Just imagine what might have happened if she hadn’t had a gun:

An 85-year-old woman boldly went for her gun and busted a would-be burglar inside her home, then forced him to call police while she kept him in her sights, police said.

“I just walked right on past him to the bedroom and got my gun,” Leda Smith said.

Smith heard someone break into her home Monday afternoon and grabbed the .22-caliber revolver she had been keeping by her bed since a neighbor’s home was burglarized a few weeks ago.

“I said ‘What are you doing in my house?’ He just kept saying he didn’t do it,” Smith said.

After the 17-year-old boy called 911, Smith kept holding the gun on him until state police arrived at her home in Springhill Township, about 45 miles south of Pittsburgh.

The boy will be charged with attempted burglary and related offenses in juvenile court, Trooper Christian Lieberum said. He was not identified because of his age.

“It was exciting,” Smith said. “I just hope I broke up the (burglary) ring because they have been hitting a lot of places around here.”

Good thing she had a weapon in the house. If not, this boy could have done God knows what to her, and possibly been free to keep on going, burglarizing other houses.

This is why banning guns is a bad thing. Banning guns means that defenseless women like Leda Smith, and other law-abiding citizens, are able to defend themselves when someone breaks into their home. Criminals do not care if there is a ban on weapons, because they are criminals. They will still get weapons, and the only people who won’t have them are the people who obey the law. Brilliant reasoning there. That boy could’ve easily overpowered Leda Smith, but with a gun, she was able to control what happened. Good for her.

As you probably already know, Cassy’s going to be out this week. And this isn’t her writing now; she asked if I could come by and do some “guest blogging.” I’ve been asked this before, by others, a few times over the years. I’ll have to confess to having made a hash out of it, for the most part. But I agreed to it this time because I notice Cassy has a lot of people commenting over here, and you guys have a good track record in my book for raising new perspectives on things. To me, that’s what makes blogging worthwhile, is the meeting of people. Also, I have a little bit more time for it now, and I see she’s tossing up a post or two a day…quality over quantity, in her typical style. Keep the fires burning for a week? Seems doable. Hope I don’t disappoint too badly.

My name is Morgan K. Freeberg (LinkedIn profile: here; Blogger profile: here), and I’ll tell you right up front that I’m sick to death of talking about that guy Barack Obama. And that other hardcore left-leaning liberal John McCain. I can’t foresee what’s going to happen this week, but I tend to put a lot of effort into finding things worth talking about, that have nothing whatsoever to do with those guys. Trying to, anyway. Usually failing at it; it is an election year, after all. Events this week will probably force me to talk about those two chuckleheads again a few times. I dunno. We’ll see. Consider your input solicited, anytime. You can reach me with your praise, criticism and suggestions at mkfreeberg@hotmail.com.

I started reading Cassy for two reasons. For one, she is a talented writer; I would put her right about on the line where “gifted” starts. It’s one thing to spell things right and get your grammar straight, it’s quite another thing to translate that into a bunch of words that can be read easily. If you’ve not tried to do either one of those, you can take my word for it. I succeed at the spelling-grammar thing, and fail at the easy-fun-reading thing, on a regular basis. Cassy is just about the furthest thing you can find from some comment on DailyKOS or some other left-wing site — you know what I’m talking about — where you have to read what’s been written, over and over again…three times, four times, five times…only to find out the whole point is to recruit you on some “Am I The Only One Who” bandwagon or “Can I Get An Amen Here” bandwagon.

The other reason I read her is far more important, though: Her understanding of what makes sense, and what does not, is exceptionally strong. She thinks for herself but still has a sense of decency, abiding by Isaiah 5:20, “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil.”

