By Peggy Tartaro,
Executive Editor

You would think after all this time that the last "From the Editor" column of the year would write itself-a review of the year, some "thank yous" to all and sundry and maybe, if I'm lucky, a bit of wisdom to end the year.

But, as I've mentioned before the "year" is never over when I start this column. In fact it's a gorgeous Fall day in Western New York, and while the Holiday Catalogs are starting to clog the mail, no one in her right mind is really thinking about the end of the year yet.

With six weeks or so to go, there's a lot of year left, especially 2005, which seems to have had more than it's share of ups and downs and "Breaking News" moments, even if television newsrooms around the country seem to have lowered the bar quite a bit when it comes to news flashes.

The biggest news for gunowners may well prove to be the granting of a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) in a suit brought by the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF), the National Rifle Association (NRA) and individual plaintiffs in the area whose guns were seized in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

As NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre pointed out, the "last time law-abiding citizens were disarmed, it was done by King George, and that didn't work for him, either."

This victory, in addition to restoring rights to Louisianians, sets precedent for the next disaster, whether natural or man-made.

Most interesting to those of us not directly in Katrina's wake, has been reaction to it.

Like Sept. 11, 2001, both the mainstream media and the vast majority of Americans, have taken away some valuable-if hard-won-lessons.

The media, and a great swath of the public are still apathetic or hostile to firearms civil rights, but since 2001, we have seen attitudes shift.

I'm sure every reader of this magazine has had a post-9/11 conversation about personal and home defense. And I'll bet those conversations have been thoughtful, intense and eye-opening, for everyone involved.

The passage of federal legislation allowing for armed commercial pilots is a good example. Most people readily understood that if you could trust a pilot with several million dollars worth of equipment and the lives of hundreds of people, you could also trust them with a firearm in the cockpit.

Although implementation of the program continues to founder on the shores of bureaucracy (and airline "safety" measures continue to veer from comical to convoluted), what the measure really provided was a restatement of principle: Americans protect life and liberty. Individual, civilian Americans.

So the ruling post-Katrina also reaffirms that. Even mildly anti-gun people watching a minimum of the wall-to-wall news coverage would agree that in the breakdown of everything from housing to government, an armed American is a good American.

The media, too, has, while largely ignoring the TRO, rather routinely showed individual civilians prepared to defend what's left of their property and not done much sneering about it.

Tested by actually being in Katrina's crucible, previously blown-dry, button-downed TV anchors have chatted amiably with doctors wearing Glocks on their hips and folks with shotguns on what's left of their front porch.

It's too bad that these types of lessons have to be relearned every couple of generations the hard way.

Peggy Tartaro

Photo © Copyright 1998 Nancy Floyd, used with permission.