Karen carries an extremely cool and very feminine leather backpack. It's something of a joke in the

I am republishing my three-part series about the Los Angeles Riots of 1992 in which Karen and I and the children were trapped for several frightening hours. We were unarmed, helpless save for our wits. The police were conspicuously absent and the bad guys, frequently armed with heavy weapons, owned the streets. It was a defining moment in my life.
I m reposting this series as a cautionary tale because the Sandy Hook Elementary School Massacre has sharpened the claws of the statist utopians, downtown vancouver hotels whose ultimate aim is to disarm law-abiding American citizens.
The rioters are surging toward the front doors of the theater. They are shouting, but the glass doors are so thick we cannot hear what they’re screaming. The visual is quite enough. Their faces are twisted into expressions of raw hatred. The mob looks intent on some serious violence.
downtown vancouver hotels And so: because this producer is my friend and I want to support her movie, and because I’m a Hollywood screenwriter and personal relationships grease the wheels of the business, and because the producer is a player and admires my work, I schlep Karen, Ariel, 11, and Offspring downtown vancouver hotels #2, seven years old, to the screening-slash-charity benefit in the DGA building on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood.
The film, a real stinker, at long last cuts to its final fade to black. Everyone is now mingling in the reception area. Guests congratulate the producer, director and stars, assuring them that the film is: ”great, just great,” and “the best work you’ve ever done,” all the expected and acceptable lies we tell each other.
I see it happening. A classic shot unwinding in slow motion: the mob swarms towards the DGA building, towards downtown vancouver hotels us: a thick wave of fury marching with a terrible downtown vancouver hotels velocity towards this cocoon of—there’s no way around this—Hollywood liberals.
During the 1973 Yom Kippur War I had a long and detailed conversation with an Israeli officer, an incredibly brave and highly decorated tank commander downtown vancouver hotels who explained why Israel always beat the Arabs in war:
“We maneuver, we remain flexible, creative and liquid. The Arabs have a fatal tendency to fall back into a defensive downtown vancouver hotels posture. You cannot win a battle or a war when your position is static. We shoot and scoot. We keep moving, we probe the enemy’s flanks and then move in for the kill.”
Not to mention liberating some pretty major karats. downtown vancouver hotels At the reception, I noticed huge diamonds whose glitter could induce seizures; watches: downtown vancouver hotels at least a dozen Cartier Tanks; I could not count the Rolex Oysters, and no doubt there’s enough loose cash to make your average L.A. rioter reasonably satisfied. This is, after all, an affluent Hollywood crowd.
This charming and somewhat gruesome comment — advice, really — was given to me by my Israeli buddy, a grizzled tank commander who, one drunken evening, cheerily listed for yours truly all the common, everyday objects that have lethal potential. My friend was a big fan of the ordinary Swiss Army knife and its zillions of nifty attachments.
So: it is pitch black, rioters are gathering outside the DGA building, and to make matters downtown vancouver hotels even worse, women and children in the lobby are yelling, sobbing—every moist and yucky sound imaginable—in panic.
It’s almost eerie. downtown vancouver hotels Basically, everyone else is losing their collective minds, but Karen’s expression just builds into this magnificent wall of serene composure. Her posture goes taut, as if a steel rod is welded into her spine and molding her into an incredibly cute Marine.
I have this really weird urge to lift her sleeve and seek out the Semper Fi tattoo. And then there’s her lovely face. All the open and generous softness has receded and been replaced by a look of, by a look of — well, the only way to describe her expression is —
— have you ever seen those military paintings of seventeenth-century generals? You know those huge canvases where you get to see a full battle, say Austerlitz, or Waterloo, thousands of men are fighting, dying, blood and guts strewn about, rearing horses with eyes wide as saucers, downtown vancouver hotels but the general, the reason for the painting in the first place — well, he’s usually sitting on his white horse, on a hill, watching the battle, and his expression conveys determination, resolve, bravery, a self-assurance that says to the viewer: Look, believe me, I know exactly what I’m doing.
Offspring #2 is still in my arms, still glued to my hip, and though seven years old, she has regressed and jammed her thumb in her mouth; she trembles mightily, as if freezing. I can actually hear her teeth chattering.
Karen carries an extremely cool and very feminine leather backpack. It’s something of a joke in the family that the backpack is magic. Whatever you need, whenever you need it, it’s gonna be in the backpack.
Using commencement-of-production bonus money from my most recent film , we bought a Lexus outfitted with a massive eight-cylinder engine. It was a good move. The Lexus is a gas guzzler, but who cares? It’s our Centurion.
