Cynthia Tucker's Alternative Universe

Every once in a while I come across an op-ed that leaves me speechless – so utterly flabbergasted that I have to walk away for a day before I can come up with a cogent response. That was the case when I read Cynthia Tucker’s piece on our “worn military” committing “massacres” in the Atlanta Journal Constitution on May 11. Her complete and utter failure to grasp even simple facts still has me shaking my head.

Tucker laughingly described Haditha and the Anbar province as “restive” in November 2005. She must have overlooked the Marines killed in an ambush less than a week before the Haditha incident. It is easy to forget about the multitude of IEDs since they were buried out of sight underneath the pavement while the residents stood by and did nothing. I can see how having no police force can make a city restive especially when the police were bombed out of town by the terrorists. Haditha was a haven for travelers – Zaraqawi was a frequent overnight guest of the city.

The Marines did not demonstrate “strange incuriosity” after the incident in Haditha. It was not a secret. There was no coverup. Testimony this week confirms that every one up the ladder was informed about the incident. They looked at it with the benefit of knowing the facts on the ground in a war zone. They did not have the benefit of sitting back a year and a half later playing “shoulda – coulda- woulda”.

How can you blame our soldiers for civilian casualties in one breath but then admit the “jihadists fire from civilian quarters” and hide behind women & children? How can you decry our soldiers perceived lack of respect for the Iraqi people but not offer the same criticisms for the terrorists that massacre civilians including women and children on a daily basis? Is it only a massacre if US Soldiers are involved?

The Pentagon Report that Tucker throws into the mix is another example of picking and choosing random statistics to fit your agenda. How can you judge the entire military by the results of a statistical sample of less than 1% of the soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan? To claim the report was held back to influence opinion on the troop surge is the height of irresponsibility.

Tucker reaches beyond all bounds of credibility with her defense of Rep. Murtha. Since when did slander and false claims help anyone but the enemy? Calling Marines “cold blooded murderers” and painting them with the brush of My Lai is loving them? Maybe in Tucker’s alternative universe but not in the real world. Murtha cares about his political clout much more than the Marines.

Our soldiers are fighting in a war with an enemy that uses the media to disseminate propaganda. Cynthia Tucker and the Atlanta Journal Constitution just carried the water for them. Again.

The list of things Tucker gets close to right is much, much shorter than those she gets wrong.

Example follows (sorry for the length but it’s hard to deal with this crap with 20 second sound bites).

On April 22, Atlanta Journal-Constitution (aka “The Fishwrapper”) Editorial Page Editor Cynthia Tucker treated the dwindling subscription base of the AJC to another of her frequent screeds against the Second Amendment. Entitled “Pushing guns for all students cartoonish idea,” it was filled with the inaccuracies and textbook leftist paranoia.

This liberal/statist rag allows her close to 20 column inches to air her idiotic misrepresentations of world events. For the same reasons liberal talk radio is an abject failure (Al Franken couldn’t deal with rational argument, either), readers who wish to rebut her are limited to 150 words once a month or so, I’ve opted to deconstruct her column here, where only the attention span and interest level of the readers rule.

Tucker’s blatherings will be marked “CT.” My rebuttals are marked “DB.”

CT: Why else would they (adults) insist that the best way to prevent carnage of the sort that occurred last week at Virginia Tech is to put guns into every available hand”

DB: Cynthia, any such proposal allowed to become operative on the VT campus – where the “authorities” rejoiced at their success in prohibiting valid Virginia CCW permitted students and faculty from carrying there and did nothing to warn the campus of the two bodies found in a door, allowing Cho 2 hours to contemplate and implement his murderous plan – would undoubtedly limit carrying to valid permit holders. However, even after 32 deaths there, given the mindset of the utopian liberal jackasses who run most such institutions, chances of that happening fall somewhere between slim and none.

CT: In real life, police officers – trained to fire in the heat of battle – hit their intended targets only 40% of the time…

DB: In real life, Cynthia, the ARRIVAL of the cops (all of whom carry visible side arms and have more serious weapons in the trunks of their cruisers) – 10 minutes AFTER that 911 call! — is usually sufficient to convince the bad guy to flee or surrender.

In real life, police officers rarely UNHOLSTER their weapons and MOST cops go entire careers without firing a shot at another human being. And the cops are an “after-the-fact” agency, usually arriving just in time to snap a few photos, put markers on the shell casings and draw chalk outlines of the departed. And while there have been and continue to be cops who will stand between you and a bad guy or a bullet, according to MULTIPLE court rulings, the police have NO obligation to protect SPECIFIC INDIVIDUAL citizens. Google “Warren v. District of Columbia.” I wonder if this legal precedent was why the Supremes just declared D.C.’s anti-firearms ordinance unconstitutional? Did the court recognize – FINALLY and after how many needless deaths of decent citizens — that when it comes to exercising our God-given right to self-defense, we’re really on our own?

And each year, it is estimated that over 2 million criminals are deflected when the intended victim simply brandishes a firearm. No shots fired. Just another good citizen who avoided becoming another statistic. That figure can only be estimated as many of those incidents occur in jurisdictions where the citizen is not supposed to have that weapon. The authorities there will often spend more time and effort prosecuting the armed citizen than searching for the thug.

