Editorial Director’s Note:

Get ready for a fresh dose of high-powered (and maybe rifle-scoped) controversy... Taipan Publishing Group’s own freedom-loving contributor-at-large Jim Amrhein is back, and today he has a question: Got Guns?

As a long-time Nevadan, your humble editorial director is embarrassed to admit he (still) doesn’t own a firearm, having let the item languish on his to-do list for many years. But that may soon change... How about you? Do Jim’s strong words resonate? Send your cheers (or jeers) here and I’ll pass ‘em along: justice@taipandaily.com

A Kind Word and a Gun (Part One)

By Jim Amrhein, Contributing Editor, Taipan Daily

Many believe that freedom isn’t “free”... that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance, as Thomas Jefferson once opined. Jim Amrhein agrees – and today he makes the case as to why all free men (and women) should own guns.

Now that I’ve settled comfortably into the rotation as a regular contributing editor to Taipan Daily, it’s time to take the gloves off. But before I do that, I’d like to thank all those who’ve written in response to my four articles in this venue thus far in 2009…

Your voluminous feedback has meant a lot to me, whatever its tenor. Just as I have over the past six years of regular contributions to the freedom and free markets debate in other forums, I read and carefully consider all reactions from Taipan Daily readers — be they affirmations, condemnations, kudos or criticisms.

That’s why today, I want to start off by firing a shot back at one particular species of critics that so often fire at me from all points on the spectrum. I’m talking about that handful or so who continually write in with variations on this theme:

“I subscribe to Taipan Daily for investing advice, not for political rhetoric. Keep your opinions to yourself, or I’m canceling my subscription...”

Let me get this straight: You would cancel your subscription to a FREE source of proven contrarian investment intelligence to avoid spending 10 minutes a month pondering the erosion of liberty, the bastardization of the Constitution, the institutional racketeering and extortion perpetrated by the RepubliCrats on The Hill, the corruption of the “watchdog” media, and other major issues confronting us as Americans — or as members of the human race?

If you're one of these people, don't read this e-mail... I beg you.

But there’s something you just don’t get. Wealth — not the wealth of a state, but the individual, personal kind you’re so hungry to receive tips on FOR NOTHING in this forum — only flourishes where liberty flourishes. History has proved this time and again.

And where does liberty flourish? Where government stands aside and allows it room to grow, and gives it the proper nourishment. Like what used to happen in a place called America. Think about it this way...

Without the systemic liberty that allows companies and entrepreneurs to innovate, free of arbitrary regulation and punitive taxation, there are no hot new investments to ride to wealth.

Without the individual liberty that allows free consumers to choose how they live without the Nanny State making them buy this kind of car and eat that kind of food and carry this much insurance and use that type of light bulb, there’s no free market to innovate in.

But most importantly, without the liberty that we all have to voice our opinions with our dollars, there is no demand for all the things that give us the ability to show our support for, or opposition to, the modern Ameri-comedy. Things like burgers for those for whom cholesterol is just a number, and tofu for those who really want to die young...

Big trucks and Al Gore-sized mansions for those who scoff at the global warming hype, and electric roller-skate-cars and pre-fab mud huts for those who buy into it...

Harley-Davidson Road Kings for those who want to have enough horsepower to tote a passenger and a POW/MIA flag off their backseat at highway speed, and little imported Italian scooters for those who need only putt-putt their own metrosexual selves between a city flat and the local coffee shop...

To my handout-happy critics, here’s the bottom line: I would argue that the topics I write about in this forum — and have written about for years in other venues — have as much of an impact on your money and bottom line as the tips, market analysis and economic projections you’re getting the other 28 days a month. You should worry less about the value of what you’re getting free, and worry more about the value of being free.

That having been said, here’s some cool irony for you: Today, I’m actually caving to the critics I’ve just given both barrels to. That’s right — instead of reflections, warnings and genius commentary about freedom and other such apparently worthless dreck, I’m actually going to offer you readers some real, actionable and important investment advice. Here it is...

Buy a gun. Now.

“One man with a gun can control 100 without one.”

– V.I. Lenin

Everywhere you look, the mainstream media is screaming about guns.

A Wall Street Journal headline from April 16 trumpets: Fear and Greed Have Sales of Guns and Ammo Shooting Up.

The article opines that “... no one knows exactly what is behind the gun-buying craze” that has seen a 27% year-over-year increase in firearm-sale background checks. But clearly the authors have an opinion (even though it was a Page One news piece, not an Op-Ed): The boom in sales is due largely to speculation on firearms of types that gun owners fear are soon to be banned by the Obama administration. The piece cites several examples of people who are indeed viewing their firearms and ammunition collection as investments...

The subtle implication of the piece is that the “fear” at play in this sales boom is more the worry of not being able to obtain certain kinds of guns under anticipated restrictions than public safety concerns in an increasingly shaky economy — and in an America in which psychopaths seem ever more regularly to shoot up schools, malls and workplaces.

