There was an extermination order against the Mormons in Missouri. It was an executive order by Governor Lilburn Boggs in 1838 and it was technically in effect until 1976.
More on all that here. Something leads me to believe that the story of the Mormon War is relevant to today. Anyway, you might want to read up when you have some time.
Maybe you all knew about it, but I was unaware of that executive order until recent months. Hat tip; Glenn Beck
When we were kids, one of the many interesting places we’d go to play, in addition to the abandoned Brick Yard, the Old School Building, the Big Pond, the Little Pond, the Clay Pitts, Billy Beeton’s, the Haunted Woods and Big Daddy Mountain, was The Dump.
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Since making this post I’ve been seeing references to pride everywhere. Parents attempt to instill in their kids “a sense of pride”, schools promote school pride, manufacturers advertise their products as being “proudly made in the U.S.A.”, the U.S. Marines are “The Few, The Proud…”, American Indian tribes are said to be “a Proud People” and so on and on as though it were a good thing. Even otherwise pretty good Christians speak of their pride as though it were a virtue, and yet pride is right there among the seven deadly sins.
We may as well be bragging about our lust, our greed, our gluttony, wrath and so on, and promoting those things to our kids.
“That’s a good company– they’re gluttonous Americans.”
“Bob here is a good guy– he’s a slothful member of our team.”
“I like Jane– she’s a wrathful, envious person.”
“The few, The Greedy, The Marines.”
It strikes as funny is all, but maybe I’m missing something. None of those would be taken as compliments. Is there another definition of pride that makes it a good thing?
People are more dissatisfied with current gun laws than they’ve ever been before. The most recent spike in dissatisfaction comes from people who want more Second Amendment freedoms, not more strict gun control laws.
Katie Pavlich
January 31, 2014
Poll: More Americans Dissatisfied With Gun Control Laws Being Too Strict
[As I have been saying for years; the anti-gun bigots are the KKK of the 21st Century. And as this century progresses they will be swept into the dustbin of history just like the KKK was in the 20th Century. The courts and, more importantly, the people agree with us.
Once we stopped them in 1994 progress was slow until the Heller decision. But I expect things will accelerate as popular opinion gains critical mass.—Joe]
If you choose not to own firearms, I ask you to consider your willingness to call people with firearms to come to your rescue if you find your life or limb in jeopardy (“hello 911, please send help, there’s an intruder in my home!”). This is – to me – a classic case of personal disempowerment, where we refuse to participate in our own defense but request or even demand that others protect us. If you find the idea of armament repugnant, I ask you to consider how much of your peaceful, affluent, and creative lifestyle is afforded by the willingness of others to take up arms on your behalf. Consider what your life here at home might be like if we suddenly left ourselves and our nation defenseless.
Daniel Vitalis
January 31, 2013
On Gun Control
[There is a lot more good stuff where this came from.—Joe]
Americans realized that infringing upon their Second Amendment rights must have a proven public safety purpose.
Since no gun-control law has ever reduced crime, they now realize they have to strengthen the laws affirming their constitutional rights before they are further chipped away.
Emily Miller
January 28, 2014
MILLER: South Carolina kicks back ban on gun concealed carry in restaurants
[A stronger form of Just One Question. Nice.—Joe]
There’s very little talk among political junkies in Texas this morning about anything else except Wendy Davis’ stunning and unexpected announcement that she favors open carry in Texas. That means strapping a gun on your hip and parading around town like something out of a damn John Wayne movie. Oh yeah, Texas needs more guys with tiny winkies strapping on holsters.
Juanita Jean
February 8, 2014
Juanita Jean Is Mad As Hell At Wendy Davis
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday!
H/T to Weer’d Beard for the email.—Joe]
Owning an unregistered assault weapon is a Class D felony. Felonies cannot go unenforced.
…
If you want to disobey the law, you should be prepared to face the consequences.
The Hartford Courant
February 14, 2014
State Can’t Let Gun Scofflaws Off Hook
[H/T to Jay F. for the email.
I agree with The Hartford Courant that felonies cannot go unenforced and that those who deliberately violate the law should be prepared to face the consequences.
I look forward to their trials and their editorials being used as evidence against them.—Joe]
I sense a great disturbance in the Force…as if a million liberals screamed out in terror, and were suddenly told by the court to grow up already…
Larry P. Card
Comment on Facebook in regard to a comment of mine to the post May-Issue CCW struck down in California.
[But will they grow up now?
No. They will not grow up now. There will have to be many, many, more lessons taught before they will be fit to participate in a free society with the rest of us. And many will never be fit for more than prison.—Joe]
The constitution is supposed to protect the government from the people. I can’t see how this will help.
jy151310
February 13, 2014
Comment to Ninth Circuit holds Second Amendment secures a right to carry a gun
[Sarcasm?
