James R. Rummel

I am a self defense instructor who lives in Columbus, Ohio.

This Debate Would Be Over If the Other Side was Rational

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One of the tactics used by those who advocate banning privately owned firearms is that Great Britain enjoys a lower level of homicide than that found in the United States. The idea is that we could have lower murder rates, if only guns were banned.

Part of their argument is true. The US has a homicide rate about 2.5 times that of the UK.

Kevin of The Smallest Minority discusses out some painful truths about this assertion. He points out that the US homicide rate used to be much greater, but has fallen even though more states have passed laws allowing private citizens to carry concealed firearms. At the same time, the rates of all violent crimes, and all crimes in general, have been climbing in the UK even though they have been passing ever more laws restricting legal self defense.

Seems simple enough. They restrict weapons in the UK, and crime goes up. We allow more people to carry firearms here in the US, and crime goes down. Even if there are other reasons which affected this outcome (and there are), the very idea that banning guns will lead to less crime has been completely discredited. Right?

I wish!

Mad Max Days

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The mayor in Flint, Michigan seems to be pondering something that used to seem impossible. The idea is to cut off abandoned neighborhoods from city services. No police, no fire, no services of any kind.

It certainly seems logical from a purely realistic standpoint. As more and more property is left to rot, there simply isn’t enough tax money coming in to provide services to every corner of the city. Might as well concentrate on the areas that still have enough legal residents still paying their taxes.

What do I think of the scheme? The very first thing that comes to my mind when someone tells me of a pie-in-the-sky project is “How are we going to pay for that?”, and this just seems to be the reverse. If the situation has deteriorated to the point that there just isn’t enough of a tax base to pay for basic services in less populated areas, yet the city government still tries to provide those services, then pretty soon the system would collapse and there wouldn’t be anything.

And, before I get a lot of angry comments, I realize that good, honest, hardworking people will suffer for this. People who have followed the rules, paid their taxes, and watched while the good neighborhood where they bought their house decades in the past became a criminal infested blight are going to get the shaft. But they will be screwed anyway if Flint goes bankrupt and everyone inside the city limits is left swinging in the breeze. They are just the one in the lifeboat who drew the short straw.

So far, it seems to be a notion the mayor of Flint has discussed only in passing, but I don’t see the situation improving any time in the future. It will be interesting to see if they have to go through with it.

(Cross posted at Hell in a Handbasket.)

A Question of Integrity

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I first started to blog in 2002. Since my main purpose in putting finger to keyboard was to provide advice for people interested in self defense issues, I quickly came to the realization that accepting advertising might just bring my integrity into question. If I endorsed a product or training course that also had an ad on my blog, why wouldn’t someone simply assume that I was more interested in the health of my bank account than the health of my students?

This really hasn’t been an issue, though. I have never enjoyed enough traffic where ad revenue would be significant. Still, a few people have made offers over the years for me to join various ad networks. My policy has always been to either politely decline, or simply ignore the offer.

I heard of an interesting inversion of this situation over at The Volokh Conspiracy. It seems that the authors of some Liberal blogs are becoming furious with elements of the Democratic Party. The complaint is that the Dems demand free publicity from the blogs, while avoiding any sort of quid pro quo by paying for an ad.

It seems obvious to me why the Democrats do this.

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Cowardice is Eternal

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Glenn posts about an interesting case.

Two subway workers in New York called the police when they witnessed a rape in progress, but didn’t do anything to physically stop the crime. A case brought against them was thrown out of court, the judge saying that calling the cops is all that is required of witnesses.

Glenn isn’t any too happy about the ruling. He says….

“In a previous day, in a different culture, such men would have been afraid of being called cowards for failing to help a woman under such circumstances.”

I don’t think Glenn remembers Kitty Genovese. That particular incident might not have occurred in another culture, but it certainly happened in a previous day.

Look at it this way. At least the New York residents who saw the crime called police this time around. That is certainly an improvement over past performance. Maybe, after another four or five decades, people who live in New York will even become as brave as those of us who hail from flyover country.

Those who follow the links above will no doubt note that two of the three examples are where people who were legally carrying concealed weapons confronted a crazed killer. Since New York effectively bans that sort of thing, we really can’t expect them to have the same level of civic concern. This is, I think, one of the points that Glenn was trying to make.

But also note that the last link leads to the story of two unarmed vacationers who tackled a rifle wielding gunman who was shooting at the White House. Neither of them were from New York.

Finding a Less Costly Alternative

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I wrote last year about how I finally took the plunge and canceled my cable TV service.

The reason why I decided to let the television go dark was because advancing technology made paying for TV shows redundant. There are very few that I like anyway, and they are available for streaming free through a variety of websites. Add the fact that my charity work kept me extremely busy, so I would only have time to watch TV at some extremely odd hours, and you can see that online video-on-demand was the cost free way to go.

Things have loosened up a great deal since I shut down the charity self defense course in January. The course put such demands on me that going to an eight hour work day feels like an extended vacation, and I have a great deal more time on my hands. Even so, I still find that only a very few TV shows are at all interesting, and have no desire to start paying for cable service that I won’t watch anyway.

But that isn’t what I want to talk about. You see, now I’m thinking about canceling my phone service.

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