Guns Save Lives - John Stossel

It's all too predictable. A day after a gunman killed six people and wounded 18 others at Northern Illinois University, The New York Times criticized the U.S. Interior Department for preparing to rethink its ban on guns in national parks.
 
The editorial board wants "the 51 senators who like the thought of guns in the parks -- and everywhere else, it seems -- to realize that the innocence of Americans is better protected by carefully controlling guns than it is by arming everyone to the teeth."  As usual, the Times editors seem unaware of how silly their argument is. To them, the choice is between "carefully controlling guns" and "arming everyone to the teeth." But no one favors "arming everyone to the teeth" (whatever that means). Instead, gun advocates favor freedom, choice and self-responsibility. If someone wishes to be prepared to defend himself, he should be free to do so. No one has the right to deprive others of the means of effective self-defense, like a handgun.

 

As for the first option, "carefully controlling guns," how many shootings at schools or malls will it take before we understand that people who intend to kill are not deterred by gun laws? Last I checked, murder is against the law everywhere. No one intent on murder will be stopped by the prospect of committing a lesser crime like illegal possession of a firearm. The intellectuals and politicians who make pious declarations about controlling guns should explain how their gunless utopia is to be realized.
 
While they search for -- excuse me -- their magic bullet, innocent people are dying defenseless.  That's because laws that make it difficult or impossible to carry a concealed handgun do deter one group of people: law-abiding citizens who might have used a gun to stop crime. Gun laws are laws against self-defense.
 
Criminals have the initiative. They choose the time, place and manner of their crimes, and they tend to make choices that maximize their own, not their victims', success. So criminals don't attack people they know are armed, and anyone thinking of committing mass murder is likely to be attracted to a gun-free zone, such as schools and malls.
 
Government may promise to protect us from criminals, but it cannot deliver on that promise. This was neatly summed up in book title a few years ago: "Dial 911 and Die." If you are the target of a crime, only one other person besides the criminal is sure to be on the scene: you. There is no good substitute for self-responsibility.  How, then, does it make sense to create mandatory gun-free zones, which in reality are free-crime zones?
 
The usual suspects keep calling for more gun control laws. But this idea that gun control is crime control is just a myth. The National Academy of Sciences reviewed dozens of studies and could not find a single gun regulation that clearly led to reduced violent crime or murder. When Washington, D.C., passed its tough handgun ban years ago, gun violence rose. 
 
The press ignores the fact that often guns save lives.  It's what happened in 2002 at the Appalachian School of Law. Hearing shots, two students went to their cars, got their guns and restrained the shooter until police arrested him.  Likewise, law professor Glen Reynolds writes, "Pearl, Miss., school shooter Luke Woodham was stopped when the school's vice principal took a .45 from his truck and ran to the scene. In (last) February's Utah mall shooting, it was an off-duty police officer who happened to be on the scene and carrying a gun".
 
It's impossible to know exactly how often guns stop criminals. Would-be victims don't usually report crimes that don't happen. But people use guns in self-defense every day. The Cato Institute's Tom Palmer says just showing his gun to muggers once saved his life.  "It equalizes unequals," Palmer told "20/20". "If someone gets into your house, which would you rather have, a handgun or a telephone? You can call the police if you want, and they'll get there, and they'll take a picture of your dead body. But they can't get there in time to save your life. The first line of defense is you."

---

The New Busy is not the old busy. Search, chat and e-mail from your inbox. Get started.

Oil: The Real Green Fuel - Jonah Goldberg

A rolling "dead zone" off the Gulf of Mexico is killing sea life and destroying livelihoods. Recent estimates put the blob at nearly the size of New Jersey.
Alas, I'm not talking about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. As terrible as that catastrophe is, such accidents have occurred in U.S. waters only about once every 40 years (and globally about once every 20 years). I'm talking about the dead zone largely caused by fertilizer runoff from American farms along the Mississippi and Atchafalaya river basins. Such pollutants cause huge algae plumes that result in oxygen starvation in the gulf's richest waters, near the delta.
 
Because the dead zone is an annual occurrence, there's no media feeding frenzy over it, even though the average annual size of these hypoxic zones has been about 6,600 square miles over the last five years, and they are driven by bipartisan federal agriculture, trade and energy policies.
 
Indeed, As Steven Hayward notes in the current Weekly Standard, if policymakers continue to pursue biofuels in response to the current anti-fossil-fuel craze, these dead zones will get a lot bigger every year. A 2008 study by the National Academy of Sciences found that adhering to corn-based ethanol targets will increase the size of the dead zone by as much as 34 percent.
 
Of course, that's just one of the headaches "independence" from oil and coal would bring. If we stop drilling offshore, we could lose up to $1 trillion in economic benefits, according to economist Peter Passell. And, absent the utopian dream of oil-free living, every barrel we don't produce at home, we buy overseas. That sends dollars to bad regimes (though more to Canada and Mexico). It may also increase the chances of disaster because tanker accidents are more common than rig accidents.
 
But wait a minute -- isn't that precisely why we're investing in "renewables," to free ourselves from this vicious petro-cycle? Don't the Billy Sundays of the Church of Green promise that they are the path to salvation?
 