Maybe. But I know people that are mentally messed up enough to believe that and yet they are professionally functional.
I believe that people like this actually exist and this is part of why we have the IRS, NSA, and TSA routinely abusing their power.—Joe]
Update: It’s sarcasm.
It seems so. I just wonder why anyone assumed it would be any different– They’re either liars or they’re as ignorant as a rock, or both. I suppose they never bothered to look at Canada’s idiotic long gun registry. They certainly never looked at our constitution, or don’t give a flying crap about it.
In fact, this is an example of the willful creation of new “criminals” so they can have some form of legal justification to harass innocent people, and nothing else. It’s a class D “felony”, they claim (oooh! scary!) if you don’t roll over and act like a Soviet citizen/sheep, standing in line to have your name put on a list.
What kind of felony is it when you willfully and wantonly violate your Oath of Office, acting in flagrant opposition to the United States constitution and to the basic human rights of American citizens?
I’m in favor of giving the politicians a fair trial, and then taking away their pensions and sending them all to prison, and banning them from any public position for life. That would be kind. We can make plenty of room in the prisons by pardoning all non-violent drug “offenders” and gun law paperwork “violators”.
I pointed out some years ago that the left, even the most radical, fringe, America-hating communist revolutionary leftist (like some of those in the Whitehouse) understands exactly how a right is supposed to work. We know they fully, completely and thoroughly understand because they’ve spent decades strenuously SHOWING US that they fully understand how a right works, that it means HANDS OFF, NO MATTER WHAT, END OF DISCUSSION, PERIOD!
They therefore can never, ever claim that they just didn’t get it, or hadn’t though enough about it, or didn’t have it presented to them in quite the right ways, or they were too busy, etc.
They’ve even taken their definition of a right beyond mere, total and absolute non-interference no matter what, ever, don’t even THINK about it, and into encouragement and even subsidy of the exercise of a right.
Keep all that in mind during their trials.
If bearing arms is a right, and of course it is, then any permit requirement or any special tax, or any special paperwork, licenses, lists or permission requirement of any kind, ever, is a violation.
To hell with permit reciprocity. The second amendment and incorporation is your legal, reciprocal carry permit, and if ANYONE attempts to hinder or discourage you in that right in any way whatsoever (infringe) they are a scum-sucking criminal, a threat and an enemy, and should be in jail, right now.
This is the Progressive/leftist’s own definition of a right, and I agree with them.
Sure; you can get your permit (I have one) but to fight for the “right” to pay the government for a “permit” to exercise your guaranteed rights is a bit like Jews fighting for the “right” to wear yellow arm bands in 1930s Germany. So I’m a German Jew, proudly wearing my yellow arm band and dutifully showing it any officer of the law who asks, “papers please” and if I don’t happen to have it on me because I forgot or lost my wallet somehow, I get a “beating” for it.
And for THIS sack-of-shit situation we celebrate! Imagine homosexuals celebrating that they can now walk around in MOST public places (but only in their home state and maybe a few others) ONLY SO LONG AS they’re registered with the government as homosexuals and have their homo-card on hand to show police at any moment’s notice for any reason. And as gun owners we celebrate exactly that situation for ourselves.
We’re all damned.
I want to stop arguing over this crap and JUST GET ALONG WITH MY LIFE, UNMOLESTED, but I know that will not happen. You stupid criminal motherfuckers doing the dirty deeds had best be begging for forgiveness from God, because I know it’s not within my power to give it to you and I won’t even try.
It is time to hide the sleeping pills and Tequila from the anti-gunners.
California’s “may-issue” CCW has been ruled unconstitutional. This ruling is really big. Both California and Illinois have had their infringement of the specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms struck down by Federal Courts.
It is becoming increasingly difficult for other states and D.C. to hold on to their oppressive CCW laws.
Here are some quotes from the decision:
The Second Amendment, Heller tells us, secures “the right to ‘protect[] [oneself] against both public and private violence,’ thus extending the right in some form to wherever a person could become exposed to public or private violence.”
…
Writing over thirty years later in what Heller calls the “most important” American edition of Blackstone’s Commentaries, id. at 594, St. George Tucker, a law professor and former Antifederalist, affirmed Blackstone’s comments on the British right and commented further on its American dimensions. The right to armed self-defense, Tucker insisted, is the “first law of nature,” and any law “prohibiting any person from bearing arms” crossed the constitutional line.
