(This letter was emailed to White House on 12-20-12.)
President Obama c/o The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
Dear Mr. President,
I know that you receive 20,000 letters a day and that you actually read 10 of them every day. I really do respect you for trying to get a pulse on what is going on out here.
Pretty shocking admissions from the liberal Jeffrey Goldberg on gun control.
An Honest Liberal Writes about Gun Control
December 16, 2012 by Dan Mitchell
I wrote earlier this month about an honest liberal who acknowledged the problems created by government dependency. Well, it happened again.
First, some background.
Like every other decent person, I was horrified and nauseated by the school shootings in Newton, Connecticut.
Part of me wishes the guy hadn’t killed himself so that he could be slowly fed into a meat grinder.
And my friends on the left will be happy to know that part of me, when I first learned about the murders, thought the world might be a better place if guns had never been invented.
Sort of like my gut reaction about cigarettes when I find out that somebody I know is dying of a smoking-related illness or how I feel about gambling when I read about a family being ruined because some jerk thought it would be a good idea to use the mortgage money at a casino.
But there’s a reason why it’s generally not a good idea to make impulsive decisions based on immediate reactions. In the case of gun control, it can lead to policies that don’t work. Or perhaps even make a bad situation worse.
I’ve certainly made these points when writing and pontificating about gun control. But I’m a libertarian, so that’s hardly a surprise. We’re people who instinctively are skeptical of giving government power over individuals.
But when someone on the left reaches the same conclusion, that’s perhaps more significant. Especially when you get the feeling that they would like ban private gun ownership in their version of a perfect world.
That’s why I heartily recommend Jeffrey Goldberg’s article in The Atlantic.
Here are some of the most profound passages in the article, beginning with a common-sense observation that there’s no way for the government to end private gun ownership.
According to a 2011 Gallup poll, 47 percent of American adults keep at least one gun at home or on their property, and many of these gun owners are absolutists opposed to any government regulation of firearms. According to the same poll, only 26 percent of Americans support a ban on handguns. …There are ways, of course, to make it at least marginally more difficult for the criminally minded, for the dangerously mentally ill, and for the suicidal to buy guns and ammunition. …But these gun-control efforts, while noble, would only have a modest impact on the rate of gun violence in America. Why? Because it’s too late. There are an estimated 280 million to 300 million guns in private hands in America—many legally owned, many not. Each year, more than 4 million new guns enter the market. …America’s level of gun ownership means that even if the Supreme Court—which ruled in 2008 that the Second Amendment gives citizens the individual right to own firearms, as gun advocates have long insisted—suddenly reversed itself and ruled that the individual ownership of handguns was illegal, there would be no practical way for a democratic country to locate and seize those guns.
Which is why prohibition was a flop. Which is why the current War on Drugs is so misguided. And so on and so on.
The author then wonders whether the best way of protecting public safety is to have more gun ownership.
Which raises a question: When even anti-gun activists believe that the debate over private gun ownership is closed; when it is too late to reduce the number of guns in private hands—and since only the naive think that legislation will prevent more than a modest number of the criminally minded, and the mentally deranged, from acquiring a gun in a country absolutely inundated with weapons—could it be that an effective way to combat guns is with more guns? Today, more than 8 million vetted and (depending on the state) trained law-abiding citizens possess state-issued “concealed carry” handgun permits, which allow them to carry a concealed handgun or other weapon in public. Anti-gun activists believe the expansion of concealed-carry permits represents a serious threat to public order. But what if, in fact, the reverse is true? Mightn’t allowing more law-abiding private citizens to carry concealed weapons—when combined with other forms of stringent gun regulation—actually reduce gun violence?
He cites examples where armed citizens stopped mass killings.
