Tag: Education

Dept. of They Never Ever Stop:

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Ravenwood commented on, well, actually ripped on this op-ed column on the PittsburgLive.com site by “associate professor of history and director of the Second Amendment Research Center at the John Glenn Institute at Ohio State University” Mr. Saul Cornell. Ravenwood reveals that the “Second Amendment Research Center” is funded by the Joyce Foundation, a group dedicated to “meaningful reforms” and providing “a model for gun policy nationwide.” Denise of The Ten Ring also waxed eloquent on the topic.

Now it’s my turn.

Taking a bite out of the 2nd

By Saul Cornell
Sunday, January 30, 2005

The Department of Justice decided to revise the Second Amendment.

Really? I thought they had decided to make a plain statement of meaning, not a revision. I haven’t noticed any change in the wording as it is archived. As I see it, the Dept. of Justice has merely done a scholarly analysis of the meaning of the Second Amendment and concluded what the 1982 Report of the Subcommittee on the Constitution of the Committee of the Judiciary of the United States Senate said:

The Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms therefore, is a right of the individual citizen to privately possess and carry in a peaceful manner firearms and similar arms. Such an “individual rights” interpretation is in full accord with the history of the right to keep and bear arms, as previously discussed. It is moreover in accord with contemporaneous statements and formulations of the right by such founders of this nation as Thomas Jefferson and Samuel Adams, and accurately reflects the majority of the proposals which led up to the Bill of Rights itself.

It would seem the Dept. of Justice’s report is hardly a revision. But that’s how Prof. Cornell sees it:

It has produced a 100-page memo designed to give activist judges a historical pretext for striking down existing gun laws.

Now THIS is RICH! Given the fact that “activist judges” are responsible for the current state of judicial affairs concerning the Second Amendment!

Up until just prior to the Civil War, the Supreme Court held that the Second Amendment protected an individual right of citizens, a right outside of militia service, to “keep and carry arms wherever they went,” as I detailed in The Blog that Ate Poughkeepsie. In fact, Chief Justice Taney stated in the majority decision of Scott v. Sanford:

(Citizenship) “would give to persons of the negro race, who were recognized as citizens in any one State of the Union, the right to enter every other State whenever they pleased, singly or in companies, without pass or passport, and without obstruction, to sojourn there as long as they pleased, to go where they pleased at every hour of the day or night without molestation, unless they committed some violation of law for which a white man would be punished; and it would give them the full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects upon which its own citizens might speak; to hold public meetings upon political affairs, and to keep and carry arms wherever they went. And all of this would be done in the face of the subject race of the same color, both free and slaves, and inevitably producing discontent and insubordination among them, and endangering the peace and safety of the State.” (My emphasis)

That’s a pretty fair listing of the “rights of the People” as protected by the Bill of Rights against infringement by government. These rights were so inviolate that the Court decided that blacks, free or not, could not be citizens because to grant them that status would thereby confer those rights – irrespective of membership in a “well regulated militia” – upon them. It was not until AFTER the Civil War that “activist judges” declared that the Second Amendment protected only against infringement of this right by Congress in U.S. v. Cruikshank, thereby violating the expressed intent of Congress and the People in the passage of the 13th and 14th Amendments because the Justices just couldn’t BEAR to see black citizens exercise their legal right to keep and bear arms.

Let’s make sure we understand each other here: “Activist judges” means judges who, as 9th Circuit Court Justice Alex Kozinski put it, “constitutionalize” their “personal preferences.” That’s what the Courts have been doing to the Second Amendment now for decades – all in the name of “public safety.” The same argument the Brady Bunch, et al. use today.

Let’s continue:

Rewriting the Bill of Rights has been pawned off as nothing more than a return to the original understanding of the amendment. Yet this revisionist interpretation has nothing to do with the original.

Reads the Second Amendment: “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 department’s revised Second Amendment contends the right of individuals to keep and carry guns shall not be infringed.

The Department of Justice has erased the preamble, which states the purpose of the amendment, to create a “well regulated Militia.” The revision goes well beyond the idea of interpreting the Constitution as a living document that must respond to changing times. In effect, Justice believes it can expunge language that it finds inconvenient and substitute language more ideologically suitable in its place.

We’re supposed to take associate Prof. Cornell’s word as an authority that this is what the Amendment really means. I find it hugely ironic that he is now claiming that what’s being done is not only a “living document” revision, but “goes well beyond” such revision. Let me quote a perhaps more competent (and less biased) authority, Laurence Tribe, Tyler Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard and author of the text American Constitutional Law from which this quote is taken:

Perhaps the most accurate conclusion one can reach with any confidence is that the core meaning of the Second Amendment is a populist / republican / federalism one: Its central object is to arm ‘We the People’ so that ordinary citizens can participate in the collective defense of their community and their state. But it does so not through directly protecting a right on the part of states or other collectivities, assertable by them against the federal government, to arm the populace as they see fit. Rather the amendment achieves its central purpose by assuring that the federal government may not disarm individual citizens without some unusually strong justification consistent with the authority of the states to organize their own militias. That assurance in turn is provided through recognizing a right (admittedly of uncertain scope) on the part of individuals to possess and use firearms in the defense of themselves and their homes — not a right to hunt for game, quite clearly, and certainly not a right to employ firearms to commit aggressive acts against other persons — a right that directly limits action by Congress or by the Executive Branch and may well, in addition, be among the privileges or immunities of United States citizens protected by §1 of the Fourteenth Amendment against state or local government action.

Laurence Tribe is hardly a right-wing gun-nut. He was one of Al Gore’s lawyers during Bush v. Gore in 2000, and is a decided lefty. Or let me quote more fully from Justice Kozinski in his dissent to the decision to deny an en banc rehearing of Silviera v. Lockyer, which seems to take a quite opposite position to Professor Cornell:

Judges know very well how to read the Constitution broadly when they are sympathetic to the right being asserted. We have held, without much ado, that “speech, or . . . the press” also means the Internet…and that “persons, houses, papers, and effects” also means public telephone booths….When a particular right comports especially well with our notions of good social policy, we build magnificent legal edifices on elliptical constitutional phrases – or even the white spaces between lines of constitutional text. But, as the panel amply demonstrates, when we’re none too keen on a particular constitutional guarantee, we can be equally ingenious in burying language that is incontrovertibly there.

It is wrong to use some constitutional provisions as springboards for major social change while treating others like senile relatives to be cooped up in a nursing home until they quit annoying us. As guardians of the Constitution, we must be consistent in interpreting its provisions. If we adopt a jurisprudence sympathetic to individual rights, we must give broad compass to all constitutional provisions that protect individuals from tyranny. If we take a more statist approach, we must give all such provisions narrow scope. Expanding some to gargantuan proportions while discarding others like a crumpled gum wrapper is not faithfully applying the Constitution; it’s using our power as federal judges to constitutionalize our personal preferences.
The able judges of the panel majority are usually very sympathetic to individual rights, but they have succumbed to the temptation to pick and choose. Had they brought the same generous approach to the Second Amendment that they routinely bring to the First, Fourth and selected portions of the Fifth, they would have had no trouble finding an individual right to bear arms.

