(Speaking of which, I’m enjoying the sweet sound of silence now that John Edwards has mysteriously shut-up)

Whenever laws are loosened, the gun control industry predicts bloodshed in the streets.  I witnessed such first hand in Florida and later Virginia when those states respectively enacted concealed carry laws, letting honest folk tote weapons in public.  The Brady Campaign, the Violence Policy Center, the Joyce Foundation (if I may be redundant) in a single voice said Hell itself would erupt and swallow those states whole.

Didn’t happen.  Not in Florida.  Not in Virginia.

Not in the 28 other states that followed FLA, rescinding restrictions on packing a heater.  In fact, Professor John Lott notes that not a single peer-reviewed criminological study on concealed carry has found a rise in violent crime compared to national averages.  A hand full of studies show minor declines in violence, and a few show major drops in select categories of bloody bad behavior.

Yet in 2008, when the Supreme Court told the District of Columbia that their handgun ban was history, the gun control industry resurrected the same claims concerning carnage.  They predicted (again) that gutters would run red with blood, which for D.C. meant nothing much would change.  The gun control industry said with certainty that death was inevitable for every living being in that city.

Guess what.

Crime statistics are in for 2009, the first full year in which D.C. citizens have been allowed to keep handguns at home, the overall violent crime rate fell.  Though much higher than most everywhere else in America, the rate of violence in The District plummeted.  Based on Census Bureau population estimates and D.C.’s own online crime statistics reporting system, violent crimes fells 6% in the first full year of liberated handgun ownership and homicides dropped 23% (if you want to check the math, here is a spreadsheet with the raw numbers).

It is unimportant to wonder why the crime rate dropped – there will be plenty of time for criminologists to analyze the dozens of potential variables.  However, private gun ownership did not cause violence to increase and may be the magic variable to explain why it tumbled.

Helmke, Sugarman, Brady, Feinstein … time to pipe down.  Your chorus is off key, again.

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In and around the nation’s capital today, Jews were targets, in literal and metaphorical senses. At the Holocaust Museum an aging bigot with an old squire rifle shot a security guard. It was a senseless act by someone so consumed with hatred that his mental faculties are suspect.

In nearby Virginia, another aging bigot said of the President “them Jews aren’t going to let him talk to me.” It was a senseless act by someone so consumed with hatred that his mental faculties are suspect. Unarmed aside from his infected mind and mouth, this incendiary statement came from Obama’s pastor Reverend Jeremiah Wright. “They will not let him … talk to somebody who calls a spade what it is.”

Which begs the question “how many degrees of anti-Semitic separation are there between Obama and James Von Brunn?”

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This is why drugs are cheap and drug profits remain higher than drug users.

The United Kingdom’s Home Office (and organization with a name more pleasant that it’s collective personality) recently concluded that a line of Peruvian Marching Powder costs less than a pint of beer. Buzz heads can dust their noses for less money than a soccer hooligan’s breakfast.

This is one of many side effects of unregulated markets. Despite enormous gauntlets imposed by governments, dope demand rages onward. Volume-focused profit potential has streamlined and optimized the cocaine trade. Like corporations with heavy firepower, the drug lords have tweaked their internal operations to the point where they deliver product at barging basement prices and get rich by shipping the stuff by the metric ton.

Maybe their couriers snort the stuff first … gives them the energy to drag crates of Charlie across the border.

Seem people south of the border have had enough of the game and want to back out of the criminalization business. Growing international consensus based on data like £1 lines has called for de-escalation of dope interdiction. Three former heads of state (not to be confused with non-state heads) recently concluded “The available evidence indicates that the war on drugs is a failed war.”

You think?

At £1 a smack and with import volumes reaching Everest heights, there is no other conclusion. America’s “War on Drugs” is now in its forth decade and has sump-pumped the U.S. Treasury a few billion each year in direct interdiction costs (border patrol, Coast Guard, aid to states, etc.) with a few billion more in financing some shady South American governments in their coca field eradication efforts. Add the cost of warehousing petty possessors in prisons and America’s War on Dope is certifiably a war by dopes, by which I mean Congress.

Yet legalization scares soccer mom’s straight, and is thus decriminalization is doomed.

What many overly protective moms don’t realize is that their kids have an easier time buying heroin at their high school than buying a bottle of Yukon Jack at the corner liquor store. Where as illegal drugs by default are a deregulated industry, and booze is a regulated one, the path from producer to consumer and the means for optimizing production are completely different. Cocaine for kids is created by hut squatters in jungles while Jack is distilled by educated workers in government inspected facilities. Bolivian Blow is transported by a chain of underpaid human mules while whiskey is hauled for profit by trucking companies with union labor, annually inspected vehicles, licensed drivers and tax funded roads. The dealer who sold you child a little crank isn’t afraid of the law but the owner of the corner market fears losing his business license for selling a bottle of brandy to your baby.

