It's obvious that George W. Bush is an engrossed disciple. The president's inaugural brimmed with natural law and Aquinas, but without the Barnett ballast it left me cold.

Obviously, Barnett occupies front-rank in Bush's thinking. Since the Cold War ended, we've been trying to come up with a unified theory of the world and a military strategy to fit, which Barnett has done.

Barnett, former professor and senior strategist at the U.S. Naval War College (as was Mahan), wrote an Esquire magazine article, which led to the book. It was a takeoff from the famous power-point briefings he gave the Pentagon in the early days of the Bush administration.

He divides the world into three parts, the first a functioning grouping of states that have been integrated into the world economy. This includes North America, much of South America, the European Union, Russia, Japan and Asia's emerging economies (China and India), Australia and New Zealand and South Africa, a total of 4 billion people. This is what he calls the Core.

In contrast, what he calls the Gap will be the source of much of the world's problems in the 21st century: the Caribbean Rim, virtually all of Africa, the Balkans, the Caucasus, central Asia, the Middle East and Southwest Asia and much of Southeast Asia. The Gap's total population is 2 billion.

The third group consists of the ''seam states'' along the Gap's boundaries: Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, Morocco, Algeria, Greece, Turkey, Pakistan, Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines. We and other Core nations have our work cut out to firewall these seams. China patrols its northern border against terrorists; Russia is concerned with the Caucasus.

Much of our problem since the end of the Cold War has had to do with the Gap. Bush was correct to move on Iraq because ''it is dangerously disconnected from the globalizing world . . . and all the ties that bind countries together in mutually assured dependence,'' Barnett writes.

He adds: ''Show me areas where globalization is thick with network connectivity, financial transactions . . . media flows and collective security, and I'll show you regions featuring stable governments, rising standards of living and more deaths by suicide than by murder. . . . But show me where globalization is thinning or just plain absent and I will show you regions plagued by politically repressive regimes, widespread poverty and disease, routine mass murder and, most important, the chronic conflicts that incubate the next generation of global terrorists'' -- the Gap.

Barnett points out that we have successfully exported security to the old Core, but Core nations must encourage more private investment to shrink the Gap.

''Think of it,'' he writes. ''Global war is not in the offing'' because our nuclear stockpile guards against it. Supposed war with China is not in the cards but we must supply more security from the public sector and more private investment to the Gap.

''Africa . . . will need far more aid from the Core than has been offered in the past. . . . This may sound like additional responsibility for an already overburdened military but that is the wrong way to look at it for what we're dealing with are problems of success, not failure. It is America's continued success in deterring global war and obsolescing state-on-state war that allows us'' to keep the peace.

Great book, great read. Read it and tell me what you think!

The media has painted the St. Louis church leader as a mean-spirited bully, yet in person he is soft-spoken and kind with a keen sense of the truth and an urgency to convey it for the salvation of souls. Rather than using high-sounding platitudes which coast over the heads of many, Archbishop Burke speaks plainly the teaching of the Church on matters of central importance, without fear of being labeled politically incorrect.

During the debate in the US about refusing communion to Catholic politicians who support abortion, Burke issued a pastoral letter explaining that, although the refusal by a pastor or bishop to distribute holy Communion to anyone is a “source of great sorrow . . . What would be profoundly more sorrowful would be the failure of a bishop to call a soul to conversion, the failure to protect the flock from scandal and the failure to safeguard the worthy reception of Communion.”

With regard to voting by Catholics, the archbishop stated clearly in a meeting held by the diocesan pro-life office, "When we go to vote, we must take into consideration all of the stands politicians make. But procured abortion, that has to be our first question."

