Today, the United States Supreme Court issued a legal groin-kick with steel-toed boots to the idea that the human right of self-defense exists at the sufference of governments and bureaucrats, in ruling for Otis McDonald XXX to XXX in his seminal lawsuit against the Duchy City of Chicago.

Monday’s decision did not explicitly strike down the Chicago area laws, ordering a federal appeals court to reconsider its ruling. But it left little doubt that they would eventually fall.

Still, Alito noted that the declaration that the Second Amendment is fully binding on states and cities “limits (but by no means eliminates) their ability to devise solutions to social problems that suit local needs and values.”

Now, it’s our turn.

———-

If you know me, you know I love a good analogy from military history.

The late sixties?  Those were, metaphorically, the years when the Germans rolled across Europe at will; gun control essentially won the battle for the hearts and minds of…well, much of the American “elite” and “intelligentsia”, and it felt like there was litte Real America could do about it.

1987, when Florida became the ninth state, and by far the largest, to adopt “shall-issue” concealed carry?  That was the Dieppe Raid raid; a bold counterstroke that showed Real America may have been down, but not out.

1991, when Dr. Sanford Levinson released The Embarassing Second Amendment in the Yale Law Review?  That was the battle of El Alamein; not a definitive battle in and of itself, it showed the world that the anti-freedom juggernaut was not invulnerable, and could be defeated.

2008, when the Supreme Court ruled in Heller that “Right of the People” meant people, not “National Guard”?  That was the bloody, ugly battle of the Atlantic, and the air battle over Germany, which made what was to follow feasible in the first place.

And this, today?  The McDonald decision?  It’s D-Day.  It’s the day all the preparatory work – the Yaltas, the raiding, the negotiations, the legal scholarship, the bombing, the posturing – all comes to an end.  It’s the day the big players – the Churchills and Hestons, the Mussolinis and the Lillehaugs, the Montgomeries and Guras, the Hitlers and the Heather Martens, the Pattons and the Kopels, the Swiss and the Laurence Tribes, the Goerings and the Daleys, the Eisenhowers and the Scalias – find their work, if not “done”, at least receding to the rear.  It’s now the job of the infantry.

That’d be us.  The grass roots.

The decision makes the court’s opinion in Heller, that the Second Amendment is a right of the people, binding on lower levels of law – as it should – but doesn’t toss out local laws wholesale.  Again, rightly.  A principled judicial conservative doesn’t legislate from the bench.

And so it’s up to us – the grass roots, the “infantry” of the Human Rights movement – to take up the battle now.  To take this battle to every pillbox of fascism and racism, the gun-grabbing city halls and state legislatures and county commissions, and turn the flamethrower of reason, the satchel charge of the Constitution, and the bayonet of human liberty on them, and destroy them, one by one, all of them.  To pound them out of existence through the weight of our numbers, the unstoppable passion of our attack, and the rightness of our cause.

And many of us “infantry” in the Higgins boats today won’t be here in the front lines when the news finally comes down that Gun Control, holed up in its bunker in San Francisco, has stuck a metaphoric (and ironic!) gun in its legal and social mouth and brought an end to the war.  This, as Churchill said, isn’t the end, or even the beginning of the end.   It’s the end of the beginning.

And it’s our job – every one of us Real Americans – to bring this thing to its end.  A prudent end, with Real, law-abiding Americans in control and criminals cowering in fear; a just end, with banana-republic tyrants like Richard Daley groveling for forgiveness before the souls of the thousands killed for want of the human right to self-defense, perhaps waddling through the afterlife with the symbolic muzzle of a metaphorical Mosin-Nagant jammed into his nether regions as cosmic penance; a sane end, with “gun control” spoken with the same dirty sneer that “McCarthyism” or “racism” get today.

And that end got a little closer today.

And it’s all in front of us.

Congratulations, Real America.  Take a day to celebrate.  Tomorrow, you’ll earn it all over again.

God Bless America.

The Supreme Court released opnions on four cases on Monday, the third-to-last day for such releases (as I understand it, and stop me if I’m wrong) this term.

That leaves them 20 opinions to release over the next two Mondays, including McDonald Vs. City of Chicago, the likely-to-be-landmark Second Amendment case that, if all goes well, will force all state and local governments to treat the Amendment as the founding fathers wrote it; a right of The People . Not the National Guard or police; not people with political and administrative clout.  The People.

Anyone wanna lay odds they hold off until the last decision of the last day of the session, June 28?

Taxi driver kills 12 in the western UK:

Armed with two weapons – a .22 rifle and a shotgun – Bird drove down the coast from Whitehaven where the first attacks took place, leaving a trail of carnage in his wake. Residents of the county were warned to stay indoors as police followed the deadly route, discovering more bodies as they went. At one point Bird abandoned his Citroen Picasso for another car which he then crashed near woods in the picturesque Lake District town of Boot. The body of Bird, a 52 year-old divorced father-of-two, together with his guns were found nearby.

