The London Sunday Telegraph Hasn't Given Up Yet

Here is today's entry into the Telegraph's efforts to alter the law to allow home defenders to use lethal force in defense of themselves and their property:

DPP: We must be able to fight off burglars
By John Steele, Home Affairs Correspondent, and George Jones
(Filed: 09/12/2004)

The right of home-owners to act in self-defence was backed by the Director of Public Prosecutions yesterday. He said people wanted to feel safe in their homes.

Well DUH!

In an exclusive interview with The Telegraph, Ken Macdonald, who is responsible for nearly 3,000 prosecuting lawyers in the Crown Prosecution Service in England and Wales, said that many burglaries took place when people were at home.

Like over half?

Prosecutors must recognise that householders who injured or killed in confrontations with intruders acted instinctively and in fear - and it was the fault of burglars that the owner felt frightened.

Tell that to the prosecutor that brought charges against Brett Osborne.

"If people do not feel safe in their homes, we are all in a very serious situation," Mr Macdonald said.

"You should feel safe everywhere but you really should feel safe in your own home."

He made his attempt to reassure the public that prosecutors were on the side of the home-owner, not the burglar, as Tony Blair publicly backed the call for greater self-defence powers for householders.

During heated exchanges in the Commons with Michael Howard, the Conservative leader, the Prime Minister abandoned the Government's previous stance that a change in the law was not necessary.

Challenged to support a private member's Bill introduced by a Tory MP to ensure that householders would not face prosecution unless they used "grossly disproportionate" force in self-defence, Mr Blair acknowledged there was public concern over recent violent attacks by burglars.

Pardon me, but who gets to determine what's "grossly disproportionate"? Tim Lambert indicates that Brett Osborne stabbed Wayne Halling in the back. So? If lethal force is justified, what difference does the entry wound angle matter? Does that make it "grossly disproportionate"? Apparently so. So it would appear to me that the proposed new law is, in effect, no different from the existing law.

One fact seems clear: Parliament isn't going to pass a "Make My Day" law, but Patrick Mercer, author of the current legislation says Osborne would not have been prosecuted under his bill.

Let me settle that issue now. The term "not grossly disproportionate" will allow home owners a much greater degree of latitude in tackling burglars. They will be able to do whatever they think is necessary to defend themselves when confronted by an intruder. What they will not be entitled to do is chase a burglar down the street and plunge a knife into his back once he is off their property. My Bill is not a licence to commit murder – it is not an English version of the Oklahoma law that indemnifies home-owners from prosecution no matter what they do to an intruder.

Under my Bill, the farmer Tony Martin would still have broken the law – for he shot Fred Barras, one of the two burglars who entered his house, in the back as he was running away. Martin's use of force was grossly disproportionate. If he had injured or even killed Barras in a struggle to repel him and his partner-in-crime while they were in his home, then Martin's actions would – under my Bill – have been perfectly legal.

Earlier this year, The Sunday Telegraph highlighted the case of Brett Osborn, who is now in prison because he defended himself against an intruder. Under my legislation, there would be no question of prosecuting a man such as Osborn. He stabbed a blood-covered, drug-crazed intruder who forced his way into a house to molest one of the women staying with him. Mr Osborn confronted and fought with the intruder and in the struggle stabbed him with a kitchen knife.

Osborn is serving a five-year sentence for manslaughter. One of the issues that led to the decision to prosecute him for murder was that he failed to "warn the intruder that he had a knife and might stab him with it if he did not desist".

This is preposterous – but it is the kind of thing that happens under the present law. Cases such as Osborn's give the lie to the claim, made so often by government law officers, that "no one has been unjustly convicted" under the existing legislation. Many more people have had to endure the stress and strain of having a prosecution hanging over their heads for months – only for the judge to dismiss the case as "manifestly absurd" once it comes to court. Those people do not end up in prison but they do suffer the protracted torture of the legal process.

Under my Bill, no one will be prosecuted for taking the kind of action Osborn took. We will frame the Bill's language very carefully to ensure that result.

Pardon me if I take that with a grain of salt. Anyway, continuing with the original Telegraph piece:

He said the Government was looking at whether the law needed to be clarified "so that we send a clear signal to people that we are on the side of the victim not the offender.

I think it's more than fair to say that, thus far, that signal has been clear as mud.

"Mr Macdonald said it was for Parliament, not the Crown Prosecution Service, to decide whether the law on self-defence against intruders should be changed.

He challenged the public perception that homeowners were being taken to court for tackling burglars. The CPS knew of few such prosecutions beyond the case of Tony Martin, the Norfolk farmer who was jailed for shooting dead a 16-year-old burglar.

But those few have received a LOT of press.

"There have been cases in which burglars have been stabbed or shot and we have not prosecuted," he said.

And those cases have received very little press. So the public has been convinced that acting in one's own defense is legally risky, and so have the burglars.

But Mr Macdonald acknowledged that the right of self-defence was a legitimate concern, as so many burglaries took place when people were at home.

He cited the case of a couple who were upstairs in their bedroom, with their children in the next room, when they heard a noise downstairs and were worried that the intruder might be armed.

"Let's suppose he turns out not to be armed," Mr Macdonald said. "That does not matter. It is what the householder believes.

"If you put yourself in that individual's position, that is what we as prosecutors ask ourselves. What is excessive in that situation?

"What could be more frightening than going downstairs and finding some man in a balaclava in your kitchen?"

Mr Macdonald said it was the right of a person to use legal force to defend himself, or another person, to defend property or to prevent crime.

Note that: "LEGAL" force, not "LETHAL" force.

The law recognised that people who were being attacked were frightened and it needed to recognise that people who were being attacked could not judge precisely their response

"When people are frightened, they behave in ways they would not behave if they were not. Frankly, it is the burglar's fault that the person is frightened.

"We are not saying that if someone is burgling your house, you had better stop and think really hard, because the law does not expect that and we are not calling for that." Mr Macdonald said the police had to conduct an investigation when they arrived at premises and found a body.

But, as a prosecutor, he would look for clear evidence of "very excessive force" before considering a prosecution.

But, unstated, is the idea that lethal force is, by definition, "very excessive."

"If it is not excessive, it is reasonable," he said. Chasing an intruder down the street, for example, and stabbing him could not fall into the category of self-defence.

Now when did the citizen lose his power to apprehend a criminal fleeing from the scene of a crime? When did that become the exclusive power of the Police? When was Sir Robert Peel's Seventh Principle invalidated?

Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.

Isn't capture of a fleeing criminal a net societal good? Is that not a duty incumbent on the citizen? And if that fleeing criminal resists arrest, and dies in that resistance, why is that not a case of self-defense? Tim Lambert provided some pages from a law text a while back that stated:

So where a policeman shot dead a man who was unarmed and had already surrendered he was still entitled to claim his action was in self-defence if he honestly believed this to be the situation. The test is whether his action was reasonable in the situation as he perceived it, rather than it actually was.

It appears, then, that there is a double-standard for police and for regular citizens. (Aside from the fact that regular citizens are pretty much prohibited from using firearms in self defense.)

Mr Blair's clash with Mr Howard over the need to give householders greater rights of self-defence occurred during Prime Minister's Questions.

Mr Blair said the Government would now consult chief police officers, the Crown Prosecution Service and the Attorney General on whether the law should be changed.

He said he shared the "general comments" of Sir John Stevens, the outgoing Metropolitan Police commissioner, who told The Telegraph that householders should be able to use whatever force was necessary to defend their homes.

"I understand the concern on this issue," Mr Blair said. "So if we get the right response back from those people, then of course we will support a change in the law."
The Government has put law and order and the fight against terrorism at the heart of its legislative programme for what is expected to be the last session of Parliament before the election.

But Mr Blair is worried that the Tories have exposed Labour's flank by demanding greater rights for householder protection.

Sir John welcomed Mr Blair's backing of a review of householders' rights to tackle burglars.

He said last night that the law needed to be changed. Since the Martin case, people had found it difficult to know what they could do.

"I have not come out with this comment off the top of my head. It is as a result of listening to what people say."

Tim Lambert has finally weighed in on the topic, calling the Telegraph's campaign "cynical and dishonest." Color me surprised. The funny part?

The truly disgraceful thing about their scare campaign is that it could convince people that self-defence is unlawful and frighten them out of defending themselves against an attacker, resulting in injury or even death of a crime victim. I am disgusted.

Note to Tim: They're already so convinced. They're already dying. And it's you who will not recognize this fact, and I'm disgusted by that.

Perhaps Tim didn't see the report on the home-invasion assaults on 89 year-old Annie Hendrick and 81 year-old Sally Skidmore. That report stated:

(A) survey conducted by The Sunday Telegraph showed overwhelming public support for a change in the law to give people new powers to fight back against intruders.

The poll, conducted by ICM, revealed that 72 per cent of people believe that the current law, allowing householders to use only "reasonable force" against intruders, is "inadequate and ill-defined".

A similar proportion, 71 per cent, say that householders should have an unqualified right to use force, if necessary deadly force, against people breaking into their homes.

More than half (51 per cent) do not believe that the police can protect householders against intruders; 70 per cent believe the government could do more to reduce the risk of burglaries; and an overwhelming 81 per cent say burglars should not have any rights to to sue householders if they, the intruders, suffer any injuries during the break-in.

I guess that 72% are all just "gullible gunners."