This is an important point, one I think is worthy of clarification. Permit me the indulgence of rambling…

I’ll tell you why I think this is important. We have people who are “strong” and we have people who are “weak”; I do not mean, by this, that the “strong” people are people you’d want to have as your allies. I do not mean, by that word “strong,” anything even necessarily good. I’m talking about, in the disorganized, anarchistic hodge-podge of a process we call “life,” these are people whose ideas are likely to prevail. This is what Jack Nicholson’s character Schmidt was talking about in the final scenes of that movie, where he says “I am weak.” His character made a critical mistake, confusing the ability to prevail in the trivial matters immediately under discussion, with the ability to survive; to achieve some measure of immortality. This is, I think, a mistake we all make at one time or another. So let me be clear on the meaning of “strong” here. I do not mean long-lived, healthy or robust. I mean, likely to prevail in the trivial matter immediately under discussion. Within an environment that is not dedicated to discerning validity or truth. This cosmetic, skin-deep sense of “strength.”

And then we have good people and evil people. Evil, tough as it may be to recognize at times, is fairly easy to define: It destroys, or preserves other things that destroy. So picture these divisions as quadrants within the human condition:

1. Strong-good people;
2. Weak-good people;
3. Strong-evil people;
4. Weak-evil people.

My point is, when we do not regulate ourselves, as we interact with each other this strong-evil quadrant begins to swell…the folks who are the subject of Isaiah 5:20, and can warp the prevailing sentiment to conform to their evil desires. We saw it with Bill Clinton lying, and all those “strong” people strongly getting in our faces, waggling their strong fingers at us — “It wasn’t a lie because it was indecent to ask him the question!” There are other examples of this, but listing them is pointless. That’s my favorite one. It’s my favorite because it was so ground-shaking and yet it took place in such a narrow frame of time.

In the summer of ‘98 we had one definition of “truth,” and by a year later we had an entirely different one. That’s a terrible thing. Don’t blame Clinton; the fault lies with us.

That is evil. It calls falsehood truth, and vice-versa. In so doing, it seeks to destroy that which creates or preserves, which is human intellect, and preserve that which destroys.

I view it as metaphorical — ancestral, I should say — for the kind of nonsense we’re enduring now. For example…we have to “responsibly redeploy” from Iraq. Deep down we all understand, I think, if the ideas underneath these tangled, complicated words were good for us, the words used to carry them wouldn’t be so tangled and complicated. We would say “just get out.” Well, we don’t say that because it is logically unsustainable to entertain that this might be a good thing to do. This is an example of the evil being strong; that idea, which we know is a bad one, has become a prevailing sentiment. There are pretty sound arguments being made that this will culminate in a disaster…yet the evil is strong…so into the cul de sac we go.

Popularity is on one side of the fence, reason and logic are on the other. That’s how it works, more often than not.

Here’s another one we have now: Saddam Hussein “did not attack us.” The only idea in that vein that could strongly bolster an argument, would be “Saddam Hussein was completely harmless.” Notice, nobody is saying that. Nobody is even debating that anywhere. The outcome of such a debate would be unhelpful to the strong-and-evil, so we leave it alone. But here, again, by being unspoken, that argument has been all-but-lost. The prevailing point-of-view is that taking any action there at all was a bad idea — and yet nobody is willing to sign their name to the idea that the area could have been safely left alone. Nobody except clowns like Michael Moore. (More on him later.)

The earth is getting warmer and we all have to sacrifice! Eh, actually the facts say no, it isn’t; and the proposed sacrifice isn’t connected with any solution, except by means of vague platitudes. The platitude mumblers don’t actually sacrifice much. They sacrifice as much as they have to, not to save the earth, but to stay popular, and become more popular. Which isn’t much. Changing light bulbs in your house is IN. Riding a bike to work is OUT. We pretend to be saving the planet, but we’re really just incorporating a new sense of fashion sense and saving the planet doesn’t have anything to do with it. Yet again, that message has stuck. The evil have become stronger than the good.

Why does this keep happening?

I’ll tell you why right now.

Because an important sub-contingent within the faction of “evil,” is narcissism. Good weighs consequences; evil, caring only about itself, charges on ahead. The advantage of momentum, therefore, goes to those who do not weigh consequences — the evil. The Isaiah 5:20 people. The conflict comes down to something resembling a game of “chicken,” in which only one of the contestants is wearing a blindfold. A force of nature wins out over a force of reason and intellect, every single time. Those who observe, analyze, weigh, discern and evaluate, end up being just like Jack Nicholson’s character Schmidt; their arguments do not prevail in the matter immediately under consideration. They must settle for, perhaps, prevailing over the longer term. Losing the battle and winning the war.

