Not long ago one of Instablogs’ most unspeakably ignorant and dishonest contributors, Rudolf Ogoo Okonkwo of New York City, wrote a post in which he attacked the people of the South for having too many guns and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia as being “crazy” and “irrational” for supporting their right to do so under the U.S. Constitution. Rudy apparently feels it’s much more civilized to live in the anti-gun climate of his own northern bastion.

As usual, Rudy failed to do any kind of research to support his post, much less to post links to source material the way any serious professional blogger always does. This means that’s its ludicrously easy to blow Rudy’s analysis to smithereens and expose him as the naked propagandizing charlatan he in fact is.

So I’ll take this opportunity to do that now, and throw a little lesson on electoral politics into th mix.

Most educated Americans understand that their president isn’t chosen by them. Instead, he’s chosen by a special parliament they elect to choose the president, which is called the “Electoral College.”

In 2000, Democrats were complaining about the Electoral College, because it didn’t agree with the public will. The public wanted Al Gore to be president, but the College chose George Bush instead.

But you didn’t hear a word of complaint from those same Democrats when Bill Clinton got just 43% of the popular vote in 1992. In a pure democracy, you need a majority of the vote to win. In a pure democracy, failing to get a majority is the same as losing. In a pure democracy, with no Electoral College, we would have had to have a runoff in 1992 between Clinton and the sitting president, George H. W. Bush, with all the other third-party candidates, who drew millions of votes, including billionaire right-winger H. Ross Perot who stole millions of votes from Bush, excluded. It’s far from a sure thing that Clinton could have won such a contest. But he didn’t need to try, because the Electoral College favored him with a majority, so the people’s vote didn’t matter.

The same thing happned to John Kennedy in 1960. Hear any Democrat complaining? No? Didn’t think so.

Speaking of 1960, it’s interesting to look back at the Electoral College breakdown by state that year. Each state gets votes in the Electoral College to match its population share in the country. In 1960, Rudolf’s home state of New York had 45 electoral votes. The People’s Republic of Massachusetts, JFK’s home, had 16, and nearby Pennsylvania had 32.

Now spring ahead 42 years to Clinton’s first election, and you see quite a different picture. Today, New York has only 33 electoral votes, the PRM has just 12 and the Keystone State isn’t really a keystone any more, with a paltry 23.

The voting block represented by these three northern bastions fell from 93 to 68, a stunning drop of more than 25%.

Why did this happen? It happened for one simple reason: People were fleeing the north in droves, and they’re still doing it today.

In 1960, Texas had just 24 electoral votes, one more than Pennsylvania has today. Today, Texas has 32 – the same as Pennsylvania had in 1960. Florida had a puny 10 electoral votes in JFK’s day; now it has a whopping 25, nearly triple its former total. In 1992, Florida and Texas cast 87 electoral votes for George H. W. Bush while New York and Pennsylvania cast 58 for Bill Clinton. Had the 1992 election occurred in 1960 instead, Clinton would have received 77 votes in his two states while Bush would have got only 34 in his pair

Get the picture?

The fact is that with their loose rules on gun ownership (and lots of other ways of living that differ from their northern counterparts) Texas and Florida are walloping New York and Pennsylvania, with their strict gun rules, in the only vote that counts – the one where people vote with their feet. People in the United States either like guns or don’t mind living with people who like them. People who like guns build successful, attractive states and draw population while people who hate guns build failing states that are driving off their population in hordes. If things go on as they are now, New York and Pennsylvania will become unpopulated wild preserves that the people of Florida and Texas will take vacations to hunt and fish in.

Oh and, one more thing Rudy forgot to mention. Until Scalia’s ruling the place in the country with the absolutely most strict rules on gun ownership was Washington DC, which banned them entirely. And guess what: Washington DC also had a higher level of gun violence of any state in the country, and higher than big cities in states with relaxed rules on gun control.

Rudy didn’t tell you any of this, nor did he tell you he’s just an art student with no qualifications whatsoever to analyze Surpeme Court rulings, because he’s a shameless propagandizing liar, the kind of laughably irresponsible blogger who causes the mainstream media to scorn online journalists and dismiss us. Who, in other words, gives all bloggers a bad name.

And he didn’t tell you because he’s a classic “Democrat” — in other words, the last thing he believes in is “democracy.” Instead of giving the people what they want and allowing them to choose for themselves, he wants to force people to accept “what’s good for them” as Rudy decides it — just like Franklin Roosevelt, who ended up giving us concentration camps for the Japanese after he tried to pack the Supreme Court with sycophants to do his bidding.

Rudy’s entitled to his own (warped, perverted) opinion, of course. But he’s not entitled to his own facts.