Justice Kozinski here perfectly illustrates “judicial activism” as it relates to the Second Amendment. Or how about 9th Circuit Justice Jay Gould’s dissent to the en banc rehearing of Nordyke v King?

An “individual rights” interpretation, as was recently adopted by the Fifth Circuit in United States v. Emerson, consistent with United States v. Miller, is most consistent with the text, structure, purposes,and history of the Second Amendment, as well as colonial experience and pre-adoption history. It also reflects what I consider to be the scholarly consensus that has recently developed on the question of how to best interpret the Second Amendment. We should recognize that individual citizens have a constitutional right to keep and bear arms, subject — in the same manner as all other core constitutional rights — to certain limits. Thereafter, the chips will fall where they may, and decisions in due course will clarify what is and is not constitutionally permissible regulation, and the further standards for addressing it.

These are justices sitting on the bench of the most liberal Appeals court in the nation, citing legal precedent and historical documentation that associate Professor of History Cornell claims don’t exist:

Although gun rights advocates have tried to claim that bearing arms did not have a military connotation at the time the Second Amendment was ratified in 1791, they have never been able to provide a body of evidence to support their claims. The only evidence they have produced is a single text written by the losing side in the original debate over the Constitution.

I beg your pardon? I refer you, once again, to the Report of the Subcommittee linked above, and how about this page from UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh? Or the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals decision in U.S. v. Emerson? There are REAMS of scholarship showing that the “bearing arms” language in the Second Amendment did not restrict “the right of the People to Keep and Bear Arms” to milita service only, else Laurence Tribe would not have reached the conclusion he did.

Remember, Prof. Cornell is writing an opinion piece for a newspaper. He doesn’t have to be right, he just has to be convincing. The ill-informed who read this piece think “Hey, he’s an authority, he must be right.” That’s why his side has to keep repeating the big lies.

To continue:

Substituting the ideas of the losers for the winners turns history into a science-fiction fantasy, in which one might as well argue that the patriots lost the American Revolution, or the South won the Civil War.

Except we’re winning. The original meaning that existed after the American Revolution, the meaning that was stripped by the Courts after the Civil War, is being slowly restored.

For better or worse, the real Second Amendment links the right to bear arms with a well-regulated militia. If Americans want to change this language it will have to be by the slow and uncertain process of amending the Constitution.

And here he simply lies. The “real Second Amendment” has never been linked to militia service in the Supreme Court, and only in the lower courts by (apparently deliberate) misinterpretation of the 1939 U.S. v Miller decision. Again, quoting Justice Kozinski:

The able judges of the panel majority are usually very sympathetic to individual rights, but they have succumbed to the temptation to pick and choose. Had they brought the same generous approach to the Second Amendment that they routinely bring to the First, Fourth and selected portions of the Fifth, they would have had no trouble finding an individual right to bear arms. Indeed, to conclude otherwise, they had to ignore binding precedent. United States v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174 (1939), did not hold that the defendants lacked standing to raise a Second Amendment defense, even though the government argued the collective rights theory in its brief. The Supreme Court reached the Second Amendment claim and rejected it on the merits after finding no evidence that Miller’s weapon – a sawed-off shotgun – was reasonably susceptible to militia use. We are bound not only by the outcome of Miller but also by its rationale. If Miller’s claim was dead on arrival because it was raised by a person rather than a state, why would the Court have bothered discussing whether a sawed-off shotgun was suitable for militia use? The panel majority not only ignores Miller’s test; it renders most of the opinion wholly superfluous. As an inferior court, we may not tell the Supreme Court it was out to lunch when it last visited a constitutional provision.

Yet that’s what most of the Appeals Court decisions Professor Cornell bases his worldview on have done. But he depends on the overwhelming majority of the public not understanding any of the history, legal or otherwise, and simply accepting his appeal to authority. It is the gun control side that needs to pursue the “slow and uncertain process of amending the Constitution” but it never even tries that path. Instead they try to pass unconstitutional laws, and failing that they try to legislate from the bench. Now that even that course is failing, they once again are attempting to deceive an ignorant public in order to anger and panic them. This way they can pursue the legislative angle, or possibly influence those “activist judges” who are willing to constitutionalize their personal preferences.

Professor Cornell concludes:

Distorting the past for ideological reasons is unacceptable, in the cause of either gun rights or gun control.

On this I concur fully. But I recognize that it is Professor Cornell and his ilk that have been “distorting the past for ideological reasons” for decades, and now they realize they’re losing, and they’re getting desperate.

I said previously that I started this blog to give me a place to be an advocate for individual rights – a place to voice my views and to hopefully help educate a populace that too often hasn’t been told what their rights are supposed to be under the system of government we’re supposed to be living in. This is a perfect example. Professor Cornell’s piece will reach a lot more people than my rebuttal will, but I will reach some, and so will Ravenwood, and so will The Ten Ring, and so will others. Individually and together we have a voice denied to us previously, and that voice is at least in part responsible for the fact that we are winning the war of ideas, at least on this particular battlefield. Not only that, but we’re winning because people are able to read the historical record for themselves and draw their own conclusions, no longer restricted to the opinions of “authorities” like associate professor Saul Cornell.

(Edited to add: I sent the Professor a link to this piece. His email address is [email protected]. If he responds, I’ll publish it.)

UPDATE – 2/3: Professor Cornell has responded. I’ll post the response and my reply as soon as I can. This piece will require some time, though, so be patient.

Further Update: The response is up here.

Dept. of Our Collapsing Schools, Part: “May I Beat Them With a ClueBat™?”

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Sissy Willis reports of this column by a writer for the Newton TAB in Massachussetts. It’s about why the public school system “was recently forced to publicly admit that the sixth-grade MCAS math scores have steadily declined over the past three years to the point where 32 percent of sixth-graders are now in the ‘warning’ or ‘needs improvement’ category.”

The school system has no answer, columnist Tom Mountain explains:

The school department offered no tangible explanation for these declining scores other than to admit that they have no explanation, as articulated by Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum and Instruction Carolyn Wyatt (salary $106,804), “[The results] have decreased, incrementally, each year and continue to puzzle us.” She went on to admit that this downward trend is peculiar to Newton and “is not being seen statewide.” Again, she offered no explanation, but she did assure the School Committee that her assistant, Math Coordinator Mary Eich (salary $101,399), is currently investigating the problem.

In full disclosure, my sister teaches 5th grade math and science. She has been a teacher for more than twenty years. Her income is, I believe, less than $50k per annum, but those administrative salaries are not out of line for the school district in which she works.

