My grandmother’s grandmother, Martha Heard, was by all accounts a formidable woman. During the lawless period after the Civil War, a gang of rowdies turned up at Grandma Heard’s door. Knowing that her husband was away on business, they’d decided to help themselves to a store of good tobacco he was known to keep. “Miz Heard,” they shouted, “we want to try some of your husband’s tobacco, you bring it out here or we’ll have to come get it.” Grandma told her children to hide, then took a shotgun from its place by the front door and stepped out on the porch to confront the men. Aiming the shotgun at the loudmouth leader, she told them to leave. He scoffed and said, “there’s just one of you and one gun, you can’t shoot us all.” To which she replied, “That may be, but it’s you I’m aiming at.” Her resolution, and the big shotgun won the day. “Let’s go somewhere else, boys,” said the leader. “I know her and she’ll do it.”
I’ve been thinking a lot about Grandma Heard lately, as I read more and more articles chronicling the precipitous decline in police response times. In Portland, Oregon, where support for the police tanked at the height of the “defund the police” movement, overall response times more than doubled between 2016 and 2022, from an average of 8.1 minutes to an average of 16.4. Since 2022, and despite belated efforts to hire more officers, response times in Portland remained stagnant, creating what some described as a “public safety crisis.” The situation in Oakland, California has been recently described as “abysmal,” with response times to high-priority violent crimes increased by more than 50 percent between 2018 and 2022, with no improvement in sight.
Gun control has long ceased to be a meaningful response to the horrible murder rates in our big cities.
It’s not just a problem in these notoriously dysfunctional cities, either. The same trend has been documented across the United States in 15 major cities. Unsurprisingly, the sharp drops in police staffing have contributed mightily to this trend; predictably, when leftist city administrations stigmatize the whole business of policing, good officers leave in record numbers, and attracting new recruits becomes much harder. It’s always been hard to be a police officer, even in times and places where community support exists. It has become much harder over the last several decades as the progressives have rewritten the urban narrative, and particularly so since the George Floyd protests and the effective decriminalization of looting. Who, in these times, would want to take on the dirty and dangerous work of policing? (READ MORE from James H. McGee: There Is No ‘Moral Equivalence’ Now)
The solution to the problem of rebuilding our police organizations should be obvious. Greater funding, to be sure, but above all, what’s needed is a profound cultural change, one in which public safety returns to center stage and its guardians are respected once again. But despite the fact that even some notoriously progressive cities have started to understand the need for more police, turning the culture around will take time — a great deal of time, particularly when the cultural headwinds remain strong. As I observed in a previous American Spectator article about the collapse of public order in France, we can’t simply wait for cultural change; we have to find practical solutions in the here and now.
What, then, are the “in the meantime” solutions to the problem of police response times? Our major cities now find themselves in a situation that has always afflicted rural communities. Chief among these was response time, an immense challenge when a handful of officers must cover a huge county. It was in this context that I first heard the title phrase of this article, uttered by a sheriff who’d done his utmost to shorten response times, in a moment when the sheer futility had been made heartbreakingly clear.
One afternoon his despatcher received a 911 call from an elderly farm couple, the wife on the phone as a young, muscular hired hand was in the process of beating her husband senseless in an angry dispute over wages. The young man then knocked the phone away, and proceeded to beat the woman, while the dispatcher listened helplessly to her cries and then to her silence.
The responding deputies arrived to find the couple dead, their bodies so sickeningly mishandled that both responders subsequently needed counseling, and one left law enforcement altogether. The arrest and murder conviction of the hired hand provided only the coldest of comforts for the little community. Telling me the tale, the sheriff concluded by confessing despair at his inability to make a difference in the moment, and then remarked “if only she’d had a gun instead of a phone.”
We hear a lot these days about concealed carry, and open carry, and Supreme Court decisions affirming our Second Amendment rights. And yet, a kind of mindless gun control fanaticism still holds sway among progressive elites. Governor Gavin Newsom recently signed into law a radical package of gun control measures, even as some California law enforcement officials decry the new laws as meaningless virtue signaling, measures that target law-abiding gun owners — for example, the millions who own AR-15-style rifles — while having minimal impact on the criminal problem it purports to solve. (READ MORE from James H. McGee: Special Kind of Heroism: WWII ‘Last Survivor’ Leaves Us)
Yet Newsom has doubled down, and is now calling for a 28th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, one that would effectively gut many Second Amendment rights. Newsom dresses up his proposal as representing only modest restrictions, compatible with the Second Amendment, but the devil is in one particular detail. In addition to specific restrictions, it also contains a provision affirming that Congress, states, and local governments can enact additional “common sense” gun safety regulations. This creates a loophole large enough to drive through a truckload of harassment for responsible gun owners.
