It’s been a little while since I last boasted about how awesome New Hampshire is, and I am feeling a bit remiss. And this reminder comes courtesy of my blog-buddy Bruce, who has a bit of an advantage over me — he’s a New Hampshirite by choice, while I’m one by chance.
One of Bruce’s buddies quoted the inimitable Mark Steyn, from his latest book, “America Alone” (which I really, really need to get). Bruce reprinted the quote here, but I’m going to lift it myself:
New Hampshire has a high rate of firearms possession, which is why it has a low crime rate. You don’t have to own a gun, and there are plenty of sissy arms-are-for-hugging granola-crunchers who don’t. But they benefit from the fact that their crazy stump-toothed knuckle-dragging neighbors do. If you want to burgle a home in the Granite State, you’d have to be awfully certain it was the one-in-a-hundred we-are-the-world panty-waists’s pad and not some plaid-clad gun nut who’ll blow your head off before you lay a hand on his seventy-dollar TV. A North Country non-gun owner might tire of all the Second Amendment kooks with the gun racks in the pickups and move somewhere where everyone is, at least officially, a non-gun owner just like him: Washington, D.C., say, or London. And suddenly he finds that, in a wholly disarmed society, his house requires burglar alarms and window locks and a security camera.
Bruce, as I said, is a recent immigrant to New Hampshire. He lives about an hour and a half from me.
Mark Steyn is a Canadian, but he currently hangs his hat a couple of towns north of me.
In between us is Dartmouth College, alma mater of all three lawyers from Powerline and Joe Malchow (late of Joe’s Dartblog).
P. J. O’Rourke lives about half an hour from me. (I’m not quite certain where — he’s a bit chary about his privacy, and I respect that.)
And Dan Collins of Protein Wisdom and Bloody Scott lives right across the river. OK, he’s a Vermonster, but I bet he hops across the Connecticut River when shopping to avoid the Vermont sales tax.
Man, wouldn’t that be a hell of a gathering? I wonder if something could be swung for Dartmouth’s Homecoming weekend…
There’s gotta be something in the granite up here…