…
We are well aware that, in the judgment of many governments, the
safest sort of firearm-carrying regime is one which restricts the privilege to law enforcement with only narrow exceptions. Nonetheless, “the enshrinement of constitutional rights necessarily takes certain policy choices off the table. . . . Undoubtedly some think that the Second Amendment is outmoded in a society where our standing army is the pride of our Nation, where well-trained police forces provide personal security, and where gun violence is a serious problem. That is perhaps debatable, but what is not debatable is that it is not the role of this Court [or ours] to pronounce the Second Amendment extinct.” Id. at 636. Nor may we relegate the bearing of arms to a “second-class right, subject to an entirely different body of rules than the other Bill of Rights guarantees that we have held to be incorporated into the Due Process Clause.” McDonald, 130 S. Ct. at 3044.
Repeating this exceedingly important part:
Nor may we relegate the bearing of arms to a “second-class right, subject to an entirely different body of rules than the other Bill of Rights guarantees that we have held to be incorporated into the Due Process Clause.”
The Second Amendment must be respected just as much as the First, or any other article in the Bill of Rights.
This is winning. This is evidence to use at their trials.
How often do we hear news reports of cold weather or a snowstorm in Canada or Alaska, or the Rocky Mountain States, and how it’s disrupting everyone’s regular lives there and…Oh the horror!? I can’t remember for sure whether I’ve ever heard or seen even one such report in my 55 years.
Yet if we HAD been hearing of these regular winter events which are not at all unique and therefore never considered “news”, AND had reports on how the people there were COPING WITH IT JUST FINE, maybe more people in Georgia and Tennessee would understand how to cope with such things themselves. Hmm?
So I think we can define news, not as something merely unusual, but something unusual and gloomy, or unusual and horrible– something that shows helpless people succumbing to their weaknesses.
To me, “News” would give you helpful, actionable information, such as how the Alaskans deal with 40 or more below zero temps for weeks on end, how those in Truckee, California deal with ten feet of snow falling within a week or two and go on about their daily lives, or how the poor can become successful and go on to help others. THAT would make interesting investigative reports AND it might help a few million of the clueless and helpless become a little bit less helpless and clueless. The closest we get to helpfullness in the news is when they’re being condescending, “teaching” us how to eat, how not to fall off a ladder, how to find government services and so on.
Prof. Randy Barnett, in his excellent book “Restoring the Lost Constitution” talks at length about this point. Briefly, he argues that you have to think of this (as Weer’d mentions) like the rule for reading a contract. A contract means what the words meant to reasonable people at the time it was signed. If the words change meaning later, that has no effect. Never mind if the words still mean what they did but it’s merely the wishes of one of the parties that have changed.
So it is here. After all, the Constitution is the document that most deserves to be called “Contract with America”. So you have to read each article using the interpretation that normal persons reading it at the time of that article’s adoption would have used.
By the way, that means “original intent” is the wrong term. What matters is not the intent of those who wrote the text — often that’s only a guess and some of the people involved did not have honorable intent anyway. What matters is the common understanding of those who APPROVED the text — the voters who ratified it. And that is easy enough to find out, just read the newspaper discussions and meeting minutes of the time.
If you do this, it’s easy to see that those who oppose the individual rights interpretation of the 2nd Amendment are dishonest and use fraudulent argument to justify their anti-American goals.
Paul Koning
February 12, 2014
Comment to Quote of the day—ebola05
[Shorter version: The U.S. Constitution is the original “Contract with America”.
What isn’t said but I think should have been in the contract is a penalties clause. Something like those who passed and/or enforced laws which were later found to be unconstitutional would be held liable for all legal fees and treble damages.—Joe]
Via @ItsRobbAllen we have an article about a paper demonstrating that mass shootings do not usher in a new age of gun control. In fact it is just the opposite.
Correlation is not causation but from looking at the numbers it seems pretty clear that horrific mass shootings are followed, a year or so later, by less support for gun control than just before the mass shooting.
The authors of the paper are clearly in favor of gun control. They ask, and answer, the question of how to go about “Breaking the Cycle”. The cycle being the “regression to the mean” and a continued drop in support after an initial surge in support for gun control following a particularly horrific mass shooting.
Their answer, in part, is:
To change the shooting cycle, gun control advocates must change the gun culture. But to change the gun culture, gun control advocates must explain, or at least distance themselves from the position that causes the fiercest opposition—that the Brady Campaign sees as its ultimate goal the criminalization of possessing guns. Nelson “Pete” Shields III, a founder of Handgun Control, Inc.—the aptly named progenitor of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence—openly advocated for the elimination of all handguns: “‘We’re going to have to take this one step at a time. . . . Our ultimate goal—total control of all guns—is going to take time.’ The ‘final problem,’ he insisted, ‘is to make the possession of all handguns and all handgun ammunition’ for ordinary civilians ‘totally illegal.’”197 John Hechinger, a sponsor of the D.C. handgun ban and a board member of Handgun Control, Inc., put it simply: “We have to do away with the guns.”198
The anti-gun people have difficult hurdles to overcome. They must attract supporters that are willing to donate money and time to, at best, only make small incremental, paper-work type, changes to gun laws. They cannot speak or even whisper of banning guns. Without banning, and perhaps even with draconian bans, people with any smarts about them will realize “universal background checks”, “gun free zones”, and restrictive carry laws are just crazy talk. How many people are willing to spend time and money on something that only benefits their cause in some abstract way of encumbering “the gun culture”.