In 1997, a disturbed high-school student named Luke Woodham stabbed his mother and then shot and killed two people at Pearl High School in Pearl, Mississippi. He then began driving toward a nearby junior high to continue his shooting spree, but the assistant principal of the high school, Joel Myrick, aimed a pistol he kept in his truck at Woodham, causing him to veer off the road. Myrick then put his pistol to Woodham’s neck and disarmed him. On January 16, 2002, a disgruntled former student at the Appalachian School of Law in Grundy, Virginia, had killed three people, including the school’s dean, when two students, both off-duty law-enforcement officers, retrieved their weapons and pointed them at the shooter, who ended his killing spree and surrendered. In December 2007, a man armed with a semiautomatic rifle and two pistols entered the New Life Church in Colorado Springs and killed two teenage girls before a church member, Jeanne Assam—a former Minneapolis police officer and a volunteer church security guard—shot and wounded the gunman, who then killed himself.
The author also punctures the left’s mythology about concealed carry laws.
In 2003, John Gilchrist, the legislative counsel for the Ohio Association of Chiefs of Police, testified, “If 200,000 to 300,000 citizens begin carrying a concealed weapon, common sense tells us that accidents will become a daily event.” When I called Gilchrist recently, he told me that events since the state’s concealed-carry law took effect have proved his point. …Gilchrist’s argument would be convincing but for one thing: the firearm crime rate in Ohio remained steady after the concealed-carry law passed in 2004.
Goldberg elaborates.
Today, the number of concealed-carry permits is the highest it’s ever been, at 8 million, and the homicide rate is the lowest it’s been in four decades—less than half what it was 20 years ago. (The number of people allowed to carry concealed weapons is actually considerably higher than 8 million, because residents of Vermont, Wyoming, Arizona, Alaska, and parts of Montana do not need government permission to carry their personal firearms. These states have what Second Amendment absolutists refer to as “constitutional carry,” meaning, in essence, that the Second Amendment is their permit.) Many gun-rights advocates see a link between an increasingly armed public and a decreasing crime rate. “I think effective law enforcement has had the biggest impact on crime rates, but I think concealed carry has something to do with it. We’ve seen an explosion in the number of people licensed to carry,” Lott told me. “You can deter criminality through longer sentencing, and you deter criminality by making it riskier for people to commit crimes. And one way to make it riskier is to create the impression among the criminal population that the law-abiding citizen they want to target may have a gun.” Crime statistics in Britain, where guns are much scarcer, bear this out. Gary Kleck, a criminologist at Florida State University, wrote in his 1991 book, Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America, that only 13 percent of burglaries in America occur when the occupant is home. In Britain, so-called hot burglaries account for about 45 percent of all break-ins. Kleck and others attribute America’s low rate of occupied-home burglaries to fear among criminals that homeowners might be armed. (A survey of almost 2,000 convicted U.S. felons, conducted by the criminologists Peter Rossi and James D. Wright in the late ’80s, concluded that burglars are more afraid of armed homeowners than they are of arrest by the police.)
That last bit of info is very powerful. The bad guys are more afraid of armed homeowners than the police. Surely, as I explained here, that tells us that gun ownership lowers crime.
Here’s another no-sh*t-Sherlock observation from the article.
It is also illogical for campuses to advertise themselves as “gun-free.” Someone bent on murder is not usually dissuaded by posted anti-gun regulations. Quite the opposite—publicly describing your property as gun-free is analogous to posting a notice on your front door saying your home has no burglar alarm. As it happens, the company that owns the Century 16 Cineplex in Aurora had declared the property a gun-free zone.
I recently mocked the idea of gun-free zones with several amusing posters. It’s unbelievable that some people think that killers care about such rules.
One place that isn’t likely to see any massacres is Colorado State University.
For much of the population of a typical campus, concealed-carry permitting is not an issue. Most states that issue permits will grant them only to people who are at least 21 years old. But the crime-rate statistics at universities that do allow permit holders on campus with their weapons are instructive. An hour north of Boulder, in Fort Collins, sits Colorado State University. Concealed carry has been allowed at CSU since 2003, and according to James Alderden, the former sheriff of Larimer County, which encompasses Fort Collins, violent crime at Colorado State has dropped since then.
I also recommend this video, which makes fun of those who support gun-free zones.
Here is Goldberg’s conclusion.
