Quote of the Day
This is a security system set up in such a way as not to inconvenience gun buyers and sellers. There is no other security system that I’m aware of that is set up in this way. Think of it: the TSA was set up to prevent another 9/11. But the nature of that job requires putting people at some inconvenience.
David Chipman
March 5, 2023
FBI gun seizure orders from people who fail background checks hit historic rates
How about we think of it this way, if someone is too dangerous to be allowed possession of a gun or to board a plane, why are they allowed to be unescorted while in public spaces?
Or another way, why hasn’t Chipman been prosecuted yet?
The TSA set up to prevent another 9/11? What a joke. The TSA is security theater, designed to employ at taxpayer expense a vast army of people unfit for real jobs. It is an agency unconstitutional to the very core.
There is a simple and well known way to prevent another 9/11: terminate the practice of having airlines be defenseless victim zones. https://www.scottbieser.com/sept11.html
It’s just like schools…kill zones for the young.
This country is going to have to totally repudiate a LOT of insane policies and government organizations (yeah right!…like THAT will ever happen)…
sigh…
TSA’s stated purpose is a classic case of fighting the last war: The usefulness of the tactic of taking over airliners to use as kinetic energy weapons ended with the impact Flight 93.
He did touch on one truth about how TSA really works: Security is inconvenient.
Good security also requires well trained and dedicated people and hard work, 24/7, which is expensive.
So instead, they cheaped out on the security (especially the personnel) and made it inconvenient so the general public would think they were getting security. The also created a Federal Workfare programs to buy votes with.
As Kevin Baker puts it: TSA is nothing more the Kabuki Security Theater
Worthless Security Theater. Aka Teatro de la Seguridad del Absurdo.
Turkeys Standing Around
Of course, Israelis address terrorism as a psychological problem, Americans address terrorism as an engineering problem. So we remove our shoes, receive scans of unknown risk, and are limited in the amount of shampoo and water we can carry on the airplane — or even carry to consume waiting to board.
I think about Peel’s Nine Principles of Policing, and how one of them is to not measure success by the number of arrests. Tons of confiscated nail clippers, Swiss Army knives and liter bottles of water, some of which are sold at auction later is not the measure of their effectiveness and success.
This is a great example of the pro-gun community claiming, “We should enforce the laws already on the books!” I’ve seen many instances of pro-gunners, including myself, lamenting about cases where some ogre felon attempts to buy a gun through an FFL, is declined, gets one through other means, and then shoots someeone. “Why wasn’t he prosecuted for attempting to buy a gun in the first place.”
This appears to be the case of getting what we asked for, and I don’t think we have good reason for bitching about it. If we don’t like the law, we need to change it. I’m sure this will be an unpopular opinion, but fair is fair.
I have always been baffled by those on our side having this “enforce the laws on the books” reaction to proposed gun restrictions when all the laws on the books are blatant infringements. If you want to be tough on crime then punish actual crime, not posssion of a tool. There should be no background checks because there should be no prohibited persons. As Joe often points out, trying to “keep guns out of the wrong hands” is a fools errand. Even if you think there should be prohibited persons, the government can’t be trusted with the power to enforce it (like most of the other powers they claim).
Spot on Jason. Plus, we already have laws against doing the wrong thing with a firearm.
Murder, assault, attempted murder. reckless endangerment. (whatever that might mean.)
And as Joe has also mentioned. If you can’t be trusted with a firearm, you can’t be trusted to be unsupervised.
Unfortunately, “fool’s errand” appears to be the major calling of governments everywhere.
They screwed up using the word “security”, Chipman and friends are incapable of securing public bathrooms. Let alone a country.
The problem as I see it, are that certain human failures, refuse to admit they are.
Chipman is one of many that just cannot bring themselves to confess they are just worthless. And the only way they can ever be truly useful is with a broom in their hand.
The next president should be all about that alone. Yes sir, that is your job title. But this is your new job. Turn in all your electronics, here’s your broom. Out front with you. Oh, I noticed some trash on the step on my way in. Hurry now.
That’s one thing I can say for the Chinese communists. All the old pictures had people sweeping up. They probably use to work in government somehow.
It’s not a matter of not inconveniencing the gun buyers, but a matter of not violating the right to self defense.
Thanks to the case law history, Freedom of Speech is the most broadly interpreted of the rights memorialized in the Bill of Rights. Just about anything government can propose to protect the public from agitprop is discarded because the means by which the important government purpose is met must be “narrowly tailored”with the least burdensome method, and virtually every time the matter comes up, something that interferes with freedom of speech or “freedom of the press (no theories on why the two rights are expressed differently) is discarded because it is not “narrowly tailored” enough. If the red-haired stepchild of the Second Amendment were treated equally, every law out there would be declared unconstitutional because it is not narrowly tailored enough, to the point that it constitutes “prior restraint”, another dirty word for the First Amendment.
The laws appear to the Statist David Chipman to not inconvenience gun buyers because it isn’t the purchase of weapons that must not be inconvenienced, but the exercise of a memorialized human right enumerated among the rights expressed in the Bill of Rights. He should imagine if his writings and speech had to be reviewed and approved by both parties in Congress before he could utter them.
The older I get the more I believe that every right and every delegated power to the national government should be reviewed using the standard of “Strict Scrutiny” I described above, not the misnamed “Rational Basis” test or the puzzling “Intermediate Scrutiny.” Those last two have become to me more of “Non-laughable Basis”.
Luckily the Bruen decision aimed to do away with the “scrutiny” standards; they are nothing more than means-end rationalization. The government is no longer allowed to say, “Yes, it infringes, but….” Anything after the “but” is part of a two-step analysis that SCOTUS declared “one step too many.”
If the Constitution and Bill of Rights mean what they say, then no amount of rationalization or “public interest” is good enough. Rights are rights. Period. Full stop. And the Constitution and Bill of Rights explicitly limit government intrusion on those rights.
“Does this statute implicate conduct protected by the First/Second/Fourth/any Amendment?” If yes, it’s unconstitutional. If no, it might be Constitutional or it might not; further analysis is required.
Bruen left some wiggle room for the government, provided they can find analogous laws from the time of ratification (1791) or Reconstruction (mid-1800s), which I think is a brilliant bit of trolling (intentional or unintentional). There were very few “gun laws” enacted at those times, and most of them were aimed at disarming blacks (former slaves, in particular) and immigrants. Let the Left — the self-labelled party of minorities — justify keeping those!
Yes, Bruen abolishes “scrutiny” — and about time for that unconstitutional abomination to die. It should be nuked everywhere, of course, not just in this one spot.
On the other hand, the “historic analysis” stuff is no better. It replaces one steaming heap of bunk by another. I guess lawyers are incapable of dealing with simple plain English words and the completely obvious meaning of “shall not be infringed”. It never meant “unless you can find a halfway plausible sounding excuse” (a.k.a., scrutiny) — nor does it mean “unless you can find some 18th century racist law that did it back then” (a.k.a., historic analysis). Neither is valid, all are crap.
Exactly my point about the trolling. Many if not most 18th century “gun control” laws were enacted out of racism, to disarm minorities and immigrants.
And those are the laws the self-styled “Party of Minorities” must point to in order to justify keeping current infringements.
Hypocrisy on display.
Or historic accuracy, after all the D party is the party of slavery and the KKK.
Worth reading: “The racist roots of gun control” by Clayton E. Cramer. It’s short, 20-ish pages.