And I'd appreciate it if Tim could tell me how these two old ladies were supposed to defend themselves against multiple young male attackers? After all,

Consider two scenarios:

1. Attacker has a gun. Defender does not.

2. Attacker does not have a gun. Defender doesn't either.

Self defence is possible in the second scenario while it isn't in the first one. Is that clear now?

Right, Tim. Neither the attackers nor the defenders in these two cases had guns (that we know of). So the old ladies had every opportunity to defend themselves, right?

And I suppose Tim didn't see the story about the home-invasion murder of an 85 year-old grandmother, who dialed 999 to report a burglary in progress. Nor did he read the stories of previous victims the Telegraph reported. One was Eric Butler, the gentleman mentioned in Dave Kopel's All the Way Down the Slippery Slope who said:

"The concept of reasonable force is nonsense. I should know: when I defended myself, I had the book thrown at me."

In 1987, Mr Butler's plight provoked an outcry. He was attacked on a London Underground train by a man who kicked him in the face, grabbed him by the throat and began banging his head against the carriage.

Only Mr Butler knew that the walking stick he carried concealed a four-inch ornamental blade. As the grip around his neck tightened and he felt his consciousness fade, Mr Butler unsheathed the blade and fought back.

The attacker was taken to hospital with abdominal wounds and later received an 18-month prison sentence. Mr Butler was convicted of carrying an offensive weapon, fined £200 and given a 28-day suspended prison sentence. On appeal the sentence was quashed but the fine raised to £300.

How dare he carry a weapon with which to defend himself! He should have just allowed his attacker to choke him to death like any good prole!

Or what about Mark Mercer:

"At long last someone is coming out against the asinine law that protects burglars' rights."

In January Mr Mercer, who owns a security camera company, held a burglar at bay with his pocket knife while his wife, Mary, telephoned the police. A second intruder escaped.

"As we waited for the police our burglar, who had a small injury that did not require so much as a sticking plaster, sat on our sofa and announced, 'I am going to sue you for this.'

"These men entered our house noisily, presumably confident that we would not dare to disturb them.

"What really gets me is that they felt secure in their belief that if action was taken against them they could probably do better out of the compensation than they could out of the burglary."

But the Telegraph's campaign is going to frighten the public and prevent them from defending themselves?

Then we have Simon Jones, former police officer and apparently a victim of the Telegraph's disgusting propaganda:

"If the definition of reasonable force was cleared up, there wouldn't be the problem of criminals suing for compensation. Everyone would know where they stood."

Mr Jones confronted armed burglars in his home last year, outside a room where his wife and two-year-old daughter were cowering. When they pulled out a 7in knife and threatened to cut his head off, Mr Jones gave them the keys to the Volvo and the Mercedes on his drive. The men were never caught. "I would like to know, for future reference: is the golf club by my bed a weapon or not?"

If a former police officer doesn't know, how the is the rest of the public supposed to? I'd also like to know how England's knife laws managed to disarm the attacker with the 7" blade, and how Mr. Jones was supposed to defend himself and his family from multiple burglars with his golf club.

No, I guess Tim must have missed those pieces. Read the rest of those stories, if you haven't already.

In related news, Lord Goldsmith, the government's attorney-general, protested that a change in the law would infringe on a burglar's right to protection from violence! And to that my response is, SO? Read that whole piece, and think of the mantra repeated by the anti-gun forces when CCW is considered: "Wild-west," "blood in the streets," "road-rage shootouts over fender-benders." It's precisely the same psychology: Don't trust your fellow citizens.

Then there's this piece that discusses Tim's position:

Some people say the present law works just fine for householders -- these people would disagree
By Karyn Miller
(Filed: 12/12/2004)

Jon Pritchett threw off the bedcovers, reached for his 12-bore shotgun and ran out into the garden where the shrill sound of his burglar alarm was piercing through the chilled darkness. Instinctively, he fired four warning shots into the air. Or, at least they were intended as warning shots.

There were two burglars that night at the property in Borough Green, Kent, but unknown to Mr Pritchett, 60, one was crouched on the roof of his barn. Until then, the burglars' evening had been going well. They had been raiding the barn's store of wine made from the grapes on Mr Pritchett's small vineyard. As the bullets went whizzing by, one of the burglars was hit in the arm, while the other fled for dear life.

With his heart still pounding wildly, Mr Pritchett telephoned the police for help. They arrived 45 minutes later – and promptly arrested him.

The two burglars, both drug addicts with a string of convictions between them, were found guilty but walked free on probation for two years. When one of the men was asked if the incident had put him off burglary, he said: "It shook me up, certainly."

Their victim was also shaken up, but his real ordeal was just beginning. It highlights why The Sunday Telegraph launched the "Right to Fight Back" campaign to allow people to protect their homes and families from violent intruders without fear of prosecution or claims for compensation from burglars injured while breaking the law.
Last week Tony Blair, Michael Howard, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner and the Director of Public Prosecutions, among others, lined up to voice their support for the campaign. However, some critics argue that a change in the law is unnecessary because any householders who are arrested and charged invariably end up being acquitted. Such opponents have clearly never been in the same position as that of Mr Pritchett.

The 60-year-old businessman was stripped naked before being made to wear only a paper boiler suit for his overnight stay in a filthy police cell. Ten years on, the memory of the ordeal causes his voice to crack and falter and he struggles to get the words out.

"My wife and I don't talk about what happened, because it is still upsetting and Margaret doesn't like it," Mr Pritchett said. "This is the first time I have talked about it for a long time," he said.

"On the night it happened and I was taken away, Margaret was left in the house. Naturally, she was distraught. She didn't sleep for the rest of that night. She was left on her own – no one was with her."

When the police attempted to interview Mr Pritchett the next morning, he opened his mouth to explain what happened and nothing came out. He had developed a severe stammer overnight. "It was partly due to the stress of what had happened," he said. "I really thought I had killed someone. And it was partly due to being shut in a dirty cell, not knowing what would happen next. They had to call the police surgeon for me. He said it was shock."

Mr Pritchett was bailed and sent home but six months later he was charged with three counts of intent to cause grievous bodily harm. Another six months after that – a period he describes as one of "stomach-churning fear" – the case finally came to court. "Can you just imagine: sitting there for six months, not knowing what would happen to you? It was horrendous.

"When it came to the preliminary hearing, the counsel for the Crown said in my presence – which I found quite astounding – that he didn't know why the Director of Public Prosecutions was pursuing this case because the Crown hadn't a hope in hell of winning it. Why they did [pursue it], I still don't know."

Mr Pritchett was tried before a judge and jury, cleared of all charges and left to pick up the pieces of his life with nothing but an award of £10 compensation for the damage done to his property during the burglary. He sleeps through the night now but still suffers from a stammer and surfaces "like a machine-gun" whenever he is anxious or upset. "You have to get on, but life is never the same," he says, sadly.

Four years ago, in attempt to leave the experience behind them, Mr Pritchett, now 69, and his wife Margaret, 71, emigrated to Western Australia. At about the same time, in the summer of 2000, Lee Gapper, a 20-year-old builder from Peterborough, interrupted a burglar in his home.

He fought the man off with a baseball bat while his lodger, George Goodayle, also 20, tackled the burglar with his fists. The blows had the desired effect and the man, a local heroin addict, fled empty handed. Mr Gapper immediately telephoned the police to tell them what had happened – only to find himself handcuffed, bundled into the back of a police van and charged, by a grinning constable, with attempted manslaughter.

"Two police officers came," he recalled. "One shook my hand and said, `Good on you.' The other officer, who was younger, threw the book at me. Someone radioed through to say that they had found the burglar at his mum's house, bleeding. The younger policeman said that it wasn't looking good for me. He said that I had used `unreasonable force'. They asked us to stay in my house. I was petrified.

"At dinner time, two more officers came to the house and arrested us both. One of them was smirking. I felt so sick. I had called them and I had been truthful about what happened. I expected that they would take me to the station, maybe interview me in the waiting room, to find out what I had done and why. That would have been fair enough. I didn't expect to be handcuffed.

"I did use a lot of force. But you have such an adrenaline rush and your heart beats so fast, when you find a burglar. When you don't know what to expect, the first thing you do is lash out with whatever you have to hand."

The burglar, who was taken to hospital with a broken wrist, fractured elbow, cracked ribs and a fractured skull, was later sent to prison for one year. Meanwhile, the attempted manslaughter charge against Mr Gapper, which carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment, was never formally dropped.

"The worst thing was living in fear and worrying," he said, though he adds that the death threats, the bricks coming through the window at night and the children taunting and spitting at him on the street rank highly. "I don't think you can recover from that. I don't think I ever will. Being in that police cell was a more distressing experience than confronting the burglar, if I'm honest."

There are others, many others, who can attest to this. In 1995, Nick Baungartner fought to the death with an armed burglar at his home in Ockbrook, Derbyshire. Armed with a shovel, Robert Ingham, 22, ambushed Mr Baungartner, a tennis court builder from Hungary who was 53 at the time of the attack. The struggle lasted for 20 minutes and Mr Baungartner broke bones in both his hands. The burglar died of a neck injury, which had cut the blood supply to his brain and caused heart failure.

Mr Baungartner had to wait three weeks while the Crown Prosecution Service deliberated over his case, before he was told that he would not be charged. "My life is shattered," he told a reporter at the time.

