The Razor

The household is in grief over the death of our alpha dog, a chihuahua we rescued almost six years ago. He was old and epileptic when we found him, but he packed a lot of personality in that little body of his. He was loyal to everyone but like most chi’s he devoted most of his time to a single individual, and for us that was the Wife, usually sleeping behind behind her knees. He was extremely active and playful, running with us as we walked the upper field in the cold air yesterday evening. He was fearless, and crept off into the night while we weren’t looking after dinner, traveling an eighth of a mile for reasons unknown in the cold and dark to the road where he was hit by a car. I found him laying beside the road, alive but severely injured. A hair-raising drive to the emergency vet was for naught, and we had to put him to sleep.

2012 was a year of brutality. It started for us with the execution style slaying of a man nearby, followed by the killing of a rescued dog that had somehow had slipped our protection and was leapt upon by some of my upper-ranking females and died at the vet. The Wife’s sister was found dead in a Las Vegas parking lot. And now this. Friends have also suffered similar tragedies this year with pets and loved ones. Then there’s the local tragedy where a woman moved into a home and ran a portable generator in the house, killing her two children and almost dying herself. Expanding outward there is Sandy Hook of course and Aurora, and abroad the horrors of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Mali and Syria. The Buddha taught that Life means suffering, and for some reason 2012 demanded more suffering both great and small than most years. I am amazed, stunned, horrified, disappointed and disgusted with the world, and I only wish the New Age Doomers had been right about the Apocalypse last week.

With my last breath of the year I am left speechless except to say, “2012: F*** You.”

Congratulations to this week’s winners.

Council:  Joshuapundit –A Game Change In Syria

Noncouncil: Larry Corriea/Monster Hunter Nation-An opinion on gun control

Full voting here.

The gun control debate has taken a sinister turn with the publication by a Gannett owned newspaper of the names and addresses of people within the New York City area possessing a permit to own a handgun. The newspaper states the information was compiled using public records, but why? Why has the Gannett owned newspaper done this?

A journalist might answer that the public has a right to know, and I would ask him to point out that right in the Constitution. The right to bear arms is clearly laid out there, but I don’t recall seeing any right for the public to know anything. Yes the information is in the public domain, but just as the name of the editor of the Journal News, and her

The assumption is that lawfully owned weapons present a danger to public safety, and the purpose is to publicly shame the owners in the same way they publicize the sex offender registry. If the assumption were true, gun crime would concentrate highest in counties where gun ownership is most prevalent, yet urban areas such as Camden NJ, Washington DC, and Chicago have some of the strictest gun control laws on the books making legal gun ownership all but impossible yet have the highest rates of gun violence. Meanwhile counties in North Carolina, Texas and Tennessee have some of the highest per capita gun ownership rates in the country yet enjoy low incidences of gun crime.

Kneejack reactions always have unintended consequences, and the publishing of this list is no different. By listing owners of handguns one can safely assume that anyone not on this list is not armed. Criminals now know who to target and who to avoid. Criminality is like water or electricity: it always follows the path of least resistance, or what is perceived by the criminal to be the path of least resistance. It is the reason why burglars avoid homes with dogs, and why they prefer homes without burglar alarms. So by attempting to publicly shame legal gun owners the newspaper has instead helped criminals pick easier targets. Nice job guys.

When I saw this report I immediately recalled Rule 12 of Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals: Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions. The power behind this story chose to attack individual gun owners by name in the New York City area because they hurt, whereas the NRA as an institution does not. Some might scoff and think this is an example of “typical” gun owner paranoia, and that may have been true before we started jailing filmmakers. Answer this: Why else publish the names and addresses of private citizens, never convicted of any crimes, who legally own a handgun?

