Supremacy clause

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An email exchange with lawyer/lobbyist Mike B. (with minor corrections and additions):

Joe: How about putting this on the agenda?
Mike: Won’t work: See supremacy clause.
Joe: Isn’t that the equivalent of saying, “The Fed can’t do that: See 2nd Amendment.”?
Mike: The 2nd Amendment doesn’t have its own tanks. See: Grant v. Lee (1865).
Joe: Vyacheslav Molotov mixes my cocktails: See Finland v. Soviet Union (1939).

You should know that Molotov cocktails have a difficult time with modern tanks. The proper application of Boomerite, thermite, and steel bars into the treads may also be required.

Conversations with special forces trained in improvised anti-tank methods are also useful. I kept my notes from the late 1990s.

Quote of the day—Louis Michael Seidman

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As the nation teeters at the edge of fiscal chaos, observers are reaching the conclusion that the American system of government is broken. But almost no one blames the culprit: our insistence on obedience to the Constitution, with all its archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil provisions.

Louis Michael Seidman
December 30, 2012
Let’s Give Up on the Constitution
[H/T to Roberta.

It’s good to have clarity.—Joe]

Quote of the day—JBR

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This will start a war in the US. Urban liberals simply do not realize that much of this country loves its guns as much as the liberals hate them.

JBR
January 9, 2013
Comment to New York Is Moving Quickly to Enact Tough Curbs on Guns
[Not if just a few states do what NY claims to be doing. If the Feds do it, yeah, I could see things heating up to extremely uncomfortable levels.—Joe]

If the pro liberty side had courage

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And if we understood how the process of winning works, we wouldn’t be protesting the latest outrages committed by the authoritarians, we wouldn’t be panicked, hoping that the next set of violations will be endurable. We’d be proposing our own “outrages” for the communists to get upset over. They’d be protesting us, you see, because we were so blatant, relaxed, and matter of fact about it.

In that spirit I propose a short, simple bill that would repeal the NFA of 1934, the GCA of 1968, and eliminate (not restructure, re-task or rebrand, but eliminate) the BATFE.

If we feel we have to use statistics to justify it, we have more than enough of those, plus we have personal human interest anecdotes galore, but better yet we have the principles of liberty and the constitution on our side. We have the future of our children on our side.

And to summarize; if the pro liberty side had courage, and resolve, and really understood the principles and how this is played, we’d never have gotten to this stage. But resolve does exist and it is growing I think, watered by the increasingly outrageous and transparent enemy. Isn’t this interesting?

Extenuating circumstances

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When politicians cite crime rates, accidents, or current news events as reasons to infringe on the rights of their fellow citizens, they are in effect claiming extenuating circumstances to explain or justify their violation of the Oath of Office.

The question then becomes whether extenuating circumstances are a legal justification for willfully violating the Bill of Rights, or whether said politicians are guilty of a serious legal offense and punishable (see 18 USC 242 for example). It has to be one or the other.

Status of old posts

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As some of you know, because you requested them, I manually imported a few important posts for reference purposes. But there are still thousands more that need to be imported from my previous blog software.

I’m still working on the conversion program to import the content. I’ve probably got 50 hours into it now but it is getting very close. It successfully preserves all the backward links to both posts and comments within the blog and saves all the comments and categories. There will be about 25 links I will have to manually fix up after the 8000+ posts and 20000 comments are imported.

I might actually get it done this weekend. It is hard to predict because you never know how many more bugs you are going to find or how long it will take you to fix them.

Quote of the day—Patrick J. Buchanan

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Many gun controllers not only do not understand what motivates those who disagree with them, they do not like them, reflexively calling them gun nuts, a reaction as foolish as it is arrogant and bigoted.

Patrick J. Buchanan
January 08, 2013
America’s Coming Gun War
[H/T to an anonymous email.

