America the Great

The history of the United States of America has it share of unsightly stains. I categorize a "stain" on our history as things which run counter to the ideals and principles espoused in The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States of America, and the Bill of Rights.

The most enduring and noteworthy stains have been slavery, racism, and elitism, which both run directly counter to the foundational principle that "all men are created equal." An emerging stain is the intolerant, and anti-democratic movements of 'social justice', critical race theory (CRT), and 'wokeness.'

In spite of very real stains, the United States of America is unequaled in the history of the world for enabling the political liberty and economic prosperity of people all over the world.

Part 1 - Slavery

In fairness to the Founding Fathers, many of them recognized the hypocrisy of their egalitarian principles and the institution of slavery. They made some concessions in their principles to keep the states united as one nation. At the same time, they took steps to minimize the political leverage that might accrue to slave owners by discounting the value of their human chattel with regards to apportioning legislative seats. 

I believe the Founding Fathers also trusted that, over time, the principle of 'forming a more perfect union' would continue to erode slavery until it could be abolished entirely. Which is exactly what happened. 

The Three-Fifths Compromise

The so-called three-fifths compromise, alluded to above, is actually a racist statement, but it may surprise some to realize that it isn't racist towards blacks. It is racist toward Native Americans (Indians):

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three-fifths of all other Persons

Note that the words 'slave' and 'black' are not used anywhere is the Constitution. Rather the terms used are "free Persons," persons "bound to service for a term of years" (i.e., indentured servants), and "all other Persons." Only the "Indians" (all Native Americans) who were undeniably free persons, were called out and excluded by race from either category.

As a matter of Constitutional law, slavery was not a racial matter. Slavery was a legal status.

US Civil War Ended Slavery

The US Civil War was the slave owners' last ditch effort to preserve the institution of slavery which was, then, cornerstone to their economic livelihood. They had no way to know that less than thirty years after the Civil War (about 1894), Eli Whitney would invent the cotton gin, which would effectively eliminate a significant reliance on manual labor for the production of cotton.

Regardless of arguments over states' rights versus slavery as the proximate cause of the Civil War, it is incontrovertible that the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution is directly linked to the Civil War. It was passed in January of 1865 and ratified in December of that same year. The amendment ensured that the debate over the legality of slavery would be ended when the Union prevailed over the Confederate States of America. The amendment converted the Emancipation Proclamation, a potentially temporary executive order using the wartime powers of President Abraham Lincoln, into the overarching law for all states in the United States of America.

Separating Racism and Slavery

The 13th Amendment does not address racism, at all. It further perfects the Union by eliminating slavery. It also eliminates the portion of the US Constitution which discounted the voting power of slaves, because it eliminated the legal status of slavery.

AMENDMENT XIII

Section 1.

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2.

Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Source: National Archives 

Slavery is a legal status, not a racial one. 

There is ample evidence in the historical record to support this assertion. If we accept the terms 'black' and 'white' as racial identifiers, then the fact that blacks in America owned slaves substantially destroys the argument that slavery is a racial issue. Further, the historical evidence supporting the involuntary servitude (i.e., slavery) of Irish prisoners brought to the American colonies by the English destroys the remaining foundation of any argument that slavery in the Americas was purely a racist institution.

Part 2 Racism

Racism Defined

Racism has existed from time-immemorial. It is based on prejudice.

The Merriam Webster dictionary defines racism as:

• Belief that race is a fundamental determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race
• Behavior or attitudes that reflect and foster this belief : racial discrimination or prejudice
• Systemic oppression of a racial group to the social, economic, and political advantage of another
• A political or social system founded on racism and designed to execute its principles

Prejudice

Webster defines prejudice as: 

• injury or damage resulting from some judgment or action of another in disregard of one's rights
• preconceived judgment or opinion
• an adverse opinion or leaning formed without just grounds or before sufficient knowledge
• an instance of such judgment or opinion
• an irrational attitude of hostility directed against an individual, a group, a race, or their supposed characteristics

Notice that prejudice is characterized by being based on lack of knowledge and irrationality.

Prejudice and racism are nothing new. Throughout history, nearly every distinct tribe, people, and nation have fostered prejudice against others.  

Among the Native American tribes of the USA most nations referred to themselves as some variant of "the human beings." This implied that other nations were less than human.

The peoples of the USA believed they had a "manifest destiny" to conquer and control all of North America (and at times beyond those limits).

Romans considered themselves superior to the barbarian nations on their borders.

Germans are better than the French. The French are better than the Germans.

Before World War II, the racial prejudice of the Japanese led them declare themselves the "master race" and justify their conquest of Korea, China, and everywhere else as a logical outcome of their racial superiority and natural right to rule.

Nearly everyone is aware of the Aryan master race theory promoted by Adolf Hitler as the rationalization for the subjugation of all "inferior" races and even the extermination of specific races. His delusion led to the death of more than six million Jews as well as contributing to the deaths of 75 to 80 million soldiers and civilians in World War II.

Racial Slavery Justified

Regardless of the legal nicety distinguishing the issues of slavery and racism, it is irrefutable that, in the years leading up to the Civil War, most slaves in the United States of America were of African descent. The ethnic characteristics of the Africans were often very different than the European ethnic characteristics of those in power. This facilitated the mental gymnastics of Bible-toting slave owners to justify their enslavement, even in the face of Christian mores condemning slavery.

They reasoned that the ethnic differences between Africans and Europeans were outward manifestations of fundamental differences in the intellectual and spiritual capacities of Africans and Europeans.

This ethnicity-driven attitude toward slavery contrasts sharply with the historical justification of slavery as the merciful fate of the weak at the hands of the strong. Throughout human history, those who survived the violent conquest of their people were enslaved.

The Root of Raced-Based Slavery

Slave owners in the USA did not have the pretext of conquest to provide any moral justification for slavery, so they had to invent a moral pretext. If Africans were inherently inferior to Europeans, then enslaving Africans was an act of service, lifting them above their brute existence and into the lowest rungs of civilization. 

At best, this was a specious argument. At worst it was simply a lie and blatant rationalization to quell a guilty conscience. The suppression of teaching slaves to read and write was a necessary measure to prevent the refutation of this ethnic rationalization of slavery. Blacks who could read, write, and reason as well as any European would put the lie to the argument that they were inherently inhuman brutes, barely better than savage beasts, or other domesticated livestock.

To support slavery in the USA, the ethnic differences of Africans and Europeans had to be portrayed as more than ethnic variations. Instead the Africans had to be transformed into a species that was similar to humans, but something slightly less. They had to be portrayed as a separate race of humans-like creatures with capabilities and potentials distinctly different, and less than European humans.

Part 3 - Modern Stains

Critical Race Theory (CRT)

CRT is nothing more or less than racism. Its foundational concept is that individual and collective behavior is predestined based on skin color. But, CRT is not color-blind. It is specifically and particularly anti-white.

Under the notions of CRT, white people are evil oppressors and black people are oppressed victims.

A key premise is that any institution (such as the government of the United States of America) which has been created and supported by white people is inherently designed to promote white-supremacy. Further, such institutions are irredeemably corrupted by this racist purpose and cannot be corrected. Instead, they must be dismantled and replaced by institutions built by black people. The assumption inherent in the is either that black people will inherently create untainted institutions, or that building institutions which are anti-white is definitively "good" because white people are defined as "evil."

It doesn't take a revelation from God to see that such vituperative views will inevitably lead to genocidal violence. Violent, genocide is the logical end of advocacy of any philosophy based on irrational hatred of others because of their inherent traits.

Racial violence deriving from CRT will come from any or all of three sources:

1. As a natural extension of CRT as its advocates embrace their own version of Hitler's "Final Solution" and seek to exterminate whites.
2. White supremacists winning adherents and supporters to aggressively "protect" whites from  increasingly threatening and militant CRT supporters.
3. Ordinary people who reject racism, embrace Constitutional principles, and band together to defend themselves against militant CRT black supremacists and militant white supremacists.

When that happens, it will be another stain on the history of the USA.

Wokeness

While the dictionary definition of wokeness sounds like a good thing, its practice is pretty vile. The Cambridge English Dictionary defines wokeness as:

Aa state of being aware, especially of social problems such as racism and inequality

Being aware of social problems such as racism and inequality is a good thing. If we are unaware of problems, we are nearly incapable of resolving them. Unfortunately, in practice, wokeness is particularly centered in the notion of intersectionality. 

The way in which different types of discrimination (= unfair treatment because of a person's sex, race, etc.) are connected to and affect each other

Intersectionality, in practice, is a game of one-upmanship where each person tries to show how much more (potentially) they are oppressed than others because of their unique behaviors or characteristics. The underlying motive is to secure preferential treatment for some intersections more than for others. The reasoning is that the greater preference is required to offset the greater degree of oppression or discrimination. The reality is that practitioners of intersectionality want to derive financial benefits based wholly on their characteristics (inherent or otherwise) without any effort or value-add to society. The narcissistic foundation of intersectionality is that society should pay for the enrichment is supposedly receives from the presence of such intersections.

The Irony of Wokeness

The consummate irony of intersectionality is that when you carry it to its logical end point, you inevitably arrive at a doctrine which determines that the individual, is the ultimate expression of intersectionality and thus merits the greatest degree of societal protection and support. 

Individual worth and protection, regardless of other characteristics, is the cornerstone of the principles of Constitutional law and liberty. That is why the Constitution begins with the words, "We the People..." 

Social Justice

The Cambridge Dictionary defines social justice as:

"The idea that all people should have the same rights and opportunities and that a country's wealth and resources should benefit everyone in that country"

Like wokeness, this is another movement that sounds right in its definition, but is totally wrong in its execution.

Let's unpack this definition to find out where it goes wrong.

 "all people should have the same rights"

That statement is totally in agreement with the founding principles of the USA. 

 "all people should have the same ... opportunities"

Life Isn't Fair

Here, we begin to skate on thin ice. Opportunities are often closely linked with circumstances and personal characteristics. Suggesting that everyone should be given the same opportunities is based on the false assumption that life is fair and evenhanded in the distribution of our circumstances and characteristics. 

Some of us have greater intellectual capacity than others. The person with an IQ of 60 is unlikely to have the opportunity to attend MIT because that low IQ indicates the inability of that person to succeed at the level of intellectual endeavors needed to matriculate and succeed in studies at MIT.

