Providence’s policy is now being re-examined as the city faces a $20 million civil rights lawsuit over the shooting of Sgt. Cornel Young, Jr., who was killed in the year 2000 while he was off duty and trying to break up a fight. He was dressed in baggy jeans, an overcoat and a baseball cap, and he was carrying a gun.

Young’s mother, Leisa Young, says the rookie officer who shot her son was not adequately trained to recognize off-duty or plainclothes officers.

Earlier this year, an Orlando, Fla., police officer fatally shot a plainclothes colleague who was investigating underage drinking outside the Citrus Bowl. The plainclothes officer had gotten into a scuffle with tailgaters and fired his gun into the air.

In 2001, two uniformed officers shot and killed an undercover detective when he pointed his gun at a suspected car thief in Oakland, Calif.

So now, the 20,000 member International Association of Chiefs of Police has called for off-duty officers who witness a crime call for assistance rather than pulling a weapon.

You don’t need bifocals to read between the lines and see where that’s heading: No cop needs to carry a gun when off duty. At which point, how long do you suppose it will be before we’re told, “Not even off-duty cops can carry guns any more: surely an average civilian without their level of training shouldn’t be allowed to blunder around carrying one of these indiscriminate weapons of death.”

First let’s point out a vital component of this reported trend which The Associated Press seems too Politically Correct to note: Decades ago, nearly all cops were white. But rookie Providence police officer Cornel Young Jr. was a young black man.

Add that fact to the equation, and let us see if we can summarize the logical chain of argument at hand:
1) When police officers see people carrying or drawing guns who they cannot readily identify as fellow police officers, they tend to shoot them and ask questions later, especially if they’re black.

2) This is leading to the deaths of off-duty cops by friendly fire.

3) The solution is to discourage or prevent off-duty officers from using or carrying firearms.
Anyone else see a problem, here? How about that first premise?

America is an armed nation. The Second Amendment guarantees each American -- and since it’s a “civil right,” this includes women and children, just as “civil rights” means black children also have a right to use integrated restrooms and buses -- the right to own and carry firearms. Beyond that, it reminds us that doing so is an able-bodied citizen’s duty (since a well-armed citizen militia is “necessary to the security of a free state.”) Further, the 14th Amendment further bars any state or local authority from infringing this vital right for federal citizens. (And if you read your history books, you know the Congress meant especially “black citizens.”)

In its 1997 study “Guns in America: National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms,” the National Institute of Justice determined 25 percent of Americans own guns -- In 1994, 44 million Americans owned 192 million firearms, of which 65 million were handguns.

And John Lott has conclusively demonstrated, in his epochal book “More Guns, Less Crime,” that whenever a state or county “allows” more law-abiding citizens to carry handguns, violent crime rates go down.

Nor do we lack for real world verification. New York City, Detroit, and Washington D.C. have virtually banned the carrying of firearms by law-abiding citizens. Their crime rates are huge. Within recent decades, Australia banned many firearms, and England essentially banned them all. Violent crime rates have soared in both jurisdictions.

Instead of disarming off-duty cops so the police can continue to feel free to shoot anyone out of uniform who they see with a gun (especially if he’s black), why not alter police training as follows:

“This is an armed nation. Twenty-five percent of your fellow ‘civilians’ own firearms, and have a God-given right to carry them around. Except for writing traffic tickets for revenue, they have just as much right to chase and apprehend a fleeing felon -- or to present a weapon in defense of themselves or others -- as you do. This includes black folks. Get used to it.

“So -- even though it may initially seem to make our jobs harder -- let’s stop hassling people when we perceive they have guns. If a call comes in reporting a ‘man with a gun,’ let’s ask whether the man is brandishing or threatening anyone, and otherwise advise the caller that being armed is not a crime.

“And particularly let’s stop shooting people who draw their guns when they’re being assaulted. Yes, pausing those extra few seconds may sometimes put your own life in danger. This is still a less dangerous job than hard-rock mining or fishing in Alaska, and you volunteered for it. You may resign at any time.”

No, the off-duty Florida officer should not have fired his gun into the air to break up a scuffle. That’s dumb. But with all due respect to the grieving Mrs. Young, no, the problem is not that Providence cops had trouble recognizing an off-duty fellow officer. The problem is that their first instinct when they saw a black man with a gun who was not obviously a police officer, was to shoot him.