I’m pleased to see the anti-gun people as bigots meme continues to spread.—Joe]

If there are too many

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If someone were to say there were too many of something then wouldn’t that mean they would advocate reducing the number?

Apparently I’m a number to be reduced. Nice to know where I stand in the minds of the anti-gun people.

H/T Twitchy Team.

If statistics were really that important…

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…we’d have gotten something like this;

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the statistical averages which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Statistical Ranges, that among these are Crime Rates, Unemployment Rates and the pursuit of Smaller Relative Income Disparities.–That to secure these statistics, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these statistics, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their desired statistics…

The first ten amendments to the constitution would have been called the Bill of Statistics, and it would lay out the target statistical ranges for various things like crime, accidents, economics, and so on.

Why there is no cell service in Westlake tunnel

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It has always annoyed me that I don’t have cell service while waiting for the bus at Westlake Station (downtown Seattle). Many times the bus or I will be late and I need to tell someone I’m not going to be on time but I have to wait until the bus arrives and gets me out of the tunnel. Or I could leave the tunnel on my own and risk missing the bus and being even later.

Yes, it’s in a tunnel 80 (?) feet underground but I put in my own microcell in the middle of a field in Idaho something like 30 miles from the nearest cell tower and have good service for myself and my Boomershoot “customers” using AT&T. Why couldn’t the cell companies get service 80 feet?

Now I know the answer:

The reason you don’t have cell coverage in Westlake Station is because the Three Stooges refused to allow the carriers to ride on the radio system without paying substantial fees for the privilege. Verizon, T-Mobil, Sprint, et al gave a collective “Eff You” to the Stooges when they demanded the fees, and now the populace is denied cell coverage.

Governments don’t have customers to make happy. They have subjects.

Quote of the day—Daniel Greenfield

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The defining American code is freedom. The defining liberal code is compassion. Conservatives have attempted to counter that by defining freedom as compassionate, as George W. Bush did. Liberals counter by attempting to define compassion as liberating, the way that FDR did by classing freedoms with entitlements in his Four Freedoms.

On one side stands the individual with his rights and responsibilities. On the other side is the remorseless state machinery of supreme compassion. And there is no bridging this gap.

Daniel Greenfield
December 17, 2012
Gun Control, Thought Control and People Control
[H/T to JPFO.

Nearly every paragraph in Greenfield’s post would qualify for a QOTD here. It is filled with awesome insights.

I decided to focus on these two paragraphs because of the last sentence of the second paragraph quoted above.

I’ve read that no two businesses or even species in nature share the same exact marketplace or ecologically niche at the same time. One will dominate and push the others out or cause them to differentiate themselves.

The freedom and anti-freedom, the left being the dominate flavor of anti-freedom, people are in a political struggle for the geographical niche known as the United States of America. There is no compromising with the other side anymore than there is compromising with someone that wishes to rob you or loot your business. There is only winning versus losing and protecting your property versus having your property redistributed for the common good.

The language of the left betrays this mindset.

In their “compassion” they will sometimes “concede” a “buy-back” of firearms they want confiscated. You can’t “buy back” something that was not yours to begin with. And you can’t “buy” something with money that you confiscated (in the form of taxes) from the victims you want to take the property from. But in the mind of the left all property, including money, is “community property” and there is no inconsistency. They don’t, and probably can’t, “get” the problem we have with their plans.

The anti-gun people claim removing restrictions against people carrying firearms on college campuses is “forcing guns on campuses”. Did you catch that? In other words we are using the power of government to force liberty upon them. One of daughter Kim’s economic class reading materials literally referred to the U.S. government “forcing free markets.” In their language and their world/philosophical view that makes perfect sense rather than being a self-contradicting statement.

