I promise you; you will want to read this excerpt from The Life of Colonel David Crockett if you haven’t already.
There’s a powerful lot of meaning in few words. I intend to print it off and hand it to my daughter, to be brought into her high school history class for discussion.
Special Thanks to LukeM, who brought it to my attention in comments here. I don’t know how I missed it for so long.
I want to be clear: the New York Times editorial board does not oppose gun ownership. We believe the Second Amendment confers a communal right on Americans to own guns – not an individual one. But that’s actually a smaller point than you might think. All we really want are sensible restrictions based on public safety and common sense. I wrote about our position in April, 2009 on our website. You can read it there, but I’ll summarize it here.
Go ahead, buy a gun. Use it to hunt, for target practice, in a collection, or in case you need to defend your home. Just register it and submit to a background check. If you live in a city, then your political leaders have the right to restrict ownership of handguns. In cities, they tend to be used to kill people.
Andrew Rosenthal
November 8, 2011
The Gun Lobby and Military Suicides
[This is so full fail that I could write thousands of words about it. But I don’t have the time and the people in the comments did a pretty fair job and raking him over the coals.
I’ll just give an overview.
Since all nine U.S. Supreme Court Justices disagree with the individual right issue what Rosenthal and the NYT editorial board thinks only has political implications and very few legal implications.
The very words he uses demonstrates he is essentially living in a different universe. We don’t have “political leaders”. We have public servants. Our servants do not have “rights” to regulate anything. They have delegated powers given to them by the people via the U.S., and state constitutions. When our servants start demanding we give up firearms and beg permission from them to own what is a specific enumerated right it is quite clear to me they have either forgotten they are servants or that they intend to change the relationship.
Yes. Handguns are sometimes used to kill people. Sometimes deadly force needs to be legally exercised and sometimes people get killed. Get over it.—Joe]
Today I’m reminded of this quote from David Crockett;
Mr. Speaker–I have as much respect for the memory of the deceased, and as much sympathy for the sufferings of the living, if suffering there be, as any man in this House, but we must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for a part of the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living. I will not go into an argument to prove that Congress has not the power to appropriate this money as an act of charity. Every member upon this floor knows it. We have the right, as individuals, to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of Congress we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of the public money. Some eloquent appeals have been made to us upon the ground that it is a debt due the deceased. Mr. Speaker, the deceased lived long after the close of the war; he was in office to the day of his death, and I have never heard that the government was in arrears to him. Every man in this House knows it is not a debt. We cannot, without the grossest corruption, appropriate this money as the payment of a debt. We have not the semblance of authority to appropriate it as charity. Mr. Speaker, I have said we have the right to give as much money of our own as we please. I am the poorest man on this floor. I cannot vote for this bill, but I will give one week’s pay to the object, and if every member of Congress will do the same, it will amount to more than the bill asks.
Representative David Crockett (TN)
Those are the words of a real man. I don’t know specifically who it was he was referencing. That’s not the point. If you want to help a veteran, by all means help a veteran. That’s your job. Personally. Don’t try to make a federal case out of it. Our military exists, ostensibly, to defend liberty, see. If we set up system of coercive redistribution to “honor” veterans, we’ve just insulted the hell out of them by contradicting everything they supposedly fought for. Hmm? So what side are we really on?
This book is dedicated to Harlon B. Carter, the man responsible for saving the Second Amendment freedoms for generations of Americans during a time in our country when gun ownership was on the road to extermination as a cherished and fundamental right. Equally important are the tens of thousands of local activists who make the “gun lobby” the true grassroots dynamo that it is. Money doesn’t vote, people vote, or as we said in the sixties, “Power to the people” and, I should add, “away from the elites, wherever they dwell.” I think Thomas Jefferson would have approved.
Richard Feldman
2008
Dedication to Ricochet: Confessions of a Gun Lobbyist
[This is a very nice start to the book.
