkles of facts, mostly amplified far out of proportion but plausible to a gullible and under-informed readership (and editorial staff), cited to illustrate the failure.Of course, all of that was nonsense; the offensive was a significant success. Like virtually every other military operation in an urban area in the history of humankind, it was fraught with error and misapprehension. That part, though, was all that was reported, by the Democrat partisans and the old time media like Mahdani and the Tribune.If I had a subcontractor or employee working for me, who did two days' worth of work that was so wrong, so far from the correct way to do the job that it was entirely useless, that person would be gone from my employment forever (even not withstanding this reporter's previous egregiously wrong work on world affairs).
Not at the Tribune. A few weeks later, a major, front-page "news" story by this same author, going through the same editors, regarding the Iranian belligerence crisis a-building, began with a full paragraph about the Iraq campaign, and what a failure it was, and capped with citing the AP's faux-combat death toll (it's actually all deaths, including vehicle accidents unrelated to combat, and represents an inflation of nearly a third).
All this comes to mind in preparation for today's Second Amendment Freedom Rally in downtown Chicago, a few hundred yards from Tribune Tower. We wait with bated breath to see what the Trib does with this story. A mass of Brady quotes interrupted by an occasional nugget about the actual event of the day? Sadly, it's what the existing pattern would lead us to expect.

Updated: The event prouduced a turnout of 600 or so, a remarkably diverse group at that. One Tribune reporter was identified by the partisans and was spoken to. Given what ensued, the reporter's comment to the rallygoer, that "this wasn't the crowd we were expecting", was highly appropriate.
What ensued was nothing. The Tribune rigorously avoided mentioning the existence of the rally at all. Buried deep in an article on a completely different topic was a very brief mention of the rally, and that was all.
Contrasted with the paper's lavish coverage of "rallies" set up by causes the Trib chooses to advocate for, such as illegal immigration, the blackout is hardly surprising.
Yet the vaunted Editorial Board insists we readers are the dummies for questioning our intellectual and moral masters in mainstream journalism.
Controlling the message comes close to controlling the history.

The Tribune continues its war on guns and the law

The Chicago Tribune carries on its all-fronts onslaught against the private possession of firearms on March 25th, 2008 with an editorial suggesting a number of things that simply aren't true.
In a fit of blogger laziness, I will just paste in my response:

To the editors:
Today, March 25th, 2008, the Tribune gave forth with an editorial taking a look, after a fashion, at the recently-argued Supreme Court case of Heller v. District of Columbia, the hugely important civil rights case concerning the Second Amendment in the Constitution's Bill Of Rights.
In it, the editorialist makes three mistakes, misapprehensions of what the underlying elements in this case are and what the law actually is.
Given that the Tribune rarely prints any sort of article on the subject of guns, gun rights, and gun law that does not contain significant errors of fact- look at the recent news article by reporter James Oliphant with its two factually incorrect elements, that the Constitution "gives" rights (it does not, and under American law, cannot), and that conventional wisdom holds that the "collective rights" interpretation of the Second is the correct one (it does not, not even among many leftists), one would not expect an editorial to be any more accurate. But accuracy is both critical and achievable.
The assertion that the opening clause of the Amendment, stating that a well-regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state, somehow introduces an ambiguity into the operative clause, that the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, is just plain a misreading of ordinary English. The first clause illustrates why the main clause is important, but does not, under any rule of grammar taught in centuries, alter or dim its rather boldly clear meaning. Even this somewhat common misinterpretation had been pretty well cleared from most of thoughtful society. How it survives in an institution filled with people supposedly highly educated in functional English is surprising.
The editorialist goes on to posit the "militia-dependant" interpretation, the one also used by DC to some extent in its suit.
When the editorial states that the militia in American law is the "18th Century equivalent of the National Guard", it betrays a serious lack of background knowledge. The militia is no such thing. The militia is actually carefully and specifically defined in American law in numerous places, not the least of which is the Militia Act, a still-operable Federal law.
Further, there is a mountain of law and scholarship given the definition of militia in America, and it can be easily boiled down to this: the militia is any voter.By “voter”, the implication is that the person is a citizen, an adult, and has not been denied any portion of his or her citizenship (by such as a felony conviction).
The concept of militia does not require organization by any governmental agency, it does not require any specific number of citizens, and it does not separate citizens from government as two different kinds of entities. Underlying this is the main, and most important concept of Americanism, which is embodied in the all-important preamble “We, the People.” In American thought, the people are the government. When that basic concept is absorbed, then the meaning of the militia and how all citizens are part of it, and responsible for the security of the state, becomes abundantly clear.
The editorialist goes on to almost wistfully say that one wishes one could go back and query "Madison and Company" as to what they really meant. There is a mountain of evidence and scholarship on what the Founders thought, said, and meant. The first and most basic resource is the Federalist Papers.
Beyond that, this miraculous assemblage of great thinkers put out huge volumes of correspondence on the subject of the new country and the Constitution they put together.
Their thinking on the subject of an armed citizenry could hardly be clearer, and given their incredible foresight and ability to distill fundamental human rights concepts into the most practical form of freedom-based governance in history, it still takes one’s breath away today. We urge that the Tribune take a little time to look into the subject before running articles that appear on this side of the newsstand to be unaware of the foundation of America law and American thought.
Sincerely...

