If you’re a victim of an aggressive coyote, you’ve only yourself to blame

By Seth Richardson
Coyotes are smart. Very smart. And they appear to be winning the evolutionary race in Metro Denver and in other big cities, where they have adapted quite nicely to urban living. The losers are over-bred, pampered, city-dwelling dogs and cats, and urban humans appear to be next on the menu. Their eyesight is excellent, their hearing remarkable, and their olfactory abilities outstanding. They are clever pack hunters with well-established tactical plans. And those plans now include humans and urban pets. I’m fine with that. They deserve their victory, if they can seize it, because urban humans and their pets have given up their right to evolutionary survival by giving up their ability to defend themselves against predators, both animal and human.

I can’t say I blame the coyotes, because in this case, it seems as if there is a free lunch, and it’s a classic case of knee-jerk urbanites being hoist on their own petard. Back in 1996 mostly-urban bunny-hugging “animal rights” sympathizers voted to pass a trapping ban in Colorado. Up until then, coyotes were kept reasonably under control, wary, human-averse and primarily rural by a significant trapping and hunting industry. Any rancher will tell you that rural coyotes don’t hang around when a human shows up. They beat it for cover as fast as they can because they’ve learned, over generations, that humans are dangerous top-of-the-food-chain predators that can kill coyotes from a long way off.

It’s actually kind of amusing to see all the hysteria and clamor for government to “do something” about urban coyotes when it’s the urban citizens who tied the hands of government and private individuals in the first place. These urban voters are beginning to receive in full measure that which they demanded more than a decade ago. Such is the law of unintended consequences.

But, lest I be accused of too much insensitivity to the plight of urbanites, I do have some suggestions. Here’s the primary one: when faced with an aggressive, and possibly rabid urban coyote or coyote pack, do what we out here in the country do: kill them.

“How do we do this” you ask? Simple. Get a gun, and when attacked, shoot. “But” you declaim, “the police tell me I can’t discharge a firearm in the city limits without breaking the law!” Poppycock, I reply. Ignore what the police tell you, they’re just trying to make their own jobs easier, not provide you with protection or accurate legal advice.

The simple legal truth (don’t believe me, go look it up) is that so long as you have a reasonable belief that you are in danger, you are permitted to shoot an animal in self-defense, anywhere in the state. I don’t know about you, but I certainly view an attack by a coyote to be placing me in danger, in no small part because it’s likely that the animal is rabid. And if it’s more than one, why, being attacked by a pack of vicious, aggressive coyotes is certainly a danger, and I doubt any reasonable jury would disagree.

Now, you do have to be quite careful when discharging a firearm in the city, because you ARE responsible for every bullet and where it ends up, and you’ll get no sympathy from me if you use your gun carelessly and hurt others or damage private property, so don’t think I’m calling for mindless gun-play in the parks, alleys and trails, I’m not.

In order to reduce the chances of stray bullets causing harm, I have a specific recommendation for those of you who decide that being a victim of an aggressive coyote is not something you care to allow: Buy a Taurus Judge pistol chambered in .45 Colt/ .410 shotshell. MSRP $569.00, available at a fine gun store near you.

This unique pistol is dual-chambered so that it can fire both a standard pistol round for self-defense against humans and large animals, and the .410 shotshell, which is effective at short range against humans and smaller animals, like coyotes. It’s a compromise firearm for sure, but loaded with two rounds of .410 birdshot and three rounds of .45 Colt pistol ammunition, it provides deterrence and protection against human attack while also allowing the user to defend against aggressive animals without so much worry about stray bullets causing harm. The harmful range of bird-shot from the pistol is probably less than 25 yards.

It’s impossible that even the most aggressive coyote is going to stick around after being peppered with birdshot. The spread pattern of the shot at 7 yards is well over six feet, which means that precise aiming is not necessary to get deterrent hits on the animal. Let it get within 4 yards or so and let him have it.

Oh, and make sure that if you shoot to protect your dog, you tell the jury (not the cops, remember your right to remain silent!) that you thought the animal was attacking YOU, because unfortunately, you’re not allowed to discharge a firearm to protect your pet in a city. Do remember the spread, and try not to shoot your dog too!

