Month: February 2004

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Anybody Know Anything About This?

Seems the BATF has indicted Oliver M. and Ulrich H. Wiegand, owners of InterOrdnance “on 83 counts alleging conspiracy, illegal importation of machineguns, illegal possession and transfer of machineguns, structuring, and money laundering.”

Really? Only 83? The ATF press release says:

The charges involve the Wiegand brothers’ federally licensed firearms business, Interordnance of America, L.P., located in Monroe, North Carolina, as well as foreign companies located in Witten, Germany and Ferlach, Austria, at one time owned and controlled by the Wiegand brothers.

According to the indictment, Ulrich and Oliver Wiegand are German nationals who established Interordnance of America in June 1995 as a firearms importation business and used the business to illegally import machineguns into the United States as machinegun component parts. According to the indictment, Ulrich and Oliver Wiegand also owned and controlled two foreign companies Wiegand Ordnance GmbH, located in Witten, Germany and Interordnance Waffenhandel GmbH, located in Ferlach, Austria, which were used by Ulrich and Oliver Wiegand to illegally import Russian-made PPSH 41 machinegun component parts into the United States for subsequent sale by Interordnance of America. In addition, the indictment alleges that Ulrich and Oliver Wiegand also illegally imported FN FAL IMBEL and STEYR MP69 machineguns. The indictment alleges that Ulrich and Oliver Wiegand imported the machinegun component parts knowing that the machineguns had not been destroyed according to ATF specifications. Further, the indictment alleges that Ulrich and Oliver Wiegand sold these machineguns as parts kits to customers throughout the United States knowing that the component parts could be assembled as functional machineguns. According to the indictment, Ulrich and Oliver Wiegand, through Interordnance of America, sold over 2000 PPSH 41, over 1000 FN FAL IMBEL and over 500 STEYR MP69 machineguns to customers throughout the United States without conducting any background checks and without recording any ownership registration information with the National Firearms Registration and Transfer Record.

So, what they’re saying is that some 3500 illegal machineguns are now in circulation? Good job ATF! A two-year investigation! Job security!

I seem to remember something about torch-cut FAL receivers that the BATF was running around trying to collect from people who had purchased parts kits.

Oh, and of course here’s another example of asset forfeiture at work:

The indictment includes a Notice of Forfeiture that asks that the defendants be required to forfeit to the United States all of the property involved in the offenses charged in the indictment and all property traceable to such offenses.

Which means, effectively, “everything they own.”

InterOrdnance has a response up at their web site. The response is here. Key quote:

Interordnance maintains that its actions regarding the importation and sale of the parts kits were at all times legal and in accordance with BATF regulations. Presently, none of the parts kits are offered by Interordnance pending resolution of the formal charges, even though similar parts kits can be found for legal sale by other firearms dealers.

Problem is, the BATF has such a bad reputation with me that I tend to believe almost anybody over them.

Dept. of Our Collapsing Schools

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Via Clayton Cramer comes this disturbing shocking irritating not unexpected story of the further deliberate distruction of our schools. A sample:

A School Engineered for Failure

The daily life of an educrat is far from uniform. Some of us have no contact with students whatsoever, and create reams of paperwork which apply to children whom we’ve never met. I, on the other hand, am one of the lucky ones who gets to interact with pupils directly for assessments, observations, or group therapy.

It is my role to academically assess, on an annual basis, all of the children at our alternative school. This is due to our kids being exempted from district wide testing based on what I call “The Spicoli Effect.” This refers to their habit of drawing rocket ships on evaluation protocols if left unsupervised in auditoriums.

One-on-one sessions with students are the most rewarding aspects of my vocation. On one occasion, last October, while timing a student completing mathematics problems, the young man suddenly threw his pencil down and rose from his chair, in response to an “all call” from the PA. He walked towards the door after announcing, “I’m going to the tug-o-war.”

I told him to wait a minute. I called up front, and discovered that the whole school, in the midst of academic instruction, was being summoned for festivities in the gym.

What occasion were we celebrating on that day in October? The fall harvest? No, it was yet another in a long line of contrived events, and this one happened to be titled “Wacky Wednesdays.” Bizarre holidays from curriculum have become the rule rather than the exception since our school hired a new principal in 2001.

Old-timers like myself dubbed her “Princess Sparkle.” It is a most appropriate nickname for our leader as it surgically captures her vapidity, lust for attention, lack of seriousness, and ever-present sense of entitlement. No one has ever witnessed her read a book or keep her mouth shut for more than two minutes.

Read the whole thing. Move the breakables first, though.

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An Interesting Email Exchange

Ok, so I found it interesting, but I thought you might, too.

When I started The Fabulous Baker Boys, Swen Swenson of Coyote at the Dog Show was the first to comment (and the first to link), and he took exception to my characterization that “rights are whatever the majority says they are.” Thus began an email exchange that ran the better part of a week. I asked him about it, and we decided that posting the exchange might be interesting to others, so here it is, my comments in blue, his in grey (and no, I don’t mean anything by that color combination.)

Sent: Sunday, February 08, 2004 8:53 PM

Subject: RE: A right is what the majority believes it is.

Swen:

Thanks for the link.

Actually, that’s the subject of an essay I wrote a while back. I didn’t link it at the debate site, but if you’d like to read my reasoning, it’s here:

http://smallestminority.blogspot.com/2003_05_11_smallestminority_archive.html#94367045

And you’re right – it’s a pragmatic view of the idea of rights. Idealism is all well and good, but not all that useful in the real world. Words on paper don’t hold the idea – we hold it in our hearts.

