Posted on 08/18/2006 12:24:13 PM PDT by neverdem
Ngoc Le heard his wife’s screams and ran from the back of the wireless store he owns in Camden, New Jersey. His wife was behind the counter, as was a masked man wielding a knife. The man brandished the blade, herding the couple into a back room. Once there, he tied the 28-year old businessman to a chair, then proceeded to rape 22-year old Kelly Le. Once the brutal rape had finished, he slit the couple’s throats, then ran away. There was no 2nd Amendment, no right to own a gun, and Antonio Diaz Reyes got away with murder.
That isn’t actually how the events of December 31st, 2004 played out. We do have a 2nd Amendment in this country, after all. So when Antonio Reyes held Kelly Le at knifepoint, Ngoc Le was able to shoot and kill the attacker with his legally owned firearm. DNA tests later determined that Reyes was responsible for a string of rapes in downtown Camden that had terrorized the city for months. The Le’s were shaken by what happened, but there were no regrets.
I was reminded of this armed citizen story when I read Tom Derby’s recent piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Derby, an English and reading teacher in Camden, New Jersey, says it’s time for the 2nd Amendment to go away. In fact, he says, “The premise of the Second Amendment, the need for minutemen, no longer exists. In a free society we must rely on the police. We have more important rights to fight for than the right to bear arms.”
Mr. Derby is an English teacher, so perhaps he can be forgiven for not knowing that the U.S. government has said our individual security and safety is not guaranteed by the law enforcement in this country. There are several Supreme Court decisions that hold citizens have no constitutional guarantee of protection by police (South v. Maryland and Castle Rock v. Gonzalez come immediately to mind), and many more decisions have been made at lower levels (in the case of Warren v. District of Columbia, for example, the D.C. Court of Appeals ruled that “a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any individual citizen.”). Despite what Mr. Derby says, we are responsible for our individual safety. The law enforcement community performs a valuable service each and every day, but any cop will tell you that they can’t be your personal bodyguard.
Tom Derby also says, “When wolves and human predators roamed freely Northeast, one was entitled to defend one’s family and property with firearms. Circumstances have changed; we need to reconsider that entitlement.” How have circumstances changed? Derby has taught in Camden, New Jersey for 18 years. He should be all too familiar with the human predators that still roam the streets. Camden, after all, was named the most dangerous city in America for the second year in a row last year, and has been in the top ten each of the past eight years, according to Morgan Quinto, the company that ranks cities on their crime rates. In 2004 the city’s murder rate was 60.8 per 100,000 residents, more than 11 times the national average. Its robbery rate was almost 8 times the national average, and its rate of aggravated assaults were more than 4 times the national average. Yet Derby says we should no longer be entitled to defend ourselves?
Derby seems to think that if we scrapped the 2nd Amendment, all the criminals in this country would lay down their weapons. Yet the criminal element doesn’t rely on the 2nd Amendment any more than child pornographers rely on the 1st Amendment. Get rid of the right to legally own firearms, and the gang members and street thugs plaguing Camden won’t even blink. But the legal gun owners, like Ngoc Le, will pay the price.
Tom Derby appears to be a teacher who cares a great deal about his students, and he should be commended for that. In his piece, he writes about several who have fallen victim to violence. One of the students he mentions, a boy named Len, was an “A” student who eventually joined a gang. Derby writes, “I lost track of Len, and a colleague brought me the bad news before the papers got it: He had become a professional assassin, and his own gang killed him and set his body on fire in a football field in North Camden.”
But Derby seems to be blaming Len’s death on an inanimate object, rather than the human beings who took Len’s life. Nothing is said about Len’s choices in life that placed him directly in the path of violence. In the end, Derby says it’s not a person responsible for Len’s death, but a thing.
It’s easy to take this approach. We don’t have to think ill of the dead, wondering why they chose a life of crime instead of a life inside the boundaries of the law. We don’t have to be angry with them for inflicting violence on others, because it’s not their fault. The devil didn’t make them do it, the gun did. But if we’re going to make excuses for the criminal behavior of those we love, we can’t expect them to change their ways.
My wife lived in Camden for nine years, and if she and I had never met, there’s a good chance that my 15-year old stepson would have been in Mr. Derby’s class. I know my wife would be glad that he had a teacher who cared about him, but she’d be livid knowing that his teacher thought she should be disarmed so she couldn’t protect her family from the wolves roaming the streets. I don’t think Mr. Derby is a bad man, just horribly misguided.
As long as federal law enforcement is involved, the implementation will not be in "good faith". I doubt they've changed the system at all, just purged the data on approved applications more frequently, at least from the active database. They'll not want to spend the money to rebuild the system the way it should have been in the first place. If they tried, Diane Fineswine and Chuckles the Cereal Killer would scream bloody murder, as they already have over the destruction of records of "terrorists" who purchased firearms.
Whatever.
It was the trial court that was declared to be in error for taking judicial notice. Of course what they took notice of, implicitly that is, was not relevant. The second amemdent, while it protect keeping and bearing "militia" arms, is not limited to protecting just those. Arms is arms. IIRC, the trial court never mentioned militia arms in it's ruling. But you can check the record which can be found here
Miller's case never went to trial. Per the Supreme Court, there was a contested relevant fact, and therefore the case had to go to trial to at minimum resolve that before any final action could be taken.
Actually, it said that a "C" candidate was just as good as an "A" candidate if facing an "F" candidate. In other words, no reason for congresscritters not to stab gun owners in the back.
A better approach is to be willing to accept some short-term lumps and make clear that the NRA won't go very strongly to bad for mediocre candidates, no matter who they're facing. That way, the presently-mediocre candidates would have an incentive to improve themselves in the eyes of the NRA.
And you might as well stop comparing the GOA to any gun group. They have NEVER accomplished ANYTHING by themselves. They are completely useless.
At least they let me know about the Lautenberg Abomination before it passed. That's a lot more than the NRA did.
Often, my faith wavers. I wonder why the Lord hasn't sent an earthquake to Hollywood and why he continues to send weather trials to the good people in flyover country.
Nobody's "good." "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God..." Know why I know that there is such a being as Satan? Simple, I'm one of his regular customers.
On the one hand, the expansion of concealed carry seems to be a good thing.
On the other hand, we are all lining up to register our names and address with the government in the process of telling them that we own a firearm.
That's not good by any stretch of the imagination.
I use a broad brush, but it has few bristles.......
The Second Amendment is the most important Amendment. It protects all other rights. The Second Amendment is the only thing standing between freedom and tyranny. Take away the Second Amendment, the "Land of the Free, Home of the Brave" becomes "Land of the Tyranny, Home of the Slaves".
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