Author: Kevin

A Little Less Blatant

The Atlanta Urinal Constipation Journal Constitution in an (unsigned, of course) editorial waxes poetic over the evil NRA:

Pry Congress from cold, deadly clutch of the NRA

Those who say that negotiating with the gun lobby is like making a deal with the devil owe the archfiend an apology.

WELL! Let’s get off on the right foot. Nothing could be as evil as an organization with 4 million dues-paying members, right?

For months, the National Rifle Association has lobbied hard for passage of a bill that would make the gun industry immune to civil lawsuits. The measure — the NRA’s top legislative priority — had already passed the House, and this week was close to passage in the Senate as well, until NRA lobbyists stepped in at the last minute and ordered that the bill be killed.

Why the sudden change of heart? Because Democrats and moderate Republicans had succeeded in attaching two quite sensible, reasonable gun-safety measures to the bill. One amendment extended the 1994 ban on military-style assault weapons that’s set to expire in September; the other closed a loophole that permitted people to buy firearms at gun shows without having to undergo instant background checks.

As opposed to those quite sensible, reasonable Democrat legislators that just want ‘the children’ to be safe, right? There’s only one right way to see this, and it isn’t the NRA’s.

Officially, President Bush backs both measures, although he has done nothing to support them.

Which is what being a politician is all about, I believe. Talk alot, say nothing.

According to a recent survey by the Consumer Federation of America, the assault rifle ban is also supported by a majority of the nation’s gun owners.

Hell, that might even be true. There are, after all, tens of millions of gun owners and only a few million of us own evil black rifles. The Ducks Unlimited crowd doesn’t have much love for us. But the Second Amendment isn’t about duck hunting. It’s not my fault that most gun owners aren’t all that conversant on enumerated Constitutional rights.

The assault weapons ban is particularly important to law enforcement officers, who had pleaded with Congress to renew the ban and also close the gun show loophole.

Um, not quite. It’s particularly important to politically connected law enforcement leadership groups. The rank and file generally know better.

According to the Justice Department, the proportion of banned assault weapons traced to crimes had dropped by 65.8 percent since 1995, most likely as a result of that law.

Really? After the Violence Policy Center claimed that one in five police officers killed with a gun were killed with “assault weapons”? I think we’ve got our messages crossed. The AWB was toothless, so it’s got to be strengthened, but if it can’t be strengthened it must be renewed. It didn’t stop the sale of “assault weapons,” but it kept assault weapons out of the hands of criminals. The gun-control crowd reminds me of John Kerry – they argue both sides of the case, but still want you to vote for them.

Nonetheless, U.S. Sen. Zell Miller was among six Democrats who voted against renewing the ban on military-style assault weapons. “First of all, the term ‘assault’ was dreamed up to give the weapons included a bad name. Who could be for an ‘assault weapon’? The definition is really ‘semi-automatic,’ and about 15 percent of all firearms owned in the U.S. meet the definition,” said Miller.

Simplistic, but relatively accurate, given what they actually want to ban.

Had the gun-immunity bill passed, it would have voided hundreds of pending lawsuits, including those filed by more than 30 cities devastated by gun violence and by dozens of shooting victims and their families. For example, it would have slammed shut the courthouse door to the families of the victims of Beltway snipers John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo. The families are suing Bull’s Eye Shooter Supply, the Washington state gun shop where Malvo either bought or stole the semi-automatic rifle used to slaughter 10 people. Between 2000 and 2002, the gun shop somehow “lost” 230 other guns from its inventory.

Bull’s Eye tried to have the case dismissed, but the courts ruled that the store had some responsibility to ensure its firearms didn’t fall into the hands of criminals. The judge relied on the established legal principle that a person who carelessly furnishes a criminal an open opportunity to commit a crime can be held liable.

Excuse me, but they completely override the critical point here: These people are also suing BUSHMASTER, the manufacturer of the rifle. OK, if you can prove that the gun was sold under the table, then the previous owner of Bull’s Eye might have some liability, but Bushmaster? Note that the AJS doesn’t mention this. It doesn’t fit their agenda. They might have to explain this themselves. Nor does the AJC mention that most of the lawsuits brought by the cities have been thrown out, appealed, and thrown out again on the basis that they are groundless attempts to legislate via the courts when the legislators won’t do what the (minority) gun control groups want. That, too, doesn’t fit their agenda.