There are reasons to think they will succeed at this:

Thing I Know #62. Throughout history, very little of note has been accomplished by people who made a paramount concern out of what others thought.

…but there are reasons to think they will fail. We have a presidential election, and the front-runner hasn’t done anything, hasn’t said what he’s gonna do about anything without flip-flopping later, lacks basic background knowledge about even mundane things like how many states there are, is backed up by a menagerie of America-hating asshole friends, and doesn’t even seem to be that bright. In short, he does everything he does, by showing off. He’s embarrassed himself quite often lately but overall, it still looks like this is his year. And what’s worse, is he’s sort of a vanguard, if you will, for all others who function this way: Sidestepping reasoned argument, and as a substitute, seeking to manipulate the prevailing emotional flavoring. Result — they stand for nothing. But they run everything.

They get their come-uppin’s eventually, more often than not. But in the meantime they do a lot of damage.

And so Cassy is, to me, the kind of “bloggress” we need now. You wad up some sloppy ball of nonsense and toss it at someone like her…even something that finds a smooth pathway from cranium to cranium in these unenlightened times, like, uh…”if you are not actively serving in Iraq, you are not allowed to say anything good about anybody who is.” Or, “one of the big obstacles women face in achieving equal status in our society, is sexual abstinence education in the schools.” Or, “‘real patriotism’ has to do with finding the most anti-American position of any issue, and consistently taking it.” Yeah, something like those. And Cassy is one of the few people around who have the balls to grab the emergency cord, yank it hard, and say out loud in a strong firm voice, “that’s crap.” Even though some supposed “majority” might say otherwise.

I should say a word or two about my own corner on this, because Cassy invited me to do so, several times. And it occurs to me, this would help you to understand where I’m coming from.

My spot is House of Eratosthenes, known colloquially as The Blog That Nobody Reads. We are a contributing blog to Webloggin. Some of the nobodies who don’t stop by to not read The Blog That Nobody Reads, grumble a bit when I call it that. But they seem to like whatever consistency ripples through it, and I like the kind of folks who have been attracted by the themes and stuck around because of the themes.

Those themes within House of Eratosthenes are multi-fold, and I’ll try to give each one of them it’s due without boring you to tears in the paragraphs below. The primary one is simply this: We point out things that “everybody knows,” that everybody knows for no better reason than that “everybody” already knows them. Nonsensical stupid things, things people bully others into believing but can’t state word-for-word, fastened on to any reputation worth defending. Things people “believe,” only because they’re worried about their continuing survival if they’re caught believing something different. Things like single mothers can raise children as well as married couples; if women run the world, war will become a thing of the past; God is fiction, we’ve evolved, there is no master design to our inner workings, and yet somehow we weren’t designed to eat meat. Things like, President Clinton told something that was virtually true because it wasn’t any of our business to ask him the question in the first place. Or that Saddam Hussein was a harmless teddy bear. Or that global warming makes it important for us to “come together” and “sacrifice” so we can “do this” — but it’s everlastingly trivial and unimportant and meaningless, somehow, to contemplate what exactly “this” is. Or womens’ equality has something to do with girls indiscriminately screwing a whole bunch of sub-standard guys.

Those things and more. I said, above, that this is Barack Obama’s year. As any thinking person knows, this is not a pinnacle of civilization or “progress,” but rather a low nadir of chaos. In our society, the intellectual “house” is a pigsty. It’s what you’d expect to find if you loaned out your house to a dozen frat boys for a month There are messes everywhere.

House of Eratosthenes is not here to clean up the messes.

It is here to point them out. Clean-up is an individual responsibility. We’re each responsible for keeping our “houses” in order, and clean the cobwebs, pizza boxes and dust bunnies out of them. There is no way for us to do this, short of respecting ourselves. We own the decisions we make, as individuals, whether we realize it or not. When we decide things in groups, we make a fustercluck out of it because the entity making the decision, the group, is distinctly different from the entity that owns it, which is the individual. Quoting Ayn Rand, in one of her snippets providing the greatest ease of understanding for strangers to the topic:

The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.

