Britain’s Prince Harry, third in line to the throne (behind his father and older brother) has reportedly told the British Army that if it prevents him from taking a front-rank assignment in Iraq with his unit, he’ll resign his commission.

“Prince Harry’s deployment to Iraq, as we have always said, is under constant consideration,” a defense ministry spokeswoman said. “It is still our intention that Prince Harry will deploy as a troop leader.”

In this role, the 22-year-old red-haired prince would be leading 12 people in four Scimitar armored reconnaissance vehicles.

But the best-selling Sun tabloid reported that army chiefs had ordered an 11th-hour review of his planned deployment.

The move would likely end up with Harry being banned from going near the front line, the Sun cited unnamed senior sources as saying. …

The prince, who as a Second Lieutenant has the rank of Cornet in his regiment, had reportedly threatened to quit the army if not allowed to serve on the front line.

Good on yer, Harry!

Gerard Van Der Leun explains.

An online op-ed by Rita Etter in today’s Tennessean is entitled, “Americans had more guns in past eras without mayhem.” She makes this observation:

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, millions of Americans owned guns. And in 1933, the murder rate was around 9 people per 100,000. But why no mass murder like today?

It struck me a counter-intuitive that the murder rate 70-plus years ago was 9 per 100,000. After all, everyone knows we have become a more violent nation over the last several decades. So I looked it up. And found Rita is correct. The homicide rate in 1933 was 9.7 per 100K.

According to FBI figures, the rate of “murder and non-negligent manslaughter” in 2003 was 5.7/100K, a decrease of 4. And to avoid cherry picking favorable data, let’s take a look at the years leading up to both 1933 and 2003.

1920 - 6.8
1921 - 8.1
1922 - 8.0
1923 - 7.8
1924 - 8.1
1925 - 8.3
1926 - 8.4
1927 - 8.4
1928 - 8.6
1929 - 8.4
1930 - 8.8
1931 - 9.2
1932 - 9.0
1933 - 9.7

It was not until 1943 that the rate fell below 2003’s rate. The FBI says in 1991 the rate was 9.8, a tenth above 1933’s rate. But beginning the next year the rate started trending strongly downward so that the 2003 rate was -36.7 percent from 1994’s rate, 5.7 v. 9.0.

Looking at other decades of comparison shows that the homicide rates have gone up and down over the years. In fact, from 1870-1910 the murder rate hovered around 1/100K! The overall rate declined by about 50 percent between 1933-1958, when it reached approximately 2003’s figure. By 1990, the rate was back to to 1933’s level. Since then it has plummeted again back to the level of the mid-1950’s. Interestingly, the climb took more than twice as long as the decline. By 2005, the rate had climbed to 5.9, where it remained for 2006.

A graph of murder rates is on this site, be advised that the site has a definite agenda but its raw data seem accurate, based on my readings.

Comments on.

Update: related article here.

James Lewis thinks that when pondering what motivated Cho Seung Hui to go berserk, his professors at VT’s English Department might want to look in the mirror pretty intently.

Mr. Howard Meek has an op-ed in Apr. 18’s Tennessean entitled, “As a society, we must find a way to stop violence at the end of a gun barrel.” It seems that Mr. Meek, a long-time published correspondent at the paper, thinks that the answer to gun crimes is more violence and extra-judicial shootings:

What about a mandatory death sentence for anyone commiting a crime with a gun? Bet that would slow it down. And let police shoot anyone who disobeys one of their orders — not to kill but at least to stop their disobedience. Overreaction? Yes, but necessary because of the society we have become.

So the answer to gun violence is state violence! Of course, not every gun crime results in a shooting, much less a death; guns are used to threaten as well as injure a criminal’s victim. But Mr. Meek wants every gun crime to result in a death! And anyone who disobeys a cop may be shot - although not to kill, you understand - whether that person is violent or not, armed or not. At first I thought that Meek was merely being hyperbolic, but in context I don’t think so. He seems serious. See for yourself.

On the other hand, Tennessean columnist Dwight Lewis, with whom I not often agree, had a sensible column yesterday, “It’s easy to focus on guns, but what about mental illness?” Lewis interviewed “noted psychiatrist Dr. Alvin F. Poussaint,” who lives in Cambridge, Mass.