Think about the “Power to the people” phrase. And remember what Chairman Mao said, “Every Communist must grasp the truth: Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” Private ownership of firearms is the ultimate power in the hands of the people. Yet nearly all communists and socialists who advocate “power to the people” in the U.S. today are opposed to private gun ownership. Why is that?
Could it be they don’t really want power in the hands of “the people”? I think what they really want is power in the hands of their people and want to remove power from those that oppose them.
Communism and socialism is not about “power to the people”. Those political systems are about government having a huge power advantage over the individual. “Power to the people”? No. Not at all. That isn’t what they really want. But no one has ever accused the political left of being consistent.
Thank you Richard for sending me an autographed copy. More later when I finish it. Not all of my review is going to be positive though. I’ve already got notes that are “not happy thoughts”.—Joe]
That’s the answer to Billy Beck’s question.
I’ve criticized your religion, certainly your politics, and the inconsistency behind the idea of women’s equality. Why not criticize your thoughts on homosexuality?
We’re not supposed to talk about it, right? It’s a taboo subject. For one thing we’re supposed to shut up out of fear– fear of being ostracized as a ‘gay’ basher or a homophobe. So when a man sees another man raping a boy, he clams up. If he’d beat the shit out the rapist as he should have done, he’d be the one charged with a crime and no one would say anything in his defense for fear of being labeled a ‘gay’ basher. Same as when a black, homosexual, Democrat man in Congress (probably the most protected class of humans, unless you’re talking of a black, lesbian Muslim extremist) running a homosexual prostitution ring in his basement. What? I suppose you’re a racist homophobe with a political agenda. Shut up. You Suck if you criticize this hard-working American who cares about kids, the poor, race relations, union workers and the environment, you racist homophobe. Neanderthal!
Sure; the witness should have done the right thing and kicked the rapist’s ass, even if he knew full well that he’d be the one prosecuted. But our cultural insanity makes doing the right thing just that much more difficult. And that, I submit, was the whole purpose of what I will call the insanity movement the first place– what’s good is bad and what’s bad is good. What’s wrong is right and what’s right is wrong.
How else do you get 300 to 400 million people to tolerate being treated like sheep?
I put the word “gay” in scare quotes because it doesn’t mean what most people today think it means. I try to use the language properly, so using “gay” to mean homosexual requires the quotation marks. He’s a bit “queer” is of course a euphemism. Lots of things are queer, but we’ve lost track of the word’s meaning. “Gay” is the same sort of euphemism, as is “fag”, as applied to a homosexual. If we’re going to use the terms in their true meanings, or understand them when we encounter them in classic literature, we have to be aware of this, and talk about it. So there you have it. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to suck on one of the nice faggots I usually keep with me right now. And by the way; I suppose I could sue you if you criticize me for smoking. If it’s an addiction, or a disease, you’d be harassing or “bashing” a person with a disability. Shut up. You have no right to talk about it unless you give me lots of money. Oh, and stop taxing me because of my disease. Would you propose a tax on “gays” who get AIDS? Shut up. Now I’m thinking of closing comments because no one is supposed to talk about any of this stuff. Shut up.
We’re not even supposed to talk about this, I guess, because it proves we’re sexist. Too bad.
When the Flappers painted the town red in the 1920s, we were told women had achieved equality. When women hit the factories during World War Two, we were told women had achieved equality (see the trend yet?). When women burned their bras in the 1960s, we were told women had achieved equality. When the pill came out, we were told that women had finally achieved equality. Women’s suffrage happened somewhere back there too.
A hundred years of non-stop achievement of equality later, we’re being told how sexual harassment is a problem in the workplace, and it’s 99.999% men doing the harassing and women, still, are the victims. Because they haven’t achieved equality I guess. What’s the message to men with ambitions? If you’re going to be running for high office ten or twenty years later, you better keep women out of your workplace so they can’t come back when the time is right and destroy your campaign. Don’t hire women. Don’t work with women, because all it takes for a women to destroy you is for her to point a finger at you.
