"YOU GUN NUTS ARE ALL A BUNCH OF COWARDS!"

There is a minority of the Gun-Control-Freak community that like to run their mouths making bizarre insinuations that we gun nuts...er, gun owners collectively suffer from a perverted sexual fetish where we treat our firearms as some divine phallic symbol needing our devout attention.  I dismiss this juvenile musing on their part as more a case of mental projection and an intentional attempt at character assassination rather than an objective summation based on empirical analysis and so I won't even dignify it with a response (Oh, wait.  I just did.  Oops...).

The larger majority of that particularly disagreeable bunch like to announce to the world that we gun owners are, by our ownership and bearing of and our practicing with firearms and other weapons, working from a state of fear (check the comments to this article).  To this I heartily reply, "Yeah, so what?"

Fear is one of our basest emotions derived from our basic survival instincts and it drives us into the whole range of behaviors that humans engage in.  Fear of starvation drives us to work for our food.  Fear of death from exposure to the extremes of our environment drives us to build shelters.  And fear of other creatures coming to take everything away from us drives us to build and collect weapons to use to fight back and keep what is ours.

But we gun owners are not cowards.  Yes, we are cognizant of the possibility that some dangerous criminal will attempt to cause us harm or take our property by the use of force, up to and including deadly force.  We prepare ourselves to deal with this problem on an individual basis, both on our side and that of the perpetrator's.  We will deal with them as they come and present themselves to us and pass what "line" we may "draw in the sand" and not engage in a blanket punishment of a group of our fellow human beings just because we are fearful that they might do something.

The Gun-Control-Freaks are also working from fear in that they are afraid of what we gun owners might do, not what we actually will do or have intent to do or are attempting to do, to them or innocent third parties.  But instead of grabbing their own torches and pitchforks and coming for us gun owners on their own and under their own authority (which might be a foolish move; one doesn't bring a torch or a pitchfork to a gunfight), they clamor for the ear of Caesar to use his sword to disarm us or kill us if we resist his forces against us (sometimes it's hard to determine which would be the preferable outcome for some of these  Gun-Control-Freaks).

So when the Gun-Control-Freaks starting throwing insults about how we gun owners are a bunch of cowards, let them know that they are the true "cowards" because they won't take care of their own problems by themselves but instead depend on others to take care of them.  They should also be informed that Caesar is the real threat they need to be fearful of.  We mice prepping ourselves to deal with the occasional cat are not as much of a threat to anyone's liberty as Caesar's "dogs of war," which are prepping to bite everyone on their backside...

Why Carterville, Illinois?

A reader writes to ask why I happened to mention the small town of Carterville, Illinois in an earlier article.  It seems, though not from Carterville, the reader is familiar with the area and was wondering if I, apparently a gentleman from Texas, just randomly pulled the name from the proverbial hat or did I intend to express some significance when I mentioned Carterville.  The short and sweet answer is "Yes."  There is some significance to that little town in my life, for you see, when I was growing up, Carterville was the closest thing I had to a hometown.

As I have shared before, my father was a career military man, spending the first half of his 20-plus years of service in the enlisted ranks of the U.S. Air Force and the second half as a Warrant Officer in the U.S. Army.  If you know anything about military life, you know that service members and their families move a lot.  With the special demands of my father's specific MOS, we moved around a little more than the average military family.  I had only two constants during my childhood:  Change and Carterville, Illinois.

Some of the bases and posts my father was assigned to were really nice (Bellefontaine Air Force Station, Ohio), some weren't so nice (Camp Darby, Italy), and some were a downright dysfunctional dystopia (Schofield Barracks, Hawai'i).  My favorite place to live, though, was where he would leave the family when he had an overseas assignment that we couldn't accompany him on and, for two out of three times, that was Carterville.