Mr. Mountain thinks, though, that he might have a grip on the problem, and he’s not even drawing a public-service paycheck:

But why have the sixth-grade MCAS scores plummeted in just three years? What mitigating circumstances, such as demographic or economic factors, could have contributed to this downward spiral?

Since Newton has been curiously alone in this decline, surely we can’t blame the MCAS itself, especially since the test has hardly changed in just three years. The demographics of the city haven’t shifted in so short a period. The socioeconomic level of the population has risen steadily. The school budget has dramatically increased – most notably with an unprecedented override in 2002 – to the point where the budget is at a record high, despite an actual decline in the number of students.

Class size has only recently increased, but mostly at the high schools and only sporadically at the lower grade levels. Since the turnover rate in the school department has always been low, the teachers and principals are roughly the same. We still have the same School Committee, superintendent and mayor.

So then, after eliminating any potential mitigating factors, what could possibly account for the steady decline in the sixth-grade math MCAS scores?

The only logical and remaining explanation is change that occurred in the Newton math curriculum itself – the subject matter of what is taught and how, what is emphasized and what is not, what has been omitted and what is new. In short, what has changed in the elementary and middle school math curriculum to have affected such a dramatic decline in the MCAS scores?

Answer: the new math curriculum, otherwise known as anti-racist multicultural math.

Between 1999 and 2001, under the direction of Superintendent Young and Assistant Superintendent Wyatt, the math curriculum was redesigned to emphasize “Newton’s commitment to active anti-racist education” for the elementary and middle schools. This meant that no longer were division, multiplication, fractions and decimals the first priority for teaching math. For that matter, the teaching of math was no longer the first priority for math teachers, as indicated by the new curriculum guidelines, called benchmarks, which function as the primary instructional guide for teaching math in the Newton Public Schools.

In 2001 Mr. Young, Mrs. Wyatt and an assortment of other well-paid school administrators, defined the new number-one priority for teaching mathematics, as documented in the curriculum benchmarks, “Respect for Human Differences – students will live out the system wide core of ‘Respect for Human Differences’ by demonstrating anti-racist/anti-bias behaviors.” It continues, “Students will: Consistently analyze their experiences and the curriculum for bias and discrimination; Take effective anti-bias action when bias or discrimination is identified; Work with people of different backgrounds and tell how the experience affected them; Demonstrate how their membership in different groups has advantages and disadvantages that affect how they see the world and the way they are perceived by others…” It goes on and on.

These are the most important priorities that the school department has determined for teaching math from grade one through eight, as documented in the Newton Public Schools Benchmarks.

Nowhere among the first priorities for the math curriculum guidelines is the actual teaching of math. That’s a distant second. To Superintendent Young and his School Committee, mathematical problem-solving is of secondary importance to anti-racist/anti-bias math.

I studied a lot of math in grade school, culminating with calculus in my senior year. I made it through Differential Equations in college. You know, not once did it occur to me that mathematics might have anything to do with racism. Are irrational numbers discriminated against? Is “square-root” a racial ephithet? Mr. Mountain has, it appears, found what two hundred-thousand-dollar public servants have obviously missed: “Nowhere among the first priorities for the math curriculum guidelines is the actual teaching of math. That’s a distant second.”

Equally apparent to me is the fact that nowhere among the first priorities for the history curriculum guidelines of far too many public schools is the actual teaching of history, nor in English curricula, nor science, nor any other of the fundamental disciplines that public schooling is tasked with. The FIRST priority in these public schools, overriding all others, is to build ignorant, pliable, unthinking, politically-correct eco-worshipping multi-culti mind-numbed robots in the socialist mold of John Dewey who said, “You can’t make Socialists out of individualists. Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming where everyone is interdependent.”

They’ve done a helluva job.

UPDATE, 1/24: From comments at Professor Plum‘s comes this University of Florida College of Education “Supplement and Study Guide” for “Multicultural Mathematics”. You’ve GOT to read this. But here’s the part that stands out like a neon sign:

EXPECTATIONS FOR CLASSROOM BEHAVIOR

Each student is expected to exhibit courteous, mature, and professional behavior. Violation of the following and other inappropriate and irresponsible behaviors will lead to a deduction in your final grade.

• cheating or otherwise presenting another person’s work as your own*

• turning assignments in late

• missing class and related experiences

• talking when someone else – a peer or a teacher – is speaking

• exhibiting a challenging, arrogant, or insolent manner

• making late and noisy entrances – or exits – from the classroom

• displaying active disinterest in class (e.g., sleeping, walking out)

• packing up books and papers before the class officially ends

• putting down or disrespecting other students

• asking irrelevant questions as an annoyance

• not being prepared for class

• not listening to announcement or lectures and then asking others about the information presented

• doing work for another course during class-time

• refusing to participate in activities

• exhibiting lack of awareness of acceptable behavior (e.g., eating or drinking in class, passing notes)

• being slow to move into or out of groups

• disrespectfully over-reacting to assignments when handed back

This is a university course for the education of future TEACHERS. And these rules are what you’d see for a third-grade classroom. But “exhibiting a challenging, arrogant, or insolent manner”? Why do I think that Dr. Thomasenia Lott Adams might have found some resistance to her instruction in “Multicultural Mathematics”? Sweet bleeding jeebus.

Department of Our Collapsing Collapsed Schools

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Sweet bleeding jeebus. Even I didn’t think it was this bad.

Via Gary Cruse of The Owner’s Manual comes this OC Register column (registration required, or use username: nombre password: letmein – bugmenot works!). Just read it.

America as it ain’t
It’s no exaggeration to say the ignorance of college students is staggering

By Richard Nehrbass
The Huntington Beach resident is a professor of management at Cal State Dominguez Hills.

After America won its independence from Germany in the 19th century and Fidel Castro became the first ruler of the Soviet Union, Betsy Ross wrote “The Star Spangled Banner.”

Wait, that’s not right. It was after the Emancipation Proclamation secured our independence from France and Tolstoy established his reputation as a singer and Stalin became the president of Italy.

No, this isn’t “magic realism,” or some obscure French philosopher’s post-modernist view of history. It’s our world, as understood by our children. Grown children, sitting in my classes at a campus of the California State University, and almost entirely the product of California’s public schools. To reach my classes, they have successfully navigated 12 years of American public education, graduating in the top third of their class. They have a history of A and B grades, they have admirable SAT scores. They are the flower of their generation. And they know almost nothing about their country, their culture or the world in general.

So serious is this problem that it is now often impossible for a college teacher to hold a discussion about anything that took place more than 15 years ago. Ask about Jimmy Carter, Gandhi or the Depression – or World War II or William Wordsworthor the civil rights movement of the ’60s – and it’s likely no one will know what you’re talking about. Most of my students can’t explain the difference between the political parties, or what the United Nations is, or name a single member of the president’s Cabinet. They don’t read newspapers or magazines, seldom watch the news on television, and think actually reading a book is an exotic and particularly cruel form of punishment.

