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.
Well fine, give us all a badge.
With out free access to arms there is no free society. There is this FDR thing he called Freedom from Fear. With out the 2nd,we all become victims of fear of the criminal element. Lots of small businesses will close if they can't keep protection. Walls will go up around communities with controlled access. Night life will die. Bars and barricades will be everywhere. People will spend their ready money for security measures rather than personal needs.
Anyone who thinks otherwise, doesn't understand how vicious the criminal element has become in this age.
Cam hits another one out of the park!
"End of the Second Amendment"?
Oh, please. Admittedly, we always need to be vigilant about this. But the Second Amendment is one of the very few battles that conservatives, at least for now, have won, thanks to the NRA. There are many more issues we need to focus on.
I don't care how much he "cares." He is actively trying to undermine a natural right and empower criminals. F him.
It would have been ironic if Derby had ended up shooting that gang-banger to protect himself somewhere down the line.
It's not an assault rifle, it is a "Homeland Security Defense Unit, .308 caliber" !
Oh, please. All we have been able to do is hold them off for now. We haven't won until all barriers to personal firearms ownership in this country have been removed (even in California).
No doubt, Mr. Derby lives outside of Camden in a nice safe 'hood, so he can theorize and "feel" all he wants without dealing in reality or consequences. How the H*** does an "A" student become a gangbanger? I guess "A" doesn't mean much in today's classrooms.
There are many more issues we need to focus on.
Which issues do you feel we need more focus on?
"On the Plains of Hesitation,
bleach the bones of countless millions who,
at the dawn of victory,
sat down to wait,
and waiting,
died."
I married an English & Reading teacher. Thank God she is a traditionalist, a conservative Christian and a Republican. I'm glad I found out all of these truths about her before I discovered her field, or I fear we'd never have struck a happy chord on which to proceed!
A few years ago, I had an English teacher at my last school going around telling all her kids that Haitians won the American Revolution! I did some research and discovered that indeed there was a contingent of Haitians who fought on the side of the colonials at the Battle for Savannah. Unfortunately, there were no battles of a critical nature that happened in the south...and second the Haitians LOST! They got slaughtered to the tune of 500 troops inside of an hour. The rest were captured. I HAD to set the kids straight.
So I got called into the Principal's office and was told to let the issue stand so that the huge numbers of Haitian kids in our school (at least 60% illegals) would be able to feel "good" about their heritage.
This required a change of tactics on my part. The very next day, some kids came in with that same English teacher trailing along behind to make sure I was following orders.
I told them indeed a huge contingent of Haitians played a significant role in winning the revolution. English teacher's BEAMING face changes to fury when I go on: In fact, they provided the British Soldiers with so many PRISONERS that there weren't enough soldiers left who weren't on guard duty to chase the American colonists back to Saratoga so the war could subsequently be won.... I never did hear another word on all of that. But I understand that the English department chair had a word about straying off into fields of education where one is NOT state certified to teach the subject.
Maybe that's one reason I was selected as the 2001 Social Studies Teacher of the Year for that school.
"Oh, please. Admittedly, we always need to be vigilant about this. But the Second Amendment is one of the very few battles that conservatives, at least for now, have won, thanks to the NRA. There are many more issues we need to focus on."
I agree. I saw this headline and thought I was going to find out about some new HUGH threat to the 2nd. A teacher writing an article in a newspaper. That ain't going to "end" the 2nd Amendment.
the Second Amendment is one of the very few battles that conservatives, at least for now, have won, thanks to the NRA.
How the H*** does an "A" student become a gangbanger?
I dunno what your perspective is, but the only "winning" in the last 40 years is to hold the loss of our rights to the current egregious level for now. We still have a ban on imported semi-autos. We still cannot legally purchase any full auto weapons made post 1986. We still have some shotguns labeled by the BATF as "destructive devices" We still have evil tyrants like Schumer, Feinstein, Mikulski, etc. introducing anti-gun legislation. We have King George II promising to sign any gun control that crosses his desk. The people whose guns were stolen by the New Orleand police haven't gotten them back yet and probably won't. We haven't won anything. We've just slowed the rate of defeat.
He got an "a" in English as a second language.
People like Tom Derby, and the authoritarian nanny-state politicians that he votes for, are not on my list of "reasons I regret leaving New Jersey."
If he wants to be a sheep, fine, that's his choice. I won't force him to buy and train with a gun, or to carry one with him when he leaves his home. But I will be damned if I'll let his ilk prevent me from being a sheepdog - one who'd prefer to be left alone to enjoy life, but one who is always looking around to see if there's danger, and who will to bear his fangs to deter it or to fight it.
His biggest factual error is in not comprehending that the police owe no duty to anyone to protect them. They aren't there to prevent crime, though it is nice the 1 time in 100 when they actually can do so. Otherwise, we're all on our own, and I don't really relish the idea of some cop making a chalk outline around my body, or of burying my wife or kids because I failed to - or was prevented from - exercising my right and duty to protect me and my own.
Of course, most of us here also understand that on a societal level the mere prevention of street crime is a minor thing - a good one, to be certain, but minor nonetheless. The far more important goal, as nathanbedford indicated, is to be able to shoot the King should he cease to abide by the constraints of his job description. The mere possession of the tools necessary to exercise that right by some 85 million of us has a huge deterrent effect on the political class, as was intended by those magnificent dead white males who are responsible for creating our country.
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