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The Bullet Counters
by Thomas Sowell   link to original source

"Killing an Unarmed Man." That is how the front-page headline in the New York Times characterized an incident in which a man tried to run over a policeman with his car and was shot by three policemen on the scene, including his intended victim.

An automobile is a deadly weapon. If you are killed by an automobile, you are just as dead as if you had been shot through the heart.

A phrase like "an unarmed man" makes a talking point-- as if matters of life and death should be discussed in terms of how you can spin a talking point.

The biggest and most common talking point when the police fire at someone is counting how many bullets they fired. There are politicians, media people and-- above all-- community activists who can work themselves into a rage over how many bullets were fired.

If we stop and think-- which of course the demagogues hope we will never do-- it is hard to see any moral difference between killing someone with one bullet or with dozens of bullets.

People who have never fired a gun in their lives say that they cannot understand why the police fired so many bullets. If it is something that they have never experienced, there is of course no reason why they should be expected to understand.

But, even after confessing their ignorance, such people often proceed to spout off, just as if they knew what they were talking about.

It is very easy for a pistol shot to miss, even in the safety and calm of a firing range, much less in a desperate situation where a decision must be made in a split second that can cost you your life or end someone else's life.

In a life-and-death situation, nobody counts how many bullets he is firing, much less how many bullets others are firing. It is not like a western movie, where the hero whips out his six-shooter, fires one time, and the villain drops dead.

A factual study of more than 200 real life incidents where the police fired their guns found that most of the shots missed.

Even at a distance as close as six feet, just over half the shots missed. This may be far less surprising to people who have actually fired pistols than to people who have not.

Not only can someone who is shooting a pistol for real not know beforehand whether or not his shots will hit the person who poses a danger, often it is not clear afterwards whether the shot hit anybody, depending on where it hit.

Nor does even a clear hit always render the wounded person harmless. When your life is on the line, you keep on firing until you are damn sure it is safe to stop.

Only afterwards does anybody count how many shots were fired. That is when the editorial office heroes give vent to their righteous indignation and their ignorant assumption that better "training" or better "rules" can solve the problem.

Such people seem to have no sense of the tragedy of the human condition, that there are times when decisions have to be made and acted upon immediately, whether or not we know as much as we would like to know or can carry out our decisions as perfectly as we wish we could.

People who are full of excuses for criminals-- bad childhood, unemployment, unfair world-- sit in the safety and comfort of their editorial offices and presume policemen to be guilty until proved innocent.

And they concoct clever headlines about killing an "unarmed" person, as if someone trying to run you over with a car poses no danger.

Where the person killed is black, as in the present case, that settles it, as far as the politically correct commentators are concerned, even though two of the three policemen who shot him are also black.

Not only do the people who put their lives on the line to protect the rest of us deserve better, we all deserve better than to have our own security undermined by those who undermine law enforcement.

The police themselves can back off on law enforcement when irresponsible charges can ruin their careers and their lives. No one pays a higher price for that than low-income minority communities where crime flourishes.


Gay marriage recycles bad ideas
by Michael Medved   link to original source

Advocates for same-sex marriage should feel embarrassed by current efforts to recycle the three most discredited ideas of the “Free Love” Revolution of the 1960’s.

Most Americans look back at the radical notions of that rebellious and drug-soaked era with skepticism and discomfort, if not outright regret. The sweeping changes in intimate relationships may have provoked excitement some forty years ago, but those alterations produced so many painful costs in terms of shattered families, degraded culture and proliferation of sexually transmitted diseases that even the most enthusiastic revolutionaries have come to reconsider the advisability of encouraging copulation without consequences or standards.

Nevertheless, arguments for redefining marriage (including the shockingly shallow logic behind last week’s Supreme Court decision in California) rely on shamelessly silly assumptions from the Age of Aquarius without acknowledging their dysfunctional history and unwholesome origins. The case for legal sanction for gay unions relies on the notions that it’s beneficial to separate sex from child-bearing, that every intimate urge deserves respect and fulfillment, and that males and females count, ultimately, as interchangeable.

1. Separating Sex, Marriage and Procreation.
The British poet Philip Larkin announced the new order in human relationships in unforgettable terms in his poem “Annus Mirabilis”:

    Sexual intercourse began
    In nineteen sixty-three
    (which was rather late for me) -
    Between the end of the Chatterley ban
    And the Beatles' first LP

The principal facilitator for the new dispensation involved the development and dissemination of the birth control pill and other improved means of contraception. For the first time, young people could “go all the way” without fear of unintended, life-changing consequences. Legalized abortion (given Constitutional protection by Roe v. Wade in 1973) completed the explosion of the ancient association celebrated in another (anonymous) piece of poetry:

    First comes love,
    Then comes marriage,
    Then comes Sally with a baby carriage.