But gun owners aren’t idiots. They too can employ Alinsky’s tactics. The paper’s editor and vice president’s unusual name makes her an especially easy find on the internet. Add in some cheap information from one of the public records sites and it’s scary what one can learn about a private individual. I didn’t even try to find out personal details and still learned too much. I cannot post that info here because a) she obviously has no clue to what she has done by publishing the story and b) my conscience will not allow me to for the same reason that I will not publish information that could be used by jihadis. I have been on the receiving end of threats before, and it’s not fun but it taught me the wisdom of the old aphorism ”people in glass houses should not throw stones.” The editor/vp obviously hasn’t learned that lesson yet.

I also wonder how the newspaper and its editor would react if, say, Drudge Report  published a listing of the names and addresses of all doctors known to perform abortions in a particular area. Such information is pretty much public record, and abortion is legal in the USA just as handgun ownership is.

The Sandy Hook Massacre has allowed anti-choice forces to escalate the war against constitutional gun ownership in the United States.  For those of us who live to be free and view the Constitution as sacred as the Koran or Bible, we must learn the tactics used against us and employ them ourselves. As our President famously said in Philadelphia in 2008, “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.” And those are words to live by.

Update: Blogger Christopher Fountain does what I in good conscience couldn’t.

I normally don’t pay much attention to religion. On my best days I follow a Buddhist philosophy and on my worst I slip into the pit of nihilism that comes with atheism. Yesterday I was chatting with a coworker of mine who seemed surprised to learn I wasn’t Christian and didn’t celebrate Christmas. “Are you Jewish?” He asked – a pretty good guess given the odds. I explained that I left the Roman Catholic faith I had been born into during my teens and never looked back, and that the issue I had the most difficulty with, the one preventing me with accepting even the possibility of the existence of a Judeo-Christian G-d was the Suffering of Innocents.

I’ve heard a lot of excuses for the allowance of such suffering in my time. That G-d has a plan and suffering is part of the plan. That G-d gave us free will, and suffering of innocents derives from our choices, or that G-d will reward us in Heaven for the suffering we endure on earth. Honestly, they all suck. I personally can conceive of an all-powerful G-d who can create a universe and independent beings populating it having free will and the ability to learn whatever lesson G-d wants them to learn without requiring the innocent to suffer. I am therefore left with three choices: G-d exists but He is not all-powerful, He exists and is all-powerful but is a sadist, or He doesn’t exist at all. None of these are intellectually satisfying, leaving me struggling in a no-mans land between hope and nihilism.

Then there’s atheism. Atheists seem to enjoy tormenting people of faith especially the Christian and Jewish faiths that spawns atheists the way pot mixed with college freshmen spawns the mistaken belief Dave Mathews is a misunderstood genius on par with Jim Morrison. I’ve never understood why atheists are so smug towards believers. There is no 100% conclusive proof that they are right and a Christian or Jew is wrong. Atheists thrill themselves pointing out the suffering caused by religion, whether during the Crusades, the religious wars of the Renaissance in Europe, or the persecution of women and gays today. But they seem to conveniently ignore the 7 million killed by Stalin in the Ukraine and an additional 1-2 million killed five years later during the purges, and the 36 million killed by Mao’s Great Leap Forward, as well as the 2 million victims of Pol Pot’s Killing Fields. All these men were great atheists, and killed many, many more than all historical religious leaders combined. Add in your petty communists like Tito, Castro, Ceaucescu, Kim Il Sung and the death toll creeps even higher.

Then of course there’s the problem that any true atheist should rationally kill himself or herself to avoid suffering, or perhaps go to the other extreme and turn the world into your personal playground like a psychopath, but that merely delays the suffering. Camus, Sartre, and Nietzsche did their best to provide answers to this conundrum but nothing works. A true atheist should be a dead atheist, which is why I suppose they have to entertain themselves by banning creches or prayers at high school football games.

It would seem that there has never been as of yet a true secular code of morality, and the existence of such may even be an impossibility. We may not be born with a sense of right and wrong but without religion it may not be possible to instill a conscience or similar repository of moral values that are we are able to rely upon through all of life’s circumstances. So instead we are stuck with religions that are thousands of years old to navigate our increasingly complex modern lives. Yet aren’t absolute truths timeless? If we respect long-dead Greek philosophers for their astute observations on human nature regarding politics, why shouldn’t we trust a bunch of wondering tribes in the desert to set our moral compasses by?

