Jeff, I think you will enjoy this article published yesterday morning:
<<The state can't save you from a sniper
Mark Steyn
National Post
Thursday, October 24, 2002
Let's suppose that the experts are right about "the sniper": He's your stereotypical white male loser, unemployed and unemployable and unable to get laid by anybody, regardless of race, creed, colour or sexual orientation. The question then arises: What to do about it?
For a couple of Maryland politicians in November's election, the answer's obvious. Democratic gubernatorial candidate Kathleen Kennedy Townsend wants more gun "control": "I know the pain of losing somebody," says Camelot's latest flickering torch-bearer. "I don't want other Marylanders to feel that pain." Democratic Congressional candidate Chris Van Hollen is also in favour of "sensible" gun control: "I lead the fight in the Maryland Senate on these issues," he says. "And Maryland is the first in the country to make progress on those issues."
Funnily enough, you're hard put to find any other Democratic candidates this election season eager to pipe up on this subject. If anything, it's quite the opposite: In the party's primaries, it was gun-friendly candidates who did well. Nationally, the Dems seem to have learned the lessons of 2000, when Al Gore managed to lose his own state, Tennessee, as well as traditional Democrat strongholds like West Virginia, in part because of the gun issue. (Gun ownership turned out to be the most accurate predictor of voting behaviour two years ago.) Paul Begala, the loyal Clinton attack dog, is on-message: On TV the other night, he held up snaps of him and his brother enjoying a weekend's hunting.
But, if Mrs. Townsend and Mr. Van Hollen think the sniper is a persuasive argument for gun control, then at least Americans know the kind of gun control we're talking about: Total.
The killer might be shooting his victims with a semi-automatic, but, on the other hand, he could be using gram'pa's hunting rifle. Gun control types usually steer clear of this area not least because it's pretty irrelevant to crime statistics: In America, there are 1.7 homicides per 100,000 long guns; in Canada, it's 1.9. So, in today's episode of Fun With Statistics, you're more likely to be killed by a homicidal Canadian rifleman than an American one. (I am indebted to Bruce Rolston, who ferreted out the comparative figures for his endearingly macho Web site Flit.)
But, of course, the real difference is not the homicidal tendencies of long-gun owners either side of the border, but between those who see what's happening in suburban Maryland as an argument for greater state power and those who see it as a resounding confirmation of the uselessness of state power. Here we have (according to the profilers) a loser, a failure, a nobody, randomly killing people in a narrow geographical area along the I-95 corridor. And yet the police forces of seven jurisdictions, the FBI, ATF and even the Pentagon's surveillance drones high in the sky can do nothing to stop him. He's taken 10 lives and disrupted millions more -- the children whose schools are closed, the organizers of thousands of cancelled leisure events, the commuters who drive miles out of the way to fill up at less exposed gas stations. The first lesson of this case is that, if a guy isn't fussy about who he kills, he can do so with impunity. If I were an al-Qaeda sleeper in Miami or Cleveland, I would find this most illuminating.
But the state has to do something. So across a wide swathe of Virginia some considerable distance from the Ponderosa shooting, the School Districts told the kids to stay home. They were responding to a letter from the killer: "Your children are not safe anywhere at any time."
That's a reason to padlock the schoolhouse? Apparently so. As National Review's Dave Shiflett pointed out, many of the 142,000 suddenly liberated students will end up hanging out at the mall or on the street. To date, the sniper has shot one victim at a school, the other 12 on the street or in parking lots. In our second episode of Fun With Statistics, by driving Virginia children out of their schoolrooms and among the general population, you're placing them at greater risk. "Your children are not safe anywhere"? Hey, tough, sorry, the state can't do anything about that, but we can at least ensure that, if your children have to be unsafe, it won't be on School District property.
Other than that, the authorities have been reduced to pleading that, despite the terrible faux pas of accidentally arresting two illegal immigrants unconnected to the sniper, they're very interested in reaching out to members of the illegal immigrant community -- or, as we now say, the "undocumented." Lovely formulation, that: undocumented -- like a l'il ol' biddy who turns up at the library but she's forgotten her card. I leave it to others to speculate why police are so eager to make contact with fine upstanding members of the Undocumented-American community, but let us note that the very existence of this crucial demographic is a testament to yet more government failure: the inability of U.S. immigration policy to secure the nation's borders.
So I guess I feel differently from Kathleen Kennedy Townsend and Chris Van Hollen. The lesson I've learned in the last year is that the bargain of big government -- trade your rights for your security -- is a false one. The Federal Aviation Administration said to passengers "Do as you're told and we'll take care of you," and on the morning of September 11th their bluff was called. Three months later, French airport security detained the shoe-bomber and then put him back on the plane. On that flight, as on Flight 93, an alert, self-reliant citizenry counted for more than all the government regulation in the world.
On terra firma, though, it depends where you are. A gun won't protect you from being shot from across the street as you pump gas. But say you're out for a stroll in the woods and you happen to see a guy at the edge of the tree line raise his rifle in the direction of the parking lot. If you live in Virginia, there's a chance you'll have a gun yourself -- like the two brave students at one of the state's law schools earlier this year who managed to hold off a would-be spree killer. Maybe you could pin the sniper down till police come.
But, if you live in Maryland, where Mr. Van Hollen has made so much "progress" on gun control, you'll almost certainly be unarmed. You can cry out "Stop!" and put him off his shot, or provoke him into whirling round and killing you instead. Or you can slink away to the nearest payphone and hope you get one of the less incompetent FBI switchboard operators.
I know which state I'd prefer a citizen to find him in. But Mrs. Townsend and Mr. Van Hollen are in tight races and have bet otherwise. Their chums in the media are now saying there are "concerns" about how widespread public "fear" will impact election turnout. We all know what the real "fear" is: Who do you think's more likely to be nervous about voting on November 5th? Gung-ho Second Amendment types? Or the ninnies who watch CNN round the clock and think more government power can make all the bad stuff go away? If Mrs. Townsend and Mr. Van Hollen lose narrowly on election day, look for the dangling chads to be dusted off and a flurry of lawsuits about how the unsafe voting environment disproportionately discriminated against Democrats.
Neither the FBI nor the School Board can make your children "safe." You have to do that as best you can, by accepting your responsibilities as a free-born citizen, and leaving the government to concentrate on the big geopolitical picture. CNN's running a 24/7 sniperfest berating law enforcement for failing to do this, failing to do that. Meanwhile, if you're exceptionally alert, you might catch the tail-end of "NORTH KOREA: YES, WE HAVE NUKES" disappearing off the left-hand side of the crawl.
Big government is always bad government. And, given the record of the last year, these fellows need to prioritize. The humble citizen can't do anything about the nukes, but he should be able to make his own judgments about school runs and shopping. The Swedish model -- that we can all live warm and snug inside the state's cocoon -- isn't going to work. As P.J. O'Rourke put it in his review of Hillary Clinton's book, "It Takes A Village To Raise A Child. The village is Washington. You are the child." And, if we're all children, then, like the man says, none of us is safe.
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