We don’t need no stinking license!

Despite all, nothing will change. Drug ideology in America is pervasive to the point that every mom and dad who still toke a jay while the kids are out of the house absolutely want the current interdiction model. They would change their minds if they could be their kid for a day and were given the assignment to score some snort after science class and some schnapps after school.

The contrast would kill them, and then kill the war on drugs.

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This includes cops.

I grew up with law enforcement officers (LEOs). My childhood friend was the son of the local police chief and I was riding shotgun in squad cars before I was old enough to drive. I discovered that the best part of being a cop is the perpetual amusement of odd occurrences, which might explain why I live in San Francisco these days for it is perpetually odd and amusing.

One night we pulled up behind a poorly concealed tiny Toyota. After the patrol officer (the first female officer on that squad who nicknamed herself ‘Patty Pig’) circled the bouncing vehicle twice, a man who easily cleared 6′4″ unfolded himself from the backseat, attempting to pull up his pants while crawling behind the wheel to make a sanctioned getaway.

Most criminal activity is more serious that backseat coitus. One tool LEOs like to cuff criminals with are cameras. The U.K. is positively mad for them, littering every street corner with snappers. There is even a proposal to put cameras in pubs. Subjects are videotaped in case their presence near a crime scene later becomes of interest to the constabulary. Though the efficacy of such evidence remains in debate, there is little to dissuade the U.K. police from fully utilizing cameras to catch miscreants committing crimes.

Unless bobbies are doing the dirty work.

Under the thin guise of anti-terrorism, it is now criminal to snap a member of Her Majesty’s forces, a member of any of the intelligence services or a constable. The prohibition is based on the corner case that a terrorist group might compile a photographic inventory of peace officers, a theory ignoring the fact that terrorist strive to induce terror in the citizenry and not armed guardians.

Blanket prohibitions are tools of oppression. Fungible laws can be applied brutally against inconveniently honest folks and the loyal opposition alike. Universal injunctions are routinely abused because few if any reasonable exceptions are included. Prohibitive laws need to be specific, not general, which is not what the U.K. now endures.

Restricting surveillance of LEOs in public has a horrific downside. It discourages and perhaps prevents applying justice to law enforcement officer who break the law. It elevates above the law people vested with power, and thus facilitates the abuse of that power.

Which brings us to the late Oscar Grant who is now a household name in the San Francisco bay area. Oscar was shot by a LEO after ringing in the New Year. The event took place on an Oakland subway platform while the train on which he had ridden waited to be released. Sensing that the LEOs on duty were being a bit too belligerent, a number of fellow riders whipped out their cell phones and began gathering grainy videos.

They are a YouTube sensation for self-evident reasons.

I wasn’t there. I’m not a witness. I cannot pronounce guilt or innocence. But at first blush the videos appear not to show a police action but an assassination. The former LEO has proffered explanations that a jury will some day consume, but they will dine up several home videos as well. It will be a wholly indigestible spread.

The videos will be a significant influence … unless the government somehow suppresses them as evidence.

The good folks at the Witness Project have long understood this. In locales less civilized than Oakland – a rapidly shrinking list – the Witness Project supplies video cameras so locals can document governmental abuses. Relief may not come from the regional legal system, but it may come from millions of YouTube watchers and the governments that those citizens command.

Which no longer includes the United Kingdom. They long ago revoked the right of self-defense and now the ability to keep bull bluecoats in line. Little wonder that England and Wales have turned violent – the laws favor the lawless … including lawless LEOs.

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The quote that caught my attention was “… never in history has there been a black market defeated from the supply side.” His claim is that it must be impossible to eliminate the supply of something if there is demand. I don’t know if “never” is an appropriate adverb, but I am incapable of finding evidence to the contrary.

Some examples:

• * Alcohol prohibition in the 1920’s generated a huge black market and vast criminal enterprises to supply the booze.
• * The drug wars of the 20th century generated a huge black market and vast criminal enterprises to supply the dope.
• * Gun control laws generated a huge black market and vast criminal enterprises to supply the firepower.
• * Controls on money influencing politics has generated a huge black market and vast commercial enterprises to supply the cash.