They can barely understand that we don’t trust the government. They can understand not trusting the “right government” which in broad terms is a government which is not “compassionate.” But they cannot understand not trusting a government because of its size. The classic joke about the anti-freedom people fear Libertarians because they would take over the government and leave everyone alone is funny because it is true. It is beyond their philosophical framework to not trust the government based on its size. It simply doesn’t make sense. It is a nonsensical thought and in order to make sense of it they have to redefine the fear of large government in other terms such as “greed”, “selfishness”, or a as a close relative recently told me, “heartless bastards”. Gun owners cannot possibly be serious about defense against a tyrannical government and rational gun ownership must be redefined in terms of a hobby, penis substitution, or some sort of paranoia in order for it to make sense to them.

Any “compromise” they offer is defined in terms they understand. They are “compromising” by “allowing” us to continue our “hobby” by registering our firearms/magazines and submitting to a licensing process. In their minds this is a HUGE concession. In our minds this essentially defeats the entire usefulness of the right to keep and bear arms.

It goes deeper. They do not comprehend that the act of submitting to the government over a basic right is unacceptable. Submission to government/authority on every level is so fundamental to their nature it is like a fish in water. Any glimpse of “not water” is very brief and incomprehensibly hostile. It is extremely scary to them. More government is less scary and more “compassionate” to them.

They oppose us so vigorously and with so much violence because they see it as does a fish having their water removed. In their minds we have to be insane, incredibly stupid, or have evil intent. There is no other way to explain our actions and desires. Hence they are completely justified in killing us because if we had our way we would destroy their existence.

As Greenfield says, “There is no bridging this gap.”

I only see two possible outcomes and two ways to get there.

The possible outcomes are:

  1. One side will dominate and force the other side into virtual extinction.
  2. The sides will find different geographical niches. This option would mean the collapse of the union of the individual states.

The two ways to get there are:

  1. “Education.” The left has been working, successfully, on education for a century.
  2. Force. The left is close to reaching a critical mass and they now contemplate a victory through force.

The force option will result in massive numbers of people being forcibly imprisoned and/or murdered.

The big wild card in this deck is that the intended victims are arming up and training. The outcome is difficult to see. It depends both upon the order in which the cards show up and how the cards are played. For example had a “Newtown massacre” occurred before the Heller decision the course of history could have been drastically different. And so it is with our future.

I hate to go all Godwin here but I’m seeing the final option being played by the anti-freedom people as being the Final Solution to the “freedom problem”. Let’s play our cards well.—Joe]

Gun Appreciation Day

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January 19, 2013 has been declared Gun Appreciation Day.

When I first heard about this, via an email from Ray Carter, Director of Development, at SAF, the first thought that came to mind was, “I really should clean some of my guns.” That is especially true of the ones that I didn’t clean after shooting them months ago. If they were sentient they would appreciate it.

But that isn’t what this is really about. It’s about sending a message to politicians. And some of our politicians really need to get the message.

Careful with the whole stats argument…thing

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 We like to toss out statistics that bolster the pro second amendment position.  That’s something of an oxymoron, really.  I’ve done my share of it, certainly.

For example, there is the decline in our murder rate as gun ownership has gone up.  That’s nice and all, but I heard the other night that if our medical and response training and technology were that of the 1960s, our murder rate would be three times what it is today.  A person must actually die, you see, before it’s actually murder.  I haven’t looked it up (that’s your job – I’m not your servant) but it certainly sounded plausible.  If it’s true, then it means that there is in fact much more violence, but that yet more lives are being saved.  Gun owners couldn’t very well take credit for that.

I’ve been harping on this stats issue, and probably pissing off some people.  It may seem like a subtle point to some, but if so it is a subtle point of crucial importance.

Like Tam said, and I paraphrase; “Even if every other gun owner on the planet tried to kill someone last night; I didn’t, so leave me alone!”

And that’s really it, isn’t it?  As the story goes, Sodom and Gomorrah would have been spared for just one righteous person.

The concept of a right is a purely moral concept, and if you can find where the Bill of Rights was to be dependent on statistics, I’d like you to show me.