Archbishop Burke has been equally clear and courageous on the hot topic of same-sex ‘marriage’. Rather than avoiding the reason behind the gay ‘marriage’ push - the societal acceptance of homosexuality - Burke addressed it head-on, warning that the tendency to avoid the issue is dangerous. In his diocesan paper he wrote, "There is a tendency to accept same-sex relationships because we do not want to deal with the embarrassment and hurt of recognizing same-sex attraction as disordered,” he said. “The fact that our American culture more and more fails to make any distinction between same-sex attraction and heterosexual attraction does not justify our failure to make the distinction, respecting God's gift of human life in its integrity and helping others to attain the perfection to which we are called as true children of God."

After concelebrating the massive vigil Mass preceding the US March for Life a few weeks ago, Archbishop Burke told LifeSIteNews.com that his motivation to continue to speak out life and family comes from “Christ Himself” and “the natural moral law” which the archbishop said “is not the question of a belief of a particular religion, but is part of the patrimony of the whole human race.”

The archbishop acknowledged that speaking the truth was intimidating. “It’s intimidating because we live, as our Holy Father says, in a society of a culture of death where people want to convince us that everything should be convenient and comfortable and they don’t like to hear a voice which says ‘this isn’t right’”, he said.

But with being outspoken on the truth will come persecution, a fact the archbishop is willing not only to acknowledge but to accept. “Bishops will be persecuted,” he said, and “also priests and lay people.”

Even now those proclaiming the truth are called, homophobic and hateful. Yet the archbishop explains, “It’s what it means to be a sign of contradiction. We just have to accept that and we have to remain tranquil in proclaiming the truth with charity, but insisting on the truth.”

“If we look to the example of Our Lord, we have to take up the cross for the defence of life,” he said.

"A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state: the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" -- United States Constitution, second amendment of the Bill of Rights

Subject only to the police power, the right of the individual citizen to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.--- Constitution of the State of Illinois, Article 1, Section 22

I was mindful of these amendments to the Constitutions of two sovereign entities as I considered recent personal encounters with manifestations of gun control here in Illinois. The first came about at a gun show in Kane County a couple of weeks ago. My son and I were attending when he saw a very nice Eagle Arms AR-15A2 Sporter Carbine for a very nice price. (The AR 15 is the semi automatic version of the M-16 military rifle. The firearm definitionally illiterate call it an "assault weapon.") My son is an electrical engineering major at the University of Illinois Chicago campus and an Illinois National Guardsmen.

He thinks that the National Guard does not afford him an adequate opportunity for rifle marksmanship, and felt that the purchase of this rifle would accomplish two objectives. One, he would have a rifle, and two, it would be one that was similar in configuration to the one that he might have to use in battle should he be called to active-duty, and afford him the extra margin of practice that might be significant toward going to win a battle or saving his life or those of his comrades.

My son decided he would purchase this firearm and presented his valid Illinois firearm owners identification card along with a valid credit card to complete the deal. The gun dealer saw his Chicago address and perturbedly asserted that he could not sell such a weapon to a person with a Chicago address. I told the gun dealer that there is no such state law forbidding the purchase of such a rifle by any Chicago resident that has a lawful Illinois Firearm Owners Identification card. The dealer reluctantly conceded this to be true, but he went on to say that Mayor Daley's lawsuits and undercover investigations had created such a hostile atmosphere toward law abiding gun dealers that he feared selling such a weapon to anyone who lived in Chicago. He pointed out Chicago's and Cook counties ban by ordinance on such guns.

After my initial anger over this back door negation of my sons constitutional rights subsided, I was forced to conclude that while this man was wrong in his assessment of the law in his decision not to sell the rifle to my son, I was forced to admit that he was being prudent with his assessment of the climate created by Richard Daley’s single-minded obsession with targeting law abiding gun dealers. The very real possibility of financial ruin at the hand of the Chicago’s Corporation Counsel's office with its bottomless reservoir of tax money to enable the negation of our constitutional rights by bullying gun dealers is not illusory, but real. I find it curious that only recently has Daley seemed to accept any significant responsibility for the pervasive corruption swirling around the apparent criminal enterprise that much of his administration is, (I breathlessly await his telling us who hired Angelo Torres) but he insists upon holding a law abiding gun dealer financially liable for some gun that he sold 10 or 20 years ago in accordance with the law that subsequently has gone through three or four different owners.