A couple of posts above that one is a concise explanation of the idea, supposedly stated by Associate Justice Scalia, though I’ve never been able to find a definitive citation:

To some degree, a constitutional guarantee is like a commercial loan, you can only get it if, at the time, you don’t really need it. The most important, enduring, and stable portions of the Constitution represent such a deep social consensus that one suspects if they were entirely eliminated, very little would change. And the converse is also true. A guarantee may appear in the words of the Constitution, but when the society ceases to possess an abiding belief in it, it has no living effect. Consider the fate of the principle expressed in the Tenth Amendment that the federal government is a government of limited powers. I do not suggest that constitutionalization has no effect in helping the society to preserve allegiance to its fundamental principles. That is the whole purpose of a constitution. But the allegiance comes first and the preservation afterwards.

My purpose in blogging is to help in my small way to keep that abiding belief alive in those who hold it, and rekindle it in those who have let it die out. If we don’t do that, once gone getting it back will be a bad, bloody business.

Kevin

Sent: Monday, February 09, 2004 7:34 PM

Subject: Re: A right is what the majority believes it is.

>>Idealism is all well and good, but not all that useful in the real world. Words on paper don’t hold the idea – we hold it in our hearts.

And what is it we hold in our hearts if not idealism?

I understand what you are getting at, and I agree with you. But consider — Encyclopedia.com offers this introduction to its definition of natural rights:

“Natural Rights — political theory that maintains that an individual enters into society with certain basic rights and that no government can deny these rights.” http://www.encyclopedia.com/html/n1/natrlrig.asp

So you see, I really am making a pretty quibbling point. *By definition*, no government or majority of people can deny your natural rights. You still have the right to life, liberty, and happiness, after they’ve stoned you to death. Cold comfort, I know. I think this is what Heinlein was getting at, that you may *enjoy* only the rights you are willing to fight for, and strong and intelligent enough to fight for successfully. After all, he was espousing the philosophy of a country that had put that philosophy into practice, where only those who had served in the military had full rights.

There would be little need to discuss natural rights, human rights, or whatever, if there weren’t a distinct tendency by governments and various other entities to violate those rights. Yes, a majority can vote to violate your rights, just like a brutal dictator can do it on his whim, but in either case it is no less a violation of rights. So perhaps you might better say that you can only *exercise those rights* that a majority agree to.

Here, I think, is the rub: It’s well and good to say you have ‘certain basic rights’, it’s not so easy to say what those rights might be, and it is in defining our rights that all the problems arise. The old socialists argued that human rights included the right to a job, food and shelter, and medical care. Tangible things very different from ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’. You’ll note that the constitution and amendments are vague throughout about other unenumerated rights held by the states and/or the people. A good part of that was because our constitutional framers couldn’t agree on what constituted our rights. Oddly, we’ve never achieved a consensus since, nor do I expect we ever will.

So yes, pragmatically, our rights are *effectively* whatever a majority agree they are, but to put it quite this way is definitionally and philosophically awkward.

Cheers!

Swen

Sent: Tuesday, February 10, 2004 7:53 PM

Subject: Re: A right is what the majority believes it is.

Swen:

You’re right, we’re having an argument of philosophy. Do I believe I have an inherent right to be armed? I do. Do I believe I can exercise that right if society does not hold that ideal? I do not.

The problem I’ve got with many advocates of the right to arms is that they state, forcefully, that the Second Amendment protects an ABSOLUTE right to arms, and screw anybody who thinks otherwise. I hate to tell them, though, it does NOT. A cursory study of the legal history of the Second Amendment pretty much puts paid to that argument. The Second Amendment doesn’t protect ANYTHING – only an abiding belief in the right to arms can do that, and that belief has been under attack from long before ratification of the Bill of Rights. The Second Amendment has simply provided a (rather steep) speed bump to the complete denial of the right, but hardly an impregnable barrier.

So to be semantically accurate I would have to say that the right to arms is a natural right, but governments CAN AND DO DENY IT. They can only SUCCESSFULLY deny it when the majority of the population does not hold the ideal in its heart. More accurately, they can only successfully deny it to the HONEST POPULATION when they do not hold the ideal. The criminal and the anarchist will exercise the right at the risk of sanction regardless.

Kevin

Sent: Wednesday, February 11, 2004 11:41 AM

Subject: Re: A right is what the majority believes it is.

>>So to be semantically accurate I would have to say that the right to arms is a natural right, but governments CAN AND DO DENY IT.

No. *By definition* a government can’t deny your natural rights. However, governments do frequently *violate* them, hence the term ‘human rights violation’.

>>Do I believe I have an inherent right to be armed? I do. Do I believe I can exercise that right if society does not hold that ideal? I do not.

I’d point out that throughout history there have been plenty of people who have exercised their natural rights despite prohibitions by government — passing out bibles in an Islamic country comes to mind. Those folks know it’s against the law, they know they may be caught and punished, or even killed. They also believe that they are answering to a higher authority. Likewise, I suspect there are a lot of folks in places like NYC who exercise their 2nd amendment right and their basic right to self-defense despite their society’s denial of that ideal. They know they may be caught and punished, but perhaps their fear of criminals exceeds their fear of the law and they’ve made a simple, pragmatic decision.