Although there is not equivalent of and IQ for artistic talent, someone with my mediocre level of artistic skill is not going to benefit from, and hence not receive, an opportunity to attend Julliard. My abilities simply aren't sufficient to qualify me for attendance. 

Legislating such "fairness" of opportunities without regard to abilities will have the end result of destroying excellence, and all the benefits that come from excellence. Excellent inventions such as smart phones, excellent art such as a Warhol (even mediocre art such as a Bob Rossi), and many other marvelous and beautiful enhancements to our lives will cease to occur.

Outcomes

"a country's wealth and resources should benefit everyone in that country"

This component of social justice is focused on individual outcomes. Everyone, means every individual. The premise here is that we should all get the same outcomes. The assumption is that these outcomes are universally good, hence the word "benefit."

The bitter reality is that the only way you can ensure that everyone gets the same benefit is by denying all but the most rudimentary benefits to everyone. Worse, such enforced egalitarian poverty is at odds with basic human nature and thus is doomed to failure. Enforced poverty will inevitably lead to corruption as people seeks ways to manipulate the system to provide themselves with what levels of comfort they want (regardless of what they may, or may not, deserve).

Capitalism

Worst of all, this phrase is totally anti-capitalist. 

The beating heart of capitalism is sustained by two things:

1. the free and uncoerced exchange of goods and services
2. the natural principle of supply and demand

While governments and individuals may strive, or succeed, to exert coercion in exchanges, the natural principles of supply and demand cannot be subverted. They are inexorable.

Scarcity and utility are the natural drivers of value. People are willing to exchange more goods and services for those goods and services which are more scarce or of greater utility. They unwilling to exchange goods and services which are scarce or very useful and will do so only if the exchange is of equal or greater value to them.

Because of this natural principle, those who provide the most scarce or most useful goods and services will inevitably accrue a greater abundance of other goods and services than others.

Socialism

This is true even (or especially) in the halls of socialist governments, where valuable information or access is clandestinely and routinely traded for such goods and services as the holder of information or access desires. Political and economic power are commodities which are scarce and very useful. Thus, such egalitarian utopias almost immediately upon inception descend into corruption as illegal exchanges become the only means whereby anyone can rise above the enforced poverty dictated by the state.

Even if equality of outcomes were possible, it would be undesirable. The behavior of slaves is especially instructive in this point.

Social Justice is Economic Slavery

All slaves enjoy an equality of outcome from their labors. From their masters they get food, clothing, and shelter. The rewards do not increase in proportion to the success of the master's enterprise. As a result, when the master is not overseeing their work, slaves do only the minimal amount of work they are not forced to do.

No one will exert themselves to excellent inventions, art, innovations, or anything else, unless it will directly increase the rewards they receive for their efforts. You may argue that this should not be how people behave. However, you can just as effectively argue that the sun should rise in the West as many days as it rises in the East, and have just as much success at changing things.

Equality of Outcomes Equals Destitution

Equality of outcomes is both unattainable and undesirable. Equality of outcomes destroys initiative, innovation, excellence, and abundance. It leads only to universal poverty and destitution.

Part 4 - The Greatness of America

As I mentioned at the start of this essay, the United States of America is unequaled in the history of the world for enabling the political liberty and economic prosperity of people all over the world.

The USA is the first nation in the history of the world which was founded on the principles of individual liberty. The US Constitution and Bill of Rights is the first government expressly designed to protect the rights of the people and preserve them from oppression by the state.

The success of the American Revolution, and its founding principles, led directly to democratic revolutions all over the world, beginning first with France. It is arguable that if the American Revolution had failed, most of what we currently know as "the free world" would still be governed by powerful monarchies. Instead, they are republics, governed by leaders who are elected by the people to serve for a time while representing the best interests of the people. 

The USA has fought and won two world wars to defend the political liberty of people in other countries. Unlike conquering powers throughout history, the USA did not require political or economic subservience or servitude of its defeated foes. Rather, it expended its treasure to rebuild its former foes and encouraged their self-determination.

In the wake of the successful imperial efforts of the USA (a stain in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) instead of colonizing and retaining the servitude of countries such as the Philippines, Cuba, Mexico, and most of the Pacific Islands, in the twentieth century the USA relinquished control of these countries to self-governance.

Through most of the twentieth century and now in the twenty-first century, the USA consistently eschews colonialism and imperialism. Preferring instead to encourage self-governance, the rule of law, and universal recognition and protection of the inalienable rights of humanity.

The Decline of America

Nation Building

Sadly, our national good intentions have been abused as politicians have been seduced into "nation building."  We try to impose our economic and political values and structures of governance on other nations which have not reached a point of maturity where they have a majority of people who desire these. 

Most recently we see this failure in Afghanistan. Instead of using our military might to teach the Taliban that it is not in their best interests to support those who attack the people of the USA, we took over their country for a time. While there, we tried to encourage democratic government. We failed because democracy is never something that can be imposed upon a people. They must win it for themselves. True, they may need outside help, but it is worth noting that no French armies took the field with American revolutionaries against the British. The greatest share of bleeding for freedom was done by Americans.

Previously, we saw this same lesson explained to us in Vietnam. Before that, it was taught to us in the jungles of Central America during the so-called wars of the Banana republics. In all those cases, after we removed our military, the governments of those countries collapsed and re-emerged in forms that the people of that country were willing to support.

Moral Decadence

At the same time as we are seeking to build other nations, our national public persona has come to be widely portrayed by media and popular culture as dissolute, licentious, and pleasure seeking. Our movies, societal trends, and many of our laws seem to disregard the importance of the nuclear family, religion, and the sanctity of life. 

All these destructive societal trends were manifested preceding the destruction of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire. They are clearly critical performance indicators for the survival of any nation. Many of our current trends, are repugnant to wholesome people of all nations. It isn't hard to understand how Muslim extremists can gain credibility with more mainstream people by calling the USA "the Great Satan." Our society is becoming increasingly devilish and degenerate.

Conclusions

We have many old, and some new, stains on our history. Slavery, racism, CRT, wokeness, social justice, and even some imperialism are all stains on our history. Many of our old stains have been removed. Some persist and are made worse by new stains. Although the old stains of slavery and imperialism have been vanquished, racism persists and is being exacerbated by things like CRT and wokeness. Before the rise of CRT, racism in the USA was on the wane and nearly extinct.

 

Despite these stains on its robes, the USA is still the best place on earth to live. We enjoy a level of economic abundance, mobility, and liberty which is the envy of the world. Our political freedom (though rapidly eroding) is still substantially greater than anywhere else. The USA is still a shining city on a hill and a beacon of freedom. Those who say otherwise are either ignorant of the facts, or jealous and conniving for our downfall.

We will solve our social ills by ensuring that the law applies equally to everyone, without any regard to their immutable characteristics, or their choice of religion.

See Tom's political views on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/TomSheppardPoliticalViews/
Follow Tom on Twitter: @ThomasKSheppard

Tom Sheppard is a business consultant and coach to small business owners and individuals. He is a recognized author with dozens of titles in business and fiction to his credit. One of his endeavors is to help those who want to see their own book in print. He does this through his trademarked Book Whispering Process (TM).

The author is not an official spokesperson for any organization or person mentioned herein.

(c) Copyright 2023 A+ Results LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Your comments are welcome... Please observe some ground rules. No profanity, vulgarity, or personal attacks. Profanity, vulgarity and personal attacks not only betray a lack of vocabulary and imagination, they also are the hallmarks of bigotry, and bigotry is the hallmark of someone who is fundamentally insecure in their views. Facts are always welcome.

If you believe Government is NOT the answer to all our problems, you will want to read
 Godvernment: Government as God

Two Things You Can Do to Make the World a Better Place Today

Tom Sheppard

10/16/2020

Many people today are very agitated about the state of our nation and the world. Everyone has their own reasons for being distraught. Some are so upset that they are taking to the streets in protests. Others are engaging in violent and riotous behavior, either believing that violence is the only way to effect change, or because they feel others have no right to their own views or property.

For many Americans taking to the streets is either too extreme, ineffective, or dangerous. They feel helpless in the face of these strong storm winds of change. Typically, the silent majority remains silent, speaking only through their votes, rather than carrying placards, or guns, in the streets.  However, times like these seem to require more than just silently casting our votes, because many interpret silence as acceptance.  That implicit acceptance feeds their belief that they are a majority rather than a minority view.

The reality is that the protestors and violent actors represent a small, but very vocal and active minority in this country. The majority of people believe that change can, and should be enacted through non-violent, civil means.

What is Fundamental Change?

While some of those espousing the need for change are calling for "fundamental" changes in this country, the majority of people are understandably reluctant and resistant to fundamental changes in our country. They have good reason for their reticence.

The phrase "fundamental change" literally means changing our foundations.  To be clear, the foundation of our nation is the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights and other Constitutional Amendments.  So, anyone calling for fundamental change is calling for the abolition of the US Constitution either in whole or in large part.

The publicly stated premise of the need for this fundamental change is a false charge that the United States is fundamentally flawed and supports racism and other unjustices through the very concepts, ideals, and organization framed in our Constitution.

When you liken the Constitution to the foundation of country you can fully understand what people like CNN correspondent Don Limon means when he talks of "burn[ing] it all down."  If you want to replace the foundation of a building, in most cases, you have to tear down the whole building and start over.  This is exactly what these activists are talking about.  What is more, the new foundation they want to install is Marxism, also known as communism, socialism, statism, fascism, progressivism, liberalism, etc.

Institutional Racism Has Been Removed

I stated above that a key driver of demand for all this change is a false charge of fundamental racism.  This cry of fundamental racism is an extension of a similarly false charge of systemic racism pervading our nation and its institutions.

I say these charges are false based on the mountains of evidence which refute these charges.  Although there is not sufficient space in this short column (or in a whole library) to demonstrate all the evidence refuting these claims I will provide a few counterpoints to support my belief that these are false charges.

The Declaration of Independence which set forth the guiding principles which led to the creation of our Constitution boldly declares that, "all men are created equal" and all have the same rights. Further it states that the source of these rights come to individuals by right of birth, not dispensed or revoked by any government of men.  These declarations exempted no one.  

While it is true that the protection of these rights was imperfectly implemented in the Constitution, those imperfections which supported slavery and the limitation of rights based on race were cured with both the blood shed in the US Civil War and legislation in subsequent years including amendments to the constitution ensuring equal rights for all citizens without regard to gender, race, or religion.  The fact that those imperfections were cured within the current framework demonstrates that the foundation is both strong and worthy of continued support.