The first time that I lived in the Carterville area, I was so young (6-18 months) that my own memories of that time are hazy at best and I have to depend on reports from older relatives (mostly Mom) to understand what happened back then.  My father was assigned to an Air Force radar station in Iceland so my mother and I (her only child at the time) lived with her maternal grandparents who owned a farm on the outskirts of town while her parents (mother and stepfather; my mother's father was killed in WWII and my grandmother remarried after the war) lived in Carterville.  I do remember playing in the cool, thick grass under the huge willow tree growing in my great-grandparent's back yard while my mother and great-grandmother hung clothes out to dry on the line.

The second time we lived in Carterville, I was a little older and so I remember most of that time on my own.  My father was assigned to Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines for a two-year tour but the first year the family had to stay behind, so he moved my mother, myself, and my kid brother and baby sister, both of whom had been born by this time, into a small rental home on East Illinois Ave just off the northeast corner at the intersection with North Hampton.  My grandparents lived a few blocks away on Brown Street.

We moved there in late winter and I finished the last third of my kindergarten year at Carterville Elementary School.  That summer we spent a lot of time at Crab Orchard Lake in my grandfather's boat.  On Independence Day, my uncle Gary took us to a drive-in theater to see "H.G. Wells' First Men in the Moon" and there was a fireworks show during intermission.  I celebrated my sixth birthday that summer with cake, ice cream, and watermelon.  Also that summer, my favorite soda, Mountain Dew, was introduced into the southern Illinois market.

That September I returned to Carterville Elementary to start the First Grade in Mrs. Web's class where I learned the most essential skill I believe I ever picked up in a public school; namely, how to read and write. This was also when public schools could throw a party for just about every holiday and we did in Mrs. Web's class.  I remember the whole lot of us tykes dressing in our Halloween costumes and marching, at least half-way (our little legs tired easily) in the Carterville Lions' Homecoming parade.

 Also that fall, three of my five most favorite childhood television shows, "Batman," "Lost in Space," and "The Wild, Wild West," premiered ("Jonny Quest" and "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." had come out the year before).  "Batman" was broadcast in that new fangled invention called "Color Television" (LIS and TWWW would come out in color the next year). Of course, no one in my family would be able to confirm this for another two years until my parents could afford to buy us our first such set from Sears,  Roebuck, and Company.

That was also the year that "A Charlie Brown Christmas" was broadcast for the very first time and my lifetime interest in the works of Charles Schulz was kindled.  I can even remember what happened to Linus after his tug of war battle with Snoopy over his blanket ended, but I'm not telling.  And that Christmas I got two of my most favorite toys; my Secret Sam Secret Agent Attache Case and my G.I. Joe Action Figure (don't you dare call him a "doll").

And when I say G.I. Joe, I mean the full 12 inch tall soldier, with uniform, rifle, helmet, boots, and other gear, ready to do battle to save the world for democracy, and not those emasculated miniscule plastic figurines that boys have to play with today.  I played with these for hours on end until wear, tear, and the mishandling by the employees of the lowest-bid government contractors who moved our household goods and furniture around the world caused them to disintegrate into their individual components and my mother had to sweep up the mess and throw them into the trash.  If you count the value of something by the pleasure it brings, "Santa" got his money's worth that year.

As winter wound down to a close, we got the official word that we could now head to the Philippines to join my father.  Though I was excited to being with my father once again, since this was the first of his absences that I had been old enough to notice, it was with some reluctance that I left my family and friends, including our mutt dog, Pepper, behind in Carterville.

We had a third chance to live in Carterville while my father did a tour in Vietnam, but the Army and my parents (mostly the Army) decided the best place for my mother and her children to wait on our soldier to return from the battlefield was at Fort Campbell, Kentucky.  Now Fort Campbell was a pleasant enough place but the best part about staying there was it was the closest I had ever lived to Carterville without being in the state of Illinois.

Being only a two to three hour drive, my mother would often pack us kids up for a trip to "Granny's" house on just about every school break or holiday.  I got to celebrate my eleventh birthday in Carterville and we ate Thanksgiving dinner at my grandmother's house.  It was almost as good as living in Carterville.

My father's last duty station before retiring was Fort Hood, Texas, which explains how I ended up where I am.  We got here in the summer (yes, during the summer in Texas; read "melt") after spending a soul-crushing three and a quarter years in Hawai'i (which was three years, two months, and two weeks longer than I would have preferred to visit the "Aloha State").  My parents found us a place to live and with a few weeks to kill before our furniture and household goods would be delivered, we headed north to visit my grandparents.

