Quote of the day—Zack Beauchamp

Posted on by

There is no longer any defensible argument for a constitutional right to own a firearm, if there ever was.

Zack Beauchamp
February 20, 2014
Ban the Second Amendment: Imagine the Second Amendment didn’t exist, and try arguing for a constitutional right to gun ownership. You will fail.
[H/T to Kurt Hofmann.

Self defense, one of the easiest ways to argue it to most people is dismissed with:

The second argument in favor of untrammeled gun ownership, a right to self-defense, is equally incoherent. For starters, there’s no reason that, in a civil society, the right to defend yourself implies the right to defend yourself however you’d like. A basic part of government’s job is to limit our ability to hurt others; assuming the absolute right to self-defense constitutes, in Alan Jacobs’ evocative phrasing, “the absolute abandonment of civil society.”

Here you can see some of his incredibly scary mindset. “A basic part of government’s job is to limit our ability to hurt others”. Wow!

It’s that same old prevention instead of punishment argument. In my mind one of the characteristics of a free society is that you are free to make mistake, or be evil, it’s just that you will suffer the consequences of your actions if you do. Except in extreme outlier cases, such as true weapons of mass destruction, the government should not ever be granted the power to prevent ordinary people from doing whatever it is they want to do. In terms of citizen/citizen interaction government power is only granted to punish those that infringe upon the rights of others.

Beauchamp’s mindset is that of one who yearns for an all powerful, all seeing, all protective government. A government with widespread informants which interrogates and tortures people in response to anonymous or torture induced testimony. That is the only way you can even hope to approach a preventive model for citizens hurting others.

Beauchamp should study history rather than yearn for an utopia who’s quest has resulted in the murder of 10’s of millions by their own government in the 20th Century.—Joe]

It’s only a matter of degree

Posted on by

I had a interesting face to face discussion with an anti-gun person yesterday. The details aren’t particularly important but it set me to thinking—a lot. They were very new to the topic, had zero factual basis, and yet thought up quasi-rational arguments on the fly. They were entirely novel and amazingly good for having been formulated in the previous few seconds.

I have been doing this for 20 years and they only spent about 30 seconds working themselves up before attempting to tear into me. The outcome was as one-sided as you might expect it to be.

It took me a long time to go to sleep last night and I spent a lot of time thinking about our debate. Going over it caused me to come up with a new approach to anti-gun people or people that haven’t given much thought to the topic.

We have frequently talked about offering to put “This home is gun free” signs up for our opponents. But I think this is too subtle for most people. The implications just aren’t obvious enough.

If someone is going to advocate for no guns or restricted access then they should be willing to carry a sign, take pledges, etc. that says, “If attacked I won’t resist”. When they drop their kids off to play at a friends place they will ask them to renew their pledges to not actively resist if some animal  (either two or four legged) tries to attack their child.

The absurdity of the idea is now apparent. They will protest. And you are now in a much stronger position to point out that restricting access to the best self-defense tools available is also absurd. It’s only matter of degree.

Government at work

Posted on by

This is what happens when the government tries to do something. It is in part because it’s “someone else’s money”:

Employees at an ObamaCare processing center in Missouri with a contract worth $1.2 billion are reportedly getting paid to do nothing but sit at their computers. 

“Their goals are set to process two applications per month and some people are not even able to do that,” a whistleblower told KMOV-TV, referring to employees hired to process paper applications for ObamaCare enrollees.  

The facility in Wentzville is operated by Serco, a company owned by a British firm that was awarded $1.2 billion in part to hire 1,500 workers to handle paper applications for coverage under the law, according to The Washington Post. 

The whistleblower employee told the station that weeks can pass without data entry workers receiving even a single application to process. Employees reportedly spend their days staring at their computers, according to a KMOX-TV report. 

“They’re told to sit at their computers and hit the refresh button every 10 minutes, no more than every 10 minutes,” the employee said. “They’re monitored, to hopefully look for an application.”

Obamacare will make healthcare more affordable. All the government has to do is pass a law declaring something to be true and that is what will happen.

That is what the suckers believe. Historic data to the contrary is always ignored. Present results are ignored. They believe intentions are more valid than results. These people do not operate in a world of facts. They operate in a world of good intentions. Most of them anyway. Some are truly evil and take advantage of this flaw in the nature of many people.

Daniel Webster and Henry David Thoreau both had it nailed over 150 years ago.

It’s time people put their brains to work and stop relying on their “hearts”. If we don’t the consequences may be extremely severe. Their ideology puts millions of people at extreme risk.

Quote of the day—Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

Posted on by

To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions.

Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble—and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.

Ideology—that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors. That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the colonizers, by civilizations; the Nazis, by race; and the Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations.

Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions.

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (Volume One) pages 173 and 174.
[Those that believe in the power of the state to do good have and will use the state to enforce their ideology upon the unbelievers. They believe “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” The twentieth century saw 60 to 100 million people murdered by their governments to make the world a better place. Governments which believed the welfare of the nation took precedence over that of individuals. That is what their ideology enabled. The ideology of the U.S. Constitution is that government has a very limited role, must be given only a small set of enumerated powers, and must respect the rights of the individual. That is why the right to keep and bear arms is an individual right. The oppressed individuals in the great massacres of the 20th Century always vastly outnumbered their active oppressors. This is why the ideologies of those who believe in the power of the state always include the disarming of the individual. The armed individual is too dangerous to their ideology.

Let’s not let the 21st Century ideologies that succeed be those that enable the murder of 10s or 100s of millions.—Joe]

Wishful thinking?

Posted on by

Clearing out my spam folder just now, I spied one from Senate Republicans out of the corner of my eye, way down the list. My first thought was that it said “Why we lose”, which would have been an excellent and highly relevant topic. In fact it said “Lyle, we are close.”

Actually, we are not close. “We” are not even on the right path and so we’ll never be close until we change paths. Since it was titled with a falsehood, and since they’re not going to address the all-important question of why we lose, there was no point in reading it.

That is of course assuming that “We” means “we Republicans” which in my case is big stretch. Since TR, over 100 years ago, “Republican” has meant “Progressive who must pander to conservatives and libertarians for votes, and who therefore hates his job”.

Quote of the day—Oliver Willis

Posted on by

@JayCaruso no, out of touch with the avg maryland voter, who isnt some gun nut compensating for something missing. @JeffQuinton

Oliver Willis
Tweeted on March 23, 2014
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday!

H/T to Jay Caruso in his post The Liberal Mindset As It Relates To Guns And The Second Amendment—Joe]

Stereotypes

Posted on by

Weer’d made a comment in this post that kind of bugged me:

Still I’ve noticed that the more homogenous a population is in an area the more revolting the racism can be. I knew a ton of people in Maine who would drop the N-Bomb frequently, and would make horrible cracks about blacks….but I always wondered if they had even SEEN one.

It’s a LOT harder to make such cracks when you know people of a minority or other groups.

Where I grew up there were virtually no “people of color”. Technically the family farm was (and is) on an Indian reservation but most of the land had been purchased by whites over the years and no Indians have lived there since before I was born. 20 miles away, in Lapwai, the entire town was (and probably still is) essentially Nez Perce. But we only saw them when our schools competed. They were serious competitors just like the kids from Grangeville and Kamiah who also had few, if any, non-whites. Their athletic ability was everything. The only pigmentation that mattered was that of their uniform. The inferiority of that pigmentation did not extrapolate to an inferiority in the pigmentation of their skin.

Continue reading →

Delusional

Posted on by

I stumbled across “Cracks in the NRA armor?” recently:

For more than 30 years, the NRA and its lobbyists have controlled the debate on gun reform with both money and media. Since the Sandy Hook massacre on Dec. 14, 2012, that has changed. That event woke Americans to the hold that the gun manufacturers and the NRA had on our country.

…

The NRA is no longer your “Grandfather’s Association” for hunters and sports shooters, but a more militaristic organization spreading fear of government tyranny.

We learned that we will not rest until our families and communities are safe from gun violence.

Yes. She is delusional if she thinks the NRA has “controlled the debate on gun reform with both money and media”. And there are a lot of other signs of her delusions there as well.

While in general a delusional opponent is probably less of a threat that a reality based one they are still an opponent. And when allowed to have power they can be an extremely deadly threat. Do not dismiss them. Keep them from the levers of power.

Think Stalin, Mussolini, and Michael Bloomberg.

Quote of the day—Ludwig von Mises

Posted on by

The welfare of the nation takes precedence over the selfishness of the individuals … was the fundamental principle of Nazi economic management. But as people are too dull and too vicious to comply with this rule, it is the task of government to enforce it.

Ludwig von Mises
1949
Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (4 Volume Set)
[For more context see here.

“Dull and vicious.” That is what they think of you if you do not place the welfare of the nation above that of your own. When people tell you this today inform them there have been a lot of people in agreement with them. It was the fundamental principle of Nazi economic management.—Joe]

Random thought of the day

Posted on by

We have a slave class in this country.