A year later, an inquest concluded that Ingham's death was accidental. But even five years on Mr Baungartner was reported to have said: "I have not been able to work since. I still have pain in my wrist and in my face where I was kicked and punched."

In the same Derbyshire village in August this year, Kenneth Faulkner, a 72-year-old farmer, was being burgled for the third time. On this, the latest occasion, he fired a shotgun at an intruder who was trying to gain access to a garage at his home. The 22-year-old man, who was wounded in the leg. Mr Faulkner was arrested after he dialled 999 to report what had happened, but in October a sympathetic judge declared that his actions "could not be criticised".

"I just want to get on with my life now," was all Mr Faulkner would say outside the courtroom. "It's something I want to forget."

The same month, Arlindo Caeiro, 33, a Portuguese-born bar supervisor living in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, was arrested on suspicion of assault after he stabbed an intruder in his family home with a breadknife. The man had attacked him with an iron bar. The case was dropped in September, but Mr Caeiro sent his 14-month-old daughter back to Portugal with a view to following her. "I have been through agony," he said. "The solicitor at the police station said my case was like Tony Martin's."

Despite such well-documented cases, Ken MacDonald, the Director of Public Prosecutions who earlier this week backed the rights of householders to defend their homes against intruders, challenged the idea that people who did so were prosecuted. Mr MacDonald said that he knew of few such cases beyond that of Tony Martin, the Norfolk farmer who was jailed for shooting dead a 16-year-old burglar.

Yesterday, from his home in Australia with his wife at his side, an upset Jon Pritchett took issue with the comments. "That's a load of tripe," he said angrily.

"We went through a whole year of hell. If The Sunday Telegraph's campaign gives other people the right to defend their homes against those who wish to destroy their lives, I hope it succeeds."

Right, Tim. The law works perfectly, and it's just us "gullible gunners" who think it needs to be changed.

Maybe Someday You'll Read a Story Like This Coming From England

But not soon, I'd say. Via Zendo Deb of TFS Magnum comes this heartwarming story of how a man's grandsons decided to defend their grandfather after his home had been burglarized twice before - the first time while he was at home:

Grandsons thwart attempted break-in

BY KATHIE O. WARCO, Staff writer

Brian Reihner discounts any notion that he and his brother, Bob, are heroes. But North Franklin Township police Chief Mark Kavakich credits them for possibly saving their grandfather's life during a home invasion early Thursday.

Steven A. Wallace, 19, of 930 W. Chestnut St., Washington, was arrested shortly after he allegedly forced his way into the Sylvan Drive home of Daniel Denman, only to be confronted by the Reihners. Police said he broke into the house about 2:30 a.m. by forcing in plywood covering a door damaged in a previous break-in.

The brothers decided to stay with their grandfather after two break-ins in the previous four days. During the first home invasion late Saturday or early Sunday, Denman was confronted by three black men who then stole cash and a compact disc player.

His house was burglarized Tuesday when he was not home. Stolen in that break-in were rolls of state quarters.

"We were just catnapping," Brian Reihner said, recalling the events of early Thursday. "I could hear him come in. I just waited until he came around the corner. Then my brother turned on the light."

The brothers were armed with rifles. Wallace pulled out a .38-cal. handgun that police later learned had been stolen in Pittsburgh.

"He grabbed my brother's rifle and pulled him down," Reihner said. "I stepped back but kept my rifle on him. I told him to just leave."

Wallace left, telling the brothers that they did not know him. He was caught a short time later by Washington police after security officers at Washington Crown Center saw him running across the parking lot. He had the gun in his pocket.

"Something had to be done," Reihner said. "I was afraid he'd do bodily harm to my grandfather. He was there for the money and would have done whatever it takes to get it."

Wallace was arraigned before District Justice J. Albert Spence on charges of burglary, aggravated assault, receiving stolen property, reckless endangerment, criminal trespass, defiant trespass, carrying unlicensed firearms and possessing instruments of a crime. He was placed in Washington County Jail on $25,000 bond.

Wallace also faces charges in connection with Tuesday's burglary after police found rolls of coins reportedly stolen from Denman's home. Kavakich said the coins were found in Wallace's backpack. Denman told police he kept the state coins in quarter rolls.

In the break-ins on Tuesday and Thursday, Kavakich believes another man was with Wallace. Two sets of footprints were found outside the house Tuesday. Kavakich believes a second person was scared off Thursday morning by the commotion inside the house.

Police are looking for a "person of interest" from the Chartiers-Houston area based on items found in Wallace's backpack. Kavakich said Washington police also are talking with Wallace about a robbery last Friday.

"I'm not a hero," Reihner said. "I did what anyone would have done."

Kavakich said the Reihners' actions were commendable.

"This is how kids should take care of their grandparents," Kavakich said. "They stepped up and may have saved their grandfather's life."

Finally! A police chief who doesn't tell people that they "took the law into their own hands" and chastises them for doing the right thing! I wonder how old the Reihner brothers are?

The only thing I'd change in that story? When Wallace pulled the .38 he should have been ventilated. But they were the men on the ground at the time, and I won't second-guess them. Kudos for their actions.

Ben Stein is a Self-Confessed Felon

In the latest Spectator, Ben Stein has a piece entitled Col. Denman’s Luger. It begins:

A few days ago, a package arrived in the mail from the widow of my late father-in-law, Colonel Dale Denman, Jr., of Heber Springs, Arkansas. I opened it and there was a leather holster and inside it, a German Luger pistol. My father-in-law had taken it from a captured German officer in early 1945 and kept it for almost sixty years. He had left his wife instructions that I was to get it.

I'm very happy for Ben that he has received this important heirloom and piece of history, and that he keeps it in a drawer next to his bed, but by receiving a handgun via U.S. Mail, instead of receiving it via common-carrier or through a Federal Firearms Licensee, he has violated federal law, to wit:

May a nonlicensee ship a firearm through the U. S. Postal Service?

A nonlicensee may mail a shotgun or rifle to a resident of his or her own state or to a licensee in any state. Handguns are not mailable. A common or contract carrier must be used to ship a handgun. A nonlicensee may not transfer any firearm to a nonlicensed resident of another state. The Postal Service recommends that longguns be sent by registered mail and that no marking of any kind which would indicate the nature of the contents be placed on the outside of any parcel containing firearms.

If the gun shipped from Heber Springs, Arkansas to Ben in Hollywood, it was an interstate transfer, and that transfer must be through an FFL dealer.

So Ben Stein has been party to not one, but two federal felonies, to which he has confessed in print. Ben says in his piece:

I have relatives and friends who get out of bed every morning and do an hour of exercise to keep them fit. I don't do that. My exercise is that I get out of bed and hit my knees and thank God for waking up in America, where I live in peace and freedom, no Gestapo chasing me, no KGB putting me in the Gulag, no Hamas blowing me up. All thanks to men like Col. Denman and the heroism he showed capturing this Luger.

Except that, by confessing his crime, the BATFE's jackboot squad can now get a warrant and perform a dynamic-entry on Mr. Stein's home to arrest him and confiscate his illegal Luger - or worse.

Of course, this won't happen since Ben Stein is a politically connected celebrity, but it could happen to you or me if we were similarly ignorant of the law.

We have no Gestapo or KGB, but we do have some stupid damned laws and some unrestrained government agencies with a known history of excessive use of force and petty prosecution.

Good luck, Ben.

What "Aggressive Edge"?

Via Head's Bunker I found the Belmont Club piece on this advice column for potential "hot" burglary victims in Britain.

Read them all, in reverse order: "advice" column, analysis, commentary.

Head? I'm in complete agreement.

And let me borrow a picture from Gunner of No Quarters in relation to Wretchard's invocation of Orwell's 1984, and the quotation used in the picture:

If you can't read it, it says:

"If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face... forever."

To which Wretchard has appended:

He forgot to add one thing: you will polish the boot.

The Lying "News" Media, Part: "They Never, EVER Stop"

I was alerted via a post in rec.guns that MSN^BS has done it again. Residents of Lampasas, Texas are holding a raffle to pay for new fencing around a school, and in fine Texan tradition, the prize is two rifles. One is a Kimber model 84 in 7mm-08, and the other is Marlin model 25N Ducks Unlimited collector edition.

MSN^BS ran an appropriately shocked and tsk-tsking story on the raffle, and interviewed Texas Congresswoman Susanna Hupp. Here's the transcript as I heard it. Unfortunately, I was unable to do a screen capture of the... Well, you'll see.

Lisa Daniels:

A school raffle in Texas is raising a few eyebrows because of the grand prize. Tomorrow night one lucky winner will walk away with a deer rifle. Some are in favor of the raffle, while others are wondering whether that prize is appropriate.

With us today from Austin, Texas is Republican State Representative Susanna Hupp. Representative Hupp supports the rifle raffle, and Representative, thanks for spending some time with us today.

At this point, the picture has shifted to a split-screen showing talking-head Daniels on the left, and Hupp on the right.

Hupp:

Thanks, Lisa.

Daniels:

So, you'll be raffling off the rifles tomorrow, and the purpose, of course, is to raise enough money, uh, to fence in a portion of a school... and I, I know that hunting is a popular sport over there, but...

Hupp:

Yes.

Daniels:

...you know what I'm going to say in this age of...

Hupp:

I like the way you say "BUT!" (laughing)

Daniels:

But! Yes. 'Cause in this age of Columbine and a lot of other school-related shootings, can you understand why some people think this is not only a bad idea, but a really dangerous one?

