Is the purpose of legal proceedings to get at the truth or to provide media entertainment?
Thomas Sowell
March 12, 1998
Media Circus versus Justice
[Sowell was referring to the Monica Lewinski/President Clinton media circus but it applies just as well to the Martin/Zimmerman media circus.—Joe]
It cannot be overlooked that the statutes strip peaceable, law abiding citizens of the right to arm themselves in defense of hearth and home, striking at the very core of the Second Amendment. As such, these laws, much like those involved in Heller, are at the “far end of the spectrum of infringement on protected Second Amendment rights.”
Judge Malcolm J. Howard
Senior United States district judge for the Eastern District of North Carolina
March 29, 2012
MICHAEL BATEMAN, VIRGIL GREEN, FORREST MINGES, JR., GRNC/FFE, INC., and SECOND AMENDMENT FOUNDATION, INC.,
Plaintiffs,
v. BEVERLY PERDUE & REUBEN F.
YOUNG, Defendants.
[This was a ban on the possession of firearms outside the home during a natural disaster or other emergency..
A few years ago the Brady Campaign was claiming a complete ban on firearms was constitutional. Their brief in the Heller case specifically claimed “the Second Amendment guarantees no right to possess firearms unless in connection with service in a state-regulated militia.”
They retreated to a position of advocating severe restrictions carrying guns outside the home. A position they strongly advocated as recently as a couple weeks ago, “Maryland and other states with more restrictive laws have chosen not to make Florida’s mistake. Their choices should be respected by the courts. Nothing in Heller, or in the Constitution, suggests otherwise.”
Now it has now been ruled this infringes upon the very core of the Second Amendment. It was at the far end of infringement.
Also this week the New York Combined Ballistic Identification System was scrapped, “the state has spent $32 million on CoBIS since the creation of the program in January of 2001, and not one crime has been solved with this technology.”
It’s getting difficult to keep up with all the wins we are making.
The options available for the Brady Campaign to have relevance have become extremely narrow and virtually no one listens to them in the small domain they might be able to eke out an existence in.
I think it is Tequila time again for the Brady Campaign and their supporters—if they can afford it.—Joe]
The greatest delusion is the hope that the evils in this world can be cured by Progressive legislation.
Bonzer Wolf
Tag line
[At this point in time I am of the opinion that most of the evils in the world are the result of Progressive legislation. This is especially true if you include the Progressive movement of the early 20th century in Eastern Europe.—Joe]
I protect my family, my property, my interests and my life. If you did the same we wouldn’t need a Neighborhood Watch. Or Democrats.
Fred
March 28, 2012
Comment to New Happenings in the Zimmerman Case.
[That is overstating things a little bit but it does have a lot of truth in it too.—Joe]
In this age of the rule of brute force, it is almost impossible for anyone to believe that anyone else could possibly reject the law of the final supremacy of brute force.
Mahatma Gandhi
August 11, 1920
The Doctrine of the sword
[But he did successfully reject brute force. By nearly every measure he won his political objectives.
He changed the course of history not only by winning critically important battles but by teaching the world the methods by which non-violent methods can achieve revolutionary political ends. This is something those advocating violence in the Martin/Zimmerman case would do well to learn and remember.—Joe]
Remember:
Birth control is not cleaning your guns…on the couch… in your underwear… every time she brings a boy over. It’s doing it on his couch.
Christopher Pearson
March 26, 2012
Via the gun email list at work.
[While this parenting technique has its merits it’s also probably a pretty good way to get your daughter pissed at you.
Not that I have any experience in that regard. But I will say that being about a foot taller than your daughter’s date, wearing all black, armed, wearing a Boomershoot coat and silently following about eight feet behind them for 50 yards as they leave the movie theater in the mall and out into the parking lot before they notice leaves an impression too.—Joe]
what the fuck do you need to be carrying around a gun for?
You have to go to Starbucks with the dick you have, rather than the dick you wish you had.
Ash Can
March 4, 2010
Comment to Open Thread: Penis Substitutes At the Ready!
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday!—Joe]
Lethality is the nicotine of the gun industry. Even more than the tobacco companies, firearm manufacturers have been shielded from public scrutiny and exempt from health and safety laws that govern other products.