There is a segment of the population that lives solely off the toil of others without making their own contribution. Their grandparents, parents, and children insist they are entitled to being supported by their slaves. They deserve to be supported and appear to have no remorse, see anything wrong with the situation, and fully expect they and their offspring to be able to continue to live off the back of others forever.

We have the slave overseers who punish the slaves who do not “contribute their fair share”. And actively seek the favors of their master who give them their power. They promise more and more benefits if only they will vote for them in the next election.

As Ayn Rand said, socialism is the enslavement of people by vote. And we have made great “progress” in becoming a socialist society.

Yes. I know. Comparing modern-day wage earners to slaves trivializes true slavery. But Marxists have been doing this for a long time and I’m not going to accept criticism for using the same tactic they use against us.

Footnote 1
From here: “It can be persuasively argued,” noted one concerned philosopher, “that the conception of the worker’s labour as a commodity confirms Marx’s stigmatization of the wage system of private capitalism as ‘wage-slavery;’ that is, as an instrument of the capitalist’s for reducing the worker’s condition to that of a slave, if not below it.”[249]

Footnote 2
While doing a bit of poking around in the process of writing this blog post I ran across this fascinating tidbit:

A black man named Anthony Johnson of Virginia first introduced permanent black slavery in the 1650s by becoming the first holder in America of permanent black slaves.[116]

And this:

Some of President Obama’s ancestors were slave owners.[263]

1911 barrel question

Posted on by

Well, technically it’s a Colt 1991A1 question. How much difference is there between a ramped barrel and a “normal” barrel? Specifically, is there much work beyond grinding off some metal at the breech to turn a ramped barrel like this into an unramped barrel like this. Just by eyeballing it, it looks like grinding away the ramp (carefully, of course, and without overheating it, etc) should be all that is necessary. Is there anything else that needs to be done, or some other difference that makes them non-interchangeable? I’m not a serious 1911 geek, but I’m sure there are some out there that would know. The difference in availability is the reason I’m asking. The description says some minor fitting may be needed in any case, and I assume that’s generally emery-cloth minor grinding to slim it a thousandth or two in one spot or another to make for a proper fit instead of being overly tight, but is there more involved?

“Messin’ around shooting” with carry pistols

Posted on by

My friends and I, as a natural matter of course, sometimes try our carry or service pistols at 100 or even 200 yards. It’s always seemed to me an obvious thing to try. Why wouldn’t you?

And so when Oleg and I were out “messin’ around shooting” at various rocks, dirt clods, sticks and whatnot at various random distances, we did some 100 yard pistol shooting with our carry pistols (a 9 mmP and a 10 mm Auto).

I haven’t commented on this phenomenon before, but I’ve noticed that the point of hold for 100 yards with a Glock 20 isn’t much different from that at 25 yards. It was when Oleg, without any prompting, made the same observation regarding his 9 mm carry pistol that it occurred to me to say so in a post. Well here it is.

Oleg was striking a roughly 8″ square plate at 100 yards with successive shots from his 9mm Glock.

I don’t know what utility this sort of pistol shooting might have in defense, but it is good to know you can do it.

Quote of the day—Jay Leno

Posted on by

We wanted a president that listens to all Americans – now we have one. Yeah.

Actually, President Obama clarified the situation today. He said no one is listening to your phone calls. The president said it’s not what the program is all about. You know, like the IRS isn’t about targeting certain political groups. That’s not what it’s about!

I mean what’s going on? The White House has looked into our phone records, checking our computers, monitoring our e-mails. When did the government suddenly become our psycho ex-girlfriend? When did that happen?

Jay Leno
June 7, 2013
From here.

[I have nothing to add.—Joe]

Alan Gura may not be our savior

Posted on by

Alan Gura did some awesome work by winning the Heller and McDonald cases. But some people are not certain his approach is the best in some other cases. They are very satisfying to the “true believers” like me but that doesn’t necessary generate the best results. Think, no compromise and losing versus getting incremental results.

The Drake case is a case in point. Peruta may be the better horse to bet on.

From CalGunsLaws.com:

Drake had some baggage. It might have forced the justices to rule on whether concealed-carry permits are unconstitutional. That would be a huge jump for the justices, and there is a good chance that there are less than five votes among the Court’s current membership to rule for gun owners on that issue.

Once the Supreme Court settles an issue it is rare for them to ever revisit it, and traditionally the justices like at least 20 years to pass before reconsidering a matter (though there are exceptions). For those who want to advance gun rights, it’s much better to have no precedent at all than to have bad precedent.

