Colonel Jeff Cooper's To Ride , Shoot Straight, and Speak the Truth describes exactly what is wrong with the United States today. Cooper wrote of the society in which he grew up during the 1930s,

Boys were taught to shoot and use their hands, and girls were taught to expect that in their men. ... In that society, it would have been both futile and ridiculous for two punks to assume control over 159 people.

Cooper's position was that there was no excuse -- none -- for 159 passengers to allow a pair of hijackers to take over an airliner. It is easy to imagine what Cooper would say about more than a million people in Boston and its suburbs allowing one punk to lock them in their homes, and out of their workplaces, at a cost of up to one billion dollars. The message to terrorists could not be clearer: Any deranged individual willing to sacrifice his life or his freedom can bring a major U.S. city to its knees.

Cooper explained exactly why:

The press, academe, and the law enforcement establishment preach: Do not fight back! On the street, in your home, on the airplane, on the high seas, anywhere, anytime. Do not fight back! You may be hurt.

This contemptible, despicable, and pusillanimous culture has not, fortunately, infested the Old South, most of the Mountain States (except Colorado), or rural and suburban Pennsylvania and Ohio. It is no coincidence that these are places where it is legal to carry a sidearm openly without a permit, and/or it is fairly straightforward to get a concealed carry permit. The "cringe like sheep" mindset is, on the other hand, most pervasive in the major metropolitan areas that are also the clearly identifiable origin of almost all attacks on the Second Amendment. Consider the five largest cities on the list:

(1) New York City, the home or origin of Governors Mario and Andrew Cuomo, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Senator Charles Schumer, and Reps. Carolyn McCarthy and Jerrold Nadler, is why New York State is among the three worst places in the country to do business. It is also noteworthy that the alleged perpetrator of the Boston bombing had selected Manhattan as his next target. New York City is probably the best place in the country to get millions of hoplophobes into the positions to which they are most suited: on their knees, or in the fetal position.

(2) Los Angeles, the home of Henry Waxman, is why California also is among the three worst places in the country to do business. Senator Dianne Feinstein is from San Francisco, another source of California's problems.

(3) Chicago, the home of Barack Obama, Rahm Emanuel, Rep. Jan Schakowsky (the wife of convicted felon Robert Creamer), and convicted criminals Bobby Rush and Rod Blagojevich, is why Illinois also is among the three worst places in the country to do business.

(4) Houston may be an anomaly because Texas has a long history of individual self-reliance. Santa Ana needed several thousand Mexicans to lock down the defenders of the Alamo, and the Mexicans eventually lost the war to a general named Houston. Harris County did, however, vote primarily for Obama.

(5) Philadelphia is the home of Second Amendment enemies Joe Sestak and Allyson Schwartz, who recently announced that they will run for governor. Schwartz has serious problems with her ethics and integrity, as shown by her support for malicious and frivolous lawsuits against firearm manufacturers. Several state legislators from Philadelphia, meanwhile, proposed a revival of Jim Crow laws whose original purpose was to make it difficult or impossible for minorities and working class people to own firearms for self-protection.

The Problem's Root Cause

Let's take a closer look at the common source of almost all attacks on the Second Amendment. These are, and again not coincidentally, the bluest voting regions on the map. These locales generally have their hands out for taxpayer largesse. These cities may contain hundreds of thousands of individual workers, but they are collectively parasitic welfare cases. The underlying reason is easy to understand.

Cities evolved for two very specific purposes: defense and commerce. Long-range artillery, followed by aircraft and missiles, transformed them from defensible positions into dense, vulnerable, and high-value targets. The suburban shopping mall, and now the internet, has rendered them largely obsolete as centers of commerce. Who wants to buy something from a store in New York, where the price must cover the city's taxes, high rents, and high living costs, when he or she can buy the same thing from a rural distribution center? Why does anybody need to pay upwards of $60 per square foot per year for office space in Manhattan, when one can offer financial or other services from anywhere in the country? Henry Ford foresaw these problems more than 90 years ago:

And finally, the overhead expense of living or doing business in the great cities is becoming so large as to be unbearable. It places so great a tax upon life that there is no surplus over to live on. The politicians have found it easy to borrow money and they have borrowed to the limit. Within the last decade the expense of running every city in the country has tremendously increased. A good part of that expense is for interest upon money borrowed; the money has gone either into nonproductive brick, stone, and mortar, or into necessities of city life, such as water supplies and sewage systems at far above a reasonable cost. The cost of maintaining these works, the cost of keeping in order great masses of people and traffic is greater than the advantages derived from community life. The modern city has been prodigal, it is to-day bankrupt, and to-morrow it will cease to be.

These are the same entities trying to tell the rest of us to surrender our means of defense entirely so we can become good little sheep just like them. The Boston lockdown should have taught them exactly where that gets them; onto their knees, or into the fetal position.

What is the Solution?

One punk, or even ten punks, cannot lock down the more heavily armed parts of our country. This does not mean that citizens strap on their hog legs, form a posse, and try to bring him (or them) in by themselves. Problems with amateur law enforcement include the chance of shooting the wrong person by mistake, along with the fact that a street is not a firing range with a backstop behind the intended target.

What this does mean, however, is that rational and prudent citizens might carry weapons while performing daily chores, or while driving to and from places of business. They don't look for the punk(s), because that is a job for law enforcement professionals who know what they are doing. The punk(s), on the other hand, had better not come looking for them. The punk does not hijack a car, break into an occupied residence, or terrorize somebody on the street without considerable risk to his personal safety.

The punk therefore does not shut down so much as a small town, let alone a major metropolis, in a well-armed society. The fact that one shut down Boston is incontrovertible proof of the degeneracy of the values and culture of the enemies of the Second Amendment.

William A. Levinson, P.E. is the author of several books on business management including content on organizational psychology, as well as manufacturing productivity and quality.