While we were there, I got to celebrate my 16th birthday.  My great-grandmother apologized to me for not getting me a card but I told her it was better that she was there to wish me a "Happy Birthday" in person after such a long time apart.  We got to return the following summer on another vacation, but unknown to me at the time, this would be the last visit I would ever get to make to my grandparents while they still lived in Carterville.

Within the next couple of years, my grandfather would retire from the Southern Illinois Railroad and he and my grandmother would move to a small farm they bought in the countryside and spend their retirement years raising and training hunting dogs with their son, my uncle Gary.  I got to visit them a few times at their new place but it never quite felt the same.  I always wondered if that was because I was no longer a child, or because it wasn't that small house on Brown Street that I was so used to.

Now everyone I ever cared about in Carterville has moved away, and the unfortunate part at my age is that most of them did so by passing away, so I have no real reason to ever visit that little town in southern Illinois again.  But, because of the special times spent there with the special people in my life, Carterville will always hold a special place in my collection of fond childhood memories.

And if anyone should ever happen to invent a machine that can not only send me back in time, but also back into my own youth, you better believe that I will jump at the chance to use it and do everything in my power to spend more time in Carterville during my second childhood than I did during my first...

Government-Enforced Racial Discrimination Intended to Alleviate...Racial Discrimination?

The Supreme Court of the United States has again visited the use of race-based preferential treatment in the application and selection process of prospective students for several State-sponsored institutions of higher learning and will render a decision later this year that will probably impact the whole concept of the government policy known as "affirmative-action."  Proponents for the continuation of affirmative-action demand that it is the duty of government to provide remedies for those races that have been "historically discriminated" against.  Since they brought up the subject, let us take a closer look at History.

On the continent of Africa, one tribe of black Africans would wage war against another.  They fought for land.  They fought for water.  They sometimes fought to get even with their enemies for the time their enemies got even with them.  As usual in war, there were prisoners captured from the ranks of the enemy's military forces and there were those innocents - women and children - who would be captured by the opposing side and carried off as the spoils of war.  All of these people would be made into slaves.

The slave's owners would trade their slaves just as they would any other commodity with other peoples they would come into contact with.  The tribes from the inner portion of the continent would trade with those tribes on the outer portions.  The tribes along the coasts would trade with seafaring people from all around the world.  Black slaves ended up in Rome, India, China, and eventually in the Americas.

This process of enslavement was not unique to black Africans.  The several tribes, clans, and nations of Europe, Asia, the Pacific, the Atlantic and the Americas would also make war with each other and the vanquished would often become the slaves of the conquerors.  Since there was a market for slaves, there was a trade in slaves amongst all the peoples of the world, regardless of the race or ethnicity of the seller or buyer.  Native Americans traded their fellow Native American slaves with the white settlers in exchange for blankets, tools, and "fire-water."  The Chinese who came to America brought with them their Korean, Japanese, and fellow Chinese slaves to sell to whomever had the funds to pay the price they demanded.

The main point of my little History lesson is to show that no race or ethnicity has a monopoly on being the victims of the crime of slavery, or even racial discrimination, and, at the same time, none has a monopoly on being the perpetrator either.  To suggest that some have to be compensated for what was done to them in the past is to be particularly selective, subjective, and childishly unrealistic. "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God."

"Affirmative-action," broken down into in basic components, is preferential treatment through discrimination by the government for one race or ethnic groups at the expense of others.  It is not a remedy for past transgressions but merely the continuation of that which it is supposed to resolve with the roles merely reversed between who is the winner and who is the loser.  When the government is allowed to dictate how we all will associate, accommodate, and interact with each other, then we all are losers.  It is like trying to make a "Right" by adding two "Wrongs" and it cannot be good for the "Gander" if what was originally done to the "Goose" is considered an act of evil.