Which leads us back to the suffering of innocents. The closest that any major religion has come to explaining it is Buddhism which elevates suffering to the first of the Four Noble Truths. But it’s the 2,500 year old equivalent of “it is what it is,” a saying I hear a lot more as I get older and struggle with. I can’t accept that answer. It doesn’t feel right and isn’t intellectually or emotionally satisfying.

What else is there? For agnostics like me there’s nothing except a yearning for a better answer, and the hope that if there is indeed an afterlife I can at last learn the reason why innocents suffer and the wicked prosper in our world.

Congratulations to this week’s winners.

Council:  The Right Planet– Talking Past Each Other

Noncouncil: Ben Stein-G-d Help Us

Full voting here.

I’ve only been on the planet a few short decades but during that time I’ve run across probably 15 or 20 end of the world predictions, some more popular than others but all wrong. Some, like the Heaven’s Gate cult were destructive, others like Y2K were expensive (or lucrative if you were a cobol programmer), but all were treated with derision and scorn by the masses. Today again the masses are right and the believers wrong as has been the case since the first End of the World declaration was made and failed to come to pass. In a year our two another prediction will become popular and the cycle will start anew.

Some believers will be dispirited, others will be relieved that we dodged a bullet somehow, and that reminds me of one of my favorite Winston Churchill quotes: “There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at without result.” For believers and non-believers alike I don’t think it hurts to allow some of that exhilaration to seep in by taking a moment to look around and appreciate Life. Of the 100 billion or so souls that have lived on this planet, we are members of the 6% alive today. For some 150,000 of us, today will in fact be the end of the world (or at least this world) and another 350,000 will be born to take their places. Our vantage points are unique and ephemeral. One of these days we are guaranteed to experience the end of the world first hand.

So the hippies were wrong today, and the Mayans, well don’t blame them: they weren’t the ones predicting the end of the world in the first place although hopefully they sold lots of t-shirts for the event. Instead of wasting time laughing at  the misguided believers in prophecies, enjoy the world a little more today than you would otherwise.

And since music is an important part of my life, and this song has been stuck in my brain for weeks now, I’ll share it with you as I wish you and yours a Happy End of the World! Oh, and Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, and Happy New Year! Sorry Kwanzaa but you’re a racist holiday created by a misguided Marxist so no soup for you.

I am a proud parent and devoted husband. I rescue animals – dogs, cats and even chickens. Although I am not a vegan I sympathize with those who are because it’s hard to deny that meat involves murder. I respect life so I am against abortion but do not believe the Law should be used to prevent it making me both pro-life and pro-choice. I have no problem with gay marriage and have been blessed in my life with friends some of whom are gay.  I founded this journal because I needed to speak out against the slaughter of innocents, the men and women of all races and economic backgrounds  that died on Tuesday September 11, 2001. The events in Newtown, Aurora, and other massacres over the years as well as the thousands killed everyday around the world in the name of G-d sicken me.

I am also a member of the NRA. Now some people want to kill me because I own guns and believe that self-protection is a human right.

All I can say is one word:

Try.

A friend sent me a link to this story about a drone operator killing a child on one of his missions and having trouble coming to terms with his actions. He wanted to know my reaction, and this is what I wrote back.

There’s nothing here that hasn’t been felt by bomber pilots over the past 80 years. In the 1940s allied bombers killed millions of Japanese and German civilians. They were viewed as unavoidable casualties in a war against regimes that chose to put them in harms way, not unlike the way Hezbollah and other terror organizations use civilians as human shields today. In 1945 while fighting in the Philippines my own father shot and killed a 12 year old Filipino boy who had been forced to carry ammunition for the Japanese. He had no choice because he knew that if the Japanese got the ammo the boy was carrying his friends would be finding that ammunition in their own bodies. It sickened him before, during and afterward. At the time he had 2 kids himself but he pulled the trigger because the enemy gave him no choice. It turns out it was a regular policy of the Japanese to use civilians as slaves whenever possible because they knew American soldiers would hesitate firing on them. They also baked it into their plans of homeland defense. While teaching in Japan I met people who had seen kids taught to carry backpacks and run towards pictures of Cary Grant and other western film stars to overcome their innate fear of the foreign face. The idea was that they would be used as suicide bombers, carrying backpacks full of explosives, but the kids were scared to death of foreigners. That’s Pure Evil if you ask me.