Exaggerated? Unbelievable? Actually, it’s even worse – as I discovered when I gave a short general knowledge quiz to my students the first day of class. There was nothing difficult about the test, just the sorts of things you would imagine no one could reach adulthood without knowing. When I collected the papers, one young woman told me she was “embarrassed” at what she didn’t know. We all should be.

A few examples:

The vast majority of these soon-to-be college grads were not aware of even the most basic facts concerning their nation’s history. Most, for example, could not identify the decade of any of America’s wars. Any! Most couldn’t identify the century. A mere 16 percent were able to date the beginning of the Revolutionary War to the 1770s, and only 12 percent chose the 1860s as the time of the Civil War. Two-thirds were unable to date the War of 1812. The mind boggles.

America’s enemies in these wars? Fewer than one in three knew Great Britain was their country’s foe in the American Revolution. Most weren’t even able to work out who the United States fought in the “Korean” or “Vietnam” wars. When asked where the words “Four score and seven years ago” came from, only 17 percent were able to identify the Gettysburg Address. And just 17 percent (presumably the same students) knew what those six words meant.

To test simple arithmetic skills, I asked what 70 percent of 240 was. This is middle school stuff. But most had no idea how to figure it out. When asked to make change for a $5 bill when a purchase came to $1.37, one-quarter of California’s future bachelors of science weren’t able to figure it out.

Perhaps the problem is they’re too busy studying current events. Perhaps, but only 16 percent could name California’s two senators, and only 29 percent knew the Senate was composed of 100 members, though one soon-to-be grad said, “Fifty, two from each state.”

World history? One student out of more than 100 – one! – could identify the authors of the Communist Manifesto. Two knew what the Magna Carta was. Joseph Stalin was the leader of what country? Sixty-one percent were clueless, though some thought perhaps Italy or Germany. Only 4 percent chose Lenin as the first leader of the Soviet Union.

The humanities? Two percent knew Keats was a poet, 12 percent could identify D.H. Lawrence, and 18 percent Tolstoy and Stravinsky. Gerald Ford, though, will be delighted to learn that half of California’s best and brightest lauded him as the inventor of the automobile.

There were some positive results, of course. Sixty percent knew Nixon was the president who resigned in office, 95 percent chose Sacramento as their state’s capital, and 81 percent more or less knew what the Holocaust referred to. (“When jewes were killed” and “killing of ethnical group” are actual quotes from soon-to-be university grads.) And 76 percent knew what happened on Pearl Harbor Day (“There was a bombing in the shape of a mushroom which killed many people and destroyed lands.”)

But enough. After all, it’s the system, not the students, that is at fault. Our young people are not stupid. Indeed, many are quite brilliant. But it’s time we asked why after 12-plus years in our public schools, and a backpack full of As and Bs, they know so little about the world they live in. And it’s past time for our nation’s schoolteachers to take responsibility for what goes on in their classrooms. As things stand, they should be as “embarrassed” at the product of their labor as some of their own graduates are.

Go read Gary’s commentary. Then read Billy Beck’s.

I can’t add anything to that.

College students! Jeebus!

UPDATE: Rodger Schultz, in his inimitable way, has a post up on public education.

From 1980 to 2002, in real money, spending per pupil in public schools increased by $3,600, rising from $5,400 per student to $9,000. That is a two-thirds spending increase.

The result .. (you guessed the result 20 years ago didn’t you, ya big smart alek)? Last year U.S. students (8th graders) finished 15th in math and ninth in science when measured against 45 countries.

(*sigh*)

Which reminds me of the 1983 report of the National Commission on Excellence in Education that stated:

If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today,we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves. We have in fact, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament.

I don’t think it was “unthinking.” I believe Connie du Toit had it right.

The other day our Carpenter’s helper heard me say something along the lines of, “it is difficult to conclude that incompetence is the reason why our public schools have deteriorated. There comes a point where you have to suspect sabotage, or a conspiracy.”

He asked me if I really meant that. I gave him the five minute explanation of John Dewey’s known affiliation with communists, his frequent essays and articles about the wonders of the Soviet education system, and his quote, “You can’t make Socialists out of individualists. Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming where everyone is interdependent.”

I then went on to tell him about how public schools changed at the turn of the last century. That there were others involved in turning Americans from free-thinking individualists to factory drones. I also added that many people probably went along with it because it seemed like a good idea, but there were certainly enough people behind the scenes, who knew that the goal posts had been moved. THAT is a conspiracy.

Yes. There does come that time when you are forced to don the tinfoil hat.

The incompetence excuse only works once. Incompetence this great is impossible to attribute to accident.

Or is it, really, war? And there’s been no “education 9/11” to wake us up to the fact?

More Excellent News from the Youth Front

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A week ago I got an email from a young reader. Here’s what he sent me:

Dear Sir,

I’m in 8th grade and visit your blog almost every day. I enjoy shooting my uncle’s handgun (a Smith and Wesson .44 special). I also like politics and am interested in what you have to say about current events. You’re definitely one of my favorite bloggers. (Sucking up never hurts.)

My 7th period Civics teacher assigned our class a writing assignment yesterday and, because I respect your opinion, I was hoping you could reply briefly.

She passed out columinst Ted Ralls article about Ronald Reagans death to the class yesterday and assigned us a 2 page paper that addresses a list of issues that the column mentions. She listed 10 questions but we only have to answer 3. These are the 3 that I decided to answer:

1. “According to the author, the Reagan administration slashed AIDS research budgets in order to fund tax cuts for the upper 2% of American taxpayers. As a result, AIDS research was set-back at least 8 years, resulting in the deaths of millions of innocent people and costing billions of dollars in health care costs. Knowing what we know today, what would you have said to Ronald Reagan about AIDS the day he was elected President?”

2. “The author notes that the Reagan administration illegally authorized the sale of 107 tons (!) of anti-aircraft missles to the nation of Iran in order to support an extremist right-wing insurgency in Nicaragua. Iran was – and remains – a staunch enemy of the United States. The author argues that because Mr. Reagan violated an act of Congress and provided material support to the enemy he should have been tried for treason and faced the death penalty. Do you agree that people – even presidents – who sell weapons to enemies of the United States should be prosecuted?”

3. “After retreating from Lebanon (a country in the Middle East) in 1983, Mr. Reagan ordered the invasion of Grenada, a tiny island in the Caribbean. The author says that this was a way for him to “look tough” by bullying a country that couldn’t fight back. Do you agree with Reagan’s decision to invade a peaceful country most Americans had never heard of in order to “look tough?” Reference George Bush’s similar efforts to “look tough” after the tragic events of 9/11.”

I wasn’t born when Reagan was president, so I’m not very familiar with the background behind the questions. Ms. Hawthorne told me she supports gun rights, she is definitely a very smart teacher, and I respect her opinion. However I think the assigment is biased by the tone of the questions.