The fact that the very kinds of high-capacity, semi-automatic, night-sighted and Mil-Spec guns that are surely soon to be in the Obama/Democrat crosshairs are EXACTLY the kinds one would want in defending his home or person is not mentioned in the Journal article at all...

Further, an April 14 New York Times Op-Ed piece by Bob Herbert pithily titled The American Way characterizes incidences of wrongful-death gun violence as “common to the American scene as changes in the weather.”

His claim that 120,000 Americans have been killed since 9/11 in “non-terror homicides, most of them committed with guns” cites no source (of course), and is misleading in several ways...

According to FBI crime statistics, there were 10,100 domestic murders committed with firearms in the year 2005. Using this as a rough baseline average, multiplying by 7.5 times (the number of years since 9/11/2001), you end up with a figure of around 76,000. Of course, not every year is the same, and other credible sources have slightly different numbers — some more, some less. And none of these are small numbers, to be sure...

Or are they?

What the Times piece doesn’t talk about is the estimated 2.5 million crimes thwarted annually by Americans with lawfully owned and carried guns. Things like home invasions, robberies, carjackings, theft, rapes, assaults and domestic disputes that threaten to get out of control. Of course, since they were prevented, there’s no way of proving how many unlawful homicides these crimes would have resulted in...

However, if even an absurdly low 1% of these crimes would have led to a homicide had it not been halted by a lawful firearm, that number of saved lives would dwarf the number of gun murders in the U.S. annually, no matter what numbers you claim as the gospel.

This begs a logical question:

Where are the “Gun-wielding citizen thwarts crime” headlines in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, or any other major news outlet?

There are two possible answers:

1) The Mainstream Media is biased against guns. (Nah, couldn’t be!)

2) The “hero gun” story ISN’T NEWS.

Think about this second reason for a minute, because it’s an angle on the gun-rights debate that I’ve never seen in any other discussion, anywhere. It may be out there somewhere, but I’m betting it isn’t...

The famous journalism quote attributed to New York Sun Editor John Bogart goes like this: “When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news.”

Translation: Even if the media were 100% unbiased about the role of guns in American culture, the use of a gun in the prevention of a crime or in defense against bodily harm still would not be in the headlines — because it is so commonplace compared to random gun terror.

And anyone who’s done even a cursory review of the facts would come to this same conclusion. Yes, even journalists...

The fact that they are in the headlines proves that the shocking gun homicides we read about in the MSM are the freak exception in America.

The rule — blasphemous as it may be to politicians, newspaper editors, mainstream rock musicians, and other high-profile anti-gun voices who can afford to live in patrolled, gated communities — is that the presence of a gun anywhere in America is far more often a deterrent to harm than the cause of it.

That’s why you should buy and carry one, if you aren’t already doing so. And if you’re in a state that won’t let you carry, you should move yourself and your money to a state that allows you the right you’re guaranteed under your own Constitution...

“If someone has a gun and is trying to kill you, it would
be reasonable to shoot back with your own gun.”

– The Dalai Lama

As my long-time readers know, I don’t give much in the way of financial advice. I leave that kind of thing to the money wizards I work with...

However, there is one cardinal rule of money and investing that EVERY ONE of the world-class investment minds you’re used to reading in Taipan’s sources would put at the very top of their list of personal financial recommendations. Here it is:

You can’t make money if you’re dead.

And given the rash of random mass murder that does in fact pervade modern life in the United States, the very best safeguard against sudden death that the average American can get isn’t a seat belt or a bottle of cholesterol pills or a portable defibrillator — but a firearm and training in how to use it instinctively and effectively.

The truth of this needs no statistician’s hocus-pocus, government report, or newspaper article of peerless integrity to bear out. The mass murderers, cop killers, and hard-core gun criminals themselves show us what exactly what they’re afraid of every time they go nuts and start shooting...

They’re afraid of guns and bullets.

Why do you think Seung-Hui Cho chose the Virginia Tech campus in which to unleash his hellish slaughter? In such a state-mandated “Gun Free Zone,” (one of the few he’d have been able to find in liberal-carry-law Virginia) no one else could shoot back...

And why did Cho, Binghamton shooter Jiverly Voong, Pittsburgh cop-killer Richard Poplawski, the 1997 North Hollywood bank robbers, and so many other infamous modern gun-criminals wear body armor?

Because these gunmen sought protection against the only thing they knew could stop them: Another gunman. Like V.I. Lenin, the Dalai Lama, Julius Caesar, Ronald Reagan, John Wayne, and anyone else with half a brain, killers know that the only match for their force is equal or greater force...

My question today is: Do YOU know it? And do you have the guts to grapple with this unpleasant truth — if not for the fundamental rightness of standing against terror and rampant criminality, at least for the protection and enhancement of your own assets?

In part two of this series: Advice on what you need in the way of arms for every purpose, plus some direct advice on how you may be able to play the modern American gun boom for some financial gain...

Other Related Topics: Jim Amrhein

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