Obama-mania goes full-cult

The March 4th, 2008 edition of the Chicago Tribune website included a feature entitled: "Test your Obama IQ", which contained seventeen multiple-choice questions about the most precious moments in the Obama's trek to the kingship. Each was more adoring than the last, leaving even the most fawning of the Trib's coverage of their Savior in the adulation dust.
Try this one: "What kind of car did Barack Obama buy to get him from Chicago to Boston to start Harvard Law School?"
Will there be a yellow-brick memorial of the Great One's early years, showing how he made this wonderful journey to become, wonderfully, even more wonderful?
Really, it would be humanly impossible to make this up, if one was trying to parody the collapse of morality within modern mainstream journalism.

Update: Yes, it can get worse. Also in the same online edition comes an article by Trib reporter Jason George, about a website named "I Dream Of Barack", in which participants, instead of seeking urgently needed mental health intervention, post what they say are their dreams about the Great One, with a decided tendency to include (based on the sample supplied) personal engagement scenarios (that's as polite a term as I can think of) bathing the dreamer in cascades of wonderfullness.
Your Correspondent apologizes for being unwilling to subject his own mental stability to any further shaking by actually directly perusing the dream-site. Tough is as tough does, but losing a perfectly good breakfast is more than this old nail-slugger's willing to give up for his readers.