The new ability to enjoy love without baby carriage also meant a new chance to indulge love without marriage… or a baby carriage without marriage, for that matter. The notion that Jr. ought to restrain himself or else he might get his best girl “in trouble” (and face a shotgun wedding) no longer carried weight. According to the core contention of the sexual revolution, intercourse represented a form of self-expression or even recreation, only occasionally (and unnecessarily) connected with procreation or long-term commitment. The result has been an explosion of out-of-wedlock birth (reaching 35% of all American new-borns in most recent numbers) with disastrous impact on poverty, crime and overall family stability.

Gay marriage won’t add to the out-of-wedlock birth rate (at least not directly) but it continues and advances the devastating disconnect of sex, marriage and babies. While society suffers from babies without marriage, gay matrimony guarantees marriage without babies. And while some heterosexual couples may prove as infertile, ultimately, as gay couples, only for a tiny minority of male-female marriages will there be the same certainty that exists for all homosexual relationships: that intimate expressions of affection can never produce progeny.

Yes, gay couples can raise kids who come to them through adoption or insemination, but in none of these relationships can there be an organic, physical, direct, causal connection between the love (and sex) exchanged between the partners and love for the progeny they produce – the very essence of a traditional marriage arrangement. With same sex union, the nature of marital sex receives a radical redefinition – disconnecting that intimacy from offspring even in a home where children may be present.

2. Following – and Honoring – Your Deepest Urges.
Though I ought to be embarrassed to admit it, I actually hitch-hiked to San Francisco during the vaunted “Summer of Love” in 1967 and repeatedly encountered the slogan “If It Feels Good, Do It!” invoked with almost liturgical fervor. As an intrigued eye-witness to some of the public “Love Ins” and private social gatherings associated with that storied time and place, I can testify that this philosophy produced less fleeting fun, let alone long-term satisfaction, than widely assumed.

Every moralist, gay or straight, concedes that our passions – even the most deep-seated and undeniable urges—remain notoriously unreliable guides to happiness, productive relationships, and even long-term health. By supplanting the old imperative to “do your duty” with the new commandment “follow your heart,” the Love Generation embraced emotion as the standard for judging all intimate arrangements and explorations.

This new emphasis produced its most damaging impact not through the indulgence of new sexual alternatives, but with the exploding rate of divorce in the 1970’s. If marriage rested on feeling rather than obligation, it naturally proved more evanescent and disposable. Before the sexual revolution, many families might quietly hum the Righteous lyrics “We’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling,” but relatively few of them actually broke up their relationships. Commitment, tradition, honor and duty all helped to keep most couples together, even through difficult times.

Gay marriage serves to move matrimony even further toward the primacy of feeling. The chief argument for treating gay attraction as equally deserving of respect and support as man-woman-love is the depth, sincerity and undeniable nature of the passion that same sex partners feel for one another. The language promoting such couplings always emphasizes emotion rather than duty or commitment or tradition; same sex partners can hardly take their position in a long, sacred line of succession back to the beginnings of time. Yes, every society has included gay people but no civilization ever sanctioned gay marriages. Redefining matrimony as “an expression of love” rather than a public and profoundly consequential social contract damages the understanding of the institution for all elements of society.

3. Treating Male and Female as Interchangeable.
Before John Gray and other astronomers of the intimate discovered the vast distance between Venus and Mars, before “Gender Feminists” revealed the natural superiority of women, before even Hollywood reconnected with the joys of girly-girls and manly men, the “Equity Feminists” of the ‘60’s and ‘70’s preached the interchangeable/indistinguishable nature of males and females. According to some psychological theorists of the prior generation, “gender” amounts to a socio-cultural construct, an artificial distinction meant to subjugate women. Enlightened pre-schools encouraged girls to play with trucks and forced boys to nurture dolls, confident in the expectation that kids of all genders would grow up equally adept as nurses and police officers, nuclear physicists and homemakers. Equality between men and women, according to the thinking of the time, meant the minimization of their intrinsic differences, and the erasure of the time-honored concept that each individual required a partner of the opposite gender for ultimate completion. The popular Ms. Magazine slogan, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” expressed the prevailing derision for the belief that both genders brought something distinctive, precious and irreplaceable to a relationship.

The promotion of gay marriage requires the same dismissal of gender differences: if a woman and a man bring utterly distinctive attributes to any marriage then same-sex unions lack the balance, the fusion-of-opposites energy, that constitute the very essence of male-female partnership. If men and women possess fundamental, unavoidable contrasts involving their physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual realities, then it’s ridiculous to claim that a male-male partnership is the same as a female-female partnership – let alone comparable to the combination of manly and feminine elements that characterize traditional marriage.

