Well, the people in Michigan have been allowed to exercise their Second-Amendment rights for a year now, and the handwringers are still waiting for blood to flow in the streets a la Dodge City.

But Michael Zagaroli, a Grand Rapids attorney who represented the state’s police chiefs in their fight against the law, said it’s too early to draw conclusions.

“I can’t sit here and say there’s been a huge problem that has cropped up, but it’s only been one year. What may happen over five years? I just have to believe that injecting so many tens of thousands of additional guns into the public realm is not going to lead to good things.”

“I have to believe, brother! Testify! Show us the power!”

To heck with rationality, or statistics, or empirical results, or…reality. He has to believe, thus demonstrating that anti-gun hysteria is irrational, and religious in nature (which we knew all along).

Here’s another man who remains true to his faith:

Kent County Prosecutor William Forsyth expected the worst. He envisioned an armed populace “overreacting” and pulling guns to shoot purse snatchers. He was among 17 prosecutors across the state to quit their county’s gun boards in protest of the new law.

“You just can’t convince me that allowing everybody and anybody to carry a gun concealed on their person is going to make it a safer place to live,” Forsyth said at the time. He did not return calls for this report.

I particularly like that last sentence. Rather than speaking in tongues, his fervent worship has apparently struck him recently dumb. Errrrr…mute. Based on the above, it sounds like the dumbness has been a longer-term problem.

Oh, but wait!

Maybe this is the reason that Michiganians haven’t been perforated and desanguinated in record numbers over the past twelve months–they’ve been keeping the guns out of the hands of vicious criminals:

“Looking at your application, it shows you have a life- preserver violation,” said Ottawa County Assistant Prosecutor Gregory Babbitt, who ran the meeting.

Vitunskas sank in his chair as he recalled fishing for catfish on the Grand River in June 2001 with two buddies on his 10-foot, flat-bottom boat. He said he didn’t know it was a misdemeanor when he signed the DNR ticket for having two life jackets instead of three.

Sharp eyes, there, Mr. Prosecutor! That’s right, we all know that it starts with life preservers, and from there it’s straight down the steep and slippery slope to bank robberies.

But not all of the potential evildoers were so obvious:

A Grand Haven man was denied because he pruned a tree while deer hunting in a federal forest — a misdemeanor…

…Forrest Brown figured he’d breeze through. The 45-year-old Grand Haven man expected to walk out of Ottawa County’s May gun board meeting with a permit. His record is clean, except for the ticket he got from the state DNR in October 2000.

Brown said he didn’t know he was committing a misdemeanor when he trimmed branches of scrub oak in a national forest to create a shooting lane for his father, who recently had hip surgery.

Yes, it would never have occurred to me, but the authorities know better–it starts with trimming branches, then it moves on to felling whole trees, and the next thing you know the perp’s walking down Grand River Avenue plinking at baby carriages.

But alas–they’re not perfect. Here’s the one that slipped through the cracks, and really has me wiping sweat from my brow, as I contemplate the potential mayhem now that this fiend has gotten hold of a gun:

“There are still some holes in the system, some substantial holes,” she said. “This is very much a self-reporting system. It’s likely that if somebody wanted to represent themselves as having a clean record and had knowledge of how to do it, they may get away with it over a period of time.”

A hole became apparent at a recent Kent County gun board meeting as members considered an applicant named Jason. The board didn’t know about his misdemeanor criminal conviction for illegal use of a telephone in Montcalm County until he told them. A background check had turned up nothing.

They gave a gun to a…a…telephone user. And not just any telephone user, either. They gave it to an illegal telephone user. And I’ll bet it was a concealed phone, too.

This is a man who shouldn’t even be walking the streets, free to call people at will, perhaps telemarketing to them. But no, they not only let him roam free, but these incompetent ninnies give him a gun.

There’s no telling what nefarious activities he’s carrying out even as I type this, because of their malingering insouciance. He’s probably using one hand to sell long-distance service for 4.8 cents a minute, and gunning down innocents with the other.

Well, at least, as we start to get the first news reports from the Great Lake State of the great telephone and gun massacre (I’m sure it will happen any day now, if not any year), some peoples’ faith will be justified and renewed, and we’ll finally be able to overturn this insane law that allows people to protect themselves.

Instantman has been running several long posts on the Pink Pistols (a gay gun-rights group), and their interactions with the NRA. It’s interesting to read the whole story, but what struck me about it was the intolerance of the gay and liberal community.