For policy wonks and other people with too much time to kill, this creates an important and rather libertarian conclusion: attempts to restrict supply will inevitably exacerbate the original problem. Sure, a few heads were ingesting new and exotic drugs in the 1960’s but every attempt to make drug use illegal stoked its mystique. Banning booze led Ma and Pa to become moonshiners while Lil Sis became a flapper in a speakeasy. Attempts to eliminate private firearm ownership have led to a more aggressive brand of street thug. And this election cycle is breaking all records for campaign cash from lobbyist.

Legislators and other disreputable sorts should head history, though they rarely do.

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This tiny tale relates the troubled souls of the Oakland Tribune, two of their writers and its Gollum editor Martin Reynolds. Martin’s misdeeds are a case study in why old media in general and newspapers in particular are a dying breed.

In May the Trib ran an article penned in tag team by two of their journalist. I misuse the term journalist herein because what they wrote in no way resembles reporting. The topic of their corrupt correspondence was gun control, and the piece was proffered in advance of a mayoral campaign by a well known advocate of gun control. I will not accuse these literary desperadoes of prostituting themselves for a politician, especially one known as the “Bay Area Bagman” and under investigation by the FBI. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if these hacks turned a trick, bending over for an elected thief.

Their reporting was contemptible correspondence. This peculiar piece did not meet minimal journalistic standards and was beyond slanted. Any reporter with integrity would have sought balanced sources, multiple perspectives and dug under the issue’s skin. These folks didn’t bother to look beneath their own distorted and seemingly psychotic version of reality. They spoke only to representatives of the gun control industry, misstated facts, cited unreliable sources and quoted discredited researchers.

They may well have smoked their breakfast. After all, they work in Oaksterdam.

I popped off a tirade to the Trib, demanding they print a retraction. I knew exactly what I was asking and did not take my demand lightly. A retraction is an admission of guilt by a newspaper for printing something they shouldn’t have. In the case of this pile of journalistic dung, a retraction was in order. A retraction, an apology, several thousand Hail Marys and possibly even a human sacrifice — the Trib had two reporters who were worthy candidates for the latter.

Martin Reynolds, the editor of the Oakland Tribune, emailed me shortly thereafter, saying in part:

However, the points you have made from what I can tell don’t come close to constituting the need for a retraction. You may not agree with the tenor of the story, or agree with the way it was sourced and what information was not reported, but writing a story in this manner does not warrant a retraction. Not even close.

Martin conveniently missed the point. I never complained about the “tenor” of the piece. I complained that their reporters abdicated their responsibilities as journalist. Anyone even faintly acquainted the political football of gun control would agree that the Oakland Tribune’s reporting lay somewhere between negligent and fraudulent. Martin might not appreciate blunt assessments of his staff’s shortcomings as journalists and human beings, but he misrepresented the nature of the problem and complaint as slickly as his two reporters misrepresented everything.

He also did not bother to question his questioner. Had he performed two seconds of investigative journalism himself, he would have ascertained my position as one of the Bay Area’s top gun control policy experts (I even used my GunFacts.info email address, which should have been his first lead) and one who had published op/eds in his paper previously. This miscue became comically evident when he finished his email with:

And I don’t think you read the story very closely if you think the reporter equated guns shows (sic) with guns on the streets.

Silly me for not closely reading the article before demanding a retraction, and in the process detailing why the article was beneath the lowest of journalistic bars as well as contempt.

I fired off a reply to Martin offering that he or his minions contradict my observation. I suggested the Oakland Tribune serialize the article, having the original reporters interview criminologists with opposing views on the sources for crime guns, or at very least explain why they were excluded in the original story. I strongly suggested that his reporters at very least ask gun-owners rights groups for data that might counterpoint the sound bites they had blindly parroted for the Brady Campaign, the Violence Policy Center and the Joyce Foundation-funded university medical researcher they quoted.

Martin was unimpressed with my suggestion that his reporters commit work or journalism. He did take up my gauntlet, and replied:

As editor of this newspaper I endeavor to give voice to as many perspectives as possible. May I also suggest you write a letter to the editor, or a short 500 word opinion piece we call a “My Word” stating your views and concerns with the story. I would be happy to make sure it gets on our opinion page.

I emphasize the last sentence as prelude and the cornerstone of evidence that Martin Reynolds has no respect for his own integrity or that of his profession.

Most people would be intimidated by his offer. Being a writer, a gun policy expert and more than ready to lead public opinion back from the intellectual wastelands into which the Oakland Tribune led them, I sent off a piece within a couple of days. I did not attack the Trib, its writers or even Martin. I simply positioned the facts behind Oakland’s crime wave and how gun control was not the answer. As always, I tailed the submission with a small stack of citations from quality research and government sources. I sent the piece in reply email to Martin, copying his promise to publish. Then I waited.