Of course, don’t forget to go to your local Sheriff and get your concealed handgun permit first. You wouldn’t want to get knicked for a concealed weapon violation while doing the right thing for society. For the best concealed handgun class I know of in the Denver Metro area, contact Rich Wyatt at Gunsmoke, 9690 West 44th Ave. Wheat Ridge, Colorado 80033, (303) 456-4545. He’s worth the trip north for Colorado Springs residents.

©2009 Altnews

Anti-gun propaganda gets people killed

By Seth Richardson

Amber Cremeens was stalked and murdered by her ex-boyfriend, Tyler James Martin on February 18th in Wheat Ridge. Martin killed himself in Chicago on Friday, saving the taxpayers the cost of a trial and incarceration.

If Amber had been carrying a gun, and had learned how to use it, she might be alive today.

It’s just that simple.

Rocky Mountain News reporter Lisa Ryckman evidently disagrees. She wrote in the February 19th edition, “Amy Miller, the coalition’s [the Colorado Coalition Against Domestic Violence] public policy director, said there’s a misperception that guns in the home are a good means of self-protection for women against domestic violence or sexual assault.” She goes on to say, “A study by the American Journal of Public Health that supposedly found that women whose abusers had access to guns were nearly eight times more likely to be killed.”

But Cremeens and Martin broke up in June, and she knew she was being harassed and stalked. Perhaps she believed people like Ryckman and Miller and felt that getting a gun wouldn’t help protect her. She was wrong. So are Ryckman and Miller, and so is the American Journal of Public Health.

The important question is not whether the abuser has access to a gun, but whether the victim does. In cases like this, when a woman knows she’s being stalked, her first order of business should be to go to the Sheriff’s department, file a report, and demand an emergency concealed handgun permit. Her next stop should be the gun store, followed by professional defensive firearms training. And if the Sheriff turns her down for an emergency permit, she should carry her handgun anyway, till her regular permit arrives. The rule is: “It’s better to be tried by twelve than carried by six.”

Ladies, it’s up to you to protect your own lives. The police won’t be there to save you, so assume that you’re all you’ve got, and prepare yourself to provide for you own defense. And if it comes to it, don’t hesitate to protect yourself. We like having you around.

© 2009 Altnews

Open warfare on the Mexican border puts U.S. citizens at risk

By Seth Richardson

The Gazette suggests that with the advent of the new Obama administration, it’s now time to revisit the need for the border fence along the U.S.-Mexican border. Agreed. We don’t need a border fence, we need at least two of them, parallel to each other and some distance apart, patrolled and protected by U.S. military forces with rules of engagement ordering them to fire upon anyone entering this country under arms, or anyone firing upon the United States from Mexico, along with orders to arrest and detain anyone else. It works in Korea, and it can work here.

In Mexican border towns like Juarez, Nogales, and Tijuana, drug-related gunplay is commonplace and more than 6000 people, including hundreds of Mexican police officers have been murdered in ongoing drug-induced warfare. And that violence has been spilling over into the United States for more than a decade. WorldNetDaily reported on February 20th that at least two incursions of armed soldiers in Mexican military uniforms had occurred in Hudspeth County, about 50 miles east of El Paso, in recent weeks. In one incident, soldiers were seen driving Mexican army HMMWVs towing thousands of pounds of marijuana across the border near Neely’s Crossing. These HMMWVs were armed with heavy machine guns, and the sheriff’s deputies who witness the incursion wisely retreated.

This is hardly the first time incursions by Mexican military units have been reported. The Washington Times reports that there have been more than 200 armed incursions by Mexican military personnel since 1996. Back in 2002, Soldier of Fortune magazine reported that armed Mexican military personnel fired on a U.S. Border Patrol agent with a .50 caliber heavy machine gun, piercing the agent’s vehicle as he sped away. Again in January 2007, Mexican army soldiers in a camouflaged HMMWV fired a .50 caliber machine gun on Texas law-enforcement officers, again in Hudspeth County. In this incident, Hudspeth County deputies were pursuing three sport utility vehicles back towards Mexico and were fired upon as the chase neared the Rio Grande. One vehicle was abandoned in the U.S. and another got stuck in the Rio Grande and was burned by the soldiers after they unloaded it. Deputies found 1,400 pounds of drugs in the abandoned SUV. There are an alarming number of other, similar reports.