And so what we do, is to champion the decision-making power of the individual; and, just to keep our sense of humor about such a grave and complex matter of human relations — make fun of the decisions made in committee.

Because you know what? That’s exactly what history does.

All who would argue that point, might find it educational to review the story of why we use a funny name like “Eratosthenes.” We’re named after a guy who figured out the size of the earth about two centuries B.C.; the experiment is discussed in detail here. That’s because, when you ponder big questions like the size of the earth, and you don’t have any technology available to find the answer by conventional means, you have to arrive at some unconventional means. Therefore, you must think for yourself. Really think for yourself. We honor this experiment, because it is logically impossible in a whole fistful of ways for it to have been conceived in committee. The premise upon which it was based, alone — the earth might be round — would’ve been shot down in a heartbeat. Bah! Who are you to say? Scientific consensus, it’s flat! And so, what one guy managed to do a long time ago, seems to be something we can’t do anymore. It represents a style of thinking that is slowly asphyxiating.

Even the good decisions we make, nowadays — how did we make them? We got twenty or thirty highly-paid professionals in a room, wasted an hour or two, and then did what the “smartest guy” said we should do. Without inspecting it. So at it’s best, group-think really is just individual-think, without anyone taking responsibility for it.

There’s something else busted, too: The people who are best at doing that…the sitting in a meeting, pretending to pay attention, and then simply mimicking the “smartest guy”…are our “educated” types. And those are the ones who make the decisions about what viewpoints should prevail and what ones should not. Over the course of a lot of years keeping my mouth shut and paying attention, I’ve learned something funny about those people: Most of them aren’t really educated. Not functionally. They don’t have an education good enough to repeat Eratosthenes’ experiment. They’ll brag all day long how they went to graduate school and learned all about climatology; and yet, they can’t do trig. They can’t even carry a conversation too far, about how angles relate to distance. By the time you’ve finished the ninth grade, you should be able to explain the Earth-measuring experiment down to the smallest detail, and answer Q&A about it. That requires a commanding knowledge of geometry, powerful enough to enable you to figure out how things work. To come up with an experiment of your own — that requires the ability to produce a list of procedures, not simply follow one.

And if you’re running around spewing nonsense about Saddam Hussein being harmless just because that’s what the other guy said, this goes well beyond what you’re doing.

Among the secondary themes, one of the most popular ones is the girls in skimpy outfits. That started out being just for fun, but then we realized quickly that this secondary theme had a lot to do with our primary theme. We’d put up a picture of Erica Chevilar in her red bikini, the Google hits would spike, our traffic would zip upward for a little while, and then someone somewhere would start sounding off about all the things that are bad about nice-lookin’ girls in red bikinis, without being able to explain what’s bad about ‘em. And that’s our central purpose. The bullying. The “That’s Just Bad, Can I Get An Amen Here?” stuff. The nonsense. We’re going to make rules about girls wearing more clothes, and department store mannequins being thicker, so our girls don’t develop eating disorders. Sports bars are oppressive to women. Women who work in banks should be fired if they wear swimsuits for calendar shoots on their personal time…in the name of “womens’ choice.”

Another theme is lamentation and alarm over the various subtle and veiled attacks on plain old-fashioned manhood. This, too, dovetails in strongly with the primary theme of people not thinking for themselves. We’re a little bit chicken to harp on it often because some may misconstrue the message — but boys and girls are different, and men and women are different. Women are better at establishing and preserving protocol. Men are better at stepping outside of it, should the need arise. Part of thinking for yourself is keeping track of what’s moderate and what’s extreme, and part of the damage we’re doing to ourselves nowadays is creating established protocols for everything; as if, any human activity that isn’t cloaked in a rigid agreed-upon social convention, is some kind of unfinished task. One trope you’ll find in our pages on a recurring basis is (roughly paraphrasing here), “if you can’t state the idea without using the word ‘every,’ ‘never,’ ‘always,’ ‘all’ or ‘none’ — it isn’t a moderate idea.” In 2008, our standard of living is very high compared with the years past, and we have a tendency to identify toxins, strip them away, measure the residue, strip it away some more, and when we’ve gotten rid of it all call ourselves “moderates.” Carbon dioxide is a great example of this. The residue-toxin can also be something intangible, like probability. The likelihood your kid might scrape his knee on the playground; extremists are trying to get rid of that, and calling themselves moderates as they do so. There are other phony toxins. They all have to do with getting rid of the exigencies associated with life — therefore, they have to do with getting rid of life itself.

