Sunday, May 09, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

VIN SUPRYNOWICZ: Wars on drugs, guns, fathers going well

We all know that in today's America, police can break into your house in the middle of the night and terrify your half-clad family at gunpoint if they have "reasonable grounds."

But did you know "reasonable grounds" now include having too high an electric bill or putting your garbage out too late?

Police in Carlsbad, Calif., will conduct an internal investigation into a March 19 police raid at a home that was invaded and searched for marijuana because of a high electricity bill, The Associated Press reports. No drugs were found.

Officers raided the home of Dina Dagy and her family because records indicated the family used three times as much electricity as their neighbors.

Police said the Dagy house was also targeted because a drug-sniffing dog "responded to the home" (proving such "hits" are about as reliable as Wonder Woman's magic lasso) and because the family put its trash out later than neighbors, "which can indicate suspicious activity," police said.

No one was shot or killed ... this time.

• Lying for Columbine: Liberals are always saying they can "find no liberal bias" in the mainstream press.

How about outright lies?

On April 23, The Washington Post news wire moved a commentary by one Margaret A. McKenna, president of Lesley University in Cambridge, Mass., urging that educators once again spend less time conveying factual curricular material, and more time on "self-esteem, civic engagement and school climate."

The piece begins: "Five years ago, automatic weapons fire echoed through the halls of Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., shattering not only lives but the complacency of that high-achieving suburban school."

No it didn't. "Automatic weapons" are machine guns. One pull of the trigger causes a properly functioning automatic weapon to continue firing until its magazine or belt is empty. Possession of such weapons has been sharply restricted in this country (in blatant violation of the Second and 14th amendments) since 1934. No such weapons were used at Columbine High School.

• Zero sanity policy: "Three boys at Bemiss Elementary School in Spokane, Wash., have been suspended for bringing `toy guns' to school," reports the Spokane Spokesman-Review.

Terry Wilson-Spence, whose 8-year-old son was among the suspended students, tells the paper that "the toy guns her son carried in his pocket were for G.I. Joe action figures. The guns are from only one inch to three inches long -- half the size of a pencil."

The school's principal, Lorna Spear, told the daily, "We've been very clear with our students and parents that you don't bring anything that resembles a gun to school. At school you don't need anything that's going to make kids feel unsafe."

"I gotta tell you, knowing that a bonehead like Spear is in charge of our children's education makes me feel pretty darned unsafe," comments former Las Vegan Chuck Muth, who forwarded this one along.

• Mr. Bremer's plan: "I just read the transcript of Paul Bremer's speech," writes in regular correspondent Lynn from Washington.

"Militias also threaten security," our man in Baghdad says, in part. "Ultimately, Iraq cannot be secure, free and united if people can set up armed militias and define the law of the land to suit their own ambitions. That is why all armed elements in Iraq must be controlled by the central government, not just now, but during the next government and the next and the next."

Once more, Mr. Bremer: That "Constitution" you once swore to protect and defend? It says an armed populace is ... what? That's right -- it's "necessary to the security of a free state." And why?

Let us turn once more to the eloquent words of Rep. Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, signer of the Declaration of Independence and member of the Constitutional Convention, who during floor debate over the Second Amendment reminded us: "What, Sir, is the use of a militia? It is to prevent the establishment of a standing army, the bane of liberty. ... Whenever Governments mean to invade the rights and liberties of the people, they always attempt to destroy the militia, in order to raise an army upon their ruins."

Heavens, Mr. Bremer: You weren't planning to impose a centrally controlled standing army over the people of Iraq, and take away their guns? I thought you were there to install "American-style democracy."

• Behind the "fatherhood crisis": Virtually every major social pathology has been linked to fatherless children: violent crime, drug and alcohol abuse, unwed pregnancy, suicide -- all correlating more strongly with fatherlessness than with any other single factor.

Tragically, however, government policies intended to deal with the "fatherhood crisis" have been ineffective at best because the root cause is not child abandonment by fathers, but policies that give mothers an incentive to initiate marital separation and divorce, according to Howard University political scientist Stephen Baskerville.

Women file about 70 percent of divorces, and about 80 percent of divorces are unilateral, professor Baskerville writes in the spring issue of The Independent Review.

"Most significantly, the principal incentive (to instigate separation) is not grounds such as desertion, adultery, or violence, but control of the children." Among the largest sources the "fatherhood crisis" are unilateral, "no fault" divorces, the professor finds.

"Identifying fathers rather than governments as the culprits behind family dissolution ... rationalizes policies that contribute further to the absence of fathers, which they ostensibly are meant to prevent. Further ... it allows officials to ignore the simplest and safest solution to these ills, which is to stop eliminating fathers."

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal and author of the books "Send in the Waco Killers" and "The Ballad of Carl Drega." His Web site is www.privacyalert.us.