And why doesn’t anybody bring up the idea of suing the BATF for allowing Bull’s Eye to keep running after they “lost” over 200 firearms from their inventory over several years. Doesn’t that strike you as odd? Isn’t it the job of the BATF to keep track of things like this? Don’t they bear some responsibility here?

The NRA and its supporters want to give the gun industry an immunity to being sued that no other American industry enjoys.

They certainly do, as the gun industry is suffering an unjust attack through the courts that no other American industry is subject to.

As they have demonstrated, they want that immunity only on their terms, with no compromise and no tolerance for any effort that might reduce the toll in lost and broken lives attributed to guns. And while that absolutist approach is troubling, the docile willingness of so many in Congress to accommodate that extremism is more troubling still.

You don’t like “zero tolerance” when it affects you, do you? We’re done “compromising.” We’ve learned that it means “we only give up half of what you want to take from us.”

Welcome to the new world. We’ve had enough. We’re fighting back.

And they have absolutely no shame in lying through their teeth.

Today comes this little op-ed from Newsday:

New round in gun issue

Paul Vitello

Pick up the Yellow Pages and go to “Guns.” Call the first gun store you find. Ask what you’ll need to purchase a semi-automatic military-style sniper rifle like the one used by John Allen Muhammad and John Lee Malvo to kill 10 people during their 2002 Washington, D.C.-area murder spree.

“You have a driver’s license?” said the man at the Long Island store I called yesterday to ask about buying the assault rifle known as the Bushmaster XM-15.

“Sure,” I said, “but what else do I need to bring?”

I was thinking paperwork – perhaps to verify my clean criminal record, my relative sanity, the lack of any documented connections between myself and al-Qaida.

“Nothing else,” said the man. “Just money.”

Whether you find this surprising or not depends on how closely you have followed the gun-control debate of the past 10 years. In the midst of a series of mass murders in workplaces, Congress in 1994 imposed a 10-year ban on the sale of military style weapons under production at that time.

OK so far, except the last part. The “10 year ban” specifically addressed 19 models and features. It did not ban “military style weapons.” Here’s where Mr. Vitello goes off the rails:

The Bushmaster, a version of the military’s standard AK-47 rifle, was the kind of gun they had in mind: highly accurate, extremely deadly from almost a half-mile away.

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry here. First, Bushmaster manufactures AR-15 rifles, which are semi-auto versions of the military M-16, not the Soviet AK-47. Second, while Bushmaster does make some “highly accurate” versions, most “military style” rifles are not known for their tack-driving accuracy, and I have yet to see any AK-47 that I’d call “accurate.” Third, “almost a half-mile”??? A half mile is 880 yards. Maximum useful range of an accurized target AR-15 is 600 meters using specially loaded ammunition. Realistically it’s a 300 meter rifle. But why let mere facts get in the way of a good fear-mongering?

But with a few modifications – a change of barrel size, a different bolt – the maker was able to legalize its product and keep selling it, despite the ban.

Say what? “Change of barrel size, a different bolt”? No collapsable stock, no bayonet lug, no flash hider. PER THE LETTER OF THE LAW.

Richard Dyke, chairman of Bushmaster Firearms, the maker of this gun, did so well in fact that he had money left over to contribute to political campaigns. He has long been a big Republican fund-raiser in Maine, his home state. And in the 2000 presidential campaign, he was appointed as George W. Bush’s state finance director.

(Knowing this much helps to understand why, when Malvo and Muhammad were killing people from 500 yards during that summer and fall, then-White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said Bush saw the shootings not as a gun problem so much as a problem of “values.”)

Muhammed and Malvo didn’t take a single shot over 150 yards as I understand it. And had they used the Remington 700 rifle they acquired first, they would actually have been able to hit people from 500 yards out, not just in Mr. Vitello’s fevered imagination.