Imagine how bad it’d be if the UK hadn’t completely banned guns!

(Although journalists can take comfort in the fact that nobody’s aiming up their butts).

In the video I posted last week, Chicago’s buffoon-in-chief Richard Daley stood in front of a table full of confiscated firearms and picked up a rifle (ironically, an old Russian Mosin-Nagant, the rifle of Stalin’s army), and “jokingly” offered to demonstrate the value of Chicago’s draconian-yet-ineffective gun ban by shooting a round up the reporter’s “butt”.

Well, the second rule of shooting is “know your backstop…”

Apparently in Richard Daley’s special little world, every gun is used for some kind of depravity or another:

Daley went on. “This gun saved many lives—it could save your life,” he said—meaning, I think, that getting that gun off the street might have saved many lives, including mine.

And he went on some more. “We save all these guns that the police department seizes, you know how many lives we’ve saved? You don’t realize it. First of all, they’re taking these guns out of someone’s hands. They save their own life and they save someone else’s. You cannot count how many times this gun can be used. Thirty, forty times in shooting people and discharging a weapon. I think it’s very important.

In other words, “Chicago has one of the highest murder rates in the US and is being paralyzed by gang warfare; imagine how awful it’d be if the law-abiding citizen could defend him or herself!”

“Next will be hand grenades, right? We’ll say that hand grenades are OK. I mean, how far can you go in regards to mass weapons? To me, any gun taken off saves thousands of lives in America. I really believe that, I don’t care what people tell me. You have to thank the police officers for seizing all these weapons. We lead the country in seizing weapons. This is unbelievable.”

Yeah.  Yeah, it is.

Daley reportedly has a vacation home in Michigan – a “shall issue” state.  It’s a wonder he hasn’t been shot thirty or forty times by now.

Under a month ’til McDonald!

I shoot because shooting is fun; it’s the best stress relief one can get alone; it’s the best way there is to ensure ones’ safety from violent crime.

But why am I a Second Amendment activist?  The honest truth – it’s exactly, precisely because of displays like this (safe for work, albeit crude and deeply stupid); it’s Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, who was asked whether his city, ravaged by gang gun violence, is benefitting from having the strictest gun controls in the US:

Is Chicago’s idiotic (and possibly soon-to-be-unconstitutional) gun ban effective?

“Oh!” Daley said. “It’s been very effective!”

He grabbed a rifle, held it up, and looked right at me. He was chuckling but there was no smile.

“If I put this up your—ha!—your butt—ha ha!—you’ll find out how effective this is!”

For a moment the room was very, very quiet. I took a good look at the weapon. It had a long bayonet. (Was it seized during the Civil War?)

“If I put a round up your—ha ha!”

I am a second amendment activist because it’s a thumb in the eye of authoritarian scumbags like Richard Daley.

(Via Ed)

Two years ago,, when the Heller case set the precedent that the Second Amendment right “of the people” meant “people” and not “the National Guard”, it left two questions:

1. Would the case apply to the states?  Heller referred to the federally-controlled “District of Columbia”; McDonald, which was argued last March and whose decision is due next month, should fix this.
2. What are the “reasonable restrictions” that the court referred to?

It’s an important question – because the orcs who oppose the human right of self-defense like to believe that human rights are commodities, and they are the dealers:

Mark Snyder, an amateur biathlete, wanted to buy a
.22-caliber bolt-action rifle for target shooting and figured the
process would take about a week. After nearly six weeks, six visits to
police departments and $300 in fees, he secured his rifle.

“I was not expecting a free ride,” said Mr. Snyder, 45, “but this is
an obstacle course they put in place.”

“Suuuuuure it’s your right “as a person”; now go get me a…shrubbery“.

The U.S. Supreme Court overturned the District of Columbia’s 32-year
ban on handguns in 2008, a victory for the gun-rights lobby that
seemed to promise a more permissive era in America’s long tussle over
gun ownership. Since then, the city has crafted rules that are proving
a new, powerful deterrent to residents who want to buy firearms.

Legal gun owners must be registered by the city, a red flag for many
in the gun-rights community concerned that registration lists could be
used to confiscate firearms. The District limits the number of bullets
a gun can hold and the type of firearm residents can buy. It requires
that by next year manufacturers sell guns equipped with a special
identification technology—one that hasn’t yet been adopted by the
industry.

This shows Real Americans two things:

• We’re going to have to win this battle in every single legislature, city council and Congress in the land, and…
• …more importantly – given that so many of the people who drive opinion on the left are so very un-bright –  the years and years we’ve spent educating people  aren’t over.

By the way, DC’s murder rates has dropped since Heller.  Who woulda seen that coming?

David Kopel notes that Colorado will now allow permitted concealed carry at its community colleges.

