During 2009, we Evil, Stupid and Uncivilized Americas bought the staggering amount of 14 million firearms. According to Joan Peterson’s Rules Of Reasoned Discourse, we should be running a high rate of crime or at least a small civil war-type casualty rate. But here comes the FBI to screw things up: According to the latest crime data, Violent Crime once again keeps going down. Murders dropped 7.1 percent in the first six months of 2010 while robberies decreased by 10.7 percent. Reports of vehicle thefts also dropped by 9.7 percent.

I can see Joan right now closing her eyes, covering her ears and going LA-LA-LA a top of her lungs.

Another shooting over the weekend in the Miami neighborhood of Overtown left 12 people injured at a block party. Witnesses say that three males wearing black trench coats opened up with a “chopper” (slang for an AK-type weapon) and possibly two handguns in 9mm. The shooter with the AK-type weapon was seen shooting from the hip, Hollywood style while people ran for cover.  Of course, Miami PD Chief Timoney and Mayor Many Diaz once more cried to the heavens requesting the federal renewal of the Assault Weapons Ban which according to the zeal you hear them talk about will eliminate crime, reduce male impotence, bring back the housing market and bring Michael Jackson back to life. Of course, doing some actual law enforcement in that area and in the Miami area in general would be a bit too much to ask to Chief Timoney and Mayor Diaz but that is the politics of the inefficient bureaucrat for you.

But guess what has happened in the Land of Perfect Gun Control? The Daily Mail from the United Kingdom brought us the following headline: The most violent country in Europe: Britain is also worse than South Africa and U.S. How’s that for a kicker? You folks remember how tough Brits got on private posession of firearms and how the politicos went to the extreme of de facto criminalizing any type of self defense (check for references about Tony Martin’s case but not before ingesting you high blood pressure medicine) and promising all British Subjects a more peaceful and human living in the kingdom.  Apparently it did not happen and Great Britain has beaten everybody in violent crimes. They even provided a cute little graphic with the stats:

Right under the graphic we find the following statement:

The U.S. has a violence rate of 466 crimes per 100,000 residents, Canada 935, Australia 92 and South Africa 1,609.

Damn, it seems the problem was not the guns as the “intelligentsia” was tired of telling us. Remember when they told us to watch “advanced” countries like UK and adopt their ways so we could live a better life? Well, it seems that not only socialized medicine failed but also the concept of the Nanny State defending you against all evil if you gave up the right and tools to defend yourself. By the looks of it, England’s criminals are having a fair thanks to the government-sponsored nationwide Gun Free Zone.

Let’s see if government types get it this time: By definition criminals choose to ignore the law.  Capisce? If you still don’t get it, please order a copy of Guns, Violence, and Criminal Behavior: The Offender’s Perspective by Mark Progebin where he states: “convicts involved in gun-related crimes aren’t deterred by laws designed to limit the availability of firearms.” and “that gun control only affects law-abiding people and not criminals.” Now the research for this book was paid for by the US Department of Justice’s Project Safe Neighborhoods program with our money. Will the legislators even pay attention? Don’t count on it.

I have no idea why, but and old memory found me this morning. Back in the early 90’s when I was living in certain South American country now under the firm grasp of a Socialist, massive riots and looting occurred. It was long four days of absolute collapse of the government basic services and control which I lived awake in coffee, cigarettes with a single shot shotgun and a Walther PPK on my waist. Thankfully our property was not affected by rioters since I already had a reputation for being somewhat crazy in Sheepland I was seen in more than one occasion experimenting with home made napalm) and an assiduous patrol kept miscreants pretty much away.

On the second day I was witness to a mob attacking a two story bodega about a two blocks away from my house. As typical of many bodegas in the country, it was owned and operated by one owner and his family and they had their living quarters on the upper floor.  It had no side or rear doors, just the front store gated entrance and side stairs connecting the second floor to the ground level.  I have no idea why the bodega was attacked but looters usually do not need one. When I noticed the attack it was already in progress and I fielded a pair of binoculars from the roof of my house to get a clearer picture. I was upset I what I saw since the looters were people that lived in the area, people that bought from that store and even got credit to purchase items from the owner when they did not have ways to pay for them, yet they thought it was OK to destroy his means of living.

The looters breached the store’s gates and proceeded inside. Seconds later they came out holding on the liquor and cigarettes while whooping their victory. After the booze and smokes were depleted, looters came back pretty much for the rest but this time I heard a firearm discharged sending everybody out running while dropping whatever items they had in their hand. The Bodega owner appeared with a big frame revolver in one hand, surveyed the damage and alongside his family recovered what little they could and proceeded for the next hour or so to secure the store entrance with whatever means they had available. Once they finished, they went inside and I returned to my patrol.

