Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

It is long past time that somebody sane considered the problem of violent crime in the nation’s “Second City”.

This is not brain science; it is not rocket surgery. The unfortunate metropolis’s 762 shooting deaths in 2016 alone, its 4378 shootings (17%—not very good shots in Chicago, are they?), are the direct consequence of a single, specific, famously liberal/progressive policy pursued over the last several decades. Bit by blood-soaked bit, the city is being converted into Detroit. If that policy had never been introduced by the wrong-headed, mentally and morally-challenged authorities who rule it, Chicago would now be peaceful, prosperous, and safe. Everyone who has ever died or suffered injuries of a particular kind owes his dismal fate to that policy and to the generations of political seat-warmers and place-holders who have mindlessly enforced it.

That policy is to completely and illegally ignore the highest law of the land, the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution, commonly known as the Bill of Rights, particularly the Second and Ninth Amendments, and to unlawfully prevent ordinary individuals from owning and carrying the means of self-defense. The Second Amendment does not say “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed—except when the authorities deem otherwise”. To act as if it did is a deliberate act of mass-murder comparable to the Holocaust, for which the city’s dirty officials should be summarily removed and thoroughly prosecuted.

What needs to happen in Chicago is that every single law that mentions guns or self-defense weapons in general, must be struck immediately from the books—nullified, repealed, or otherwise disposed of—and the natural individual right to own and carry weapons assiduously enforced. Reparations must be paid to former gun- shop owners, forced out of business. It will be necessary to treat Illinois laws the same, and ultimately, those of the United States itself. But we’re speaking of Chicago, here. With most of the city’s officials finally in jail where they belong (and maybe joined by Michael Bloomberg and George Soros), everyday people can get on with the task of cleaning up their own neighborhoods.

We’ve seen this process before, beginning in the early 1970s in Orlando and Toledo, where just the knowledge that one’s potential victim might be armed, reduced the violent crime rate by double digits, Criminals will do anything to avoid a fair fight. If the murderous thugs of Chicago need a practical lesson, then everyday people, going about their everyday business, are the ones to teach it: the lady with a .380 pistol in her purse or pocket, the man with a .357 on the back of his hip or a .45 under his armpit. The state of Vermont, which has no laws restricting the right to concealed carry, has been virtually crime-free for decades.

All of this socio-political progress from the not-so-miraculous (or even very surprising) course of simply compelling these over-fed and over-reaching officials to obey the law they falsely swore an oath to uphold. That is the basic principle behind what I propose, but there is another aspect, remarkably obvious once you consider it, to the situation.

Crime of the sort that Chicago suffers, exactly like street-level terrorism, is a diffuse problem. Unlike the organized crime of the Al Capone days, it doesn’t have a head that you can cut off, a structure that you can disrupt. Respecting everybody’s fundamental right to self-defense—to obtain and carry the means of self-defense—is the _diffuse_ solution. The cops can’t be everywhere, but the people of a great city already are. Sometimes these self-defenders will succeed, sometimes they will fail. But those who expect their victims to be bound and rendered helpless by a corrupted city government will have an ugly, often fatal, surprise waiting for them. In relatively short order (judging from what’s happened elsewhere) crime will subside.

I have loved Chicago. Its “Miracle Mile”, and the “Loop” are the most beautiful city-scapes I have ever seen. They’re like something out of a 1950s Sunday Supplement (look it up) future. You expect George Jetson to fly by at any moment. The Museum of Science and Industry is a world marvel. Chicago’s myriad of distinct neighborhoods are a wonder to behold. Chicago could be a wonderful place for everyone to live once again by this time next year.

Victim disarmament (gun control) is the pathological product of a class of disturbed individuals (and their cowardly, gullible, and stupid supporters) who do not trust the very people who put them in office, and would much rather allow massive crime to reign, than give up the sick psycho-sexual pleasure of wielding power over them.

******

I have been under the weather and I usually work late into the early morning, so at 11 AM I awoke to hysterical words and sensational pictures from the Orlando airport, where some criminal thug had shot thirteen people, five of them to death. This is a perfect illustration of what the rest of this essay is about. Instead of doing or saying anything useful, the puffed-up authorities were alternately abusing the victims, huddled together in terror on the floor between luggage carousels, and making pompous pronouncements to the gullible media.

In my first novel, The Probability Broach, drafted in 1977, I suggested how to deal with problems like this. Rather than shaking innocent passengers down and stealing their personal weapons, rather than denying them their fundamental human right to self-defense, simply insist that the ammunition they carry onboard will not damage the aircraft—or issue them an acceptable substitute. Glaser Safety Slugs were invented for this very purpose, decades ago, and would serve it well. Now, forty years later, four decades, I wake up, and the first thing I see and hear is a criminal incident being hideously, unspeakably mishandled.

Forty years.

And it will go on this way, over and over again, unless We the People—We the Deplorables—begin demanding that the over- inflated flummoxes, in and out of uniform, who think they rule us back the hell off, get the hell out of the way, and let us handle matters like this properly. It was the people, and not the law who finished off the Frank and Jesse James gang. In a free and rational world, the lowlife who emerged from that airport bathroom in Orlando would have been cut to pieces by at least a dozen better-armed individuals before he got a second shot off.

And I could be listening to something other than ignorant blather tonight.