If men and women were equal, there’d be roughly the same number of men complaining about harassment by women as the other way ’round, or at least it wouldn’t be so overwhelmingly one-sided. A high school aged male I knew was getting rather steamy text message from a far older, married woman employer. It was fairly apparent that sex was happening between them. An experienced lawyer said that maybe he should count himself the luckiest kid in school.
That’s the double standard and it’s everywhere. At the same time we’re being told that women are strong, that they can not only take care of themselves they’re capable of doing anything a man can do at least as well as he can do it, we are simultaneously asked to believe that the slightest gesture can turn a strong, capable, professional woman into a quivering blob of dysfunctional, sobbing, frightened, victimized jelly that only huge sums of money, or certain political outcomes, or both, can cure.
When I was interviewing a college-age woman for a bookkeeping position at my small business, she asked if there was enough work there to actually keep her busy full time. Fair question. In addition to telling her that although the business was small, it was complex, and that furthermore, being small, there were a lot of other things she could do besides keep books. What I meant, and I expected it to be as obvious as the rather prominent nose on my face (she was a business major after all) was that total specialization is something a small business cannot afford, therefore we all have to pitch in with cleaning, stocking shelves, receiving shipments, answering phones, and hundreds of other tasks that are involved in keeping a business running properly that don’t warrant separate employees. Her response caught me off guard. I was accustomed to working in the real world, unaware of just how bat-shit insane the world of leftist political academia had become. Condition white;
“WELL…just what’s THAT supposed to mean…?!!” Gawd. She’d apparently been to one of those “How-to-know-when-you’re-being-sexually-harassed” classes they offer to women on college campi these days as part of the “Women’s Studies” curriculum. Interview over. Don’t call us, we’ll (not) call you. We have enough problems without having to deal with stupid shit like this.
Which is it, then, ladies? Are you capable of standing up for yourselves, strong, and proud to play a vital and dynamic role in all the action, or are you perpetual victims, bent on being perpetual victims for social, financial and political gain? Do you want to be taken seriously or do you want to be a poor little victim, ’cause it sure as hell can’t be both. This bi-polar premise is running rather thin and I for one quit falling for it sometime back in the 1970s.
I guess. It’s an electric milti-copter. It has one thing going for it that a number of flying machines don’t have– it’s actually gotten off the ground with a human aboard. I don’t know what it has to offer that a regular helicopter or auto-gyro doesn’t. Maybe it’s the power transmission system being electrical wires instead of drive shafts and belts. I immediately though of a hybrid (gas/electric) system, and they talk about that on their web site. Great as batteries have become, they’re still no match for gasoline.
Still, the main obstacle to wide-spread (affordable) personal aircraft is the FAA and similar, tax-payer-funded authoritarian gangs. Note that one of the benefits to the multi-copter sited is the fact that it can be flown as an ultra-light– it gets past a lot of the aviation regs. In a free market we’d all have viable, affordable options for our own aircraft right now. Poor college kids would have them, as easily as they now have old beat-up cars.
I suppose that would scare the pee out of the authoritarian cowards, so maybe it could be said that we have our current, restrictive system as a means of avoiding the embarrassment for certain people who would soil themselves in public, falling into the fetal position and sucking their thumbs, or simply getting angry and losing control that way. Frankly, I’d kind of like to see that. Not in that it would be pleasant, mind you, but it would indicate that we’re on the right track. In a society where cowards are given any notice other than to receive our contempt, or where cowards actually run things, there will be much impediment to real progress.
HT to the Blaze
Sebastian has the info on the most recent incident where banning something made it more popular that ever.
I’ve posted about this type of thing before.
The people that enact rules and laws like this apparently don’t have children or weren’t paying attention when they were growing up. When I was helping the kids buy Christmas presents for their mom (~20 years ago) I would put the packages in the car and never mention the contents again. They never told their mom what she was getting for Christmas. On the other hand Barb will repeatedly remind them all the way home and again as they entered the house, “Don’t tell Daddy what he is getting for Christmas!” They would burst through the door and run the length of the house and tell me what I was getting before Barb could get the packages into the house.