Racism Persists

While it is inarguable that racist and sexist behaviors continue to persist in individuals and even in some societies and businesses, the purging of racism and sexism from the halls of federal, state, county, and city governments across the United States of America is clearly demonstrated in both statute and court cases where such anti-social behaviors have been punished with both criminal and civil penalties.  Likewise court cases demonstrate that the weight of law has been consistently been brought to bear to rectify racist and sexist discrimination in both public and private institutions and societies wherever it has been found.

In short, the history of our nation shows over and over again that our system of government is very effective in the ongoing perfection of the defenses of our rights.  

A More Perfect Union

Some seek to discredit the Constitution and our national foundation by pointing out the flaws of the founders.  Noting how some of their behaviors were in greater or lesser degree in conflict with the ideals they embodied in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.  The notion here is that their creation could not be less flawed than the founders.

The reality is that the founders were not perfect.  Many of them had aspects of their lives which were not in full harmony with the principles they put forward in the framing of our government.  As noted above, some of their imperfections were passed on through the Constitution.  

While individuals have the option of repenting and changing their behaviors to align their actions more closely with their principles, those attacking the foundation of our nation would have you believe that no such means to remedy defects exists for our government.  However, as I mentioned above, those means not only exist, they have been applied and continue to be applied.  

Because of its amendments, our Constitution today is a more perfect document than it was when it and the The Bill of Rights were ratified back in 1787.  

Our founders declared their intent was to create "a more perfect union."  What the created was not perfect.  It was, however, more perfect than what it replaced.  And since then, it has been perfected further.

The world today is so much better than it ever has been before because of the existence and rise of the United States of America.

To this point in my column I have explained why our union does not require fundamental change.  What follows is to help to take action to protect our foundation from those who want to burn down our nation and rip up the US Constitution.

Action #1 - Stop looking to government to solve societal problems.

Those who are seeking to "burn it all down" are rationalizing their efforts on the basis that the government is not adequately addressing societal ills.  This argument rests on a false foundational premise.  It assumes that it is the role of government to cure the ailments of our society.  

The problem with this assumption is that our societal ailments are neither more nor less than manifestations of our own human imperfections and bad actions driven by ungodly defects in human nature.  When I say ungodly, I mean that literally. 

Ungodly defects in human nature are those motives, thoughts, and actions which are in conflict with the best attributes we believe are inherent in deity, e.g., love, charity, kindness, generosity, etc.  Any efforts which profess to be attempting to rid us of these ungodly defects are reflexively wrapped in a mantle of altruism because they appear to be aimed at making us better people and thus making the world a better place.

Government Cannot Change Human Nature

Unfortunately, there is no government or economic architecture which has ever been devised and tested in the history of this world which is capable of transforming human nature into a more godly version of itself.  That is the realm of religion, not government.

The reason governments fail to effect this transformation is because they, necessarily, are only able to control the outward behaviors of people and cannot force thoughts and beliefs to change on demand.  Those which have tried, notably communism is in this camp, have used mass extermination to eradicate those whose manifested thoughts and beliefs, or behaviors, failed to conform.

In contrast with the universal failure of government in this regard, religion has achieved the transformation of man's nature on several individual and at least two documented collective occasions.  However, the ability to sustain a community of such transformed individuals has been, at a minimum limited by individual life spans and sometimes they were exterminated by those with differing beliefs or agendas.  

Successful Individual Transformations Achieved by Religion

According to Buddhism, the Buddha successfully transformed his nature, and then taught others.

According to Islam, Mohammed's nature was changed as he became the prophet, and he then taught others.

Judaism and Christianity teach that Enoch, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Peter, Saul/Paul, and John the Revelator all overcame the defects in their human nature to transform into the kind of people we should be.  I omit Jesus of Nazareth from this list because although "he learned wisdom" in this life, his disciples believe he was perfect from birth, rather than achieving some transformation during his mortal life.  It is his nature that Christians seek to emulate.

Successful Collective Transformations Achieved by Religion

According to the Old Testament, not only did Enoch achieve personal transformation to the point where he "walked with God,"  the entire city of Zion, people led by Enoch, achieved that transformation to the point where all of them were "caught up into heaven."

The New Testament records a period where the disciples of Christ, for a time at least, achieved a very happy state where they had all things in common and had no poor among them.

Successful Individual or Collective Transformations Achieved by Socialism

• The Soviet Union - NO 20+ million killed (just by Stalin) trying to make it work.
• Cambodia - NO 2+ million killed trying under Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge to make it work.
• Cuba - NO with nearly 100,000 dissidents dead, the country still looks like it is living in the early 1950's, at best. 
• Venezuela - NO 7,000+ dead by "security forces" with violent unrest and rampant poverty
• China - NO 45+ millions killed already with tens of thousands more in "re-education" camps right now.

With this sort of proven track record shown in this scorecard you would think that socialism in all its forms would be dead and buried, never to rise again.  However, like some shambling, shuffling, half-decayed horrifying walking-dead zombie in a B-grade film socialism continues to rise up and threaten the lives of us all.

If the zombie of socialism were as blatantly distinct from our current government it would be easy to hunt it down and kill it.  However, at least since FDR's New Deal, socialism has been making massive inroads into the American government.  So many socialist solutions have been implemented to lesser degrees that nearly the whole economy and government has been converted over to socialism piecemeal.  Don't believe me?  Take a good hard look through this lens.

Anytime government is tasked with doing something for people which they should be doing for themselves, that is a form of socialism.

Social Security is Socialism

The Great Depression threw many people into poverty and highlighted the fact that many of the elderly lacked sufficient means to support themselves in their waning years.  In response, Congress passed the Social Security Act and FDR signed it into law on August 14, 1935. The underlying notion of Social Security is that we somehow have a life-long right to economic security and everyone around us is responsible to protect that right.

Economic Security is Not a Right

Take note that economic security was not listed in The Declaration of Independence as one of our inalienable rights, nor did it appear in any form in The Bill of Rights, or any constitutional amendment.  The notion of this "right" is based on the idea that it is the "right" thing for us to care for the less fortunate among us.

This is not only a perversion of transforming morally right behavior into a legally defensible right it uses immoral means to support this morality.  In the past, impoverished people, if they were unable to rectify their own situation turned first to family and then to the community through private charities.  

Private Charity Beats Government Programs

Private charities and families rely on morally impelled charity to help the impoverished.  Government uses forced taxation and income redistribution, which are immoral means to try to remedy a moral wrong.

Healthcare is Not a Right

Medicare and Medicaid likewise are state sponsored charity.  Both are aimed at setting right a morally wrong situation where people are unable to afford their health care.  In fact the whole notion currently being promoted around "Medicare for All" is just a logical extension of this usurpation of private charity by the state.  Are you seeing a pattern here?  

Congressman Bernie Sanders, a self-proclaimed socialist and erstwhile Presidential candidate has proclaimed that from the socialist view private charities should be abolished.  The socialist view is that all "charity" is handled by the state by using tax dollars pulled from the pockets of working people.

When President Johnson declared the "war on poverty" he integrated a whole new raft of government programs to "right" a moral wrong of people living in poverty.  He attacked the problem through taxes and government programs instead of promoting what was already working to reduce the number and percentage of people in poverty - self-reliance, hard work, thrift, and the safety net of the nuclear family.  The results speak for themselves - destruction of the nuclear family among the poor, rising poverty levels, rising crime rates in poor areas, and the list of human misery just keeps mounting with every new wrong that socialists want to make right with the power of government. 

How can you determine if a politician or social movement is promoting good or bad solutions?  

Use the simple question, will the implementation of this result in increased dependence on government or increased emphasis on self-reliance?  

Take note, I ask you to consider not just the hype, but to consider how it will look once it is implemented.  If it is the former, oppose it.  If the latter, support it.  

Here are some practical ways to implement Action #1.

Read and analyze party platforms (national and state) to uncover whether the party philosophy trends toward reliance on government or self-reliance of individuals.  Most parties post their platforms online now so they are relatively easy to find.

Read and analyze proposed and actual legislation and ordinances to uncover whether they tend to increase the intrusion of government into private lives or to protect individual and states’ rights.

Study the effects of existing laws and ordinances to uncover whether they tend to support self-reliance and individual industry or government dependence.  Look at key demographic trends before and after a given piece of legislation was introduced.

For example, if you look at poverty rates in the US, particularly in the Black American community you will see that the rates were falling steadily for many years prior to LBJ's War nn Poverty.  After, the rates leveled out, instead of continuing to decline, and have begun to climb. 

It is telling that a key indicator of poverty is whether or not there are two parents in the home.  Prior to The War on Poverty, the percentage of single mothers in the Black American community was less than 10%, now it is well above 50%.  It seems pretty clear that the economic incentives in this legislation had the effect of encouraging out-of-wedlock marriages and the dissolution of the nuclear family.  

The results have been devastating the the Black American community, locking multiple generations into poverty and enforcing the soft bigotry of low expectations to exacerbate the problem by discouraging academic achievement by children.

Study and analyze both the voting records and pronouncements of candidates and politicians to uncover where their words and deeds align with the protection of individual and states’ rights and encourage self-reliance or government dependency.

Action #2 - Make Your Views Known

Exert your influence to encourage the cause of liberty, self-reliance, charity, and decreased worship of government as the cure for all our ills. Bear in mind, this step is neither passive nor free of costs.  The biggest costs may be the loss of friends and the vitriol of those who disagree with your views.  Whenever you take a stand, there are inevitably those who will oppose you.  These days, that opposition has proven to be particularly nasty and uncivil.

Whether or not others become uncivil is irrelevant. If you want to maintain the moral high ground that comes with supporting our unalienable rights (and their attendant responsibilities) you need to maintain high standards of civility and decorum.  Descending to the level of those who oppose you degrades you and your position, creating a semblance of moral equivalence between the principles you promote and those you oppose.

Use social media appropriately – don’t go negative.

Most of us are far too familiar with how nasty people can be on the internet.  Don't be one of those folks.  When you use social media, keep it positive and uplifting.

Many years ago while I was serving as a missionary, one of my trainers pointed out a very important principle to me.  He taught me that there are two ways to attempt to win people to your view. 

