POLITICS - RKBA - Accessories to Murder (long)

[Old Ironsights]

Suppose I worked for you.

Suppose, when you hired me, I had sworn by everything I believed in to labor faithfully in your interests, to the very best of my ability.

Now suppose that we were walking down an alley when a figure with a nine-inch butcher knife sprang out from behind a dumpster and confronted you, demanding that you choose between your money and your life.

To your astonishment and dismay, instead of defending you (as I once promised), I grab you from behind and pin your arms so you can neither escape nor defend yourself, while the mugger goes through your pockets and takes everything valuable that you're carrying. When he whimsically decides to plunge his knife into your body, I ignore your screams, and even order you to shut up, while I hold you there as you're stabbed again and again and finally fall lifeless to the dirty pavement.

You're dead.

What does that make me?

You don't have to be a lawyer to understand that what it makes me is an accessory to armed robbery and murder, after, during, and (if I had planned to do it to you all along) before the act. I am a criminal co-conspirator. And to make things even worse, in this scenario, it turns out that I've somehow arranged things so that I may never be prosecuted for my crime, or held legally accountable for it in any way.

Morally, of course, I'm pond-scum. I'm as low and contemptible a creature as it's possible for a human being to be. I'm even lower than the basically honest and straightforward mugger who didn't work to gain and betray your trust, but simply took your life while robbing you. Any way you slice it (if you'll pardon the expression), I'm a cold-blooded killer. It doesn't matter that I didn't personally wield the knife. And if I do it often enough, to enough people, I'm a serial killer.

At this point, I want to make it clear that this is not a parable. It is not a metaphor, a simile, or any kind of analogy. It is an accurate, point-for-point description of the criminal behavior of the authorities in many of America's biggest cities -- New York, Chicago, Denver -- where you are forbidden to carry, or in some cases to own, a weapon of self-defense. Instead of using their resources to pursue criminals, the police in these jurisdictions are busy preventing you from exercising the unalienable individual, civil, Constitutional, and human right of every man, woman, and responsible child to obtain, own, and carry, openly or concealed, any weapon -- rifle, shotgun, handgun, machinegun, anything -- any time, any place, without asking anyone's permission.

The crime I'm guilty of in my scenario is the crime they're guilty of in real life. Through force or the threat of force, they pin your arms and make you helpless while robbers, rapists, and killers do whatever they like with you. Certain of these authorities are even guiltier because they've mounted a deliberate, nation-wide effort to spread their particular kind of deadly criminality as far and wide as possible.

If you have any doubt about the mortal threat that their heinous, criminal, unconstitutional scheming poses to you and to yours, order the astonishing JPFO video documentary Innocents Betrayed, available at:

http://shop.jpfo.org/cart.php?m=product_detail&p=8

as well as the amazing book Death by Gun Control, which can be found at:

http://shop.jpfo.org/cart.php?m=product_detail&p=22

Foremost among these schemers is New York mayor Michael Bloomberg. The easiest thing in the world to forget is how it felt to be poor. And if you've never been poor (or even middle class), you might as well belong to a different species from the rest of us. Worth about $11.5 billion dollars, Bloomberg is rather typical of the arrogant, power-hungry "malefactors of great wealth" who are protected by heavily-armed bodyguards, go everywhere by armored limousine and helicopters, and who have no idea at all what it's like for ordinary people to work hard, struggle to pay the bills, and brave the savage jungles that victim disarmament has made out of America's once great cities.

See: http://www.jpfo.org/alerts/alert20070813.htm

You might also enjoy this, featuring Bloomberg's partner in victim disarmament, serial killing, and mass murder, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley: http://www.jpfo.org/images02/handbill-daley.jpg

According to University of Chicago Professor John R. Lott, Jr., writing in More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998, p.159), his 15-year analysis of Federal Bureau of Investigation crime-data from every county in the U.S. (data Bloomberg and others of his ilk are certainly familiar with) confirms that counties permitting legal concealed-carry see significant reductions of crime, the largest occurring in big cities. Says Lott, the cost of denying individuals their legal and moral right to the means of self-defense is more violent crime: 1500 additional murders, 4,000 rapes, 11,000 armed robberies, and 60,000 aggravated assaults. In other words, 1500 individuals die each year for lack of a gun -- which makes officials like Bloomberg serial killers.

Mayors and other big city types hate the very idea of an armed citizenry because it makes their administrations look bad. From World War Two onward, violent crime in America's biggest cities rocketed upward, until it was predicted that something like one in three or four individuals would eventually become victims sometime in their lives.

Billions of dollars and millions of man-hours were thrown at the problem and it only seemed to make things worse -- although whenever a statistical blip occurred, and crime dropped by one or two or three percent, the bigwigs, stuffed shirts, and police brass slapped each other on the back and took credit for it, as if it actually meant something.

Then came a genuine revolution, sparked, I think, by movies like Death Wish (ironically, the Brian Garfield novel on which it was based was written from the opposite motive, as a cautionary tale against "vigilantism") and Dirty Harry. In spite of heartfelt pleas and dire threats from the police and others, ordinary people started arming themselves. Desperate to retain some appearance of control, state legislatures began changing carry laws -- Florida was the first -- making it microscopically easier for folks to defend themselves and violent crime began to plummet over the next 20 years or so, in double digits.

Even more significantly, the state of Vermont, which requires no such licensing or permit, enjoys the lowest violent crime rate in the nation.

Despite that lesson -- or more probably because of it and the way it makes them look -- cities like New York, Chicago, and Denver, and their mayors, Bloomberg, Richard Daley, and John Hickenlooper, cling to long-outdated notions about individual weapons ownership and self-defense. Denver has gone as far as declaring that because it's a "home rule" city, the Bill of Rights doesn't apply within the city limits -- and an impossibly idiotic or corrupt state supreme court has agreed.

In many ways these places are not the sophisticated, cosmopolitan hubs of Western Civilization they advertise themselves to be. They're smug, self-satisfied, backward, provincial potholes in the road, much more comparable to Oxford, Mississippi, Selma, Alabama, and other towns that fought against civil rights for black people in the 1950s, and their mayors are like the cliche overweight sheriffs and police chiefs with mirrored sunglasses standing in the way of moral and legal progress.

Nearly everywhere else in America, in rural areas and more and more small cities, the horrendous mid-20th century crime problem has been solved by the proper application of modern technology and the Second Amendment. Is it going to take a new generation of Freedom Riders -- or the domestic equivalent of the Nuremberg War Crimes trials -- to drag the big cities and their authorities into the 21st century?

Will they ever be punished for their many crimes? Of course they will, because we demand it and will never rest until justice has been served.

P.S. We have just learned that a U.S. Federal court of appeals has shoved a thumb in Michael Bloomberg's eye by ruling that a lawsuit he had mounted against the nation's gun manufacturers violates the 2005 Lawful Commerce in Arms Act -- designed to prevent this very kind of lawsuit.

Congratulations, court -- too bad, Bloomie!

L. Neil Smith
lneil@netzero.com

http://www.jpfo.org/smith/smith-bloomberg.htm