Philosophically, I think you either believe you are ‘endowed by your creator with certain unalienable rights’ or you don’t. If you do believe you have rights that have come from some *higher source* [and it doesn’t have to be religious], how could you possibly argue that those rights should be submitted to the review of the unwashed masses? How could you even much care what society thinks? Is it *safe* to ignore society and follow your conscience? Of course not, never has been. But let’s not forget the old rub about trading freedom for safety — you will have neither.

I think I agree that there is no such thing as an absolute right. The right to bear arms should not give you the right to threaten or injure innocent people with them, any more than the right to free speech extends to shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theater. [I would argue that the right to bear arms doesn’t give you the right to run around like a lunatic playing vigilante either, an activity that seems to draw a lot of applause in some circles.] Bottom line, sometimes it comes down to whether you should follow your own conscience and common sense, or obey a law you know is foolishly, even dangerously wrong.

As in all things, we make our choices and we take our lumps.

Cheers!

Swen

Sent: Wednesday, February 11, 2004 6:55 PM

Subject: Re: A right is what the majority believes it is.

Swen:

Oy, semantics.

Denial vs. violation of natural rights: Um, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, being the portion of the government responsible for ensuring the legal protection of my right to arms, denies that I have one. However, to date the actual violations of my right have been relatively minor. (I live in Arizona, thankfully.)

Exercise of right: Pardon me if I was unclear. Do I believe I can FREELY exercise my right if society does not hold it dear? No, I do not. I exercise it at the risk of prosecution, persecution, or worse, or I don’t exercise it at all.

Do I believe that I have an inherent right to arms? Indeed I do. “(H)ow could (I) possibly argue that those rights should be submitted to the review of the unwashed masses?” I’m not arguing that they SHOULD, I’m arguing that they ARE. Fait accompli. I don’t have a choice in the matter, being but one voice among the “unwashed masses” that have decided that the right I believe in really isn’t what I believe it is. Since the government that supposedly represents them has accepted (or imposed) that view regardless of the written guarantee, and that government has the overwhelming firepower to carry out whatever it wishes (see Waco, TX) then I have but four choices: Follow the law even though I disagree with it; violate the law, but keep a low profile and hope for the best; violate the law openly (ride in the front of the bus) and risk certain incarceration; or violate the law violently and die for my beliefs.

Given those four choices, I VERY MUCH care what the public believes, as I like not being dead or incarcerated.

My remaining options, then are either to live with the status quo, which is ever-dwindling individual rights or to be an activist to try to affect the beliefs of the “unwashed masses” and their representatives in government in order to change the direction we are traveling. I choose option B. I’m not “trading freedom for safety,” I’m retaining my freedom so that I can work to recover the ability to freely exercise my inherent rights. The point may come where I decide to choose to violate the law and take my chances, or even violate the law and die for my beliefs, but I am not at either of those points – yet.

Is this helpful?

Kevin

Sent: Wednesday, February 11, 2004 10:53 PM

Subject: Re: A right is what the majority believes it is.

Sigh.

I concluded my first email to you: “So yes, pragmatically, our rights are *effectively* whatever a majority agree they are, but to put it quite this way is definitionally and philosophically awkward.”

That, and only that was my disagreement with your original post and I believe I said from the first that it was only a minor quibble.

Cheers

Swen

Sent: Thursday, February 12, 2004 6:18 AM

Subject: Re: A right is what the majority believes it is.

Swen:

Yeah, but arguing about it is SO entertaining, isn’t it? 🙂

Look, my entire point is that if we don’t AS A GROUP recognize the reality that we live in a pragmatic world, our view will end up marginalized (as it is most definitely becoming.) That’s the reason I wrote that piece – as a wake-up call. Words have meaning, but as our exchange illustrates, unless we all agree on the meanings, any conversation we have will be useless. That’s why discussing things with a gun-control proponent is so difficult. We use the same words, but they don’t mean the same thing. And in my not-so-humble opinion, they understand that and use it on purpose to achieve their goals. That’s why they’ve dropped “gun CONTROL” and switched to “gun SAFETY”. But both terms, in their lexicon, mean “gun ELIMINATION.”

The problem is there’s not just two groups, us and them. There’s three: us, them, and the majority of the pragmatic population that lives somewhere in between. We’ve got to reach those pragmatists, and spouting idealism – regardless of which side you’re on – tends to chase them away. Our side is big on idealism. The gun control groups have learned that pragmatism works. Scare ’em with “assault weapons,” “plastic guns,” “cop-killer bullets,” etc, etc. Doesn’t matter whether anything they say is factually accurate, they just have to convince those in the middle that it’s a pragmatic thing to do to eliminate the perceived threat.

Anyway, it’s been interesting.

Kevin

Sent: Thursday, February 12, 2004 8:12 AM

Subject: Re: A right is what the majority believes it is.

>>Look, my entire point is that if we don’t AS A GROUP recognize the reality that we live in a pragmatic world, our view will end up marginalized (as it is most definitely becoming.)

Absolutely. Can’t eat all those principles and ideals. [A gripe I have with big ‘L’ Libertarians. Abolish the IRS indeed.] Although the bottom line I tend to draw is that some things are simply sacred and not to be trifled with — like the Bill of Rights. That, I’ll admit, is rooted in my gut, not my head. It’s my gut feeling that you’ve got to take a stand on something, so it might as well be on principle. *However*, you are absolutely right. Principles are very personal and emotional things, and it’s about impossible to get everyone together on what our principles should be. [Or even how we should verbally express them. Gad! Do you suppose the awkward construction of the 2nd amendment was due to similar problems? I bet it was.] Therefore, I’ll argue that while we should always be guided by principle, we must act pragmatically.