El Paso, Texas itself is under siege, with hundreds of drug-related cross-border murders, and Tucson, Arizona is dealing with a rash of violent drug-related home invasions. This increase in violence by drug-cartel soldiers and enforcers is becoming commonplace all along our border with Mexico.

Civilian law enforcement resources in U.S. border cities are simply overwhelmed and under-armed to cope with an influx of narco-terrorists armed with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades and other military explosives. In a February, 2009 policy analysis from the Cato institute, author Ted Galen Carpenter reports that the cartel’s enforcers, the Zetas, who are highly-trained military anti-terrorist soldiers who defected to become heavily-armed terrorist insurgents, have stockpiled enormous amounts of military weaponry inside the U.S., to be used to protect drug shipments and punish those who don’t pay up or who give information to law enforcement. They also have orders to kill U.S. law enforcement officers who interfere.

Last week protesters, thought to be shills for the drug cartels, blocked border crossings in Ciudad Juarez, Nuevo Laredo and Reynosa in protest of Mexican president Felipe Calderon’s deployment of 40,000 Mexican soldiers along the border in an attempt to destroy the drug cartels. But when the Mexican military is assisting the drug runners, and uniformed Mexican soldiers are firing on U.S. citizens and law-enforcement, they need to be taken down, using whatever force is required.

What we have on our border is a real, old-fashioned guns, bombs and bayonets war, and when war comes to our borders, the appropriate response is to deploy our military. That’s what they are there for, after all. Before they are sent overseas, their primary duty is to protect U.S. soil and its citizens against military-grade attacks by anyone.

It’s time for Congress to declare war on Mexican drug cartels and anyone else, including renegade Mexican military units, who invade our borders. President Obama should immediately send military troops to the border to prevent incursions by these well-armed terrorists. This isn’t about some abstract connection to global terrorism, these are attacks on U.S. soil and U.S. sovereignty that cannot be allowed to continue.

For the present, deploying the military along our border will begin to cut down on and violence and incursions from Mexico. This is the first step in sealing the border. The next step is to complete the border fence, and then build another one about 200 yards inside that one, and create a sterile free-fire zone between the fences. This will require the eminent domain seizure of lands from private owners to create a border zone that can be protected using military munitions and troops. This is unfortunate, but it’s a necessity and government is fully authorized to seize such property upon the payment of just compensation. It should have been done decades ago, and now we have no choice.

This is not a situation that lightly-armed Border Patrol agents and local law enforcement are suited or trained for. This calls for deployment of the regular army, including Special Forces teams, and all of the associated equipment we have at our disposal to detect and destroy armed intruders. We should be deploying troops, armor, aircraft, missile-armed Predator drones, surveillance equipment and artillery with instructions to destroy anyone crossing the border under arms, no questions asked.

President Calderon of Mexico has deployed 40,000 soldiers along the border with only limited effect, and it’s high time we secured our side of the border, which will assist him in tracking and destroying armed insurgents. Calderon has a real problem keeping his military from being corrupted by the vast sums of money and very real threats by the cartels to kill the families of anyone who oppose them. Deploying troops was his only answer to the pervasive corruption of the Mexican police in the area. The U.S. military, however, does not face the same sort of corruption and intimidation that Mexican authorities do.

The next step is to begin cross-border operations using Special Forces, Predators and military aircraft to search out and destroy the operating bases of the drug cartels along with their transportation infrastructure. We can destroy armed insurgents and their bases of operation using remote sensing and stand-off weapons, as we do in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and we should do so here. But we must be careful. The danger of working too closely with the Mexican government is that it is so pervasively corrupt. If we share sensitive operational intelligence with the Mexican government, it will certainly be leaked to the drug cartels, and American soldiers will die.