Sebastian speculates, ‘Americans, I believe, also possess the same “character that reacts against the hectoring and bossiness of officialdom,” as their British cousins.’ While correct, that characteristic well extends beyond Brits and Americans.
I thought nearly everyone had heard of Eve, the Garden of Eden, and forbidden fruit.
I’d commented just this morning that I’d seen more than enough of Newt. Then this was sent to me by a relative of a relative;
Not too shabby for a Republican. The problem for Newt though is that we know Newt. He has a history. I can only assume that this was a trial balloon for him– to see how this sort of thing sells in the marketplace (in the minds of people like him) in which the industry of political rhetoric sells its wares. He’s a craftsman in the art. I still think the world is better off with Newt as a history teacher.
“Isolate and crush the secular socialist left” he says. The only reference to liberty he makes is to religious liberty. OK, what about the religious socialist left? Why bring in the “secular” bit when you could just say “crush the socialists”? He still talks about “running” the country too. That bugs me– Raise your hand if you want to be run by someone in Washington. See? Didn’t think so.
The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence is concerned about states’ rights:
“National concealed carry reciprocity legislation is a terrible idea for public safety and a huge affront to states’ rights,” said CSGV Executive Director Josh Horwitz.
I guess that means we can count on their support for The Firearms Freedom Act, states that wish to ban abortion, and even the reinstituting of slavery should some state desire it.
What these people don’t understand (or more likely just don’t want to acknowledge) is that states’ rights/powers only extend as far as the people rights. There are certain individual rights that are guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution that no state, county, or city may infringe upon. The right to keep and bear arms is one of those rights.
A sense of confidence in the courts is essential to maintain the fabric of ordered liberty for a free people and three things could destroy that confidence and do incalculable damage to society: that people come to believe that inefficiency and delay will drain even a just judgment of its value; that people who have long been exploited in the smaller transactions of daily life come to believe that courts cannot vindicate their legal rights from fraud and over-reaching; that people come to believe the law – in the larger sense – cannot fulfill its primary function to protect them and their families in their homes, at their work, and on the public streets.
Chief Justice Warren E. Burger
Courts: The Chief Justice Speaks Out
U.S. News & World Report (vol. 69, No. 8, Aug. 24, 1970) 68, 71
Address to ABA meeting, Aug. 10, 1970.
[I am of the opinion that the first two conditions have already been met.—Joe]
There are some things that are just completely incomprehensible to me. Maybe someone else can put it this into words I can understand:
The National Jewish Democratic Council (NJDC) unequivocally opposes and condemns all invocations of the Holocaust in political discourse.
Does this sort of prohibition also apply to invocations of the Soviet, Chinese, and Cambodian genocides as well? Or is there something special about the Nazi regime that means it is special? If so, then why? And how does one determine this “specialness” in advance rather than just memorizing some rules someone made up?
Further along that same line I have had numerous people tell me my “Jews in the Attic Test” is “brilliant”, “genius”, “one of the best things you have ever written” and it got me a “Thinking Blogger Award”. But one Jew I pointed it out to told me, “I agree with everything you say here but you must change the name. You don’t realize how offensive that is to Jews.”
What?
I. Just. Don’t. Get. It.
I don’t know. I like watching The Universe series on The History Channel (once I get past the stupid graphics and the talking-down-to they give us) but this guy, a frequent contributor to The Universe, seems a little too full of himself for someone who apparently doesn’t understand the words he’s using.
Just as there are many solar systems in our galaxy, and many other galaxies in the universe, there may be, we find, other somethings (he uses “soap bubbles”) in the universe. “Universe” has it right there in the word– Uni. There can be only one. What all it may include is a subject for further study and discovery, but there is only one. Please.
Maybe this bugs me more than it should, but I don’t think so. When it comes to cross-culture or cross-generational communication it is critically important. Simple things like the meaning of “the People” and of “…shall not be infringed” have been under assault for example. If we’re not constantly on our guard we lose our history. When we lose our history we lose our culture and our freedom.
