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Enough.
As I write this, thousands of people are participating in “The March For Our Lives” demonstrations in our nation’s capitol and in other cities across the country. The marches are a response to the horrific shooting in Parkland, Florida. The students who are participating in this march are scared of the violence that happens all too frequently in our neighborhoods.
I understand and share in that fear. In 2006, when my wife and I lived in Phoenix, there was a violent home invasion in the Arcadia district and a three-year-old boy was kidnapped. Our oldest son was three years old at the time, and it had a profound effect on how my wife and I perceived our personal safety.
“I want a home alarm system,” she said. “We’ll get one,” I said. “I also want a gun.”
So I went to my local shooting range, rented every 9mm pistol they had available, bought a gun, learned how to shoot and started carrying a gun whenever and wherever it was legal to do so.
Those two adorable boys are the reason why I started carrying a gun. I’m not going to march in the streets and I’m not going to ask anyone else to make me safe: I’m going to do everything in my power to make myself and my family safe. Realizing that the world is a scary place is a good thing, but hoping that someone will make the scary things go away is not going to solve the problem, because no matter how much you want someone else to meet your need to feel safe, they will fall short of that goal. Taking charge of your safety and becoming your own first responder is the only way you can be sure there will be someone who is trained and able to respond to a life-threatening emergency in your vicinity.
Enough. Take charge of your own security today. Don’t wait for the government. The life you save could be your own.
Published in Guns
But that would be racist and cultural appropriation.
Maybe they and around 50% (50%!) of white females should try graduating high school, working full time, and getting married before having kids? Apparently those 3 little things (that were extremely common just a short generation or two ago) are just too gosh-darned hard and old fashioned for our little snowflakes to even imagine.
In that order. That’s the key.
“Unexpectedly.”
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/380172-march-for-our-lives-crowd-smaller-than-expected-report
Kevin, I’m getting a 404 message. Link error?
I like the way you think. It bothers me to see people complaining after a hurricane that the government isn’t very quick bringing water to drink. For heavens sake, if it is going to storm and you are told, prepare yourself.
… the what?
A communication system created by Al Gore. It is controlled these days by Al Gore-Rhythm.
Yet historically speaking, the lack of an ability to own a personal weapon was a factor in the Third Reich, in Stalin’s time, in the villages and hamlets where Allende’s progressive followers lived.
In liberal California, with its groovy pro-med-marijuana laws, police arrested a marijuana user every 48 minutes. (That occurred until the recent 2016 recreational legalization passed.) Meanwhile in Alaska, a police officer thought twice about taking on a citizen over marijuana possession. After all, in Alaska the chances are good that the citizen owned a gun.
Well yes – if banning guns is the only thing you do it won’t achieve much. But comprehensive solutions probably include several tactics – and also take time to succeed.
This surprises me; in Massachusetts, the police have been looking the other way over pot for a very long time, I think. Since way before it was legalized. Not because of a concern over guns, just because. I kind of thought it was that way everywhere, but I guess not. Or maybe the police in my town are just weird, I don’t know :)
And in the meantime…what is the best way t0 protect school children from school shooters?
1.) Take down the “Gun Free Zones” signs.
2.) Have at least one armed, trained adult inside the school.
3.) Advertise the fact that your school is protected by highly motivated good-guys-with-guns who will not hesitate to defend their charges from any threat.
And in the meantime, what is the best way to protect children in inner city Chicago from gun violence?
1.) Increase the number of police officers
2.) Use Stop-and-Frisk and other proactive tools
3.) Arrest and imprison violent criminals.
Are there any steps you would recommend for inner cities to reduce the relative attractiveness of gang membership and it’s associated increasing levels of criminality? Proactive policing increases the cost of membership but doesn’t directly address the pull factors – why people choose to join a gang instead of going to grad school for example.
What I wonder about the student marches, etc:
If other kids at the school had been NICER to Nickolas Cruz, might the massacre not have happened?
Was Cruz bullied, excluded, shunned by his fellows? Yes, I know, he was scary bad news, but I wonder if he thought he had some friends among the student body, would things have gone as they did?
The insane, absurd, indescribably stupid tactic by the local police, of “breaking the prison pipeline” by not arresting juvenile lawbreakers, thereby allowing Cruz to avoid a rap sheet, probation, psychological intervention, or any sort of reformatory supervision, sanctions that might have impaired his access to guns – have Hogg et al mentioned that? I bet not. Gun laws only work if the law enforcement system works, and in the absence of law enforcement by their own idiot police force, the most restrictive gun laws in the world wouldn’t have helped.
You go girl!