More on Chicagoness, and the 2008 presidential election

I'm a Chicagoan, born and bred, and still living in the County of Cook after 55 years of subjugation to the Throne of Daley Everlasting. Having also done business within the County as a remodeler/contractor, I've had some close-up perspective to fill in around my lifelong attention to things Machine.
Additionally, I am married to a daughter and granddaughter of old-time Irish Chicago policemen, a woman who also spent ten years toiling for a large, wealthy suburb as a mid-manager and who fled one Friday afternoon, exclaiming, "I'm becoming one of them!", her final tribute to government employment.
I mention all of this as background to my introduction of a point: As far as the 2008 election campaign/endless train wreck goes, a grasp of Chicagoness is critical to a full comprehension of what is about to take place. I have little doubt that either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton is going to be the Democratic nominee for president. What's important about Chicagoness is that both are Chicagoans (to some degree) but more importantly, both are products of the Cook County Machine. Clinton grew up inches from the Chicago line, and still consorts with her old local friends.
Clinton's easy, casual corruption, a long and should-be-well-known story, comes right out of her Chicagoness and growing up under the aegis of the Daley behemoth.
But more important is Barack Obama. I submit that few who are not Chicagoans really appreciate what he is: a well-designed and manufactured product of the Daley Machine. He was built for the specific purpose of keeping his master, and his many wealthy friends, out of prison.
Second on his task list is funneling enormous amounts of money into the county, which is far beyond broke, and beyond salvation, as well, owing to the assiduous purchasing of power by the Man. Chicago is beautiful, and broke. Daley needs billions to hold on and keep the lights on. Obama is merely the front man for that effort.
There was nothing accidental about his rise to prominence. Some of the most capable political operatives in the country seized upon his potential to create a nearly irresistible force in national politics.
The creators knew his one natural asset, his incredible, practically weapons-grade personal charm, was by far the most important thing. No buzz could ever take hold without something to initiate it.
I will cite as a personal example: a close friend works for one of the giant corporations who have early on established ownership of the President-to-be. I wish I could provide better context, but I cannot chance my friend's gainful employment at his beloved line of work.
Non-political, he was an instantaneous convert upon first meeting. The transformation was truly frightening. I tried to reason: everything you believe in as a (now-formerly) self-employed person is what Obama is against!
To no avail. The pod had done its work; the neuralizer had wiped out the past; the soma had undone the skepticism.
Multiply that by thousands and it's easy to picture the Freres Daley rubbing their hands with glee.
Into their new empty vessel they allowed some sophisticated-sounding stuff they remembered from the Sixties to be poured in, just so it all sounded nice and intellectual and elite-like.
One managed election process later, they had a newly-minted state senator, who, when he could be stirred into actually taking a stand, mostly just followed the party line demanding a total ban on firearm possession. Usually, though, a lowish profile and a set of "present" votes was plenty.
When the time came to spring the creation upon the broader public and insert him into the US Senate where he could start making some real hay, one small kink developed- the normally hopelessly inept Illinois Republican Party inadvertently nominated a superior candidate. Jack Ryan was not only far more qualified, with far more intellectual horsepower (a measure of work accomplished, remember), he was every bit as pretty and nearly as charming as the Daleybot.
This impediment was quickly dispatched with though, as the Machine enlisted the aid of the local newsrag, the Chicago Tribune, which they knew, of course, could not help themselves but to assist the ascension of one of their own, a "progressive".Furthermore, knowing the deeply-ingrained institutional racism of the leftist press, the fact that the candidate could be called "black", even if he wasn't, very, made the process a slam-dunk. No modern journo could help but be an advocate for the saintly victim, the put-upon Person Of Color.
Jack Ryan was taken out swiftly with a smear campaign that probably left even Ryan stunned, and he was plenty smart enough to know what he was getting himself into.
Even if the Daleyites weren't brutal enough, the infusion of Clintonites, most especially the savage Rahm Emmanuel, should have let him know how bad it was going to be.
It was bad. The Tribune ran daily front-page screamers about suspected problems with Ryan, while judge-shopping across the country (who paid for that? The Trib? Soros/MoveOn? The DNC?) in a frantic effort to find dirt.They never actually did, but with the trumpets blaring that candidate Ryan was being investigated, and Seriously Wrong Things were sure to be found, the tide of public opinion began to slip away from the hapless Ryan. Merely having totally overshadowed the Machine product in every way imaginable was no match for the war-sized headlines.Finally the Tribsters (or whoever they hired) managed to get Ryan's divorce papers unsealed. Right there was enough to power days' worth of headlines. When the nasty bits were finally opened to public view (destroying the son's life, too), all they had was the unsubstantiated claim made by the wife's divorce attorney, refuted by Ryan, that he had asked her to have intercourse with him, her husband, in an inappropriate place.
Lacking anything other than this assertion, the Trib went so full blast that even the ordinarily-politically-savvy Trib columnist John Kass crumbled and began to whimper that maybe Ryan (who he respected and favored) should step aside.
It took about three weeks to demolish the decent Ryan. It took merely hours for the Party to appoint Alan Keyes, a talk-show-host/intellectual from Maryland, to the now-absurd candidacy. Apparently no one else was willing to step in front of the Daley/Emmanuel firing line.
Even running virtually unopposed, Obama struggled to get two-thirds of the vote in a very blue state with the assistance of a machine capable of delivering tens of thousands of “extra” votes.
Obama still has not yet won an actual, contested election (can’t count the Iowa primary caucuses). But given the nature of 21st Century media, it hardly matters. Oprah, Brian Williams, Barbara Walters, and the whole rest of the Lefty opinion-maker class has already swooned for the Obama charm, and in an environment wherein substance, stands, and common sense are just baggage to be concealed, the bandwagon has gone out on the road with nary a bump in the golden brick road ahead of it.
The Tribune has never stopped its advocacy. They did the clearing of the battlespace early on, as the current practice requires, and got most of that annoying corruption stuff out of the way and got on with the business of hyping without allowing any leaks of any position on any topic save that of "change". Now, they're content to run daily hagiographies with glamour shots of the product, usually with a microphone, smiling beneficently at the little people while expounding on how much better it's all going to be when he's running things.
In the end, it's hard not to think the Machine is getting its very own president.

