You can limit access to guns, but crazies will still find a way.

As horrified travelers watched, a Greyhound Canada bus passenger repeatedly stabbed and then decapitated the young man sitting beside him, who was sleeping with his head leaning against the window, a witness said Thursday.

While not all the details of this horrific knife wielding incident are yet available, I would rather be shot than be stabbed and decapitated.

This sort of tale reinforces my viewpoint that society should be investing resources in mental health improvements instead of implementing bans on various weapons. In Canada, Mr. Crazy McStab doesn’t have access to a pistol but needs him some killing. So he gets a big butcher knife, sits quietly on the bus for a while and then chops up the guy next to him. Maybe it was planned. Maybe he knew the guy and wanted revenge. Who knows?

The point is this - if you really, really want to kill someone horrifically you will find a way. If you want to kill a large group of people, you will find a way. There are, in fact, thousands of ways to kill a large group of people with readily available means that are not projectile based. They can all be researched on the Internet or found elsewhere. Think of the guy in China who poisoned 30-plus of his competitor’s customers.

That’s why we should be focused on what makes people mentally ill in the first place instead of on the inanimate tools these people use to go on rampages when their sicknesses take control of them. No one in Canada is calling for a knife ban but some idiot will. And it won’t fix anything.

Gun control advocates have to lie if they hope to make a convincing argument that guns cause violence. That is because the facts don’t match their desire to remove weapons from the hands of private citizens. Private citizens who own guns, by and large, are also responsible citizens. It is hard to sell a message that individuals cannot be trusted with guns when the data proves otherwise.

Why do the states with the most liberal and least restrictive gun laws also have the least violent crime, statistically speaking? Why do the big cities with the most restrictive gun laws also have the most gun violence per capita? Maybe it is because government is exacerbating the social problems that lead to high rates of violence. Rather than fixing crime rates, gun restrictions just increase the crime rates.

In the mean time, the fear mongers that comprise the anti-gun crowd continue to make up stuff to convince the rest of us that they should control your right to defend yourself from the criminal class they helped create.

The VPC (Violence Policy Center) also has to purposely limit its selectively picked data to states rather than cities. This is because the one jurisdiction with the strictest gun control in the entire nation is the District of Columbia. In D.C., all handguns are banned, long arms must be stored disassembled, locked and unloaded, and law-abiding citizens have no right to carry guns. According to the same 2005 CDC data relied upon by the VPC, D.C. has the highest rate of shooting deaths of any place in the United States! The district has well over double the national average.

Gun crimes happen because of groups like the Violence Policy Center. These groups try to teach us that we as individuals are not responsible enough to decide for ourselves the course of our lives. When you pursue policies that discourage self-reliance you foster an atmosphere of apathy, under achievement, hopelessness and despair. If the Violence Policy Center and other groups like it truly want to change the levels of violence in our cities, they should focus on improving education and changing the cultural values we teach the children who live in those violent zip codes. You cannot solve a problem if you are not willing to look at the root causes of the problem. Violence is not caused by guns, it is caused by flawed memes.

The memes children learn in New Hampshire are very different from the memes children learn in Washington, D.C.

Gun control certainly works.

London also emerges as the “crime capital of Europe” with the likelihood of becoming a victim - mostly of a range of petty crimes - said to be higher than all other EU capitals and even higher than cities such as Istanbul and New York.

It works in favor of criminals. Ask the British.

We live in a society where rule of law is dearly held by many citizens. Question: how long will the status quo hold? In a time and place when overgovernance is the norm, rule of law is corrupted and weakened by a simple fact - there are too many laws for the law to be applied equally to everyone. When you make hundreds of thousands of laws you cannot hope to apply them equally to everyone. You cannot even pay honest lip service to the concept.

Our legal system has three basic tiers: federal, state and local. It is generally held that federal law trumps state law which trumps local law. For this reason, there should be very few federal laws, a few state laws and as many local laws as communities deem necessary. When you have too many laws at every level, you begin to read stories like this one, in which local authorities decide that their laws are more important than the laws made by those representing larger bodies of citizens. Pennsylvanians can do whatever they damn well please, as far as I am concerned. Practically speaking though, local Pennsylvania authorities are cheapening rule of law by deciding to ignore state laws. In the long term, they hurt everyone by doing so.

A society without rule of law is a society that is always moments away from a descent into chaos and mayhem. It worries me greatly that several conditions exist in this nation today which, alone or together, could act as catalysts for a descent into darkness.