Colorado is joining Utah in allowing licensed carry at all state higher education campuses. As I detailed in Connecticut Law Review article, there have never been any problems caused by the Utah policy, or by licensed carry at Colorado State University, which has been in effect since 2003.

After an avalanche of nothing happens at Utah and Colorado schools, perhaps some common sense will prevail.

Gang violence has made Chicago the most dangerous city in America – so much so that the locals are asking for National Guard help.

Let’s see if they take the next step and install an authoritarian government who promises to “organize” things in exchange for cashing in their liberties…

…oh, wait.

Kal Penn, the “Harold and Kumar” star who left the TV series “House” to take a puff patronage job in the Obama administration or campaign (whatever), was apparently robbed at gun point in Washington.

TMZ has learned Kal Penn — aka Kumar from that “White Castle” movie — was robbed at gunpoint early this morning while walking in a neighborhood in Washington D.C.

Law enforcement sources tell TMZ Penn claims a man carrying a gun approached him around 1:20 AM and took his wallet and other personal property.

Clearly fraud is involved.  Guns are illegal in DC.

Silly TMZ.  Silly Penn.

Bob Collins at MPR notes a crime that few others did:

In Colorado, a gunman walked into a school and started shooting kids, until a hero teacher tackled him.

I checked the story, from a Denver TV station:

The Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office said the suspected shooter has been arrested. A well-placed source told CALL7 Investigators the suspect is Bruco Eastwood, 32. It’s unclear if Eastwood has any affiliation with the school. He likely will face two counts of attempted murder.

Witnesses said the gunman was tackled by math teacher David Benke as he apparently attempted to reload his high-powered rifle.

Wanna bet Keith Olberman or Rachel Maddow jump on this bit here?

A parent who saw the incident told 7NEWS that the gunman kept mumbling to himself, “I’m fighting for freedom. I’m fighting for freedom,” as he was being taken down.

But Collins had a bigger question:

That’s not the story. This is the story: These stories are no longer considered newsworthy enough for the front page of the country’s major newspapers.

Collins wonders why.  I think there are a couple of intertwining possibilities:

1. Nobody died.  Thank God.  Two wounded victims may be below-the-fold in Denver; it’s not even page 10 in Chicago.
2. Obama is President.  There’s no need for the media to keep showing that the wheels are coming off society.  And so the media will not.
3. The big media is starting to twig to the fact that these stories reinforce the right’s take on the Second Amendment.  The middle-school was a “Gun Free Zone” – and yet, mirabile dictu, the gunman had a, er, gun.

Am I too cynical?  Am I cynical enough?

It’s been all over the news; three member of the U of Alabama/Huntsville’s biology staff were killed yesterday, allegedly by a woman who’d been denied tenure.

Tenure, of course, is one of those niceties of academic life that promotes basic academic freedoms by making it much harder to arbitrarily and capriciously fire a professor.  Call it an “arbitrary termination-free zone”.

In a sense, all of the victims were denied an even more-important tenure – the right to protect themselves and those around them from being arbitrarily and capriciously blown off of this earth.  U of Alabama/Huntsville was a “gun-free zone”.

Several pieces of information indicate that students, faculty, and staff are banned from having guns on university property (here and here).

My condolences and prayers to the families of the victims – and the family of the alleged perp.

So how many more  humans are to be denied their temporal tenure to placate our anti-gun lords and masters?

…after nine people are killed in your cesspool of a city over the Thanksgiving weekend, for the love of all that is Holy, by all means make sure you keep guns out of the hands of the law-abiding! 

Because heaven only knows what’d happen if the scum that pervade Chicago (I’m talking about the ones that haven’t been elected to office yet, just to be clear) had to worry about the law-abiding citizen lighting them up.

And by all means, spend millions defending your deeply authoritarian (and hypocritical) gun ban against the NRA and its associated phalanx of real Americans, as your children are being massacred in the streets with impunity.

Good to know you’ve got your priorities straight.

How many of those nine funerals will you be attending, Sauron Mayor Daley?

In this past month, we’ve seen amply on display the left’s forbearance at jumping to conclusions…

…at anyone who’s not a conservative.

Chicago mayor Richard Daley – mayor of the city with the toughest gun control laws and among the highest gun crime and murder rates in the US – on Fort Hood:

“Unfortunately, America loves Guns. We love guns to a point where that uh we see devastation on a daily basis. You don’t blame a group.”

Unless that group is law-abiding gun owners and the NRA, of course.  Or talk radio, or Michele Bachmann or Michael Savage or Glenn Beck or Karl rove or “neocons” or “teabaggers” or Christians or pro-lifers.   Other than that, you don’t blame a group.