My other encounter was at a forum held in Wilmette, Illinois by the Illinois League of Women Voters. This forum was entitled "Gun Violence and What Can Be Done About It.” The forum was billed as a panel of "experts" consisting of a public defender who had had members of her immediate family murdered by a juvenile offender, a suburban police chief, an official from the Illinois Council against Handgun Violence, a public health advocate, and a moderator from the League of Women Voters.

The composition of this panel was very curious, since no one from the Illinois State Rifle association or the National Rifle Association was there, nor any academics the like of John Lott, the economics professor who has done an exhaustive study that concludes firearms in private hands are a net benefit society. I happen to know that these folks ALSO have an interest in the reduction of UNLAWFUL gun violence. (Note my emphasis on the word UNLAWFUL. Gun violence by the law abiding in lawful defense of life is something that I see as POSITVE. Pacifistic conflict resolution should be reserved for clinical settings where the offender is restrained and not engaged in an immediate threat to your life) I guess that this is the same sort of mindset that says that the New England Journal of Medicine is chock-full of information about muzzle energy, exterior ballistics, cyclic rates of fire, and defensive gun usage and that Guns and Ammo magazine has excellent treatises on heart surgery. But what do I know? It became readily apparent that this panel was not about an exchange of ideas to stop the unlawful use of firearms, but about infringing what the Second Amendment says shall not be infringed, namely the right to keep and bear arms.

The first speaker, the public defender, related a painful tale about a juvenile offender who attempted to fraudulently obtain a firearm owners identification card and failed in the attempt. He then broke into a lawyer's office and stole a gun which he used to murder the woman's sister and her husband. She then went on to inform us of the lifespan of a gun, which she said consisted of the date of its manufacture; it's acquisition by a criminal, and its use in a crime. (The use of the term lifespan brought to mind the remarks by Alan Keyes when he spoke of a certain pagan mindset amongst many gun grabbers that often anthropomorphize guns with human characteristics such as good and evil and in this case a sort of animate life synonymous with criminality.) She didn't seem to think that there were any other characteristics of a gun that were noteworthy and that there was no benefit to society of gun ownership that was worth mentioning. She lamented the fact that despite the passage of 20,000 gun-control laws in this country, criminals still have access to guns, and the only logical conclusion that I could draw from her analysis is to end legal access to guns by the law-abiding to defeat criminals. (I suppose it would be impolite of me to point out to her that criminals have access to all manner of illegal drugs such as cocaine and heroin despite their utter prohibition by law to every citizen in the United States.) By the end of her speech, a logical conclusion that could be drawn from her tragic tale is that her sister and her husband might have benefited by having a firearm to defend them. (But I know this isn't about logic. I should simply yield to the emotional power of her argument.)

The next panelist from the Illinois Council against Handgun Violence cited questionable studies purporting to show that since most Americans don't own firearms, he implied that most citizens would be willing to countenance a tyranny of the majority that would serve as a rationale to negate the protections of the Second Amendment, despite that inconvenient thing about "shall not be infringed.” He gave us the usual bogus statistics detailing "children" as being up to 19 years old and being killed by "guns", even those that are killed in the course of gang disputes over drug territories. (I wish the United States Army had considered me a "child" back when I was a 19-year-old buck sergeant in Vietnam in command of a 53 ton tank equipped with a 90 mm cannon, a 50 caliber heavy machine-gun, and a 7.62 caliber co-axially mounted machine-gun. I might have been able get away with a lot more stuff that they were willing to consider me has an adult to court-martial me for.)