CT: (According to criminologist Geoffrey Alpert) “You can train all day in simulated situations…and you think you can hit a target. But it comes right down to it and someone is pointing a gun at you, and it just doesn’t happen.”

DB: Geoffrey may be right about that. And IF that IS a basic human fear, isn’t it also quite possible that all but the most deranged murderer would ALSO become a bit concerned that one of his victims was pointing HIS weapon at HIM? Might not the killer become just a bit less accurate in his shooting? And I can’t speak for you, Cynthia, but seeing a number of my family/classmates/coworkers/fellow officers bleeding on the ground and knowing that unless I act as quickly and efficiently as possible, I will join them would almost certainly cause me to settle down and kill the SOB.

CT: That utterly irrational argument comes straight from the NRA, which long ago abandoned any pretense of representing the reasonable aims of hunters and sports shooters. The gun lobby now peddles an insane policy of making firearms as ubiquitous as cell phones.”

DB: Cynthia, Cynthia – the Second Amendment is NOT about hunting and sports shooting! It’s about FREEDOM. In case you miss the point, the Second Amendment supports your precious First Amendment. Here are the words of an icon of the Democrat Party in the 1960’s, Senator and former presidential candidate, Hubert Horatio Humphrey:

“Certainly, one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right of citizens to keep and bear arms. This is not to say that firearms should not be very carefully used and that definite safety rules of precaution should not be taught and enforced. But the right of citizens to bear arms is just one more guarantee against arbitrary government, and one more safeguard against a tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible.” —Humphrey, Hubert, “Know Your Lawmakers,” Guns, February 1960, p.4.

CT: My father certainly would not have (accepted the NRA’s positions). An avid hunter and veteran of combat in Korea, my father owned shotguns, rifles and a handgun. (He hid the handgun from his four children so well we never came across it, though we enjoyed poking around where we didn’t belong.) Yet, he was fanatical about gun safety.

DB: Thanks to your dad for his service. I, too, am a veteran. Never saw combat (few of us do) but knew several of the good men on The Wall.

Perhaps if your dad had taken the time to give you more weapons training – as I did MY kids and grandkids – you would be more comfortable with and around them. The old “forbidden fruit is the sweetest” thing. Take the forbidden out of it and the untoward and often fatal fascination goes as well.

Then again, perhaps your inordinate fear flows from another problem once discussed by Sigmund Freud, to wit: “A fear of weapons is a sign of retarded sexual and emotional maturity.” Instead of shrieking about gun control you might want to get thee to a shrink. If you go, please make appointments for Chuck Schumer, Barbara Boxer, Diane Feinstein, Chris Dodd, Eleanor Clift, Lawrence O’Donnell, Rosie O’Donnell (gee, are they related?)… This could be a long list and we might need SEVERAL shrinks.

CT: When I moved to Atlanta just out of college, I told him (my father) that I was going to buy a handgun. He strongly disapproved, believing I’d be more likely to get injured with my own gun than fend off an attacker with it. “You don’t need a gun, “ he said. “You need to stay out of dangerous places.”

DB: YOU? BUY A HANDGUN?? It’s not too late, Cynthia. No thanks to you and your fellow gun-grabbers, they are STILL being made (and, as long as there is evil in the world, always will be!). Perhaps Dad’s remark flowed from his failure to properly train you in their use. And as for staying out of “dangerous places,” that’s probably a hell of a lot easier for you than it is for your black brothers and sisters trapped in some of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the country.

And who would have thought that COLLEGE DORMITORIES, CLASS ROOMS AND HIGH SCHOOLS would become those “dangerous places?”
You see, Cynthia, ANY location can become a killing field and if the only gun there is in the hand of a killer, he will have, on average, 10 minutes to do his thing work BEFORE the cops show up to do theirs.

CT: His (my father’s) concerns are borne out by the FBI’s stats about gun crimes. In 2005, 8,890 people were murdered with firearms. Guns were also used in 142,471 cases of robbery and 151, 118 cases of aggravated assault. By contrast, there were only 143 cases of justifiable homicide by civilians using a firearm.

DB: Where to start?

Of those lamentable stats, I wonder how many were cases of gang-bangers and street hoods whacking each other in idiotic turf or drug wars? I’m beginning to suspect that you are far less concerned about honest citizens using firearms to defend themselves than you are embarrassed by the numbers of intra-racial killings by inner-city punks and hoodlums. The GUNS were simply the means to the end. Would you prefer they use machetes, as is often the case in other parts of the world today? Why are you not also calling for machete control?

And do you REALLY think that concern for violating even the most stringent gun control laws – even registration (which I personally will resist to the end of my days) – will stop someone bent on far more serious acts such as RAPE, ROBBERY or MURDER? Give me a break! I could buy a gun on the street in any city in the country – even NY, San Francisco or D.C.

And today, right now, something like 98.6% of the 250 million or so firearms in this country were NOT used in the commission of a crime!

