You stated that gun laws helped the situation where you lived next to a drug dealer and feared for your safty. I didn’t and still don’t see the connection here so was wondering why you felt they helped. It sounded like you assumed he didn’t have any weapons because he was choosing to obey the laws.

BTW calling the cops on your neighbors with report of illegal drug dealing is probably a sure way to get your neighbors busted here in the states as well or did you not notice all the articles on much the police enjoy going on paramilitary style raids? So it sounds like you would have had exactly the same experience here and any potential gun law was not relavant anyway.

So . . . One weekend during the interval Mr. Balko had temporarily banned me from posting at the Hit’n'Run blog I went out and got a parallel universe generator. It pretty much took me all weekend to get the thing set up. It turns out that virtual parallel universe emulators are easy, peasy and you are pretty much good to go out of the box. However, in order to be sure of my experimental results, I paid the extra money for a real parallel universe generator. The money was no problem, but tuning the frequency of magnetic flux variations in the particle accelerator was a straight up b***h. Not only that, the spiral in one of the accelerators was a tad eccentric (nothing you could see, even with a fair microscope, mind you) and I had to take the whole set-up back to Radio Shack and get another one. They did not want to accept the return, but they did me right once I showed them that I was willing to camp out there as long as it took. Sometimes I think I might be the reason that they don’t have 24 hour Radio Shacks anymore.

Anyway, that first weekend with the generator I had my first successful trial run. I saw what would have happened if Kerry had won (long story short, it would have been worse). then I got busy at work for a few weeks.

My next free weekend, I did the parallel universe and set my self up in a comparable apartment building in San Diego with a comparable drug dealer. I was more fearful in this parallel universe than I had been in Toronto. I ended up living in a seedy motel on El Cajon Boulevard for 40 days, with all my stuff in a storage locker in La Mesa right by the 8. Although I did not see Tony’s gun, he made some remarks to the effect that he had one and was prone to accidental shootings. I found his threat credible. I got giardia (sp?) from the seedy motel and the movers who did my second move from the storage locker to my new place in LaJolla (well, LaJolla adjacent actually) took our prize collection of, ummm, erotica. Then I returned to our universe, which I call Universimus Prime.

The very next weekend had had the time to run another experiment. This time I put me and my wife and Tony (the dealer) and Matt (the noisy young drunk on the first floor flat) in a comaparble place in Cincinnati. the place was between downtown and the univesrity. the agent said it was Over The Rhine, but it was not really to far up the hill to be OTR. This time around I did not have a direct confrontation with Tony the dealer. The reason is that there were gunshots and helicopters around so often that I was simply to scared to do so. I ended up breaking my lease and going to Cheviot. Because I broke my lease, I ended up paying $15,000 in combined damages (to my ex-landlord) and legal fees (to my lawyer). In court, I told the judge about the gunshots and helicopters and how I did not feel safe in my unit. I said that the danger made it “uninhabitable” just like my lawyer had told me to do. The judge responded with a Latin phrase, which my lawyer whispered to me means “buyer beware.” I responded to my lawyer that I was only renting, and not buying, but she said that that made no difference. I left that parallel universe just about the time my first credit card bill came. I did not see any other way out.

Still convinced that I could find the American dream in some parallel universe, I replayed again two weeks later. This time I chose Dallas, specifically East Dallas. Lower Greenville — but, just a bit too low on Greenville, if you know what I mean. In this universe, Tony had a gun and shot me in the head as I was unlocking my front door one day. Of course, Texas has had CCW since ’95, and I had my mine when I was shot. Not only that, I was a crack shot because I would practice with my Dallas, TX buddy D.C. Rean on most weekends. However, Tony got the drop on me and I perished in a fountain of blood and tissue.

Now here is the crazy thing: if you die in a parallal universe, it turns out that your spirit may return, but your body cannot. You can post on blogs (I enjoy the Adge (natch!), Grylliade and Unqualified Offerings, but that is the only sense in which I continue to exist here in Universimus Prime.

So, anyway, MikeZ, I hope you accept my proof. I worked hard and made gr8 sacrifices to get it for you!

Now highly restrictive gun laws probably do reduce gun injuries, certainly domestic violence and accidental discharge incidents from otherwise law abiding citizens would go down. I just fail to see how a drug dealer who is already commiting crimes that would put him away for a long time, would be bothered by having a firearm for his own safety. Certainly he doesn’t have the option of calling the police if one of his transactions goes bad.

In my opinion attempting to ban 500+ year old technology seems like an exercise in futility.

Even if my wife and I had had pistols, there would be no way that that would have made us safe if he had had a gun. I had to go to work everyday and that meant walking past his door.

When things got a certain amount bad, we gave 60 day notice and found another apartment to move into at the end of 60 days. When things got much worse over the 60 day notice period, we started to make preparations to spend the last week in a motel, but we also called police and the police ended up arresting the guy which basically gave us time until we were out of there and into the new apartment (which had no drugdealers, yay!). So, yeah, we considered leaving and did leave.

If a comparable situation had happened in an American city, like, say, Philadelphia, then we basically would have had a much higher motel bill, a temporary storage bill, add’l mover costs and would have had to move further away when we did move. Don’t get me wrong. Some people in Toronto have handguns, but they are much less prevalent, and, in my particular situation, that was a good thing. It saved me money and logistical hassles.

Ed Grylls, A.K.A. Man vs. Wild takes a camera crew and they had to admit to cheating by staying in hotel rooms. But if you want to see a survivalist eat and drink the grossest things or run around naked in the snow, he’s your man.

If this story were in the States, the SWAT team probably would have wrecked up the joint more, put the guy in jail and released him when they felt like it, and said they acted correctly. No one would agree with the cops.

Because it’s Toronto, everyone is sorry and cool about it, but everyone thinks the cops acted correctly.

I’m a little skeptical about this one. It is just too perfectly wrong, and no real authority on the click-through that I saw. Photoshooped picture? If the tag is real, are we sure it belongs to that guy?

Dave W: Ever consider, I dunno, having a pistol of your own for defense? My reaction to a potentially deadly situation is to Not Be There, but otherwise, I’d prefer to be armed rather than hope some tweaker can’t break down my door. But I guess some people would rather shelve their self reliance and hope the cops feel like showing up when Mr. PCP is convinced you stole his stash.

What, you mean like in Britain?

Clever, but I can’t think it’s all that good for business.

It seems like it would be good to me. Advertising is supposed to be memorable first, and inoffensive second. And besides, the group that would likely find this most offensive is happily married people – not exactly the target market.

However, it was disturbing that an anonymous call reporting a gun would get the police into people’s houses, and not in a nice way. Sometimes no guns would be found. Never was a victim of that kind of prank, but I did not like the possibility hanging out there.