The Smallest Minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. – Ayn Rand
Quote of the Day
We’re winning ground in the realm of gun rights, but losing every other right during the interim. Eventually, it will be easy to ask for permission to have a gun, but we’ll have to provide our GPS coordinates to the authorities at all times if we go outside the view of the security cameras inside our houses. – Robb Allen, “Some infringement on constitutional rights is OK” Sharp as a Marble
From the Dept. of “Make ‘Em Mad”
David Codrea points to the latest in .gov thuggery from that bastion of freedom, Maryland, where former Attorney General J. Joseph Curran published his 1999 manifesto A Farewell to Arms: The Solution to Gun Violence in America (PDF) Here’s just a part of what Curran recommended:
In the short run, we must change our gun culture. People must come to realize that we endanger our lives and those of our children by owning and carrying handguns, and by tolerating it in our neighbors. There is no reason why, in going to a movie theater or grocery store, we should worry that someone’s gun might discharge accidentally and kill our child. As attitudes have slowly but surely undergone radical transformation regarding such critical public health issues as smoking and using seatbelts, bicycle helmets, and child car restraints, so too must owning and carrying handguns come to be seen as dangerous and aberrant behavior. We must change people’s minds about how far they are willing to endanger themselves in tolerating the choice of others to carry a gun.
Thus, I call upon everyone – private employers, government agencies, schools, physicians, and especially parents – to help. First, to put teeth into this initiative, I ask the General Assembly to take the lead and make guns in public accommodations illegal. It is one thing to continue to tolerate people choosing to endanger themselves and their loved ones by keeping a gun at home. We should no longer, however, allow them to force others to endanger themselves by going to a movie theater or baseball game where guns are permitted. In addition, private employers outside the context of public accommodations should prohibit guns on their premises, with prominent signs to remind the public that guns must be left at the door.
In other words, this:
One thing I noted through Curran’s entire manifesto: he never said how he intended to disarm, you know, criminals.
Anyway, it looks like the departure of Curran in 2007 didn’t have any salutary effect on Maryland’s official hoplophobia. It would appear that the State monitors ammunition purchases and checks them against their list of registered firearms. And if there’s a discrepancy? Do they send an officer of the law to politely ask about whatever might be concerning them during, say, normal working hours?
Oh no! Instead they ninja-up and go tacticool. From the Maryland Shooter’s forum:
In case anyone isn’t on the MSI mailing list, this is from the latest. Reading this made me feel physically sick. This is straight up police state stuff, and someone could have been murdered by the police had it gone down a little differently. This has got to stop. Something HAS to be done.
Hello Henry.
I just wanted your organization to know what Our State Police are up too. The incident below happened to me, a legal gun owner in La Plata, Maryland two nights ago (August 4, 2008 at 12:30 PM). Next time, they won’t get in without a warrant. You live and you learn. Below, is the e-mail I sent to Mr. Chris Contee NRA, Chief Counsel at his request. I know I’m not an isolated incident so I hope your members keep their doors locked.
Dear Chris,
It was great to speak with you today by phone. Sorry but also glad you are so busy with our legislative matters. What would we do without you and the NRA?
As I told you by phone, my Wife and I were unfairly besieged late last night by the Maryland State Police. I have also relayed this occurrence to “Citizens Group for the right to keep and bear arms”. I believe they are in Seattle Washington. Enclosed is my summation for your review. Good luck on your trip and safe travel.
Last night at 12:30 pm a MD State Police “Armed Response Team” showed up at our door. I was dead asleep, my Wife was laying some ceramic tile on our basement floor when our driveway alert went off several times. She looked at the camera monitor and screamed that Police in Assault gear were running up to our front door. That made me sit straight up from a dead sleep.
We thought they were there for my Brother in Law who had just been mailed Bench Warrants to our home, but he doesn’t live here and he is already incarcerated, so my Wife opened the door for them. Then I heard one of them say he had some papers for me or needed to speak with me,so I got up to speak with them 6 or 7 officers in full assault vests, etc. and NO ONE in uniform. Four heavily armed police came into the house while at least two others walked around outside of our home.
One, began to talk to me asking me about the types of weapons I own. Remember now, I was just startled from a dead sleep and I kept asking why are you here, why do you want to know about my guns? Every gun I bought in Maryland I bought from a MD Dealer. Well this Trooper said that I had purchased a “large amount” of ammunition recently and wanted to know why. When I questioned why he was asking, then he changed his tune to what type of Handguns I had. I told him I just purchased my first handgun in Maryland last week, but had not even picked it up from the Store . He questioned me about other handguns I might own and I realized that he was “fishing” to match his list of my ammunition purchases with handguns that I owned. Then I told him about my C&R license that I had purchased 2 with that but was not required to register them with ST. Police. Moreover, I told him it was the MD. ST. Police who approved me as a “designated collector” so why are they here in storm trooper fashion at 12:30 pm maybe to kill me because I legally bought some handgun ammo? He told me that most of the ammo I purchased was for weapons that they had no record of me having registered so the “SYSTEM” Flagged me. Flagged me for what? Death, Harassment at midnight by 7 Storm Troopers?
I asked, “… does your system know that it is stupid to buy ammo with your own ID if your are going to do something illegal, Does your system know that I have a C&R and can buy weapons of various calibers without your knowledge, Does your system know that you yourselves registered me as a designated collector, who “collects” so it is not unusual for me to buy any type or manner of ammunition and finally, Does your system know that it is NOT illegal to purchase handgun ammunition in the State of Maryland whether or not you own that caliber handgun?”
The Trooper (plain clothes), had a list of ammo calibers that he referred to and I agreed, there’s no secret that I bought the ammo, but so what? And I’m still not sure of the States definition of a “large amount”. Look, I’m not outfitting a Militia, hate group, or giving it to someone who can’t buy it, or even buy ammo for a stolen weapon I don’t want to register. Any weapon I have every owned has either been purchased at a Gun Store or I personally knew the individual I bought it from and its origin. And, last time I looked it is not illegal to buy handgun ammo, even if you don’t own the caliber weapon OR you don’t own a weapon at all !! So unless the law is changed, Police cannot harass people who do so.
That being said, the young Trooper told me I “should” voluntarily register all my weapons or this would happen again… because the “system” flagged me. And another thing, he kept asking where I kept my weapons, in a safe? I never answered him and he asked me three separate times as to the locations of any weapons I might have. I got the distinct impression he wanted me to voluntarily let him see/inspect the handguns for the calibers I bought ammo for, but I was ready for that. No warrant, no see. I mean, I would hope you could trust the Police, but why should I let six or seven or so strangers know where I keep guns? If indeed I had the calibers he was inquiring about?
The point here though, is that Police came to my home without a warrant, dressed to kill, trying to intimidate me about something that is NOT illegal !! This was not an Interview it was an interrogation under duress.
Funny the last thing he said to me before leaving was “… Mr. Curtis, sorry to have HARASSED you, you have a good night.”
Read the whole thread.
Sounds like Maryland’s effort to “change the gun culture” are proceeding apace, doesn’t it? Are you mad yet?
I received my M1 Carbine from the CMP a couple of weeks ago, and I noted then that the serial number on the Certificate of Authenticity didn’t seem right to me. According to the information I could find, the serial number the CMP thought the rifle carried would have made the receiver a Saginaw, but it (and the barrel) were clearly marked “IBM CORP.” So I fired off an email noting that I thought they’d misread the second digit of the S/N as a “6” rather than an “8”, where the “8” would have made it a 1943 production IBM unit.
I just received a new receipt and a new Certificate of Authenticity in the mail with the correct serial number. That’s pretty good service!
Quote of the Day
In the months after the Afghan campaign, France’s foreign minister, Hubert Védrine, was deploring American “simplisme” on a daily basis, and Saddam understood from the get-go that the French veto was his best shot at torpedoing any meaningful UN action on Iraq. Yet the jihadists still blew up a French oil tanker. If you were to pick only one Western nation not to blow up the oil tankers of, the French would surely be it.
But they got blown up anyway. And afterwards a spokesman for the Islamic Army of Aden said, “We would have preferred to hit a U.S. frigate, but no problem because they are all infidels.”
No problem. They are all infidels.
When people make certain statements and their acts conform to those statements I tend to take them at their word. As Hussein Massawi, former leader of Hezbollah, neatly put it, “We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you.” – Mark Steyn, America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It
Something I think far too many people deliberately refuse to acknowledge, much less accept.
C-SPAN covered the July 31 Ninth Circuit Judicial Conference where Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy spoke. The video is available here (RealPlayer). Orin Kerr linked to it because Kennedy discusses, briefly, the Heller decision, but this part is what caught my attention, starting at about 28 minutes in:
We went at the request of the State Department to Poland, and I asked as I always do if I could please meet with the faculty at the law school. So we met the faculty of the law school in Warsaw, and, um, they told me ahead of time that I couldn’t address the students because it was the second or third week in September and the students were not to come until the following week, which disappointed me. But they had the faculty meeting, so that I could talk about curriculum and meet the faculty.
Well, halfway through the meeting, somebody comes in and says “Oh, Justice Kennedy, we forgot. Our entering law students are here today for an orientation and they want to hear you.” Now, these are basically High School seniors, just entering the University, and um, there’s maybe ninety of them in the room, they speak excellent English – Polish is a secret language anyway. (Laughter) So went out, “I’m Justice Kennedy of the Supreme Court here to tell you about the Constitution. . .” and, uh, they know that I solicited questions at the outset, and asked to be interrupted, and uh, as I was talking about the Federal structure, and the structure of the national government. And a student raised her hand and said “Now, the President checks the Congress, and the Congress checks the President, what is it that checks the courts?” Very good question, so we talk about that.
There’s a discussion I’d have liked to listen in on.
And then another student says “Now federalism, you think federalism is very important, but, you know a lot of money goes to Washington and then goes back to the states with conditions on it. Doesn’t that undermine the sovereignty of the states?” (Kennedy shows a stunned look to the audience, drawing laughter.)
So, I, I, g-go on with this, and I, the discussion is very good. A third student raises. . . I think it was a lady, raises her hand and says “Were Chief Justice John Marshall’s opinions all popular when he wrote them?”
And I said, “Wait a minute.” (Laughter) I said, “You’ve, you’ve planned this, Das ist ein schwindel, this is a trick!” (More laughter) Um, and they said “No, no, you don’t understand! We’ve been trying to design our Constitution for fourteen years, and we’ve studied American legal and American Constitutional history since the fourth grade.”
(My emphasis.) Get your attention? It got mine.
It gets better.
I told Mary afterwards, I said “If I’d had that class at Princeton or Duke or Stanford,” I said, “I would’ve come home and told you ‘It’s a great class!'” I said, “These are High School students!” So we told the same story that night at the dinner where the Provost was. He said, “Well, it’s, it’s. . . That’s true. But the other thing they didn’t mention; we can’t say anything good about the Communists – they wrecked us for probably a hundred years – but there was one fallout of what they did. If you wanted to be a doctor, an architect, an engineer, a physician, you didn’t have the opportunity to go into that profession, so you went into teaching. And for fifty years we had the best teachers in the world, and you’ve seen the product.”
Here we get the George Orwell Daycare Center and High School seniors who wouldn’t recognize the Constitution if someone burned a copy in front of them.
The Big “O”
At first, Rick Husong was stunned by the overwhelming wave of negative and sometimes crude reactions to his bid revealed in Whispers last week to build a pro-Sen. Barack Obama movement around a hand salute dubbed the Big-O. Among the hundreds of comments posted on the Whispers site were those comparing it to a gang gesture, a Nazi salute, or worse. “This is how Sieg Heil got started. And, no I’m not saying Obama is Hitler. I just think people should be careful about slipping into a personality cult for a charismatic leader,” wrote Jake of Tennessee. Husong tells me that he was pretty depressed by the reaction to his idea and free design offered on the website of Loyalty Inc., his California creative company. That is until he heard of a fan walking on Venice Beach wearing a T-shirt displaying the artwork. In fact, despite the tsunami of criticism, the artwork has been downloaded 7,700 times and his site has been hit 214,000 times since the first Whisper went live. “I would call that a raving success,” he says, adding that he plans to make his Big-O the “peace sign of our generation.”
He also E-mailed me last night to say that the hits on the artwork have inspired him to push even harder to build a movement around the hand signal.
Well, we know what it inspired on my part.
But the actual image in question is this one:
Here’s the take of the one outspoken Obama supporter in my office:
I have to say I am a little frightened by this. My first thoughts as I saw this were, “Great, all we need is an elephant to stroke and we are set!” Then I remembered that the GOP is represented by the elephant… talk about the irony.
You don’t say.
As Glenn Reynolds noted, Mr. Husong has forgotten the First Rule of Holes.
UPDATE: Robb weighs in with a “hand salute” suggestion of his own.
Quote of the Day
For over 80 years, teacher education in America has been in the grip of an immutable dogma, responsible for endless educational nonsense. That dogma may be summed up in the phrase: Anything But Knowledge. Schools are about many things, teacher educators say (depending on the decade)—self-actualization, following one’s joy, social adjustment, or multicultural sensitivity—but the one thing they are not about is knowledge. Oh sure, educators will occasionally allow the word to pass their lips, but it is always in a compromised position, as in “constructing one’s own knowledge,” or “contextualized knowledge.” Plain old knowledge, the kind passed down in books, the kind for which Faust sold his soul, that is out. – Heather Mac Donald, Why Johnny’s Teacher Can’t Teach, The Burden of Bad Ideas
Clayton Cramer looks further into the story behind U.S. v Moses that I pointed to a few days ago.
Clayton concludes that the story as related by Bryan Fischer is essentially correct. RTWT, but here’s the pullquote:
When you are dealing with the federal government, remember that you are dealing with people with enormous power. They resent being ignored. They resent being told that you aren’t going to obey them. They are rather like an Egyptian pharoah (which makes the defendant’s name especially ironic).
And it isn’t just the federal government. Remember the recent incidents involving TSA drones? In one incident in Chicago a TSA agent is reported to have yelled, when a passenger she was abusing demanded to see a supervisor, “I have power! I have power!”
Yes, it seems to be all about power.
In New Jersey v. Pelleteri the Superior Court of New Jersey, Appellate Division declared:
When dealing with guns, the citizen acts at his peril.
The more accurate statement seems to be, “When dealing with Government, the citizen acts at his peril.”
Do Not Patronize
Breda relates her experience of finding an entire shopping center and a DQ marked as “Gun Free Zones.” She asks:
“What do I do?”
Well, I’d recommend carrying a stack of these little business cards around with you.
Assuming they’re still available. Perhaps Ohioans for Concealed Carry offers something similar?
Quote of the Day
No, man, I don’t think we’re better than anybody else. This is America – we are everybody else! – Zo, from this video found at Rodger’s
I’m not a “conservative Republican,” (small “l” libertarian, more like) but I appreciate the arguments made by the speaker.