(Please see the brandishing stats cited above in connection to your mention of those 143 justifiable homicides. Gotta wonder how many deaths of honest citizens by clubbing, knifing or other means THOSE brandishings prevented.

CT: If dozens of VT students had been armed, “Lord knows what a disaster we would have had,” Alpert said. “I think it’s inappropriate to have firearms in a classroom…”

DB: Jeeez, this Alpert guy gives wimps a bad name.

And, gosh, what a disaster, indeed. 32 people might have died. Certainly glad Cho ran out of ammo.

And too bad Cho wasn’t told about the danger of firearms in the classroom before he went to class that day.

Let me steal a fascinating scenario used by your pal and nemesis Neal Boortz to make a point here.
You’re in a class full of people at a university. Let’s say that there are 30 people in that room. A predator with a gun walks through the door. He shoots the professor, kills him. He then takes the remainder of the people in the room and lines them up against a wall. He then walks up to the first person and shoots them in the head.
Now ... let me allow you to change the scenario. We can freeze-frame this situation while you make a decision. Your decision is this: You can put a gun into the hands of one student or a professor in that room, or you can leave things exactly the way they are. What are you going to do? Come on now, let’s have it. Which way do you want it? Do you want the predator to be the only one in the room with a gun? Or would you like to have at least the fighting chance that would result if one, maybe two of your classmates had a firearm?
Now believe it or not, there are people out there (we generally call them liberals) who would say; “Oh no, I don’t want anyone else to have a gun! They might try to shoot the killer and innocent people might get caught in the crossfire!” Well you can try to find a rational basis for that argument from now until pigs fly, and you will fail. There is no rationality in that argument. It’s an argument based in mindless hysteria. (DB: Hysteria of the sort displayed by one Lawrence O’Donnell who, on a recent “McLaughlin Group” display of complete IGNORANCE of weapons, declared that if Cho had not had AUTOMATIC weapons which SPRAYED BULLETS and had to pull the trigger for each shot, the kids at VT might have been able to charge him and take him down. Even after Pat Buchanan called him out on that idiotic remark, O’Donnell was unfazed by his ignorance.)
Let’s couch the argument a bit differently. Let’s say you are the parent of a college student. You get a call from the campus police saying that YOUR CHILD is being held hostage in a classroom on the campus. The hostage-taker has a gun and has already shot one student. The police tell you that they have developed a plan whereby they are going to be able to sneak a gun into the hands of one of the students in the classroom, a student known to the police to be proficient in the use of a handgun. Before the police can take this step, they need the unanimous consent of the parents of the students in that class. While you’re thinking it over, the hostage-taker executes another student. OK ... your decision. What do you say? Are you going to say, “No, I don’t want any of those students to be armed. I don’t care how qualified they are with a gun.” Or are you going to allow the gun to be passed to the student.
Now if your answer is that you would allow the gun to be passed to the student, then please explain your rational for the position that the student in question should not have been permitted to have a gun in the first place with a concealed carry permit? You may have difficulty in understanding this, but it really is rather difficult to arm these students after the fact. And insofar as the shooter is concerned ...you do understand that there is no way in hell to have prevented him to come on to that campus with guns once he made up his mind to do so, don’t you?
CT: So all those armchair heroes – all those firearm fanatics who claim everything would be different if they’d been in one of those classrooms with a gun – should don their red cape and take a leap.
DB: Cynthia, you make it TOO easy! “…red cape…?” How appropriate that a socialist/statist would choose red. And as far as that “leap” is concerned, I suggest one for you. Back into REALITY!
Here endeth Cynthia’s call to disarm.
BTW, Cynthia’s email addy is cynthia@ajc.com. Let her know how YOU feel on the subject. Perhaps if enough of us do so, we can drag her back into the real world. Anybody know where we can rent a team of oxen?
Let me wrap this already too long dissection of her delusion with a TRUE story.
In the early 80s, I attended a speech by the late Arkady Shevchenko, then the highest ranking Soviet official to defect to the West. He had been their top guy at the UN.

He spoke, interestingly, at KENNESAW COLLEGE — and we all know what Kennesaw is famous for! I’m proud to have played a a small role in helping Mayor Darvin Purdy get that legislation through the Kennesaw City Council.

Shevchenko’s talk dealt with the clear intent of the leadership of the old Soviet Union to somehow take America. He mentioned their ICBMs and the nuclear blackmail threat they posed.

Then he broke from his prepared remarks and offered the audience this wisdom:

“The leaders of my country are as AFRAID OF YOUR 200 MILLION PRIVATE FIREARMS as they are of your ICBMs. NEVER GIVE UP YOUR GUNS.”

Frankly — and, while he had to be careful as he was under FBI protection at the time, Shevchenko cautiously alluded to THIS in his remarks — I’m as concerned about some domestic tyrant (say, a Hillary, Guilliani, Obama or Chuck Schumer) as I am about some foreign enemy.

And it is THAT threat about which the Founding Fathers were concerned that prompted them to leave us the Second Amendment.

The BIG question is: WILL WE KEEP IT?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j73SsNFgBO4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cg9q9sxJFnA

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