The police chiefs should be urging more citizens to go armed so their men get used to it, not trying to turn us into a police state, which is defined as “a place where only the police carry guns.”

## #

Drawing some mail was my report last month on the elimination of the exemption which used to spare holders of Nevada Concealed Carry Permits from the trouble and expense of a new $25 background check every time we buy a firearm:

“Vin -- Your recent column, ‘Complete disarmament?’ Well, yes, maybe in your case,” writes in Richard Hilliard of Henderson.

“But really, that’s a paranoid fantasy,” Mr. Hilliard continues. “Disarmament by whom? Not the NRA, not the armaments manufacturers. We’ve got to support our war machine!

“Consider. Have drivers been deprived of licenses? Have car owners been deprived of cars? If that happened, the economy and even the world would take a dive.

“Have boozemakers been deprived? Not with the huge corporate interests marketing the stuff.
“Have cigarette companies been deprived? Same answer. Corporate interests.

“There are already enough firearms in America to supply every man, woman, child, and fetus, so complete abstinence is not an option.

“Vin, rest easy. You’re safe, and you have powerful bedfellows.”

This is a familiar set of anti-capitalist sound bytes, but I’m afraid they don’t grow much more coherent with age.

“Huge corporate interests” were already marketing booze in 1919, when it was banned completely for 14 years. Similarly large and powerful interests sell and market tobacco, yet the crippling of that economic engine -- the inevitable, incremental move towards a complete ban -- is well underway in all the populous seaboard states.

Driving? Once we allowed the right to travel to be converted into a conditional, “licensed” privilege, government now believes it can and take away this “privilege” from those caught driving “under the influence” at .08 percent (do I hear .06? .04? No scientific rationale needed!) But they now go far further, threatening to suspend the drivers licenses of those who are behind in their child support, and many other newly minted “offenses” having nothing to do with competence to handle the automobile.

So yes, many drivers HAVE been deprived of their licenses.

Odd, however, that Mr. Hilliard would list tobacco and alcohol, yet omit such once legal products as heroin and cocaine.

What became of the legal, tax-paying manufacturers of those plant extracts who trusted the federal government when they were told the 1913 Harrison Narcotics Act only required them to register so their products could be checked for purity and potency, that this would NEVER lead to the outright ban of their products? Have those trusting manufacturers and their legitimate customers been “deprived” through engaging in a registration and regulation scheme?

Banned completely. Yet we’re supposed to believe it could never happen with guns, since “powerful corporate interests” profit from the trade.

There have rarely been corporate interests more successful in the trade than Mauser and Walther. Should the Jews of Germany and Poland thus have rested easy, knowing these greedy capitalists with their hunger to keep selling arms and ammunition to the civilian market would never allow them to be disarmed, leaving them no way to resist when the Gestapo came to round them up and put them on the trains?

Historians estimate the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto may have had as few as 10 handguns between them when they started their last-ditch uprising against their Nazi executioners.

British firearms manufacturers were a wealthy and well-respected fraternity, 80 years ago. They would surely have called it a “paranoid fantasy” if anyone had suggested law-abiding British citizens would be barred from possessing any self-defense firearms whatsoever by the start of the 21st century -- even though the handwriting was on the wall by 1946, when authorities there disposed of all those loaned American small arms (some of them lovely, collectible hunting rifles) by throwing them in the Channel or using them as re-bar for the rebuilding of London.

Today civilian disarmament in Britain is complete. What happened? How on earth did the “huge corporate interests” fail to protect their civilian market?

Will the NRA help to disarm, us? Of course. The NRA is the country’s largest gun control organization; they backed the Brady Bill.

You see, Mr. Hilliard, the kind of people who want to run our lives don’t see an armed populace as a good thing. An unarmed populace is NECESSARY for the completion of their “war machine.” Why do you think they sneer and ridicule anyone who tries to remind us why the founders said an armed populace was “necessary to the security of a free state”? The goal of tyrants down through the ages has been precisely to make sure their own sworn legions are very WELL armed, while the civilian populations they aim to oppress are thoroughly DISARMED.

Far from being contradictory, these two goals fit together like a hand in a steel gauntlet.