Street Crime and Packin' Heat

There's a story in the Chicago Tribune today about a mugging victim who moved from the city to the suburbs because she doesn't feel safe (http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-chicago-muggings-24-aug24,0,3762222.story?page=2).

Pretty common theme, actually. Not everyone who gets mugged moves, of course. Some can't, others choose not to give up and let the creeps win. All who have been victimized live with fear, however. It may just be a tiny bit that's hidden way in the back of their minds. A niggling doubt as they pass someone a little sketchy on the street. Or it may develop into full-fledged, weapon-carrying paranoia.

Pistol packin' disturbs me the most. Sure it's fine to tell your bar buddies you're ready to blow away a bad guy. The fact remains, drawing and using a handgun during a street crime requires speed, dexterity, an adamant sense of purpose and a willingness, not just to wound but to kill. If you haven't been trained properly, blowing away that "bad guy" may have catastrophic results.

We're talking about a window of opportunity that opens for mere seconds. Identifying the threat may occur when it's already on top of you. How far away is your attacker? Is he armed? What with? Who's in the shadows behind you? For that matter, who is in range of your bullets behind your attacker? Are you being attacked at all or is it your overactive imagination? In some places, merely reaching for your weapon may be construed as a crime so you'd better be absolutely certain your life is at risk.

Have you practiced with that pistol in simulated tactical situations or just on the vanilla pistol range? Do you have any idea of the legal labyrinth you enter when you take someone's life? What if it happens by accident?

I believe in the right to carry a concealed weapon and would like to see Illinois adopt a progressive new statute to allow it. I believe even more strongly in common sense.

That may be the best weapon we own . . . and one that should never be kept concealed.

A Mockery of Justice

If you blow up an airplane full of innocents, I don't care if your prostate is the size of your head and you've grown a third leg in the middle of your forehead...you don't deserve "compassionate release" from prison.

I love the Scots, am part Scots myself in fact, but they blew it releasing the Lockerbie bomber. He's dying of prostate cancer? Fine, let him die. Releasing him makes a mockery of everything free nations are trying to do to combat terror.

Many American politicians including the President have condemned Scotland's action but, truth be told, the very same thing might have happened had the man been a prisoner here in the states.

We've lost our frontier ethic. We're no longer the sort of people who, having shot our enemy, will routinely go up and put a final round in him just to be sure he's dead. We're soft on gangs but we go after guns, hoping that will solve the problem. We let drunk drivers have four, five, six chances and more until they finally get behind the wheel and kill someone. And then we sentence them gingerly at best. We assign our cops to chase pot smokers while billions of dollars of cocaine and heroin are flowing into our streets. We release career sex offenders from prison and then beat our breasts when, surprise! they rape and murder our children.

That wonderful Scotsman, Sean Connery, put it best in The Untouchables:

"They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. *That's* the *Chicago* way!"

Had it been up to me, the Lockerbie bomber would be dead already. Told his cancer was terminal, I would have kneecapped the bastard and dumped him atop of a landfill to rot with the rest of the garbage.

That, my friends, is the sort of compassion he and his colleagues understand . . . and deserve. That's the Chicago Way.

Say Goodbye to Saturday Mail Delivery

Bob Greene, writing an online column for CNN, reports today that Saturday mail delivery may become a thing of the past. I haven't seen any other articles on the subject but Bob says they were lost amidst the more urgent news that's been happening this summer...Michael Jackson's death, the showering of a baseball player with beer, all of that stuff.

For the moment, I'll take Bob's column as fact because it gives me something to blog about.

Frankly, I think he gets all misty-eyed sometimes just to be able to write about getting misty-eyed. He talks about the "giddy anticipation of seeing the mail carrier strolling up the sidewalk" as though he was back in the malt shop at college waiting to run back to the dorm and see if he's gotten a letter from home.

"Giddy" isn't a way I would describe waiting for my mail. At least not since the box has been routinely filled with catalogs, bills and solicitations from charities like Mercy Home that should be taking the money they spend on mail solicitations and using it to feed and house their kids.

Every day, I take at least ninety percent of my mail straight from the box to the recycling bin.

The U.S. Postal Service is a huge, clunky governmental bureaucracy that's hemorrhaging money. . . $7 billion this year, if Greene's facts are correct. If eliminating Saturday deliveries will cut $3 billion of that, go for it.

In fact, how about mail-less Mondays, too?

Angry

Is it my imagination, or are we an angrier and more unconcerned species than we were years ago? Nastier generally. More mean-spirited toward each other.

A fan throwing beer on a professional ball player. An entire city harboring a grudge for years against another fan who caught a foul ball at an inopportune time. An entire political party so enraged at having lost the Presidency that it will do just about anything to see his policies fail, even at the risk of damaging the country. Mortgage lenders in such heat to make their fortune on the backs of new homeowners that they deal a critical blow to our financial system? A train engineer who is talking to friends at the time of a fatal collision. An air traffic control supervisor out of the tower and his employee chatting with a girlfriend while a plane and a helicopter collide.

How many stories could you add to that list in the next few minutes?

Then there are the daily injustices perpetrated by kids with illegal guns. The almost delighted way they take human life...women, kids, the elderly...with little concern for the consequences. I suggested, seriously, this morning that we should consider establishing a Kevlar for Kids Fund for children in the neighborhoods where gangbangers rule.

Crooks are everywhere. Crimes personal to me. A burglary down the block with high school kids the perpetrators. My friend Joe held up at gunpoint while delivering sandwiches. Again, high schoolers holding the shotgun.

Every generation, when it reaches a certain age, looks at the world and thinks it's going to hell in a handbasket.

I guess it's my turn to make that observation.

What a shame.