From one of Glenn’s correspondents:

I would say there is a consistent bias in the media, both gay and straight but particularly gay, in the way that gun owners and their views on GLBT people are represented. But I don’t think it’s so much a reporting bias as an editorial bias. Now Steve writes an article on the NRA convention. It says what happened, calls out a speaker who was inappropriate, and talks about the Pink Pistols, giving fair coverage to the point that most gun owners are not homophobic. Steve has done his job. But PlanetOut has never before covered the Pink Pistols in any other context. We’ve been the fastest growing gay sporting organization in the country, probably the fastest growing gay group, and we’ve had a pitched legislative battle with a lesbian senator whose most notable achievement was to amend gun- control legislation to allow arbitrary discrimination against anyone, including gay people, and particularly women and the poor (and who was subsequently endorsed by HRC). During that time, news media from the Wall Street Journal to the Washington Blade covered the Pink Pistols, but PlanetOut was nowhere to be seen. Hmm.

Continuing along that line, I note that I never read an article in the gay media like “Gay gun owners say NRA members pretty friendly to them”. We got positive coverage in Gun Week and Guns & Ammo. Does PlanetOut report that? “Gay gun group praised in Guns & Ammo” is just as important a headline as “At NRA gathering, speakers ridicule gays”, isn’t it? Everyone expects Schlussel to mouth off, so is that really bigger news than a gay-friendly gun group getting great coverage in gun media and being invited to speak at lots of pro-gun events, which many gay people claim is impossible?

I found it interesting (but no longer surprising, particularly after the Dr. Laura deal), that the gun rights people seem to be much more tolerant of gays, than the gay and liberal community is of gun activists. It really shatters the stereotypes, and further highlights the hypocrisy of their ongoing demands for “acceptance” and “tolerance.” Don’t expect to read about this in the mainstream press…

Jonathan Last is shocked to discover that gun owners are not only human, but they’re, well…good people.

And I’m shocked to discover that the editor of the Weekly Standard on-line is shocked by this. This, to me, is simply evidence of how pervasive anti-gun hysteria is in our culture.

Jonathan Last is shocked to discover that gun owners are not only human, but they’re, well…good people.

And I’m shocked to discover that the editor of the Weekly Standard on-line is shocked by this. This, to me, is simply evidence of how pervasive anti-gun hysteria is in our culture.

Jonathan Last is shocked to discover that gun owners are not only human, but they’re, well…good people.

And I’m shocked to discover that the editor of the Weekly Standard on-line is shocked by this. This, to me, is simply evidence of how pervasive anti-gun hysteria is in our culture.

The always-dependable (when it comes to spouting imbecilities) Richard Reeves sends in a missive from whatever planet he inhabits–it’s clearly not this one. The basic theme is that Mr. Bush is not up to the job, and that he will therefore be a one-termer.

It’s so full of chocolaty stupidity, I hate to excerpt it, but I will anyway. Fortunately, it’s short. His talent (as it were) is such that he manages to pack a whole universe of idiocy in a very brief bit of mental flatulence.

This was a day in the life of the president of the United States, Thursday, April 18, 2002:

• The circumstances of endless savagery in the Middle East forced him to look into a television camera and tell the world that Ariel Sharon (news – web sites) is “a man of peace.”

  Well, it seems to me that things have been a lot more peaceful over there in the past couple weeks. At least no more Israeli bat mitzvahs have been interrupted by murderers disassembling themselves.

• Halfway around the world, on the West Bank, the U.N. peace envoy to the Middle East, a Norwegian hardly given to flamboyant language, one of the first outsiders to inspect Mr. Sharon’s recent work, looked into other cameras and said: “Horrifying, horrifying … Israel has lost all moral ground in this conflict.”

  No, he’s only given to flamboyent language when the subject is Israel. When it comes to Arafat, and his bomb factories, and his exhortations to murder, and his booby-trapped refugee camps, and his unending lies, and his general violation of every single tenet of the Oslo agreement for which he won his Norwegian peace prize, our Norwegian friend seems to have lost his tongue.

• In Kabul and Washington, members of the forces commanded by President Bush (news – web sites) had to face the cameras and apologize for the killing of Canadian soldiers, our best friends, by American bombs in yet another friendly-fire incident of the kind that punctuates long-distance, high- tech warfare.

  Yes, Richard. This is war. And even if weren’t, people are often killed in training (typically a couple dozen per year in each service, I believe). It is tragic, but these are real weapons, with real explosives, and sometimes things happen. It’s not a good day for a President when they do, but it’s certainly not a challenge to his presidency.

