http://www.townhall.com/columnists/samfrancis/archive.shtml
Sam Francis (archive)

June 23, 2000

Legal guns would end New York’s ‘wildings’

Can it be only a coincidence that the mob attacks on women during the Puerto
Rican Day Parade in New York City took place only a week or so after the
controversy about the National Rifle Association’s plan to open a cafe in
Times Square? It’s definitely not a coincidence that virtually no one has
commented on the obvious connection between them. Indeed, it’s further
evidence that most people today miss what ought to be the obvious link
between private firearms and public safety. The NRA, in one of its perennial
campaigns to spruce up its image, wants to open a cafe in Times Square,
where you could buy NRA-brand sportswear, sip coffee and tea and play video
games that simulate real gunfire. There would be no real guns, of course,
because real guns are illegal in the Big Apple, which no doubt explains why
the city is so pleasantly law-abiding.

Times Square, for decades, was the site of the most degrading and offensive
pornography and live sex shows the human imagination could concoct. Anyone
who objected to it was denounced as a bigot, a bluenose or a fascist who
hated free speech and having fun.

Most of that filth is now cleaned up, I’m told, but there are still folks
who object to what’s going on there — namely, citizens like gun gestapo
guru Sen. Charles Schumer, who moans about the NRA plan as threatening to
push the city back toward “Dodge City.” Mayor Rudolph Giuliani just says, “I
don’t think it’s going to happen.” The City Council also thumped its chest
and passed a resolution saying the cafe and its theme of guns should not be
permitted to “take root.” The same authorities that for decades tolerated
the sewer that Times Square had become now vow to ban a perfectly legal,
harmless and indeed wholesome business.

Of course, what all the eminent citizens object to is the legitimacy of
firearms that the NRA’s cafe would suggest. No one in the city’s political
establishment wants to believe or wants others to believe that guns can be
legitimate and even useful for protecting New Yorkers against the animals
that the same authorities refuse to scrape out of its streets and parks. If
the citizens started getting the idea that guns are legitimate, they might
also start demanding to legalize guns inside the city.

Indeed, if guns were legal inside the city, it’s likely the mob attacks
during the parade would never have happened. The Puerto Rican “youths” who
thought it the height of good fun to spit on women, hit them, yell lewd
insults at them, throw water on them and rip their clothes off would have
found healthier and safer amusements. But then, of course, you have the
police department to prevent that sort of thing, don’t you.

But of course, again, the whole point is that you don’t have the police
department. The real scandal of the most recent “wildings” in New York is
not that gangs of savages can roam the streets assaulting women at their
leisure but that the cops — even when informed about it — will do
absolutely nothing to stop or control it. One jogger in Central Park
witnessed some of the attacks on women and alerted a contingent of some 40
police officers to them, but the cops “never budged.”

This, of course, yet again, is why the Framers of the Second Amendment knew
private ownership of firearms was important enough to be included among the
most fundamental rights of citizens. The police, in cities like New York,
cannot and will not protect you. The Framers knew that neither the police
nor the armies of their day could protect Americans in the pursuit of their
fundamental rights and therefore that only Americans themselves could
protect themselves.

To be fair, the Framers probably did not anticipate that cities like New
York would hire, train and deploy police forces larger than most European
armies of the time and that such forces would still be useless in protecting
women from mob attacks in broad daylight. You have to be pretty far gone to
imagine that kind of thing happening, but that’s where we’ve arrived today.

If the NRA ever builds its cafe in Times Square, it won’t stop any future
attacks on women by mobs or criminals or even the local political leaders,
but it might start reminding New Yorkers of what many other Americans
outside the city have always known — that you can’t rely on government at
any level to take care of you and defend you, that you ultimately have to be
responsible for that yourself, and that you can do that only when the right
to keep and bear arms is a lot more secure than it is in New York today.