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got another response!
A member sent this as a link from the New York Times.
A Rifle in Every
Pot
By GLENN REYNOLDS
Published: January 16, 2007
Knoxville, Tenn.
IT’S a phenomenon that gives the term “gun control” a whole new meaning: community ordinances that encourage citizens to own guns.
Last month, Greenleaf, Idaho, adopted Ordinance 208, calling for its citizens to own guns and keep them ready in their homes in case of emergency. It’s not a response to high crime rates. As The Associated Press reported, “Greenleaf doesn’t really have crime ... the most violent offense reported in the past two years was a fist fight.” Rather, it’s a statement about preparedness in the event of an emergency, and an effort to promote a culture of self-reliance.
And it may not be a bad idea. While pro-gun laws like the one in Greenleaf are mostly symbolic, to the extent that they actually make a difference, it is likely to be a positive one.
Greenleaf is following in the footsteps of Kennesaw, Ga., which in 1982 passed a mandatory gun ownership law in response to a handgun ban passed in Morton Grove, Ill. Kennesaw’s crime dropped sharply, while Morton Grove’s did not.
To some degree, this is rational. Criminals, unsurprisingly, would rather break into a house where they aren’t at risk of being shot. As David Kopel noted in a 2001 article in The Arizona Law Review, burglars report that they try to avoid homes where armed residents are likely to be present. We see this phenomenon internationally, too, with the United States having a lower proportion of “hot” burglaries — break-ins where the burglars know the home to be occupied — than countries with restrictive gun laws.
Likewise, in the event of disasters that leave law enforcement overwhelmed, armed citizens can play an important role in stanching crime. Armed neighborhood watches deterred looting in parts of Houston and New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
Precisely because an armed populace can serve as an effective backup for law enforcement, the ownership of firearms was widely mandated during Colonial times, and the second Congress passed a statute in 1792 requiring adult male citizens to own guns.
The twin purposes of self and community defense may very well lie behind the Second Amendment’s language encompassing both the importance of a well-regulated militia and the right of citizens to keep and bear arms. As the constitutional and criminal law scholar Don Kates has noted in the journal Constitutional Commentary, thinkers at the time when the Constitution was written drew no real distinction between resisting burglars, foreign invaders or domestic tyrants: All were wrongdoers that good citizens had the right, and the duty, to oppose with force.
Greenleaf’s ordinance is consistent with this approach. But it may also serve another purpose.
Experts don’t think the Kennesaw ordinance, which has never actually been enforced, did much to change gun ownership rates among Kennesaw residents. And, given that Greenleaf’s mayor has estimated that 80 percent of the town’s residents already own guns, the new ordinance can’t make all that much of a difference. But criminals are likely to suspect that towns with laws like these on the books will be unsympathetic to malefactors in general, and to conclude that they will do better elsewhere.
To the extent that’s true, we’re likely to see other communities adopting similar laws so that criminals won’t see them as attractive alternatives. The result may be a different kind of “gun control.”
Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee, is the author of the blog Instapundit and of “An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology are Empowering Ordinary People to Take on Big Government, Big Media and Other Goliaths.”
Response #2
Date:
Wed 6 Sep 21:28:09 CDT 2006 He writes: What a way to resolve
an issue. Fire the current staff. We shall see if the new vendor retains
all the current employees. And if you think the new vendor wants to become
union...well I have an iceberg in Arizona to sell you. |
It is our firm belief that any replacement vendors will, unlike Gateway, deal with the union in good faith and enable us to obtain a contract which meets the needs of our members at Sheridan, and at Dwight and Vandalia where drug counselors have voted for union representation since the strike began. This victory would
not have been possible without the courage and determination of the strikers
themselves, nor without the support of the dozens of locals which contributed
to the Adopt-A-Family Strike Fund. |
However,
there has been a disruption of services, but our members will get the
treatment they have earned. Webmaster adds: Our members got the "treatment" all right! Thanks Henry Baby! Please don't do any favors for me, though. Thanks pez |
Response #1
Our
Enslavement to “Freedom”
By Dr. James Hitchcock
New methods of contraception have severed the connection between sex and the procreation of children and, in case contraception fails, abortion is now legal. But despite this preoccupation with avoiding pregnancy, it is now possible for women to become pregnant through technology rather than sexual intercourse. It is within the realm of possibility to manipulate conception in order to choose the sex of the child, and allegedly it is even possible to create life in laboratories. Sexual relations between people of the same sex are considered normal, and people can have their sex changed by surgical procedure. Meanwhile, at the other end of life there is a push towards assisted suicide and euthanasia. Each of these denies
aspects of our traditional understanding of what it means to be human:
sex is not necessarily related to procreation, sexual identity and the
family are not fixed by God or nature, human life is not sacred, and we
are not answerable to any higher power. |
Each
of these changes looks like progress, because they involve breakthroughs
in technology. Western civilization has always had an almost unlimited openness
to technological change — more so than any other culture in the world
— and only rarely has there been significant resistance to such changes.
Today what is broadly called environmentalism does question technology, but there is an odd contradiction here — people who are opposed to human “meddling” with nature, who want only natural foods and who decry pollution, are rarely concerned about contraception and cloning. Things having to do human reproduction are still new, exciting, and liberating, whereas pesticides, dams, and gasoline engines are old hat. These changes have been sold under the slogan of freedom, as each new development promises to liberate people from inconvenient limits on their behavior. Thus radical interference with the human reproductive cycle is welcomed, because the idea of sexual “liberation” has become almost sacred. But unnoticed amidst all these changes is an idea invented in the twentieth century and promoted under a variety of names -- social engineering, which is the claim that most people do not really know what is best for themselves and for society. However, instead of calling for naked force, social engineers call for “education,” meaning propaganda, and for manipulating people through social agencies. These radical changes have themselves made people less free, because they have destroyed signposts of thousands of years’ duration and plunged us into a confusion in which it is difficult to make rational judgments -- what is a family and does it matter, is gender real, what indeed is a human being? (©2006,
James Hitchcock. This article originally appeared on July 13, 2006, on
the Women for Faith and Family website. It is reprinted by the kind permission
of the author.) |
We
have a profile of the kind of person the social engineers consider the ideal
citizen -- someone who questions the wisdom of bringing children into the
world and approves of having at most one or two, who wholeheartedly approves
of homosexuality, who considers gender merely a “social construct,”
who welcomes laboratory experiments with human life, and who urges people
not to delay unduly their exit from this life.
Social engineering hopes to create a perfect society, which in turn requires that people not be allowed to exercise their freedom by standing in the way. Abortion is a “choice,” but the right to choose cannot be extended to people who reproduce “irresponsibly,” and the creation of human beings through technology might produce a higher type of person. People who cling to outmoded moral beliefs cannot be allowed to indoctrinate even their own children, much less have a voice in public policy. The chronically ill and those deemed biologically deficient cannot be allowed to use a disproportionate share of medical resources, so that their deaths must in some cases be facilitated by the state. Decades ago Aldous Huxley wrote a novel whose title entered our language - Brave New World. Much of this sounds like science fiction, and its full realization may be some distance in the future, but there is no doubt that society is headed in that direction. The only thing that can prevent it is a vigilant citizenry who, unfortunately, often seems confused and timid and fails to see how offers of present “freedom” have become the basis for future enslavement.
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