• Back on television, the president gave a lecture to the elected president of Venezuela, an incompetent, if charismatic, lefty named Hugo Chavez, who had been overthrown two days before with some help and cheers from the right-wingers running the middle levels of the Bush State Department. Bush warned Chavez that he better do more of what we consider the right things, or we’ll get his army after him again.

  Incompetent? He seems to be pretty competent at retaining power, like most thugs. And I didn’t hear Mr. Bush say any such thing, but then, as I say, Mr. Reeves lives on a different plane of existence.

From there he drifts off into total incoherence and irrelevance. And when I get to the end, I still don’t know why Bush will only serve one term.

What an interesting day to break this story–the seventh anniversary of the OKC bombing.

If it’s to be believed, the Clinton Administration and FBI covered up evidence that Terry Nichols met with Iraqi agents prior to the bombing.

Why? We may never know for sure, but I would presume that it was more politically useful for Mr. Clinton, in the midst of his post-1994-loss-of-Congress irrelevancy, to demonize the American “right wing,” in the form of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, and to not distract people from that with Middle East connections that would then have to be actually dealt with…

It will be interesting to see what effect this will have in November at the polls. If it’s true, the Dems are in big, big trouble.

Remember the vandalism to the White House by outgoing Clinton Administration staffers, that was later denied (and basically ignored by the Bush Administration, which wanted to “set a new tone”)?

Well, the GAO has confirmed that it was true.

Those who have seen the GAO report, a preliminary document, say as many as 75 computer keyboards had to be replaced — at a cost of more than $5,000 — because Clinton staffers had broken off the W keys, a jab at George W. Bush, the winner of the bitterly contested 2000 presidential election, who was often referred to during the campaign as W.

I wonder if those are special keyboards of some kind? Seventy bucks for a keyboard seems kind of pricy, but I tend to go for the five-dollar specials at Fry’s.

Two historic doorknobs were stolen from the Old Executive Office Building along with a presidential seal, valued at $350, said the sources, who could not detail how the rest of the damages were inflicted.

Chairs and telephone tables were broken, desks were overturned, garbage was strewn in offices and telephone lines were cut, the GAO report says, but does not, in each case, attribute the acts to vandalism.

OK, now let’s pull the string on the top, and let the spinning begin…

Democrats dismissed the findings of the investigation ? which they say cost about $200,000 to conduct just to find $14,000 in damages.

So, generously assuming that those numbers aren’t lies, let me make sure I have this right. No one should have to be held accountable for their actions if the cost of identifying misbehavior exceeds the cost of the actual damages. Is that the argument here?

So, if someone is burgling, and they only steal a couple hundred bucks worth of stuff, but holding a trial might cost many hundreds, or thousands, of dollars, we should just ignore it?

In what moral swamp do these people reside?

And now that the truth is out, it also demonstrates just what kind of juveniles were running the country for eight years.

John McWhorter and others have described how many of the things that hold blacks back in America are a function of their own cultural attitudes, in which studiousness or scholarship are derided, or even ostracized, as “acting white.”

This phenomenon carries through all the way to college, in which many talented people are channeled into “African-American Studies” (just as many innocent women are cheated of a true education in “Women’s Studies” departments), rather than into something that offers prospects for professions and productive endeavors beyond being African-American Studies professors.

I ran across this very good article in the Village Voice that deals with the specific issues of black scientists involved with NASA and astronomy, and how they’re often denigrated and discouraged by their own community. I highly recommend it.

But less obvious is that NASA’s move injects life into color-blind disciplines that black scientists say have been eclipsed within their own community by more overtly Afrocentric pursuits. Some top students lifted their faces from difficult physics textbooks only to receive what amounted to a slap from a black hand.

One example: Two African American undergraduate students on the Harvard University wrestling team were walking from the gym. The younger one, a kid from the Bronx named Neil, complained that his astrophysics courses weren’t leaving him time to sleep. The banter stopped as abruptly as their footfalls.

“Blacks in America do not have the luxury of your intellectual talents being spent on astrophysics,” declared the elder student, waving his hand in front of Neil’s chest. That indictment, recounted in Neil deGrasse Tyson’s autobiography, The Sky Is Not the Limit, rings fresh in him today, though he’s an astrophysicist and director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, where he also teaches classes for the CUNY program.

No, obviously what blacks in America need are more Cornel Wests, not people who discover, and impart real knowledge.