“Clearly, the man who did the shooting at Virginia Tech had a mental-health problem which resulted in a murder-suicide,'’ Poussaint said. “You can’t force people to get help, but you can induce them. There are thousands of students who commit suicide on college campuses all around the country each year.

“And sometimes when people are depressed and think about harming themselves, they harm other people as well.'’

So, think before you offer a simple solution such as arming teachers. What happened Monday goes much deeper than that.

And the implication follows that a solution of disarming everyone needs to be thought through, too. I think that the coming debates will whirl around the privacy barriers preventing college administrators from learning about the status and diagnoses of mentally-ill students and mental illness diagnoses being reportable to the instant-background check system used in firearms purchases.

Also relevant are these observations by Dr. Chris Rangel:

Although people suffering from serious mental illness like schizophrenia, major depression, or bipolar disorder are twice as likely to commit a violent act as the general population, the vast majority of people who do commit violent crimes do NOT have any serious mental illness and the vast majority of those with mental illness do NOT commit any violent crimes. Other variables like male gender, youth, substance abuse, and poverty are far better predictors of future violent behavior than mental illness alone. …

Mental illness is not even a good predictor of the future risk of committing mass murder. In one study of 34 adolescent mass murderers only 23% had any evidence of pre-existing mental illness and only a scant 6% showed signs of psychosis. …

There’s nothing simple here, folks.

BTW, according to ABC news, there 1,100 college suicides per year. This is a lot of needless, tragic deaths, but hardly the “thousands” that Dr. Poussaint avers.

Well, it was inevitable and it didn’t take but 24 hours. Yesterday the United Methodist News Service released a piece entitled, “Virginia Tech tragedy reflects gun violence epidemic.” Unsurprisingly, the article is bereft of actual analysis or familiarity with pertinent facts in its call for draconian gun-control laws. For that matter, there’s precious little theology there, too.

The principal quotee is Jim Winkler, head of the UMC’s General Board of Church and Society, based very near the US Capitol in Washington, DC. Mr. Winkler (he is not ordained) is hard Left; he said in May of last year that “Congress should impeach President Bush ‘to advance the kingdom of God.’” Says the UMNS’s article,

The social action agency of The United Methodist Church also renewed the church’s call for governments around the world to ban ownership by the general public of handguns, assault weapons, automatic weapon conversion kits and weapons that cannot be detected by traditional metal-detection devices.

“…Had this ban been in place, this shooting might have been prevented since one of the guns used by the assailant was a 9-mm handgun,” said Jim Winkler, chief executive of the United Methodist Board of Church and Society.

“We once again call on the Congress to ban all handguns and assault weapons so that our communities will be safer and so that this endless cycle of violence can be ended,” Winkler said in an April 17 statement, one day after the shootings in Blacksburg, Va., left 33 people dead.

Well, not even Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has called for more gun legislation, but there’s nothing like getting in front of the curve, eh, Jim? The Washington Post reports:

“I think we ought to be thinking about the families and the victims and not speculate about future legislative battles that might lie ahead,” said Reid, a view expressed by other Democratic leaders the day after the shootings that left 33 dead on the campus of Virginia Tech. . . .

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., was one of very few lawmakers to defer pushing for gun control in the early hours after the shootings. “There will be time to debate the steps needed to avert such tragedies,” he said on Monday, “but today, our thoughts and prayers go to their families.” . . .

I call upon Mr. Winkler to apologize for politicizing the horrors of the Virginia Tech tragedy even before all the families of the murdered have been officially notified.

Be that as it may, the entire tenor of the platform recalls the Aesop’s fable of the mice who wanted to bell the cat.

LONG ago, the mice had a general council to consider what measures they could take to outwit their common enemy, the Cat. Some said this, and some said that; but at last a young mouse got up and said he had a proposal to make, which he thought would meet the case. “You will all agree,” said he, “that our chief danger consists in the sly and treacherous manner in which the enemy approaches us. Now, if we could receive some signal of her approach, we could easily escape from her. I venture, therefore, to propose that a small bell be procured, and attached by a ribbon round the neck of the Cat. By this means we should always know when she was about, and could easily retire while she was in the neighbourhood.”

This proposal met with general applause, until an old mouse got up and said: “That is all very well, but who is to bell the Cat?” The mice looked at one another and nobody spoke. Then the old mouse said: “IT IS EASY TO PROPOSE IMPOSSIBLE REMEDIES.”