The other problem with Drake is what is called prior-restraints doctrine, which is when the government requires you to get a permit before engaging in speech-type activity, such as a license before showing a movie. Any government system requiring citizens to get government permission before speaking faces a strong legal presumption that it is unconstitutional, and the government must show that the license is narrowly focused on achieving a compelling public interest.

Applying that legal doctrine to guns is considered far-fetched by many Second Amendment lawyers. The courts will likely never adopt such a demanding standard. Speech is by nature spontaneous and fluid. Many of the most important things to be said are said in the moment.

Firearms, in contrast, are tangible, heavy, and expensive. You have to think about obtaining a firearm, plan for it, budget for it, and then go to specific locations to obtain one. And words can rarely kill people, but guns can.

Yet these are the arguments Drake’s lawyers chose to make, so the biggest problem withDrake may have been the legal team. Lead counsel in that case is Virginia-based lawyer Alan Gura, who was one of the lawyers who argued both of the Supreme Court’s famous Second Amendment cases, Heller and McDonald.

…

In contrast to Drake, Breitbart News has already explained why Peruta is a perfect case for the Supreme Court to take. California law forbids openly carrying firearms outside the home and provides that no one is entitled to carry a concealed weapon without a permit. It empowers local sheriffs with the discretion to decide who gets permits, and the sheriff inPeruta requires applicants to give some special reason aside from a desire for self-defense.

Peruta was extensively discussed in the Drake legal briefs filed as part of the petitioning process, more thoroughly than any other case except Heller itself. So the justices had ample opportunity to compare both cases and determine which one they would prefer. AndPeruta was argued by former U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement, regarded by many as the best Supreme Court lawyer in America, who would also argue the case at the High Court.

It’s not just gun owners who are considered terrorists

Posted on by

This is very interesting.

A sample:

These incidents were not aberrations of the era. During the Bush years, for example, documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) revealed, as the group put it in 2006, “new details of Pentagon surveillance of Americans opposed to the Iraq war, including Quakers and student groups“. The Pentagon was “keeping tabs on non-violent protesters by collecting information and storing it in a military anti-terrorism database”. The evidence shows that assurances that surveillance is only targeted at those who “have done something wrong” should provide little comfort, since a state will reflexively view any challenge to its power as wrongdoing.

The opportunity those in power have to characterise political opponents as “national security threats” or even “terrorists” has repeatedly proven irresistible. In the past decade, the government, in an echo of Hoover’s FBI, has formally so designated environmental activists, broad swaths of anti-government rightwing groups, anti-war activists, and associations organised around Palestinian rights. Some individuals within those broad categories may deserve the designation, but undoubtedly most do not, guilty only of holding opposing political views. Yet such groups are routinely targeted for surveillance by the NSA and its partners.

One document from the Snowden files, dated 3 October 2012, chillingly underscores the point. It revealed that the agency has been monitoring the online activities of individuals it believes express “radical” ideas and who have a “radicalising” influence on others.

***

The NSA explicitly states that none of the targeted individuals is a member of a terrorist organisation or involved in any terror plots. Instead, their crime is the views they express, which are deemed “radical“, a term that warrants pervasive surveillance and destructive campaigns to “exploit vulnerabilities”.

…

The government may treat anyone who challenges its policies as terrorists.  For example:

…

Constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead writes:

No matter what the Obama administration may say to the contrary, actions speak louder than words, and history shows that the U.S. government is not averse to locking up its own citizens for its own purposes. What the NDAA does is open the door for the government to detain as a threat to national security anyone viewed as a troublemaker. According to government guidelines for identifying domestic extremists—a word used interchangeably with terrorists, that technically applies to anyone exercising their First Amendment rights in order to criticize the government.

Daniel Ellsberg notes that Obama’s claim of power to indefinitely detain people without charges or access to a lawyer or the courts is a power that even King George – the guy we fought the Revolutionary War against – didn’t claim.  (And former judge and adjunct professor of constitutional law Andrew Napolitano points out that Obama’s claim that he can indefinitely detain prisoners even after they are acquitted of their crimes is a power that even Hitler and Stalin didn’t claim.)

And the former top NSA official who created NSA’s mass surveillance system says, “We are now in a police state“.

The implications of such massive surveillance are staggering. It might be nearly impossible to stop because with such surveillance in place a political reformist can and will be targeted. From the article:

Among the information collected about the individuals, at least one of whom is a “US person”, are details of their online sex activities and “online promiscuity” – the porn sites they visit and surreptitious sex chats with women who are not their wives. The agency discusses ways to exploit this information to destroy their reputations and credibility.

One might hope that an economic collapse of the Federal Government, which I think is nearly certain, will stop it. But an agency with that much power and the tools to maintain it will be among the last to go down and make itself “useful” in any government resurrection.