The Police chief, who is president of the Illinois Association of Chiefs of Police, regaled us with anecdotal tales of officers responding to homes where people had been shot, both accidentally and deliberately, officers forced to defend their lives against criminal offenders with guns, and general criminal misuse of firearms. He did not generally relate this as to how to prevent handgun violence, but he did caution us that adherence to the "rule of law" demands that if a particular local township or city, under the rubric of police power, establishes a blanket prohibition banning any particular class of firearm, then that premise should be unquestioned and complied with. I got the feeling that he was a bit uncomfortable with much of the misinformation put forth by the panel, and that he knows from long experience that much of it is untrue.

The moderator from the League of Women Voters (a seemingly humorless woman who was reminiscent of Nurse Ratchett from “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”) wrapped up the discussion by agreeing to take a couple of hand written questions from the audiences that were submitted before the panel commenced speaking. The first question asked as to how Hale De Mar, the Wilmette resident who used a handgun to successfully defend himself against a burglar who had broken into his home two nights in succession, and had been prosecuted by the Village of Wilmette for violating its prohibition against possession of handguns; would have been benefited by the sort of gun-control advocated by the panel. (I can summarize that position fairly; totally prohibit the ownership of handguns.) What ensued was a classical Jackie Gleason "hommana hommana" moment wherein a full five seconds passed before any panelist responded. They said that since the Village had enacted their unconstitutional handgun ban that was the end of the matter and that he should have used a shotgun or a rifle to blast the miscreant with. (This ignores the very real possibility of the danger of over penetration that rifle bullets present when used at close range, and the physical difficulties that present for some people with operating the slides or handling the greater weight and recoil of a shotgun, to say nothing of ignoring the sacred concept of "choice" that the League of Women Voters seems to hold sacred when it comes to "reproductive rights.") The guy from ICHV cited what may be the most often cited example of social junk science ever, the Kellerman study which purports to show that you are 22 times more likely to be a victim of firearm related death if you keep a gun in your home than someone who does not. There were loud howls of disagreement from the audience after this turkey was invoked, and my friend, Rich Johns of rose to display a T shirt inscribed with the slogan of “Criminals for Gun control.”

The moderator then admonished the audience in a tone that would have suited David Copperfield’s headmaster Creakle by warning “If you don’t behave, we will turn off the microphones.” The discussion than ceased and devolved into groups of folks engaging the panelists in individual discussions. Rock solid 2nd Amendment supporter WLS radio talk show host Teri O’Brien was in attendance and expressed her sincere condolences to the speaker whose family had been murder victims. She said that she wished that her brother in law could have defended himself with a firearm. She responded by saying that O’Brien was insensitive for such a remark and walked away in outrage. Throughout this entire discussion, the second amendment was never once even mentioned as worthy of consideration has an obstacle to any sort of gun-control that they proposed, and has they continually mentioned seizing assault weapons and handguns from the general public they continually said that they did not want to take guns away from anyone. It brought to mind what the FBI was saying over the loudspeakers at Waco has they assured the people inside the compound that the Combat Engineer Vehicle with the 165mm demolition gun smashing thru the walls was not an assault.