This is infuriating and dangerous nonsense, as Matt Ridley demonstrates in his mesmerizing new book, "The Rational Optimist." Let's start with biofuels. Ethanol production steals precious land to produce inefficient fuel inefficiently (making food more scarce and expensive for the poor). If all of our transport fuel came from biofuel, we would need 30 percent more land than all of the existing food-growing farmland we have today.
 
In Brazil and Malaysia, biofuels are more economically viable (thanks in part to really cheap labor), but at the insane price of losing rainforest while failing to reduce the CO2 emissions that allegedly justify ethanol in the first place. According to Ridley, the Nature Conservancy's Joseph Fargione estimates rainforest clear-cutting for biofuels releases 17 to 420 times more CO2 than it offsets by displacing petroleum or coal.
 
As for wind and solar, even if such technologies were wildly more successful than they have been, so what? You could quintuple and then quintuple again the output of wind and solar and it wouldn't reduce our dependence on oil. Why? Because we use oil for transportation, not for electricity. We would offset coal, but again at an enormous price. If we tried to meet the average amount of energy typically used in America, we would need wind farms the size of Kazakhstan or solar panels the size of Spain.
 
 
If you remove the argument over climate change from the equation (as even European governments are starting to do), one thing becomes incandescently clear: Fossil fuels have been one of the great boons both to humanity and the environment, allowing forests to regrow (now that we don't use wood for heating fuel or grow fuel for horses anymore) and liberating billions from backbreaking toil. The great and permanent shortage is usable surface land and fresh water. The more land we use to produce energy, the less we have for vulnerable species, watersheds, agriculture, recreation, etc.
 
"If you like wilderness, as I do," Ridley writes, "the last thing you want is to go back to the medieval habit of using the landscape surrounding us to make power."

The calamity in the gulf is heartrending and tragic. A thorough review of government oversight and industry safety procedures is more than warranted. But as counterintuitive as it may be to say so, oil is a green fuel, while "green" fuels aren't. And this spill doesn't change that fact.

---

The New Busy think 9 to 5 is a cute idea. Combine multiple calendars with Hotmail. Get busy.

Afghans at language school go AWOL

Seems to me this is an issue that should be looked into more.   http://www.mysanantonio.com/military/afghans_at_lackland_afb_language_school_go_awol_96628274.html
 
"Asked why the Air Force hadn't revealed that Afghan troops had gone AWOL, Emery said the disappearances occurred gradually. "I don't know if I consider that particularly newsworthy," he said, adding, "it hasn't been all at once."

Nothing happens all at once, dip-sh*t! It is a process, like everything.  Enemies are patient and will gather info, build forces, infiltrate, etc. until the time is right to strike. How long was the planning and training process for 9/11.  The incompetence and complacency of our government never ceases to amaze!

---

Hotmail has tools for the New Busy. Search, chat and e-mail from your inbox. Learn more.

The World Is a Cruel Place -- and If America Weakens, It Will Get Crueler - by Dennis Prager

One of the many beliefs -- i.e., non-empirically based doctrines -- of the post-Christian West has been that moral progress is the human norm, especially so with the demise of religion. In a secular world, the self-described enlightened thinking goes, superstition is replaced by reason, and reason leads to the moral good.
Of course, it turned out that the post-Christian West produced considerably more evil than the Christian world had. No mass cruelty in the name of Christianity approximated the vastness of the cruelty unleashed by secular doctrines and regimes in the post-Christian world. The argument against religion that more people have been killed in the name of religion than by any other doctrine is false propaganda on behalf of secularism and Leftism.

The amount of evil done by Christians -- against, for example, "heretics" and Jews -- in both the Western and Eastern branches of Christianity -- was extensive, as was the failure of most European Christians to see Nazism for the evil that it was. The good news is that Christian evils have been acknowledged and addressed by most Christian leaders and thinkers.

But there were never any Christian Auschwitzes -- i.e., systematic genocides of every man, woman and child of a particular race or religion. Nor were there Christian Gulags -- the shipping of millions of innocents to conditions so horrific that prolonged suffering leading to death was the almost -inevitable end.
The anti-religious Left offers two responses to these facts: The first is that modern technology made the Nazi and Communist murders of scores of millions possible; had the church been technologically able to do so, it would have made its own Auschwitz and Gulag. The second is that Nazism and Communism were religions and not secular doctrines.
The response to the first is that technology was not necessary for the Communist murders of over a hundred million innocent people in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia and elsewhere. In Cambodia, millions were murdered with hammers, in Rwanda with machetes.

The response to the second is that Communism and Nazism were secular movements and to deny that is to tell a gargantuan lie. Even if one argues that Nazism and Communism were religions, they were nevertheless secular religions. That too many Christians morally failed when confronted with Nazism is true, but irrelevant to the fact that Nazism was in no way a Christian movement.

And now the post-Christian world is getting worse.
The moral news about the world in which we live is almost unremittingly negative.