It should go without saying that not only is Chicago a “gun free zone” (for the law-abiding) but so was Fort Hood; the Army doesn’t allow private carry of firearms on base.  A base full of soldiers who’ve not only trained to use firearms under excruciating pressure, but have largely done so through multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, had no more means to protect themselves from Hasan’s alleged onslaught than a bunch of high school kids or Chicago shoppers or anyone unlucky enough to live in a place throttled by wahhabi liberalism that values ideology over human life.

The legitimacy of any government body that tries to thwart your absolute human right to defend yourself and your family should be questioned.

…that the left’s “atmosphere of hatred” provoked  this atrocity?

State police at the Corunna post have confirmed a well-known anti-abortion activist was shot multiple times and killed [Friday] morning in front of Owosso High School.

The victim’s identity has not yet been released but the shooting occurred around 7:30 a.m., after most students were off the buses and safely inside the building, said Owosso schools transportation supervisor Jayne Campbell.

State police also confirmed that a suspect was taken into custody about 8:15 a.m. at the suspect’s home.

Of course we know how it works; if a conservative shows up at a rally with a legal gun carried legally, it’s a sign of incipient violence to the left, which will also torture context (Tim McVeigh and Holocaust-museum shooter Van Brunn were not conservatives, no matter how the left might wish it to be so) to create an appearance of depravity.  But when “the right” are the victims, as in Owosso and in 2007 on Christians in Colorado Springs?  Page A8.

Of course, we don’t know if the shooting in Michigan was politicaly motivated yet.  But it’s interesting that the same media that will leap to the most pejorative smear by association possble about conservatives will work so diligently to avoid scrutinizing lefties.

Reports are still congealing, but 2-3 have been injured in a shooting at the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC.

Israel responds:

The Consulate General of Israel in New York City called the reported shooting “disturbing” and said it seemed “someone didn’t internalize the message.”

One could say that.

Hey, good thing Washington DC all but bans civilian gun ownership, and is dragging their feet on Heller; goodness knows how bad it could have been.

Lost in among the rest of the news this past week was an amendment to a bill full of regulations on credit cards by Tom Coborn which, when signed, will allow legal carry pemit holders to carry their firearms in national parks. 

Though it’s mired in a bill that is otherwise full of miserably bad ideas, the amendment would allow people who are demonstrably law-abiding citizens (the only kind that can get shall-issue permits) to do in national parks pretty much the same thing they do everywhere else in our society; nothing out of the ordinary.  In the states nationwide that allow civilian carry (currently all but Wisconsin and Kansas), and especially the 40 “shall issue” states (where the burden is on the state to prove that a citizen can’t have a permit), permittees pretty much cause zero crime and create zero problems (inevitably, after lefty politicians, reading off the scripts the gun-control victim disarmament lobby give them, predict gore in the streets).

There is, after all, a reason that of the 32 states that have passed “Shall Issue” laws since 1983, none have repealed it via legislative action (and only Minnesota’s was overturned, on a picayune administrative technicality by an intellectually-dishonest judge, giving us a one-year gap before the legislature swept up the judge’s mess).

Of course, my “representative”, Betty McCollum, is not one to let facts, evidence, and twenty years of statistics get in her way.  When blinkered ideology demands, she is right there, waiting to Mbark out the talking points on cue, like a trained ideological seal.  Paul Schmelzer describes her reaction over at the Minnesoros “Independent“:

The language of Coburn’s amendment stated that the rule would “protect innocent Americans from violent crime in national parks and refuges.”

But Minnesota Democrat McCollum characterized the amendment as “a political game played at the expense of millions of families who will visit our national parks seeking enjoyment, recreation, and peace.” She continued:

“This is a shameful example of the failure of the legislative process and I would urge President Obama to veto the Credit Cardholders’ Bill of Rights and send it back to Congress to take the guns out. What rationale is there for the need to carry a concealed weapon on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial?

Actually, McCollum is asking the wrong question reciting the wrong question, from the notes handed to her by one astroturf anti-gun group or another.  The real question, in the wake of last year’s re-affirmation in the Supreme Court’s Heller decision that the Second Amendment is a right “of the people”, is “what rationale is there to prevent people who are demonstrably two orders of magnitude more law-abiding than the average citizen from exercising their legal, licensed right?”

The only rationale can be for politicians to score political points with the NRA.

Not that that’s true, but to the extent that there’s accuracy in the statement – that pols need to beware of the NRA – then good.  The more the merrier. 

Our national parks are treasures. They don’t need to be protected by random people carrying loaded, concealed weapons around millions of vacationing families.”

One wonders if McCollum even has a conscience; she lies so fluently.

“Rep.” McCollum; concealed carry permit holders are not “random people”.  They are people who have passed background checks, taking skills courses, and are quite demonstrably better, more law-abiding, more trustworthy, more stable than 99% (literally) of your constituents.