One way is to tear down the view of others while touting the brilliance of your view.  He pointed out that this seldom works because it puts people on the defensive.  They tend to become reactive and are so busy thinking of how to defend or attack that they often quit listening to the positive points you are trying to make.

The alternative is to largely ignore the view of others while simply talking up the good points and benefits of your view.  Many times, this wholly positive approach disarms them a bit and draws them in to look at your view more deeply and begin to ask questions.

To that end, here are a few rules of the road to remember:

• Make sure your posts and comments encourage support for your views without denigrating others
• Make complimentary comments, likes, follows, and shares of posts which support your views without denigrating others.
• Engage in civil discourse instead of uncivil discourse.

Please note, avoiding denigrating other view points does not mean avoiding disagreeing with them.  I am not calling for the total avoidance of conflict.  Rather, I am calling for the use of constructive conflict instead of destructive conflict.  

Constructive conflict is conflict that doesn't leave people damaged in its wake.

Civil discourse means learning how to disagree without being disagreeable. 

• Use facts as much as possible. Don't blindly repost memes either for or against.  Make the time to do a little research and try to verify facts before sharing them.
• When you move from fact to belief, state it as a belief.  This clarity bolsters your use of facts and deprives opponents of the opportunity to justifiably call you out for substituting beliefs for facts.
• Do not use insults or name-calling (ad hominem attacks).  When you resort to hurling insults at your opponents it is because you have lost your ability to use facts and reason and are resorting wholly to emotion to exert influence.  While emotion has its place, all too often it leads people into indefensible and ill-considered positions.
• Engage with and support political candidates and parties that align with your views.

Consider Running for Public Office

Having run for office I can tell you it is no picnic.  It takes some money, good support, and a lot of hustle.  As nasty as it may sound, running for office is all about marketing, and you are the product.

Perhaps the worst aspect of running for office is the very negative views many people have about politicians.  As soon as you run for office, you are now a politician.  All those unkind things you may have said or heard about lying, dishonest politicians will now be said to you and about you.

Look local first. School Board, City Council, Mayor, County Council, County Clerk, etc.

It sounds trite, but it is true, the higher you go in politics the less you can actually affect.  You can have the most significant impact at the local levels rather than at state and federal levels.

Summary

Two things you can do to make the world a better place today are to stop looking for a governmental solution to societal ills and make your influence felt in a positive way.  These are pretty simple, but not particularly easy steps.  However, you can do them and they will begin to immediately make your tiny corner of the universe a bit better.

See Tom's political views on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/TomSheppardPoliticalViews/
Follow Tom on Twitter: @ThomasKSheppard

Tom Sheppard is a business consultant and coach to small business owners and individuals. He is a recognized author with dozens of titles in business and fiction to his credit. One of his endeavors is to help those who want to see their own book in print. He does this through his trademarked Book Whispering Process (TM).

The author is not an official spokesperson for any organization or person mentioned herein.

(c) Copyright 2020 A+ Results LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Your comments are welcome... Please observe some ground rules. No profanity, vulgarity, or personal attacks. Profanity, vulgarity and personal attacks not only betray a lack of vocabulary and imagination, they also are the hallmarks of bigotry, and bigotry is the hallmark of someone who is fundamentally insecure in their views. Facts are always welcome.

If you believe Government is NOT the answer to all our problems, you will want to read
 Godvernment: Government as God

The Truth Behind the Separation of Church and State

Image (c) Mark Hayes Photography; and Depositphotos.com

This article was excerpted from Godvernment: Government as God

Tom Sheppard

9/4/2020

Image (C) Michael Rosenwirth and Depositphotos.com

The unfortunate truth is that the French Revolution was a foreshadowing of the coming conflict between religion and politics.

When Robespierre and his associates moved to take control of the government in France and vanquish the despots of their day, they included the clergy in the same bucket as the royalty.  They were not wrong on that score.

Since about 300 AD, Christianity and the Christian church, be it Protestant or Catholic, had been taken over and made into an arm of the government.  By the way, this is no singular event in world history.  Religion has been used by government, particularly by monarchies, as a subtle means to control the population for millennia.

In ancient Egypt, the pharaoh was considered a god incarnate.  He had the power to condemn his enemies not only to prison or death in this world, but to consign their eternal souls to endless torment.

In the majority of ancient monarchies, the Priest-King, where the King was also the high priest of the prevailing religion, was the norm.  The Priest-King was responsible for standing, as the Israelites asked Moses to do, between god and his people.  He was to supplicate god on their behalf and instruct them on his divine will for them.

If things went well, the Priest-King was inviolate.  However, if drought prevailed, or warfare went badly, the Priest-King was often, if not the first, then at least the most prominent sacrifice made to divert the anger of the heavens and return favor to his people.

The reason the revolutionaries of France targeted the clergy along with the nobility is for the simple fact that not only were they often one and the same, with lesser sons of noble houses being given plum positions in the clergy, but they also worked closely together in their efforts to oppress the people and to keep them in line.  After all, if your cleric tells you that disloyalty to the king is a mortal sin which can condemn you to Hell, what god-fearing person in his or her right mind would entertain thoughts of abolishing the monarchy for even a minute?

Even today, the monarch of England is recognized as the head of the Anglican Church.  In effect, the English monarch is the high priest(ess) of Anglicanism.

When Henry the Eighth split with the Roman Catholic Church, he made sure he provided himself a means to keep the religion of the land as much under his control as possible, under the circumstances.  He also did not hesitate to let his clergy be as zealous in defending his throne as any of his other vassals.

In fact, religion or churches as arms of the state were the prevailing forms of government the world over until the Founding Fathers of the United States of America succeeded in establishing the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights as the governing framework for this country.  With the lessons of history staring them in the face, it is no accident that the very First Amendment to the Constitution addresses the need to protect religion from usurpation by the state, to prevent it from becoming an arm and tool of the government.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

There are many in this country who take up the cry of “separation of church and state” to rally people to their cause of pushing religion from the public square.  How shocked would their adherents be to realize that they have actually turned the intent of the First Amendment totally on its head?

The First Amendment doesn’t say anything at all about prohibiting religion from influencing government.  Rather, it says that government has no right to infringe on the free exercise of religion.  And, it follows immediately by adding that freedom of speech, press, assembly and petition are to be equally protected from the predations of government oppression, regardless of the intentions of the governing.

A website on preserving religious freedom established by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints succinctly lists seven distinct implications of the First Amendment.

 

1. Government can’t establish an official church or favor one church over another.
2. Government cannot discriminate against religious believers.
3. All people have a fundamental right to believe, worship, and exercise their religious beliefs as they wish, so long as it doesn’t harm the health and safety of others.
4. Individuals can gather together with other believers to form churches.
5. Churches have a right to conduct their internal affairs without government interference.
6. Government must sometimes provide special accommodations to religion.
7. Government can listen to all voices—including religious voices—when making policy.

https://www.lds.org/religious-freedom/faq/protected-in-the-first-amendment

 

Today, there are many who are pushing not only to silence religious voices in the public square, but to silence religion altogether.

I stated early in this chapter that this conflict is looking more and more like a cage match to the death.  I was not over-dramatizing the situation.

The reality is that this death match is exactly what Marx was aiming to provoke, and it is not a matter of chance that the strongest persecutors of organized religion, and Christianity in particular, are coming from the ranks of those who have embraced one of the modern faces of Marxism.

    The Union of Church and State

 Regardless of whether you call it Marxism, Maoism, communism, socialism, fascism, progressivism, liberalism, statism, or collectivism, it all amounts to essentially the same thing—the belief that government is the answer to the defects of humanity.

Today, there are legions of organizations purporting to be pushing for social justice.  I could easily fill page after page of this book with just the names of such organizations without any explanation of the stated goals of these groups, their charters, or their leadership. 

All these social justice groups believe that humanity is defective.  They are in good company with that belief because all the religions of the world and countless self-help authors agree that, individually and collectively, the human race is defective in ways that risk self-extermination.

The social justice groups also believe that our current governments are defective.  It is hard to contend that a defective human race can, on its own, come up with a perfect form of government. 

Both the religionists and the social justice organizations make much of their appeals for people to do right by each other, to liberate the oppressed, and to protect the downtrodden.

These social justice groups, regardless of whether they sprout from religious or secular sources, fall into two broad categories.  On one hand, you have groups that are advocating that government non-involvement is a primary cause of social injustice.  They argue that government must get more involved to solve these difficult problems of societal inequity.  Programs must be established, taxes must be levied, laws must be put in place and enforced, and dissenters must be forced into line and penalized or jailed if they fail to comply.

The second group advocates that government interference is making a bad situation worse.  They argue that the result of government intervention is a consistent worsening of any problem the government seeks to solve.  Their prescription is greater personal and private efforts with a primary focus on helping people change themselves as the means to resolve social inequities one person at a time.

The first group wants to use the coercive power of organized government, the power of the gun that ultimately backs all laws and regulations promulgated by government, to force us all to become better human beings and to treat each other as we should.

The second group wants to give us the freedom as individuals to choose on our own to associate with people and efforts that are designed to encourage us all to become better human beings by helping us to see the intrinsic benefits of choosing to treat people properly.  Sometimes they have tightly focused programs to achieve this end, but more often they have broad, generalized structures called churches whose avowed purpose is to bring together groups of like-minded people and enable them to achieve a change of heart on the individual level, however that might occur.

Both groups have the same ultimate goal: to save humanity from its own worst instincts, but each group has embraced a radically different approach.

I hope to show in this book that, in this case, it is all about the approach. 

Machiavelli Was Wrong

Nicolo Machiavelli is credited with asserting that “the end justifies the means.”  Although I haven’t found that phrase in his seminal book, The Prince, the sentiment is present. 

Moreover, in the actions of all men, and most of all of Princes, where there is no tribunal to which we can appeal, we look to results. Wherefore if a Prince succeeds in establishing and maintaining his authority, the means will always be judged honourable and be approved by every one.

Nicoló Machiavelli, The Prince

I am told that the actual quote of “the ends justify the means” is from Ovid.

Regardless of the exact source of the quote, there are a great many people who believe that the principle expressed is true, and base their actions and plans on that premise.

I believe that the ends will never justify the means, because an evil means will never produce a good end. 

Trying to force people to be better human beings is evil and will never produce the stated objective.  The end result of trying to force people to behave well at best will produce a society of pious predators—legal-minded hypocrites that will “strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel.”  It will be a society where on the outside, people appear polite and kind, noble, and good, while in fact their actions will result in the oppression and depredation of nearly everyone.  But the depredations and oppressions will be wrapped in the altruistic mantle that it is being done “for the benefit of everyone,” or “for the greater good.”

Perhaps the worst part of this lie will be that those who benefit will be far less than the 1% of the population today whom the liberal elites excoriate for their wealth.  At the height of the existence of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and its affiliates in the Warsaw Pact, far more than 99% of the people lived in utter poverty and scarcity compared to the average citizen of the NATO nations.  Far less than 1% of the people in these socialist nations enjoyed anything like the abundance available in a typical U.S. supermarket.  And the less-than-1% who enjoyed this wealth were all either government bureaucrats at the top of the hierarchy of an unelected government, or violent criminals—and sometimes those were exactly the same people.

What makes this so bitterly ironic is that the anti-1%ers, if they get what they are asking for, will still remain in the lower 99%, while just facilitating the shift of the 1% from one group to another.  And the second group will be far more villainous than the current 1%, because the current 1% needs to provide the masses with something of value to them to attain their wealth, while the regime that waits in the wings will just have to pass a law to line their pockets.  They won’t add any value at all to anyone but themselves and their henchmen.

    Lessons from Collectivist History

      What surprises me most about the current popularity of collectivism such as that preached blatantly by politicians such as Bernie Sanders, and less blatantly by most other political candidates, is that its advocates appear to be utterly unconcerned about the lessons of history that can quickly and easily be seen by examining the events that have transpired in those countries where the principles of collectivism have actually gained power and been implemented.

The acolytes of collectivism almost uniformly sneer at fascism as something evil.  Apparently they are unaware that Nationalsozialismus, is the German word for Nazi or National Socialism.  Before Hitler initiated his infamous “Final Solution” in an attempt to exterminate the Jews of Europe, he executed more than 100,000 homosexuals, handicapped, elderly, and infirm “for the good of society.”  These unfortunates were considered a drain on society, and it was the civic duty of all good Germans to embrace a healthy lifestyle and keep themselves fit and healthy.

Like Mussolini, Hitler made many private companies, especially large ones, into state-run organizations.  The socialist governments of Italy and Germany ran every aspect of the economy.  They controlled who could get a job, and noted that people who didn’t hold a job outside the home were drains on society, just like the other “undesirables” they had already shipped off to death camps.

In addition to the horrors enacted by the Nazi party on Europe, we can easily see the lessons of socialism that emerge from both the USSR and China.

In the USSR, Lenin and Stalin “re-educated” tens of millions of their citizens to encourage the desired kind of “right thinking.”

Lenin is credited with being directly responsible for the deaths of 5 million citizens.  Stalin is credited with killing more than 20 million of his own people, and that is not counting the more than 20 million Russians who died during combat in World War II.

In China, Mao Zedong (AKA Mao Tse Tung) initiated “the Great Leap Forward” to convert China from an agrarian country to an industrial one, obviously for the good of the people.  This resulted directly in famines that killed between 15 and 45 million citizens.  Add to this staggering amount the number of people he “re-educated” to death or executed outright because they didn’t agree with his means, and he is credited will killing 40 to 70 million of his own people.

Between the great socialist leaders Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, discounting war deaths, their push for socialism and enforced social justice resulted in the deaths of more than 100 million people.

In more recent times, Pol Pot, after succeeding in overthrowing the government of Cambodia, used his Khmer Rouge child soldiers to brutally slaughter about 6 million of his own citizens, focusing especially on those who were college-educated.  He recognized that those people with a good education were unlikely to accept whatever he said as truth and as right when they had the lessons of world history already in their heads.

If you add in the war-related deaths that came from efforts to force people to accept socialism, you immediately get another 20 million Russians who died trying to stay out of the German version of socialism and 9 million Russians who died in the Russian Civil War to implement socialism in that country.  Add in tens of millions of civilians and soldiers from the battlefields of Europe to Southeast Asia, and you get a horrifying picture of the blood and horror that prevails whenever and wherever socialism gains control and begins its efforts to force people to behave in the ways its leaders dictate.

Conclusions

When government replaces God as the vehicle for the best hopes of humanity, the inevitable, historically proven result is widespread death, destruction, and unrelenting misery for the vast majority of people.

Even the avowed atheist and anti-religionist Sam Harris, in his book The Moral Landscape, advocates that science proves that such a result is inarguably and absolutely bad by anyone’s standards.

Food for thought!

See Tom's political views on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/TomSheppardPoliticalViews/
Follow Tom on Twitter: @ThomasKSheppard

Tom Sheppard is a business consultant and coach to small business owners and individuals. He is a recognized author with dozens of titles in business and fiction to his credit. One of his endeavors is to help those who want to see their own book in print. He does this through his trademarked Book Whispering Process (TM).

The author is not an official spokesperson for any organization or person mentioned herein.

(c) Copyright 2020 A+ Results LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Your comments are welcome. Please observe some ground rules. No profanity, vulgarity, or personal attacks. Profanity, vulgarity and personal attacks not only betray a lack of vocabulary and imagination, they also are the hallmarks of bigotry, and bigotry is the hallmark of someone who is fundamentally insecure in their views. Facts are always welcome.

If you believe Government is NOT the answer to all our problems, you will want to read
 Godvernment: Government as GodClick on the image below to buy your copy today

Godvernment is available in both paperback and ebook format through Amazon.

The Constitutional Right And Social Obligation To Carry A Gun

Tom Sheppard

3/20/2019

I was looking at a website promoting products related to lawful concealed carry of firearms.  The site included a video testimonial in which the piece below was referenced.  Curious, I looked up the reference and found the article below.  Originally penned more than a decade ago it is a little dated, however its fundamental points are unaltered by time.  If you are wondering about whether or not is right to carry a firearm, you should give this article serious consideration before deciding.  You should also consider whether or not everyone has an inalienable right to defend themselves.  

"if our lives are endangered by plots or violence or armed robbers or enemies, any and every method of protecting ourselves is morally right."

  Cicero

The Constitutional Right 

And Social Obligation To Carry A Gun

By Robert H Boatman

The Author and his estate have granted permission to reprint it in full or in part as long as attribution is given to Robert H. Boatman

There’s an old wisecrack, true as witticisms, proverbs and aphorisms usually are. It goes like this - funny the things you see when you don’t have a gun.

Suzanna Gratia (now Gratia Hupp) was having a pleasant lunch with her parents in Luby’s cafeteria in Killeen, Texas, when she saw a pickup truck come crashing through the wall. A man armed with two guns and plenty of spare magazines emerged from the truck and started shooting everyone in sight, including Gratia’s mother and father. Al Gratia was shot fatally in the chest. Ursula Gratia was shot point-blank in the head. More than 20 other people in the cafeteria were murdered in cold blood before the killer turned one of his guns on himself and blew his own brains out.

Suzanna hid under a table, clutching her purse which normally contained a .38 revolver. In deference to Texas law at that time, which prohibited carrying concealed weapons on one’s person, she had left her gun in her car. Several more dead diners had guns legally and inaccessibly locked in their cars. Suzanna Gratia Hupp has vowed never to make that mistake again, though such pronouncements always come far too late.

“The decision to follow the law cost me the lives of my parents,” she says. “There is not a day that goes by when I do not think about that.”

Not long after the Killeen massacre, John Taylor and Craig Godineaux knocked on the locked front door of a Wendy’s restaurant in New York City. They called out to the manager, Jean Dumel Auguste, by name. Taylor was familiar with the operation and layout of the restaurant, having worked there for a short time before he was dismissed for theft. The manager opened the door for Taylor and Godineaux and led them to his basement office. Minutes later, he used the store’s intercom to summon his entire night crew of six employees down into the basement for a meeting. What followed was one of the worst massacres in New York history.

The two armed killers herded all seven Wendy’s employees into a walk-in refrigerator, bound their hands, gagged their mouths, covered their heads with plastic bags, ordered them to kneel on the floor, and methodically shot each person in the head with a small-caliber pistol at point-blank range. They then stole about $2,000 in cash and left. New York law and Wendy’s corporate policy had prohibited the victims from arming themselves.

All of the people involved in these incidents were, in a profound way, responsible for their own deaths or the deaths of loved ones. They were equally responsible for the deaths of innocents who dared associate with them and, by abstract extension, for the deaths of everyone ever killed in similar circumstances. Anti-gun laws and policies are always complicit in the execution of innocents. And it’s appropriate that survivors are always ashamed of their inadequacy.

In the final analysis, to face evil with impotence - whether out of cowardice or feeble-mindedness or submission to foolish laws - could well be responsible for the death of society.

Suzanna Gratia Hupp decided to fight back. She set out to change the foolish laws. She turned her anger on her legislators who had “legislated me out of the right to protect myself and my family.” She joined the crusade for the right to carry concealed weapons in Texas and she ran for the state legislature. She was successful on both counts, though not in time to save the lives of her parents.

Today, Rep. Hupp has some harsh words for those gun-control fanatics who come out of the woodwork every time there’s a mass slaying like Columbine. “Why is it that mass shootings now seem to always take place in schools and post offices, places where guns are not allowed? They’re always in these so-called gun-free safety zones.” Like Luby’s cafeteria.

Five Wendy’s employees - Ramon Nazario, Anita C. Smith, Jeremy Mele, Ali Ibadat and Jean Dumel Auguste - took their shame to their graves. There was no good reason on earth why it had to end that way.

A scenario almost identical to that of Wendy’s in New York began to unfold at Shoney’s restaurant in Anniston, Alabama. Two armed robbers took over the restaurant, which was filled with two dozen customers and several employees, and started to herd everyone into the restaurant’s walk-in refrigerator. But this time a smart employee, Thomas Terry, drew his concealed .45 and shot both of the bad guys before this particular mass execution could take place. In a matter of seconds, one criminal lay dead, the other incapacitated, and more than two dozen innocent people had been handed back their lives thanks to a man who had a gun and was not afraid to use it. Thomas Terry, bleeding from a grazing wound to the hip, was happy to play the hero with so many lives at stake.

And still they ask, Why do you carry a gun? What are you afraid of? Do you think some nut is going to drive through the wall and start shooting everybody? Do you think a couple of hardened criminals are going to shove you in the refrigerator and execute you? To which you can only reply, Do you think when you walk out of here and cross the street you’re going to be hit by a truck?