All this exposition brings me back to my main point about the rule of law and gun-control and police power as Caprice Power. The legal term police power is an ancient concept, one that under girds the primary and most important reason for government, that of the responsibility to promulgate law necessary for the health, morals, safety, and welfare of the populace. Black's Law dictionary, 6th edition, p.1156 of defines police power as follows:
Police Power.
...adopt such laws and regulations as tend to prevent the commission of fraud and crime, and secure generally the comfort, safety, morals, health, and prosperity of the citizens by preserving the public order, preventing a conflict of rights in the common intercourse of the citizens, and insuring to each an uninterrupted enjoyment of all the privileges conferred upon him or her by the general laws.
The power of the State to place restraints on the personal freedom and property rights of persons for the protection of the public safety, health, and morals or the promotion of the public convenience and general prosperity. The police power is subject to limitations of the federal and State constitutions, and especially to the requirement of due process. Police power is the exercise of the sovereign right of a government to promote order, safety, security, health, morals and general welfare within constitutional limits and is an essential attribute of government. Marshall v. Kansas City, Mo., 355 S.W.2d 877, 883.
Note how this definition of police power is circumscribed by the requirement to be exercised within “constitutional limits.” The supreme law of the land is the United States Constitution, not the common law provision of police power. The exercise of police power must be subordinate to the supreme dictates of the Constitution. In the Quilici vs. Morton Grove decision, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals took the most expansive interpretation possible of the phrase "police power" in Article I, Section 22 of the Illinois Constitution and said that the right to keep and bear arms is what any particular unit of government says it is under the home rule provisions of the Illinois Constitution. The court held that Morton Grove may exercise its police power to prohibit handguns even though this prohibition interferes with an individual's liberty or property. In effect, the power of the state legislature has already been usurped by the courts concerning home rule gun bans, and this effectively preempts the right of the state legislature to carve out legislative exceptions to the unconstitutional gun bans enacted under home rule provisions. Just wait until one of these communities decides to appeal Illinois’s recent Self Defense Act passed over Gov. Blagojevich’s veto. They will cite the 7th Circuit Court Morton Grove decision as the basis to overturn the Act.

I consulted with a good friend of mine, the constitutional scholar Mark McGuire. Mark gave me black letter law on the constitution. Mark said that “a Constitution, whether federal or state is not a grant of authority, but a limit. That means that the Second Amendment has such is a limit on legislative authority, i.e. the police power.”

A climate has been created in Illinois wherein local communities such as Morton Grove, Oak lawn, Chicago, Wilmette, and many others have seized upon "police power" has the pretextual cart of gun prohibition to drive the constitutional "horse" of the right to keep and bear arms. The founding fathers were probably the most astute observers of governmental theories that have ever been gathered at one time in one place in all of history. They were quite aware of the police power provision of English common law, but they did not intend that the police power would modify the Second Amendment’s general protection of the right to keep and bear arms into a general prohibition on a whole class of firearm that are suitable for militia use. This militia use is for the “people” mentioned in the second clause of the 2nd amendment and is in accord with the provisions of the last Supreme Court decision that directly bore on the Second Amendment, the Miller decision of 1939. That held that the militia was 'A body of citizens enrolled for military discipline.' And further that ordinarily when called for service these men were expected to appear bearing arms supplied by themselves and of the kind in common (military) use at the time." Hand guns are common weapons of military utility for the individual soldier. The military has thousands of them.

None of this means that the right to keep and bear arms may not be infringed under any circumstances. The police power can be properly invoked to do so should one employ a firearm under circumstances that can reasonably be construed to cause alarm or harm to another, or in the commission of a crime. It is an entirely appropriate exercise of the police power to seize weapons so used and prosecute any such offenders. But that is hardly the case insofar as Wilmette, Chicago, Morton Grove, and the other units of government that invoke blanket prohibitions of handguns to ALL their residents, who are law abiding and peaceable.

I note that these communities are generally pretty affluent. I think it is safe to say that a large percentage of the residents are mature adults in professions that license them to fly airplanes, practice medicine and surgery, use explosives such as dynamite in construction, design buildings and bridges, and employed in many other occupations that involve a considerable degree of expertise and skill. It should be highly insulting to them to think that NONE of these residents are capable of using an instrument that an 18-year-old private in the military can be taught to use effectively in three days.

It is my earnest hope that discussions of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms can be reclaimed from the province of emotionalism, junk science, unconstitutional judicial decisions, constitutionally illiterate politicians, anti-gun news editorials, and replaced with logic, the original intent of the framers of the Constitution, and a respect for the citizens to whom the inalienable right to keep and bear arms is granted by natural law and protected by the 2nd Amendment.

==>THOMAS P.M. BARNETT-THE PENTAGON’S NEW MAP