For the Sesame Street audience, “soap bubble” works OK, but surely there’s a better choice. I’ll take it over “multiple universes” any day though, as the latter is a direct contradiction of terms, hanging right out there in your face.
Encarta offers this definition of the universe; “the totality of all matter and energy that exists in the vastness of space, whether known to human beings or not.” Well there you have it, see? You might want to alert the theoretical physicists and the astronomers you know. That last clause is even better than I’d hoped. I’d figured on something more like “everything that exists everywhere, period. No, really– everything. Seriously. Dude” but that definition has a bit of a problem built into it. Ten points if you can describe it.
First and foremost you must quit looking at and treating the law-abiding armed citizenry of the United States as the enemy. For if you don’t, we certainly will be.
Convince us by your actions that you are no better than the gangs who commit crimes without uniforms and we will treat you similarly. And there ain’t nearly enough of you to shove us around in a real national emergency.
Mike Vanderboegh
February 17, 2010
“Choose this day whom you will serve.”: An Open Letter to American Law Enforcement.
[Note that this was written before the details of Fast and Furious had become public.
It may be becoming time for law enforcement to chose which side they are on. The failure of the Occupy Wall Street “movement” to achieve anything close to critical mass should be a sufficient hint that the socialists are not the clear winners if we have an economic collapse.
The left has seriously overplayed their hand; Polls show them in extreme distress, “under the radar” gun control is failing and the Tea Party has demonstrated itself far more numerous and smart than the OWS/Flea-Party. So what happens next? They have two choices. They can retreat and regroup or they can “go for broke”. I think OWS was the left to testing the waters of the go for broke option.
The question now is; Will the socialists in power swallow their pride and do the wise thing or will they let their narcissism go into full bloom? I know far too many people invested in copper, lead, and brass who would like a return on that investment for the “full boom” option to end well but I’m not sure the narcissists really understand reality and it will be American law enforcement that has to make some very tough decisions.—Joe]
I find the destruction of any kind of government data utterly abhorent (sic) and contrary to the concept of open government.
In response, I’m posting publicly a copy of the gun registry database I received via the Access to Information Act in 2007.
Glen McGregor
October 26, 2011
You can have my gun registry data when you pry it from my cold, dead hands
This is regarding the Canadian long gun registry.
[“Any kind of government data”, really? What if it was a registry of one of the following:
What McGregor apparently doesn’t understand is that this registry is something that should have never been allowed to exist in the first place. There are some datasets which only use is abuse or the risk of such abuse is much greater than any benefits that might be gained. When a list is a set of people who are in the minority and who historically have been victims of oppression then extreme scrutiny must be given to the existence of such a list let alone the publication of such a list.
I will give McGregor a little bit of slack that some of his commenters don’t in that he claims his copy of the list does not have any names or addresses in it beyond the first two characters of the postal code. This helps some. But an oppressor (think of the Belgium Corporal story) could use this data to confiscate all the firearm in a particular postal code area by going door to door demanding to know who owns, for example, the Remington 700 chambered in 30.06 with serial number XXXX.
The right to keep and bear arms is a fundamental natural right and for any government to keep records on the exercise of such a right is to put the right in jeopardy of infringement.
Your “cold, dead hands” McGregor? I don’t think it will go that far. I believe the threat of a prison sentence will be more than sufficient to get the data destroyed. But if not then I don’t have a problem with him dying in prison over it.—Joe]
…when we do lose, and we’ve been losing, on balance, for over 100 years so this matters.
Kevin posted this as an example of truth, which of course it is…as far as it goes. Excellent as his points are, Epstein doesn’t wrap up the argument. He gets the ball to the goal line and then punts. Excellent drive, but we never score. The enemy gets the ball at the 20 yard line. As I told Kevin, Epstein ignores the elephant in the living room;
Watch Does U.S. Economic Inequality Have a Good Side? on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.