Today we don’t carpet bomb anymore. Instead we use precision to kill our enemies, and far fewer civilians die today than would otherwise. I personally take issue with the statement that our foreign policy “regularly murders innocents overseas,” as if the point of our actions is to kill civilians. I’ve seen the same crap levied against the Israelis by the Leftists and Libertarians, who then conveniently justify the terror attacks by jihadis against civilians or the unguided missiles they fire into Israel. So you have one side trying to kill civilians and the other side doing its best to minimize civilian casualties yet some people morally equate both as the same. I guess that’s what happens when you’ve lost your own moral bearings in life. If the US or Israeli governments wanted to kill civilians, they could kill millions at a time. But they don’t.

I usually don’t waste my time arguing with people who believe this stuff because honestly their bearings are so off I don’t see the point. I would ask though, “What would you have us do? Should we carpet bomb the village, send in Seal Team 6, or simply let the terrorists go?” We tried that last option in 1998 when Clinton fired a few cruise missiles into Afghanistan after a dozen Americans and hundreds of innocent Africans died in the embassy attacks in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, and what happened? 9-11. Seal Team 6 puts more American lives in jeopardy without decreasing the likelihood of casualties. So what’s left? Sending in the B-52s?

Leftists and Isolationists cannot accept that we are in an existential war with radical Islam. The Lefties believe we deserve retribution for our treatment of the Indians, the Soviets, the Vietnamese and even America’s raping of the planet (immediately after 9-11 I saw an environmental group claim the attack was due to just that). They want us to suffer the way some Calvinists believe we must to atone for our sins; substitute “the planet” or “the environment” for God and there’s not much differences between two. Libertarians think we can exit the world’s stage and not suffer the consequences. They cannot accept it’s not 1492 anymore. Hell even Jefferson realized we couldn’t avoid interacting with the world when the Barbary Pirates raided American ships and sold American sailors into slavery in the early 1800s. He ended up shelling Tripoli, and no doubt killed many more civilians than this drone pilot did.

When my father shot the 12 year old he knew that if he didn’t the ammunition he carried would kill others. By killing he saved lives. Yeah, it’s difficult for some to believe but killing can save lives (think about the lives saved had someone put a bullet into Lanza’s brains before he stepped into that school.) Does this drone pilot consider the lives he may be saving by taking out the jihadist along with the child? It’s not clear because the way the story is written it appears as if he’s firing on an empty hut. From my understanding of the military, blowing up empty huts isn’t really the point of our engagement in Afghanistan. The jihadis tend to kill more Muslims than infidel, so it’s likely that he’s saving other children’s lives in the area. It’s also possible that the jihadi is plotting innocents outside of Afghanistan. He might feel better if he knew that by killing that child he saved other lives, but he doesn’t seem to consider that.

Oh, and I also find it a hoot that the German media is moralizing about this (the story appears in Der Speigel). Sorry but I haven’t forgotten what happened in the recent past there, and call me a bigot but I don’t think the Germans have earned the right to moralize about anything just yet. Get back to me in a few hundred years.

Rhymes with Right has a moving piece honoring the passing of Senator Daniel Inouye. Inouye was a member of the Greatest Generation, but fought for a nation that didn’t trust him simply because of his ethnic heritage, becoming a hero in more ways than one. Just because a man has a “D” behind his name doesn’t make him less a man; in fact in Inouye’s case I think he had more guts and sense than any of those he most recently served with having “R”s behind theirs.