Speaking of lopsided margins (emphasis added to the Mindy story by yours truly):

The [original credit-card bill] was divided into two parts in a parliamentary maneuver. [Senator] Coburn’s amendment passed the House by a 279 to 147 margin, and the credit card reform bill passed on a separate 361 to 64 vote. In the Senate, the combined bill passed by a 90 to 5 vote.

Betty McCollum: Liar?  Puppet?  Lying Puppet?

Three major U of M buildings closing early today due to a threat of a shooting – or so they say:

The university says Thursday that it’s closing the Carlson School of Management, Hanson Hall and the Hubert H. Humphrey Center.

All classes and activities beginning at or after 3:45 p.m. Thursday are canceled. The buildings will close at 4:30 p.m.

University Police Chief Greg Hestness says officials are erring on side of caution. Police are investigating the threat.

Clearly this is in error.  The U of M is a gun-free zone.  It’s state law!

Clearly, no illegal shooting can happen.

The Missouri House of Representatives voted to allow concealed-carry permittees to carry and (in the case of students) store their firearms on the U of Missouri campus.

Of course, Athat’s got the usual pants-wetting crowd in an uproar

“Missouri’s college students should be allowed to learn and exchange ideas in an environment free from the threat of concealed guns,” University of Missouri System President Gary Forsee said in a news release Thursday. “It is hard to imagine that such a proposal could gain support given the magnitude of gun-related tragedies experienced on college campuses across the country.”

Yes, it is hard to imagine, given the illogical hysteria on the subject, much of it fed by the media.

Read the whole thing.

And realize – as President Foresee, the failed former CEO of Verizon, apparently does not – that the people with the permits are not the ones doing the fraternity pranks and playing the drinking games, much less the ones shooting up classes, like happened in the “gun free zones” at Virginia Tech and Columbine.

One of the more frustrating aspects of the Columbine shooting was the reports that the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department SWAT team waited for four hours before entering the school. They were worried about bombs; the police’s SOPs said, essentially, that it was better to leave the students and staff inside the building on their own than to risk police lives to a potential bomb threat.

It doesn’t impugn the courage of any officer, or the integrity of the Jeffco SD, to say that when in doubt, police procedure left the citizen on his or her own – but I can’t imagine the frustration and horror that the parents outside must have felt, as the hours ticked by, knowing their kids were inside the building, not knowing if they were alive or dead but knowing that there were a whole lot of cops in battle rattle waiting in the assembly area not rushing in to save them.

Of course the horrific toll among New York’s first responders on 9/11 showed that astounding bravery is a common trait among American cops and firefighters. When the “standard operating procedure” is to go in and do what they’ve been trained to do, the police, fire, paramedics and other first responders in the US – and, I suspect, most of the world – step up and do the job.

———-

But when I saw reports like this one from Mumbai – that the Mumbai police froze under fire from the terrorists during last week’s terror attacks – I thought about a couple of lessons that smart people learned from the wave of mass shootings in the US, among other places.

1. You can not count on the police to save you from even petty street crime, much less this sort of systematic assault.
2. When you leave both raw courage and standard procedure out of the equation, remember – the police aren’t soldiers. They are trained to uphold the law; to maintain control of situations where they generally have the advantage. Police do not train to fight pitched firefights against disciplined, motivated, military attackers – not even the SWAT teams.
3. The only places on earth that are truly remotely safe from this sort of assault are the places where terrorists know that death (to them) doesn’t necessarily wear a uniform and drive in a plainly-identifiable car; places where the civilian population aren’t soft targets, like sheep in a pen. Nearly every mass-shooting in the United States in recent years has happened in places where the civilian isn’t allowed to have the means to self-defense at hand; schools, malls that are posted “no guns“, New York subways, colleges that are “gun-free zones” and the like.

Indians – individual Indians, anyway – seem to be learning all of these lessons; Sebastian D’Souza, the photographer who got so many portfolio-worthy shots of the gunmen as they carried out their mayhem, famously wrote:

The gunmen were terrifyingly professional, making sure at least one of them was able to fire their rifle while the other reloaded. By the time he managed to capture the killer on camera, Mr D’Souza had already seen two gunmen calmly stroll across the station concourse shooting both civilians and policemen, many of whom, he said, were armed but did not fire back. “I first saw the gunmen outside the station,” Mr D’Souza said. “With their rucksacks and Western clothes they looked like backpackers, not terrorists, but they were very heavily armed and clearly knew how to use their rifles…

…

The militants returned inside the station and headed towards a rear exit towards Chowpatty Beach. Mr D’Souza added: “I told some policemen the gunmen had moved towards the rear of the station but they refused to follow them. What is the point if having policemen with guns if they refuse to use them? I only wish I had a gun rather than a camera.”

