Some time ago, our neighbor’s adult children would throw wild parties, attended by scores if not hundreds of people that were noisy, inconsiderate and littered the street with food and drink containers.
When we called the police, they would sometimes respond, but the problem persisted. To make a long story short, we contacted an arbitration service who conducted a meeting between us and the neighbor; after we met and exchanged grievances, the neighbor agreed to stop after I enumerated a long list of incidents and threatened a lawsuit. Basically, we had to do it ourselves.
None of the events above were life-threatening, although some of the young adults made threats against us. We decided to acquire even more home protection than we already had.
The police’s ability to intervene on the behalf of the law-abiding will get worse before it gets better.
Here’s another case of having to do it yourself as told by Mike Adams to a reporter at The Athens (Ohio) News (excerpt):
[Adams] decided to buy his first gun. He had moved into a new house in a bad area of town where crime was high, prostitutes roamed the neighborhood, and a crack house sat across the street.
Adams said sometimes the noise at night was overbearing and he and a few neighbors would take turns calling the police. After receiving no response, Adams and other residents received permission to set up an operation to expose the suspected felons. Finally the police had enough information to obtain a search warrant. Shortly afterwards, 18 people in the house across the street from Adams were arrested for illegal drugs.
After that, Adams said he came to the realization that “police cannot police society.” He bought his first gun and acquired a concealed-carry permit. Owning a firearm gave him a peace of mind “not that the government will take care of me, but that I will take care of myself,” he said. Since then, Adams added, owning a gun has influenced his “entire worldview.”
Read the entire article about Adams’ address to Ohio State and his conversion from anti-gun to pro-defense. This paragraph, in particular, should be obvious:
Despite supporting a gun ban in his youth, Adams said he believes that even if legislation were passed to ban handguns, guns would not disappear. Rather, he said, they would end up in the hands of criminals instead of law-abiding citizens using firearms for self-defense and property protection.
Unfortunately, there are those who ignore the statistics and still want to disarm America.
Yes, I know that’s Joe Friday’s Badge #714 up there.