Aloha, Senator, and Requiesce in Pace after a life lived with honor.

After 9-11 it took me weeks before I could write about it. Days after the Sandy Hook Massacre, I still find it difficult. I feel that the world is a horrific place, and there is nothing that I can do to help it. Worse, I feel that evil is the default condition of the world, and that good is fleeting and powerless to stop it. Yes I believe – KNOW - that evil exists, and that as a result good does as well. But where I differ from my Christian, Jewish and Muslim friends is that I do not believe G-d is all powerful, that good is in control. No, I believe the Devil rules and we exist in his fiery realm. The glimpses of goodness we get in our existence are just the shattered remains of Heaven that he long ago destroyed. So when John R. Coyne, Jr says “There is evil in the world. It’s beyond mental illness, beyond gun control. It is evil,” I disagree slightly: Evil is not the exception it is the norm. Evil is to be expected, what should surprise us or challenge our beliefs is when something good happens.

Ben Stein says what I feel best, writing, “There is plenty of blood of all kinds on our hands, especially of the most innocent and blameless among us… real babies, truly innocent. God help us. Man is made of such crooked stuff that it is impossible to set him straight, said a famous philosopher. God help us.”

If only G-d could, but He can’t because He is vanquished, destroyed, reduced to mere shimmers of Grace in the heat of our hellish existence.

Update: Jed Babbin suggests forcibly incarcerating the mentally ill should be considered. Since a paranoid schizophrenic threatened to kill my wife (and she refuses to arm herself), I’m all for it. It would have also saved the poor soul who was pushed in front of a subway train in NYC. Would it work in all cases? Perhaps not but the option should be on the table.

Speaking of insanity, when will Republicans stop their fetishistic devotion to the wealthy after the party has been abandoned by them? As Victor Davis Hansen point out, 8 of the 10 wealthiest counties in America voted for Obama in November 2012, yet the party continues kowtowing to the uberrich by most recently exempting Hollywood from animal cruelty laws. Hollywood isn’t exactly supportive of the GOP, yet that hasn’t stopped the party from cosponsoring and supporting legislation such as the DMCA even going so far to fire  Derek Khanna, formerly of the Republican Study Committee for daring criticize the legislation that protects the film and music industries at the expense of artists and consumers.

It’s time to cap the tax exemption on charitable giving. Why not a cap on say, $10 million? Everything beyond that is taxable. Such a cap won’t hurt charities like Goodwill or AmVets, two charities that are largely supported by small donations from individuals, but it will put a dent in giving to large high profile charities and foundations supported by liberals that in return support liberal causes. Hansen suggests limiting the mortgage interest tax deduction to a single mortgage on the primary residence to the first $100k with no interest tax deduction on second or vacations homes. After all why should taxpayers subsidize mansions and multiple homes of the wealthy? Also, disallow the tax deduction for state and local taxes. For the average taxpayer this won’t result in much, but it would kill those who live in Blue states such as California, Illinois and Connecticut who are allowed to deduct their high state taxes from their federal taxes, in effect forcing people living in low tax Red states to subsidize the wealthy in La Jolla and the Hamptons. As Ann Coulter states, “You want high taxes, New York and California? Then pay them — with no deductions for state and local taxes on your federal returns.”

Coulter also points out that the reason why capital gains are taxed at a lower level than wage income is that most people pay taxes on their labor and then invest the money, so capital gains are a form of double taxation. But for the likes Warren Buffet who are compensated completely through capital gains, they do in effect pay a lower rate than the doctors, engineers and others who have to work to get the cash they need to invest. She writes, “Close that loophole. Almost no Republicans will be harmed in the making of this tax change. (There’s a reason Sen. Chuck Schumer fought so hard to save it.)”