I’d say that about an hour later I checked the bodega again and I saw a large crowd in front. Their demeanor appeared angry and they were looking up at a window on the second story facing the front of the store. Through the barred window I saw a hand come out making go-away gestures but the crowd did not heed. Some in the mob once more attacked the store entrance, but I am guessing the reinforcement was much sturdier because they could not breach it this time. I kept watching the impasse silently congratulating the store owner for his stand when I saw something that chilled me: some idiot looter appeared suddenly with a Molotov cocktail and launched it towards the second story window. Thankfully it missed and hit the wall creating a fireball of little damage against a cement block structure.

It dawned on me that this was now not a bunch of idiots trying to score some freebies from the neighborhood merchant but a full fledged lynching mob intent on murder and nothing could be done to stop them. Police was nowhere to be seen and those not in the mob were like me trying to protect their households or cowering inside them praying to be spared from the wolves roaming the streets. I saw another looter with yet another Molotov cocktail but this time carefully preparing himself for a perfect pitch. He never did. The hand came through the barred second story window but this time holding the revolver and shooting it. One looter down and a Molotov cocktail rolled off his hand harmlessly.

Another looter, incensed by the shooting of his colleague picked up the firebomb and tried to toss it. The revolver went off again and another looter fell to the ground. This one I could see was dead on the spot. My binoculars allowed me to see the head exploding with perfect detail and the body just switching off to a mass of uncoordinated muscles and bones.  I lost track of the Molotov cocktail but I guess it did not go off again because I did not see a fireball, but a couple more appeared in the hands of other looters. More detonations came out the second story window sending two more looters scurrying and at least one of them leaving blood behind him.

This sequence kept repeating itself for another couple of hours. Mob attacking the gate, failing, mob trying to firebomb the upstairs apartment and getting shot for their efforts. I counted at least four dead on the ground and some 8 wounded taken away when the mob finally decided that it was getting to steep a price to pay for their obstinacy and withdrew to seek easier targets. Some 45 minutes later, the store owner and his family came out, loaded their old pick up truck (amazingly left untouched by the mob) with whatever belongings they could pack and abandoned the store. That night the looters came back and set the whole place on fire destroying the only grocery shop in a mile radius forcing the neighborhood to go farther away for their supplies from now on.

I heard later that the Store owner and his family moved to another city. The store was sold for a pittance but the new owner transformed it into a bike repair shop that went bankrupt soon afterward. Last I heard was that the building was abandoned and became a den of druggies and cheap hookers. Nobody was prosecuted for the attacks to the store and thankfully neither was the store owner for defending himself and his family.

So what can one armed man do? When the Shit Hit The Fan, a store owner saved himself and his family against a crowd and bought himself enough time to escape to safety. This was the leasson I learned that day and I hope you may save this little story in your brain’s memory bank for whenever somebody tries to convince you guns are not the solution.

On August 20, 2002 the Venezuelan Government under Hugo Chavez enacted the Disarmament Law under the promise of reducing the crime violence gripping the nation. Six years later the results are tragically in: Caracas, the capital and most populated city in the country now boast the dishonorable distinction of being the most dangerous metropolis in the world with a murder rate of 130 per 100,000.  The citizens of Caracas are in a literal state of siege and panic. The sounds of shots are more common than the sounds of birds and that is tough when you realize that tropical Venezuela is home to 11,000 species of birds.

Venezuela’s Disarmament Law is a Gun Control advocate wet dream. First of all it dictates that gun ownership is a privilege given by the Estate and to be removed without warning or compensation. You ask “compensation”? yes because it does not matter that you spent your hard earned money, filled paperwork, got fingerprinted, went through a psychiatric consult, waited up to a year and had to carry an specific permit for each gun you may be allowed to have, you do not own the gun, it belongs to the government, you are just renting it.

The Disarmament law voided all previous gun records and gave a 90 day grace period for gun owners to re-register their weapons. After that period expired, all guns not registered became illegal and the owner a criminal facing grave penalties and/or jail time.

But that, like infomercials say, is not all. This law complements The 1928 Law of Firearms and Explosives which defined the initial restrictions of gun ownership including what weapons & calibers are you allowed to “own.” IE: the good old 9mm is not a legal caliber to use because the Military uses it. Same for the .45 and the 30.06 and anything that has ever been used by any of the branches of the Venezuelan Military as standard weapon or caliber. That pretty much leaves the user with .22, .38, and .32 ACP.  Shotguns may be OK but slugs are not allowed and rifled shotguns are a no-no.