Tom Diaz
January 20, 1999
[“Shielded from public scrutiny and exempt from health and safety laws? Do the rights protected by the First Amendment have a Federal Agency devoted to the regulation of them? Do you need to pass a background check before you can purchase a book on religion?
Are you required take a class and get a license before you are allowed to vote? But what is more dangerous? A few million people carrying handguns in public or a Joseph Stalin implementing his progressive political views? Diaz is not only has his facts wrong he doesn’t even have a clue about the dangers facing humanity.—Joe]
It is a shame that we are still a species that feels comfortable, even celebrates, an instrument built solely to maim or kill. We are, after all, the same species that believes in persuasion and reason and has seen the efficacy of nonviolent movements. Yet ending tyranny and oppression and defending life and liberty still seem to require firearms.
John Yemma
March 12, 2012
Guns and freedom: the American paradox
[For the Christian Science Monitor it’s actually a pretty favorable opinion. My impression is that Yemma in transition from an anti-gun position to something neutral or even positive. He sees the tragedy of firearms misuse but recognizes that at least in worst case situations they are necessary.
We need to keep coming out of the closet and showing the benefits of gun ownership. It’s fun, it decreases crime, and it is a deterrent to tyranny.—Joe]
To be sure, correlation doesn’t prove causation. But the experience of Colorado State and DC should come as no surprise. By now there’s so much evidence that higher rates of gun ownership lead to lower rates of crime that it isn’t hard to fathom why fewer and fewer Americans want to ban handguns.
Jeff Jacoby
March 21, 2012
A safer society with guns
[Via David Hardy.
As David said, “It’s staggering that the Boston Globe ran this.”
We need to continue the mop up operations in many places but at this time it is just pockets of resistance that need to be cleaned up. They will scream, yell that the blood will run in the streets, and fight us as best they can but their current strategy and tactics is a losing game plan. Their only hope is to change their approach and I don’t see anything that has a reasonable chance of working. Only terrorist operations have any chance at all against us and I can’t see that working without other, extreme, complicating factors coincidently aligning in such a way as to be enable them.
On the other hand it is easy to imagine we eventually will have constitutional carry everywhere in this country.—Joe]
New Yorkers surrender their weapons for the good of all or face jail time.
…
Jerome and Graves pleaded guilty to misdemeanors and were sent back to states where the right to own a gun can trump the right to live.
New York Daily News
March 31, 2012
District Attorney Cy Vance deserves praise for pursuing gun cases–New York City is the wrong place for unlicensed weapons
[If surrendering weapons was for the good of all then why don’t the police do it?
You don’t have a right to live. That would imply someone could be forced to provide you food, shelter, and medical care. As always when someone says something is a right the first thing you should ask is, “At whose expense?”
What the New York Daily News ignores or is oblivious of is that you do have a right to defend yourself and that all members of the U.S. Supreme Court agreed there is a right to keep and bear arms. I expect their ignorance will be forcibly ended by the courts within a few years. Whoever wrote that opinion piece will then be dragged, screaming and kicking, into the 21st Century just as the KKK supporters had to be forced into respecting the rights of black in the 20th Century.—Joe]
Generally speaking, it isn’t “progressive” to want to repeal the Industrial Revolution.
Ken
March 18, 2012
Comment to Quote of the day–Helen Caldicott.
[But “progressives” aren’t progressive. They yearn to implement a proven failed political and economic system invented over 150 years ago. Perhaps it’s a mere coincidence but the rise of Marxism marked the end of the Industrial Revolution. “Progressivism” is the propagation of a lie that people desperately want to believe:
Therefore when a “progressive” wants to “repeal the Industrial Revolution” they are just being true to their nature.–Joe]
[W]hen a government has the ability to forbid gun ownership, it has the ability to render groups it dislikes helpless to defend themselves. Regardless of whether modern gun control accomplishes its purpose of reducing crime — and for the record, there is no evidence it does — a free society should fear a government with such power.
Robert Verbruggen
July 7, 2010
Gun Rights Are Civil Rights
[Via Proclaiming Liberty: What Patriots and Heroes Really Said About the Right to Keep and Bear Arms by Philip Mulivor.