Then there’s the Hollywood excise tax that Instapundit Glenn Reynolds has suggested re-instituting the excise tax on Hollywood that was repealed in the 1950’s. Hollywood has replaced the blacklist and slavish devotion to anti-communist ideology of the 1950s with their leftist equivalents today. The industry provides an outlet for a leftist interpretation of history (watch any Oliver Stone film to see what I’m referring to) while enjoying the benefits of conservative tax policy. As Reynolds notes, “Why should movie stars and studio moguls, with their yachts, swimming pools and private jets, not at least shoulder the burden they carried back in Harry Truman’s day—when, to be honest, movies were better anyway.”

Update: Victor Davis Hanson weighs in.

If the country is going to turn redistributionist, then we might as well do so whole-hog — given that eight of the wealthiest 10 counties in America voted for Obama. Why not limit mortgage interest deductions to just one loan under $100,000 — while ending tax breaks altogether for second and third vacation houses?

Under the present system, the beleaguered 99 percent are subsidizing the abodes of Hollywood and Silicon Valley “millionaires and billionaires” — many of whom themselves have been railing against the one percent. Should the government provide tens of thousands of dollars in tax breaks for a blue-state one-percenter to live in tony Palo Alto or Newport Beach when there are plenty of fine homes far cheaper and sitting empty not far away in Stockton and Bakersfield?

Blue states usually have far higher state income taxes that are used as deductions to reduce what is owed on federal income tax. Why should working folks in Nevada or Texas have to pay their fair share, while Wall Streeters get huge federal write-offs from their New York or Connecticut state income taxes?

What is the purpose of government?

Is it to provide for the collective needs of the citizenry that the people cannot provide individually for themselves, or is it to exist for the purpose of improving the lives of those working for the government itself?

This is an answer that California is determined to learn. According to former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, as reported by Bloomberg, half of the state’s budget is devoted to government employee salaries, health care and pension benefits and other compensation. According to the Census Bureau, in March 2011 there were 671,942 full time public sector employees in California. The state also employed an additional 310,298 part-timers for roughly a million workers. The Census estimates in 2011 California had a population of 37,691,912. The 2011-12 state budget was $85.9 billion. So if what Bloomberg reports is true, 2.7% of the population of California is gorging on 50% of the budget while the remaining 97.3% makes do with the rest.

The public sector unions, of course, see nothing wrong with this situation. Bloomberg reports:

“At the time we accomplished our biggest gains, I actually felt I was losing the recruitment war,” (Jon Hamm, chief executive officer of the California Association of Highway Patrolmen, the union for CHP officers) said in an e- mailed statement. “I think it is clear that when our biggest gains were negotiated I did not feel they were ‘excessive;’ in fact, almost the opposite was true.

So the high compensation was necessary to recruit the best and brightest. Where have we heard that argument before? With CEO pay, another group whose pay some, such as the Soros front group ThinkProgress, have argued is unjustifiable. Note to Lefties: When you start using your opponent’s defense as your own, guess what? You have become your opponent.

Albert Einstein reportedly said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results (I think this guy says it best.) When Democrat Gray Davis took the governorship the state had $12 billion surplus. Gray immediately went on a spending spree, throwing money at every possible Democratic constituency in existence. He did the job so well the damage outlasted his successful recall from office and blighted the terms of the governors who followed him. But instead of revolting against their politicians they keep electing the Democrats over and over again. Today the state is a one party Democratic state. There is no opposition to these policies that enrich the few while causing the many to suffer. The California GOP lacks any power to fight the continued plundering of the state by the rapacious minority of public sector workers belonging to unions who support the Democratic party alone.

Californians choose this of their own free will. It is a damning testament to Democracy, one that undermines faith in the form of government elsewhere in the country. It would be easy for conservatives and libertarians who believe in the separation of federal and state power and live in the remaining 49 states to write the state off as a basket case and wash their hands of its problems, but doing so ignores the sheer economic weight of the state. At a GNP of $2 trillion, 1/7th the entire US, the state’s economy is tied with Italy’s for eighth largest in the world. We may smirk as the EU struggles to maintain its cohesion and even compare California’s fate to the supposedly lazy Greeks, but California’s economy is 5 1/2 times the size of Greece’s.  That means we have over five Greeces, an EU sized mess,  in our own American back yard. An economically dysfunctional California isn’t just a threat to itself, it could wreck the American economy for years.

