…The police are putting on you hold for an hour.
…[T]he afternoon of May 5, at Phoenix Park near Turner Field, Jackie Gordon watched a middle-aged man in a yellow jumpsuit chasing children on the playground while exposing himself.
Gordon grabbed her cellphone and dialed the familiar number for help: 911. The police, she was told, were on their way.
They weren’t.
Instead, the 911 operator sent an electronic message to a dispatcher for the Atlanta Police Department, who held the call — for 56 minutes and five seconds — before sending an officer to Phoenix Park. The dispatcher had no choice: The police department had no one available to promptly respond to a report of a man demanding sex from children.
With too much crime and too few officers on the streets, Atlanta police dispatchers routinely hold such emergency calls even longer than the time in which officers are supposed to reach the scene, an investigation by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution shows.
Via War On Guns.
I’ve been asked recently what my stand on gay rights is.
How about this? My stand is that if you try to assault or kill someone for being gay, your victim should be armed and capable of defending themselves.
Talking about the the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, recently signed into law by President Hopey, Kurt Hofmann points out:
Even the title of the bill is misleading: ” . . . Hate Crimes Prevention Act”? Laws don’t “prevent” crimes; they punish them, after the fact. Sure, it’s to be hoped that laws, and the negative consequences of breaking them, will act as a deterrent, but if that deterrence were very reliably effective, we would presumably not have a prison population of over 2 million.
Will the family and friends of the next Matthew Shepard or James Byrd, Jr. take much comfort in the fact that the killers will now face these new, federal penalties? Would they not instead vastly prefer that the “hate criminals” were stopped in their tracks?
Hofmann includes the obligatory link to the Pink Pistols.
Speaking of self-defense, for any reason,
here’sPhilip Van Cleave, the President of Virginia Citizen Defense League, arguing for concealed carry on college campuses — and, by the way, concealed carry, open carry, night stand carry, what ever:
Myth after myth, shot down by cold hard facts.
On the Virginia Tech campus.
And, yeah, it’s all anecdotal evidence. But here’s the thing: these kinds of incidents are so rare, all the evidence on both sides is, essentially, anecdotal. What the available statistics do show is that at the very least, permitting people to arm themselves does not increase the number of bad things happening. Like seatbelts, yes, wearing a seatbelt sometimes causes problems — but the way to bet is that you are safer wearing a seatbelt, or a gun.
“What does it matter if I’m standing here, or if I leave campus…? Why is my life not valuable on one side of a line…and totally valuable and I’m a great citizen on the other…?”
“What’s so bad about self-defense, and what’s so good about being a helpless, unarmed student being murdered?”