Debunking more canards

In the controversy swirling around the US Supreme Court's electing to take on the Heller v. DC gun-rights appeal case, one of the best things that may come of it all is the bringing into the sunlight a lot of very important concepts- and, one would hope, the dismantlement of a number of misconceptions on the subjects of not only guns, but the US Constitution and human rights.
As one who has been involved in shooting sports and gun rights, I get to hear an impressive amount of sheer wrongness on the subject. Without really going into commentary on how American society has become so separated from its heritage since the end of World War II and the consequent rise of "media", television most especially, in the education of Americans about what a narrow coterie of fiction writers in California thinks it knows about history, law, and guns, debunking is the first order of business for persons concerned about the importance of both arms and the law.
One of the first things I will hear when in the company of liberals/lefties/progressives when the topic is raised is the familiar old bromide that "handguns are only for killing". In any technical or literal sense, that statement is false, and very much so.
In fact, few handguns are either designed or intended for killing anything. The small fraction that is are hunting guns, such as the well-known TC Contender, a large single-shot device normally equipped with a telescopic sight. Hardly the stuff of gangbanger fantasies.
A certain number of handguns are designed for target work. Many are of the .22 rimfire caliber, nearly the smallest commonly available one. What target handguns share is large size and features that work against both stealth and rapidity. Even a USPSA Open Division pistol is huge and heavy chunk, and not very useful for anything outside of its narrow realm of operation.
In fact, nearly all handguns are designed for personal protection. When one hears the statement that "Glock 9mms are only for killing", well, you're hearing something so far from the reality that it bears no relation to real life.
Personal protection handguns are designed and intended to stop. To stop a living thing, human or not, from doing what it’s doing, as quickly as possible. That is exactly, and only, why a law enforcement officer carries one, why a soldier carries one, and why a law-abiding citizen carries one.
In fact, killing is a problem for that purpose and all users of handguns for personal protection dread that potential side-effect. The use of a firearm may well constitute deadly force, but death is absolutely not the primary intent- stopping an anti-social activity is.
This is not a trivial or semantical issue- grasping this elemental truth is essential to the understanding of arms at all. Until a participant in the discussion on the right of humans to keep and bear arms can get past this critical thought-step, nothing that follows will be grounded in reality. In a non-military situation, to use a gun to kill a human being- for that express purpose- is a crime. It's homicide.
The police officer in the dark, stinking apartment hallway watching a gun pointed at his partner has no intent of killing the gun-pointer, no intent of committing a homicide. He wants to stop the miscreant, stop him from bringing harm to someone undeserving.
There is no difference in the use by civilians of handguns for personal protection- when the shopkeeper sees a savage, drugged-out robber pointing a shotgun at his spouse, he will use his gun to stop the robber, and killing would be a secondary, if awful, consequence.
I will add that I have two friends who both were faced with exactly these scenarios, and I can testify to their state of mind as regards whether they were stopping or killing. I hope the reader never finds him- or herself faced with the same sort of decision, and I am sure that the death of the attacker, should it be a consequence, will not be found anywhere as intentional.
Handguns are not for killing at all. They're for stopping. It's not a moral quandary about a law-abiding and righteous person taking a life- it's that person preventing harm to an innocent. With that foundational concept cemented into place, the issue of citizens bearing arms, including carrying in ordinary life, can be made clearer and more sensible.
Another question I will hear, then, is why carry? "I've never had a need for a gun" will follow soon. One widely-mentioned view holds that a "conservative is a liberal who was mugged", and that does have a certain amount of truth to it.
Another illustrative answer is that in fact, I've never needed a seatbelt in the million miles I've ridden in and driven automobiles... but I won't go past the foot of my driveway without wearing one. Same goes for riding in airplanes. Same goes for helmets on motorcycles. Same goes for business liability insurance.
Bond cards. Fire extinguishers. Criminal lawyers' telephone numbers.
The fact is, life has things go wrong, and some element of preparation for those things is just common sense. Never needed a gun? I did, and it served to help protect the safety of an innocent person, a neighbor. I didn't have to even touch the trigger in that case, and I am eternally grateful that was so, but not as grateful as the neighbor whose home was not invaded as a direct result of the presence of my gun, as she waited nineteen long minutes for the police to arrive.
In those discussions, what follows will be the insistence upon regulation of the right to arms- gun control. That is another issue where little knowledge is very often present, underpinning some pretty non-factual arguments.
I might as well dispense immediately with one more faulty "known fact", that gun-rights advocates demand a complete absence of regulation of the use and possession of firearms. I know and read thousands of gun-rights advocates. I have never heard one say such a thing, that no restrictions on the possession of firearms are permissible.
The bizarre and wrongful demonization of the National Rifle Association, an organization that is more concerned with the safe and lawful use of firearms than any other, and has been such a repository of expertise on firearms law that it formerly was frequently consulted by legislators to author and proof firearms legislation goes along with this.
Just like other basic rights, the right of the keeping of arms is related to upholding one's citizenship. The law provides the reduction of citizen's rights in the event of bad behavior. A violent felon may not own a gun, or vote, or get certain kinds of jobs, and so on and so forth. One may reasonably suggest restrictions on other, specific types of arms. Frequently we hear that rocket-propelled grenades are a good example of arms that ought to be prohibited. In fact, they are heavily restricted in the US and there's no problem in reality. Automatic firearms, machine guns as they are more commonly called, are sometimes cited as another type to be banned. But, the real-life fact is that there are hundreds of thousands of machine guns in private hands in the US and virtually none- as small a number as can be thought of- are used in violent crimes. There's no problem there, and imagining one where none exists probably serves more to illuminate the mind of the imaginer than any sort of solution to violent crime.
That same reality also pertains to personal carry by civilians. The real-life fact, again, is that ordinary citizens carrying personal protection guns are just about never- as close to never as a human activity could be- involved in committing violent crimes. 46 states issue permits for concealed carry (two have no restrictions on carry such as permits or licenses) and among those carriers, such a tiny percentage are ever charged, much less convicted, of a violent crime so as to be negligible.
While perhaps not a legitimate debating device, I can always point out to someone arguing against lawful concealed carry that I, as a permit-holder (non-resident permits) am far less likely, statistically, to commit a violent crime with a gun than my rhetorical opponent.
That does point to one of the odder things a gun owner is exposed to- the modern, "liberal" person who, upon discovering the presence of a gun, immediately insists that the bearer is about to shoot someone. I would like to write this off as more of the sort of view into the mind of the gun-ignorant, but it still is a cause for concern. Why would someone even think such a ridiculous thing?
Well, Hollywood, of course. There lies the primary fountain of firearms nonsense in this country and many others. I can recall a calm, thoughtful relative once asking me if it really was hard to shoot things, instead of how it looks on television.
Here's a simple, foolproof law of certainty for persons who don't know much, or anything about firearms: if you saw it on TV or a movie screen, there’s a better than 90 percent chance it's false. Whether the chilling totalitarianism of Dick Wolf's "Law and Order" television series or the latest Big Hollywood Star's anti-gun movie (Jodie Foster comes to mind), it's so full of nonsense that when an actual fact appears, it's a surprise.
Very much the same thing appears in the news business. I'm not here to explain what sort of person gravitates into journalism, but it does not require a statistician to discover that 80-90 percent of mainstream journalists vote straight Democrat, and spend their advocacy time on causes almost invariably well left of center.
Then, check out their editorials calling for the banning of guns of one type, another, or altogether. Those will have been preceded by news articles reading exactly like Brady Group press releases about how bad it is guns aren't outlawed. Then ask them one and all how many voted for G.W. Bush. Expect to hear some serious silence.
Thanks to the Internet, gun owners get their laughs at the ridiculous misrepresentations of guns, gun law, and gun owners almost instantly, now. And there are plenty of those laughs to be had. There are a lot of news organizations that couldn't put together a fully-factual, even-handed article on these topics even if they suddenly wanted to. I can refer you to my hometown Chicago Tribune again, where the journalists believe that the Brady Campaign, the current name for the largest (but not very large) anti-gun group out there at the moment feeds them solid and accurate information for publication, but the NRA, the Illinois State Rifle Association, and the other gun-rights groups present an extremist and minority distortion of reality.
Think about that- the Brady people know more about guns that the NRA people? How does that even make it through the smell test?
Possibly the most pervasive canard pushed by these groups is that of a huge, mysterious "gun lobby". With the current craze for casting corporations as entities with nefarious intent, shading the gun owners as part of this corporate-tainted political force is an easy sell for uninformed advocates trying to influence uninformed voters.
Gun owners constitute approximately half of the adult population of the United States. Suggesting that a group such as that comprises a "lobby" should be comical. Unfortunately, to many growing up and living in environments without experience of the realities of guns and gun ownership, most especially large urban centers like Chicago, hating corporate lobby-thingies is a facile thing. That doesn’t make it accurate.
There are several anti-gun organizations. At the moment, the Brady group, an amalgam and recasting of a couple of older and less-attractively named ones, is holding sway on mainstream media storylines about firearms. Others, broader advocacy groups of the progressive/leftist/liberal bent are strongly anti-gun as well- the inaptly-named American Civil Liberties Union is an especially loud one.
None come close to the dreaded NRA when it comes to being a grass-roots-up organization with an involved, informed, and participatory membership. Even at four million, the NRA represents a small fraction of gun owners, but compared to the anti-gun groups, it’s huge, active, and connected.
Yet, turn on CNN or open the LA Times and you’d think the NRA was a corporate-based bunch of mercenaries at the beck and call of firearms manufacturers. It would be hard to find a more inaccurate picture of a not-for-profit, but the deep and wide ignorance of mainstream media is so complete that I suspect that the journalists producing the anti-gun news articles are not even aware of the falsity of the assumptions underpinning their storylines.
The next time you see a Brady-type like Paul Helmke speaking through the media mouth that anti-gun laws bring safety and pro-gun laws endanger innocents, you’re getting nonsense that can’t be supported by fact or science. In the tidal wave of media demonization of the NRA, you’ll never hear the reality.
So here’s a set of questions you can answer for yourself and go around the mouthpieces: Where is the strongest, worst gun control in effect? Places like Chicago, and Washington, D.C. Where is the violent crime the worst? Where is the murder rate the highest? Those very same places.Try a different variation. What about the celebrated gun bans imposed on other parts of the Anglosphere, such as the U.K.? England now has some of the most onerous gun control in a democracy anywhere, put into place a decade or so ago. What’s happening to the violent crime rate? It’s skyrocketing, to the point where England has passed the U.S. for risk of violence. And it includes gun-involved crime, too. What’s worse is that it’s not confined to the deep-urban setting as it is in the US; it’s everywhere across the countryside. No place is safe.
How about the rapid spread of right-to-carry laws that swept the U.S. starting in the Reagan years? Did those states see increased gun-involved violence? Nope, far from it. Almost every place legal conceal-carry was liberalized, violent crime rates went down, and in some places, a lot.
How could a suggestion that gun-control laws prevent violent crime even be floated?
On a sea of canards.