The end of the 2nd Amendment?

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.

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This is just a fabulous article. Please forward it to everyone you can. May Diane Feinstein, Rosy O'Donnell, Hillary Clinton and all other politico-celebrity types who work so sanctimoniously to disarm the average American, while they themselves maintain their armed guards, one day find themselves permanently ensconced in that special place in hell reserved for the hypocritical, self-serving elitists who denigrate personal
self-defense while they hire others to do their wet work for them.

http://www.guntruths.com/Houck/just_another_day_with_gun_contro.htm

Just another day with Gun Control, January 16, 2000
by Jim Houck
The movie I went to see today, at the request of my film managers, was Hurricane starring Denzel Washington. I write feature films. I write TV ads for the largest advertising agencies on earth for clients like Toyota, Ford, Sony and Coke. I am the "Hollywood crowd" that the liberal press lies about so often.

I arrived early at the Torrance, California AMC 20 Theaters, so I bought my ticket and sat on a bench just outside the front lobby under a palm tree for about half an hour, enjoying the many different faces, the playing kids, the adults.

A flood of Californians streamed out suddenly. A young girl had been attacked by a criminal who had just shot her.

"Is the shooter stopped?" I asked, reaching for my Heckler & Koch USP .45, running for the lobby with the intent to kill the criminal before he could injure or kill more of We the People.

"No, nobody can do anything! He's just walking around like he owns the place!" a California woman cried, trembling like a mouse before the lion. And indeed, the criminal did.

I ripped up my leather jacket and found my holster missing. I didn't have my .45 with me today. I'd opted not to take it just this one time at the advice of the local Californians, avoid the hassle of the California cops if they discover it, I thought, save the massive court costs of exercising my right. "Don't get caught, the street officers will hook you and book you and let the judges sort it out," a friend and local California police officer had told me repeatedly. Besides, it was three in the afternoon next door to Palos Verdes Estates, one of the most affluent and lowest crime areas in the United States.

My decision to leave my self defense at home very likely cost the young man who would be shot next his life. I have extensive, combat firearms training. I've been in three gun battles with criminals in New Orleans and Miami in the defense of myself twice and a Miami police officer once, and I've never missed nor have I lost. The criminals did.

Of course the criminal didn't know these things. He didn't know he was in a "low crime" area and he didn't seem to care that it was three in the afternoon on a Sunday. All he knew was that he was operating in Senator Diane Feinstein¹s wet dream, a theater of perfect Gun Control. Not one citizen in the large crowd of moms, dads, young men or young women had a firearm with which to defend themselves. So they ran. But the funny thing is, they didn't run very fast and the certainly didn't run very far, in fact, many basically hurried and stood around and complained about not being able to finish their show. You see, criminals being in full control is nothing new in California. It's not news. It didn't excite these folks.

I stopped outside the lobby doors. No gun. No way to fight this criminal, I thought.

The shooter fired again, dropping a young man next. Well, the California people voted this idiocy through, they repeatedly elect servants like Diane Feinstein and Barbara Boxer as state senators, people who take away their rights to self defense and the defense of their families, I thought, let them deal with the consequences of their decisions. Of course the criminal walked out the back of the AMC 20 Theaters and vanished long before the local police could wade through the Sunday traffic and do the paperwork. At least they were nice enough to come. They didn't have to. They responded as a "courtesy" according to the Supreme Court. They have no legal duty to protect the individual from criminal assault or murder. Something surprisingly few people know, especially in California.

I looked at the downed young man. He would die, judging from my own personal
experiences as a shooter of over 20 years and where the criminal had injured him. The girl, barring very unusual circumstances, she would live, judging from where the criminal had injured her and her loss of blood.

The police put pressure on the injuries to try and reduce the bleeding from the criminal attack. Another courtesy service.

I sat back down on the bench and watched the Californians as they angrily demanded their ticket money be refunded, the victims of the criminal lying ten yards from them, moaning, dying.

A man with his wife in the line of angry movie patrons turned to me and growled, "I'm surprised Feinstein isn't here already. And the liberal mainstream press. You know, we carry our guns anyway and we didn't bring them today because it's such a hassle to have to hide them all the time from the local cops. What a bunch of shit. Just look at that guy. He's probably going to die."

Thanks, Senator Feinstein. As a resident of Florida, in Los Angeles working on feature film scripts with my L.A. based managers, it's interesting to see how your Prohibition on self defense, "Gun Control" works. Of course, had you been there to see The Hurricane, your armed bodyguards would have used their semi-automatic, high capacity "assault weapons" to stop the criminal dead in his tracks, which is what the bastard richly deserved. Funny, Diane, with all your SB 23s and SB 15s and Prohibition on self defense, the criminal still badly hurt and perhaps killed two young kids who just went to see a movie on a quiet Sunday afternoon. Why call it "gun control?" Why not rename it "defenseless sheep" or the "citizen massacre laws?" Or maybe just simple "bullshit."

Wish you could have been there Diane to see how your idiotic laws work in real life. It was memorable.

Jim Houck is the Creative Director of Citizens of America

I do have to plead a certain amount of ignorance here. I thought the Brady Law was simply a waiting period for all buyers, plus a denial of the automatic right to own a gun to certain felons. Neither, in my opinion, would violate the Second Amendment. (The language of the Second Amendment says "of the people," which suggests a certain concept of the good citizen. That some small class of dangerous people can be kept from owning weapons. There is no such terminology ("of the people") in, say, the First Amendment. A law forbidding an ex-felon to speak freely on public issues would be blatantly unconstitutional.)

If the Brady Law goes beyond what I've described, then I'd agree that it does, or might, violate the Second Amendment.
But I would still point out that it was enacted a decade ago by a Democratic Congress. I know it was renewed, but that's different. To me, if you want to show that we aren't making progress on gun rights, let alone show that we're losing on gun rights, you'd have to show that new laws or regulations that are now occurring, or about to occur, serious enough to outweigh the progress we've clearly been making, currently and much more recently than Brady, on concealed-carry.

What YOU don't seem to understand is that having those damned laws that need rolling back in the first place, is a total abrogation of 2A. It is not "idealist" to insist that a RIGHT be recognized as such.

You CAN'T have "a little bit" of a "right" any more than you can be "a little bit" pregnant.

How about making you take a state mandated test, and get a piece of paper to let you join a church?

Or to post?

Or to assemble? Oops; that is also necessary, too, in many instances. Scratch 1A, too.

As to "progress, I was BORN in Californicate, and was able to openly wear a gun in public WHEN I WAS IN 7TH GRADE...and did. In high school, I almost ALWAYS had a gun in my car...LEGALLY. At 16, I was able to (and did) hunt legally ALONE. Now, I would not even be able to own a gun legally at that age, let alone be anywhere near a school with it.

Half or more of what I presently legally own here, would not be legal to even possess there, now; and you call it "progress" because a tiny fraction of the restrictions are selectively rolled back?

It is only progress when it is not necessary to keep fighting the same battles over & over to keep any gain made.

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