Thing I Know #130. The noble savage gives us life. Then we outlaw his very existence. We call this process “civilization.” I don’t know why.

Another theme is just a big ol’ hodge-podge of things that are “red state,” that we happen to like; anything that ends up being under attack by these evil-strong prevailing-viewpoint bullying-not-explaining people. Guns. Meat. Barbeque sauce recipes. Really big powerful internal combustion engines with multiple turbochargers. Beer, wine, practical jokes, James Bond movies and robots.

The list wouldn’t be complete without mentioning the one really deadly thing we’re REALLY supposed to hate, without understanding why we hate it: The woman who loves her man and does nice things for him. We obsess over the seemingly meaningless gesture of bringing her man a cold beer — simply because that ticks off the feminists faster than anything, and they themselves can’t seem to coherently explain exactly why. But here in Northern California, the strong-and-evil feminists have emerged triumphant in molding the prevailing sentiment. We’re supposed to look with disdain down upon women who bring their men beer, and show some kind of fawning respect to women who do not. Even the fellas are supposed to do this. Therefore — men are supposed to be nice to women who are mean to them, and mean to women who are nice to them.

You know, prevailing sentiment that may be, but I don’t think that dog’s gonna hunt.

So who am I, to dare to point this out?

I’m just a middle-aged guy who writes long, windy, bloated essays like the one you’re reading now. I’m concerned about the “Strong Good” quadrant. It is anemic, and it should not be. As Edmund Burke said,

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

The primary concern there, is the primary concern here. When the good remain silent, everybody else slowly departs from the kind of thinking that energized Eratosthenes’ experiment two thousand years ago, the kind of thinking that powers “The Blog That Nobody Reads”; and they start to babble away with all their foolish nonsense.

Things you say for the purpose of getting attention. How quickly we are seduced when we say things to get attention. And that is the key reason why we call ourselves The Blog That Nobody Reads; as a reminder. If you’re still unclear on how that works, you could review the List of Things People Say To Get Attention, which is a little compendium I’ve been putting together of self-inflicted injuries, of the public relations variety, perpetuated by celebrities, politicians, authors of letters-to-Editors, and other folks drunk on their own glamor. It is not meant to be exhaustive; the point isn’t how long I can make such a list, the point is that there is always a fresh supply of such incidents rolling in.

People don’t think when they’re showing off. It’s a simple fact of human nature.

What else can I say by way of introduction. I’m often told a sign of a civilized society is one that gets rid of the death penalty. To me, a death penalty is one of the fundamental things a civilized society keeps in place.

What are my less popular views…

I think the word “totally” should be banned.

The best movie swordfight of the twentieth century was at the end of The Phantom Menace.

I’m in Dr. Savage’s corner on this whole autism business…mostly. Not completely. I think he committed a sin for being both a doctor and a shock-jock, demanding credibility for one of those roles, and then speaking in the capacity of the other. He was tactless; to date, I don’t think he’s suffered any punishment that he hasn’t deserved. But in my book, his point was a valid one and it’s overdue for some critical inspection. We are not thinking like Eratosthenes on our Four A’s (autism, aspie, AD(H)D and allergies). This is group-think at it’s most damaging and millions of children are suffering for our mistake. Some of them, perhaps permanently.

And I don’t smile for photographs. Ever.