Here the screen switches to full-screen Hupp.

Hupp:

Well, I can't imagine why they would think it was a dangerous one. Um, in answer to the rest of your question, you know, here in Lampassas and central Texas we live in the land of common sense. And if we lived in another area, perhaps we would be raffling off a, uh, season tickets to a sporting event.

AT THIS POINT THE IMAGE CHANGES TO A WALL OF MACs, CAR-15's, AK's, folding-stock shotguns, etc., while Hupp's voice-over continues, calmly and logically. To me, it looks like the evidence room of a police precinct, as most of the weapons are heavily worn.

But the fact of the matter is, we live in a hunting area, so we chose a deer rifle we knew the hunters would slobber over.

The image pans over the wall of eeeeevil "assault weapons" while Representative Hupp's voice-over continues showing at least two dozen of these "spray-firing bullet-hoses." The camera zooms in on an Uzi, then a MAC-11, then a Thompson, then pans over a suppressed Ingram, then the shot jumps to another MAC with a suppressor in a case. The text at the bottom of the screen states "Texas School to Raffle Deer Rifle Tomorrow Night." This shot takes 28 seconds while Hupp continues to explain in a calm, reasonable voice the idea behind raffling off a DEER RIFLE. Continuing,

Hupp:

And it's something that is, has worked far better than all the, the bake sales and cookie-dough sales and Krispy Kreme sales and everything else that they've done. Uh, it's a very popular thing in Lampassas, and it's working well, and frankly my child is a third-grader at that school, and this money is going to protect him as well as the others at that school.

At this point the image switches back to the split-screen between Daniels and Hupp.

Daniels:

And, and that's definitely... I know the community overwhelmingly supports what you say, but I can hear parents right now watching their TV monitors thinking "Hey, this is ludicrous," you want to put deer rifles in the hands of these kids. You're not only sending them the wrong message, but you're basically inviting trouble. What would you say to those moms and dads?

Let me interject here. First, Rep. Hupp didn't see what was on the monitor while she was speaking, or I'm certain she'd have (rightly) gone orbital. Second, at the statement that "you want to put deer rifles in the hands of these kids" she got a shocked look on her face. If I was an ignorant Blue-stater with no more knowledge of firearms than Sarah Brady, the "Wall of Doom" they put up would have shocked and angered me. Knowing what I know, the fact that MSN^BS was propagandizing under the VPC's "anything that looks like a machine gun" strategy doesn't shock me, but I'm pissed off!

Hupp responds:

Wait a minute, wait a minute! You said we're putting deer rifles in the hands of kids? Whoever wins this raffle has to be in compliance with all the federal and state regulations. In other words, we cannot hand it to a child. But I will tell you this, again,

(as the picture switches from Hupp to a school hallway full of children)

again, in the land of common sense, uh, there are a lot of children who do go deer hunting in our area.

(Image switches to a classroom)

But that's, but that's not what this raffle is for. It has to go to an adult, and they have to comply with federal and state regulations.

Daniels:

We should mention that in 1991 after leaving your gun in the car, you watched as your parents were among twenty-one other people who were gunned down in a mass shooting in a local restaurant. Obviously... is, is that a big reason for the way you feel about guns? I know you're a strong advocate of the Second Amendment...

Hupp, as the image switches to her, full-screen:

Yeah. Um, let just say that, as a friend of mine in the PTSO put it, uh, she said, "We're use.. We are mothers using guns to protect our children." We're putting up... We're... We're raffling this rifle to raise money to put a fence around the school to protect our children. But frankly, I don't think the double entendre or the double-meaning is lost on, uh, I don't think it's lost on too many people.

(Image switches back to split-screen)

Daniels:

And I know that you're, Representative, that your defending your position, but can you understand why people think that this sounds like a bad idea?

(Image switches to a smiling Hupp who's just been asked if she's a moron:)

Well, you've asked me that a couple of times...

(Image switches BACK TO THE "WALL OF DOOM!")

...and again I have to tell you that I'm very proud of the area I live in. Um, it is a common sense area. I will tell you that there is a six year-old girl on my little boy's soccer team who just went out and shot her first ten-point buck.

(Image switches to that hallway full of targets students.)

Now I am not a hunter. My family are not hunters, but it is a reasonable thing to use a deer rifle as a, uh, a fundraiser in our area.

(Back to a smiling Hupp, then to the split screen again.)

Daniels:

All right, state Representative Susanna Hupp, we appreciate your coming on the show.

Hupp:

Thank you so very much for having me.

End of tape.

Somehow I think if Hupp knew how she'd been manipulated for a propaganda piece, she wouldn't have been anywhere near as pleased or as gracious.

If you'd like to see the clip for yourself (for however long it's up) you can view it here. Broadband is recommended, and you'll have to watch a short commercial first. Internet Exploder is apparently required as well.

Another Link

Carnaby Fudge has an excellent post, Spray 'n Pray from last Thursday that I just found, illustrating graphically that the Violence Policy Center and the Brady Campaign get their vast knowledge of firearms and tactics from Hollywood.

I wish I'd written it.

The Policeman's View of that Snowball

Dave, the author of England's The Policeman's Blog writes about the effort to rewrite England's self defense laws in Hot Burglaries. Excerpt:

The wife and children of Mr Monckton will doubtless be relieved to know that the burglary rate in England is declining significantly. They will also be pleased with official reassurances that the risk of being confronted in one’s own home by a burglar is astonishingly rare. Not as astonishingly rare as it is in the US, where the right to defend one’s family has not been taken away from the individual and given to the state.

Whenever I go to a burglary, I reach for the modern English policeman’s weapon of choice: the photocopier (double sided, black and white, 40 copies per minute). I have to print out leaflets to put into letterboxes asking if people saw anything at about the time of the burglary. I usually do about five houses either side of the attacked property and ten on the opposite side of the street and any other properties that may be significant (shops, garages etc). I also take a detailed statement about what has been taken, the layout of the house and any damage caused and I give the crime number to the injured party. SOCO will arrive (if they can finish before 9.00 pm) and often recover footprints and glove marks. Finally, I leave a leaflet offering the services of Victim Support and advise the homeowners to take better security precautions in the future. The victim’s faith in the police restored, I leave to return to the police station to write a detailed report of my actions.

The English middle classes are at their best when they are burgled: the stiff upper lip, the offer of tea, the uncomfortable draught caused by the smashed window in the kitchen (“don’t worry officer, we’ve not touched anything”). They display a resignation which I used to find touching, but now makes me rather frustrated.

RTWT. For that matter, read the whole blog.

Edited to add, An Englishman's Castle points to the latest news stories on the "Bash-a-Burglar" law, and credits bloggers at least somewhat.

On Guillotines and Gibbets

Personally, I’m interested in keeping other people from building Utopia, because the more you believe you can create heaven on earth the more likely you are to set up guillotines in the public square to hasten the process. - James Lileks

In my copious (HA!) spare time over the last few days, I've done some reading, and a lot of thinking. Last Friday I read Theodore Dalrymple's piece The Frivolity of Evil, and on Saturday two associated pieces from that same issue of City Journal, Dads in the 'Hood, and The Myth of the Working Poor.

All of these pieces reminded me of essays I've written here. For instance, from Dads in the 'Hood:

In 2001, BET.com encouraged visitors to post Father's Day greetings. Organizers assumed that they would see a Hallmark fest of "I love you" or "I miss you." Instead they got a "venting session": "I hate you," "To all my deadbeat dads out there, I just want to say, thanks for nothing," and "That bastard forgot that I even existed," contributors railed.

Father loss is a recurrent theme in contemporary black music, chronicled by some of the baddest brothers: "What's buried under there?/Was a kid torn apart once his pop disappeared?/I went to school, got good grades, could behave when I wanted/But I had demons deep inside," raps Jay-Z, who was raised in Brooklyn's notorious Marcy Projects and usually sings of "hos and bitches." "Now all the teachers couldn't reach me/And my mom couldn't beat me/Hard enough to match the pain of my pops not seeing me."

Back in June I wrote a three-piece essay on "Dangerous Victims." The first, "It's Most Important that all Potential Victims be as Dangerous as they Can" was inspired by a piece at Grimm's Hall called Social Harmony, and that had everything to do with father-figures. I excerpted this out of it:

I was reading an article the other day, in the local newspaper, about an elderly Korean gentleman who has moved into town and opened a martial arts studio. He chastened the reporter who had come to interview him not to suggest that the martial arts were 'all about fighting.' "No!" he said. "The purpose is social harmony."

That is exactly right. The secret of social harmony is simple: Old men must be dangerous.

Very nearly all the violence that plagues, rather than protects, society is the work of young males between the ages of fourteen and thirty. A substantial amount of the violence that protects rather than plagues society is performed by other members of the same group. The reasons for this predisposition are generally rooted in biology, which is to say that they are not going anywhere, in spite of the current fashion that suggests doping half the young with Ritalin.

The question is how to move these young men from the first group (violent and predatory) into the second (violent, but protective). This is to ask: what is the difference between a street gang and the Marine Corps, or a thug and a policeman? In every case, we see that the good youths are guided and disciplined by old men. This is half the answer to the problem.

