Quite a bit of response to my parking ticket column last week, some of which runs on the facing page.
There was also a message on my phone Monday morning to call Wayne Griffin, deputy chief of field services for the city of Las Vegas, who told me Sunday's column "makes some valid, valid points. We're going to change those meters from one hour to four hours ... all around that downtown area."
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I'm not sure that's quite the dramatic change downtown needs to draw customers. But it's nice to know someone is reading.
Also drawing some mail was my entry of the previous week, on the elimination of the exemption that used to spare holders of Nevada concealed carry permits the trouble and expense of a new $25 background check every time we buy a firearm:
"Vin -- Your recent column, 'Complete disarmament?' Well, yes, maybe in your case," writes in Richard Hilliard of Henderson.
"But really, that's a paranoid fantasy," Mr. Hilliard continues. "Disarmament by whom? Not the NRA, not the armaments manufacturers. We've got to support our war machine!
"Consider. Have drivers been deprived of licenses? Have car owners been deprived of cars? If that happened, the economy and even the world would take a dive.
"Have boozemakers been deprived? Not with the huge corporate interests marketing the stuff. Have cigarette companies been deprived? Same answer. Corporate interests.
"There are already enough firearms in America to supply every man, woman, child, and fetus, so complete abstinence is not an option. Vin, rest easy. You're safe, and you have powerful bedfellows."
This is a familiar set of anti-capitalist sound bytes, but I'm afraid they don't grow much more coherent with age.
"Huge corporate interests" were already marketing booze in 1919, when it was banned completely for 14 years. Similarly large and powerful interests sell and market tobacco, yet the crippling of that economic engine -- the inevitable, incremental move toward a complete ban -- is well under way in all the populous seaboard states.
Driving? Once we allowed the right to travel to be converted into a conditional, "licensed" privilege, government now believes it can take away this "privilege." They now threaten to suspend the licenses of those who are behind in their child support, or guilty of many other offenses having nothing to do with competence to handle the automobile.
So yes, many drivers have been deprived of their licenses.
And like the scorpion stinging the frog in the famous folk tale, the regulators don't seem to care whether it's crippling the economy. They're on a mission, and it's all about control.
Odd, however, that Mr. Hilliard would list tobacco and alcohol, yet omit such once legal products as heroin and cocaine.
What became of the legal, taxpaying manufacturers of those plant extracts who trusted the federal government when they were told the 1913 Harrison Narcotics Act only required them to register so their products could be checked for purity and potency, that this would never lead to the outright ban of their products? Yet we're supposed to believe it could never happen with guns because "powerful corporate interests" profit from the trade.
There have rarely been corporate interests more successful in the trade than Mauser and Walther. Should the Jews of Germany and Poland thus have rested easy, knowing these greedy capitalists with their hunger to keep selling arms and ammunition to the civilian market would never allow them to be disarmed, so they'd have no way to resist when the Gestapo came to round them up and put them on the trains?
British firearms manufacturers were a wealthy and well-respected fraternity 80 years ago. They would surely have called it a "paranoid fantasy" if anyone had suggested law-abiding British citizens would be barred from possessing any self-defense firearms whatsoever by the start of the 21st century.
Today civilian disarmament in Britain is complete -- carpet installers actually get sentenced for carrying knives in the course of their employment -- except for criminals, who wield imported AK-47s, and so terrorize the law-abiding populace that the London newspapers have redubbed Manchester "Gunchester."
How on earth did the "huge corporate interests" fail to protect their civilian market?
You see, Mr. Hilliard, the kind of people who want to run our lives don't see an armed populace as a good thing. An unarmed populace is necessary for the completion of their "war machine." Why do you think they sneer and ridicule anyone who tries to remind us why the founders said an armed populace was "necessary to the security of a free state"? The goal of tyrants down through the ages has been precisely to make sure their own sworn legions are very well-armed, while the civilian populations they aim to oppress are thoroughly disarmed.
Far from being contradictory, these two goals fit together like a hand in a steel gauntlet.
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the daily Las Vegas Review-Journal and author of "Send in the Waco Killers" and the new novel "The Black Arrow." His Web sites are www.TheLibertarian.us or www.LibertyBookShop.us.