Only when the custom of carrying a gun once again achieves its deserved high level of social legitimacy and political priority will this country get back on the track of respect for human freedom and dignity that has set it apart from the rest of the world for two centuries.

The Anti-Freedom Zealots

Ask any American and he’ll tell you he believes in liberty. To a point, of course. All too often, when liberty goes beyond the inalienable right to choose one’s own brand of mouthwash, the cold fear of freedom begins to seep into the bones.

Cheering on the fear of freedom are those quivering souls steeped in terror at the thought of independent decision-making and freedom of action on the part of their distrusted fellow man. These anti-freedom zealots are members of the well established international community of political ideologues who have brought you such gun-control activists as Joe Stalin and Chairman Mao. And since at least the 1930s it has been clear that even The Land of The Free has its share of these political low-lifes. We must face the fact that the anti-freedom zealots have made their American home in the left, or “liberal,” wing of today’s Democratic Party.

Anti-freedom zealots live in a wayward universe of their own making, a cosmos where nature is contradicted at every turn, where responses to every problem are suicidal measures as certain to make the problem worse as showering gasoline on a housefire. The upended logic of these fanatics is stunning: If there’s a problem with bad guys shooting good guys, then let’s make sure the good guys don’t have guns.

Criminologist Cesare Beccaria, writing in the 18^th century, had a word to say about anti-freedom zealots. “False is the idea … that would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one may drown in it … The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm those only who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. [emphasis added]  Can it be supposed that those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws of humanity, the most important of the code, will respect the less important and arbitrary ones, which can be violated with ease and impunity, and which, if strictly obeyed, would put an end to personal liberty. Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides …”

Many Americans today have been taught by propaganda disseminated in the mass media that guns lead dangerous lives of their own. Thus the notorious anti-gun politician, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) describes a rare and highly desirable sporting rifle in the following terms: “This kind of weapon can blow up a limousine, a helicopter, can take out a vehicle, armored vehicle, maybe a mile away. It can shoot through seven buildings!”

One wonders why the rabid Mr. Waxman and his ilk don’t use similar words to describe the lethal five-gallon bucket, an evil instrument of death which drowns twice as many children each year as are shot by America’s 250 million guns.

Anti-freedom zealots are both helpless and hopeless. They are like decaffeinated coffee, de-clawed cats, or poorly bred dogs who’ve been easily persuaded to forego their natural hunting instincts in order to avoid minor electrical shocks and so tend to have recurring problems with their weakened nervous systems.

Sarah Brady of Handgun Control Inc, has said, mimicking Clinton’s pathetic duck-hunting argument, that “the only reason for guns in civilian hands is for sporting purposes.” Anti-freedom zealots like the Bradys and the Clintons need to be informed that to save one’s life is not a sporting purpose. There’s nothing sporting about it. If it takes a full battle-dress M-16 or AK-47 to get the job done, well, that’s what they’re for.

In their terminal confusion, anti-freedom zealots pay lip service to a Constitution they don’t really understand, but in every act and every thought, whether out of total ignorance or deliberate intent, reveal that their mission is to facilitate the destruction of the Constitution and its replacement with an unnatural ideology most of us thought rusted to bloody dust a long time ago.

Anti-freedom zealots are a malignant danger to all life on Earth as we know it, because their anti-self-defense, anti-gun position is an expression of the most utter contempt for individual human life it is possible to conceive.

Anti-freedom zealots see nothing wrong with leaning on their neighbors to provide them with personal protection even though they would never consider returning the favor. They worship their effeminate fantasy of an all-powerful government with true religious fanaticism [my point exactly in Godvernment].  They believe all other humans are as mentally weak, irresponsible, incompetent and self-hating as they know themselves to be. And they encourage only civilization’s most self-destructive tendencies.

To be charitable, anti-freedom zealots are unthinkingly naïve, stone-blind and cowardly. To be frank, they are the evil seeds ultimately responsible for all the crime, war and needless violence the planet has ever seen.

Paradise Lost

In the beginning, weapons grew on trees.

In the lost paradise of our species, every man, woman and child was armed to the teeth with the finest state-of-the-art killing machines society could produce, and all was well. As man grew more sophisticated and his weapons grew even more effective at protecting weaker citizens from stronger ones, the first evil caveman genius saw that, as a precursor to the enslavement and destruction of his intended victims, all who would dare resist him must first be disarmed. In the name of peace. In the name of social harmony. In the name of common sense. To save the children. Evil geniuses, and evil idiots, have been singing that tune ever since. And the more gullible among our species have all too often danced to it.

The now-dead Peter Shields, founder of the radical anti-gun Handgun Control Inc, sings, “If attacked, put up no defense. Give them what they want.”  [they may just want to kill you, like Johnny Cash sings, "I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die."]

The aforementioned anti-gun politician, California Rep. Henry Waxman, sings, “If someone is so fearful that they're going to start using their weapons to protect their rights, it makes me very nervous that these people have these weapons at all!” Few politicians in today’s unabashedly socialist Democratic Party have not at some time joined in the anti-gun chorus or made up worse verses of their own.

In the recent past, half of American voters demonstrated that they are capable of dancing to anything if it has a simple beat and a catchy tune. They cheerfully elected and reelected to the highest office in the land a psychopathic criminal and traitor of the lowest order, a thoroughly dishonest and evil man who devoted his entire personal and political life to the eradication of timeless human liberties Americans take for granted.

Few American voters have even read the Bill of Rights, brief as it is, much less understood its meaning and significance. How do you think they’d feel on any given day about a total re-write? As the ghost of Bill Clinton fades back into the putrefied swamp from whence it came, we must remember the lessons learned.

Niccolò Machiavelli cautioned as early as the 16^th century that the demise of the armed citizen meant the end of civic virtue and, with it, the end of the people’s control over their own destiny - and a very fast end at that, as he observes in The Art of War: “Rome remained free for four hundred years and Sparta eight hundred, although their citizens were armed all that time; but many other states that have been disarmed have lost their liberties in less than forty years.”

Whom are we to trust with our lives and our liberties, other than ourselves?

Carrying A Gun Is An Absolute Right

The framers of the Constitution were under no pressure from the NRA when they wrote “… the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

In the same spare sentence, they reaffirmed their historical preference for a “militia” over a standing army, and indicated that this militia should be composed of armed citizens - citizens of a “free state” whose right to keep and bear arms must never be infringed. Anti-freedom zealots, including academic invalids and the hypocrites of the mis-named American Civil Liberties Union, have stood on their pointy heads in tortured attempts to misinterpret this sentence ever since. Those of us who know how to read the English language have no trouble at all.

The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. THE RIGHT OF THE PEOPLE to keep and bear arms shall NOT be infringed. The right of the people TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS shall NOT be infringed. The right of the people to keep and bear arms SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED. What part of NOT do the illiterates out to subvert the Constitution NOT understand?

The Constitution of the state of Pennsylvania (adopted September 28, 1776) allocated more words to make the point even more unmistakable: “XIII. That the people have a right to bear arms for the defence of themselves and the state; and as standing armies in the time of peace are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to be kept up; and that the military should be kept under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power.”

Indeed, the individual right to keep and bear arms for personal defense is based on exactly the same principle as civilian control of the military. One wonders if the ACLU would argue with that.

The Second Amendment, like most other articles in the Bill of Rights, was adopted from the English Bill of Rights of 1689 which, in turn, was based on centuries of English Common Law. English jurist Sir William Blackstone observed that the English Bill of Rights clearly meant that Englishmen possessed “the right of having and using arms for self-preservation and defense” and that “having arms suitable for their defense” was one of the five auxiliary rights people possessed “to protect and maintain inviolate the three great and primary rights,” the first of which is “personal security.”

Unfortunately for the English people, they have been persuaded by their own far-left government and insidious anti-gun activists to allow the English Bill of Rights to be, as they might say, shat upon. Today, the English do not have the right to keep and bear arms for self-preservation and defense. As a direct result, they live in a crime-ridden society that grows worse with each passing day.

The recent 2000 International Crime Victims Survey published by the Dutch Ministry of Justice, a highly respected and accurate measurement of the percentage of people by nation who are victims of violent crimes, ranked England far ahead of the United States (which ranked 8^th), and second only to Australia (where English-style anti-gun laws are also in effect) as the most violent nation. A recently disarmed England now has twice as much violent crime as the United States.

The English Home Office, which cooperated in the survey, has refused to publish these findings in England. It’s better not to remind the gullible subjects how empty were the promises of safety and security for which they so eagerly traded away their very real and priceless freedoms and responsibilities.

The great Roman philosopher and senator, Cicero, immortalized armed self-defense as an “inalienable right” more than 2,000 years before the U.S. Constitution did so. Cicero said:

There exists a law, not written down anywhere but inborn in our hearts; a law which comes to us not by training or custom or reading but by derivation and absorption and adoption from nature itself; a law which has come to us not from theory but from practice, not by instruction but by natural intuition. I refer to the law which lays it down that, if our lives are endangered by plots or violence or armed robbers or enemies, any and every method of protecting ourselves is morally right.

Even people to whom armed self-defense is but a remote abstraction often endorse, without even realizing it, the unquestionable principles underlying the right to carry a gun. Jaron Lanier, writing in Discover Magazine (Feb. 2001) said in reference to new copyright-protection technology - “In a democracy, citizens are supposed to act as partners in enforcing laws. Those forced to follow rules without being trusted even for a moment are, in fact, slaves.”

It is perfectly obvious that we have a natural right to arm ourselves and to kill any criminal or other force that threatens us just as surely as an elephant has a right to kill an attacking lion and a mother bear has a right to kill a wolf grinning suspiciously at her cubs. Animal-rights extremists extend the animals’ right to the killing of humans under such circumstances.

Even the Dalai Lama, Nobel Peace Prize and all, said in May of 2001 during a speech about “nonviolent resolutions to conflict” to 7,600 Oregon and Washington high-school students - “But if someone has a gun and is trying to kill you, it would be reasonable to shoot back with your own gun.” So said the Dalai Lama.

There are criminals among us who are both homicidal and incorrigible. Their parents took a shot at civilizing them and failed. Their school teachers took a shot at them and failed. The odds are overwhelming that government welfare programs and penal institutions took a shot at them and failed. If it ever becomes your turn to take a shot at them, don’t fail.