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. "

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

I hate to say it, Martin, but there are people, invoking your name, that are turning your dream into a nightmare and causing greater animosity between the races which is leading to the disunion of our nation and the break-up of our modern American society.  This could have been their plan all along...

Because It's Not a "Background Check"

Many of our benevolent government officials who are in favor of doing away with the liberties and rights protected by the Constitution of the United States keep asking, "Why would anyone, in his right mind, be against a background check for anyone wanting to purchase a firearm?"  Sidestepping their attempt to label anyone who disagrees with them as mentally deficient, let me go on record as saying there is nothing wrong with a background check being performed on someone about to be entrusted with a very important item.  The problem arises in that what our benevolent government officials are proposing is not a "background check."

A background check is when someone, usually with your consent, reviews available public and private records of your life to study your personal history to help them determine how they will deal with you in the present and in the future.  A bank or other lending institution will check your credit and payment history to determine if you are a good risk for them to extend you a loan.  A potential employer might check your criminal history to see if you can be trusted "with the store."  A doctor will check your medical history to see what medical problems you have had in the past and then chart a course of treatment for what currently ails you.

What our benevolent government officials have created, constantly maintain, and keep adding to, is a simple list of people they don't want dealers licensed by the federal government (BATF & E) to sell guns to.  The dealer involved in the transaction does not get to review any history or make any decision to sell on his own.  The decision has been made for him by our benevolent government officials and there are very few options to "petition the Government for a redress of grievances" for a buyer who believes his name has been added to the list in error.

Now for the government to maintain an air of legitimacy for this list we can be assured that dangerous criminals that have committed and have been convicted in a court-of-law of carrying out violent and heinous crimes will be on the list (of course, those who were employed by the government at the time of the commission of their evil deeds might not be on such a list).  It will probably include those who have been determined by a competent judge, in a court where concerned relatives and friends have filed suit, to be mentally incompetent.  This list will also include those who committed serious offenses but were found "Not Guilty" for reasons of insanity.

But the list doesn't stop there.  It includes anyone who a government employee just thinks is too crazy or too dangerous to own a gun and government employees have access to several "1-800" telephone numbers with which to make their report.  They also have legal immunity from civil suits for telling outright lies (libel and slander) since they have a "duty to report."  It is possible that one day in the future, government employees might just start adding names from the "White Pages" of many telephone books just to satisfy some employer-mandated quota.

The biggest problem with this government list of those who "can't buy," just like the similar "don't fly" list maintained by the TSA, is that it is just another tool of oppression to be used by those who have manipulated their way into the seats of power of the government.  We are already aware that such anal-retentive types keep special lists of their enemies for which they use the authorities granted them under their public positions to punish those who find themselves on such lists and this alleged "background check" will no different.

Since some of our benevolent government officials have already publicly stated that their end goal is the complete and total disarmament of the American people, we can know that they don't intend to make things safer for the American people, but only for themselves when they come to rob "We the People" of anything we might have left...

Self-Righteous Bullying in the Name of Stopping Bullying

A few years back there was one of those ridiculous Public Service Announcements that focused on the use of the word "gay."  A couple of teenage boys were having a private conversation in a pizza parlor when one of them refers to a nearby statuette as "gay."  The young man was using the term in one of its modern connotations as a synonym for "stupid," "lame," or "pathetic."  Up pops from the next booth America's favorite Black lesbian comedienne, Wanda Sykes, who quickly berates the 16-year-old boy for his choice of terms and their usage and demands that he "knock it off!"

Let's understand that in a libertarian society like we are supposed to be living in here in America where the individual has the right to free speech, the only concern that a speaker should have when it comes to his choice of words is whether or not his listener will understand what he meant when he spoke.  Ms. Sykes is just trying to bully the young men into either using only language that she approves of, or of a more sinister nature, into silence altogether.

Though many try to set the meanings and definitions for our common language down for posterity in dictionaries and thesauruses, nobody owns the language so as to prevent others from changing it for their purposes.  Even the word "gay" as used to designate members of the homosexual/lesbian community is itself a neologism from the word "gay" originally meaning happy and carefree.  For instance:

"...We'll all feel gay when Johnny comes marching home."