For those so ignorant, stupid, or evil to claim “that can’t happen here” remind them it has happened here. Verbruggen explicitly points out that the end of slavery but the continuing repression of blacks in the deep south continued for many years was enabled by gun control. And don’t forget about all the people of Japanese descent who were sent to concentration camps in this country.
It can happen anywhere and therefore most restrictions on firearms must be eliminated. Gun control fails my Jews in the Attic Test.—Joe]
I dunno, thinking about standing around waiting for your coffee and having to witness what happens to the banana in the process of being turned into a frappuccino, I can understand why some guys might want a little symbolic reinforcement.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
March 4, 2010
Comment to Open Thread: Penis Substitutes At the Ready!
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday!—Joe]
As long as I’m above ground and I’m not getting rained on I’m doing great. Everything else is just gravy.
Ry Jones
March 17, 2012
[Ry was explaining to me how he kept his spirits up when unemployed for eight months and his financial situation grew worse and worse.
As I posted a few weeks ago Ry is now working at the same place I am and he is now on his road to recovery.—Joe]
The Taliban position on peace is clear and unchanging; it would behead Americans wherever it found them.
Wesley Pruden
March 16, 2012
PRUDEN: A curious experiment in gun control in Afghanistan
[Yeah. That pretty much sums up my appraisal of the situation too.
With a little further inspection I realized this position isn’t all that much different than what anti-gun people have in mind for gun owners:
If a kid in a red state finds his daddy’s handgun and blows his head off, we’ll feel terrible (we’re like that), but we’ll try to look on the bright side: At least he won’t grow up to vote like his dad.
—Joe]
Free enterprise really means rich people getting richer: they have the freedom to exploit and psychologically rape their fellow human beings in the process…Capitalism is destroying the earth.
Helen Caldicott
[The first part of the first sentence is technically correct but she (and most others) say it as if it were a bad thing.
500 years ago the worlds richest king, with all the wealth in his country, could not have purchased a zipper for his pants, an elastic waistband for his underwear, or a single Viagra pill. A bare-footed, half-naked man dancing around a bonfire with a bone stuck through his nose was nearly state of the art in medicine.
It was free enterprise, capitalism, that gave put zippers, elastic, Velcro, and Viagra within the reach of nearly anyone. An only slightly more select class of people can have state of the art handheld device which can deliver images at nearly the speed of light. Of course those images might be TSA pinups of your wife, your daughter “gone wild” dancing half naked in front of a bon-fire, or of your politician demonstrating the effectiveness of Viagra on his stainless steel pierced penis. But still, Velcro is pretty cool stuff.—Joe]
Losing innocent children to gun fatalities can be eliminated with gun control.
Marianne DeAlessi
March 15, 2012
Argument for gun control
[What kind of fantasy world is she living in? Even ignoring the hundreds of thousands of children murdered by their own government using firearms many who might have been saved had there not been gun control the only “gun control” that could possibly achieve such a result would be the complete destruction of all firearms. And of course as the availability of firearms tends toward zero other types of violence tend to go up such that there is no net gain in safety.
It may be that she is suffering from Peterson Syndrome but if not then she should attempt to answer Just One Question before advocating for more gun control.—Joe]
Today, responding to the anti-rights twaddle of daily newspapers is more and more like arguing with—for lack of a polite comparison—terminally ill mental patients. Having departed from the world of fact and reason long ago, and sliding ever faster toward their inelegant demise, newspapers simply have become distractions and decoys for gun-rights activists. It’s only from the force of habit that gun writers today bother to rebut the tired fallacies rehashed in the dead-tree media.
Philip Mulivor
March 14, 2012
Gun rights and the death of newspapers
[“Terminally ill mental patients.” I like that.—Joe]
What comes out of the mouths of Leftists that is purportedly the law is as related to the law as Cargo Cult is related to science.
Whenever some made-up statistic like this one is put forth by Leftists the blogosphere should accompany it with images of James Gregory and the Heinz Ketchup bottle from “The Manchurian Candidate.”
Windy Wilson
March 13, 2012
Comment to Quote of the day—Gun Victims Action.
[I’m not sure the reference is understood by enough people to get the message across but the gist of it is certainly correct.—Joe]