There’s no realistic solution that interposes a police officer between a law-abiding citizen and a miscreant bent on doing them harm.
Harassment such as that recently attempted by New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham. Back on September 8th, she initiated a largely pointless — and patently unconstitutional — public health order limiting the right to carry firearms, yielding ground only under the pressure of a court order. Even before the temporary court order, her proposal had drawn bipartisan backlash. Raul Torrez, New Mexico’s Attorney General and a fellow Democrat, refused to back Lujan Grisham’s measure, calling it “unconstitutional.” The court order has been extended, allowing for much further debate, including examination of the revisions limiting the application of Lujan Grisham’s order to parks and playgrounds in Albuquerque. One suspects that this ridiculous exercise in progressive posturing may ultimately find its way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
One might also suspect that this will also happen following a similarly inane undertaking in Illinois. In January of this year, Illinois’s radical progressive governor, J.B. Pritzker, signed into law a comprehensive ban on so-called “assault-type” weapons, including both a prohibition on future sales and required registration of current owners of such weapons. On August 14, the Illinois State Supreme Court upheld the law, but multiple challenges are now working their way through the lower Federal courts. In the meantime, however, heretofore law-abiding Illinois gun owners face harassment from state authorities.
The performative absurdity of these measures depends upon the fantasy, promoted by Hollywood and the mainstream media, that “assault rifles” account for the majority of firearms-related homicides. An analysis of FBI statistics indicates that all rifles, including “assault rifles,” accounted for only 2.6 percent of the total number of homicides for 2019, the most recent year for comprehensive statistics. Homicides with knives accounted for 10.6 percent, and even “hands, fists, and feet” accounted for more murders (4.3 percent) than rifles, including the demonized “assault rifles.” As is true of so many areas of our public life today, progressive culture warriors pursue actions designed to punish the “deplorables,” rather than providing any kind of measurable public good. (READ MORE: Are Assault Rifles Strictly Weapons of War?)
And so it goes. In spite of a nationwide trend in favor of increased firearms ownerships, as demonstrated by year upon year of record firearms sales, the left seems determined to pursue its assault on responsible gun ownership. In spite of very explicit instruction from the U.S. Supreme Court in the Bruen case, among other rulings, progressive politicians like Newsom, Lujan Grisham, and Pritzker seize every opportunity to subvert the Second Amendment. Ironically, the only gun owner whose rights the progressive media seem disposed to protect is a certain Hunter Biden, and anyone who has ever filled out the current required paperwork for purchase or transfer of a firearm will understand just how lame his legal excuses really are.
Americans in recent years have increasingly come to understand the wisdom of the old saying, “God created man, but Colonel Samuel Colt made men equal.” This understanding has been reflected the passage in many states of laws enabling self-defense. Despite the moaning of the Newsoms and Pritzkers, in many instances the very best home defense weapon is the progressive’s much-hated AR-15, which, as anyone who has ever fired one knows, is easy to handle and to shoot, even for the old or the weak. I suspect that, had it been available in the late 1860s, Grandma Heard would have kept one by the front door instead of the shotgun.
By all means, we should enact and enforce laws designed to keep firearms away from criminals and to punish severely those who use a firearm in the commission of a crime. But we should disabuse ourselves, once and for all, of the notion that depriving law abiding citizens of the right to defend themselves is good public policy. Gun control has long ceased to be a meaningful response to the horrible murder rates in our big cities. It is instead nothing more than a progressive cultural totem and an excuse to do nothing about the drug and gang problems that are at the heart of the current murder epidemic. Addressing these problems raises inconvenient questions for our Soros-funded DAs and the social justice warriors who elect them to office, who sometimes seem bent on enabling criminality rather than ending it. If they don’t want effective policing, and they don’t want to allow their fellow citizens the means to defend themselves, then one is left to conclude that they simply wish we were all dead — certainly, it often seems that way.
I lost touch with my sheriff friend many years ago, but I’ve never forgotten his story of the elderly couple, and his lament about response times. Even if we could wave a magic wand and repair the damage wrought by “defund the police,” there’s no realistic solution that interposes a police officer between a law-abiding citizen and a miscreant bent on doing them harm. Instead, with the sheriff, I wish she’d had a gun in hand instead of a phone, a pistol, or perhaps one of the many AR-15 clones.
Or maybe even Grandma Heard’s double-barreled shotgun.
James H. McGee retired in 2018 after nearly four decades as a national security and counter-terrorism professional, working primarily in the nuclear security field. Since retiring he’s begun as second career as a thriller writer. His 2022 novel, Letter of Reprisal, tells the tale of a desperate mission to destroy a Chinese bioweapon facility hidden in the heart of the central African conflict region. You can find it on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback editions, and on Kindle Unlimited.