This is due Friday and I’m trying to find articles that argue with Mr. Ralls conclusions. I’ve googled “Reagan + AIDS”, “Reagan + Iran” and “Reagan + Grenada” among many others. Alot of what I found agrees with the author, more or less. If you have time before Friday, do you know of a link that deals with one or more of these topics and offers a counter-argument? I know you’re busy, so PLEASE don’t take any time to help unless you know of a link immediately. It’s not a big deal, I’ll definitely get the paper done regardless. Thanks in advance for any help.

Well, after sucking up, and then invoking the RCOB™ by mentioning that subhuman pustule Ted Rall, of course I had to help out. So I gave him a pointer to a site showing government spending on AIDS from 1981 through 1999, and a PBS (!) site for an overview of the invasion of Grenada. On question #2 I was not as sanguine. I told Mr. Pomeroy:

In regards to question #2, Ronald Reagan was, in my humble opinion, in the wrong.

Strategically I understand what he was doing, but he was doing it outside the law. The weapons were sent to Iran to be used in the then-raging Iran-Iraq war, not “to free hostages in Lebanon” – or at least not ONLY for that reason. Better, I assume, that they fight each other than sit and plot against us. Plus, the money from those sales went to fund support for the anti-communist Contras in Nicaragua – people who were none too savory themselves. Had this gotten out, the scandal probably would have resulted in impeachment. As much as I hate to say it, he should have been prosecuted for it. As one of my favorite people to quote – Justice Louis Brandeis – said:

“Decency, security and liberty alike demand that government officials shall be subject to the rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen. In a government of laws, existence of government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our government is the potent, omnipresent teacher. For good or ill, it teaches the whole people by example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a law-breaker, it breeds contempt for the law. It invites every man to become a law unto himself. It invites anarchy.”

However, Reagan was successful in his effort to defeat communism both in South America and in the Soviet Union. To me, that mitigates the crime. But it does not negate it. If we allow leaders to violate the law, it does damage to the entire system. What good is it to defeat an external enemy if the system we are striving to save collapses from internal rot?

Well, he did more research and wrote his paper, which I will reproduce here in its entirety:

Analysis of “Reagan’s Shameful Legacy” by Ted Rall

1. “According to the author, the Reagan administration slashed AIDS research budgets in order to fund tax cuts for the upper 2% of American taxpayers. As a result, AIDS research was set-back at least 8 years, resulting in the deaths of millions of innocent people and costing billions of dollars in health care costs. Knowing what we know today, what would you have said to Ronald Reagan about AIDS the day he was elected President?”

The author writes that the Reagan administration “refused to do anything about the AIDS epidemic, all so they could fund extravagant tax cuts for a tiny sliver of the ultra rich.” However, he does not use any evidence to support his claim.

According to the “CRS Report for Congress, AIDS Funding for Federal Programs 1981-1999”, funding for AIDS increased every year Reagan was President. When he took office in 1981, funding for AIDS was only $200,000. When he left office in 1988, annual funding for AIDS was over 1.3 billion dollars. According to my calculations, that is approximately a 4000% increase in spending. In contrast, during Clinton’s presidency, there was only about a 100% increase in AIDS spending.

Although the author does not mention the “deaths of millions of innocent people”, the question does so I will address that. While some people definitely caught AIDS from blood banks, I would assume (though I don’t have any sources to back this up) that most caught it from unprotected sex and sharing needles. When you knowingly engage in high risk behavior, this does not make you “innocent”. They did not deserve to die but, if they had practiced some basic personal responsibility they probably would be alive today.

I would have told Reagan in 1981, based on what I know today, that he probably did everything he could by funding research. The only thing he should have done differently in my opinion, is also fund needle-sharing programs and condom programs which would have cut down on health care costs since less people would have caught AIDS.


2. “The author notes that the Reagan administration illegally authorized the sale of 107 tons (!) of anti-aircraft missles to the nation of Iran in order to support an extremist right-wing insurgency in Nicaragua. Iran was – and remains – a staunch enemy of the United States. The author argues that because Mr. Reagan violated an act of Congress and provided material support to the enemy he should have been tried for treason and faced the death penalty. Do you agree that people – even presidents – who sell weapons to enemies of the United States should be prosecuted?”

Based on my research, this is a complicated issue that the author simplifies in order to make a point. There were strategic and political goals besides supporting the Contras in Nicaragua that led to sale of weapons to Iran. At the time, Iran and Iraq were at war and supporting that conflict (rather than have them scheme to harm the United States) may have been in the best interest of the U.S. Reagan also compared the Contras to the Founding Fathers during the Revolutionary War. This may have been an exaggeration or even completely incorrect but, it seems obvious that Reagan thought he was doing the right thing and decided to make painful compromises to achieve his goal. I also think it was a different time too. When Reagan was President, Communism was the biggest threat, like terrorism is today.

However, it is clear he did break the law by going around Congress and doing something he said he wouldn’t do (sell weapons to terrorists). He probably should have been prosecuted. However I think the death penalty is extreme in this case. If Reagan was just trying to put money in his bank account or sold weapons to be used against the United States, then maybe. But the evidence points to the fact that although his methods were wrong, his intention was good. In court, this probably would have been a “mitigating factor” that resulted in a much lighter sentence.


3. “After retreating from Lebanon (a country in the Middle East) in 1983, Mr. Reagan ordered the invasion of Grenada, a tiny island in the Caribbean. The author says that this was a way for him to “look tough” by bullying a country that couldn’t fight back. Do you agree with Reagan’s decision to invade a peaceful country most Americans had never heard of in order to “look tough?” Reference George Bush’s similar efforts to “look tough” after the tragic events of 9/11.”

I do not agree that Reagan, or any other leader, should invade a peaceful country in order to “look tough”. Putting people’s lives at risk just to “look tough” is immoral and should be illegal. However, again the facts do not back up the authors claim. There were many other factors involved.

According to an article on the PBS website, the Grenada invasion had been planned long before the terrorist attack in Lebanon. The reasons included Cuban soldiers stationed in Grenada, a Communist coup, martial law on the island, and the construction of an airstrip that could have been used as a “Communist beachhead”. There were also the 800 medical students whose lives may or may not have been in danger. After the fact, some said they were in danger, others said they were not. After the invasion, U.S. soldiers found enough arms for 10,000 men. Although there is not anything necessarily wrong with being armed, it sounds like they were doing more on the island than just being peaceful.

In my opinion, the author is showing bias by only telling part of the story. If the reader did not research the facts, it would be easy to believe what he says. But once you do the research, there is a lot more to it. It makes me think that Mr. Rall is not informed or he is trying to deceive. In my opinion, neither option speaks well for him.