If they could speak of grand plans to ban guns and create a “gun free America” if only given enough money and time then they probably could get more support. But doing so increases their opposition more than their support.
So how to “change” (eliminate) the gun culture? That is another huge hurdle. There are no “anti-gun ranges” or “anti-gun shows” to take people to for fun, learning, and familiarity. A process/cycle has been identified for which the chances of the anti-gun forces breaking is very low. To disrupt the cycle requires a raising the bar to gun ownership such that the propagation of “the gun culture” is inhibited. But raising such a bar is virtually impossible at this time because of the courts and the resistance with which disruption is met with.
It’s a similar problem to that faced by those who advocate for reducing greenhouse gases which contribute to “Global Warming”/”Climate Change”. People like the benefits of those activities which produce the greenhouse gases as a side effect. Any effort to break “the cycle” of greenhouse gas production encounters very stiff resistance on the specifics of the proposed legislative action even though some polling data indicates a sizable portion of the (mostly ignorant) population agree with the vague, overall goals.
One could say that this paper settles the science on the politics of gun control. The gun control people are losing and as long as we continue expanding our culture they will continue to lose.
To a certain extent guns are like sex. Once someone becomes sexually active they seldom voluntarily become asexual let alone anti-sexual. And so it is with people who learn to use guns in a safe and supportive environment.
Many anti-gun people are proud they have never fired a gun and vow to never shoot one. “Guns only have one purpose!”, they insist. They wear their ignorance with pride and yet demand they should legislate the rules of ownership. And so it is in some social circles in regards to sexual activities.
But most people would laugh and, at their most charitable, say, “How cute!” if monks who had taken vows of celibacy were demanding laws which regulated sexual behavior between consenting adults. “No one needs sex more than once a month!”, they might demand.
And once such people gained control government registration of each sexual union would be “just common sense” to reduce the transmission of sexual diseases. Sympathetic courts would rule that government had an interest in protecting the safety of the citizens and the registration law, no matter how unlikely to be complied with, it has a rational basis and hence overrides the non-enumerated constitutional right to privacy.
And of course many gun control advocates really are nothing but Puritans afraid someone somewhere is having fun.
Anyone who utters the words “the Constitution is a living document” or “the Constitution must be interpreted in the context of the times we live in” believes in a society with no governing rules.
These folks are not “Americans”, but true believers in the Marxist cause.
Ignore them or ridicule them.
ebola05
February 9, 2014
Comment to Second Amendment applies to carrying guns in cars
[I’m not so certain you can safely conclude “the Marxist cause” but I’m confident the rest is correct.—Joe]
Via Rusty Weiss who says:
In the clip seen below, Democrat Assemblyman Joseph Lentol can be heard pleading with McLaughlin that he not share the list “because it has the capacity to dampen the enthusiasm of compromise.” To which McLaughlin replies, “It sure does, when we talk about the confiscation of assault weapons.”
Yes. Yes it does.
Don’t let anyone tell you, “No one wants to take your guns.”
It did not take long to realize that MAIG’s agenda was much more than ridding felons of illegal guns; that under the guise of helping mayors facing a crime and drug epidemic, MAIG intended to promote confiscation of guns from law-abiding citizens. I don’t believe, never have believed and never will believe that public safety is enhanced by encroaching on our right to bear arms, and I will not be a part of any organization that does.
…
Troubled urban areas desperately need an economy that welcomes businesses to locate and remain in our cities. Robust respect for the Second Amendment rights of the law abiding does this by discouraging theft and enhancing personal safety.
Unless Bloomberg and MAIG recognize and implement these principles, their efforts are doomed not only to fail, but also to cause further — if unintended — harm.
John Tkazyik
Mayor of Poughkeepsie New York.
February 5, 2014
Valley View: Mayoral group’s gun agenda is wrong
[If you read the comments you will find they generally don’t believe he had a true change of heart. Rather, he decided he was on the wrong side of the issue because of a shift in political winds.
Whatever.
Regardless of the reason his removal from MAIG and his public support for the 2nd Amendment his actions weakens our opponents and strengthens our side.—Joe]