I’d take that for starters and see where it takes us. Recalibrate as needed.
How would you achieve that?
How do you deal with fathers who (a) don’t want to be around and (b) lack the skill set to get and keep a job? Or mother’s who aren’t equipped to home school because they lack basic schooling themselves?
One reason immigrants can do relatively better than many native borns is that they arrive with significant, in tact social capital. How do you increase individual possibilities in communities that lack this?
Turn it over to the community organizers such as Obama Inc.
Historically, that’s dealt with by would-be mothers denying access to the baby-making equipment until a would-be father resolves (a) and (b) in a productive direction, which also leaves her free to complete basic schooling.
The complete, historically-proven systems are based on sexual mores adopted by entire communities and encouraged by numerous mechanisms, including various combinations of honor, shame, governmental support, and the thoroughly advertised prospects of long-term success in life for those who do and do not comply.
FIFY.
Stop excusing their bad decisions.
Well, one answer would be to decrease the attractiveness of the alternatives.
At the moment, in both inner-city black neighborhoods and rural-poor white ones, which I lump together as welfare-dependent communities, government programs have made men worse-than superfluous. The mothers of their children are better off without them, financially and often in other ways as well. So I would reform welfare so as to make family formation in welfare-dependent communities as necessary as it is in working- and middle-class communities.
Concomitantly, I’d abolish minimum wage laws or, at the very least, allow anyone receiving public assistance of any kind to freely negotiate his or her own pay with an employer. This would allow low-skilled or otherwise less-desirable candidates (the young, those with criminal records, short resumes, handicaps or other deficits) to compete for entry-level jobs. In other words, let’s give low-skilled American workers the single, true advantage now enjoyed by illegal immigrants.
Intensive, pro-active policing is not sufficient but it is necessary. No one can get ahead in life if he or she is, you know, dead. “Not Dead” is the starting line too many young men, in particular, are unable to get to, and they know it. One of the primary reasons young men join gangs is that this provides them (or is perceived to provide them) a certain measure of protection. Suppressing street violence with a strong police presence, and removing demonstrably violent people from the community really does allow more young men to Not Die.
Human beings naturally form families and communities because, throughout our history, it has hurt too much not to.
The heterosexual pair-bond, in which men and women don’t just care about or love each other but actually need one another, is the default model for our species. Building families and creating social capital is what we do— unless something actively interrupts the process. This is why people from impoverished, war-torn and otherwise deeply disadvantaged countries can nonetheless arrive in the United States with more social capital than the welfare-dependent people who already live here. This is why the history of African-Americans used to be a case-study in how family- and -community formation empowered members and allowed for astonishing progress even in the teeth of serious and often savage oppression… until the moment that the Great Society welfare programs were implemented. At which point, African Americans became the unfortunate poster-children for the destructive effects of welfare-dependency.
I’m pretty much ok with everything proposed here… the only thing I’d add is that if a woman takes out a restraining order, she gets a concealed carry permit to go along with it right away, even in “May Issue” states like New York.
How’s that worked out for you? And them?
In this world as it sadly is. Rather than as one would have it.
Mayhap. But it can’t have been that entirely awesome if there was any appetite for those Great Society programs. Or indeed the real situation of those war torn (and socially regressive) countries
I suspect he was an easy target to pick on. School does not work well for most children in large systems. There are only so many top dogs and teacher’s pets. The vast majority are just muddling through, and Cruz’s mental age probably did not help him cope, combined with his mother’s death.
Hogg picked up where Cruz left off. Hogg seems to bask in anger that gets attention also.
A few years ago, it seemed every divorce lawyer in this area advised women to get one. A county cop told me they were a joke. One day he pulled a car over and the woman was driving her soon to be ex husband somewhere. She had a restraining order against him. He was being good that day and needed a ride, so she picked him up. The cop said he arrested both of them.
Another local gal was murdered by an ex boyfriend in her barn where he chased her. She had a PO, but needed a gun.
My sister didn’t get one because she thought it would incite her ex and they were sharing custody of the kids.
And…
“Not entirely awesome” is that pain I’m talking about, the pain that tends to “noodge” (or shove) people to do what they need to do to make the pain stop. We aren’t robots, but we do respond to negative incentives like hunger, boredom and social shame.
If you are a young person from a welfare-dependent community, there is a path you can follow that will lead not only to financial independence but a far more interesting, healthy, productive and meaningful life. The path is this: stay in school, graduate, get a job (any job), get married and have children. In that order.
It’s simple, but it’s not easy: following this path requires, first of all, that you know what the path is, not just as a concept, but because you have seen people follow it.