It’s time for a declaration of war, not upon Mexico, but upon the criminal, terrorist drug cartels, their military arm, the Zetas, and their supporters, and it’s time for us to destroy them, root and branch, without mercy. While it is true that demand for drugs in the U.S. drives the drug trade, this is wrongfully seen as a justification for not doing what is necessary to secure our borders against armed incursions and violence. This isn’t about drugs, it’s about open warfare on our border. The U.S. has spent more than 5 billion dollars on anti-drug efforts in South America in the last nine years, and 400 million in assistance was granted to Mexico in June, 2008 under what is called the “Merida Initiative.” All this money hasn’t done much to impede the flow of drugs. Let’s divert it to defending our border instead. If we cannot stop the flow of drugs out of South America, we can at least stop violent armed incursions and protect citizens of the border regions against narco-terrorist violence.

If the Mexican government objects, well, let it. It’s had plenty of opportunity to do the job itself, but it is so notoriously corrupt and ineffective that the U.S. need no longer consult with it before taking unilateral action to defend its borders. Mexico has a vested interest in not fighting drug importation to the U.S., because all of the billions of drug dollars that flow south support the moribund Mexican economy, and in spite of President Calderon’s protestations, the U.S. has plenty of justification for unilateral action.

Certainly Mexicans will object to U.S. military action, but they’ve had their chance and muffed it, and now it’s time for us to stand up and defend our nation. We demand that our borders be protected and respected, and we demand that our new President do whatever is necessary to ensure the safety and security of our citizens from this clear and present danger.

© 2009 Altnews

Greek Goddess no threat to the Republic

By Seth Richardson

Atheists and Secularists can calm down, the celebration planned in Manitou Springs honoring the Greek goddess Hebe, who’s been surveying her domain from atop the town clock for 118 years now, won’t threaten the Republic with an unlawful establishment of state religion after all.

After Gazette reporter Andrea Brown wrote about a case of mistaken idolatry in the February 7th edition, questions were raised about whether a planned “Celebration of Hebe” being sponsored by Historic Manitou Springs, the local historical society, would constitute a First Amendment violation of the separation of church and state.

It seems that for all these years Hebe has been standing in the shadow of her more famous cousin, Hygeia. Historian Deborah Harrison discovered that the goddess who graces the town clock is actually Hebe, the daughter of Zeus, and the goddess of eternal youth.

Historic Manitou Springs has ordered 15 statues of Hebe that will be painted by local artists for a celebration in May, and then sold to benefit the historical society.

When the story hit the papers, some comments were heard about potential violations of the “wall of separation” between church and state. Hebe is after all a Greek goddess, and as such, a state-sponsored or funded celebration in her honor could be viewed as a religious event.

This is not the only time that Hebe has been dissed by government. Back in 2005, the city of Roseburg, Oregon had it’s own little Hebe-teapot tempest going. It seems that back in 1908, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the ’95 Mental Culture Club erected a fountain in Roseburg dedicated to temperance, and topped it with a statue of Hebe.

According to a 2005 story by reporter John Sowell in Roseburg’s The News Review, the Douglas County Museum of History & Natural History had planned an exhibit of a Hebe statue as part of a display about the historic fountain during Women’s History Month. A group of Roseburg residents had been gathering funds and were hoping to reconstruct the fountain and statue, which was destroyed in 1912. The Douglas County Commissioners banned the museum exhibit, saying “this issue is very divisive in our county.”

It seems as though critics thought that Hebe was an anti-Christian icon, claiming it was associated with paganism and Wicca, a claim denied by both Wiccans and Pagans.

But not to worry, the Celebration of Hebe in Manitou Springs is a privately funded event by Historic Manitou Springs, which is not a government agency, so there’s no First Amendment implications.

People should feel free to attend the celebration, which Deborah Harrison describes as “a celebration of our statue, not worship.” Go ahead and bid on a Hebe statute and express your own freedom of religion and right to freedom of assembly, and help out a very worthy cause in the process. Oh, and you might want to grab a sip of water at the town fountain, just in case it has been blessed by Hebe and actually is the fountain of youth. You just never know.

© 2009 Altnews