Mumbaiian blogger Amitabh Bachchan’s post on his reaction to the attack has been getting a lot of attention (emphases added); like a lot of Americans when faced with this sort of unreasoning malice, he’s taken a sensible precaution and drawn a metaphorical line in Mumbai’s beach sand:

My pain has been the sight and plight of my innocent and vulnerable and completely insecure countrymen, facing the wrath of this terror attack. And my anger has been at the ineptitude of the authorities that have been ordained to look after us. I have simply loved and endorsed the sentiments expressed by one of those that came on for comments on the Arnab reportage, Suhel Seth. They were strong, precise and most apt. And of course I have had the greatest pride in those from the forces that have and continue to fight for our freedom. Brilliant officers and police personnel have laid down their lives for us. I can only but salute them and respect their sincerity in the call of duty.

The response needs to be much more than symbolic:

I have been at the receiving end of a million calls and an equal number of sms’s the whole day to come live on TV or on the print media to express my views on the current situation and am being lured by words such as ’we need you to speak to express solidarity and for the people to maintain their calm’.

This is disgusting !! I will NOT do that. TELL ME AND ORDER ME INSTEAD THAT WE REQUIRE FOR EVERY INDIAN TO GET UP AND WALK INTO THE FACILITIES WHERE THE ACTION IS ON AND I WILL BE THE FIRST TO WALK. But, please do not ask me to come and make sloppy statements that will do nothing more than create viewer interest in said particular channel ! I respect what the media is doing in serving the nation with its continuous information bulletins and I admire the brave and diligent manner in which they have devoted themselves to the cause. But what they expect me do I find against my ethics and want to be excused from it…

…As an Indian, I need to live in my own land, on my own soil with dignity and without fear. And I need an assurance on that.

And at the end of the day, one person is responsible for that assurance:

I am ashamed to say this and not afraid to share this now with the rest of the cyber world, that last night, as the events of the terror attack unfolded in front of me I did something for the first time and one that I had hoped never ever to be in a situation to do.

Before retiring for the night, I pulled out my licensed .32 revolver, loaded it and put it under my pillow. For a very disturbed sleep.

The responses in his comment section and the Indian (and other) media have been the sort of thing that any American Second-Amendment activist is well used to hearing. Bachchan responded in a way that’d do any of us proud:

The act of pulling out my revolver is a symbolic metaphor, a figure of speech, to demonstrate my complete loss in faith in the system and in the governance, in providing me, a citizen of India, with my rightful sense of security. It is to demonstrate that now I shall have to personally look after my family and myself and not depend on the state. A state that is just so miserably incapable of protecting its citizens…

…For too long we have remained the servile submissive nation. There has been no strong adjective to describe our character.

I’d love to interview Mr. Bachchan on the NARN one of these weekends.

The lessons should be obvious:

1. Every citizen in a truly free society should have not only the right, but the means to ensure their own security.
2. Indeed, it should be considered a duty, alongside voting and jury duty, for every citizen in a free society to be competent, equipped and capable of defending him/herself and his/her family from whatever disorder threatens them.
3. No society that infringes those rights and responsibilities is really “free”, other than the “freedom” the coop of chickens enjoys as long as someone else keeps those foxes away.

Citizens in any “free society” should be a pack, not a herd or flock.

(Via Collins)

The important part is finding the good news.

For example, it’d be easy to look at this piece, above the mugging and violent assault on crime novelist Laura Caldwell while jogging in Chicago last weekend…

On Thursday, Caldwell, a red-headed attorney who in 2005 successfully defended a man who spent five years in jail awaiting trial for murder, was jogging at Seminary and Altgeld in Lincoln Park when she saw two men — one with a hood pulled over his cap and the other who was lifting his jacket over his head.

Nervous, Caldwell felt the hair rise on the back of her neck. Suddenly, one of the men kicked her from behind, and she fell onto the street.

“They smashed my mouth into the pavement and kicked me a few times,” she said. “They screamed about money, but I said, ‘Guys, I am jogging and I don’t have any money.’ They took my iPod and ran off.”

…and other such stories…:

Police officers told her that muggings are more common in Lincoln Park in late autumn, when the victims are walking in darkness and more susceptible to surprise attacks, she said.

There was an armed robbery at the same intersection just after 11 p.m. on Nov. 6. And over the last month, there have been two assaults and a purse-snatching within three blocks of Caldwell’s mugging, police records show.

In September, the sister of Bears quarterback Rex Grossman was robbed at gunpoint in her garage about six blocks away at Racine and Armitage.

…and of course Chicago’s skyrocketing murder rate and out-of-control gang violence, and think “Wow.  Crime’s getting bad in Chicago!”

What you should  be thinking is “Whew.  Good thing none of those criminals has to worry about a law-abiding citizen being able to legally use a gun to defend themselves.  All hell could break loose, then!”

Chicago; governnment so good, we now have it nationwide!

Chicago on track to be the murder capitol of the US:

Chicago is the Second City in nickname and the third in population, but when it comes to murder, the city has the dubious distinction of being second to no city in America.