The communists hate the concept of unalienable rights, and will use stats as a way of changing the subject– of completely reframing the conversation.  I call them “tweakers” because all they care about is tweaking this and tweaking that, using the force of government ostensibly to get some predicted result in the statistics.

That’s a communist premise, and it stinks right from the get go.  It puts us into disparate groups, each being ruled according to its status.  Statistical arguments alone, either for or against a “right” imply the non-existence of rights by ignoring them.  Conversely, if rights truly exist, stats have no bearing on them, and the discussion is purely about morals– right verses wrong.

Our premise is, or should be, that justice demands the respect of all human rights, all the time, that rights belong only to individuals, just as criminal prosecutions are of individuals.  If you didn’t violate, or attempt to violate, someone else’s rights, you are to be held harmless in all regards.  If there were only one, that is the American principle.  If that ideal is not upheld, you have no rights and in that case your statistics won’t save you.

The communists know exactly how this works, and you all know that they know it, and of course they hate the very concept of rights.  They will ignore it and fall back on statistics.  It’s a pretty clever, evil trick.  I’ll give them that, but what else have they got, being that they’re on the wrong side?

That is where we (I hope) differ.  Not only is the moral rights concept all we need, it is all that can work in the long run to persuade good people.  If we rely on stats, we’re relying on the weather, essentially, because stats, like the weather, are not only very fickle but are subject to interpretation, while rights are eternal.

Sure; bring out the human interest stories– we probably don’t do near enough of that, all told, but start them, and finish them, with the moral Declaration.  There’s not a Republican alive, and very few in the NRA, who can do this, so it’s up to us.

Random thought of the day

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I wonder how much CO2 emissions would be decreased if the global cooling/warming/climate-change whiners were to stop exhaling all that CO2.

I’d rather play with explosives

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I work in downtown Seattle. I don’t like cities in general because I have strong introvert tendencies and crowds of people “drain my energy”. Go to a lower, more detailed, and less personal, level and it just gets worse.

This happened January 1st in a place I walk through twice a day:

Several shots were fired inside the Westlake bus tunnel in downtown Seattle Tuesday night, according to the Seattle Police Department. But, officers were unable to turn up any suspects, witnesses or victims.

Two bike officers heard the shots while patrolling Westlake Park around 11:40 p.m.

Several people were running out of the Metro tunnel when the officers arrived. But, the man officers stopped said he only heard the shots and didn’t see the shooting.

Officers found six bullet casings and fragments on the tunnel’s mezzanine level and are reviewing surveillance video in an attempt to come up with any additional information.

Within the last few months the bank, essentially across the street from where I work and where I do most of my banking was robbed at gunpoint and there was a shooting in the hallway I traverse to get to the pizza place in the mall where I frequently get lunch.

This morning as I was riding to work the bus was stopped and could not enter the Westlake tunnel station where I usually get off. There was a fire in the tunnel and it was being evacuated.

Two years ago this happened in that tunnel where I get on and off my bus.

Had someone been kicking a 15-year old girl in the head while she was on the ground when I was around and within range they likely would have been shot (the guards just a few feet away doing nothing could have been collateral damage that I wouldn’t have been too concerned about at the moment—They have standing orders to “observe and report”). That would make for a very messed up existence for weeks and perhaps years for me.

I just want to go home to Idaho away from everyone but a few close friends and do something safe in the middle of a 100 acre field. Something like play with explosives.

Quote of the day—ArieKreyveldt

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This is so boring, every ass can see that this gun thing is about small dicks #guncontrol

ArieKreyveldt
Tweeted on December 18, 2012.
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday! Via still another Tweet from Linoge.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Greg Hamilton

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I see people every day who should be pepper sprayed. The world would be a better place if someone just hosed them down.

Greg Hamilton
January 5, 2012
[While Greg was almost for certain exaggerating to make a point it is also true he goes places and does things as part of his “continuing education” that most “ordinary people” would not do.

