Via Fark, the Associated Press reports:

A man tried to use a stun gun to fend off a carjacker and ended up being shot five times.

...While trying to reach for his money, the man also pulled out his stun gun and shocked the carjacker. But the carjacker reacted by shooting the man at least five times, [Atlanta police Sgt. Lisa] Keyes said.

...Keyes stressed the importance of simply giving up the vehicle when confronted by a carjacker.

Bzzt, wrong. The correct answer was: "Quit messing around with Tasers and get a real gun."

Dangerous Dan points out a This is London story about Daniel Craig, the actor who will be playing James Bond in the upcoming Casino Royale and, presumably, other films in the series. Ironically, it seems that he hates guns:

Daniel Craig will have a problem playing the new James Bond — because he hates guns.

The actor will wield 007's famous Walther PPK in the movie Casino Royale.

But he revealed in OK! magazine: "I hate handguns. Handguns are used to shoot people and as long as they are around, people will shoot each other.

"That's a simple fact. I've seen a bullet wound and it was a mess. It was on a shoot and it scared me. Bullets have a nasty habit of finding their target and that's what's scary about them."

Craig, as an actor, should be able to immerse himself in the role despite his views. But if history is any guide, the results could be disastrous:

Craig is not the first Bond to reveal a hatred of guns.

Roger Moore, who played the superspy from 1973 to 1985, said after quitting the role that he hated "that awful pose" of Bond with his gun which has become an iconic movie image.

Moore is widely regarded as the worst Bond ever, and his movies are seen as having nearly wrecked the series. Here's hoping Craig does better.

I think the real danger, though, is not that Craig will fall short, but that the movie scripts will be toned down to reflect his own personal preferences. That means we could see Bond flicks with titles like:

•		The Man with the Golden Reputation for Fairness
•		A View to a Peaceful Resolution to the Dispute
•		License to Talk Things Over
•		The World is More Than Enough for Everyone, So Let's Share

Sadly, Ace's prediction is looking more prescient every day.

When they're the ones bearing them. (Via Instapundit.)

Frankly, after seeing his attempt to operate a boat, I wouldn't trust him around dangerous weapons.

Horror stories are coming out of New Orleans, with roving bands of looters stealing guns and shooting at police and rescue workers.

Some bloggers are taking these shocking incidents as an opportunity to once again deride that old Robert Heinlein quotation, "An armed society is a polite society."

Of course, no society in which thousands are trapped in 15 feet of floodwater without food or shelter is apt to be particularly polite. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that "society" in New Orleans has broken down all together and ceased to exist for the time being.

And, in such a situation, guns can come in pretty handy to ward off gangs of looters. Here's a brief media roundup:

USA Today:

Looters have been prowling here practically since the rain stopped Monday. Some residents have armed themselves to protect their property.

The San Antonio Express-News:

A detective told the New Orleans Times-Picayune the looting was "ferocious" and was only going to get worse.

So it wasn't a big surprise when people picked up guns to protect their businesses and homes. That's what happens when folks know the cops aren't coming.

The Advocate:

Employees at A.J.'s Produce Co. on Chartres Street in the Bywater neighborhood of New Orleans, spray-painted bright-red stern warnings for would-be thieves right on the sides of the building.

"You loot, we shoot!" they read. "Looters will be shot!" And "loot and die!"

"We had a few come around, but the boogie man scared them away," said 59-year-old John Allen, who sat in a lawn chair guarding the building about 10 a.m. Tuesday. "The signs did the job."

The Houston Chronicle:

Managers at the Covenant Home nursing center were prepared to cope with power outages and supply shortages following Hurricane Katrina. They weren't ready for looters.

The nursing home lost its bus after the driver surrendered it to carjackers. Groups of people then drove by the center, shouting to residents, "Get out!"

On Wednesday, 80 residents, most of them in wheelchairs, were evacuated to other nursing homes in the state.

"We had excellent plans. We had enough food for 10 days," said Peggy Hoffman, the home's executive director. "Now we'll have to equip our department heads with guns and teach them how to shoot."

And one more, from those gun lovers at the The New York Times:

John Carolan was sitting on his porch in the thick, humid darkness just before midnight Tuesday when three or four young men, one with a knife and another with a machete, stopped in front of his fence and pointed to the generator humming in the front yard, he said.

One said, "We want that generator," he recalled.

"I fired a couple of rounds over their heads with a .357 Magnum," Mr. Carolan recounted Wednesday. "They scattered."

He smiled and added, "You've heard of law west of the Pecos. This is law west of Canal Street."

The stories of armed looters on the rampage are indeed appalling and repulsive, but they don't lead me to cry out for gun control. It's at times when law and order dispappear that criminals will be able to get guns most easily — and law-abiding people will most need one close at hand.

One positive impact blogging has had on me is that it's made me read more books. Some were specifically mentioned on blogs I read, and others seem like they'll help flesh out some of the ideas and topics I've been reading about and debating online.