- from the Civil War era song, "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" by Patrick Gilmore

"...We'll have a gay ol' time."

- from the theme song for the Hanna-Barbera cartoon, "The Flintstones"

Some members of the Homosexual community refer to themselves as "queer," while protesting at the same time of the use of this label to describe them by non-Homosexuals.  So it's alright for a queer for call himself "queer" but it's homophobic and bigoted for a non-queer to call the queer a "queer."  Sometimes I commit certain insensitive faux paus accidentally through my ignorance of the societal rules governing the expected conduct when one is discussing such subjects and sometimes I intentionally violate the rules to show the oppressive double-standard of those dictators who write and enforce these "social contracts" amongst us all.

Now the mayor of Philadelphia, Michael Nutter, has called for an investigation into an article by Philadelphia Magazine titled, "Being White in Philly."  The author, Robert Huber, wanted to investigate how White people were viewing race relations in the city.  "In a city that is largely poor and segregated, white people have become afraid to say anything at all about race,” Huber wrote on the cover of the magazine.   It seems Mayor Nutter preferred that White people should have remained afraid and silent.

He has called upon the Philadelphia Human Relations Commission to investigate this magazine and the article's author for spreading  false and misleading racial stereotypes by giving accounts from unnamed sources of Black-on-White crimes in the Philly area.  He contends that "the First Amendment, like other constitutional rights, is not an unfettered right" and equates the article to yelling fire in a crowded theater.  Is it any wonder why "Hate Crimes" are allegedly under-reported in this country when a certain segment of this nation's population is "prohibited" by some of those in positions of government power from speaking freely about the subject?

Mayor Nutter and Ms. Sykes are both bullies.  The purpose of bullying is to exert power over an intended victim so that, through the use of force, the threat to use force, or by leaving someone open to public ridicule, the victim is intimidated into not exercising his/her rights under Natural Law.  I related in an earlier article my experience with Schoolyard Bullies when I was growing up and I would have to say the worst bullies were those who acted out of righteous indignation like Mayor Nutter and Ms. Sykes.

Because of some innocuous act or, more often than not, because of what I was and am in a racial and ethnic sense, some people would assume that I was a bully therefore justifying their sanctified crusade to bully me in the name of stopping me from bullying them.  Any attempt to defend my person or my reputation was just further evidence of my own "bulliness" and my ignorance of it and its severity.  Something in their past, and not in mine, had caused them to be frightened of people like me.  The most popular emotional response to those people, places, things, and situations we fear is hate.

At some point in our early development we suffer an incident that causes us a great deal of fear and everything associated with that moment becomes our "discomfort zone" where we feel unsafe and in potential danger.  Many of these become what psychologists call "phobias."  I will readily admit that I suffer from enochlophobia, the fear of large crowds in tight places (movie theaters, restaurants, civic centers, etc.) and I, like many others, will do what's necessary to avoid them.

When people are forced into their "discomfort zones," then their anxiety levels begin to increase and, when they reach a certain breaking point, people will react like a cornered animal and respond with extreme violence.  One way to reduce the chances of these outbursts is to allow people to avoid conditions that resemble their "discomfort zones" or, at least, allow the anxious person to openly discuss their feelings about the matter with whatever language they choose to use.  Yes, this might lead to incidents of self-imposed segregation, but that would be the better alternative to driving people to commit assaults or murder.

Forcing people to keep their feelings about sensitive social issues bottled up so as to not insult hyper-sensitive types only leads to a build-up of pressure which, like the over-cooked water heater, will lead to a great deal of destruction and heartache.  Time and further investigation will tell if this would be an unintended consequence of the actions of these self-righteous bullies, or their intent all along...

Make It Big Enough and Tell It Often Enough People Just Have to Believe It Regardless What It Is

With all this talk about more laws to control people's access to firearms and related equipment, there are a lot falsehoods, propaganda, and downright lies being said repeatedly by those in favor of disarming the American people.  I think it's time to set things straight so I'll just take a swing at a few of them.