In a sense, the position of gay rights advocates has become contradictory. If replacing a bride with a second groom on the wedding cake makes no difference in the nature of the marriage, then a female partner is interchangeable with a male partner. And if the core differences between men and women count for so little, then it’s hard for homosexuals to claim that they can only feel attraction to their own gender. If men and women are, essentially, the same, then why can’t gay people choose opposite sex partners and spare us all the trouble of redefining the nature of marriage and upending the social order?

Despite politically correct protestations to the contrary, men and women remain, and will always remain, vastly and incurably different and for most homosexuals choosing a convenient opposite sex partner seems as unthinkable and unacceptable as my choosing another male. Science can’t fully explain the origins of homosexual impulses, but it’s a terrible mistake for defenders of traditional matrimony to describe it as a “lifestyle choice.” Most people – gay and straight alike – never choose their orientations, and every American deserves respect and liberty and privacy.

Insisting on equal rights for individuals, however, hardly requires the equal treatment of all relationships. The demand to recognize same sex unions as virtually identical to male-female marriage isn’t just a matter of extending an ancient, honorable institution to new customers. It is, rather, an unprecedented effort to redefine and restructure that institution at its very core and, in the process to breathe new life into three dysfunctional old ideas definitively discredited many years ago.


Control criminals, not guns
by Walter Williams  link to original source

Every time there's a highly publicized shooting, out go the cries for stricter gun control laws, and it was no different with the recent murder of Philadelphia Police Sgt. Stephen Liczbinski. Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell and Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, in a letter to the state congressional delegation demanding reenactment of the federal assault weapon ban, said, "Passing this legislation will go a long way to protecting those who put their lives on the line every day for us. … There is no excuse to do otherwise."

Gun control laws will not protect us from murderers. We need protection from the criminal justice system politicians have created. Let's look at it.

According to former Philly cop Michael P. Tremoglie's article "Who freed the cop-killers?" for the Philadelphia Daily News (5/8/08), all three murder suspects had extensive criminal records. Levon Warner was sentenced in 1997 to seven and a half to 15 years for robbery, one to five years for possessing an instrument of crime and five to 10 for criminal conspiracy. Howard Cain was convicted in 1996 on four counts of robbery and sentenced to five to 10 years on each count. Eric Floyd was sentenced to five to 10 years in 1995 for robbery, rearrested in 1999 for parole violation and later convicted in 2001 for two robberies. If these criminals had not been released from prison, long before they served out their sentences, officer Liczbinski would be alive today. So what's responsible for his death: guns or a prison and parole system that released these three criminals? Tremoglie cites other examples of criminals, with convictions for violent crimes ranging from robbery and assault to murder, who were paroled and later murdered police officers.

A New York Times study (4/28/06) of the city's 1,662 murders in 2003-2005 found that 90 percent of the murderers had criminal records. A Massachusetts study reported that on average, homicide offenders had been arraigned for nine prior offenses. John Lott's book, "More Guns, Less Crime," reports that in 1988 in the 75 largest counties in the U.S., over 89 percent of adult murderers had a criminal record as an adult.

A few days after the murder of Liczbinski, Governor Rendell told a news conference, attended by state elected officials and top law enforcement officials, "The time has come for politicians to decide. You have to decide whether you're on their side -- the men and women who wear blue -- or whether you're on the side of the gun lobby." Instead of saying "whether you're on the side of the gun lobby," Rendell should have said "whether you're on the side of the criminal and the courts, prosecutors, prisons and parole boards that cut soft deals with criminals and release them to prey upon police officers and law-abiding citizens."

If there is one clear basic function of government, it's to protect citizens from criminals. When government failure becomes so apparent, as it is in the murder of a police officer, officials seek scapegoats and very often it's the National Rifle Association and others who seek to protect our Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. We hear calls for stricter gun control laws when what is really needed is more control over criminals.

There are many third-party liability laws. I think they ought to be applied to members of parole boards who release criminals who turn around and commit violent crimes. As it stands now, people on parole boards who release criminals bear no cost of their decisions. I bet that if members of parole boards were held liable or forced to serve the balance of the sentence of a parolee who goes out and commits more crime, they would pay more attention to the welfare of the community rather than the welfare of a criminal. You say, "Williams, under those conditions, who'd serve on a parole board?" There's something to be said about that.

What is the most important issue in the 2008 election?
	Health care
	War in Iraq
	Economy
	Abortion
	Gay Marriage
	Tax reform
	Immigration
	National security
	2nd Amendment
	Judges
	Environment
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Part V