But I am sympathetic to the idea of armed self-defense, because it does often work, because encouraging learned helplessness is morally corrupt, and because, however much I might wish it, the United States is not going to become Canada. Guns are with us, whether we like it or not. Maybe this is tragic, but it is also reality. So Americans who are qualified to possess firearms shouldn’t be denied the right to participate in their own defense. And it is empirically true that the great majority of America’s tens of millions of law-abiding gun owners have not created chaos in society.
Goldberg’s article, by the way, doesn’t even mention the value of private gun ownership when government fails to maintain public order, as occurred after Hurricane Sandy and during last year’s British riots.
I have a couple of final things to share, including this this video about a woman who lost her parents because she decided to obey a bad government law. And here’s a great study from Cato about individuals using guns to protect themselves.
____________
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Thank you so much for your time. I know how valuable it is. I also appreciate the fine family that you have and your commitment as a father and a husband.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733, lowcostsqueegees@yahoo.com
“Oh how love I Thy law! it is my meditation all the day.” Psalm 119:97
, 
In Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors, a rabbi named Ben (Sam Waterston) suffers from an eye disease and may lose his sight. Ben’s ophthalmologist, Judah Rosenthal (Martin Landau), has a thriving and privileged lifestyle, but Judah’s way of life is put at risk when his mistress, a lonely flight attendant named Dolores (Anjelica Huston), threatens to expose him as a philanderer and embezzler. Employing his brother’s shady connections, Judah opts to have Dolores killed. When he does, he has an inner debate about whether God will pass down some intrinsic moral justice with which he will be punished, or if humankind creates its own morality and thus, if one chooses not to recognize it, one cannot be punished by it. Meanwhile, an unhappily married, struggling documentary filmmaker named Cliff Stern (Allen) pines after his charming production assistant, Halley (Mia Farrow), while making a piece about his wife’s self-absorbed brother, Lester (Alan Alda), a television producer whose ego is only outmatched by his success. As Cliff’s marriage grows more distant, he attempts to affirm his love with Halley, while his contempt for Lester and his romantic outlook leave him blind to how life rarely works out like it does in the movies.
In the opening scene, Judah gives a speech at a banquet in his honor. He has just overseen the opening of a new ophthalmology wing in his hospital, and he relates a story about what his father told him as a boy: “The eyes of God are constantly watching us.” Much later, his father’s lesson haunts Judah after he has Dolores killed. He remembers how as a boy his Jewish family had intense dinner table discussions about the origins of religion and morality. In an imagined debate or perhaps distant memory, Judah sees his father arguing that morality is impelled by God, who sees to it the unjust are punished. Judah’s aunt, however, says a person creates their own sense of guilt; a murderer, if he could live with the guilt, could easily kill and no such “God” would punish him. Though he is now, or so he thought, an atheist, Judah, whose ironic biblical name has grand implications, cannot help question what he has done and if God will punish him. But then, Judah’s initial doubts are just a part of his process of rationalization, which began before he ever openly discussed Dolores’ murder.
A component of Judah’s rationalization involves a dreamed conversation with the rabbi, Ben. Although earlier in the film, Judah engaged Ben to discuss how the stability of his marriage had been threatened by Dolores, he has mentioned nothing of her further blackmail or his own plans of murder. Judah is too careful for that, and instead he imagines a conversation with Ben in which he deliberates on the question of morality in plotting a murder, and whether or not he will be punished by God. After the discussion wherein Ben takes the position of Judah’s father, Judah finally tells his imaginary Ben, “Jack lives in the real world. You live in the kingdom of heaven.” Judah’s father once said that he would choose God over Truth. Judah is the opposite, as God would judge his actions as immoral in this case. Truth, however, is ambivalent to any number of atrocities, not the least of which is murder. And so, Judah must take the path of Truth as defined by his aunt—it is the path that allows Judah’s comfortable life to proceed uninterrupted, and without the fear of punishment from some intangible force.