From a pragmatic point of view though, with the proliferation of ‘shall issue’ CCWs and even the recent jaw-dropping proposal of Vermont-style carry in Colorado, I’m surprised you’d suggest that we’re becoming more marginalized. It would appear to me that, shall we say, ‘pragmatic gun rights’* have been on the ascent since CCW passed in Florida [well, okay, there was the little Brady mess in there], and 9/11 has given us an immense boost, sending a wake-up to a lot of people who thought the government could protect us.

*Here I should point out that while pragmatically, CCWs are a great advance in exercising our freedom, idealistically, licensing a natural right is an atrocious idea. For that reason, I’m mightily heartened by the new initiative in Colorado. One might even suggest that, by giving in a little on our ideals, in the form of CCW licensing, we’ve gotten a foot in the door to get back to a more ideal situation vis bearing arms. Give up a little in the short term to gain a lot more in the long. As you note, given the incrementalism gun banners are so fond of, I personally never would have believed I’d see the day when our congress critters would stand up in a state legislature and legitimately argue that the people should be able to bear arms. !What a concept!

Colorado’s new initiative is, I think, a shining example of why it is better not to be too rigidly absolutist and idealistic. In the give and take of politics it is difficult to get anywhere if you won’t compromise at all. Unfortunately, the record from the ’60s, when GCA ’68 was passed, to ’80s, when we started making gains again in places like Florida, has been that any compromise on our part meant all give for us and all get for the gun controllers. That, I think, is what makes so many, including myself, so absolutist and unwilling to compromise.

Of course, whether one is willing to compromise depends a good deal on which direction we’re moving. When it was ‘Oh, it’s a perfectly reasonable bit of gun control, give a little will ya?’ Compromise started to sound like a dirty word. But now that it’s ‘The Brady Bill was a useless bit of tomfoolery, give us back that little bit’ — when *we* gain by the compromise, which we seem to be doing on occasion now — it becomes a whole lot easier.

Bottom line, we’ve got a long way to go, but I think we’re making progress on a number of fronts.

Cheers!

Swen

Sent: Thursday, February 12, 2004 8:12 PM

Subject: Re: A right is what the majority believes it is.

Swen:

Y’know, we should have blogged this.

And I’ll retract that “more marginalized” comment. That was true without question up until, possibly, Florida’s passage of CCW. There are signs that the pendulum may be starting a backward swing, but I’m going to remain vigilant.

Kevin

So, your thoughts?

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I Want a BUNCH of THESE!

Do you work at a place that has those “motivational posters” on the walls? You know, beautiful cibachrome shots of gorgeous scenery with an inspirational message at the bottom like this one on leadership?

The caption says something like “Until you spread your wings, you have no idea how far you can fly.”

I find these things annoying.

Apparently someone else does too, and in an excellent example of free market acumen, he has started a business to address (and create!) that market. The business is Despair.com and it produces DEmotivational posters, “Demotivators,” most of which are absolutely hilarious. Here are a few of my favorites:

Also true for “Government Regulators”

So absolutely true, especially to those of us in highly technical fields.

and

I would like very much to sneak a bunch of these professionally framed posters into some of the major corporation offices I have been in and replace the annoying ones with these just to see how long it would take somebody in management to notice.

Anyway, you can see the entire catalog here, so go and peruse. But put a towel over your keyboard. There are some funnier than these.

KevinLeave a comment

SMILE! You’re on Candid Camera! (Don’t You Feel Safer?)

This is one of the most disturbing trends that I’ve seen building over the last few years – more and more cameras being used by governments to observe the people they supposedly work for. These cameras take two forms: closed circuit TV where a few officials sit in some dark room and observe banks of monitors (or videotapes run for later review); and unattended cameras such as those used in speed traps which are checked periodically and used as revenue-gathering devices. In each case the cameras are installed with the promise of increasing “public safety,” yet the facts are that they do no such thing. I touched on this topic very briefly in “England Slides Further Toward Bondage” back in November, but I want to expand on this topic now because it was a closed-circuit TV camera that caught footage of the abduction of Carlie Brucia and led to the capture of her killer. But it’s hardly all up-sided.

I came across this Christian Science Monitor article in a link at FuturePundit that claims Britain has one (government run) CCTV camera for each 14 inhabitants, yet the evidence is that such surveillance only makes people think they’re safer. Read the entire FuturePundit piece, as Randall Parker goes into more detail concerning the effectiveness of these systems than I am going to. Go ahead, I’ll wait….

Finished? Good. Then I discovered that new blogger Gunner, proprietor of No Quarters, also had something to say on the topic (scroll down to “Burn Baby, Burn”). He links to two groups who are resisting the other kind of cameras, the ones used as revenue devices, and news stories of these cameras destroyed by “resisters.”

Finally, there’s a post by the Geekwitha.45 on just one example of the idiocy of CCTV’s as a deterrent. His take on the subject has more to do with the death of jury nullification, but in “This is what happens…”, he tells the story of one Richard Albert who had the temerity to drive around the gate at a closed U.S./Canadian border station so he could go to his chosen church on Sundays. He faces a $5,000 fine for that.

As the Geek put it:

Since the gate is “duck aroundable”, the border station is pretty useless, isn’t it? But no, they installed cameras, and started taking pictures and handing out $5000 dollar fines to residents.

ANGER.