Carrying A Gun Has Always Been Both Right And Duty

There have been many societies in which not carrying a weapon was a serious and severely punishable crime. This was true in Greece, Rome, Europe, Britain and, though seldom enforced, is still true in certain places in America today. This is as it should be. A citizen who shirks his duty to contribute to the security of his community is little better than the criminal who threatens it, and is better off living in a society that places lesser demands on his capacity to accept responsibility. As cowards from the Vietnam era discovered, that’s what Canada is for.

English scholar Granville Sharpe, who helped bring about the abolition of slavery in England and supported American independence, wrote in 1782 that “No Englishman can be truly loyal who opposes the principles of English law whereby the people are required to have arms of defence and peace, for mutual as well as private defence … The laws of England always required the people to be armed, and not only armed, but to be expert in arms.”

In 1785, William Blizard, chief legal advisor to London’s mayor and city council, stated that “The right of his majesty’s Protestant subjects, to have arms for their own defence, and to use them for lawful purposes, is most clear and undeniable. It seems, indeed, to be considered, by the ancient laws of this kingdom, not only as a right, but as a duty…”

Commenting on the early legal requirement that every American male and every American household be armed, attorney Don B. Kates says that citizens “were not simply allowed to keep their own arms, but affirmatively required to do so.”  He further says that these statutes reflect the classical world view that “arms possession for protection of self, family and polity was both the hallmark of the individual’s freedom and one of the two primary factors in his developing the independent, self-reliant, responsible character which classical political philosophers deemed necessary to the citizenry of a free state.”

You don’t have to have lived in ancient Greece or Rome or Middle Ages England or revolutionary America or on the west side of L.A. during the Manson massacres, as I did, to know that anyone who lives in a house without a gun is a dangerous fool.

There have not always been police. England had none until 1829, America had none until 1845, and only in the so-called modern era have police officers been armed. At one time, fear of anything resembling a standing army was so intense that police were, in fact, the only citizens not allowed to carry guns. Throughout much of 19^th century England and America, the policy of forbidding police to have arms while on duty was the only form of gun control.

Police were expected to rely on a fully armed citizenry to come to their aid when armed enforcement of the law was necessary - a circumstance that occurs with growing regularity today.

Armed Citizens Of The 21^st Century

On January 3, 2001, the Citizens’ Self-Defense Act of 2001, intended “to protect the right to obtain firearms for security, and to use firearms in defense of self, family, or home, and to provide for the enforcement of such right” was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives. Given the current sorry state of our elected representatives, the bill was never expected to pass into law, but rather to serve as a symbol of just how timid, disconnected from reality and contemptuous of liberty most Washington politicians - who would never consider voting for such a bill - have become.

It doesn’t matter. The fundamental liberties reaffirmed in H.R. 31 were never granted by politicians in the first place. The source of these liberties is as old as the first free man. And, as long as man is free, the source will remain.

Included in the Citizens’ Self-Defense Act of 2001 are the following Congressional findings:

(1) Police cannot protect, and are not legally liable for failing to protect, individual citizens, [emphasis added] as evidenced by the following: (A) The courts have consistently ruled that the police do not have an obligation to protect individuals, only the public in general. For example, in Warren v. District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Department, 444 A.2d 1 (D.C. App. 1981), the court stated: “[C]ourts have without exception concluded that when a municipality or other governmental entity undertakes to furnish police services, it assumes a duty only to the public at large and not to individual members of the community.” (B) Former Florida Attorney General Jim Smith told Florida legislators that police responded to only 200,000 of 700,000 calls for help to Dade County authorities. (C) The United States Department of Justice found that, in 1989, there were 168,881 crimes of violence for which police had not responded within one hour. (D) Currently, there are about 150,000 police officers on duty at any one time. (2) Citizens frequently must use firearms to defend themselves, as evidenced by the following: (A) Every year, more than 2,400,000 people in the United States use a gun to defend themselves against criminals - or more than 6,500 people a day. This means that, each year, firearms are used 60 times more often to protect the lives of honest citizens than to take lives. (B) Of the 2,400,000 self-defense cases, more than 192,000 are by women defending themselves against sexual abuse. (C) Of the 2,400,000 times citizens use their guns to defend themselves every year, 92 percent merely brandish their gun or fire a warning shot to scare off their attackers. Less than eight percent of the time does a citizen kill or wound his or her attacker. (3) Law-abiding citizens, seeking only to provide for their families’ defense, are routinely prosecuted for brandishing or using a firearm in self-defense. For example: (A) In 1986, Don Bennett of Oak Park, Illinois, was shot at by two men who had just stolen $1,200 in cash and jewelry from his suburban Chicago service station. The police arrested Bennett for violating Oak Park’s handgun ban. The police never caught the actual criminals. (B) Ronald Biggs, a resident of Goldsboro, North Carolina, was arrested for shooting an intruder in 1990. Four men broke into Biggs’ residence one night, ransacked the home and then assaulted him with a baseball bat. When Biggs attempted to escape through the back door, the group chased him and Biggs turned and shot one of the assailants in the stomach. Biggs was arrested and charged with assault with a deadly weapon - a felony. His assailants were charged with misdemeanors. (C) Don Campbell of Port Huron, Michigan, was arrested, jailed, and criminally charged after he shot a criminal assailant in 1991. The thief had broken into Campbell’s store and attacked him. The prosecutor plea-bargained with the assailant and planned to use him to testify against Campbell for felonious use of a firearm. Only after intense community pressure did the prosecutor finally drop the charges. (4) The courts have granted immunity from prosecution to police officers who use firearms in the line of duty. Similarly, law-abiding citizens who use firearms to protect themselves, their families, and their homes against violent felons should not be subject to lawsuits by the violent felons who sought to victimize them.

[Thankfully, in the years since 2001 many states have issued so-called Stand Your Ground laws which have nearly eliminated such abuses of law-abiding citizens defending themselves.  TKS]

In 1987, a year after Glocks were introduced to the U.S., Florida enacted a pioneering “shall-issue” right-to-carry law that has served as the model for the rest of the country. The Florida law affirmed the right of a private citizen to carry a concealed gun and eliminated the abuses so typical of “discretionary” right-to-carry laws that resulted in gun permits being awarded arbitrarily to the political cronies of petty officials, limousine liberals, movie actors, athletes and various other celebrity representatives of the rich and famous crowd, but denied to so-called “ordinary” citizens. The Florida law made it crystal clear that any citizen with basic firearms training and a felony-free record would be issued a concealed-carry permit upon request, period.

Florida’s landmark right-to-carry law was supported by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, Florida Sheriffs Association, Florida Police Chiefs Association and other law enforcement groups. And it was supported by Florida voters.

The media, however, was predictably vociferous in its opposition to the exercise of Constitutionally guaranteed rights, and in its total submission to the party line of radical anti-freedom, anti-self-defense and anti-gun forces. Headlines predicted vigilante justice and wild-west shootouts on every corner. “Florida will become the “Gunshine State.” “A pistol-packing citizenry will mean itchier trigger fingers.” “Florida’s climate of smoldering fear will flash like napalm when every stranger totes a piece.” “Every mental snap in traffic could lead to the crack of gunfire.”

Such dire and colorful predictions, of course, proved totally false. Nevertheless, that same hysterical fear-mongering and bald-faced lying are used even today every time a new state gets ready to pass an enlightened right-to-carry law. In actual fact, the only notable thing that happened for the first five years after Florida passed its right-to-carry law was that, as homicide rates in the U.S. soared, Florida’s homicide rate fell a dramatic 23 percent. A few of the opponents of concealed carry actually had the courage to admit they were wrong.

Thanks to the intensive lobbying efforts of the NRA, along with the tireless grassroots work of politically aware gunowners, 33 states now have Florida-style laws which require the prompt issuance to their citizens of legal permits to carry concealed weapons. Well over half of the U.S. population, more than 60 percent of all handgun owners, live in these free states, yet no more than one to five percent ever apply for such licenses.

Notwithstanding the fact that most people do not carry guns, the mere possibility that an intended victim could be armed with a handgun eliminates millions of crimes every year. 

According to the FBI, states with “shall-issue” right-to-carry laws have a 26 percent lower total violent crime rate, a 20 percent lower homicide rate, a 39 percent lower robbery rate and a 22 percent lower aggravated assault rate than those states that do not allow their citizens to legally carry guns.

Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Florida State University, Gary Kleck, in Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America (Aldine de Gruyter Publishers, 1991) found that “robbery and assault victims who used a gun to resist were less likely to be attacked or to suffer an injury than those who used any other methods of self-protection or those who did not resist at all.”

Convicted felons reveal in surveys that they are more afraid of armed citizens than they are of the police. And well they should be. Armed citizens kill 2,000 to 3,000 criminals each year, three times the number killed by the police. And only two percent of civilian shootings involve an innocent person mistakenly identified as a criminal, whereas the error rate for the police is more than five times that high.

Kleck’s research shows that private citizens use firearms to protect themselves and thwart crime about 2.5 million times a year. Citizens use firearms to prevent mass killings, bank robberies, gang attacks, carjackings, rapes, kidnappings and hostage-takings. They use them to help capture prison escapees and murderers, to come to the aid of outnumbered or ambushed law enforcement officers. Yet only a handful of these 2.5 million life-saving uses of firearms are ever reported in the mainstream press.

If a lot more people carried guns, what kind of a society would we have? Certainly not the kind predicted by anti-gun fanatics. Those hysterical doomsayers have been proven absolutely wrong one hundred percent of the time. Would we have a crime-free society? 

Certainly not. Criminals are as natural and immune to total eradication as fruit flies. But a better-armed society would severely limit the violent damage criminals wreak before they are stopped. Criminals are naturally self-destructive. The reasons they are so doesn’t matter. To assist them in their self-destructiveness is the polite and civilized thing to do. Thus another ageless axiom: An Armed Society Is A Polite Society.

In his essay, Behavior Modification And Self Defense, Michael Mitchell writes that laws do one thing and one thing only - provide a penalty for wrongful behavior. The function of laws is to punish people, and punishment is a form of behavior modification. But laws are obviously only effective on the law-abiding populace. Criminals, by definition, don’t respect the law; they make their living breaking it. And fear of punishment is only effective if it is swift, sure and severe.