While Judah’s story has a chilling arc, Cliff’s is almost more painful to accept because of its initial, comparably light mannerisms. Roger Ebert described the transition as “Shakespearean: The crimes of kings are mirrored for comic effect in the foibles of the lower orders.” In some respect Ebert’s assessment is accurate. Certainly Allen intended to compare classes in the film, but he does so by contrasting the social positions of Cliff and Lester, not Cliff and Judah. The relationship between Judah and Cliff is relative in that Judah is best associated with Lester, and Cliff is better aligned with Dolores—the two men of power (Judah and Lester) and their victims (Dolores and Cliff). In another way, Cliff’s arc implies that the high drama of Judah’s tale has a realistic correlation to everyday life, that Judah’s tale is not “just a murder story” and these sort of hopeless turns happen up and down the social ladder. As such, Cliff’s story is much more than a mere reflection of Judah’s; it presents one of two unique illustrations of Allen’s thesis on the unfair order of the universe. Ebert’s assessment presupposes that Judah’s story takes precedence over Cliff’s, whereas Allen’s novelistic structure designates no single protagonist.
Alda portrays Lester as one of cinema’s all-time most contemptible characters, the actor deliciously self-confident and egomaniacal in the role. Lester carries a small voice recorder with him for periodic mental notes, but in each case the note furthers his character’s vain and self-important persona. With a smile he tells Cliff that he only agreed to allow him to direct the project as a favor to his sister. Then, right in front of Cliff, Lester stops to make a note, “Idea for farce: A poor loser agrees to do the story of a great man’s life and in the process comes to learn deep values.” Lester views Cliff as a loser and seems to enjoy telling him as much. As the shooting of Lester’s documentary commences, we see his grand opinion of himself on display. He sermons on the structure of comedy as if he invented it (“If it bends, it’s funny, if it breaks it’s not funny” or “Comedy is tragedy plus time”). He always seems to be promoting the career of some beautiful young airhead, whom he’s no doubt sleeping with. And he never misses an opportunity to remind those below him about his numerous Emmys and his other various accolades.
In both Judah and Cliff’s stories, there are thriving men of power who are corrupt and get away with murder or offenses relative thereto. Allen sees the world as an inequitable place where those in power get away with high crimes and smaller, more personal injustices, while the lower classes are stepped on in the process. In each case, these men of power seem aware of their own crimes, and it becomes their willingness to accept a life of transgression that leads them to success, whereas the morality of smaller men like Cliff holds them back. (This is not to suggest Cliff, or even Dolores, are wholly innocent; merely that their class prevents them from being corrupt on a grand scale.) In Judah’s case, he accepts his status as a pillar of his community and defends it against Dolores’ threat. He could have simply come clean to his wife and defused Dolores’ rage, but one of the reasons he refuses to admit his affair is because his wife would be crushed. “She worships me,” he says, and Judah could never live a life in which he did not feel exalted. As for Lester, he sees himself on the rough cut of Cliff’s footage, in which he’s shown seducing one of his young actresses; Cliff’s cutting compares Lester to Mussolini and an actual jackass, and so Lester fires Cliff. Nevertheless, Lester is content; the world views him as a success and he knows it, and he knows that the world will forever see Cliff as a loser.
Allen brings Judah and Cliff’s stories into harmony at the wedding of Ben’s daughter. Four months have passed, and we find Judah’s existential searching has faded away and he appears blissful and without concern. He has accepted the godless world and buried his guilt. Cliff’s deluded hope that Halley would return from London and their courtship would resume is destroyed when he sees Halley and Lester together. They are engaged. Cliff is crushed. Cliff and Judah each drift away from the reception and stumble upon one another. They talk about Cliff’s career in the movies, and Judah says he has a great “murder plot” for Cliff. Detailing his murder of Dolores as though it was fiction, Judah explains how the man in his story, plagued by guilt and questions of God’s moral justice, awakens one morning and “the sun is shining, his family is around him and mysteriously, the crisis has lifted.” Cliff wonders if someone could ever really live with such a thing on their conscience, having seen so many films noir where the protagonist’s crimes tragically lead them to their demise. Judah responds, “This is reality. In reality we rationalize, we deny, or we couldn’t go on living.” In movies, in fiction, people turn themselves in for tragic effect; in reality, people like Judah get away with murder and bury their sins, people like Lester get the girl, and people like Cliff are stepped on.
Placing Crimes and Misdemeanors within Woody Allen’s filmography becomes a matter of determining which themes from which films are encapsulated and focused by this one. Just as 