Comparing Grenada to Iraq and Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon is difficult to do because, there doesn’t seem to be much connection. Although I have mixed feelings about the Iraq war, I fully support the war in Afghanistan. Also, we were attacked and I think we need to fight back out of necessity. There are also many strategic and political factors that influenced the decision including strict Wahabist Islam, countries in the region like Syria and Iran which support terrorism, and the flaunting of U.N. resolutions by Iraq for 12 years. There is a big difference between “looking tough” and “being tough” when it is necessary. For the most part, I think Bush is trying to do what is necessary.

Chris also sent me the other seven questions he had to select from:

According to the article, at the end of the 1980’s America was “buried in the depths of a recession and a trillion bucks in debt. It took us over a decade to dig out.” It wasn’t until the less-rightist Clinton administration took office that the economy began to improve. What does this tell you about Reagan’s theory of “supply-side economics”?

The author states that the Reagan administration “turned welfare recipients into homeless people” through welfare reform initiatives. Which do you think is more harmful to society as a whole: higher taxes that help provide necessities for the poor or lower taxes and millions of homeless families with nowhere to go? Would it affect your decision to know that a few welfare recipients took advantage of the welfare system?

The author reminisces about his time in college, when Reagan slashed education budgets, forcing universities to strip their best and brightest students of their scholarships. As a result, many had to take low-wage jobs and have never reached their full potential as members of society. Were tax cuts for the rich worth denying those students a future? Was it just those students who suffered or have we all lost something?

Twenty years ago, many people believed that war with Russia (then the USSR) was a real possibility. The author argues that the Cold War isn’t over. He asks “In which direction do you think those old ICBM’s (nuclear missiles) point today?” Did Reagan give us real safety from a nuclear war or just an illusion? Based on our reading, do you think the USSR was even a real threat to the United States, or was it “manufactured”?

The federal tax code was designed to redistribute income from the most wealthy to the least fortunate. Reagan took steps to dismantle this century-old social contract and now Bush is continuing his legacy. As a result, a tiny sliver of the population now controls 80+ percent of all the wealth in our country. Discuss how this affects our prospect for democracy. What can be done?

The author notes that Reagan, like Bush, “relied on Christianist depictions of foes as “evil” and America. as “good”.” Based on the passage we discussed from “A People’s History of the United States”, do our foes have any legitimate reasons to hate and fear us (excluding the fact that they’re all just “evil”)?

The author draws parallels between Reagan and Bush, including the fact that “both appointed former generals as secretaries of state and enemies of the environment to head the Department of the Interior.” Based on what we’ve learned, what do you think the most likely motive is behind appointments like these?

Chris and I discussed, as you might imagine, the teacher’s apparent leftist bent, despite her stated support for gun rights.

Well, now that you’ve read all that, I thought you’d like to know the last and most important part:

Just thought I’d let you know I got an A minus. She wrote that it was well thought out even though she wrote almost as much as I did arguing with me! Thanks again for your help. I’m very happy with my grade and the paper.

Sincerely,
Chris

Congratulations, Chris. Glad I could help. And keep thinking for yourself. Perhaps you ought to correspond with Bryan Henderson for some ideas.

I haven’t felt this good in a long time!

Dept. of Our Collapsing Schools – Homeschooling Starts to Hurt

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This month’s Time magazine has a three-page cover article on homeschooling entitled Seceding from School. It makes a passing attempt at “fairness,” with comments and quotations from both sides of the issue, but (IMHO) it leans towards public schooling with a near declaration that parents who homeschool are being elitist and shirking their civic duty by not making their children suffer through the same educational morass that less fortunate families cannot escape.

Thomas Jefferson and the other early American crusaders for public education believed the schools would help sustain democracy by bringing everyone together to share values and learn a common history. In the little red brick schoolhouse, we would pursue both “democracy in education and education in democracy,” as Stanford historian David Tyack gracefully puts it. Home schooling forsakes all that by defining education not as the pursuit of an entire community but as the work of one family and its chosen circle. Which can be great. Despite some drawbacks, there are signs that home-schooling parents are doing a better job than public schools at teaching their kids. But as the number of kids learning at home grows, we should pause to wonder: Better at teaching them what? Home schooling may turn out better students, but does it create better citizens?

That’s the fourth paragraph of the article.

That last sentence left my mouth agape.

I think that if Jefferson saw what passed for “education” in many if not most of today’s public schools, he’d be in favor of burning the existing “system” to the ground and starting over.

My stepdaughter graduated from high school in 1997. Her knowledge of American history, civics, and even geography is essentially nil. When the movie Pearl Harbor came out, I asked her if she knew what Pearl Harbor was. No clue.

She is hardly an exception to the rule.

Perhaps we should look to what the author might mean by “better citizens,” then. Founding Father Thomas Paine (whom my daughter has never studied) said “Reason and Ignorance, the opposites of each other, influence the great bulk of mankind. If either of these can be rendered sufficiently extensive in a country, the machinery of Government goes easily on. Reason obeys itself; and Ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it.”

Connie du Toit once wrote

The other day our Carpenter’s helper heard me say something along the lines of, “it is difficult to conclude that incompetence is the reason why our public schools have deteriorated. There comes a point where you have to suspect sabotage, or a conspiracy.”

He asked me if I really meant that. I gave him the five minute explanation of John Dewey’s known affiliation with communists, his frequent essays and articles about the wonders of the Soviet education system, and his quote, “You can’t make Socialists out of individualists. Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming where everyone is interdependent.”

I then went on to tell him about how public schools changed at the turn of the last century. That there were others involved in turning Americans from free-thinking individualists to factory drones. I also added that many people probably went along with it because it seemed like a good idea, but there were certainly enough people behind the scenes, who knew that the goal posts had been moved. THAT is a conspiracy.

Yes. There does come that time when you are forced to don the tinfoil hat.

The incompetence excuse only works once. Incompetence this great is impossible to attribute to accident.

Count me in the tinfoil-hat brigade. Especially when I see peices like this Time one suggesting that it’s our civic duty to indoctrinate our children and make them better citizens.

In my opinion, the homeschooled are far more likely to be reasoning, free-thinking individualists, and that means better AMERICAN citizens – the kind willing to make decisions unpopular with the UN.

The Time article continues:

To see how home schooling threatens public schools, look at Maricopa County, Ariz. The county has approximately 7,000 home-schooled students. That’s only 1.4% of school-age kids, but it means $35 million less for the county in per-pupil funding. The state of Florida has 41,128 children (1.7%) learning at home this year, up from 10,039 in the 1991-92 school year; those kids represent a loss of nearly $130 million from school budgets in that state. Of course the schools have fewer children to teach, so it makes sense that they wouldn’t get as much money, but the districts lose much more than cash. “Home schooling is a social threat to public education,” says Chris Lubienski, who teaches at Iowa State University’s college of education. “It is taking some of the most affluent and articulate parents out of the system. These are the parents who know how to get things done with administrators.”

Get things done? Like what? They seem to be completely unable to alter curricula so that the kids get an actual education.