What extreme bullshit. Harrassing the local residents with revenue collection activities has absolutely nothing to do with serving the principles of securing our borders.

Not. A. Damned. Thing.

And the cameras?

Absofuckinglutely Pointless.

Any Al-Q agent who slipped through would be long, long gone, hidden in Boston or NYC within the next 10 hours, and whatever car they drove will have been ditched along the way.

Well, yes.

But don’t you feel safer? And isn’t that what matters?

In Orwell’s 1984 Big Brother put a camera in every room of your home. You never knew if you were being observed, but you knew you could be. In England today, they haven’t gotten to that point, but a ratio of one camera per 14 citizens subjects is, to me at least, disturbing. According to this USAToday piece:

If you live in London, you can’t get through a typical day without being captured on tape at least eight times – and possibly as many as 300.

and

“What you’re looking at in Britain, with saturation CCTV coverage in every nook and cranny of the country, is what you’ll be seeing all over the United States in the next 5 years.”

So sayeth Simon Davies, head of Privacy International, which predicts 6 million CCTV cameras in the U.S. in five to seven years.

The Christian Science Monitor piece points to two incidents where CCTV was used to apprehend violent criminals, one in which a “knife wielding assailant” was captured shortly after his crime was taped for posterity, and another more heinous crime in which 2-year old Jamie Bulger was abducted and murdered by two other children.

But here’s the difference: In the case of both Jamie Bulger and Carlie Brucia, the cameras that captured the footage were not run by any government agency. They were owned by the businesses at which the children were abducted. In none of these cases were these crimes prevented by the presence of cameras, though it is true that the cameras made it far easier to identify and capture the criminals. In the case of privately owned surveillance equipment, the implementation of these cameras is restricted by privacy laws, and the information they gather is not the property of any government body. If there is a crime, then the information can be freely given to the appropriate government agency, or that agency can attempt to get it through legal subpoena, but when the government owns and installs the cameras then they have little incentive to follow the requisite laws. For example, the CSM piece notes:

(S)erious question marks hang over the technology and its dark Orwellian implications. Many cameras are hidden or not signposted, in breach of regulations. Several cases of abuse have been documented, raising fears of snooping or worse.

According to this ACLU piece:

Surveillance systems present law enforcement “bad apples” with a tempting opportunity for criminal misuse. In 1997, for example, a top-ranking police official in Washington, DC was caught using police databases to gather information on patrons of a gay club. By looking up the license plate numbers of cars parked at the club and researching the backgrounds of the vehicles’ owners, he tried to blackmail patrons who were married.

—

Powerful surveillance tools also create temptations to abuse them for personal purposes. An investigation by the Detroit Free Press, for example, showed that a database available to Michigan law enforcement was used by officers to help their friends or themselves stalk women, threaten motorists after traffic altercations, and track estranged spouses.

And I should be surprised… why?

The proliferation of closed-circuit TV and traffic camera systems is a given, since very few people appreciate or even consider the downsides. I have no answers for you here, though I’m quite enthusiastic about the vandalism civil disobedience idea (not that I’d ever do anything illegal, you understand.) The idea that surveillance and recognition systems might someday become as ubiquitous as illustrated in Spielberg’s film Minority Report bothers the hell out of me. I can think of nothing to add to FuturePundit’s concluding paragraph:

There is a limit to what technology can do to counteract the decay of a culture that has lost belief in the right of law-abiding people to defend themselves. One of the hardest problems when trying to guess about the future is that there is no way of knowing whether any given culture will partially or totally decay and become very degenerate. More generally, what technology can make possible is a far larger set of possibilities than what people will choose to do with it.

What do you think?

Dept. of Our Collapsing Schools

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I don’t know where the hell I was while this was going on, but it seems that Cathy Siepp’s daughter Cecile, 14, caught some flak from a teacher at her high school for daring to espouse right-wing opinions in a paper. She was denigrated and called racist by the teacher not only in the class in which Cecile presented the paper, but in other, later classes. In the past, as Cathy says in this National Review Online piece, humiliation by the teacher (and then the students) would have been the end of it.

Not so anymore.

Cecile has a blog of her own, and she blogged about the incident. Apparently Cecile has been visiting and commenting at right-wing blogs for quite a while, and one of those blogs is the libertarian-oriented Samizdata, based out of England. (Highly recommended, by the way.) Brian Mickelthwait, one of Samizdata’s contributors, started a “Support Cecile” effort, and the next day Cecile got an Instalanche from Glenn Reynolds.

As Cathy writes in her NRO piece:

(E)ven if she hadn’t received such an outpouring of support, I think Cecile’s regular stops in the blogosphere would have served as an antidote to what happened at school this past Friday. Certainly if a teacher implies a student is a racist idiot one day, and by the next some 200 smart and articulate adults have said she’s not and here’s why, that rather counteracts the original lesson plan. Now that so many teens have blogs, concerns about doctrinaire teachers may be passé. Our sons and our daughters are beyond their control.

One can but hope.

Read the whole thing.

Spin, Spin, Spin

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A couple of posts down is the story of Caroyln Lisle who shot an intruder in her Rancho Cordova home. Quoted in the story is one William Vizzard, described as “chair of the criminal justice department at California State University, Sacramento.” One commenter called him “a gun control flunky” and suggested Googling to prove it. So I did.

I found this interesting transcript from PBS’s Newshour from October 18, 2002 where Mr. Vizzard, described as an ex-employee of the BATF was one of the panel. The discussion was about “ballistic fingerprinting,” and was inspired by the fact that the DC snipers were active at that time.