Strike one for the kid from a welfare-dependent community.
The path requires self-discipline, a quality we usually build upon the scaffolding provided by our parent’s imposition of discipline upon us especially (jn the case of boys) by fathers.
Strike two.
Following the path means paying attention to seemingly abstract matters —schoolwork—-the capacity for which is seriously impacted by a chaotic, unpredictable and possibly dangerous environment.
Strike three.
And, by definition, it requires delaying gratification and forestalling pleasure—drugs, hangin’ out, the various adrenalized idiocies all adolescents are drawn to, and of course, sex. Just Saying No is, again, much easier when parents have imposed and enforced limits and one’s neighbors applaud virtue and shame vice. Ummm….have you been to a trailer park in DownEast Maine lately?
Strike four.
I get impatient with conservatives who argue for “personal responsibility” as the antidote to welfare-dependency. It’s not that what they say is untrue— indeed, until the systemic issues have been addressed, pure personal responsibility is the only game in town. But when I consider the enormity of the task facing the children from welfare-dependent households that I see here in Maine, I am humbly aware that, in their situation, neither I nor my children would fare better.
Again—trillions of dollars spent, and not only has the poverty rate not improved, I believe we’ve made it more difficult for a person born into poverty to escape it.
And…(short and sweet, I promise): It’s possible that violent crime rates in inner-city Chicago would decrease if guns were legally available to law-abiding citizens.
One of the big takeaways from Tom Givens’ presentation at TacCon this year was that, according to post-arrest jailhouse interviews, the #1 thing that crooks fear is an armed victim.
The crook is expecting things to happen in a certain way: They present you with the threat of physical violence, and we give them what they want. When the easy pickings grow teeth is when they lose control, and they HATE that.
Excuse me? You asked what was to be done, future tense. I answered, future tense. It’s not working out for me yet — and won’t — because it isn’t being done by the majority of society. It used to work for 99% of the population before progressives sabotaged our society. Let me clarify:
Failure to shame pre-marital sex and pre-marital cohabitation is excusing bad decisions. Welfare for never-married parents is excusing bad decisions. Public assistance so generous that many stay on it for decades is excusing bad decisions. Shifting blame to society for the prevalence of the seven deadly sins is excusing bad decisions. Publicly recognizing any form of marriage other than of one man and one woman is excusing bad decisions.
You are attempting to turn this point to me, but you should ask yourself how the Sexual Revolution and the Great Society of public assistance have worked out.
The sexual revolution has—on average— had some serious downside for women and kids. I’d argue it’s been a mixed bag for men, and probably a good thing (again, on average) for gay and lesbian people. That last is true (I think) because being gay or lesbian was far more difficult for more people than it is today. Since I am of the opinion that my gay and lesbian friends and relations did not make a decision (wise or otherwise) to be gay or lesbian anymore than I made a decision to be heterosexual, and since I do not want them to be humiliated or attacked for being gay or lesbian, the improvement is welcome.
As I have argued at other times, I think it is entirely reasonable for society to disapprove of behaviors that can exist in either gay or straight persons—-promiscuity, adultery and the exploitation of the young being obvious examples. And I think it is reasonable for a society to encourage marriage and family formation as the normative state of adult citizens.
However vexing/compelling LGBTQ issues are, they are (IMHO) a distraction if we are talking about problems of violence, gun-or-otherwise, in welfare-dependent communities. (We should be so lucky that the worst thing a corner store in inner-city Baltimore has to worry about is being sued for refusing to bake a wedding cake.) The one-two punch of the sexual revolution and the Great Society has proven devastating to those who had not yet developed sufficient social capital and thus a certain resilience. The source of that resilience is both external— available resources—and internal: I have confidence that there are resources available.
So when my late hubby and I were young parents, I can honestly say we were poor: we didn’t have much money.
But we had and exercised a reasoned, goal-oriented agency. We were both educated and, if I’d been willing to put my kids in daycare, I could’ve gotten a reasonably good job. If a disaster struck us and we needed to borrow money from our relatives, okay, they weren’t the Rockefellers, but our families could and would help out. Of course, they would have demanded to know what we’d done to screw up…they’d ask what we intended to do with their money, and some choices would be more acceptable than others. If it was really bad, and we had to crawl back into the parental nest, there would have been rules to negotiate, demands to meet. All of this sounds like a burden but in fact, it too represents a kind of resource, a scaffolding of expectations that would support us as we rebuilt.
Knowing that scaffolding exists grants confidence.
Again, this didn’t require anyone to be wealthy. Just functional. And how does one become functional? By functioning.