And waited, and waited, and …

I gave Martin nearly a month to reply and/or publish, pinging him upon occasion, checking the Tribune web site and even resubmitting the op/ed through their online interface. Nada. I searched the Oakland Trib web site daily using both my name and various keywords to find my response to their journalistic lapse.

I finally gave up, rewrote the piece, submitted it to the San Francisco Chronicle. They printed it shortly thereafter.

Allow a tally:

• The Oakland Tribune published a piece of journalistic effluvium
• An expert on the topic complained
• The editor of the Trib promised to publish an opposing perspective
• The editor reneged on his promise

The price one places on their self-respect varies from person to person. The average man won’t sell his at any price. A politician or an Oakland Tribune reporter sells theirs at a discount. A street walker sells hers for spare change. But the editor of the Oakland Tribune gains not a penny for his – he cannot sell what he does not posses.

If you feel compelled to remind Marin that journalistic integrity is essential, feel free to pop him a note at mreynolds@bayareanewsgroup.com.

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Because of my expertise in gun control policy, I receive daily feeds of news stories concerning the subject. I was rather surprised today to see two “identical” news stories with very different headlines. One headline amplified the core political story and the other amplified the bias of the reporting newsroom. That for former was a newspaper in good repute and the latter was a TV station is not a surprise.
When I say the stories were “identical”, I’ll note that the report from a television web site was a reduced version of the newspaper report, but copied their content word-for-word.

The newspaper in question is the Richmond Times-Dispatch, a truly great paper which I had the please of reading for seven years while residing in the magnificent city of Richmond, VA. They report that a state agency will review private sales of firearms at gun shows. This is a sensitive issue nationally, but especially in Virginia where we have held suspicion of the intentions of government ever since Patrick Henry said “Give me liberty of give me death.”

The Times-Dispatch rightly headlined the piece “Gingerly, panel to examine gun show sales.” Though incomplete, the headline cornered the issue of how the government will delicately investigate if private sales of firearms at gun shows contribute to guns entering the underground market (this is a useless review given the standing criminological research that concludes such leakage is minimal).

Keep in mind that the city of Richmond is in the center of the state, cradled by urban, suburban, and rural regions. It truly reflects the state’s varied populations and thus is quite attuned to neutral phraseology.

The TV station is in Washington D.C. where guns are, for practical purposes, banned. The TV station headline reads “Va. Crime Commission To Study Gun Show Loophole.”

For those unfamiliar with the debate, the phrase “gun show loophole” is a fanciful and borderline insane description of the issue. It was invented by organizations with stated goals of eliminating private firearm ownership. Aside from being a inaccurate issue statement, the term “gun show loophole” is designed to invoke fear by falsely insinuating that there is an unintended oversight in the law.

It is instructive then to see that the television station borrowed a lobbyist phrasing in order to invoke fear in their viewership, and not the more reasoned original headline provided by the newspaper.

The funny part is that biased folks in the media still don’t understand why they are losing market- and mind-share. Folks, if you repeatedly mislead people — especially in the age of the Internet and instant fact crosschecking — they will soon ignore you as an unreliable source.

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In actuality it is the politics of hope above reality, which gives and entirely new dimension the Obama brand.

A tragic case in point is the latest squandering of scratch this side of Congressional salaries. In my silly city of San Francisco, the government has sought to house the homeless. A noble ideal and one grounded in the same ruthless, rational logic of any Monty Python skit.

The Mayor — a locally grown Bill Clinton, replete with his own trouser problems — last year predicted his pet project and election gimmick would provide “healthy, affordable housing for 106 formerly homeless individuals.”

Affordable it is given that the bill is footed by people with homes, jobs, incomes, kids to raise, and a larger than ever tax bill. “Healthy” it might be if it weren’t for secondhand crack cocaine smoke in the hallways. In San Francisco’s Plaza Apartments, you don’t even need a “contact high” — respiration is sufficient.

As with Federal public housing projects before, The Mayor was oblivious to the mechanics of crime and poverty. Ignoring decades of research into why people become homeless, Frisco conceptualized a simple (and thus simplistic) solution of giving homes to the homeless. This assumed that homelessness was the cause, and not merely a symptom of another and larger problem.

A government flunky, in a rare moment of lucidity, noted “80 to 90 percent of the people we have are struggling with drug use. We know when we bring those people indoors those issues do not go away.”

He later said the sky was blue, bunnies are cute, and that Gavin Newsom in no way deserved the salary he receives.