This will be kinda long, but I’m going to fisk it.

RAY SUAREZ: The recent sniper attacks in the Washington, DC, area have revived a debate over a technology that helps authorities trace ammunition found at crime scenes. The technology is called ballistic fingerprinting, and it’s based on the idea that every gun leaves unique markings on its bullet casings.

Um, not quite so unique. Modern manufacturing methods and tooling mean that guns coming sequentially off a production line are very likely to have very similar tooling marks.

Gun makers would be required to register those fingerprints so a national database could be compiled. Until recently, crime labs relied solely on the human eye and a microscope to look at evidence from bullets, but now bullets, bullet fragments and shell casings are scanned into a computer and compared against thousands of other bullets or casings.

SPOKESMAN: When a barrel is produced or a firearm itself is produced, it’s made by other tools. The metal is formed and moved around, scraped away, and those imperfections of each of those tools in the manufacturing process have accidental characteristics it imparts on the gun. It’s still a needle in a haystack, but now we can get through the haystack faster. These comparisons from bullet to bullet are into tenths of seconds.

This assumes that there’s enough left of the bullet to allow identification. On top of that, the bullets being compared must also be of similar composition. For example, a .45 caliber 230 grain full metal jacket bullet made by Speer will have much different markings than a 185 grain hollowpoint bullet manufactured by Federal when fired from the same gun. Especially if the first was fired into a water barrel and the second recovered from a corpse after impacting a major bone. A computer probably wouldn’t be able to get a match. A human eyeball Mark I might. But the human eyeball takes a lot longer than tenths of a second.

RAY SUAREZ: Law enforcement officials back the idea of ballistic fingerprinting and so does the federal Bureau of Alcohol, tobacco and Firearms. Several lawmakers have called for legislation requiring gun makers to record the ballistic markings. The National Rifle Association and other gun rights advocates oppose legislation, saying the fingerprinting is an unproven science.

The Bush administration was also skeptical, saying earlier this week the technology might not be reliable and could infringe on privacy. But on Wednesday, Spokesman Ari Fleischer said the President does want to look into creating a national registry.

ARI FLEISCHER: The president wants this issue explored. And to that end, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms has been meeting, and met yesterday afternoon with White House staff to start to discuss the various issues: The technical issues, there are feasibility issues, the pros and cons about how this could possibly… may be effective, whether it could work or whether it would not be able to work.

Gee, thanks Mr. President.

RAY SUAREZ: While the national debate continues, two states, New York and Maryland, have already enacted laws requiring a ballistic fingerprinting for handguns.

Neither of which has yet to have a match that didn’t identify a crime gun already in their possession, contemporary with the crimes, and firing ammunition that matched that found at the crime scene.

We pick up the debate with Joe Vince, the former chief of the crime guns analysis branch of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. He now has a consulting company in the Washington area. And William Vizzard, a former ATF agent, now chair of the division of criminal justice at California State University at Sacramento.

Well, since the speculation, Joe Vince began with the Washington area sniper, let’s take a look at how ballistic fingerprinting may have been useful in a case like this, in investigating a case like this?

JOE VINCE: In a case like this, Ray, this right now, the ballistic evidence is your best evidence. It’s almost your only evidence. So it provides a lead for law enforcement. And any time you’re working an investigation, law enforcement officials are looking for leads that take them to the next step.

You build your case incrementally. And for this, knowing that it was a .223 what type of firearm it could come from, is very useful.

RAY SUAREZ: But would you, if you had this database, have been able necessarily to narrow down what firearm?

Note, now, how Mr. Vince artfully dodges answering the question:

JOE VINCE: With a database like this, the possibilities multiply. And we have to remember that law enforcement today needs to rely on 21st century technology. In 1890, if you wanted to get in law enforcement, you received a badge, a gun and a club, and said go out there, enforce the law.

Well, that was towns of hundreds. Now we have metropolitan areas of millions. Law enforcement has to leverage technology in order to help them solve crimes — as the gentleman said on your earlier piece, to take the haystack and eliminate as much hay as you can to find the needle.

Simple question, wasn’t it? Would the technology help narrow down what firearm? Answer? Evasion, obfuscation, and haystacks. Is he called on this? Don’t be silly.

RAY SUAREZ: William Vizzard, would this have been a useful tool in this investigation?

WILLIAM VIZZARD: Well, it conceivably could be although — given the circumstances — an individual who apparently has planned these shootings in advance, it’s most likely not in the sense that we have about 200 to 250 million guns in circulation in the United States today.

And it’s possible for an individual simply to acquire one of those and use it, knowing that it’s not in the database. I mean, if we were to begin a database, for instance, today, or at whatever point Congress would cease debating it, presumably, it would start recording bullets and cartridge cases from that day forward.

Now one could of course try to collect the 250 million existing samples out there. But I don’t hear anybody really advocating that because the mechanics of simply trying to track down those guns and get some sort of record on them is extremely difficult. So Joe is certainly right about the technology; it’s extremely useful technology.

It’s proven very useful in a number of crimes involving suspect firearms and bullets or cartridge cases recovered from crime scenes. And had we been doing this from the 1930’s on, and of course in those days we didn’t have in way of cataloging it, we might have some utility at this point.

Hey! An actual answer! No wonder he’s no longer in the ATF.

RAY SUAREZ: But given the plans that are under consideration now this gun would have had to have been either used in a crime before or purchased and profiled at the time of purchase in order to get a hit in a database, is that right?