"The Constitution of the United States - ," or sometimes more specifically, "The Second Amendment -  allows for reasonable restrictions on the people's right to keep and bears arms."

Let's have a look at the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, shall we.

"A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

Infringe - actively break the terms of a law or agreement; act so as to limit or undermine something; encroach   New Oxford American English Dictionary, Oxford University Press

Neither the U.S. Constitution, nor the Second Amendment to that Constitution, allows for "reasonable restrictions" since any form of government-imposed restriction, reasonable or otherwise, would be an infringement on the people's right to keep and bear arms.  So from where does this fallacy come?  The Supreme Court, of course.

As I've pointed out before, the Supreme Court has usurped for itself the power to determine the Constitutionality of any actions by the governments of these united States, or the people contained within the boundaries thereof.  It is the Supreme Court that allows for "reasonable restrictions" on many rights supposedly protected by the section of the Constitution known as the "Bill of Rights."  The main purpose of the Supreme Court has been to increase the power of the government and reduce the freedom of the American people.

"The right to own guns only applies to the militias and the modern day equivalent is the National Guard."

Though the word "militia" is mentioned in the Second Amendment, it is in that portion that is more of a declarative statement of fact - a militia (a group of citizens working together and armed with private weapons) is necessary to secure a nation that is free and not under tyrannical rule.  The portion that references the specific right and sets forth the limitation on the governments of the U.S. from interfering with it, says "the right of the people" and not that only of the several states, the citizens, or militia members.  It is open to everyone, regardless of their employment, or non-employment, status with the government.

Secondly, calling the National Guard a "militia" is a mere legal designation by federal law and the Guard is a professional military force directed by the President of the United States under the auspices of his position as "Commander-in-Chief" of the U.S. armed forces.  It is not to be understood as a militia in the traditional sense of that term since it no longer involves the common man as much as it employs professional soldiers hired as such for service to the government.

"Federal law is the supreme law of the land and trumps any State law meant to impede it."

This argument is usually brought forward when the governments of the several States propose laws to prevent the Federal government from enforcing one of its laws within the jurisdiction of the State.  The "supreme law of the land" in the United States is the Constitution and not just Federal law.  If one or more of the States passes a law that is Constitutional, yet interferes with a law passed by the Federal government that is also Constitutional (which is very rare) then the States usually cede power to the Federal government because who doesn't like letting someone else do the heavy lifting.  The Federal government does, after all, have greater resources and covers a larger area.

But, if the Federal government passes an un-Constitutional law and tries to enforce, or inflict, it upon the American people, then it is the duty of the States, as the creators of the Federal government, to reign in the agents of tyranny and stop them from oppressing the citizens of that State.  Most of the States are rather weak in their opposition to these grievous actions of the Federal government and propose punishing errant officials with just misdemeanors instead of the capital felonies they should be charged with.

"When the Second Amendment was written, it only applied to muzzle-loaded flintlocks and can't possibly have been meant to apply to modern firearms."

First, the word used is "Arms" and that includes all forms of weapons - knives, swords, clubs, spears, bows, and, of course, firearms - at whatever degree of technology the bearer wishes to own.  Secondly, the writers of the "Bill of Rights" were well aware of improvements in technology for weapons and, for that matter, the conveniences of modern living within their own lifetimes and they could most assuredly believe there would be more in the future beyond their own time.  The one thing they knew that would probably change very little would be Human Nature and therefore the people should always be prepared to protect themselves from criminals and tyrants.

Thirdly, and on those rare occasions when they actually get something right, the Justices of the Supreme Court have been able to apply the time-honored libertarian principles of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to other modern inventions like the telephone, television, and the Internet.  The right to a Free Press is not just limited to printed materials like newspapers or magazines, nor is the right to Free Speech limited to only public speaking engagements.  It is interesting that those who call the Constitution a "Living Document" that changes with the times should insist that it be stuck in the past when it comes to the right to live free in our present day.

"There are industrialized nations that have stricter gun laws than the U.S. and they have less violent crime than the U.S."

