Here's the slogan among us Second Amendment enthusiasts: "Call the cops, call for a pizza, see which one comes first." Review of the Year's End

from Radio Derb at your service, National Review

by John Derbyshire 12/31/2010

What follows from all this? What follows is, huge cuts in public services. If New York City sanitation workers think that laying off 400 trash haulers in an 8,000 workforce is worth a go-slow, and if you think the resulting dislocation is scandalous, wait till they, and you, see what's coming. Michael Bloomberg is a limousine liberal who trims services and ticks off unions only with the utmost reluctance and restraint. Itty-bitty Bloomberg-scale cuts aren't going to close the financial gaps. For a look at the future, check out the city of Camden, New Jersey. Already holding the title of America's second most dangerous city, Camden is laying off half its police force.

Municipal austerity is the wave of the future, coming soon to a city near you. If you live in New York, get yourself a good sturdy snow shovel. If you live in Camden, New Jersey, get yourself a carry permit.

03 — NY Gov. commutes John White's sentence. That brings us to the commutation of sentence given by outgoing New York Governor David Paterson to John Harris White, who shot dead Daniel Cicciaro back in August 2006.

White, who is black and works as a New York City road construction foreman, lives in Miller Place, a pleasant middle-middle-class suburb just down the road from me in Long Island. On that evening in 2006, White's 19-year-old son Aaron had been thrown out of a party by other teens who thought, mistakenly, that he had threatened a girl. Aaron went home, but some partygoers followed him in two cars. They made a scene in the street outside White's house, and seem to have trespassed into his driveway. White came out with a gun and confronted the teens. Daniel Cicciaro, 17 at the time, got in his face, whereupon the homeowner shot him in his face from three inches away. He claims the gun went off accidentally, but as an English girl said in a more famous case: "He would, wouldn't he?"

White duly went to trial and in December 2007 was found guilty of second-degree manslaughter and unlawful possession of a weapon. In March 2008 he was sentenced to two to four years imprisonment, way less than the 15 years maximum for second-degree manslaughter. He was then freed on bail pending an appeal. The appeal dragged on for over a year, but this past July White was finally locked up. He served five months, then Governor Paterson commuted his sentence, leaving him a free man.

There are two large issues in play here: a citizen's right to defend his property, and race — a black adult shooting a white teen.

On the first, I'm something of an absolutist. If there's someone in my driveway yelling curses at me, and I ask them to get off my property, and they don't, and I ask them again, and they still don't, I think I should have the right to shoot them. A man's home is his castle, or ought to be. White's critics say: "Why didn't he call the cops?" Here's the slogan among us Second Amendment enthusiasts: "Call the cops, call for a pizza, see which one comes first."

And there you see the connection to the previous segment. As slow as your local cops may be today in getting to the scene of a disturbance, they'll be a lot slower in the future, as cities, counties, and states slash their payrolls. If you're interested in protecting your home and your family against unruly elements of the local populace, get yourself some guns and learn how to use them.

That's just me, though. New York State does not take my absolutist position, and under state law White certainly committed a serious crime in shooting Cicciaro. Furthermore, it's not clear Cicciaro was actually on White's property when he was shot. "At the foot of the driveway," is how the location is decribed in all the news stories; so even by Derbian standards, White's conduct was ambiguous.

And then there's the obvious point about race: so obvious I don't need to mention it, but I will anyway. If a white homeowner had shot dead a black teen at the foot of his driveway, he would have got 25 to life and the story would have made headlines nationwide. No governor would have commuted his sentence, most certainly not a black governor like Paterson. Paterson's action was just naked racial favoritism. This kind of asymmetry is so much taken for granted nowadays I'm even starting to hear an ironic name for the system we live under: Jim Snow.

Under the Jim Snow dispensation, a crime like John White's is taken implicitly to be justified by slavery and segregation. Certainly John White played the race card for all it was worth, arguing that two cars full of drunk suburban teens put him in mind of a lynch mob in the Old South. He was of course backed up by the NAACP, Al Sharpton, the Nation of Islam, and every other group of antisocial race-guilt hucksters incapable of useful work.

White compounded these offenses, at least in my eyes, with ostentatious displays of sanctimony, telling us far more than we wanted to know — or, in my case at least, were willing to believe — about his relationship with God, his humility before divine justice, and the many prayers he had offered for the dead boy's soul, and for — wait for it — yes, for "healing." Yo pal: you shot the kid through the head at close range. That doesn't heal.