I’ve said before that my sister is a teacher, so I have a little bit of insight into just who has the ability to ‘get things done with administrators.’ It’s the ones who threaten lawsuits for not advancing little Johnny to the next grade, even though he’s illiterate, because not doing so will “hurt his self-esteem.” People are pulling their kids out of public schools because they can’t affect the system – it’s far too ingrained at this point. The Titanic doesn’t take course corrections any longer, even though it’s obvious the iceberg is dead ahead.

Look at this example of supposed balance in the Time story:

Despite its growing acceptance, there are nagging shortcomings to home schooling. If you spend time with home schoolers, you get a sense that some of them have missed out on whole swaths of childhood; the admirable efforts by their parents to ensure their education and safety sometimes seem to have gone too far. In 1992 psychotherapist Larry Shyers did a study while at the University of Florida in which he closely examined the behavior of 35 home schoolers and 35 public schoolers. He found that home schoolers were generally more patient and less competitive. They tended to introduce themselves to one another more; they didn’t fight as much. And the home schoolers were much more prone to exchange addresses and phone numbers. In short, they behaved like miniature adults.

Which is great, unless you believe that kids should be kids before they are adults. John McCallum, 20, of Wheaton, Ill., began learning at home after fourth grade. On the whole, he valued the experience. But if he could change anything about his teen years, he would want more interaction with people his age. “I don’t date, and that’s something I attribute to home schooling,” he says. Or consider Rachel Ahern, 21, of Grand Junction, Colo., who never set foot in a classroom until she went to Harvard at 18. As a child, she socialized with older kids and adults at church and in music classes at a nearby college. “I never once experienced peer pressure,” she says. But is that a good thing? Megan Wallace of Atlanta says if she had gone to high school, “I would have gotten into so much trouble.” One could argue that kids need to get into a certain amount of trouble to learn how to handle temptations and their consequences.”

They’re complaining that homeschooled kids aren’t little hooligans. One “could argue that kids need to get into a certain amount of trouble” but I’m not one of them. I prefer to let them mature and see the errors that they missed. I think that eighteen year-old mature adults are, by definition, good citizens, and something to strive for.

We used to get them out of the public school system, not all that long ago.

(Homework assignment: Read Francis Porretto’s most recent piece, The Assault on Accuracy for more illustration of the collapse of our schools.)

UPDATE, 3/24/04: Chris O’Donnell of O’DonnellWeb points out that this Time piece is actually a couple years old. I don’t know where I first ran across it, but I assumed it was current. All the better, as homeschooling has had a couple more years to irritate the Statists.

Dept. of Our Collapsing Schools

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Via Clayton Cramer comes this disturbing shocking irritating not unexpected story of the further deliberate distruction of our schools. A sample:

A School Engineered for Failure

The daily life of an educrat is far from uniform. Some of us have no contact with students whatsoever, and create reams of paperwork which apply to children whom we’ve never met. I, on the other hand, am one of the lucky ones who gets to interact with pupils directly for assessments, observations, or group therapy.

It is my role to academically assess, on an annual basis, all of the children at our alternative school. This is due to our kids being exempted from district wide testing based on what I call “The Spicoli Effect.” This refers to their habit of drawing rocket ships on evaluation protocols if left unsupervised in auditoriums.

One-on-one sessions with students are the most rewarding aspects of my vocation. On one occasion, last October, while timing a student completing mathematics problems, the young man suddenly threw his pencil down and rose from his chair, in response to an “all call” from the PA. He walked towards the door after announcing, “I’m going to the tug-o-war.”

I told him to wait a minute. I called up front, and discovered that the whole school, in the midst of academic instruction, was being summoned for festivities in the gym.

What occasion were we celebrating on that day in October? The fall harvest? No, it was yet another in a long line of contrived events, and this one happened to be titled “Wacky Wednesdays.” Bizarre holidays from curriculum have become the rule rather than the exception since our school hired a new principal in 2001.

Old-timers like myself dubbed her “Princess Sparkle.” It is a most appropriate nickname for our leader as it surgically captures her vapidity, lust for attention, lack of seriousness, and ever-present sense of entitlement. No one has ever witnessed her read a book or keep her mouth shut for more than two minutes.

Read the whole thing. Move the breakables first, though.

Dept. of Our Collapsing Schools

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I don’t know where the hell I was while this was going on, but it seems that Cathy Siepp’s daughter Cecile, 14, caught some flak from a teacher at her high school for daring to espouse right-wing opinions in a paper. She was denigrated and called racist by the teacher not only in the class in which Cecile presented the paper, but in other, later classes. In the past, as Cathy says in this National Review Online piece, humiliation by the teacher (and then the students) would have been the end of it.

Not so anymore.

Cecile has a blog of her own, and she blogged about the incident. Apparently Cecile has been visiting and commenting at right-wing blogs for quite a while, and one of those blogs is the libertarian-oriented Samizdata, based out of England. (Highly recommended, by the way.) Brian Mickelthwait, one of Samizdata’s contributors, started a “Support Cecile” effort, and the next day Cecile got an Instalanche from Glenn Reynolds.

As Cathy writes in her NRO piece:

(E)ven if she hadn’t received such an outpouring of support, I think Cecile’s regular stops in the blogosphere would have served as an antidote to what happened at school this past Friday. Certainly if a teacher implies a student is a racist idiot one day, and by the next some 200 smart and articulate adults have said she’s not and here’s why, that rather counteracts the original lesson plan. Now that so many teens have blogs, concerns about doctrinaire teachers may be passé. Our sons and our daughters are beyond their control.

One can but hope.

Read the whole thing.

Our Collapsing Schools Dept.:

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This news is from Canada, but it’s an idea that I think is probably a good one: Hamilton school to offer single-sex classrooms

Learning improves when boys, girls are separated, studies say

An Ontario school is giving parents an option rarely offered in the public school system — all-girl and all-boy classes.

Starting in the fall, parents of Grades 7 and Grade 8 students at Cecil B. Stirling School in Hamilton will have the choice of keeping their children in a co-ed classroom or moving them into single-sex classes, which have traditionally been limited to private schools.

The program taps a growing body of research that suggests boys and girls learn differently and benefit from being separated, particularly in such key subjects as mathematics, reading and writing.

Teachers used to worry about girls falling behind in science and math but the concern has now switched to boys.

There’s more, go read the rest.

I think that there’s a lot wrong in the school systems here that single-sex classrooms aren’t going to affect, but any effort to actually improve things is welcome. I’ve become convinced that the destruction wrought on our schools cannot have been an accident – at least not completely.

“Guns offer false security” Says a Grad Student

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AlphaPatriot sent me this USAToday op-ed by Kimberly Shearer Palmer, hoping, I suspect, that I’d fisk it.

Who am I to let a reader down?

Let’s begin:

Before I held a revolver, I thought only police officers and psychopaths shot guns. Guns seemed uncontrollable objects that could inflict death at any moment; I preferred to avoid them.

