One of the first real-life stories I heard about the .44 Magnum was from a Tennessee sheriff whom I met one spring at a law enforcement conference in St. Louis. “Most men can't handle the goddamn thing,” he said. “It kicks worse than a goddamn bazooka, and it hits like a goddamn A-bomb. Last week I had to chase a nigger downtown, and when he got so far away that he couldn't even hear my warning yell, I just pulled down on the bastard with this .44 Magnum and blew the head clean off his body with one shot. All we found were some teeth and one eyeball. The rest was all mush and bone splinters.”

Well. . . let's face it; that man was a bigot. We've learned a lot about racial problems since then. . . but even a nigger could read The Police Chief in 1970 and see that we haven't learned much about weapons. Today's beat cop in any large city is a sitting duck for snipers, rapers, dope addicts, bomb-throwers and communist fruits. These scum are well-armed -- with U.S. Army weapons -- and that's why I finally quit official police work.

As a weapons specialist I saw clearly -- in the years between 1960 and 1969 -- that the Army's weapons-testing program on the Indo-Chinese peninsula was making huge strides. In that active decade the basic military cartridge developed from the ancient 30.06 to the neuter .308 to a rapid-fire .223. That lame old chestnut about “sharpshooters” was finally muscled aside by the proven value of sustained-firescreens. The hand-thrown grenade was replaced, at long last, by the portable grenade launcher, the Claymore mine and the fiery missile-cluster. In the simplest of technical terms, the kill-potential of the individual soldier was increased from 1.6 per second to 26.4-per second -- or nearly five KP points higher than Pentagon figures indicate we would need to prevail in a land war with China.

So the reason for this nation's dismal failure on the Indo-Chinese peninsula lies not in our weapons technology, but in a failure of will. Yes. Our G.I.'s are doomed in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Burma, etc. for the same insane reason that our law enforcement agents are doomed in Los Angeles, New York and Chicago. They have been shackled, for years, by cowardly faggots and spies. Not all were conscious traitors; some were morally weak, others were victims of drugs, and many were simply crazy. . .

Let's face it. The majority of people in this country are mentally ill. . . and this illness unfortunately extends into all walks of life, including law enforcement. The illness is manifest in our National Stance from Bangkok to Bangor, to coin a phrase, but to those of us still dying on our feet in the dry rot of middle America there is no worse pain -- and no more hideous proof of the plague that afflicts us all -- than the knowledge of what has happened to The Police Chief, a magazine we once loved because it was great.