THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

LIBERALS ALWAYS PORTRAY AVERAGE AMERICANS AS PANICKY COWARDS | 2002-08-03

As good liberals, history professors are always trying to prove that there were no heroes at the Alamo. Liberals always try to prove that Americans are evil exploiters and cowards, especially those who fought for Politically Incorrect causes like taking Texas from Mexico.

In academia and on the East Coast the doctrine is that people should never "take the law into their own hands." All guns should be in the hands of the police. They say that any American who has a gun will use it for crime and that Americans are too cowardly to defend themselves, so the police have to do it.

Some time ago, the media were all reporting that if a home had a gun in it, a burglar was exactly FORTY-THREE TIMES more likely to take it away from the cowardly, panic-stricken householder and use it AGAINST HIM than the householder was to protect himself with it.

This "fact" reigned supreme for months. Then career police officers began to write newspapers saying that, in twenty-five year careers on the police force, they had never seen this happen once, and they had seen a lot of robberies and burglaries thwarted by armed citizens.

Like all gun control "facts," this one was discredited and everybody agreed to forget it had ever been said, especially respectable conservatives. But the next time the media come up with another "fact" like this, everybody will report it respectfully.

I heard National Public Radio announce that since Kennesaw, Georgia, began to require every citizen to be armed, the crime rate has shot up. Actually, it turns out that from the time Kennesaw started that requirement to the time NPR made that report, not one single crime had been committed there!

Probably no crime has been committed there since. So NPR ws as wrong as you can get.

NPR made no correction and no conservative ever asked for one.