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Whitaker's Current Articles August 2, 2003
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Fun Quote:
"By definition, a melting pot is nothing
specific. Anyone who can be deeply loyal to nothing specific is in
desperate need of psychiatric care."
Me in the Southern Partisan, 1985
Making
it to 100
I remember reading about how often the ancient
Greeks stayed active until they were very old. A lot of them stayed
active into their late 90s, one until he was 99. But then they
died, and none of those mentioned made 100.
It is no accident that Strom Thurmond and Bob
Hope made it to 100 and promptly died. My grandfather reached 90
and promptly died because he knew he would not make it to 100.
George Burns had a big party planned for his
100th birthday. Then he died at 99, too.
But Strom and Bob Hope made it to 100 and then
died.
I wonder if this is like the four-minute mile.
In my youth the big deal was for somebody to finally run a mile in
four minutes. Roger Bannister did it, and soon another man did it.
Then even college athletes began to beat the four-minute mile.
That happens with most records. First
everybody barely misses it, then lots of people break it once the
barrier has been crossed.
Maybe Hope and Thurmond have started a trend.
South
Carolina's Tax-Paid Anti-Gun Lobby
Every state and every major city in America has
a tax-paid anti-gun lobby. That lobby wears police uniforms and
gold braid on their hats.
In South Carolina the state-supported anti-gun
lobby is called SLED, the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division.
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In a proposal from Sen. Dave Zien to state of Wisconsin
found at
http://home.wi.rr.com/ccw4wi/ppa_intro.html
Florida has the most studied concealed carry law and the one
after which the bill is most closely modeled. From passage in 1987
to January 31, 1996, Florida had issued 320,571 carry licenses. Only
58, or 0.02%, have been revoked because the holder committed a crime
(not necessarily violent) while in possession of a firearm. During
the same period, over 300,000 firearm crimes were committed in
Florida by non-licensees.
According to FBI uniform crime reports, after enactment of
their concealed weapons law, while Florida's homicide rate was
dropping 27% and its handgun homicide rate has dropped 38% while
increasing 8% and 43% respectively in the U.S. as a whole. Florida’s
homicide rate has now dropped 41%.
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When the concealed weapons law was proposed in
1992 the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED) fought
desperately against allowing permits for law-abiding citizens.
My information is that when they lost that
fight, SLED officials fanned out over the state, telling store
owners to put up “No Guns Allowed” signs to make permits as useless
as possible.
Unofficially, of course.
I have talked to a lot of pro-gun people about
this. Every one says, 1) Yes, it’s true and 2) No one is allowed to
complain about it.
South Carolina gun lobbies want to go along and
get along, so SLED's anti-gun fixation is not mentioned by any
decent person.
So I’ll talk about it.
When the permit law came up for renewal, SLED
did what any lobby has to do: it accepted the inevitable. Permit
holders have done better than any type of police in handling their
guns, so SLED did not try to get the law repealed.
When the time came for the legislature to renew the permit law,
all that SLED and all the other anti-gun lobbies could say
was, “Permits are working just fine, let’s just keep them like
they are.”
Police brass want to go back to the good old
days. Before the present law, sheriffs and the police doled
out permits to people who could do them some political good.
Why SLED and Other Anti-Gun Lobbies Want to Keep Permits the Way
They Are
Permit holding has been tried. Permit
holders have done a superlative job. As a result, permit
holders today ought to have all the rights that permit holders had
back when the police doled them out for political pull.
SLED and the other anti-gun people want to keep
the present gun permits because they aren't worth much. You can’t
carry a gun to and from a restaurant that serves alcohol, so
criminals are safe in mugging those people. When the old
permits were handed out by the sheriff for political pull, you could
carry a gun if you were crawling out of a bar, no problem.
Today's holder of non-political permits can’t carry a gun
at night to and from a hospital, so criminals don’t have to worry
about nurses pulling a weapon on them. The State newspaper
went ballistic when it was proposed that permit holders be allowed
to carry weapons to and from church
The State paper headline was, “GUN LOBBY WANTS
GUNS IN CHURCH!”
So if you want to mug people on the way to
church, feel free, courtesy of SLED and the State newspaper.
In South Carolina only the weapons rights that go with a badge
are worth having . And that's just the way SLED
and the police brass want it. They hope that once permit
holders will give up on getting real permits.
Then we can go back to the old system where SLED, sheriffs and
the police brass gave real permits to
those with the political pull to do them some good.
Pro-gun people tell me that it is stupid and dangerous for me to talk about
SLED as a state-paid anti-gun lobby. Everybody tells me that. But
my whole life has been a string of stupid and dangerous activities,
and today the only stupid and dangerous moves I regret most are the ones
I was too smart to make.
SLED may deny everything I said above. Their
stance on renewing the law on permits is a matter of public record,
but I am willing to bet that some of them will deny that, too.
What if I am wrong? Nobody else is
going to mention this tax-paid anti-gun lobby, so sometimes you just
have to stick your neck out.
I feel someone needs to mention SLED's lobbying
because no one has privately denied it and no one will publicly
attack it.
The Magic Policeman
Conservatives insist that anybody who puts on a
uniform becomes superhuman. So they insist that the police should
have guns anywhere.
Liberals and conservatives agree that you are
not magically endowed with the power of putting a gun to good use if
you are not wearing a uniform.
No decent person questions this. So I will.
So far permit holders, hundreds of thousands of
them, have a perfect record of using their weapons. By
contrast, the rate of suicide and heavy drinking among policemen,
for good reason, is very high. The real statistics favor
the permit holders. But SLED will never mention that.
What really ticks me off is the fact that
liberals and anti-gun people like SLED are always saying ridiculous things,
and they never lose an ounce of credibility for it.
One outstanding example was the “forty-three”
myth. For years liberals told us that an honest person with a
gun was forty-three times as likely to have that gun taken away and
used against him as he was to use it for his own defense.
No conservative challenged this number.
No police official debated it. They promoted
this kind of thinking.
Then career policemen began writing a few
letters to local papers. A typical one pointed out that he had been
a cop for twenty-five years and he had never even heard of some
criminal genius taking a gun away from somebody and using it against
them.
Other cops wrote in, saying they had never
heard of that, either, but all of them knew of people who had
successful defended their lives and property with a gun.
They referred to themselves as "street cops" or "working cops."
A policeman who tells the truth about gun control will never get
that gold braid on his hat.
Please see WorldView for
September 7, 2002 -
THE COP WITH THE DEGREE
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