I’ve been sick

Posted on by

I was late in posting QOTD yesterday and today. I’ve been very sick. It wasn’t until today that the doctors figured out what was going on. It was a “perfect storm” of an undetected cavity in a tooth in proximity to a wisdom tooth fragment left behind after the extraction. A soft-tissue infection developed and even after the antibiotics kicked in enough for the visible infection to go away I still felt terrible. I have seen three doctors so far and will see five before everything is taken care of. I’m somewhat functional now but only with the help of drugs.

It’s amazing the effect something going on in a length of gum tissue less than an inch in length can have. Late morning on Wednesday was the worst. I was shivering uncontrollably. I was in bed with a down comforter and four blankets, doubled over, on top of me. It was 70 degrees in the room and still I was shivering and for inexplicable reasons, because I didn’t have significant pain at the time, had streams of tears rolling down my face. Barb turned on a space heater and heated the room up to I don’t know what temperature before I finally was able to stop shivering.

I’m so glad this didn’t happen during Boomershoot.

Quote of the day—Ayn Rand

Posted on by

There is no difference between communism and socialism, except in the means of achieving the same ultimate end: communism proposes to enslave men by force, socialism – by vote. It is merely the difference between murder and suicide.

Ay Rand
“Foreign Policy Drains U.S. of Main Weapon,”
The Los Angeles times, Sept. 9, 1962, G2
From here.
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]

That’s not the way it works

Posted on by

As you might have gathered from reading Prince Law Office’s blog or what Sebastian had to say the ATF recently ruled that non-incorporated trusts are not considered a “person”. A careful reading of the law regarding machine guns then becomes very interesting:

(1) Except as provided in paragraph (2), it shall be unlawful for any person to transfer or possess a machinegun.
(2) This subsection does not apply with respect to–
(A) a transfer to or by, or possession by or under the authority of, the United States or any department or agency thereof or a State, or a department, agency, or political subdivision thereof; or
(B) any lawful transfer or lawful possession of a machinegun that was lawfully possessed before the date this subsection takes effect.

Because it is only unlawful for a person to transfer or possess a machinegun and a trust is not a person then your trust can now purchase machine guns. If the law means what it says.

But that isn’t the way thing work in our country anymore. The way things work is that many or most of the politicians and judges dispense “justice” which means not what the law says but what they want it to mean at this particular time and place. We are long past the time when the law really means what it says. You don’t believe me? Review the history on Obamacare in the last few months. Or try getting a prosecutor to bring charges against someone using 18 USC 241 or 18 USC 242 for infringing upon the rights of people exercising the right to keep and bear arms.

And they are proud of the way they dispense “justice” so don’t expect anything to change anytime soon.

Quote of the day—Eric Bates

Posted on by

If we want to stop gun violence, the 2nd Amendment has to be reworked and we must pass bills that restrict access to all types of weapons. The rest of the civilized world has figured this out already – but Americans are always late to the party when it comes to doing smart and sensible things.

The big problem is that the 2nd amendment won’t be reworked.

Eric Bates
May 15, 2014
The “Guns Everywhere Law” Keeps Us Safe Nowhere
[Bate doesn’t realize that the US Supreme Court has ruled that the right to keep and bear arms is not granted by the 2nd Amendment nor “is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence”.

I think Bates should move to one of those “civilized world” places he think is “smart and sensible” where they infringe upon the right of people to defend themselves. He should choose wisely because I’m of the opinion we should push such countries to stop their human rights violations and respect the right to keep and bear arms.

Bates is one of those who Alan Dershowitz would call a foolish liberal.

If we want to stop slander and libel we need to rework the 1st Amendment. If we want to get more convictions for criminal activity we need to rework the 5th Amendment. And if we want to stop people with dark colored skin from committing a disproportionate amount of crime we need to rework the 13th Amendment.

We won’t be going there in my lifetime.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Brian Anderson

Posted on by

Besides the Constitutional issues with gun control, the thing that bothers me the most is that the anti-gunners just don’t know what the hell they are talking about. They say they want to have a “conversation” about gun control, but they aren’t even armed with the basic knowledge of how firearms work, let alone stats and facts to back up their attempts to disarm the American populace.

Brian Anderson
April 28, 2014
Anti-Gun NJ Politician Confused About Guns
[H/T to JPFO.

They don’t have basic knowledge about how firearms work, stats, and facts because they are irrelevant to them. Their “reasons” for wanting to disarm us are independent of such things or the facts that do matter to them must be carefully hidden from us in order for their plans to succeed.—Joe]