The last ingredient in the 130 per 100,000 murder recipe is the criminalization of self defense. I am no legal expert or pretend to know about law so I will give you a sad anecdote. A Venezuelan criminal lawyer friend of mine emailed me some years back regarding a case she was defending. She wanted to consult me (like I was a Spanish speaking version of Mas Ayoob, yeah right!) about shooting techniques used in self defense and about some other self defense issues related to guns so I explained her all I could over the phone while I was preparing an email with links to several websites that might shed much better information that I could give. I asked what was the case about and she explained that her client was confronted inside of his house by an armed criminal in the wee hours of the night. The criminal was armed and so was the client who triple tapped the miscreant sending him to his well deserved oblivion. The home owner did the dutiful thing and called police who promptly arrested him and dragged his butt to jail for murder.  I was shocked and asked why was he arrested if he was in his house, attacked by an armed criminal and he only defended himself. The lawyer responded that three shots, according to Venezuelan jurisprudence was too much, in fact it was legally considered “viciousness & savagery” (Ensañamiento in Spanish) and thus murder, not self-defense. The legal standing is that one should shoot only once, asses the damage done to the opponent and then shoot if the threat to one’s life is imminent.  I asked the lawyer if that means I would have to give the Bad Guy a freebie shot before I could make sure he was gone for good and she said yes, that is the statute. She said that she could explain two shots fired as the person being nervous and pulling the trigger too fast without thinking but that the judge would not consider three shots as “nervousness.”

At the end her client ended up serving 10 years (the judge was gracious enough) for second degree murder. My only thought was that he was lucky he did not engage in a Bill Drill or he would serve thirty years in a Venezuelan prison.

If what happened in Congress yesterday and the absurd speech by Nancy Pelosi blaming all republicans is any indication of what is coming, we better start stocking up. The amazing chutzpah can only be attributed to her knowledge that no real investigation will ever be made on the causes that brought down the financial markets because that would surely put the blame on the icons of the Democratic Party: Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and to an extent kill the presidential hopes of Hossanna Obama. And she is resting assured that the Main Stream Media will bury the story as deep as possible even though if it means no more jobs for them.

If past history teaches us anything is that, if Obama wins and gets to apply his social policies, we will see more misery and we will also have a rise in violent crime. Depending on how fast it happens and if Congress is still held my Democrats, rest assured we will see an onslaught of federal anti-gun measures brought to both the Senate and the House of Congress, highly touted and supported by the Media as the solution for all crime problems and will be signed by Obama with a smile. Make no mistake: THERE WILL BE NO SUNSET PROVISION IN ANY OF THESE LEGISLATIONS. We will be shafted forever with deep restrictions to our Second Amendment.

Things will be marginally better with McCain. With his history of “reaching across the aisle” I am sure he will be more than accommodating to restrict our access to guns if he needs some important piece of legislation passed in the democrat-controlled Congress. We are barely a little over a month before elections but other than vote, there is little we can do. We need to set out targets on changing Congress with the strength of a sandblaster. We need to get rid of the liberal democrats and RINOS that brought us to where we are and will have no compulsion in transforming the USA into a Third World country. Our mandate is to clean Congress in 2010 to our favor and keep it there. Time to start is now.

In the meantime, get that gun you wanted to get, better yet get two or as many as you can afford. Get ammo and lots of it. If you don’t reload, you better think about it and fast, there are plenty of resources and help in different websites and forums just in case OSHA under Obama decides that ammunition is dangerous to your health and you should have a HazMat permit to store it. Get as many spare high capacity magazines as you can since they are the first target alongside those ugly assault rifles of future bans.

Get ready, sinister times are coming.

I bumped into several news items published in Ski News related to the rising gun violence in England and I am amazed that it happens at all! From unarmed police officers being shot by armed thugs to teens brandishing AK-type weapons and scaring the hell out of motorists to individuals making weapons to sell to gangs none of these were supposed to be happening in the Old Country. The Queen’s subjects were guaranteed by their govrnment that banning weapons from civilian possesion was going to keep them safe. The promise did not hold.

One in 10 brits say that they have been affected by gun crimes. The number should be zero according to the gun control “experts” that still insist on spouting their failed theories. And as the gun laws are slowly being eliminated in the USA with a corresponding degree in the number of crimes, England’s viloent crime rate keeps rising.  Still the “experts’s” solution is to add new gun control laws and increasingly more power to the police without realizing that decreasing the number of victims by empowering them to defend themselves is the answer and not disarming civilians and thus creating a guaranteed pool of unarmed product for the criminal consumers.

But what do I know? I am a gun nut and they are Civilized… and dying.