I grew up in the Pacific Northwest. My resume is full of Information Technology stuff, twenty years’ worth. Most of my positions held, especially back in the younger years, had to do with software development. I’m afraid that’s why my treatises are a bit bloated — in software development, of course, if anything is left undefined, the whole damn thing ain’t gonna work. People ask if I’ll start a writing career; I like the idea of being able to do something for money, late in life, with one foot in the grave and writing is just about the only thing that would fit that. But I harbor no delusions about becoming a great one. Ever. You have to have empathy to do that. You have to anticipate what the audience already knows, and leave it out. Like lots of nerds, and children falsely diagnosed with the 4 A’s, I’m empathically-challenged. Hey, maybe someday some one will come up with some disorder label for that. Then nobody will ever expect a damn thing out of me. We could call it P.E.D.D. for Persistent Empathy Deficit Disorder.

Kiddin’.

I have no college education, and my high school GPA is medium-to-dismal. I’m one-time married, divorced for sixteen years and almost seventeen; I have a live-in girlfriend who loves doing things for me. And yes, I do things for her. I have one son who is eleven years old. He’s weird in all the ways I’m weird, and then some. The schools tell me he’s off-the-charts intelligent but they don’t know how to relate to him. That’s what a lot of people say about his Dad. I’ve pretty much figured out why they call the boy intelligent. Why people call me that, sometimes I have to seriously wonder.

I’m a South Park Republican, I think. I don’t like seeing religion used to inflict guilt, and I tend to part company with my more fundamentalist right-wing brethren on this point; becoming more horrified every single living year with the decisions that are made in groups, and how they are made, I just can’t bring myself to go to church anymore. Haven’t gone in quite some time. But the liberal hierarchy of “values” is really offensive and odious to me. I think that fits the definition, or overlaps with it anyway…

I hate conservatives, but I really f—–g hate liberals. — Matt Stone

I believe in God. I wasn’t too sure about Him until my son was getting ready to get born. I was encouraged, in those oh so civilized, sensitive, enlightened Clinton years, to take an active role in all tasks that had to do with the pregnancy. Darwin just left waaaaaay too much unexplained. So when the know-it-all atheists can get condescending and snooty, I can be condescending right back, and I can rattle off exactly what is left unexplained by the gnostic atheist viewpoint. No, I’m not talking about that silly creationist-banana thing. Better stuff than that. YES, there’s a God. It isn’t open to question, except for patently absurd, silly questions. The kind of surreal strange questions socially desperate and strong-but-evil people ask, not to learn about anything, but to show off and get attention.

I don’t imagine this leaves you hungering for more by way of introduction. But there’s always the possibility that I may have been guilty, again, of clarifying one thing, when the curiosity of some may have been focused on something else. So consider the following as reference material — take what you like, leave the rest:

Things I Know
Things I Doubt
Things I Don’t Get
What’s Wrong With the World?
The Oath of Eratosthenes
House of Eratosthenes Glossary
Yin and Yang
What Is a Liberal?
Seven Steps to Insanity

Anyway. Plum pleased to be here. Cassy says she’ll be back inside the week. In the meantime, I’m going to do my darndest to make sure, in the week ahead, this is the longest single thing you ever have to read outta me…

Obama has a history of being ardently against guns. For example, look at this questionnaire he filled out showing us his anti-gun agenda from the Politico:

Of course, now that the DC handgun ban has been overturned, Obama’s singing a different tune. He wants us to believe that he just loves the Second Amendment, and would never want to take guns away from honest Americans! Unfortunately for him, though, not everyone’s sipping the Obamamessiah Kool-Aid. He seems to think that everyone is so enamored of him, that they won’t bother looking at what he’s said in the past.

Take this video from Hot Air, for example:

See, in today’s politics, there’s this newfangled thing called the internet. It means that millions of Americans are able to do their own research, separate from the biased and shoddy reporting done by the mainstream media, and that your ultra-liberal background won’t just quietly fade away with no one the wiser. If you’re the most liberal Senator in Washington, we’re going to know about it. But of course, what can Obama do except lie about where he stands? He has to run on an empty vehicle of HOPE! and CHANGE! because if Americans knew just how liberal he really is, he knows he’d never win. So it’s spin, spin, spin for Obama.