WILLIAM VIZZARD: It would have to be placed in the data base through scanning in either at time of manufacture or when it was picked up by the police.

Of course unlike fingerprints when you fingerprint an individual and they’re subsequently released and you have their fingerprints, in the case of guns, normally when police get their hands on a gun, they don’t release it and so it’s usually useful only for checking against previous crimes as opposed to building a database for future crimes.

This, too is factually accurate. So far I’m impressed.

RAY SUAREZ: I’m sorry, Joe Vince, go ahead.

JOE VINCE: Well, a good comparison is over 100 years ago when we started fingerprinting. We had no database and we were doing everything in a card file. However, we said this is a good tool to use and it has been extremely useful. Now we have a computerized AFA system; that’s a national system that has fingerprints computerized.

And we don’t only put bad people into that system of fingerprinting. Every man and woman who enters our armed services is fingerprinted. Schoolteachers are fingerprinted.

My wife is a schoolteacher; she’s in there. The reason for that in the military is to obviously check their background, check the teacher’s background but also, God forbid, if they were injured or killed in the line of duty, we could identify them.

This is the same thing we have to do. We have to take incremental steps now and build our database up so we have the same capability that we have with fingerprints.

Yet no one suggests that we fingerprint and DNA scan every single individual so we can pick criminals out of the population from crime scene evidence.

RAY SUAREZ: William Vizzard notes that there are some 250 million guns already out there. How long would it take until you had a database that was actually useful, a body of profiles that was large enough to be useful compared to the number that’s already out there?

And, once again, Mr. Vince dodges the very simple question: “How long?”

JOE VINCE: Well, I agree with Bill, there are a lot of firearms out there. But we have to take the next step. (And there is ALWAYS a “next step.”) I was in Palm Beach, Florida, last week and I talked to the sheriff’s office there. Six months ago they received the IBIS equipment and that has already linked seven or eight different homicides and shootings together that they did not know it was related.

So you can see, in a short period of time you can have some success. We have to start somewhere. Congress wisely already allocated the money. We’ve put the equipment everywhere in the United States. Now we have to effectively use it as a law enforcement tool.

Uh, Mr. Vince, you matched crime scene evidence. You did not identify the firearm or its possessor. And YOU DIDN’T ANSWER THE QUESTION.

RAY SUAREZ: Mr. Vizzard, you’ve used the fingerprints analogy. To carry it one step further, it’s pretty hard to change your fingerprints. Is it hard to change the so-called fingerprint that a firearm puts on a shell casing?

WILLIAM VIZZARD: It’s difficult. It’s more difficult than the opponents have characterized. Firearms are made of extremely hard steel and it takes a long time to wear them enough to significantly alter them. But they are capable of being altered, unlike fingerprints and DNA.

Not exactly true, Mr. Vizzard. For example, take two identical Glock model 17 handguns manufactured three years apart, both of which had been ballistically fingerprinted at manufacture. Run 10,000 rounds through gun #1. Then replace the barrel with a new one you can buy – without a background check, via mailorder. You won’t get a ballistic match on the bullet any more. You might be able to get a shell casing match, but after 10,000 rounds I’d imagine the breechface, the extractor, and the firing pin would be quite worn and the last two items might have been replaced. Add to that the fact that the hardness of the brass and the primer cup has a significant effect on the markings put on the case and you just decreased the possibility even more. Finally, swap the slides and barrels between gun #1 and gun #2. It’s the frame of the pistol that’s considered the “gun.” But it’s the slide and barrel that leave the ballistic markings. Your trail just went cold.

WILLIAM VIZZARD: I think the real issue probably here is that the devil is in the details. It’s a question of cost/benefit analysis, not a question of whether it would be desirable to have this data. I think it would be. I’m not an apologist for the NRA. I’m not morally opposed to the idea.

I simply think that if you consider the cost and the benefits, for instance, we aren’t currently, I believe, scanning into AFIS, any of the prints– any of the non-criminal prints that Joe mentioned, either at the state or the federal level. Some local agencies do.

We are taking DNA only on a very small number of samples from serious offenders. It varies from state to state, depending on what the state law is. We would probably solve far more crimes collecting DNA from everybody in the United States than we would from collecting ballistics from every gun manufactured, so I think you just have to weigh what’s the cost going to be, how is it going to work. (I stand corrected. Someone has suggested it.)

Is there going to be a chain of custody issue, which I haven’t heard anybody discuss; you can get a lead without a chain of custody issue, but if you want to actually make the comparison and you don’t recover the firearm, that’s going to be a problem.

So I don’t think it’s a case of it being a bad program in the sense that it’s evil. I think it’s just simply a very difficult program. And before you rush into it, you sit down and you figure the cost and you figure the benefits. And you say what would we do with the money if we didn’t spend it on this. That’s my only point.

And a good one it is.

RAY SUAREZ: Well, Joe Vince, how would it work? A lot of the firearms sold in the United States are made overseas. There are domestic makers and sellers as well. At what point in the life cycle of a gun would we check the markings that it puts in the firearm?

JOE VINCE: It would have to be when the firearm sold. Right now in Maryland and New York, they’re doing it with new handguns. And it really is not keeping a database of names. It refers back to a serial number of a gun and then back to the records of that dealer.

So the government really doesn’t have the information. But we do it in a way that’s very similar to the tracing of firearms that we do now for crime guns, which has also been very useful. But again I really think we have to look at integrating this, too with the various information systems we have in law enforcement.