My piece was specifically on the difference between "violent and predatory" versus "violent but protective," but in this context it is critical to understand that violent and predatory is the natural condition - it is through directed training and education that young men develop the socially critical characteristics of honor, integrity, and the understanding that violence for protection is valid, but for predation is not. That training and education, politically correct or not, comes almost exclusively from older men. And if that training doesn't occur, then the behaviors detailed in both Frivolity and Dads result.

In addition, that training comes not only from the immediate father figure, but from other father figures such as the elderly Korean sensei in Grimm's piece, or, as in this excerpt from Dads:

Michael Datcher's Raising Fences perfectly captures the starkness of the contrast between the love and marriage that are central to the mainstream life project, and the consequences of their absence in the ghetto. As a child during the 1970s, Datcher was bused from a poor, single-mother home in Long Beach, California, to a middle-class white school. He visited a classmate's middle-class home and was floored. "It was a feeling of stability, comfort, and safety that touched me," he recalls. "I wanted that feeling in my life." He was similarly astonished when his friend introduced him to his father. "My parental introductions had always begun and ended with the mama because the mamas were the daddies too," he says. "Not in this house. They had real fathers here. . . . I literally could not speak."

The loss of a father figure for a few in a society is damaging - for that few. But when such loss is epidemic then there are no alternates to turn to, and it becomes endemic and self-sustaining. The concept of a "father" vanishes, to be replaced by a "brotherhood" in which the smartest, least restrained strongman becomes the leader - the dictatorial, criminal, paternal order of gangs.

In both Frivolity and Dads it is made apparent that the mechanism that has destroyed the family unit and resulted in what Dalrymple describes as the dropping of the "barriers to evil" is the Welfare State, and the force behind that mechanism is the flawed ideology of the Left.

The third City Journal piece, analyses that:

(T)he new thinkers quickly veer to the left of (Socialist author Michael) Harrington, following some of his more radical acolytes whose theories produced the War on Poverty's most spectacular disasters. Harrington had seen the poor as victims because they could find no work; his more radical allies, especially a group associated with Columbia University's social-work school, argued that compelling the demoralized inner-city poor to work or take part in training that would fit them for work, instead of giving them unconditional welfare, was itself victimization. Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, for example, argued that America's poverty programs - "self-righteously oriented toward getting people off welfare" and making them independent - were violating the civil rights of the poor. Journalist Richard Elman claimed that "vindictive" America was "humiliating" welfare recipients by forcing them to seek entry-level work as taxi drivers, restaurant employees, and factory laborers, instead of giving them a guaranteed minimum income.

Sympathetic mayors and welfare officials responded to Cloward and Piven's call, boosting benefits, loosening eligibility rules, and cutting investigations of welfare cheating. Welfare rolls soared, along with welfare fraud and illegitimate births. The result was a national backlash that sparked the Reagan administration's welfare spending cuts.

But the Columbia crew left its enduring mark on welfare policy, in the principle that welfare, once a short-term program to help people get back on their feet, should be continuous and come with few restrictions and no stigma. A welfare mother, screaming at New York mayor John Lindsay (responsible for much of the city's rise in welfare cases), expressed the system's new philosophy: "It's my job to have kids, Mr. Mayor, and your job to take care of them." It was a philosophy that bred an urban underclass of non-working single mothers and fatherless children, condemned to intergenerational poverty, despite the trillions spent to help them.

But wait! It gets worse!

Like communists who claim that communism didn't fail but instead was never really tried, Barbara Ehrenreich made her public debut with an attempt to brush aside the War on Poverty's obviously catastrophic results. The 46-year-old daughter of a Montana copper miner-turned-business executive, she joined Cloward and Piven to co-author a 1987 polemic, The Mean Season: The Attack on the Welfare State. The War on Poverty had failed so far, the book claimed, not because of its flawed premises but because the government hadn't done enough to redistribute the nation's wealth. America needed an even bigger War on Poverty that would turn the country into a European-style social welfare state. Pooh-poohing the work ethic and the dignity of labor, the authors derided calls for welfare reform that would require recipients to work, because that would be mortifying to the poor. "There is nothing ennobling about being forced to please an employer to feed one's children," the authors wrote, forgetting that virtually every worker and business owner must please someone, whether boss or customer, to earn a living. Welfare's true purpose, the book declared, should be to "permit certain groups to opt out of work." (The authors never explained why all of us shouldn't demand the right to "opt out.")

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the quintessential example of what I, in more than a dozen posts, have described as cognitive dissonance - the inability to accept that ones fundamental premise is wrong, and results in failure. As Steven den Beste put it so succinctly:

When someone tries to use a strategy which is dictated by their ideology, and that strategy doesn't seem to work, then they are caught in something of a cognitive bind. If they acknowledge the failure of the strategy, then they would be forced to question their ideology. If questioning the ideology is unthinkable, then the only possible conclusion is that the strategy failed because it wasn't executed sufficiently well. They respond by turning up the power, rather than by considering alternatives. (This is sometimes referred to as "escalation of failure".)

Or, as I keep putting it: "Do it again, only HARDER!" This raises a question, though: If it is so blindingly obvious to many of us that the ideologies behind, for example, gun control and welfare are so fundamentally flawed, why are these ideologies not dead? Not only are they not dead, in many ways, still flourishing? Why is the demonstrably erroneous ideology of the Left still advanced by people who just want to keep turning up the power, with the resultant escalation of failure?

I submit, it is because the Left has never been significantly checked as it strives to spread its flawed ideology. Leftists occupy the majority of journalism positions, both as reporters and editors. Editor and Publisher reports that the most recent Pew Research Center survey found:

While most of the journalists, like many Americans, describe themselves as "moderate," a far higher number are "liberal" than in the general population.

At national organizations (which includes print, TV and radio), the numbers break down like this: 34% liberal, 7% conservative. At local outlets: 23% liberal, 12% conservative. At Web sites: 27% call themselves liberals, 13% conservatives.

This contrasts with the self-assessment of the general public: 20% liberal, 33% conservative.

Bear this in mind when you read that: Dan Rather considers himself a "moderate."

Leftists make up an overwhelming majority of educators and administrators in both primary and secondary education. Through these vectors of media and public education the Left has spread its ideology largely without any effective opposition for literally decades. Bear in mind also, I'm not attributing this occupation of media and education to some "vast Left-wing conspiracy." It's a natural outgrowth of a philosophy that builds unquestioning "true believers" who take their flawed ideology as gospel and are thereby inspired to evangelize. A fundamental tenet of Socialism is to proselytize the proletariat so that it recognizes the oppressive bourgeoisie and can then take steps to pull it down. The two places to best accomplish this are media and schools, so the evangelical migrate there, and steadily chip, chip, chip away at the proletariat, spreading the "hate the bourgeoisie" meme that produces women who tell mayors, in all seriousness, "It's my job to have kids, Mr. Mayor, and your job to take care of them."

But why do we not oppose the Left? Or at least not oppose it with much success?

In Not with a Bang, but a Whimper? I noted the retirement of Toren Smith from his section of the battlefied, The Safety Valve:

Frankly, I'm tired of getting all bent out of shape about the stupidities of the world, which seem to be getting worse and worse as time goes by. The last few months it seems every day brings worse news about the corruption of science, the destruction of society by PC-think, the complete and utter end of rational political discourse, and the hydra-like expansion of government powers. International politics has gone insane.

--

To hell with rubbing my face in all the downer crap that's out there. Yes, I know - even if you don't go looking for politics, politics will come looking for you. But I'm going to try crossing the street, at least for the time being.

I also quoted Porphyrogenitus on the apparent futility of illuminating the failures of Leftist ideology:

Everywhere your light touches you get the satisfaction of seeing the cockroaches scurry away. You move the light around the room, and you get to see cockroaches scurrying off. What you don't see, because you have moved on, is as your light moves, the roaches scurry right back into the places they left. You have changed nothing.

We have been shining a light on this problem for probably a quarter of a century or so now. We know two things. Firstly, that the people doing these things are, like all bullies, cowards as well - they are intellectual bullies, but also intellectual cowards. When the light is shined on them, they complain (their academic freedom is being violated, dissent is being suppressed, the whole litany. Never mind how they close the academy to perspectives that aren't theirs, how they silence views in the name of sensitivity and the like). But they also tend to back down - back down on speech codes, back down on anti-American course outlines, back down on whatever. Superficially.

Because, having felt we solved the problem, we dust off our hands and move on. Then the roaches go right back into place; the speech codes get put back into place, in a slightly different guise. The same old stuff is taught, with less overtly obvious descriptions in the course descriptions but the same lectures. And it spreads.

Yes it does. We on the "Right" side of the spectrum - the ones who recognize the flaws in the ideology of the Left - have patted ourselves on the back over the re-election of George W. Bush so much that we have dislocated our shoulders, but we've apparently chosen to ignore the elephant in our own living rooms: the continuing slow growth of Leftism. As I pointed out in More on the Divide, the binary election map is vastly red vs. minimally blue, but in an analog map, the U.S. is a sea of purple. A three percentage-point victory is not something that should make rational humans comfortable, but it apparently has.

We've not had much success because we're not "true believers." Like Toren, most of those of us who recognize the flawed ideology of the Left have to earn a living. The efforts we make in fighting them are on or own time and on our own dime. The Left is getting paid to evangelize, often on our tax dollars. We shine the light, but when it passes they come back out and keep on going. It's tiring, soul-sapping, and we're overwhelmed by the media and education vectors. Leftism is easy. Reason is hard. Being irresponsible is easy. Responsibility is hard.