In these days when the legal system cannot be relied upon to provide effective punishment for criminal behavior, armed self-defense can. It’s definitely swift, as the gun will appear during or immediately after the negative behavior. It’s sure, since, if the criminal doesn’t stop his assault, he will be shot. And most people would definitely call a bullet to the chest severe.

The beauty of armed self-defense is that, because of its immediate, sure, and severe nature, the mere threat is usually enough to stop the behavior. Is it any wonder that states that pass concealed-carry laws experience immediate and obvious drops in crime rates? The violent criminal in these states isn’t nearly as worried about being arrested for his crime as he is about being shot by his would-be victim. This fact fits perfectly with well-established principles of behavior modification.

On the flip side, the crime facilitators (gun control advocates) with their notions that we should submit to criminal assault, reward criminal behavior. The criminal gets what he wants - your money, your dignity, and maybe your life. Since positive reinforcement - reward - is the strongest, most effective behavior modification tool, that criminal behavior is likely to be repeated. In other words, by submitting to criminal demands, you are encouraging criminal behavior.

Mitchell did not say, but I will, that the most effective way to modify the behavior of a criminal is to modify it to the extent that he is no longer capable of any behavior at all.

In 1998, John R. Lott, Jr., senior research scholar in the School of Law at Yale University, authored the most comprehensive and exhaustive study of crime and gun control laws ever conceived, based on the largest data set on crime ever assembled. His landmark book, More Guns, Less Crime (The University of Chicago Press, 1998, 2000), now available in an updated second edition, includes thorough analyses of more than 54,000 observations and hundreds of variable factors across more than 3,000 counties in all 50 states for 18 years.

The assiduously researched conclusions reached by Lott immediately set off a wave of panic among anti-gun fanatics and drew organized, systematic personal attacks of the most vicious and dishonest nature, including death threats leveled at Lott and his wife and children. Yet not a single serious academic challenge of Lott’s research, his methodology or his incontrovertible conclusions has ever been successfully mounted. In fact, Lott’s conclusions have reluctantly been called “bulletproof” even by the liberal mainstream press. Among those conclusions are:

• Gun ownership saves lives. 
• Gun ownership also saves money. Nationwide, each one percent increase in the number of people owning guns reduces crime victim costs by over $3 billion.
• Concealed handgun carry by private citizens reduces violent crimes, including rape, murder, aggravated assault and robbery, throughout the entire community and in surrounding communities.
• When a state passes a right-to-carry law, crime reduction is immediate and substantial, and crime-reduction benefits continue to grow the longer the law is in effect.
• The greater the number of concealed handgun permits issued, the greater the reduction in crime.
• Mass shootings in public places are reduced to virtually zero within four or five years after right-to-carry laws are passed - except in designated “gun-free” zones, such as schools, where self-defense is known to be prohibited.
• The largest drops in violent crime from concealed handgun carry occur in the most urban areas with the greatest populations and the highest crime rates.
• Citizens who do not carry guns benefit equally from the crime reduction which results when other citizens carry guns. The people who benefit most from this “halo” effect are women, children, the elderly and blacks.
• Of all the methods studied by economists, the carrying of concealed handguns is by far the most cost-effective method for reducing crime. Each and every concealed handgun permit issued reduces total economic losses to crime victims by $3,000 - $5,000. 
• Accident and suicide rates are unaltered by the presence of concealed handguns.
• The effect of increased penalties for using a gun in the commission of a crime is small.
• The Brady Law, other mandated waiting periods, safe-storage laws and one-gun-a-month laws all increase crime, especially rape.
• Background checks, training requirements and age restrictions have no crime-reduction benefits.

Bottom line, in keeping with the title of his work, the more guns there are in society and the more these guns are carried by private citizens, the less crime there is.

These are some of the reasons why police, who fight crime for a living and are well aware of the realities of street criminals, support right-to-carry laws for private citizens by an overwhelming three-to-one margin. This is an even higher margin of support for right-to-carry than the strong support voiced by the civilian population.

Policemen are nobody’s personal bodyguards. Their jobs are to find and arrest people who have committed crimes, not to prevent such potential crimes from happening in the first place. Clearly, the responsibility for victim-prevention lies with the victim-to-be.

The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals (Bowers v. DeVito, 1982) did not mince words when it ruled, “There is no Constitutional right to be protected by the state against being murdered by criminals or madmen.” 

What It Means To Carry A Gun

That loaded Glock in your holster is a powerful expression of your Constitutionally guaranteed liberty as an American citizen, your recognition of the solemn duty you have to your fellow man, and your willingness to accept the full weight of a life-and-death responsibility.

When you are prepared to defend yourself, you are equally prepared to defend all of society and all of its guiding principles. Your responsibilities are therefore many - moral, legal and tactical. That is why most people, including lifelong gunowners, experienced hunters and competitive shooters, even in states that freely issue concealed carry permits, do not choose to carry a gun.

Your moral responsibilities are to fire your gun into another human being only when the line of necessity has clearly been reached, and then to fire without hesitation and to full effect. Remember the words of Cicero.

Your legal responsibilities are to justify your actions to those who would call you a criminal at the drop of a hat, and quite possibly to a jury of your peers, most of whom have neither the competence nor the courage to carry a gun in their own defense. Read the findings of the Citizens’ Self-Defense Act of 2001.

Your tactical responsibilities are to carry your gun with confidence, to be well trained in your ability to operate it effectively, and to have instilled in yourself an iron will to use deadly force to prevent or end violence committed against yourself or others. Most of this book is dedicated to your tactical responsibilities, because that’s what will save your life.

Violence happens either at random, or directed toward the obviously vulnerable, or toward someone in particular for a reason. You can rest assured it will not happen at the shooting range when you are all suited up in your speed rig with a plan of action worked out for the coming run-and-gun stage. It will happen when you are home sleeping in your bed, shopping at the grocery store, walking out to get the mail, mowing the grass, at dinner, at church, at the theater.

The most dangerous places in the world are those called “gun-free safety zones” by their ignorant political creators and known by criminals and psychopaths as “safe-to-kill zones.” Even an adolescent school kid can figure out that an advertised killing field where no one is allowed to shoot back is the safest location in the world to carry out a mass shooting. Don’t even consider going to a place like that unarmed, whether it’s your kid’s school or a national park. If you can’t handle breaking the law, don’t go.

The assistant principal of a high school in Pearl, Mississippi, broke the law. He kept a .45 in his car parked on the school grounds. When a deranged student opened fire, Joel Myrick ran for his gun. Two students were killed because Myrick had to retrieve his gun from his car instead of his holster. But the .45 eventually prevailed, and Myrick stopped the massacre long before police arrived on the scene. God only knows how many lives he saved. But assistant principal Joel Myrick wasn’t awarded any medals. Of the several hundred newspaper and television stories about the incident, only a few even mentioned his name. Almost none revealed the fact that he used a gun to stop the killings.

When you bodyguard someone for a while, or when you just live a normal life with your eyes wide open, you realize how vulnerable we all are to becoming another tidbit-of-opportunity in the relentless food chain that sustains the life of this unpredictable world. It’s a realization not of paranoia but of reality. That’s the way it is, always has been, always will be. You can ignore it out of faint-heartedness, deny it out of lunacy, submit to it out of a fatalistic contempt for your own life and the lives of others, or you can face it with courage and intelligence and prepare yourself to deal with capricious reality’s predisposition toward danger.

Most of those dangers can be met with nothing more than a strong I’m-not-a-victim mindset and body language. Many others may shrivel with the demonstration of superior verbal skills. Still others may require a fundamental knowledge of martial arts, a container of pepper spray, a makeshift club, the presence of a well-wielded knife or the sight of a firearm. A few, perhaps one in a lifetime, will not be affected by any kind of less-than-lethal response and will not end until you churn your attacker’s dreams and determination into a chunky red stew and spew it all over the street with a couple of big-bore hollowpoints. The trouble is, you never know when or where that last one is coming.

If you ever find yourself under attack by an armed criminal, you will be on the defensive and he will be on the offensive. In other words, he will have a strong advantage going in. And, though he will not have trained himself to shoot nearly as well as you have trained, he will be far more experienced in the art of killing. The odds are, any criminal who is intent on killing you has probably killed men before, knows how to do it, knows how it feels and likes it. You’re not going to talk him out of it, scare him out of it, or wound him out of it. You’re going to have to kill him.

Studies show that simply brandishing a weapon saves many lives, but I am personally against the idea of waving a gun around while your adversary thinks. The way to overcome his offensive advantage is to strike without warning. Once you make the decision to free your Glock from its holster the entire situation should be over and done with in a second or two. The most important component in practicing your draw is firing the instant you have a sight picture on your target, and continuing to fire until your assailant no longer exists.

More than a century of military and police research tells us that most people, including up to 85 percent of trained soldiers and cops, are psychologically unable to use deadly force in a life-or-death situation no matter how compelling the circumstances may be. If you can’t kill, there is no reason for you to carry a lethal weapon.

Carrying a loaded gun with the ability and will to use it is not a casual fling meant to bring some excitement into your boring life. It is an all-embracing lifestyle and must take precedence over your respect for law, your fear of social criticism, your love of humanity, your wardrobe and your drinking habits.

You can never be unaware of the weight you carry on your hip or under your arm. You can never forget your responsibilities. You must wear your Glock with the same allegiance as your wedding ring. If you’re not married, your Glock is your wedding ring. Wear it for life. Don’t even think about leaving home without it. Be prepared to use it at a moment’s notice. Carry it all the time. And shoot to kill.

“Liberty or death,” the meaning of which is clear and absolute, is but a trivial phrase if you do not carry a gun. For freedom-loving Americans, the five most important words in the English language are, and always have been - from my cold dead hands.

Before his death in 2009, Robert H Boatman authored at least six books on firearms.

Tom Sheppard is a business consultant and coach to small business owners and individuals. He is a recognized author with dozens of titles in business and fiction to his credit. One of his endeavors is to help those who want to see their own book in print. He does this through his trademarked Book Whispering Process (TM). 

 The author is not an official spokesperson for any organization or person mentioned herein. 

(c) Copyright 2019 A+ Results LLC. All Rights Reserved. 

 Your comments are welcome... Please observe some ground rules. No profanity, vulgarity, or personal attacks. Profanity, vulgarity and personal attacks not only betray a lack of vocabulary and imagination, they also are the hallmarks of bigotry, and bigotry is the hallmark of someone who is fundamentally insecure in their views. Facts are always welcome.