Various surveys of homeless hominids claim that between 68% to 90% have become full time sidewalk campers due to drug and alcohol abuse. Interviewing these folks shows that they were born with better options. None started life with a crack pipe in the infant lips and begging for spare change from other babies. They descended the societal ladder one drink or rock at a time.

Much like Paris Hilton’s panties.

This is the norm of criminality as well as self destruction. Crime does not cause criminal behaviour. The poor tend to be victims of criminals because a life of crime leads to poverty and thugs descend into poor neighborhoods. You don’t have to take my word on this. Throughout the rural South are good, decent, hard-working people still farming the forty acres their ancestors were awarded. These people are about as poor as you could fear becoming, and yet are not innately prone to committing crimes. Nor are they routinely victimized since criminals tend to light in cities where their targets are more numerous and thus their trade is more profitable.

Then they run for office.

This why public housing projects are deadly districts of maddening malfeasance. Once the poor were warehoused into centralized locations, criminals drifted into the projects, bringing their life-long habits with them. When the government made single motherhood possible, if not profitable, gang games became even more lucrative. Mobile sperm donors, unshackled from the bonds of marriage and raising their offspring, could continue their felonious existence. Crime became a lifestyle.
The same systematics apply to San Francisco’s Homeless Hilton. Take a population of people — 70% or more of whom cannot keep bottles from their lips and needles out of their veins — and stack them like corpulent cordwood into a central facility. One must expect the root cause of their low lifestyle to follow. Thinking that providing a roof and a stipend would change decade long addictions requires the special insanity reserved for politicians.

“[P]ermanent supportive housing solves homelessness,” is what Mayor Newsom said when the program received federal funding.

Nothing in the known universe (i.e., reality) can make a boozer sober except the discipline to say “no”. The same applies to junkies and loco politicians with taxing authority.

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There is a certain snake by the name of Senator Don Perata. I know Don, having sat with him in a corporate board while he engineered a few million in corporate welfare. I have talked him down in front of reporters. In other words, I’ve been so close to him so often that my doctor insists on conducting frequent tests for slime infections.

Like most politicians, Don has one game he most enjoys playing, that being gun control. Don has never seen a gun control proposal that didn’t make him moisten his Depends. In California he has attempted to ban guns, tax ammunition into an unaffordable commodity, and has told many false tales about threats of violence from NRA members (he loves to tell that story to reporters, but whenever challenged to produce police reports on these ancient incidents, he or his demonic staffers demur).

So imagine my giggle fit when news broke that Don “The Bay Area Bagman” Perata had been carjacked … at gunpoint. All his efforts to disarm the general populace (I say “general” because Don has at least one handgun and the rarest of Bay Area artifacts, a concealed carry permit) seem to have been for naught.

The carjackers were prototypical street thugs. They were men in their 20’s. They worked in tandem (one walking up to the car, and another boxing Don in with another vehicle). They held their gun “gansta” style (sloppily sideways). They were dedicated criminals who most likely:

• Did not have a permit from the state to buy a gun.
• Did not wait the mandatory 10-day period to obtain a gun.
• Did not obtain a permit to carry their gun in public (unlike Perata).

In short, they willingly violated every law Don Perata enacted. Meanwhile my buddy Rich, a Vietnam vet, father of two, grandfather of three, who has held a job all of his life, paid his taxes, and has never broken a law more serious than speeding … he has obeyed all of those laws.

Perata never has “gotten it.” Don never stops long enough to separate chaff and understand the motivations and rationalizations of criminals. He fails to perform simple logic and isolate the good guys from the bad.

And now Don had a thug shove a gun up his nose while Rich and I chuckled. We laughed because we know the incident will not help clarify the issue for Perata. Some skulls are too thick.

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I don’t have any objection to tattoos on principle. In fact, a well placed tattoo on a woman can be sexy (especially if one treats them as a set of handlebars). But so many people now have tats that it is no longer cool. Skin and ink has become mainstream, and the few of us not wearing body art are the differentiated minority.

I always thought allowing some random biker — with a prison record and suspect hygiene — to jab a used needle into my epidermis bordered on insane. But two mentally challenged Texans have made getting a tattoo almost fatal.

Seems that either Robert Glasser and Joey Acosta of El Paso wanted a tattoo of a revolver. So in order to make their tat as realistic as possible, they decided to trace a real .357 mangle’em.

They didn’t bother to unload it first.

Somehow, Robert and Joey managed to shoot themselves at the same instant. One round staffed Robert’s hand and then clipped Joey’s arm. For this to happen, both “men” would have to have been on the barrel side of the loaded and cocked handgun. Triple stupid.

Sadly, Robert and Joey do not qualify for a Darwin Award, but might receive an honorable mention for trying.

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