Russia
Russia is devoid of a moral values system. Whatever moral role the Russian Orthodox Church played was largely extinguished during the seven decades of Communist suppression of religion. Today, pockets of religious morality notwithstanding, Russia is essentially a nihilistic state. Under the leadership of a former KGB director, Russia now plays a destructive role in world affairs. Russia today is characterized by major arms shipments to Syria, protecting Iran while it becomes a nuclear power, forcing its will on Ukraine and other neighboring states, and the violent suppression of domestic critics who shed any light on the organized crime syndicate that rules the geographically largest nation in the world.

Turkey
The Ataturk Revolution is being undone. Turkey, the country long regarded as the bridge between the West and Islam, is rapidly moving away from the West and to an increasingly anti-Western Islam.

Iran
Iran is ruled by the heirs of Nazism, if that word still means anything after being cheapened by the Left for decades, most recently by the Left's comparison of Arizona to a Nazi state. The rulers of Iran boast of their desire to initiate a second Holocaust against the Jews, all the while denying that the first Holocaust took place. And the country's treatment of Iranians who seek elementary human freedoms and of Iranian women is among the worst on earth.

Congo
According to all reports, nearly 6 million people have been killed in the Congo in the last decade. The great secular liberal hope in "humanity" and "world opinion" has once again been shown to be the false hope it is. World opinion and "humanity" have rarely done anything to help the truly persecuted. But there is more to the Congolese genocide -- the absence of reporting about it in the world's media and its being a non-issue at the United Nations. If an Israeli soldier kills a rock-throwing Palestinian, or even worse, makes plans to build 1,600 apartments in east Jerusalem, the U.N., world opinion and the world media cover it as if it were the primary evil on earth. But the Congolese deaths are barely worth a mention.

Mexico
Mexico is fighting for its life against narcotics gangs that compete with Islamists in their sadism. Mexico could become the largest narco-state in the world. To be a good person in Mexico today, i.e., to oppose the drug lords in any way, is to put oneself in danger of being slowly tortured to death.

Europe
Europe long ago gave up fighting for or believing in anything other than living a life with as much economic security, as many days off and as young a retirement age as possible. World War I killed off European idealism. And whatever remained was destroyed by World War II. What I have written about the Germans is true for nearly all of Europe: Instead of learning to fight evil, Europe has learned that fighting is evil.
Other consequences of European secularism and the demise of non-materialistic ideals include a low birthrate (children cost money and limit the number of fine restaurants in which one can afford to dine), and appeasement of evil. Thus most European nations are slowly disappearing and nearly every European country has compromised Western liberties in order to appease radical Muslims.

Radical Islam
Polls taken in the Muslim world regularly report that about 10 percent of the world's Muslims say they support radical Islam -- meaning Islamic totalitarianism as practiced by the Taliban and terror as practiced by Al-Qaida. That means at least one hundred million people. Add to that the unspecified number of Muslims who support the Nazi-level and Nazi-like anti-Semitism promulgated in much of the Middle East and you have an enormous body of people committed to the death of the West.

China
As in Russia, traditional Chinese virtues were largely destroyed by Communism, and China, too, is essentially a nihilistic state whose government spends its vast sums of foreign currency in buying influence in some of the cruelest places on earth (Zimbabwe, for example) and protecting the genocide-advocating regime of Iran.

The United Nations
The net result of the United Nations is an increase in evil on earth. Whatever good is performed by some of its institutions, like the World Health Organization or UNICEF, that good is outweighed by the amount of evil the U.N. either abets or allows. It has supervised genocide in Rwanda, done nothing to stop genocide elsewhere (e.g., Congo and Sudan), gives a respectable forum to tyrannies, and is preoccupied with vilifying one of its relatively few humane states, Israel. Its contributing to human suffering is exemplified by Libya being elected to its Human Rights Commission and Iran's election to its Commission on the Status of Women.

The United States
The United States was described by President Abraham Lincoln as The Last Best Hope of Earth. Most Americans agreed then. However, with the ascent of the Left in America -- in our educational institutions, news and entertainment media, and arts world -- fewer and fewer Americans believe this. On the contrary, the Leftist view of America, which pervades American life, is of a country deeply morally compromised by endemic racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, militarism, imperialism and a rapacious capitalism, leading to immoral levels of economic inequality.

As in Europe, these views are leading America to avoid offending its enemies. The American attorney general recently refused to answer a congressman's repeated question about whether he believes that radical Islam might have been one factor motivating recent Muslim terrorists in America.
With America more interested in being like Europe and being liked rather than in fighting its enemies, more and more countries are identifying with America's enemies than with America. Last week's three-way hug among the leaders of Brazil, Turkey and Iran was a clear example of such.
Meanwhile, America is rapidly accumulating unpayable debts that will render it not very different from Greece. Indeed, California, once the grease of the American economy, has become the Greece of the American economy.

As the Left's power increases, America's power recedes -- and the world further deteriorates. Under Democratic Party rule, the Last Best Hope of Earth has decided that the United Nations and Western Europe deserve that title, not the United States.

Those of us working to remove Democrats from power regard this November's election as not only a referendum on the direction of America, but of the world itself.