Evil is easy. And yes, I mean precisely that word: evil.

The Lileks quote above is quite accurate. When (or if) the Left finally achieves unbridled control, it will continue in its cognitive dissonance, and keep turning up the power until guillotines are erected in public squares or mass starvation is seen again as a regrettable but necessary step towards Utopia. I and others like me who know and can illustrate the fundamental flaws in the Leftist ideology would be sent to "re-education" camps (or get a government-issue bullet behind the ear.) It cannot be any other way, so long as their ideology cannot be wrong.

What, I think, the Left fears from the religious Right is a conclusion that the Left is actively, deliberately evil in its pursuit of its Utopia. I don't see that, myself. Misguided certainly. Deluded. Unwilling to reason. But I've been giving the entire question a great deal of thought, and I've concluded that the vast majority of the Left consists of the brainwashed products of the education system and the media who have had no (or very little) exposure to anything else - thus the reaction by the mainstream Left to the blogosphere, talk radio and FOX News. They vaguely grasp the ideas presented, but are not "true believers." They want the State to be responsible for them, because they've only been taught that is the job of the State, and being taken care of is easier than doing it yourself. Being presented with an alternative is troubling, though, as Bill Whittle puts it:

Your Worldview has been hit by heatseeking reality, and you're on fire and out of control. You have only a few decades in which to react! Think fast! Cool, soothing logic tells you it's time to get out.

There's a smaller portion of the Left, the True Believers I discussed above. Even here these people are merely deluded, suffering from cognitive dissonance. I don't understand them, but I recognize their existance.

And then there are the actual evil ones - the ones who know the facts, but - like Stalin - are willing to manipulate their "useful idiots" to achieve power.

But how do you tell them apart?

Does it matter?

A while back Connie du Toit wrote this (have the quote, but not the link):

The other day our Carpenter’s helper heard me say something along the lines of, "it is difficult to conclude that incompetence is the reason why our public schools have deteriorated. There comes a point where you have to suspect sabotage, or a conspiracy."

He asked me if I really meant that. I gave him the five minute explanation of John Dewey’s known affiliation with communists, his frequent essays and articles about the wonders of the Soviet education system, and his quote, "You can’t make Socialists out of individualists. Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming where everyone is interdependent."

I then went on to tell him about how public schools changed at the turn of the last century. That there were others involved in turning Americans from free-thinking individualists to factory drones. I also added that many people probably went along with it because it seemed like a good idea, but there were certainly enough people behind the scenes, who knew that the goal posts had been moved. THAT is a conspiracy.

Yes. There does come that time when you are forced to don the tinfoil hat.
The incompetence excuse only works once. Incompetence this great is impossible to attribute to accident.

That's what the Left fears - that the Right will manage to reach and educate enough people, and they'll conclude sabotage and conspiracy. Instead of guillotines we'll have ropes and gibbets as Kim du Toit and Emperor Misha often recommend (only half-jokingly.) That attitude is taken to its logical (and hilarious) conclusion in this post by Mike at Cold Fury. Excerpt:

Yep, that’s right, you commie bastiches, we’re coming for you. It’s only a matter of time now until you hear that late-night knock on the door you’ve been dreading all along. Our jack-booted gendarmerie is going to be working overtime rounding up every non-white and non-rich subject of our fascist regime, and we’re going to be baking every last one of you into pies that we’ll then refuse to share with the poor and hungry. We’ll be baking those pies in coal-fired ovens, and those ovens will be devoid of any sort of exhaust-scrubber whatever, because we want to release all the toxic gases and chemicals we can into the atmosphere.

RTWT, it's very funny. But it illustrates what I think is psychological projection from the Left. We're in the middle of a philosophical Cold War. The fact of the matter is, though, that philosophical war is a religious one. It is, in effect, between the faiths of Christianity and Socialism. In Herbert Meyer's Open Letter to Europe from immediately after the election, he said:

We believe that church and state should be separate, but that religion should remain at the center of life. We are a Judeo-Christian culture, which means we consider those ten things on a tablet to be commandments, not suggestions. We believe that individuals are more important than groups, that families are more important than governments, that children should be raised by their parents rather than by the State, and that marriage should take place only between a man and a woman. We believe that rights must be balanced by responsibilities, that personal freedom is a privilege we must be careful not to abuse, and that the rule of law cannot be set aside when it becomes inconvenient. We believe in economic liberty, and in the right of purposeful and industrious entrepreneurs to run their businesses – and thus create jobs – with a minimum of government interference. We recognize that other people see things differently, and we are tolerant of their views. But we believe that our country is worth defending, and if anyone decides that killing us is an okay thing to do we will go after them with everything we’ve got.
If these beliefs seem strange to you, they shouldn’t. For these are precisely the beliefs that powered Western Europe – you - from the Middle Ages into the Renaissance, on to the Enlightenment, and forward into the modern world. They are the beliefs that made Europe itself the glory of Western civilization and – not coincidentally – ignited the greatest outpouring of art, literature, music and scientific discovery the world has ever known including Michaelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare, Bach, Issac Newton and Descartes.
It is your abandonment of these beliefs that has created the gap between Europe and the United States. You have ceased to be a Judeo-Christian culture, and have become instead a secular culture. And a secular culture quickly goes from being “un-religious” to anti-religious.

The Left, intolerant and unbending, agressively evangelical, historically in control of the education of youth and the flow of information to everyone, fears a Christian backlash and a modern-day massacre of St. Bartholomew's Eve. They don't much fear the non-religious among the Right - we're not organized enough. We're not true believers. But they understand that when men like Theodore Dalrymple start throwing the religiously-weighted word "EVIL" around, then the backlash might not be far away.

UPDATE, 12/8: Jeff at Caerdroia has an excellent post up, Politicism, that is also explanatory of the cockroach-resilience of the Left.

UPDATE, 12/9: Russell at Solarvoid has penned a companion piece from the devout Mormon perspective. You might want to give that a read as well.

UPDATE, 12/10: Zendo Deb of TFS Magnum has a post expanding on the collapse of public schooling, with an inside insight - her parents were both educators. (Rambling? I'm hurt!)

UPDATE 12/11: Rodger Schultz gives an example of what the Left fears:

Go to your next PTA meeting and lay the law down. Say, we've had it with your left wing agenda! We will sing Christmas carols! We will not study the Koran in class! We will not allow you to politicize our kid's education! Now here's the important part. Some schmuck will stand up, some pasty face creep wearing a "Reelect President Gore" button, and announce that he will not allow your right wing values to corrupt his little precious. It's here that you turn into a mob and lynch him. That's right. If there ain't no rope hooks inside, go outside and use a tree. When the cops come to investigate, every one says "I didn't see a thing," and what can they do? (I learnt that from Bill Clinton). If you live in Hollywood, or Beverly Hills, or one of them places, you will have to do this several thousand times. Make sure you go to Rob Reiner's kid's school. Trust me, after these vermin read about the 6-7 thousandth lynching, they'll get the message and STFU.

See? It's a meme!

Further Update, 12/11: Eric S. Raymond penned an article over at Armed and Dangerous on Wednesday that dovetails nicely into one of the points I was making. In his Left2Right — a critical appraisal, he discusses an effort by the Left to "reach out" to the Right to get them to understand the error of their ways. Eric says:

I'm not a conservative or right-winger myself, but a radical libertarian who finds both ends of the conventional spectrum about equally repugnant. My tradition is the free-market classical liberalism of Locke and Hayek. I utterly reject both the Marxist program and the reactionary cultural conservatism of Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, and (today) the Religious Right. Conservatism is defined by a desire to preserve society's existing power relationships; given a choice, I prefer subverting them to preserving them.

One advantage my libertarianism gives me is that while I disagree violently with a lot of right-wing thinking, I understand it much better than most leftists do. The reverse is not quite as true; while I do believe I understand left-wing thinking pretty well, most right-wing intellectuals are not so ignorant of leftism that I have an unusual advantage there. They can't be, not after having passed through the PC indoctrination camps that most American universities have become.

And I'm right there with him, for the most part. But in critiquing some of the posts at Left2Right Eric hits the point I make here in On Guillotines and Gibbets:

(T)he Bushies ignore advice from left-wing academics because they believe the source is poisoned. They believe you hate America and want to destroy it. Given that belief, it would be their duty to listen to your advice only with the determination to do the exact opposite of anything you recommend.

Now, mind you, in pointing this out, I am not alleging that you actually do hate America and want to destroy it. My claim is that from the point of view of most conservatives, that is the only model that plausibly explains your speech and behavior. They do not merely pretend to believe your kind is evil as a matter of rhetoric or tactical positioning, they actually do believe it. With the best will in the world to listen to critics and weigh evidence, they still wouldn't take policy advice from you any more readily than you would accept it from a Nazi.

(Allow me to contrast this with the position I think more typical of libertarians, which is that left-wing academics are not evil per se but have been so canalized by Marxist-derived ideology that on most politico-economic issues they should be ignored on grounds of irremediable incompetence.)

And that's my point: The Left doesn't fear Libertarians of either the large or small "L" stripe, nor does it fear non-Christians. We aren't true believers of either the Christian or Marxist pursuasion. We aren't the types to build guillotines or throw a rope over a gibbet, because we see the Left as incompetent, or mislead, but not actively evil.

But when evil is "the only model that plausibly explains (their) speech and behavior," what should one do? Continue letting their misleading incompetence destroy America?