The possibility that Congress will “ban all handguns and assault weapons” (a meaningless term, that) is exactly zero. In fact, the arm’s length that even Senators Reid and Kennedy put gun control, at least this week, almost certainly speaks not only to a basic decency that Mr. Winkler evidently lacks, but a tacit acknowledgement that stringent gun-control measures such as Mr. Winkler urges is a losing issue.

I also titled this post “ringing in the eschaton” because church people are prone to a particular kind of dangerous delusion, namely that the peaceable kingdom can be achieved by fiat, that the perfection of human beings and society can be wished into existence. I have to wonder whether Mr. Winkler thinks everyone should sing “Kumbaya” also. For any observer of the national scene who is actually serious about his work can see that Mr. Winkler has proposed exactly nothing. He has said nothing more than, “let all guns disappear and let everyone live in peace. Selah!”

This is a decidedly unserious approach to the aftermath of the Virginia Tech murders. It has all the intellectual depth of a bumper sticker.

Mr. Winkler is also quoted thus:

… “In 2005, the Federal Bureau of Investigation reports that there were 10,100 deaths by firearms in the United States. This represents an average of four deaths for every 100,000 people in the United States. By contrast, England, Wales, Scotland, and Canada averaged .54 deaths for every 100,000 people.

Well, I’ve long covered the rocketing gun-crime rate in the UK, most lately in February. Since the enactment in 1996 of some of the strictest gun laws in the world, gun crime has more than doubled. As long ago as 2003, the left-of-center Guardian reported, “Gun crime spreads ‘like a cancer’ across Britain.”

Few people paid much attention when, late last month, Shabir Hussain and his friend Mohammed Shabir were jailed for 11 years at Birmingham Crown Court. Working with rudimentary tools in the basements of their homes, the pair had set themselves up as armourers to the local underworld, converting blank firing pistols into lethal weapons.

They produced more than 170 guns and sold them to gangs from Bristol to Manchester. …

According to the Association of Chief Police Officers, gun crime is ‘growing like a cancer’ and spreading to smaller communities.

Police intelligence suggests Shabir and Hussain were the tip of the iceberg. Hundreds of similar gun factories have been set up in homes across the country and detectives admit guns are being put on the streets more quickly than they can take them off. …

So much for banning the manufacture of handguns. Mr. Winkler continues,

“The presence of guns in U.S. society has not led to greater security but in fact has undermined the general sense of safety.”

Mr. Winkler, meet Mr. Bradford B. Wiles, a Virginia tech graduate student. Writing presciently last August, after two people were shot at the school, Mr. Wiles said,

I had entrusted my safety, and the safety of others to the police. In light of this, there are a few things I wish to point out.

First, I never want to have my safety fully in the hands of anyone else, including the police. …

Of all of the emotions and thoughts that were running through my head that morning, the most overwhelming one was of helplessness.

That feeling of helplessness has been difficult to reconcile because I knew I would have been safer with a proper means to defend myself.

I would also like to point out that when I mentioned to a professor that I would feel safer with my gun, this is what she said to me, “I would feel safer if you had your gun.”

What would Mr. Wiles say this week?

In my seminary, a professor officially listed as “distinguished” said that America’s “mainline denominations have a well-deserved reputation for having nothing to do with anything important.” Under Jim Winkler’s administration of a UMC general board, the accusation sticks like glue.

Continental Airlines flight 90, flying from Newark, N.J., to Tel Aviv, was intercepted by four Israeli Air Force fighter jets today. The Jerusalem Post reports the fighters came “very close” to “destroying” the airliner.

Four fighter jets - two F-15s and a pair of F-16s - buzzed a Continental Airlines flight that had originated in Newark and was carrying some 250 passengers once it came within eight kilometers of Israel, after the pilot failed to contact Ben-Gurion Airport upon his approach in line with international regulations.

A senior Air Force officer said the IAF went on high alert due to the suspicious incoming aircraft. He said Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz were updated about the event and IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi as well as IAF chief Maj.-Gen. Elazar Shkedy were placed “on-line” in case an interception order was needed.

“This was the closest we ever came to intercepting a civilian airplane,” the officer said.

The aircraft landed safely at Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv.