If a Police Officer Says It, It Must Be True

 

Very shortly after I started this blog I did a transcript of an NRA piece exposing a case of a police official, in that case Sheriff Ken Jenne of Broward County, Florida, deliberately misleading a CNN reporter concerning “assault weapons.” 

 

Here’s another one.

Should gun ban be extended?

 

The federal law that prohibits the manufacture, sale and possession of semiautomatic assault weapons will expire Sept. 13 unless Congress and President Bush renew the ban.

 

However, the U.S. House of Representatives has yet to act on a bill to do so, and Congress will recess Friday until after Labor Day.

 

“I think it’s something to consider,” said U.S. Rep. Jim Gerlach, R-6th, of West Pikeland. “I want to see what a final bill would look like.”

 

One House bill would provide a straight 10-year extension of the assault weapons ban.  Another measure has been introduced that would outlaw more firearms, said Gerlach. 

 

He added that Congress could vote on the bill when lawmakers return to Washington, D.C., in September.”

 

Law enforcement feels it’s been effective,” said Gerlach, “so that’s good feedback to have.”

 

Last week, the Pennsylvania Chiefs of Police Association passed a resolution to encourage Congress to renew the 10-year assault weapons ban that President Clinton signed into law.

 

East Pikeland Police Chief James Franciscus, who serves as Chester County Police Chiefs Association financial secretary, supports extending the ban.

 

If the ban is lifted, people will be able to purchase fully automatic weapons, and they will be able to use those automatic weapons,” he said. ”  It could jeopardize the lives of the public or police officers or others.

Gee, that’s what Ken Jenne implied but did not actually say.  (There’s more to the op-ed, but it’s the typical boilerplate “HORRORS!” piece.)

 

I have a question:  Should people so ignorant of the law be police chiefs?   Or, if he actually knows the law and is lying, should people willing to frighten the public with a non-existent boogeyman be in such positions of power? 

 

I think not.

 

Engage, or Disengage?

Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried. – Winston Churchill

The bulk of my writing (and reading) time this last week has been occupied in an educational but otherwise fruitless discussion on the topic of the (il)legitimacy of government and the the fundamental “rightness” of anarchy (defined as “absence of a ruler,” not “chaos.”)
 
The discussion began, if you care (and if you don’t, why are you reading this?), over a piece at the group blog, No Treason concerning Al “Howlin’ Mad” Gore’s comment about “digital Brownshirts” and the reaction of many of the conservative bloggers to this calumny. That post went up June 27 and has garnered (as of this writing) 126 comments. If you’ll look below, you’ll find four posts, including one by my first guest blogger Aaron Gunn, on the same topic which have garnered (as of this writing) 77 comments. In addition to that, this conversation has inspired Francis W. Porretto to pen an essay on the topic.

Like there haven’t been enough words thrown around, I feel the urge to expand upon the theme myself, and since this is my blog and I can do what I want, so I shall.

I did a little reading around over at No Treason which, if you’re unfamiliar with the reference, is named after a treatise by Lysander Spooner. Spooner was a nineteenth century abolitionist – and a lawyer, among other things.  Spooner’s treatise was, essentially, on the illegitimacy of any government that compelled anyone by force to support it. For those who have not read it, it is available in three pieces:

Part I: No Treason
 
Part II: The Constitution

Part III: The Constitution of No Authority

Law professor Randy Barnett wrote his recent book Restoring the Lost Constitution in part because of Spooner’s treatise, and dedicates the book to Spooner and to James Madison. In the preface to it, Barnett writes:

Growing up, I was like most Americans in my reverence for the Constitution. Not until college was the first seed of doubt planted in the form of an essay by a nineteenth-century abolitionist and radical named Lysander Spooner. In his best-known work, No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority (1870), Spooner argued that the Constitution of the United States was illegitimate because it was not and could never have been consented to by the people on whom it was imposed. Although as an undergraduate I found Spooner’s argument unanswerable (and I must admit so it remained until I was in my forties), the problem was largely theoretical. My mind may have doubted, but my faith remained.
 
Until I took Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School. The experience was completely disillusioning, but not because of the professor, Laurence Tribe, who was an engaging and open-minded teacher. No, what disillusioned me was reading the opinions of the U.S. Supreme Court. Throughout the semester, as we covered one constitutional clause after another, passages that sounded great to me were drained by the Court of their obviously power-constraining meanings.

I, myself have gone through a similar disillusionment. I began studying the law as it relates to the Second Amendment of the Constitution starting back about 1995, and the decisions of state, federal, and higher courts did for me what numerous Supreme Court decisions did for Prof. Barnett. (For anyone interested, Clayton Cramer’s For Defense of Themselves and the State: Legal Case Studies of the 2nd Amendment to the U. S. Constitution is an excellent compendium of the jurisprudence on this topic, though it was written as a Master’s thesis so it can be a bit dry in places. I understand Clayton has a few on hand he’s willing to sell at a reasonable price. He might even autograph them!)
 
Spooner had a similar effect on John T. Kennedy – one of the contributors to No Treason (the blog). John writes:

A little background: I’d been a liberal for most of my life. As a very young man I’d fancied myself a communist, I even carried Mao’s Little Red Book around with me for a couple of years reading it like scripture. But as I settled into making a living I embraced a more typical and pedestrian American liberalism. I felt the proper function of government was to help people. I always voted a straight democratic ticket up until 1992. Clinton was the very first liberal I couldn’t bring myself to vote for, but that was only because I didn’t trust him.
 
The launching of the Clinton administration was punctuated by the fiasco in Waco. I initially supported the government’s role at Waco, but at the same time I was haunted by the sense that something was terribly wrong with this government. Not something that could be blamed on a scoundrel like Clinton but something much deeper. I didn’t know precisely what it was but I knew I wanted a whole lot less of it. By 1994 I was gleefully cheering Republicans on in their crusade to cut back government. By 1996 it was pretty clear to me that their crusade was a scam.
 
This is about the time I was introduced to Spooner’s work.
 
I’d been thinking quite a lot about what the proper function of government was. I studied the Constitution and other works of the founding fathers to understand what they thought. The founding principle of American government was that just government required the consent of the governed. But there was a nagging question that kept coming up: Who consented to this constitution, this government? I couldn’t figure it out. I heard legal scholars describe the Constitution as a form of contract. When asked how a contract could be binding on people who had not even been born, they’d brush off the question with the assurance that an explanation of how such a contract was valid was too technical for the layman to understand.
 
But how could they consent to what they did not understand?
 
This was by no means the focus of my inquiries into the proper function of government, it was just a nagging puzzle that wouldn’t go away. I assumed the Constitution was a valid contract for reasons I didn’t yet fully understand.
 
So Lysander Spooner’s writing hit me like a truck. A big truck.
 
Spooner revealed the dirty little secret: There is no contract. The Constitution is not a contract, in substance it’s nothing like a contract and it has no morally binding force on anyone.
 

This didn’t instantly turn me into an anarchist, that came a little later, but it crippled me as an advocate of government. Never again could I propose any government activity without knowing that I was advocating that it be forced upon others regardless of consent.

I’ve undergone quite an epiphany myself, actually, in the ten or so years my political trek has taken. Mine has been quite recent, too, as evidenced by the four pieces I have displayed prominently on the left side of this blog, under the heading, The Courts Will Not Save Us Trilogy and The Denoument.
 
I am, however, still an “advocate of government,” unlike Mr. Kennedy et al. In comments one John Lopez and I had the following exchange:

(Lopez) That’s Barnett’s likely audience — folks who pointedly refuse to think. Barnett’s book is wonderful for folks who want to feel better about their preconceptions. And that category includes roughly, oh, 100% or so of voting conservatives, sitting around scratching their arses and wondering why Things Ain’t Whut They Used To Be. None of them want to hear that their precious Constitution, Bill Of Rights and all, is so much hot air. Their delusions are just too tender to be poked with a sharp truth. Look upthread at what started this discussion. D’ya think self-labeled “Digital Brownshirts” have *any* *ability* *at* *all* to deal with logic?
 
Not true, John. Not that the whole thing isn’t a delusion – it is. But it’s a shared delusion. Like money, it has value so long as enough people believe it has value.
 
Because if enough people lose their faith in the delusion, we devolve back to the age in which the world is only ruled by large men with weapons, and our illusions of “rights” vanish.
 
I think I’ve pegged the difference between our worldviews. You actually think that there are such things as “individual rights” that exist outside the belief systems of any culture. I don’t. But I’m all for maintaining the mass delusion, and improving it whenever possible. At a minimum I want to slow the decay of the delusion, because I think what actually happens over time is that the actions of the power hungry lead to the disillusionment of the masses, and the whole house of cards comes crashing down.
 
Freedom is magic, John. It works only so long as we believe.

And that is, in essence, my epiphany. Oh, the seeds have been there in the back of my mind for a long time. After all, I wrote the piece linked above there – What Is a “Right”? before I started this blog. I wrote another piece, Hoist the Black Flag! in the middle of the four pieces of “The Courts Will Not Save Us.”
 
But for me, it all boils down to Churchill’s quote at the beginning of this essay:

Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried.

All forms of government are coercive. There is no magic wand that will allow individuals to “protect their production” from the coercive State. Lopez and Kennedy et al. hope for one, but even they acknowledge that it doesn’t exist. I have referenced Tytler’s (probably apochryphal) piece on why democracies fail on several occasions, but the canvas of history shows that all forms of government are coercive, and all are transient. The more free, the more ephimeral. The more statist, the more brittle. The historical record indicates that the power of the individual has grown through each and every cycle of history, albeit with some horrifying conditions on the downturns. Our Constitutional Republic, flawed as it is, has produced the most free, most resilient, most powerful and most productive nation this world has yet seen. That cycle, by appearances, is closing. It may take another fifty years or another five hundred – that remains to be seen.
 
Or perhaps, just perhaps, the horse will learn to sing. Perhaps enough people will come stick their fingers in the dike, and stop it from crumbling. Perhaps enough will believe in the magic, and make the world be as it should, not as it is.
 
Because that’s the magic wand the Anarchists need to make the world work the way they want it to: A population that understands that it’s all a mass delusion – and that chooses to believe in that mass delusion with all its might.
 
But until then, the few of us who understand that it’s all a delusion and believe anyway would like the help of the ones who see the delusion, but won’t help sandbag the dike. Because the downturn promises to be very ugly, and putting it off as long as possible seems indicated.  
 

I’m FAMOUS!

 

In a roundabout fashion.  Steven Den Beste linked to the post below with the WMD eye test cartoon.  That, in itself, would be responsible for about a thousand hits over the next day or so.  However, Instapundit saw fit to link to Steven’s post, so The Smallest Minority is getting an Instalanche as well.

 

I think I’m going to need to pay the proprietor of Photobucket some more money.  My account is going to seriously abuse his bandwidth this month.

 

Kinda cool, though.

 

Another KABOOM!

 

Late last month I put up some pictures of a KABOOM! in which a shooter’s .45-70 Marlin Guide Gun “spontaneously disassembled.”  Back in August I related the story of how I managed to accidentally dump some Unique powder into a nearly full bottle of 2400.

 

Well, it looks like someone managed to duplicate my mistake (or someone sabotaged his stuff on purpose) and he spontaneously disassembled a S&W 629 Mountain Gun by stuffing 18 grains of Unique into a .44 Magnum case thinking that he was using 2400.  The story comes by Sixgunner.com, but it’s not a permnent link, so I’m going to reproduce the whole post here:

I bought an S&W Model 629 Mountain Gun in 44 Magnum several years ago and it instantly became my favorite carry gun and companion. I liked it so much that years later I jumped on the opportunity to buy another one as a backup “just in case”. I soon developed a sentimental attachment to it as well. I have used and continue to use 7.5 grains of Unique as my standard load using commercial cast bullets. I have a couple of ammo cans loaded with bullets using that recipe.

 

 I have a small batch of “hunting loads” using 21.0 grains of Alliant 2400 and hand cast “tempered” bullets of my own making. Alliant 2400 is an excellent powder but it has been years since I actually loaded anything using it. I have two containers of A2400, a 5 pound container I use for storage and a one pound container that I used to work out of, both plainly labeled original “Allliant 2400” containers. At some point over the last few years I or someone else poured Unique into the smaller container labeled A2400.

 Last week I got out my old bullet mold, an original Ideal # 429421 and cast a batch of 250 grain 44 caliber bullets. I lubed and sized them to .429 and prepared to make up a batch of my hunting loads using 21.0 grains of A2400. The first thing that I noticed was that I could only get 18 grains of powder into a 44 magnum case. It was a very humid Florida day and I assumed that the humidity had somehow caused the powder to “swell up”. I told my new bride about the odd incident and how I know that I used to load 21.0 grains of powder while in Wyoming and Alabama but could only get about 18 grains in a case now that we live in Florida. All the time never suspecting that I had been using Unique powder instead of A2400. I have been reloading for over 30 years. I should have noticed. The two powders look nothing alike. Only a novice could possibly make such a terrible mistake, but I did.

 I went to the range early Saturday morning and fired of a few 22s with my S&W model 617 to limber up and then loaded my 44 magnum and mentally prepared for the jolt. My bride was about 3 feet to my left loading her 22 cal. Ruger and she said she felt the concussion rip through her body as I touched of the first round. Believe me, I had noticed it too and the fact that my sight picture had changed. I no longer had a rear sight on my Mountain Gun. As a matter of fact, I no longer had a top strap either and three of the chambers were gone. The barrel was barely hanging on to what was left of the top of the revolver. Miraculously, neither I nor my wife was hurt in any way. I searched the outdoor range for remnants of my gun that had been transformed into shrapnel but never found a single piece. I have no idea how much pressure is generated by 18 grains of Unique behind a 250 grain bullet but I have included a picture of the results on what was, at one time, a wonderful gun.  

 I disassembled the batch of defective rounds but on the outside chance that one of the batch got in with my low powered ammo  or that I have somehow done something like that before I am in the process of disassembling every 44 magnum round that I have. The Lord really looked out for us this time.

 The only other fact that might come into play in this incident is that I went through a divorce starting about 3 years ago and my first wife had control of my reloading equipment for about a year. I do not know who packed it all up but it was in storage for about 2 years. This was the first time I’ve used A2400 since before the divorce.

 I hope that you can post this on your website so that others may learn from my mistake.

Here’s the picture:

OUCH!  That was one very lucky couple.

 

Justification vs. Purpose



Steven Den Beste’s latest piece, Can I, May I, takes Kevin Drum (and the Left in general) to task over the “QUAGMIRE!” meme:

Appearance and reality. That’s what it’s all about. It’s a fallacy to assume that they are the same thing. The difference between them has become a major factor in politics and diplomacy during the last 3 years.

Sometimes appearances do ultimately matter more. If your enemies can control the perception of your success so that it is widely viewed as a failure, that can have severe consequences. Hence the incessant drumbeat of quagmire! quagmire! quagmire! played by those who want us to lose this war, or who have other reasons for wanting it to look as if we are losing this war.



In April, shortly after the simultaneous uprisings of Sunnis based in Falluja and of some Shiites led by al Sadr, Kevin Drum wrote a
triumphant post:

War supporters are forever complaining that things are going great in Iraq and the only reason we don’t know about it is because of media bias. You know, that nasty SCLM wants us to lose in Iraq.

So here’s my question: it’s pretty clear that things have, in fact, gone to hell. We may eventually clean up Fallujah, arrest Muqtada al-Sadr, end the riots in Sadr City, and retake Najaf. But even if we do, it’s pretty obvious that Iraq is close to meltdown, we don’t have enough troops to keep order, and media reporting about all this has been perfectly accurate.



So how about it, guys (and you know who you are)? Are you going to step up to the plate and admit that the media has been pretty much right all along and things really do look pretty bleak? Or are you going to continue to complain that reporters are just ignoring all the good news about school openings and electric grid repair?

I am no regular reader of Kevin’s site, so I have no idea whether, in light of later events, he in his own turn “stepped up to the plate” and admitted that Iraq wasn’t actually all that close to meltdown.



Because it doesn’t matter. In the short term, the reality in Iraq didn’t actually matter; what mattered was how it was perceived elsewhere, especially by voters in the US. Contrariwise, in the long run, the perception didn’t matter; the reality of what was happening in Iraq can not ultimately be denied.

Unfortunately, the “long run” is made up of a lot of “short runs”. On July 13, Kevin no longer seems to be talking about meltdowns, but was still referring to the invasion of Iraq as “a mistake“. Why? Because he’s making another form/substance mistake, and confusing justification with purpose.



Leaving aside questions of 20:20 hindsight (it was not at all clear in March that the inspections had proved anything), and of historical revisionism (the US did not give UNSCOM detailed info about where to look, because UNSCOM leaked like a sieve), his basic point is irrelevant even if he is right about it:

The fact is that by March 2003 we didn’t have to rely on CIA estimates or on the estimates of any other intelligence agency. We had been on the ground in Iraq for months and there was nothing there. There was nothing there and we knew it.

Did the CIA screw up? Probably. Did it matter? No. George Bush invaded Iraq in March 2003 not because he was convinced Iraq had WMD, but because he was becoming scared that Iraq didn’t have WMD and that further inspections would prove it beyond any doubt. Facts on the ground have never been allowed to interfere with George Bush’s worldview, and he wasn’t about to take the chance that they might interfere with his war.

Whatever faults the CIA has, let’s not blame them for the war in Iraq. We all know exactly whose mistake it was.

WMDs were never the real purpose of the invasion. WMDs were the focus of the spotlight, however, because of serious diplomatic efforts to gain UNSC approval for an invasion. Within the context of the UNSC, the only way to justify an invasion was to claim that Iraq had not fully cooperated with UN inspectors. Which, despite what Kevin would like to pretend, Saddam’s government had not, even as late as March 2003.

But the public justification made in the UN had nothing to do with the real purpose, the real strategic goal which required the invasion. Kevin makes casual reference to that, when he says, Facts on the ground have never been allowed to interfere with George Bush’s worldview, and he wasn’t about to take the chance that they might interfere with his war.

Except that “facts on the ground” did not interfere or contradict the real purpose, which was to depose a corrupt dictator and to “nation build” so as to make one core Arab nation a better place for the people living there. By so doing, the goal was to infect the imaginations and aspirations of the citizens in other nations in the region, to “destabilize” the corrupt dictatorships in charge and to try to bring about long term change to the whole region. And that could not be publicly proclaimed at the time without deeply imperiling the strategy for the overall war.

Steven has much more to say on this, and it’s well worth your time, but this piece specifically reminded me of another cartoon I ran across this morning that says it all, perfectly:

Anybody Got a Room?

 

Rich from Seldom Sober will be making a pilgrimage from The People’s Republic of California to the People’s Republic of New York in September on his Blogs Across America tour, but he’s got some holes in his itinerary.  Specifically, he needs a hostel between his stop here in Tucson and his stop in Colorado Springs.  Any offers?  Then he needs another break or two in the trek between Detroit and the Big Apple.  C’mon, surely there’s some bloggers out there willing to give a fella a hand (and get a bitchin’ T-shirt out of the deal.)  Drop him a line if you can help.

 

Here’s the map of the projected route:

Lambert Responds!

Tim Lambert has finally responded to my last salvo in the “Self Defense” exchange, and it’s a pretty good piece, too.  Unoriginally titled Gullible Gunners, episode IV, Tim makes a good case that not all cases of self-defense that we “gullible gunners” point to, actually are.  But, once again, Tim misses my point.
 
I’m going to make this post remarkably short (for me, especially on this topic.)  Tim concludes his piece by attempting to refute the example I gave in my last entry on this topic.  Tim writes:

Finally we turn to Brett Osborn. Baker claims that this is a case of the government prosecuting someone for an obvious case of self defence. Like all the killers who were convicted he stabbed the victim in the back. This doesn’t sound he was defending himself, but there were others present so he could have been defending them; we just don’t know for sure. In any event, it certainly isn’t an obvious case of self-defence. In this case we don’t know what the jury thought of the evidence because Osborn chose to plead guilty to manslaughter. Why?

Osborn decided that he could not face the risk of life imprisonment. “You see it in the paper,” Osborn has said, “that bloke Tony Martin who shot the kid who was burgling his house. He went to prison for years.

Osborn mistakenly believed that Martin had been convicted despite acting in self-defence. And the reason why he believed that was because of the activities of the “Tony Martin is innocent brigade(sic)”. If Osborn was really acting in self-defence then the jury would have acquitted him but Osborn was unsure of this because of people like Baker who argue that self-defence is legally risky in England. As a result Baker is now in jail.

I assure you, I’m not in jail.  Regardless of how much some would like to see me there!

The law and the results of the cases seem clear. Self-defence in Britain is lawful. There may be some chilling effect on people because of fear of being convicted for self-defence, but the people responsible for that are on Baker’s side of the question.

Not entirely, Tim.
 
Not even mostly.
 
Tim didn’t comment on the judge’s statement in that case:

Judge Shirley Anwyl QC said that she accepted that Halling could have been perceived to be “dangerous to others”. But she added: “With hindsight it is clear that Halling was presenting no real danger to anyone but himself.”

Yet hindsight – under English Law – isn’t supposed to factor in.  What the defendant actually believed at the time – regardless of the accuracy of that belief – IS
 
She continued:

“By your plea you have accepted that you intended real serious injury. Your use of violence was not wholly unpremeditated in that you did equip yourself with at least one knife. She added: “I am in no doubt about your genuine remorse and your appreciation of the appalling effect that the killing of Halling has and continues to have on his relatives and friends.”

But she sentenced him to five years in jail for it. 
 
Nor did Tim comment on the statement of Osborne’s lawyer:

“The law,” explains Harry Potter, the barrister who, with Charles Bott, would defend Osborn, “does not require the intention to kill for a prosecution for murder to succeed. All that is required is an intention to cause serious bodily harm. That intention can be fleeting and momentary. But if it is there in any form at all for just a second – that is, if the blow you struck was deliberate rather than accidental – you can be guilty of murder and spend the rest of your life in prison.”Moreover,” Mr Potter continues, “while self-defence is a complete defence to a charge of murder, the Court of Appeal has ruled that if the force you use is not judged to have been reasonable – if a jury, that is, decides it was disproportionate – then you are guilty of murder. A conviction for murder automatically triggers the mandatory life sentence. There are no exceptions.”

I pointed out to Tim that here in the States had someone like Mr. Halling forced himself into a home and been shot by the homeowner for it, said homeowner wouldn’t have faced prosecution regardless of the direction of the bullet travel, as Mr. Osborne would have been defending not only himself, but the other residents of the house.  There would have been no question that, in arming oneself and shooting at a home invader, serious injury was the intent, but here that’s generally OK.  In England it holds a serious risk of prosecution.   
 
The law in England saw fit to charge Mr. Osborne with murder for stabbing Mr. Halling.  He was at real risk of being convicted for it.  Tim holds more faith in the jury than I do.
 
Draw your own conclusion.  I know what mine is.  The “chilling effect” is real – something I’m glad Tim admits to.  The people responsible for the “chilling effect” are on the side of the State.  The ones on my side simply recognize it, and are trying to mitigate it here. 

D’OH!

Francis W. Porretto, Curmudgeon Emeritus, has started his own blog, Eternity Road, and I haven’t added it to my blogroll – until now.

Francis also promises an essay on the topic du jour, Anarchy as a system of government, which should prove as excellent as everything else he writes. From the blog:

For additional confusion, note that all States, large or small, young or old, powerful or weak, are in a condition of anarchy with respect to one another. None of them concedes the inherent legitimacy of any other’s coercive privileges. Their relations are based on the more pragmatic concession of not invading just yet.

Funny, isn’t it? Anarchy, supposed by many to lead inevitably to unacceptable violence and disharmony, appears unavoidable at the inter-State level. But we accept that tacitly, because up to this point, all the alternatives proposed or attempted have been far worse.

Hmmm… I need to think about that.