It’s always a pleasure to take a class from Greg. He says things in a succinct, humorous, and insightful manner that makes the lesson stick.

Yesterday I was retaking a two day class I had taken in the late 90’s. Last time it was with my son James and daughter Kim. This time it was with Barb L. and her kids. Even though I had basically not practiced anything from this class in well over a decade it still came right back and I was anticipating the next lessons and was able to coach other students who were my “sparing partners” when they didn’t quite get it right.

Insights Training. Highly recommended.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Robert J. Avrech

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We need Liberal control, not gun control in order to save lives.

Robert J. Avrech
Emmy Award winning screenwriter. Religious Zionist. Republican. Movie fanatic. Gun owner.
December 26, 2012
Comment to Stalked: Girl Without A Gun
[There is more than a little truth to this statement. The liberal agenda enables and emboldens criminals both on the streets and in control of the power of the state.

Reading the post made me think of Barb L. and her “I can’t wait until he is my ex” husband (as she described her husband in the first few minutes of our first date). Her situation probably wasn’t as bad as the one detailed in the post but still she “got her affairs in order” before the divorce papers were served on him because she believed the chances were significantly greater than zero that he would kill her after he was served.

The papers were served several months ago and Barb’s anxiety has decreased some. We seldom talk about it but it’s not something I ever forget. We recently found out that he knows she is “seeing someone” and he knows my name.

Every visit to her place, every time she visits me, every time we see each other at lunch I wonder if he or a friend is watching. He certainly knows where she lives and works but does he know where I live and work too? Would he be able to find her and the kids at my place if things ever “got ugly”? Sometimes people “raise their eyebrow” when they get hints as to the extent I safeguard the address of my residence but this is one of those times I’m glad I have.

I go to the observation deck of my clock tower when I hear her car drive up and as she leaves my place to make sure she makes it across the parking lot safely. As far as I’m concerned it’s a known distance range and if I can see it with my naked eye I can hit it. Her 300 pound “I can’t wait until he is my ex” husband would be easily visible, even without my glasses, in the parking lot.

I’ve taught her how to use a gun and she, her children, and I will soon be taking an Insights class together. The best way to save lives is to be responsible for our own safety. Acquiring the skills and tools to do that effectively are an essential part of being responsible adults. Many liberals want to do away with that. This has and will cost many lives.—Joe]

The problem with experts

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Plenty of research, plenty of information, zero mention of the second amendment or the core principles behind it;

http://johnrlott.blogspot.com/2013/01/with-megyn-kelly-on-fox-news.html#comments

In other words, he didn’t make the case.  Instead he argued purely within The Enemy’s framework, proving who had all the control over the conversation.  Human rights, and the power relations between citizens and government, were apparently not even worth mentioning, yet those are THE points to be made.  Listen to their words very carefully.  Lott and Kelly both took the bait, hook, line and sinker, and ran with it.  It’s sad.  The term, “too clever by half” comes to mind.

In fact, a fundamental human right is being impugned and attacked without being mentioned– as though it didn’t exist– as though infringements on that right aren’t specifically prohibited.  “Machineguns are already highly regulated, and aren’t used in crimes” as if that would matter– as if your rights depend on statistics– as if a certain set of infrigements to your rights is all we’re going to talk about.  It would be like discussing how to cook your mother for dinner, with no mention of the mother’s moral right to life or the legal prohibition against killing her and eating her.  Cannibals are arguing over the cannibal pot, and the audience is to see one chef as the more clever culinary tactician than the other.  No doubt many of us on both sides are cheering along like mindless sports fans at a game.  We are better than this.  It’s not a goddamned game.

Quote of the day—Edward W. Howe

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Some men are alive simply because it is against the law to kill them.

Edward W. Howe
[I have a funny story to tell that involves this quote on a couple of t-shirts. But ask me in person sometime. It wouldn’t be appropriate to put it on the web.—Joe]