The worst part of this piece of propaganda is that it is basically correct but not necessarily the whole truth.  Yes, there are other countries that have more restrictive laws than the U.S. and they have less crime.  But, and this is a big "but," there are countries with less restrictive laws than the U.S. and they have less crime than the U.S., too.  As Dr. John R. Lott, Jr., PhD. points out in his book, "More Guns, Less Crime," crime rates boil down to being more about demographics rather than about laws prohibiting private gun ownership.

Japan is one of those countries that many like to present as an example of a modern disarmed and polite society.  Japan has laws that heavily regulate firearms in the hands of private citizens and Japan has a lower violent crime rate than the U.S.  Unmentioned is the fact that Japan has a very racially homogenous society with a population that consists of about 95% of people that would consider themselves, "Native Japanese."

Statisticians can carve up the U.S. for comparative analysis with other countries and when they find a piece that has the same ratio of different racial and ethnic groups within the local population as Japan has, they find these pieces have the same, if not lower, crime rate regardless of how less restrictive the local gun laws are.  If these folks look at a piece of America that has gun laws similar to Japan, but with a more diverse population that has no clear dominant racial or ethnic majority, then they find the crime rates are much higher than Japan.  It seems that it is the prevalence of people in a society, and not guns, that causes a higher crime rate.

When one cannot win an argument by the truth, then those with lower morals usually resort to lies.  The beauty of this is that they can be defeated, hopefully, by the spreading of the truth.  The truth will not set you free, but it will give you a better idea of who is trying to enslave you, and to be forewarned is to be forearmed...

President Obama Leads Mob to Hang Young Black Males Out to Dry

There is much to human history about the actions of mobs.  They have wreaked all forms of destruction and wrecked many lives with their acts of violence.  It is an interest of psychological inquiry as to why a crowd of 30 or more individuals (and some people question why we need high-capacity magazines) would cause so much bloodshed engaging in behaviors that so many of them would be too cowardly to do on their own.

The worst of these had to be the "lynch mob."  A quickly formed group of enraged citizens would join together in "righteous indignation" and work to rid their city, town, or neighborhood of criminals and other social undesirables by grabbing the nearest "not-one-of-us" and hanging that poor soul by the neck until dead.  A lot of these innocent folks were young Black males that happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

President Obama now calls upon the "mob" in Washington to inflict even more damage on America's frail economy by raising the Federal Minimum Wage from its current $7.25 per hour to $9.00.  I have already explained how "price floors," such as a minimum wage laws, cause an unsold surplus for the commodity that they apply to and, if the commodity is labor, then what we are talking about is unemployment.  Professors of Economics, Walter E. Williams and Thomas Sowell, have explained time and again how such laws adversely affect those on the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder in America and that is most commonly Young Black Males (YBM), with an unemployment rate generally hovering around 50%.

Long before this blog, I once wrote a paper suggesting one way to reduce this high rate was to allow Black entrepreneurs and small business owners to hire YBM's at a wage less than that mandated by the Federal Minimum Wage Law.  In exchange for the lower wage, the YBM would receive on-the-job training and work experience from a mentor/employer that they might more readily identify with on a social level.

I was immediately lambasted for suggesting that YBM's were worth less than young males from other races and labeled a racist bigot.  I had made no such suggestion and I did agree that such a law would be racist, but only a detriment to those young males from other races who would now suffer a higher unemployment rate than the YBM's.  Of course, this was not the first time in my life that I had been the victim of slander, libel, or perjury.

As a person who prefers to deal with reality as it presents itself to me, I have to ask the pointed question:  Which is more damaging to a young person's life, to have someone suggest that the labor of a young person with no job training or work experience is worth less than some arbitrary value assigned to his labor by our benevolent government officials, or to implement a government program that will doom the young person to a life without gainful employment and quite possibly drive them to a life of crime, an option that is known to significantly shorten one's lifespan?

President Obama claims to be the friend of the low and downtrodden in this country, but as his programs prove to be more damaging to this nation's economy, which in turn will affect those at the bottom more adversely than everyone else, we will all see that "with friends like him, we don't need any enemies..."