RTWT. Eric uses that weighted word, "evil," quite a bit.

UPDATE 12/28: Kim du Toit linked to this piece with some kind things to say in agreement, and then Raging Dave from Four Right Wing Wackos pointed out something I and Kim neglected to:

One reason that the Left continues to spread its failure-bound ideology is that the people spreading it, by and large, have insulated themselves from the negative ramifications of their decisions.

How many business owners do you see trying to spread the socialist propaganda of the Left? Not too many. Most business owners understand that socialism and communism spell failure for anyone trying to run a business. These owners deal with the effects of their business decisions on a daily basis, and if they screw up, they are the ones who have to deal with the consequences. The same goes for people just working full time and trying to run a household, or raise children. Their decisions and the results of them are felt almost immediately, and must be dealt with by the people responsible.

When's the last time some communist college professor had to deal with the consequences of his actions? Why do you think that universities are so full of bullshit laden socialist fuckwits? Because it doesn't matter what some braindead hippie holdover says or does, his paycheck keeps on coming.

That's a valid point. The Left has done a magnificent job of setting up Professional Educators as an untouchable field - it's nearly impossible to get fired after achieving tenure at either elementary education or the university level. There have been a number of posts on this topic at the Volokh Conspiracy having to do with college-level tenure. And in the media, if you don't share the groupthink, it's difficult to advance as well. See Bernard Goldberg's books Bias and Arrogance, and John Stossel's book Give Me a Break!
But if you're Jayson Blair....

This is a point also made repeatedly by Thomas Sowell in his book Vision of the Annointed: Self-Congratulations as a Basis for Social Policy. Another group that shares this immunity from the results of their actions? Government employees and legislators.

I'm Not Normally a "Joiner," but...

This is a good cause. I have joined the Spirit of America Gunblogger Team and tossed in $50 towards the cause as well. Will you help?



So far we've raised $330.00 and our team is placed seventh out of a field of 21 other teams. (Of course, the Northern Alliance is just a bit ahead of us, with $10,169.00, but it's all for a good cause.) Little Green Footballs is individually responsible for $13,266.00 in donations!

You know what I don't see? Big Leftist blogs. Why am I not surprised?

More on that Snowball

(Why I have such a hard time finding these Telegraph peices is beyond me.) Also in Sunday's edition was a piece on the opinion of Sir John Stevens, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner concerning the rights of homeowners when their homes are invaded:

Time to let people kill burglars in their homes, says Met chief
By John Steele, Home Affairs Correspondent
(Filed: 04/12/2004)

Householders should be able to use whatever force is necessary to defend their homes against criminals, even if it involves killing the intruder, the country's most senior police officer said yesterday.

Sir John Stevens, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, said those who defended their families and property should only face prosecution over injuries to intruders in "extreme circumstances", where they could be shown to have used gratuitous violence.

Speaking exclusively to the Telegraph, days after John Monckton, a financier, was stabbed to death in an attempted robbery at his home in Chelsea, Sir John said: "My own view is that people should be allowed to use what force is necessary and that they should be allowed to do so without any risk of prosecution.

"There's a definite feeling around when I go out on the beat with officers and talk to members of the public that we need clarity in the law."

He said the current legal test of "reasonable force", which has evolved in common law, seemed to be weighted against householders and left the public confused about their rights.

Said confusion resulting in a "chilling effect" that inhibits people from using force to defend themselves?

Sir John suggested replacing it with legislation that put a statutory duty on police, prosecutors and the courts to presume that the force someone used in their home against a violent intruder was within the law, unless the facts clearly disproved this.

As opposed to, say, conducting a three-week murder investigation before deciding not to charge a 63 year-old nearly blind man in the stabbing death of a 23 year-old man who had knocked the front door "off its hinges" in his effort to get inside the house?

Other police chiefs shared his view - the strongest assertion of a home owner's right to self-defence issued by a senior officer in recent times - that there was too much doubt about what people could do, he said. The issue should be resolved by Parliament as "a matter of urgency."

Really? "Too much doubt"? I thought the self-defense rules were clear as mud!

Sir John, who will step down in January after five years as commissioner, said: "There is a real difficulty in people understanding what force they can use to defend themselves, their loved ones, their families and their homes. In years gone by I think there was a broad understanding of what it meant.

So what changed?

The prosecutorial system, not the letter of the law.

"The test at the moment is that you use reasonable force in the circumstances. You do not use excessiveness. I think the test of reasonableness needs to be looked at and clarified within statute.

"The thing is too imprecise at the moment for people when they are in extremis. You should be absolutely clear about what your legal rights are to defend yourself."

He suggested that the case of Tony Martin, the Norfolk farmer jailed for shooting dead a 16-year-old burglar, Fred Barras, in August 1999, was exceptional one which had distorted the issue of self-defence.

Martin, he pointed out, "did shoot the burglar as he was running away. He did use a gun that was illegal. The Martin case skewed everything and it was the wrong case to concentrate on".

Speaking at Scotland Yard, Sir John said: "Now is the time, specifically with these two cases we have had recently - in Chiswick and Chelsea - for the law to be clarified." The Chiswick case involved a teacher stabbed to death in his home in west London. A man has been charged with his murder.

"It's all very well for the lawyers to say the law is clear, but I'm afraid people on the street don't feel that, and on occasions neither do the police," said Sir John.

"Of course you don't want to have gratuitous or excessive violence… but you have to be given the power to use what is necessary.

"I'm not talking about guns but people being allowed to defend themselves and use whatever is necessary to defend themselves against someone who may well be armed with a knife."

So why not guns? Firearms are the only weapons that will make a woman in a wheelchair the equal of healthy young men. Forcing people to defend themselves by confronting assailants at contact distance is not "reasonable."

There should be a presumption in law "that the person using the force to defend themselves is acting within the law, rather than the other way round".

Even if a struggle led to the death of an intruder, Sir John added, the law would presume that the person in that house had acted lawfully "and let the law change that presumption because of fact in evidence".

He said: "The message it sends to the would-be attacker is, `Do not think you can come into people's homes and people will not defend themselves with the right type of force that's necessary.' At the moment it seems it's the other way round."

The proper response to predatory violence is the threat of overwhelming response - not parity.

Until they figure that out, they haven't got that snowball's chance.

The Snowball Appears to be Losing

I've chronicled the London Sunday Telegraph's effort at attempting to change England's self-defense laws over the last several weeks. Today's entries don't bode well. Here's the op-ed:

The apocalypse is here, in our homes
Dominic Lawson
(Filed: 05/12/2004)

Remember Robert Symonds? It is the name of the 45-year-old Putney teacher who six weeks ago was stabbed to death in the hall of his home by a burglar. His body was found by his wife while their two children slept upstairs.

It was as a result of that incident that this newspaper launched our "right to fight back" campaign, which calls for the public to be given an unqualified right to self defence against intruders in their own homes. The point that struck me so forcibly at the time was not just the horror of Mr Symonds's death, but the fact that had Mr Symonds picked up a kitchen knife before encountering the burglar, and managed to get blows in first, then he would now, as the law stands, be facing a murder trial.

This in direct opposition to Prof. Tim Lambert's assertion that no such thing is a given. Dominic must be another "gullible gunner" I guess.

The defenders of the status quo argue that a jury might acquit, on grounds that such self-defence was "reasonable force". We argue that such cases should never even be considered as crimes in the first place.

Gee, that's my assertion too!

While the public has backed our campaign - one admittedly unscientific poll conducted by BBC Radio2 suggested that 97 per cent were behind us - the Government, led by "tough on crime" Tony Blair, has been depressingly reluctant to seize the initiative. At a lunch the other day a very senior member of the Civil Service said to me: "Your campaign will never succeed. It goes against the entire administrative culture in this country."

Of course it does. As I've said, once the State has made a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, they will not willingly yeild back that power.

Well, he's probably right about that. But yesterday the outgoing Metropolitan Police Commissioner, and today the Conservative Party, have declared their support for the principle underpinning our campaign.

This is all by way of a preamble to the fact that at 7.30 last Monday evening, my wife's cousin, John Monckton, was stabbed to death by burglars who had used a preconceived and simple act of deception to enter his well-protected Chelsea home. They also attempted to murder his wife, Homeyra, who, while still in a very serious condition, would certainly now be dead, had it not been for their nine-year-old daughter's discovery of the scene and extraordinary calmness in calling the police.

Police who could not prevent the assaults, but could show up and take a report, of course.

I have to say that even if the law had been changed in the manner that we propose, it would have been very out of character for John to have taken advantage of it to use force against an intruder. He was the most peaceful and gentle of men. But that is not the point. The issue is one of deterrence.

Precisely. His assailants could not then know they would not be resisted, if it were the right of each and every resident to use lethal force in self defense. But because they know that such action will result in probable prosecution, they know that home invasion is a safe and often lucrative activity to engage in.

In America, where householders have an unqualified right of self-defence, only 12 per cent of burglaries take place while the owners are at home. In this country, the figure is well over 50 per cent, and as the horrible case of John Monckton shows, intruders are now deliberately choosing times when they know they will encounter someone who can be induced to allow entry into a home that is sufficiently secure to prevent an easy break-in.

And where "sufficient security" indicates a lucrative payoff.