As CBS 2’s Mike Puccinelli reports, the Chicago Sun-Times pointed out on Friday that Chicago has seen 426 homicides this year through Tuesday, compared with 417 in New York and 302 in Los Angeles.

At the end of 1998, Chicago made international headlines as the U.S. “murder capital” after surpassing New York’s homicide totals for the first time ever. Chicago shed that dubious distinction when murders plummeted over the last decade.

Per capita it’s even worse:

There are more than 8 million people in New York, compared to slightly under 3 million in Chicago. The population of Los Angeles exceeds that of Chicago by more than 800,000.

Whew.  Imagine how much worse it’d be if Chicago didn’t in effect ban gun ownership by law-abiding civilians!

Mail delivery stops in on a Chicago-area block  deemed too dangerous by the Post Office:

Dozens of mailboxes remain empty after the post office suspends service in one south suburban neighborhood…The U.S. Post Office seems to think that this is one of the most dangerous blocks in the country. People who live on it say they haven’t gotten any mail delivered to their homes in almost two weeks.

How dangerous?

“Between robberies and shootings and delayed police response, several things going on, that would make it unsafe,” said Harvey resident Venus Jones.

One of those shootings on the morning of October 10th reportedly happened yards away from the mail carrier. That’s when the mail stopped on Marshfield between 151st and 152nd streets, but the post office didn’t tell anyone.

“Some of the people didn’t even know that it was being held at the post office,” Jones said.

Now Jones, who says her own home has been broken into three times in 30 days is talking to her neighbors about the mail problem and what should happen next.

Sounds bad.

Good thing the rights of the the law abiding citizens in the area to own guns are more tightly restricted than any place in the country!  Goodness knows how bad it’d be then, right?

You and your kids are out for a day of fun at Valleyfair.

Some dirtball cops a feel of your daughter.

You go to try to set him straight.

He calls for a bunch of his friends.

They mean to do  you harm.  Lots and lots of it.  Eight teenagers and twentysomethings, jacked up on misplaced testosterone.

What do you do?

If you’re a concealed carry permit holder in the state of Minnesota, and didn’t seek out the confrontation, and think you can convince a jury that you reasonably fear death or great bodily harm, and that you’ve made reasonable efforts to de-escalate, and that the use of lethal force is reasonable (again with the jury), and there’s not a big crowd with possibilities for collateral damage, the decision is both easy and awful.  You draw.  You point.  If the scumbags are like most scumbags, they get a sudden case of mortal fear, and they run like hell.  If they don’t back down – say, they draw a knife or a gun of their own, or come at you with tire irons – you shoot.  Given that you are probably overwhelmed with adrenaline,  you don’t – can’t – try to get cutesy with your aim; you shoot for center mass, and keep shooting until your target drops.  And pray that that’s enough to stop things.  As, indeed, it usually is.

What if it’s not you?  What if you see the event going down – the father defending his daughter, the gang of wanna-be thugs gathering, the “men” stomping on the man’s head.  You have a permit.  There is no sign of a security guard, to say nothing of cops.  Nobody else is stepping forward.  You reasonably believe that the guy, the father, is about to get his brains stomped out.

What do you do?

While Minnesota’s self-defense law states that one can use lethal force in self-defense if one reasonably believes oneself or another person are in imminent danger of death or great bodily harm, things get very cloudy when you are not the potential victim, but just a good samaritan.

 There’s nothing hypothetical about the story, of course.  As John Hinderaker notes, the local media is finally talking about  this two-week-old beating at Valleyfair…:

Shakopee police say as the crowd was leaving Valleyfair Amusement Park around midnight on the 4th of July, the victim’s daughter was confronted by two men.

“The 12-year-old daughter was either touched or slapped in the buttocks area,” Scott County Attorney Patrick Ciliberto said. “The father confronted (the men) by yelling at them for what they had done to his daughter,” he added.

Police say the two men called their friends, who were also in the park. The group of seven men and a juvenile then confronted the father.

“They beat him to the ground and then, the evidence that we have, when he was on the ground, they used their feet on him. They were kicking him in the face when he was down,” Ciliberto said.

According to the criminal complaints, the men were stomping on the 41-year-old father as he lay on the ground, unconscious.

He suffered severe head injuries, including a fractured right orbital bone and possible subdural bleeding on the brain. “We don’t know if there are permanent injuries yet,” the County Attorney said.

Of course, nobody was armed – or if they were, they opted not to use their gun to break up the beating.  Nothing unusual there; it’s a difficult decision, made all the harder by the disdain in which the local officialdom holds citizens who defend themselves or other citizens from the depraved. 