One particularly enjoyable recent read was the widely-discussed Freakonomics, in which economist Steven D. Levitt applies quantitative analysis to unlikely questions, like whether Sumo wrestling matches are sometimes rigged. (Answer: Yes.)

However, the old saying notwithstanding, if you're going to write a book about unconventional, outside-the-box thinking, it really shouldn't copy someone else's cover:

Logic and its Limits Shaw 1997 (2nd edition)	Freakonomics Levitt, Dubner 2005

FOLLOW-UP:
A more substantive criticism of Freakonomics is Levitt's tendency to gloss over or ignore evidence that undermines his arguments. To his credit, however, he has started a blog where he acknowledges (although does not always fully address) criticisms.

In this post, titled "Does Freakonomics Suck?", he links to a detailed and persuasive rebuttal of his contention that legalization of abortion post-Roe v. Wade led to a decline in crime rates in the 1990's, as fewer unwanted children were around to turn into criminals.

I have similar problems with Levitt's offhanded dismissal of the idea that gun ownership deters crime, because criminals are less likely to attack people who might be armed. He mentions one researcher who found such a link, but then says there were "allegations" that he forged his data. Well, people can "allege" whatever they please, and often do, especially on contentious issues like gun control. That doesn't mean their allegations, without any substantiating evidence, are valid.

Levitt then mentions that other researchers failed to find that gun ownership deterred crime, without naming them, identifying their studies, or assessing the quality of their findings. He also fails to consider the possibility that gun ownership might deter certain types of crime, like burglary, more than others, like battery. Or that below a certain level of gun ownership, the risk that potential victims might be armed could be too low to deter criminals.

In short, Levitt is quick (and correct) to attack society's overreliance on "conventional wisdom", yet it seems he's not above creating a little conventional wisdom of his own. Perhaps the best thing I can say about Freakonomics is that I took its message of skepticism to heart and instinctively applied it to the book itself.

ANOTHER FOLLOW-UP:
I emailed Levitt about the similarity in covers, and he was gracious enough to respond, pointing out that he addressed the matter on his own blog in this post back in April. It reads:

Chika Azuma, a cover artist at William Morrow, created the present cover. According to the book jacket, it was derived from a photo collage by James Meyer/Getty Images; the inside orange slice is credited to Jan Cobb. Our guess, therefore, is that the apple/orange existed as some form of clip art, likely the same source used by another cover artist for another book cover.

Another mystery solved.

YET ANOTHER FOLLOW-UP:
In the notes at the end of the book, Levitt does cite two researchers who claim that increased gun ownership does not lead to lower crime levels. But he does not describe or evaluate their findings, and I doubt most readers will have the resources or inclination to dig up old issues of the Stanford Law Review or the Journal of Political Economy on their own.

Robert Mugabe's policy of confiscating farmland from white farmers and handing it over to his political cronies and military backers has, over the past several years, effectively killed Zimbabwe's once-productive agricultural sector. Fields that once yielded bountiful harvests now lie fallow and untilled. In many cases, plots have simply been abandoned by new owners with no farming experience.

As a result, people who once lived in Zimbabwe's rural regions fled to its cities and industrial areas. That left Mugabe with a problem: Having destroyed the countryside, how could he get people to move back there and start farming again? His answer was elegant in its simplicity: Destroy the cities, too. The Telegraph reports:

President Robert Mugabe's onslaught against Zimbabwe's cities has escalated to claim new targets, with white-owned factories and family homes being demolished in a campaign that has left 200,000 people homeless.

Across the country, Mr Mugabe is destroying large areas of heaving townships and prosperous industrial areas alike.

The aim of this brutal campaign is, says the official media, to depopulate urban areas and force people back to the "rural home".

But Mugabe isn't just destroying private property. He's also crushing his political opposition:

Virtually all the areas singled out for demolition voted for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change in the last elections. The MDC says that Mr Mugabe ordered the destruction as a deliberate reprisal. But the regime is also seeking to depopulate the cities, driving people into the countryside where the MDC is virtually non-existent and the ruling Zanu-PF Party dominates.

The Guardian offers a sense of the impact Mugabe's wave of destruction is having on ordinary Zimbabweans:

Thousands of families have been made homeless and are sleeping in the open as winter sets in, taking night temperatures down to 4C (39F).

"The police came in the morning and just started tearing down people's homes. Some were burned down, others were bulldozed," said a resident of Chinotimba township in Victoria Falls. "My sister's home was torn down, and so she has moved in with us."

...Police and army flattened nearly 1,000 homes in an area of the capital known as Hatcliffe Extension, according to Trudy Stevenson, MP for Harare North. "It looks like a bomb hit the area. The destruction is terrible."

The 81-year-old Mugabe, who is also moving to nationalize all land, is ensuring that he will have total and uncontested dominion over an impoverished hellhole. Brilliant.

(Found via Tim Blair, who sees parallels with Mao's Great Leap Forward.)

FOLLOW-UP:
Perry de Havilland says Zimbabwe needs a revolution.