When I debated this issue with the eminent lawyer Lord (Andrew) Phillips on the Jeremy Vine radio show, he argued that while the number of burglaries would drop if there were an unqualified right of self-defence "the number of injuries to householders will vastly increase because the burglars will get their retaliation in first... It is an iron rule, criminals are more violent than victims."

Really? Has England really lost its "aggressive edge" to that point? Most criminals are cowards. They don't want to risk their asses, and will find an easier way to make a living. What the law in England has done is make home invasion nearly risk-free so that even cowards can engage in it.

As I pointed out to Lord Phillips at the time, we are not arguing that homeowners should be compelled to confront intruders. They can, if they wish, listen to the advice of Her Majesty's Constabulary, which is to lock themselves in their bathroom and wait for the police to arrive.

Two other points occurred to me later. The first is that we should not let our behaviour be conditioned and controlled by what thugs might think or desire. The second is that Lord Phillips's argument reminds me of the former foreign secretary Douglas Hurd, who maintained an arms embargo against the persecuted Muslims of Bosnia on the grounds that to let them fight against their heavily-armed Serb oppressors would lead to "a level killing field". That well-intentioned but morally obtuse policy led directly to the first massacres seen on the continent of Europe since it was occupied by the Nazis.

Funny how that works, isn't it? Such good intent, such bad results.

(But the philosophy cannot be wrong...)

It would, of course, be better not to have to talk in such apocalyptic metaphors. But the doubling in recorded violent crime over the past eight years is a domestic apocalypse now.

Pshaw! That doubling is due to a change in counting methods. Or something. The British Crime Survey says violent crime is down! Didn't you get the memo?

Of course there are measures that should be carried out which do not require the public to "take the matter into their own hands". In urban areas, it would help to see the police out in force. In Central London, for example, there is scarcely a street corner which is not being patrolled by traffic wardens. Is it too much to expect the same from the Metropolitan Police?

It was exactly such a policy that dramatically reduced violent crime in New York under Mayor Giuliani. He also introduced a tough sentencing policy. In this country the average sentence given to burglars by our magistrates - that is, the tiny minority who are detected, charged and given a prison sentence - is 3.8 months. Even the average sentence given to those convicted of aggravated (ie violent) burglary is little more than four years. Halve that for "good behaviour".

I am quite prepared to believe the prison reformers that a long custodial sentence does not reform a person's character. The point is that the longer such characters are off our streets the safer we all are.

Which is why I'm entertained by headlines of "Crime Down Even As Prison Population Climbs." Well, DUH! Prison isn't for reform, it's for punishment and to get the criminal out of circulation. We've pretty much proven that "reform" is a lost cause.

Of course, even if the police were more active on the streets, and even if we had a more rigorous sentencing policy, there will still be violent burglaries, thousands of them. And at that time, no police force on earth can protect us. That is when we have, in my view, a natural right to unqualified self-defence, regardless of the law of the land.

Bear in mind, the right to self defense was called by St. George Tucker in 1803 "the first law of nature" and noted that "in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible." Welcome to England where they've done it again!

After John's murder my mind was filled with violent thoughts. I imagined his killers strung up on gibbets in Trafalgar Square, being pecked at by the pigeons. Then I received a letter from his friend and fellow Catholic, Lord Grantley, who said: "John would have wanted us to pray not only for his family, but also for his murderers, that they should repent, for otherwise they would perish, a fate he would not have wished on anyone."

For those of us of a less spiritual cast of mind, the earthly fate we would not wish on anyone is John Monckton's own. This is time, not just for prayers, but for action.

I'm in agreement with Mr. Lawson, but these three letters to the editor are not:

Sir - Sir John Stevens, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, says the law should be changed to allow householders to use "necessary" rather than "reasonable" force to defend their homes (leader, Dec 4). But such a change would, most probably, swing the balance away from the householder.

I don't see how that is even possible, but...

It is easy to imagine circumstances in which a jury might conclude that the force used was reasonable, but unnecessary. In the case of Tony Martin, many argued that it was reasonable for Mr Martin to shoot the burglar dead, although he was running away at the time. I suspect that fewer would argue that it was necessary. More generally, what if a householder could retreat into a secure room to escape from the intruder? It would not then be necessary to attack the intruder, but it would still be, as recognised by the law, reasonable to do so if he was invading your home.

Precisely, and your point?

Sir John also says that the force used against an intruder should be presumed to be lawful unless the facts clearly show otherwise. Your editorial argues that such a presumption should be made almost absolute. At present, juries are directed, in cases of self-defence, (a) that a man defending himself cannot weigh to a nicety the exact measure of his defensive action, and (b) that if, in a moment of unexpected anguish, the defendant had done only what he honestly and instinctively thought was necessary, that is potent evidence that what was done was reasonable.

Yet we've seen cases in which this was not the standard used, haven't we?

To get any closer to an almost absolute presumption would require the law to allow people acting in self-defence to use more force than was reasonable; in other words, to be allowed to use unreasonable force.

Stephen Taylor, Northampton

No, Mr. Taylor, sufficient force. Appropriate force. Overwhelming force. Not unreasonable force. There's a difference between violent-and-predatory and violent-but-defensive, and England seems to have forgotten it.

Sir - Most householders would probably consider that the average burglar would be more skilled than them in the use of knives, swords and blunt implements, and so would choose a firearm as the only effective defensive weapon.

An astute observation!

To support Sir John's "unqualified right to use force", shotgun and firearm certificates might have to be issued to millions of people.

And the downside of this would be...?

Thousand of police officers would be needed to process these certificates and to inspect the premises to ensure the weapons were suitably stored. I would suggest that, for effective use, the best place would be under the bed, rather than in a secure and approved gun cabinet.

Of course you could simply drop the useless and ineffective weapons regulations that have done diddly squat in making the country safer, couldn't you?

Centres to teach householders how to handle and safely deploy pistols, guns and rifles would need to be established across Britain to limit the number of accidental self-shootings. Without regular training, some self-shooting or wounding of others through "friendly fire" would be inevitable in a panic situation.

Angus Jacobsen, Inverbervie, Kincardineshire

You know Angus, we keep hearing the same kind of scare-stories here about concealed-weapons permits, that there will be "blood in the streets" and road-rage killings that just don't happen. Interesting to see the same tactics being employed across the pond.

Sir - I would ask Sir John to direct his highly trained, highly paid police force to protect my home and family, so that I am not forced to kill an intruder.

I don't really feel up to it, however well it is regarded by the law.

Brian Farmer, Blackwood, Caerphilly

Don't worry about it, Brian. You don't have to do it. It would be completely voluntary. You could just sit back and reap the rewards of having neighbors willing to do it for you. Unless, of course, you wanted to put a sign out in front of your home indicating that you were defenseless and unwilling to protect yourself and your family.

No? Didn't think so.

The thermostat in Hell won't go down low enough, I fear. The snowball doesn't have a chance.

The Frivolity of Evil

"Thank you, Kim" is not precisely what I want to say but I needed to read The Frivolity of Evil. I think everybody needs to read this piece, and discuss it, because it's overwhelmingly important. With the question of "moral values" raised by the pollsters here after the election, and the sneering reaction of the Left to the response, it's especially timely. Theodore Dalrymple writes in City Journal of what he most accurately terms "the frivolity of evil," echoing things I've seen and read literally for decades.

It does not do this piece justice to excerpt, but I must. A couple of weeks ago I reprised a much older fisk I'd done long before I started blogging. The author of the piece I fisked was a self-professed utopist liberal. Among the characteristics he attributed to Liberals was the following:

"Liberals have a fundamental faith in the ability of humans to better themselves and act appropriately when the situation calls for it."

Read Dr. Dalrymple's take:

My work has caused me to become perhaps unhealthily preoccupied with the problem of evil. Why do people commit evil? What conditions allow it to flourish? How is it best prevented and, when necessary, suppressed? Each time I listen to a patient recounting the cruelty to which he or she has been subjected, or has committed (and I have listened to several such patients every day for 14 years), these questions revolve endlessly in my mind.

--
Intellectuals propounded the idea that man should be freed from the shackles of social convention and self-control, and the government, without any demand from below, enacted laws that promoted unrestrained behavior and created a welfare system that protected people from some of its economic consequences. When the barriers to evil are brought down, it flourishes; and never again will I be tempted to believe in the fundamental goodness of man, or that evil is something exceptional or alien to human nature.

That's the difference between theoretical and experimental. Yet, as we've all seen, while the experimental evidence overwhelmingly disproves Liberal belief, they go on believing it. Or acting as if they do.

Dalrymple goes on, in damning detail, to illustrate his fundamental points. Please, please read this. Think on it long and hard. Pass it around to friends and relatives. Get into arguments over it. Make Liberals defend their positions regarding what he illustrates.

Thank you, Kim, for pointing me to that post. I think I'll go be ill now.

Blog Hiatus - (No, Really!)

Sorry for the lack of posting. Right now I'm so buried in work it's not even funny, and it will remain like this through at least the first week of January. On top of that, I'm fighting a cold, too.

Anyway, I'm going to be working gulag labor hours for the next four or five weeks (assuming I don't go home sick the next couple of days,) so I'm not going to have much time to read, much less write.

Hopefully I'll get a post or two in every now and then, especially on Sundays (which I WILL be taking off,) but don't expect to see three or four posts a day.

For readers just now finding TSM, please peruse my "Best Posts" and the archives. For the rest of you: Sorry, but life intrudes.