Like, say a gun registration database? That would be the logical “next step” would it not?

JOE VINCE: The idea is that law enforcement collects enormous amounts of information. This is just one piece and DNA is another. But it’s getting knowledge from all that information. That’s what we have to look at. So it is integrating this so we can get those leads consistently and so that crimes like the sniper in Maryland can be swiftly apprehended.

RAY SUAREZ: How about that, Mr. Vizzard, the idea not being that it would provide absolute information, but when cross referenced, when overlaid with a lot of the other sources that police use, it might be useful?

WILLIAM VIZZARD: It would clearly be useful in some cases. My guess is that for sometime what you would get are rather poorly planned crimes, particularly among younger offenders who tend to acquire new guns more readily than older offenders.

I suspect– I really would question Joe’s characterization of collecting at the time of sale. Frankly collecting at the time of import or manufacture would make more sense. We’re talking about a lot of guns here and I envision ATF being back where they were when they used to put personnel at the distilleries — simply putting somebody at the factory and scanning the data in there, but without a national gun registration and licensing system, you’ve got real limits on the value. (Thank you for making my point, Mr. Vizzard.)

And of course that’s why the NRA gets so exercised by it. I’m as not offended by a licensing and registration system as they are. But without that information, private sales very often result in guns just simply being swallowed up and disappearing.

And we do oftentimes trace guns to individuals. We oftentimes lose the track, also. So I think you just have to again analyze the worth of the system as it relates to the specific kind of information you’re looking for. Nobody, I think at this point, can estimate the cost.

Every computer system ever built has turned out to be different than people expected and I realize we’re running the system on a small scale today. But if we start running on a much larger scale, we’ll probably gain some economy of scale and probably also run into problems we didn’t know we would have. All of those things have to be addressed.

Thus endeth the transcript.

All in all, I thought Mr. Vizzard was quite fair, and Mr. Vince was the typical official-line-spewing, job-justifying government flunky.

For further reading on the efficacy of a ballistic fingerprinting database for identifying firearms in the general population, I strongly recommend the initial ballistic fingerprinting study report to the California legislature, Feasibility of a California Ballistics Identification System , the follow-on AB1717 report – Technical Evaluation: Feasibility of a Ballistics Imaging Database for All New Handgun Sales, and the Maryland State Police Forensics Division IBIS report (a 2.5Mb scanned document in PDF format. Maryland never officially released this report as far as I can tell.)

When Vizzard said “Nobody, I think at this point, can estimate the cost” he wasn’t kidding. What he didn’t say was nobody can estimate the effectiveness, either. Without those two crucial bits of information, it’s damned hard to do a cost/benefit analysis, isn’t it?

UPDATE, 2/12: Reader Kevin P., who was the commenter that characterized William Vizzard as a “gun control flunky” has withdrawn that comment, and instead states: “I withdraw that term unreservedly and apologize to Mr. Vizzard should he ever read this.

“However, I will stand by the assertion that he is a gun control advocate. He is a rarity, an informed and knowledgeable gun control advocate, probably because of his career in the ATF. His performance in the PBS ballistic fingerprinting debate was fair and accurate – but it is something that should be expected and demanded of everyone.”

Yes, it should. Kevin P. also links to this quite interesting review of Mr. Vizzard’s book Shots in the Dark: The Policy, Politics, and Symbolism of Gun Control by Dave Kopel. Give it a read.

Thank you, Kevin. Stuff like this makes my day.

KevinLeave a comment

Dept. of Agenda? What Agenda?

AGAIN via Instapundit, more evidence of media bias and agenda. We all knew about it, but it’s refreshing to see journalists talking about it for a change. Bernie Goldberg bore the brunt of being the first to protest publicly, but now we’re seeing more.

Anyway, it seems that Dr. Bob Arnot, NBC foreign correspondent, hasn’t had his contract renewed, and he’s a might perturbed about the stories he’s pitched that the network has rejected. And he’s got something to say about it.

In a 1,300-word e-mail to NBC News president Neal Shapiro, written in December 2003 and obtained by NYTV, Dr. Arnot called NBC News’ coverage of Iraq biased. He argued that keeping him in Iraq and on NBC could go far in rectifying that. Dr. Arnot told Mr. Shapiro that NBC had alienated the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad since it shot and then aired footage of correspondent Jim Miklaszewski at the scene of the November bombing of the Al Rashid Hotel, in which a C.P.A. staffer was shown injured. That incident, he wrote, “earned the undying enmity of the C.P.A.”

“We’ve been at a significant disadvantage given NBC’s reputation in Iraq,” Dr. Arnot wrote Mr. Shapiro. He argued that due to his excellent relationships with military and C.P.A. personnel, NBC News could repair its standing with government authorities by airing more of his material.

“I’m uniquely positioned to report the story,” he wrote. “NBC Nightly News routinely takes the stories that I shoot and uses the footage, even to lead the broadcast,” but “refuses to allow the story to be told by the reporter on the scene.”

In other words, he suggested, NBC News did not like putting him on the air.

Dr. Arnot included excerpts from an e-mail from Jim Keelor, president of Liberty Broadcasting, which owns eight NBC stations throughout the South. Mr. Keelor had written NBC, stating that “the networks are pretty much ignoring” the good-news stories in Iraq. “The definition of news would incorporate some of these stories,” he wrote. “Hence the Fox News surge.”

Much more. Read the whole thing.

I wonder if FOX is looking for a Geraldo replacement?