It is only a matter of time before California goes cap in hand to Washington DC, and when it does it will be met with howls of protests from conservatives and libertarians – and rightfully so. But the truth is California isn’t going to go away; we can’t kick it out of the Union the way the Germans are contemplating doing to Greece, but at the same time we can’t ignore it either. It is in our own interest and the interest of the country’s to help get the state back on its feet and to do so while balancing the needs of its people while getting them in touch with the responsibilities they shirked in the past.

I just came back from a patrol run on my property. When I go on patrol I go out armed, usually with a semi-automatic rifle and handgun backup. My property is mixed woodland with pasture and bears have been seen on the neighbors acreage. Not that I’d shoot one if I saw one, but I can’t be sure how the bear will react. There are also hunters who occasionally ignore the NO TRESPASSING signs on my property and it’s amazing how polite people get when they know both sides are armed.

Earlier I had spotted two pit bulls near my pond. Both looked like fighting dogs without collars with scars and wounds around their necks that come from to-the-death fights. I have written before about my feelings about pit bulls. I am not comfortable with the breed and trust them less than I do other breeds.  I have eight rescued dogs on my current roster, and none of them would stand a chance against either of these muscular fighters, so I chased them off with my SUV when I went out and after I returned an hour later got on the motorcycle, armed myself and canvassed the area looking for them.

I love animals and that includes pit bulls. I do not fault them for being who they are, and deeply despise the human beings who have bred and fought them for sport. I understand that some are valued pets and would never hurt their owners, but these two I saw on my property were not pets. They were fighters probably dumped instead of shot by their owners. But no matter what my feelings are, regardless of how much I would love to feed them and clean them up and watch them frolic and play with my pack of misfits, the reality is that if they got close to my house they would  likely decimate my pack, from the chow-shepherd mixes down to the minpin and chihuahua.  So bleeding-heart animal lover I am, I set off on my motorcycle to make sure they did not threaten my rescues and moved on, and if they stood their ground I was prepared to kill them. I hate killing animals, hate it more than anything, but Nature rarely cares about the human conscience and confronts me from time to time with threats to my family or my pack. Rest assured that at these times I do what needs to be done to protect those under my care, regardless of the pangs of my conscience.

A horror is unfolding a few hundred miles away, and while I fully expect to hear the usual calls for the confiscation of my ability to protect myself and those I care for, I am prepared to resist them. I understand the pain that causes people to respond in such a way, but I wish they would heed what responsible gun owners have been saying for decades: the solution is not to confiscate guns it is to provide them to those who we task with caring for our loved ones in our absence. We are not going to change the hearts of the insane killers who slaughter just as I am not going to turn the pit bulls who crossed my property into pets happy to join my pack. All it would take to stop such massacres is a person carrying a gun and trained in its use. In fact murders are deterred all the time by law abiding citizens wielding a gun in self-defense, but these cases rarely make the news. They usually won’t because we can never see what would have happened had the gun owner not reacted, had they not carried a weapon and used it to defend themselves, their friends or loved ones.  In such events we have a single dead criminal instead of multiple innocents, but such things ever make the inner pages of the newspaper and are often ignored completely.

There will always be pit bulls that know nothing but killing just as there will be people without souls who will do heinous acts that tear at the souls of those of us who have them. My pack surrounds me, trusting in me to protect them, and I am alert. It is all I know and what I am.

Congratulations to this week’s winners.

Council:  VA Right –Boehner and Cantor’s ‘War on Conservatives’ Causes Exodus of Conservatives from the GOP

Noncouncil: The Commentator-Rejection and terror: Same old Palestinian choices

Full voting here.

Congratulations to this week’s winners.

Council:  Joshuapundit – ‘Palestine’ – A Celebration At The Funeral

Noncouncil: Victor Davis Hanson-Waiting for the GOP’s Populist Turn

Full voting here.