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Happy Labor Day, Bloomie!
by L. Neil Smith
[email protected]

Attribute to L. Neil Smith's The Libertarian Enterprise

It was reported Sunday afternoon that city police had discovered a "suspicious" suitcase, seemingly abandoned, on Needham Avenue near Wilson Avenue, in the Williamsburg area of the Bronx, after a witness called authorities about 3:30 p.m. to report the luggage, sources said.

Stuffed inside, to their horror, police found the decomposing and putrescent remains of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's gun control policy.

It was not immediately apparent how long the suitcase had been there, according to New York Daily News staffer Joe Kemp, but it is believed the deceased legislation was closely related to the Sullivan Act of 1917, named for Big Tim Sullivan, one of the most corrupt and sleazy politicians in New York history—which is saying a great deal—and originally designed to keep the city's Italian population disarmed.

Bloomberg's policy was merely the final victim over a New York City Labor Day weekend in which (the following statistics having been collected by Jonathan Dienst, Shimon Prokupecz and Melissa Russo of NBC News, New York) 67 individuals were shot, including two police officers, and as many as 10 people were murdered, a teenage boy and a 56-year-old female among them, all of them—nine on Friday, 10 on Saturday, 33 on Sunday and 15 on Monday—hurt or killed in what has been advertised as a gunless city since shortly after the First World War.

One individual, and one individual alone is morally responsible for each and every one of those injuries and deaths, and he should be made to bear legal and financial responsibility for them, as well. He is not merely a petty tyrant who rules over what has become a sewer of crime and corruption, Bloomberg has done his level best, over the past several years, to spread, as far and widely as he can, that special brand of insanity, stupidity, and evil that is properly named not "gun control", but for what it truly is and what it does, "victim disarmament".

Ironically, the same sources say "The upcoming 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terror attacks and holiday weekend violence had put the city 'on heightened alert,'" according to Police Commissioner Ray Kelly. According to NBC, an annual Labor Day parade "celebrates the culture of the Caribbean islands" and is one of the city's largest outdoors events. Police helicopters hovered overhead during the parade, and officers on scooters and on foot patrolled the surrounding blocks.

Right under their noses, a woman was shot to death while sitting on a stoop with her daughter. One shooter was killed, and another ended up in serious condition at a nearby hospital. Bullet fragments hit a police officer in the arm and chest. Another officer was grazed by a bullet. (At least one gunman had an extensive criminal history, including possession of a firearm and assault and drug charges.) Four people were shot and wounded along the parade route and a city council member was briefly detained after getting into a confrontation with police.

The commissioner was quoted as saying, "It's just unfortunate that there seems to be some violence [attendant to the parade] every year." In fact, there is always violence, and fatal shootings in 2003 and 2005.

One item the syndicated stories failed to report is that New York police officers are notoriously bad shots. We know this because they complained bitterly about one suspect who shot at them with "inhuman accuracy" during his pursuit and apprehension. Interviewed later, he revealed the arcane secret of his eerie and unerring marksmanship: he used his sights. It appears that it's never occurred to anybody to tell the police what those three bumps on the top of the slide are for.

It has long been observed that in prisons—which are supposed to be minutely controlled environments, in which every inmate and every cell is searched at intervals for weapons—almost everyone can get a "shank", a fighting ring, or a bar of soap in a sock (a highly lethal weapon). If victim disarmament doesn't work there, it can't work anywhere.

That observation seems to be true, as well, of the police state that Bloomberg and his predecessors have turned New York City into: 67 shootings, 10 killings, over a span of one extremely closely-observed tightly-controlled city weekend. It isn't just that the NYC cops are corrupt and incompetent (although, for the most part, they are) but that the concept of victim disarmament simply doesn't work and never has.

I don't know what Bloomberg's problem is. Maybe his toilet training as an infant was bungled. I do know that America would be better off without him, and he'd be much happier, too. Let's trade him to Red China for a couple of musicians and a blogger to be named later.

Meanwhile, let's re-arm the people of the city, perhaps through Archie Bunker's original idea of gun stamps, to be paid for by firing at least nine tenths of the 34,500 cops who strive hard every day to make New York a dangerous and depressing place to live and work.

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