Did you notice the omission? That is a fairly classic example of an argument between what I call “tweakers” (I know– the term is already taken, but it fits here). It’s like two dairy farmers arguing over how to get the most milk from their cows. “Tweak the cows (people) this way, and you get x result, tweak the cows that way and you get y result, etc.”
The discussion went as far as it could without actually mentioning the fact that we aren’t cattle, what we achieve or own is none of the government’s business, and that the United States was created as a place where rights protection was the government’s main job– not tweaking people. Id est, there is no moral or principled argument unless you count material result or statistical result as a principle, which it isn’t.
As Ayn Rand so eloquently stated some 50 or so years ago– the self appointed champions of conservatism are often the worst enemies of liberty. By failing to make the moral argument, while the enemy has plenty of (false) moral arguments, we often appear hollow and even hypocritical to the less attentive.
They’re the ones motivated by compassion. We only have only the cold steel nuts and bolts– economic theories that help the rich while ignoring the plight of the poor and desperate.
Epstein’s cross examiner knew he was scoring points with his audience when he repeatedly used the term “inequality” to falsely describe what Epstein was advocating.
Here’s the elephant in the room– human rights protection. That one thing that’s so lacking everywhere else in the world. The banishment of coercion. The American founding principles. The shining torch of Liberty that has brought so many people here from all over the world. The unleashing of the human spirit.
Wrap it up. Cross the goal line, or we’re doomed.
A biometric login for your computer is useful and very cool. A biometric database of 9 million Jews with pictures, fingerprints, name, date of birth, national identification number, and family members is a target.
From 1933 through the early 1940’s IBM made a lot of money helping the Germans collect, sort, and distribute that sort of data.
That target was hit and is now available for free download.
Think about the implications before you advocate for a National ID card or the mandating of ID in order to be functioning member of society. Giving up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety has known consequences.
Someone has their tin-foil hat on way too tight:
The Obama regime is preparing to instigate a revolution for the purpose of their being able to hold on to power and complete the enslavement of the American people.
According to this report the “Occupy Wall Street” protests that began in New York City nearly a month ago have now spread to at least 25 other US cities and show no sign of abating any time soon.
From what I have seen in Seattle there isn’t that much going on and what is going on isn’t the material of a revolution.
About Pres. Reagan. I recall that he added an extra 5 cents tax per gallon on our fuel, ostensibly to repair the failing highway system, because the gazillions they were already collecting and wasting weren’t enough. Reagan then held that extra tax money over the state of Idaho’s head, saying we had to change our drinking age from 19 to 21 or we wouldn’t see any of the money they were taking from us. Idaho caved.
That radically changed the economies of all Idaho border towns.
No one seems to have learned anything from that– when our drinking age was lower and our sales tax far lower than bordering states, we got tons of business from those states. We don’t have that so much anymore, so now our idiot Republican Governor has his thooper thpecial “Hire One” program– you’re supposed to call the state apparatchik and see if your business qualifies to be part of a state government jobs program. Oh goody. To call him a fool is being generous. Right– I want to put my capital at risk, create new products, bring them to market and worry my ass off the whole time while getting robbed by this mutherfucker, so he can take credit for my work. I think I’d rather die.
Kind of like our country as a whole. Some educated kid from Germany was complaining to me recently about the “Fat Cats” sheltering their money in other countries (other than the United States, where he lives). Those dirty bastards who won’t hold still and let us rob them…how dare they? I asked him if our country shouldn’t be the place people from all over the planet come to secure their property rights. That’s what we were supposed to be. Remember? He stood up and left, saying he didn’t want to get himself in trouble. Good riddance. I have that effect on a lot of people.
It’s like I always say, the Tragedy of the Commons is a tragedy of commons. No commons, no tragedy. How much simpler could it get?
Mark Alger
October 24, 2011
Comment to Quote of the day—Ted Turner.
[There are some commons that probably have to stay common. For the example the atmosphere, the oceans, and to a certain extent the electromagnetic spectrum. But it is an idea worth giving considerable consideration.—Joe]