In 1994, after a crazed loner killed a Saint Paul police officer, a citizen – and expert marksman –  had a clear shot at the murderer.  He hesitated – because he feared that he’d be prosecuted by then-Ramsey-County Attorney Mark Foley, known (as is his successor, current occupant Susan Gaertner) for his hatred of law-abiding citizens with guns.  So he shot instead to mark the car – and did it with such accuracy that he was able to tell the police forensics lab exactly where to find the bullet, later on.  If only he’d felt empowered to do the same with the murderer’s head; the madman went on to murder another policeman later that day.  The citizen was right to be worried; Foley did try find some reason to prosecute.  The Saint Paul police made it known to Foley that, since the citizen had tried to save a cop, they would not cooperate with any attempt to prosecution.

Would he have gotten the same treatment had he decided to help a typical citizen?

Like someone who had tried to draw on this lot…:

The six adults charged and held in jail are Devondre Evans-Lewis, Andrew Shannon, Darris Evans, Terry Arnold, Derry Evans, and Anthony Gildersleeve.

…and their two “juvenile” accomplices?

Eight “men” who put an innocent man in the hospital, possibly with permanent brain damage?  “Men” who could have killed the victim?

We don’t know.  It’s all gray area. 

The DFL wants to keep it that way.  They want you, the law-abiding citizen, to feel out of your depth when trying to keep the forces of barbarity at bay when they are tearing civilization apart in your face.  They call it “vigilante justice”.  When we try to change the laws to put the average citizen on firmer ground, they lie through their teeth to scare the uninformed (who are uninformed precisely because that’s the way they want it). 

Feel helpless?

Feel angry?

Good.  You should.

You should turn your anger on everyone who voted against Tony Cornish’s “Stand Your Ground” bill.  At the polls only, of course.

You should turn your anger on Citizens for a “Safer” Supine Minnesota, the lying racist orcs who want to keep the laws just as they are – because they value criminal lives more than they value yours.  But only rhetorically.

You should turn your anger on the lying hacks in the bought-and-paid-for media who play along with CSM’s propaganda, who give it unquestioned play while understanding neither the laws, the proposals for change, nor any of their ramifications (beyond what’s fed to them by their benefactors).  But only by repudiating their lies.

And save some anger for the alleged perps.  Because they are out on bail.

And here’s praying that, if every last one of them doesn’t suddenly come to Jesus (or whomever) and beg forgiveness for trying to destroy a man and his family, that the next man they try to destroy can respond meaningfully – with half a dozen shots to the chest.

Chicago, awash in gang crime, is getting desperate:

The summer of 2008 will be remembered as especially violent. Blagojevich said there’s been a child shot nearly every day since June 26. Bringing in state troopers — even National Guard helicopters to high-crime areas — is still very much in the planning stages.

The governor said Chicago Mayor Richard Daley hasn’t asked for help, but Blagojevich said he’ll call the mayor once he has some concrete suggestions about what help he can provide. He didn’t have many specifics, but he said it’s more likely that state police will be brought in than the National Guard.

Whew. Good thing it’s still almost completely impossible for the law-abiding citizen to get a gun in Chicago.

Goodness knows what would happen…

Yesterday morning, I had a special project going on.

Can’t talk about that just yet.  Maybe in a couple weeks.

But afterwards, I went to what might have been a Twin Cities first; a group of Twin Cities Second Amendment supporters met at the Lake Harriet bandshell…

…for a picnic.

Of course, most of the crowd of around thirty – over-21 Minnesotans with clean criminal records, no record of drug or alcohol abuse, mental illness or incipient violence, and every one of whom had passed skills courses – was armed.  Indeed, as Minnesota’s carry permit isn’t a “concealed carry” permit, but a “carry” permit (most people carry concealed out of tact and to avoid standing out in the crowd to anyone who is planning mischief), probably over half of them were carrying openly, with pistols holstered at the hip. 

It was probably the safest picnic shelter in Minneapolis.

I didn’t know about the event until Sunday morning.  I didn’t know what to expect…

…well, yes.  I did know what to expect, in the sense that I do know many of the people involved (although I did meet a few new ones), and that there’d be nothing weird going on in the picnic shelter, other than the sort of particularly intense discussion you get when David Gross, Joe Olson and John Caile get into a room at the same time.

But being that the shelter was at the top of Lake Harriet, where Harriet Parkway comes together with several bike, skate and walking paths by the boat yard, the bandshell itself (there was a jazz concert going on) and the north Harriet beach, and on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon, made it one of the busiest places in one of the most liberal cities in America.  I expected some wierdness to break out among bystandards and passersby.

I eyed the crowd pretty carefully; while many people walking past the shelter did abrupt double-takes when they saw that half of the picnickers were strapped, we didn’t seem to generate a cone of fear around us.  Indeed, I only saw one Park cop drive by and look things over (and then drive off), and, eventually, a woman who walked up and asked why so many people had pistols.  She got a courteous, friendly explanation, as well as a couple of carry permits for explanation’s sake. 

It was a lot of fun.  We’ll have to do it again sometime. 

Maybe in Rice Park?