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Enterprise, Number 23, March 1, 1997.
Murder at the Pinnacle
By L. Neil Smith
[email protected]Exclusive to The Libertarian Enterprise
Another damned coincidence.
By now, everybody in America believes he knows about how a 69-year-old Ali Abu Kamal took an elevator to the 80th floor of the Empire State Building in New York City, wounded six people, killed one more (or killed six people and wounded one -- I've heard it both ways on the radio this morning, from the same network) and then very obligingly shot himself with a .380 caliber Beretta semiautomatic pistol he's supposed to have purchased illegally in Florida.
Why, the guy even had his passport with him! Get it? To show that he was a vile, ragheaded foreigner? And a month-old receipt from a firearms emporium to prove that being a foreigner didn't prevent him from buying a handgun in that nasty old alligator state? Come on, guys, gimme a break! Don't you think it's all a little obvious, even for the Nixon-era CIA who created the "gun control" industry to begin with and, as far as I know, are still behind it?
Another national disinformation network even claimed for a while that two victims jumped off the building, to their deaths, to avoid being shot. At any moment, I expected to hear a sidebar interview with King Kong or at least Fay Wray.
How convenient the occurence is -- how suspiciously convenient -- to those who (in light of last year's Northwestern University study that put the lie to everything they profess to believe) feel the desperate need of a cornered rat to discredit, at any cost, the phenomenon of private gun ownership in Florida, and to stop the spread, from that state, of the only positive sociopolitical trend today: the massively effective suppression of violent crime by armed individuals.
New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani -- who could be a poster boy for everything that's gone wrong with the Republican Party in the 1990s, for its despicable cowardice, its self-destructive stupidity, its all-encompassing ideological corruption -- opines grandly that this ludicrously predictable episode is an argument for "national licensing". Why, Rudie? So the rest of the country can be just like the dark, violent, cockroach-infested garbage heap you rule over? So your uniformed bully-boys -- the dirtiest police force this side of Ankara -- can beat people up and kill them with impunity they way it's done in Arkansas?
Is there no Constitutional depravity in which Republicans will not wallow? Is there nothing they will do to arrest their increasingly rapid descent into the compost heap of history? Apparently there isn't. What else can we expect from the mentally, morally, and viscerally crippled members of a plastic toy opposition party who stubbornly refuse to distance themselves from the bloody atrocities committed at Ruby Ridge and Waco, let alone prosecute and punish the murderous criminals -- Bill Clinton and Janet Reno -- responsible for them?
As for this latest transaction at the Empire State Building, we've seen it all before, haven't we? "By sheerest coincidence", whatever specific weapon it is, that "just happens" at the moment to be under political pressure in the Congress or some state legislature, "spontaneously" figures in a telegenically splashy enormity, carried out by a government-manufactured psycho who neatly disposes of himself before he can be captured and maybe exposed for what he is.
We've seen it all before, as well, in Scotland, in Australia, and in New Zealand.
We're no longer fooled or stampeded by it. We've seen it so many times, done in such a clumsy and transparent manner, that now it's up to those, like Rudie Giuliani -- who profit politically by it -- to prove to us that it isn't happening. Don't hand us any of that college freshman philosophy crap about how "you can't prove a negative". Like hell you can't. We prove people are "not guilty" all the time, don't we? Conversely, we also prove they're not innocent.
What this Empire State Building absurdity does prove, once and for all, and beyond a shadow of a doubt, is that victim disarmament -- commonly and improperly known as "gun control" -- doesn't work. It's been not working for something like 80 years, since passage of the infamous, crooked, and patently unconstitutional Sullivan Act stripped New Yorkers of their means of self-defense and started that city on its path to becoming the world's crime capital.
The Sullivan Act must go, now.
In an increasing number of states, if some loonie started waving a little pocket pistol around on a crowded observation platform, half a dozen armed individuals would put him down with .40s, .357s, and .45s, before he managed to hurt anybody. More likely, it would never have occurred to said loonie to wave his pistol around in the first place, or if it had, he'd have thought better of it. That could have happened in New York last weekend if the highest law of the land, the first 10 amendments to the Constitution, was in operation there, instead of the fascist legislation that's been passed in its place.
The Sullivan Act must go, now.
How many more innocent individuals are going to die before creatures like Rudie Giuliani do their job, which principally consists -- like that of any other elected executive in this country -- of actively enforcing the Bill of Rights?
The Sullivan Act must go, now.
And with it, all federal, state, and local victim disarmament laws.
The Sullivan Act must go.
Now.Permission to redistribute this article is hereby granted by the author, provided it is reproduced unedited, in its entirety, and appropriate credit given.
L. Neil Smith's award-winning The Probability Broach opens a window onto a Libertarian civilization. More of his books (see The Webley Page: http://www.lneilsmith.org//) are available at bookstores everywhere, at http://www.amazon.com, at Laissez Faire Books, (800) 326-0996, or Frugal Muse Bookstore, (608) 833-8668. Neil will speak at the AZLP annual convention in Phoenix, 4/19/97.