421 CHRONICLESnthink, potato soup but paw soup (viz.npig’s trotter). Steaks and eggs abound,nfrequently in combination. Hot toastedncorn — mats — is served, unpopped,nwith aperitifs. Remarkably inexpensivenChilean wines form the staple of mostnwine lists. It is not a great gastronomy. Itnis great countryside. We settle for that.nGeoffrey Wagner is a retired City CollegenEnglish professor who travels widelynin South America.nLetter From thenLower Rightnby John Shelton ReednGoetzing Down in the GunfirenStatenLast October 1, Florida’s new handgunnlaw went into effect and the talkingnhairdos on the evening news had annarched-eyebrow contest. As you maynhave heard, law-abiding Floridians, tirednof being an unarmed minority in thenSunshine State, rared back and passed anlaw that allows any Floridian with nonpolice record, $145, and two hours tonspare for token instruction to get a permitnto carry a concealed weapon. Moreover,nfor a while at least, thanks to anloophole in the law that no one seemednto be rushing to repeal, it appeared thatnanyone would be allowed to pack a pistolnin plain view.nFlorida, of all places. Who’d haventhought it? The least Southern of thenSouthern states. But I guess a full-pagenad in Southern Living magazine a couplenof years ago should have told usnsomething like this was coming. It wasnfor the National Rifle Association, and itnshowed a Cuban-American Florida statenlegislator fondling his pistol and sayingnhe wouldn’t give it up without a fightnbecause he knows what it’s like to livenunder Communist tyranny. This isn’tnthe image Southern Living usually triesnto project, but it does look a lot like life,nat least as far as Florida’s concerned.nThose of us who still think of Miami as anretirement home for old Trotskyitengarment-workers from the lower EastnSide are at least 20 years out of date.nSouth Florida has more Cubans andnNicaraguans than retired New Yorkersnthese days, and some of those guys arenreal Americans.nNow, I should say that my SecondnAmendment fundamentalist friends findnme squishy-soft on the subject of handguns.nI tend to believe that we compromisednthe constitutional principle whennwe gave up the right to carry automaticnweapons, bazookas, and flame-throwers,nand I’ve always thought that anythingnlegal you can do with a pistol, you can donas well or better with a long gun. Youncan shoot varmints with a .22, protectnyour home with a shotgun, resist tyrannynwith a deer rifle. About the only thing an.38 is better for is knocking over liquornstores, and it would be all right with me ifnwe outlawed handguns altogether. (Thatnis, if my state did — your state can donwhat it pleases. That’s what federalism isnall about.)nBut I must say the right people arenupset by Florida’s new law. Maybe it’snworth a try. A friend of mine who drivesna tow truck told me recenfly about goingnout at night to pull a car out of a ditch.n”There was two of them there when Ingot there, but must have been 10 after Ingot it out. They said they wasn’t going tonpay me—no way. So I reached back andngot my shotgun and told them: ‘I’mntaking this car in, and you all can get itnback when you bring the money.'”nDid they pay up? “They come in thennext day.”nDid he always take his gun along? “Indon’t leave home without it. You know,npeople are so mean these days.”nRobert Heinlein has observed that annarmed society is a polite society — andnLord knows Florida can use all thencivility it can muster. But plainly thenguardians of our civic morality are lessnscandalized by how mean people arenthese days than by what Floridians arendoing about it. So keep your eye on hownthis experiment is evaluated by thenmedia.nNo fair saying next year that Miaminhas the highest murder rate in the U.S.,nif not the Western Hemisphere. It hasnthat already.nNo fair, either, saying that more murdersnnext year are committed with handguns.nThat may happen, if only becausenpeople won’t have to use sloppy, slow,nunreliable methods like knifing, strangling,nor bludgeoning. The state-by-statenstatistics suggest that tough gun lawsnmean mostly that crimes of passion getncommitted with other weapons; wherenthere’s a will, there’s a way.nnnNo, the statistic to watch is totalnhomicides, however committed, excludingnthose in self-defense. Why excludenthose? Because that’s the point: Floridiansnapparently intend for some differentnfolks to die now. Folks that deserve it. Itnremains to be seen whether it works thatnway or not, but would it be a bad thing ifnit did?nThe fact of the matter is that Floridiansndon’t display much in the way ofnenlightened liberal concern for the livesnof scum. It was in Florida, after all, thatnan oft-burglarized storekeeper was acquittednlast year for rigging a booby trapnthat electrocuted a young share-thewealthnactivist. Florida is right up therenwith Texas in legal executions, too; younmight say that this new law just extendsnthe “definition and, ah, privatizes thenprocess.nSome other statistics we might want toncheck out in a year or so are those fornrobbery, burglary, and rape. When thenlaw went into effect, the network newsnshows all carried interviews with youngnwomen on firing ranges saying thingsnlike “If somebody tries to rape me I’mngoing to blow him away.” I wouldn’t bensurprised if some rapists move to NewnYork. As drive-in movie critic Joe BobnBriggs observes: “There’s somethingnabout a woman in a bikini with a machinengun strapped across her chest thatnsays, ‘Hey, women are people, too.'”nMaybe pocketbooks that might holdnSmith and Wessons can get the samenmessage across. The old Colt .45 wasn’tncalled “the Equalizer” for nothing.nA book you probably haven’t seennreviewed in the mainstream press presentsnsome evidence to back me up. InnArmed and Considered Dangerous,nJames Wright and Peter Rossi report thenresults of interviews with nearly twonthousand felons, doing time in the prisonsnof 10 states. A majority of thesenexperts agreed that criminals avoid potentialnvictims they believe to be armed,nand two out of five had themselvesndecided in the past not to commit ancrime for that reason. Three-quartersnagreed that burglars avoid occupiednhouses for fear of being shot, and over anthird had actually been scared off, shotnat, or captured by an armed victim.n(These gentlemen, by the way, had hadnno difficulty obtaining weapons, evennunder restrictive laws, but over 80 percentnof those who had used guns toncommit crimes said that if they couldn’tn