So when it comes to guns, what’s the answer for Obama? That he was for the unconstitutional handgun ban in Washington, D.C. before he was against it? Sorry, buddy. That didn’t cut it in 2004. And it’s not gonna cut it now.

Hat Tip: Gateway Pundit

Sorry, I’m just not excited about this at all. Know why? Because there never should have been a handgun ban in the first place. So as far as I’m concerned, this decision was way overdue, and it’s about damn time. The sad part is that the decision should’ve been 9 - 0, if the activist justices like Stevens and Bader-Ginsburg, for example, were actually concerned about staying true to the Constitution. But they aren’t, and so we get the 5 - 4 decision. (Sigh.) So while I’m happy that the ban was lifted, I just can’t seem to garner much excitement beyond IT’S ABOUT DAMN TIME. Rachel, on the other hand, is absolutely thrilled.

In honor of this, I think I might go shooting this weekend. Maybe break out the shotgun. We’ll see.

Here’s the AP story on the “historic” decision — because, you know, this is an entirely new concept and all. I’m quoting them, and if they have a problem with it, oh well. When bloggers start getting paid for the endless poaching of our writing by the mainstream media, then I’ll start paying them.

Silent on central questions of gun control for two centuries, the Supreme Court found its voice Thursday in a decision affirming the right to have guns for self-defense in the home and addressing a constitutional riddle almost as old as the republic over what it means to say the people may keep and bear arms.

The court’s 5-4 ruling struck down the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns and imperiled similar prohibitions in other cities, Chicago and San Francisco among them. Federal gun restrictions, however, were expected to remain largely intact.

The court’s historic awakening on the meaning of the Second Amendment brought a curiously mixed response, muted in some unexpected places.

The reaction broke less along party lines than along the divide between cities wracked with gun violence and rural areas where gun ownership is embedded in daily life. Democrats have all but abandoned their long push for stricter gun laws at the national level after deciding it’s a losing issue for them. Republicans welcomed what they called a powerful precedent.

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, straddling both sides of the issue, said merely that the court did not find an unfettered right to bear arms and that the ruling “will provide much-needed guidance to local jurisdictions across the country.” But another Chicagoan, Democratic Mayor Richard Daley, called the ruling “very frightening” and predicted more violence and higher taxes to pay for extra police if his city’s gun restrictions are lost.

Republican presidential candidate John McCain welcomed the ruling as “a landmark victory for Second Amendment freedom.”

The court had not conclusively interpreted the Second Amendment since its ratification in 1791. The amendment reads: “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

The basic issue for the justices was whether the amendment protects an individual’s right to own guns no matter what, or whether that right is somehow tied to service in a state militia, a once-vital, now-archaic grouping of citizens. That’s been the heart of the gun control debate for decades.

Writing for the majority, Justice Antonin Scalia said an individual right to bear arms exists and is supported by “the historical narrative” both before and after the Second Amendment was adopted.

President Bush said: “I applaud the Supreme Court’s historic decision today confirming what has always been clear in the Constitution: the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear firearms.”

Prominent British anti-gun activist Pat Regan was found dead in her home, having been stabbed to death, allegedly by her grandson. This is just such a tragedy… why, if only she’d had some way of defending herself!!

The grandson of prominent anti-gun campaigner Pat Regan has been arrested on suspicion of stabbing her to death.

Mrs Regan, 53, was discovered at the property on Marlborough Grange in the Hyde Park area of Leeds on Sunday.

The mother-of-six started campaigning against gun crime when her son Danny was shot dead in 2002.

…

Mrs Regan set up a Leeds branch of Mothers Against Guns after her son Danny, 25, was shot at his home in Haydock, near St Helens, Merseyside in December 2002. His killer has not been found.

She had met government officials to discuss how to tackle the problems of guns and gang-related crime.

I thought that crime would disappear if guns were outlawed, though! Well, I guess this just goes to show us that what we really need to do is outlaw ALL weapons. Here’s a list to start us off: