Before we get really cranked up, remember that gun owners are also taxpayers, and that shooters, as well as every other “interest group” traditionally support their lifestyle with what we call “disposable income.”
That is, money not spent on household necessities and other bills can be used for recreational and personal purposes. The Washington Legislature appears to have reached a decision to have citizens here dispose of that income in the form of additional taxes. The Seattle Times reports that lawmakers claim a new $890 million tax package “is centered on a temporary three-tenths-of-a-cent sales tax increase.”
Did anybody in the Evergreen State ever hear of a “temporary tax increase” (without the help of a Tim Eyman initiative)? People who believe this is a “temporary” tax hike fall into the same intellectual vacuum as the editorial board at the Norwich Bulletin, a Connecticut newspaper that believes it is wrong for domestic violence victims to arm themselves against further potential attack.
Just because someone has a permit to carry the weapon doesn’t preclude that individual from using it inappropriately, or eliminate the possibility of accidents that could harm, or cause someone’s death.—Norwich Bulletin
It may be a rare event that journalists do what I am about to (just ask award-winning journalist Bernie Goldberg, author of Bias), but here goes. The authors of an editorial headlined “Arming civilians an unwise move” must be a collective of morons. While acknowledging that restraining orders are pieces of paper, these fools insist that it would be a horrible mistake to enact legislation allowing private citizens to carry stun guns for personal protection. Even the Connecticut Police Chiefs Association backs the idea, but these newspaper nitwits are choking on it.
My colleague, David Codrea, writes about this editorial here.
“No one is safer,” they lament, “if everyone is armed, whether it be a pistol or a stun gun.”
The Norwich knuckleheads have much in common, it appears, with the kooks at the Columbus Dispatch who seem to think, in their editorial wisdom, that people in large cities should have different civil rights, or at least be restrained from exercising them in the same way, as people in rural areas.
The editorial discussion in Columbus was a pitiful plea to the U.S. Supreme Court to “rule wisely” on the Second Amendment Foundation’s lawsuit against the City of Chicago’s handgun ban. “A highly restrictive law such as Chicago’s and Oak Park’s would be unnecessary in many other locales,” the Dispatch editorial sneers, “such as small towns, rural areas and anyplace where gun violence is a rare occurrence. But Oak Park sits next door to Chicago’s highly urbanized suburbs and neighborhoods and absorbs their spillover criminal activity. Chicago is engaged in a major campaign to reduce the violence and, in high-crime areas, has installed sophisticated cameras that can detect gunshots, turn rapidly to capture the scene at that site and alert police.”
Unfortunately, the Supreme Court's conservative majority appears unlikely to step away from its activist interpretation of the Second Amendment as an individual right to own guns for self-defense and hunting.—Columbus Dispatch
It is embarrassing to see such absence of logic substitute as intelligent discourse on the editorial pages of major newspapers. It is no wonder why millions of Americans no longer read newspapers and subscriptions are down. Newspaper subscriptions are another use of “disposable income” and if people in other states are taxed like they are here in Washington, newspapers are going to suffer further declines, especially when the editorial pages support those tax hikes while arguing against the notion of equal civil rights for Americans, no matter where they live.
Here is the simple truth: When pieces of paper won’t stop a violent attack from a domestic abuser, an electric shock or a bullet will. When people in large cities are victimized by neighborhood thugs that police seem unable or unwilling to do anything about, those citizens are most in need of the means to defend themselves. Alan Gottlieb and I wrote about this in America Fights Back: Armed Self-Defense in a Violent Age.
Cameras cannot fight back, and it might be a useful exercise for my press contemporaries to share a few minutes with Simon Thomas. Who? He’s the 45-year-old British subject whose unusual (considering British gun laws) display of a shotgun to thwart a burglary at his home is making headlines in The Telegraph in London. Mr. Thomas is the proprietor of an inn, and he discovered a pair of thieves loading his belongings into their vehicle, while he was home and while his daughters were sleeping.
He told the newspaper that, in retrospect, he almost wishes he had fired. Two things stopped him. The gun wasn’t loaded and when he told the thugs that police were on the way, they left their booty and fled. He bluffed them twice, once with the empty gun and once when he lied about having called the coppers. As a footnote, the newspaper said it took police 50 minutes to arrive. Heck of a response time to an in-progress burglary.
When they saw his shotgun they begged for their lives and started unloading their haul of stolen mountain bikes from their car. They claimed to have thought the premises were empty. – UK Telegraph
When police can’t get there in time, what other options do we have? Burglary may not be a violent crime – unless someone is home – and then what? Depend on a camera?
The system certainly doesn’t protect people. Witness the case of Rey Davis-Bell, the now-convicted killer who told a psychiatrist in 2002 that he planned to settle some scores with “everybody who has done me dirty.” That led to a January 2008 fatal shooting at a cheesesteak stand in Seattle, and now has brought a civil lawsuit by victims alleging that the state didn’t do enough to monitor this thug. Perhaps justice will this time be served.
In the meantime, maybe it’s time for people to just get mad. Remember the film Network? Maybe it is time – as the Howard Beale character played superbly by the late Peter Finch reminded us – to get “mad as hell” and not take it anymore.
If tax-hungry politicians and newspaper editorial boards don’t start “getting it” about how their elitist attitudes offend people, they’re likely to hear a lot of people sticking their heads out of windows yelling.
For more info: Second Amendment Foundation. Chicago Gun Case.
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Comments
right on Dave. just ask Jennifer Paulson how well restraining orders and "gun free zones" worked for her....
I'll vote for the three-tenths of a cent increase any day over the option of a state income tax. Now that the camel has its' nose in the tent, watch out when it breaks wind...
I like the term activist, and asking for a "rule wisely" decision from Chicago?
"The mobs of the great cities add just so much to the support of pure government as sores do to the strength of the human body. It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigor. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution." --Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Virginia
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