Ooh! “police officers and psychopaths!” I ought to drag out the Freud quote.

Then I learned how to shoot. My friends arranged a trip to a shooting range outside Chicago. Our instructor, a former police officer, taught us how to stand and point, hunching our shoulders for accuracy. We shot at the target silhouettes’ heart and lungs before aiming for its head. In real life, our instructor explained, our attackers might wear bulletproof vests.

One of my absolute favorite quotes belongs to blogger and author Teresa Nielsen Hayden: “Basically, I figure guns are like gays: They seem a lot more sinister and threatening until you get to know a few; and once you have one in the house, you can get downright defensive about them.” Seems she discovered the truth of that.

I was thrilled with my new power. A technological advantage now would let me fight the bad guys, even ones bigger and stronger that I am — or so I thought. Guns give women equal killing ability, but they also draw us into the dangerous illusion that owning one makes us safe.

Then her instructor did a piss-poor job of explaining what a gun can and cannot do. Owning a gun doesn’t make you safe. NOTHING makes you “SAFE.”

Owning a fire-extinguisher doesn’t make you safe from fire, either. It simply provides you a tool in the event that one occurs. Just as, in the event of a fire, an extinguisher provides you the means to protect yourself, your loved ones, and your property until the fire department arrives, a firearm provides you the means to protect yourself, your loved ones and your property in the event of a crime until the police can arrive. But you have to have more than that. You need to know what the tool can do and cannot do – be it a gun or a fire extinguisher. You have to have it available – keeping it locked up and/or empty or simply where you cannot reach it in an emergency renders it useless. You have to know that you will be able to use it if necessary – if you don’t believe you can, having it won’t do you any good.

There’s more to owning a gun for self-defense than simply purchasing it.

More women are using guns. The number of National Rifle Association Women on Target programs — shooting clinics for women only — more than doubled between 2001 and 2002, says Stephanie Henson, manager of the NRA’s women’s programs. Last year, clinics were held in 38 states. Henson says women’s interest is so strong that the NRA recently launched Woman’s Outlook, its first magazine aimed just at women.

Self-defense is the reason the overwhelming majority of Women & Guns’ readers are interested in using guns, says Peggy Tartaro, the magazine’s executive editor.

Then I hope like hell they’re getting better training than Ms. Palmer got.

But gun popularity among women is based on two misconceptions. First, gun advocates often call guns the great equalizer between men and women. In reality, according to a new study by the University of California at Davis, women who own handguns are more than twice as likely to be murdered with a firearm by their partners than those who do not. While this may be partly explained by the fact that women who fear an attack are more apt to buy a gun, the study shows guns often fail to help women protect themselves.

Perhaps because they don’t understand, as Ms. Palmer does not understand, what having a gun for self-defense requires? Where before she seemed to believe that guns were some kind of magic talisman OF evil, now she seems to believe that they are some kind of magic talisman to WARD OFF evil. They are neither.

“Having a gun gives women a false sense of security,” says Naomi Seligman, communications director of the Violence Policy Center, a Washington non-profit that urges stricter gun control. “Guns can be taken away, and women can be killed by their own guns.”

And Naomi Seligman is an unbiased source of fact, I suppose? How often are “guns taken away” from someone? Approximately 1% of the time. If you have a gun and are prepared to use it, no one’s going to take it from you.

The second misconception is that guns are the only solution to help otherwise “weak” women protect themselves. In fact, a wide range of self-defense options, from chemical sprays to street fighting, gives women the tools to fight back.

Except according to the National Criminal Justice Reference Service “(W)hile 33 percent of all surviving robbery victims were injured, only 25 percent of those who offered no resistance and 17 percent of those who defended themselves with guns were injured. For surviving assault victims, the corresponding injury rates were, respectively, 30 percent, 27 percent, and 12 percent.” Defending yourself with a gun provides the best chance of escaping injury yourself. A 110 pound woman against a 180 pound man means, even if she gets away, she’s probably going to be injured.

A popular new form of self-defense training simulates attacks on the street and in the bedroom by male “attackers” wearing protective padding. This realistic-training approach includes verbal and psychological elements that prepare women for real-life situations. Fighting off a man in a simulated attack is much more likely to resemble a real incident than shooting at a target-range silhouette.

I wholeheartedly agree. If you’re going to carry a gun for self-protection, then training for real-life situations is an excellent idea. But that training should not denegrate the advantage that having a gun provides. Consider, if you are about to be assaulted; robbed or carjacked, and your training has prepared you, which is more likely to put off your attacker: a can of pepper spray, or a .38 revolver aimed at his abdomen? And what if he has a firearm? Which is more likely to deter him then?

Self-defense classes also offer a significant psychological benefit. After taking self-defense courses with simulated attacks at The Empower Program Inc., a Washington non-profit, my younger sister and I felt more confident walking down the street. We were aware that at any time, anywhere, we knew how to fight back. The course also taught us how to avoid violent situations and how to de-escalate encounters before they become deadly. Like Jennifer Lopez’s character in the 2002 movie Enough, in which she learns to fight to protect herself and her daughter against her abusive husband, we had reclaimed our right to feel safe while depending only on our own bodies.

More magical thinking. She felt more confident. Yahoo to Jennifer Lopez, but I’d like to remind you that that was a movie. However, we have actual stories like this one where a woman awoke with a man on top of her. She took HIS gun and killed him with it. “In this case, the victim made the decision to struggle and fight back…She made the decision that she was going to survive this incident.”

It’s about mental attitude. A gun is just part of that. More stories:

In December, 2002 in Tucson AZ, Martha Lynn Chaney shot her abusive boyfriend when he tried to force his way into her home. (Story no longer available online)

In March, 2002 in Colville WA, 71 year-old Bethan Scutchfield, an invalid woman, shot and killed a 28 year old man who was physically assaulting her. The man was her granddaughter’s ex-boyfriend who was violating a restraining order.

December 2001, A LaCenter OR woman, Cheryl Swenson, shot her abusive husband when he broke down a bedroom door in order to continue beating her.

The June 11 issue of the Indiana StarPress reports that Charlotte Johnson shot and wounded her ex-boyfriend in self-defense.

WZZM news in Grand Rapids, MI reports that Robin Trumbull used a handgun to defend herself from an attacker.

The March 23 edition of the Macomb Daily online edition reports that a 40 year old woman was the victim of an attempted robbery, but she told the robber: “If you’re going to shoot me then do it, ’cause I’m definitely going to kill you,” when she pulled her 9mm handgun on him. He ran.

Considering guns as women’s only shot at self-defense is like eating fat-free cookies to ward off obesity; they can make the situation even worse. Instead of buying a gun, I’m sticking to basic street smarts that will always be there when I need them most.

Try a combination, Ms. Palmer. “Street smarts” and a gun will protect you better than “street smarts” without one. But a gun without “street smarts” is still better than having neither, so long as you’re willing to defend yourself.