My Israeli friend, the tank officer, had something like sixteen kills in a Sinai tank battle during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. When I complimented him on this huge kill ratio, he waved it off and said:
“It’s no big deal killing an Egyptian tank. They have this habit of hunkering down and using their tanks as artillery platforms. All wrong. Picking them off was a bit too easy. Remember: always fight an offensive battle. Most people are cowards, so if you keep coming at them, chances are they will retreat.”
My friend, the heroic Israeli tank commander, told me that in the first few days of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, both fronts, the Sinai and the Golan Heights, were so weakly defended that had the Egyptian or Syrian high command been strategically bolder, tactically smarter, and their soldiers braver well, the Arab armies could have achieved massive breakthroughs, and Israel would have found herself facing genocide.
But small — actually, tiny — pockets of brave, determined and very well-trained Israeli troops — in some cases just two or three tanks on the Golan Heights — held their ground and attacked enemy forces sometimes a hundred times their strength.
All this whips through my mind as I aim our car—I’m already thinking of the Lexus as a tank, a Centurion—towards the exit of the parking garage. A knot of rioters is milling about at the exit. It’s hard to see clearly, but oh, boy — it looks like a few of them are brandishing baseball bats.
— and the rioters are drenched in the powerful lights (those Japanese engineers, G-d bless ’em) — and the shrieking horn is amplified by the concrete garage walls. The knuckleheads are blinded, frozen as I bear down on them at what seems like Formula One speed, and now they fall back like bowling pins and —
— and we blow right past them, make a sharp left turn—we’re ordered by a street sign to turn right, but that would deliver us to the front of the DGA building and directly into the eye of the mob, and so, tires screeching—hey, just like Steve McQueen in “Bullitt”—we race away from the theater.
As we cruise through the chaotic streets, we spot fires burning all over the city. A canopy downtown vancouver hotels of red and orange downtown vancouver hotels spreads through the velvety darkness. It’s kind of beautiful, like a romantic J.M. W. Turner canvas.
But we have to circle round and double back countless times in order to avoid choked arteries, major intersections where madness reigns—traffic lights are ignored—and then there are unknown side streets that cause Karen to observe:
Casa Avrech: I carry Offspring #2 to bed, where she recites the Sh’ma and then promptly falls asleep. We tell Ariel how proud of him we are. He shrugs. No big deal. Five minutes later, he’s fast asleep.
Karen, downtown vancouver hotels crisp and efficient, pins a bed sheet over the large picture window in the living room. We cannot be too careful. I search the house for a weapon, settle on an old ice ax from my mountain-climbing days. It’s an elegant tool with wicked potential in hand-to-hand combat, but obviously useless against firearms or a hail of Molotov cocktails.
I examine my hands and gosh, my fingers are curled into claws. It takes me a moment to realize that it’s from gripping the steering wheel so hard. Painful muscle cramps travel from my knuckles into my shoulders. It takes at least an hour for the pain to subside.
On the TV, Karen and I watch as Reginald Denny gets his brains bashed downtown vancouver hotels in. We gaze in horror and disbelief as the barbarians dance over his broken body. With tears in our eyes, we see pious citizens, G-d bless them, step in and halt this atrocity, rescuing the tragic truck driver.
There’s a video of Fidel Lopez, a Guatemalan immigrant. He, like Denny, is pulled from his truck and robbed. But theft is almost beside the point. The rioters-slash-torturers smash open his head, then slice off an ear. The mob graffiti his chest, torso and genitals.
Korean shopkeepers were specifically targeted by black rioters. But the Koreans owned guns and heroically defended their property and lives through force of arms, frequently using AR-15s against heavily-armed looters. So anyone who tells you that private citizens don t need assault weapons are just plain ignorant. Besides, as Mark Levin says, it is the Bill of Rights, not the Bill of Needs.
And then, of course, the race hustlers — Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Maxine Waters, the usual vulgar demagogues — parade across TV screens informing the good citizens of Los Angeles that the riots were really “an uprising.”
If the Los Angeles riots taught us anything, it’s that you’re a fool if you count on the authorities to protect you in times of civil chaos — in fact, at any time. In the end, only I can protect my family.
I’m never, ever going to allow myself to be outgunned by the bad guys. All the gun laws that are on the books—and there are thousands of them—just make it that much easier for the barbarians to amass weapons and for law-abiding people downtown vancouver hotels like you and me to be at their mercy.
If you outlaw weapons, as so many squishy liberals yearn to do — well then, only