1. Too many laws - an average citizen cannot possibly be expected to know, understand or follow the federal, state and local laws because there are hundreds of thousands of them, particularly when you include “guidelines” which can be punished by force if not followed. This weakens the rule of law by encouraging citizens to throw up their hands and stop even trying to interpret, understand or comply with basic common sense rules.
2. Too many bureaucrats - an average citizen cannot possibly be expected to know, understand or respect thousands of faceless strangers who make decisions from thousands of miles away about how that average citizen should conduct his or her daily affairs. This weakens the rule of law by encouraging citizens to ignore missives from these strangers and to be dishonest with these strangers when confronted by them from time to time.
3. Too many taxes - an average citizen cannot possibly be expected to know, understand or comply with current federal, state and local tax code. Were it not for the organized system of theft known as withholding, the average citizen would realize that the levels of “voluntary” robbery have reached well beyond ridiculous. This weakens rule of law because most productive citizens do not appreciate having the fruits of their labor stolen and redistributed.
4. Too many ignorant citizens - the bureaucrat class has purposely fostered an environment of mediocrity in education and a culture that values instant gratification above fiscal responsibility. It has encouraged systems that produces illiterate godlike football heroes and dooms to obscurity the men and women who are truly contributing something valuable to the society - scientists, economists and inventors are basically ignored while Congress debates the merits of steroid use by empty headed ball throwers.
5. Too many empty promises - every election comes with new broken promises an average citizen cannot possibly be expected to believe yet somehow, they foolishly do, at least the ones who can be bothered to vote. An average citizen cannot possibly be expected to keep track of all the broken promises, but every one of them degrades the rule of law, respect for government and the general moral condition of the nation. The War on Terror is just five years old but most of us are more terrified than we were when that war began. The War on Drugs is more than four decades old but more of us use drugs than ever before. The War on Poverty is more than 40 years old as well. Lying politicians have had to redefine the term poverty to include people who consume so many calories every day that they are obese. Those living in poverty now have color televisions and washing machines and cars. But the war is still on because without it, the empty promises wouldn’t be needed.

When there are enough laws and enough bureaucrats and enough taxes and enough ignorant citizens and all the empty promises that can be have been made then the system will eat itself. Rule of law, having been bludgeoned into a coma in her sleep, will slowly bleed out while the world burns. No one will be left to notice.

Of every 100 people who read this post, 99 of you will not reach this sentence. That is because you have been trained to believe government will always take care of you. You have been conditioned to feel certain that rule of law will always protect you from the barbarians at the gate. You have been indoctrinated into a false sense of security and you will stand in your lines and submit to security searches and let people take your money and tell you what you may or may not do with your own body. You will be born and you will die without truly understanding the value of rule of law. You will exist in this life without ever really understanding that in a society that truly values freedom, the number and complexity of laws is limited so that rule of law can endure.

Washington, D.C. isn’t the only city in the U.S. that ignores the Constitution’s second amendment and bans private gun ownership, or at least severely restricts it. As far as I know, though, at this time, the District of Columbia is the only metropolis booking “voluntary” appointments to search homes for illegal weapons.

D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier says she’s changing a plan for searches of private homes for illegal guns.

The chief now says searches would be done by appointment unless there is an urgent need. Police and city lawyers are still trying to work out what can and can’t be done during these searches.

Since the program was announced weeks ago, it has been delayed in part because of fears citizens’ rights will be violated.

Lanier now says police will distribute literature to homes in high-crime neighborhoods asking owners to sign forms and set up appointments.

I’m left nearly speechless. If I lived in one of these neighborhoods, I would be planning on moving. Of course, you probably couldn’t pay me enough to live in the world’s center of graft and the highest crime city in the country. Now that government has screwed up the country’s moral and educational foundations, it wants to fix the problem by treating us all like irresponsible idiots. Admittedly, many of Washington D.C.’s residents probably shouldn’t have handguns. We should be asking ourselves why this is. Why does the city have to worry about whether or not its population can be trusted with weapons in the first place? Address the root causes that make gun ownership undesirable - a lack of individual responsibility, an amoral approach to life and a culture that breeds indifference and apathy.

Fix those things and the problem with guns will correct itself. Until we can honestly discuss the real problems in D.C., gun crime will continue to be an issue. Search those houses every week. Gun crime won’t change a bit.