Now, the so-called assault weapons ban – weak and evadable as it is – is due to expire. This will make it possible for gunmakers to return their products to their full monty of killing power: more bullets per clip, more thrust per squeeze. The National Rifle Association has made the end of the ban one of its top priorities.

What, exactly, does “more bullets per clip, more thrust per squeeze” mean? The number of rounds per magazine hasn’t changed – my “pre-ban” 30-rounders fit my “post-ban” AR-15 perfectly well, and my “post-ban” AR-15 shoots one round “per squeeze” just like a “pre-ban” does. Again, why let facts dilute a good scare?

Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-Mineola), who is known among NRA-backers as that woman from Long Island who just won’t shut up – just because her husband was killed and her son was wounded by a madman in 1993 with a legally purchased gun, she blames the NRA – has been working the hallways of Congress this week in an effort to bring to a vote a bill that would make the temporary ban permanent. Her bill would also tighten some of the restrictions on fire power. “The majority of people don’t even know it’s expiring,” she said.

“Tighten some of the restrictions?” This is the first piece of understatement in this entire philippic. By the same token a guillotine would be “just a bit extreme” for curing headaches. “Most people” don’t know it’s expiring because it hasn’t had any effect on anything.

Her opponents include not only Bushmaster’s maker and Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas), the majority leader of the House, but the formidable lobbying apparatus of the NRA, which flexed its muscle Tuesday when it pulled its support from a Senate bill that would have attached McCarthy’s ban to another measure.

The other measure, shamelessly named the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, would have protected the gun industry from lawsuits filed by shooting victims or their families. Several such suits have been brought already by families of the 10 D.C.-area sniper victims.

The NRA was so opposed to McCarthy’s weapons ban, it was willing to scuttle the Lawful Commerce bill for now, and wait for another shot.

“The president himself says there are terrorist cells at work in this country,” she said. “Do we want these people to be able to walk into any gun store?”

Non sequitur alert! How would extending the “assault weapon ban” prevent “these people” from walking “into any gun store”? Another example of the complete logical disconnect exhibited by gun banners.

Bush, during his 2000 presidential campaign, said he would support extending the assault weapons ban. But he hasn’t lifted a finger to help bring it to a vote in the House or the Senate.

So, to review just this much: A weak ban on assault weapons is passed in 1994, despite which assault weapons sales flourish.

If you want to be truthful, not despite, but because of.

Bush says he will support the ban’s extension, but doesn’t seem to really mean it. Members of the Republican-controlled House and Senate keep the extension from coming up for a vote; in an election year, no one wants it on record that he or she voted for every American’s right to shoot people’s heads off from 500 yards.

As Marie Antoinette or someone similar once said, let them eat values.

Actually, if I want to shoot someone’s head off from 500 yards, my “assault rifle” or any military-style semi-auto is going to be about my last choice. I’d use my 1914 vintage 1896 Swedish Mauser bolt-action rifle that I’ve configured for steel silhouette shooting.

Or I’d get a Remington 700 PS like Muhammed and Malvo originally were going to use.

The fact of the matter is, only a few safe congresscritters want to be on record as voting for further infringement of the right to arms. Most of them have discovered that voting against the right to arms makes re-election a chancy thing, and that violates the First Rule of Public Service: KEEP GETTING ELECTED.

People like Mr. Vitello were the reason I got active in the fight over the right to arms.

I got very tired of seeing the public blatantly lied to with essentially no way to rebut the liars.

Mr. Vitello, you’re a liar. A willful, blatant, rabble-rousing preacher of fear. You should be ashamed of yourself, but of course you aren’t. You wrap yourself in a mantle of “good intentions,” and deceive yourself that lying in a “good cause” is justified. It isn’t. You are yet another example of the falsity of University of Toronto associate professor of philosophy Benjamin Hellie’s statement:

But left- and right-wing sources are not symmetrical. The goal of the right wing is to perpetuate and worsen a system in which a small number of people control obscene quantities of wealth and power at the expense of the vast majority, whereas the goal of the left wing is to distribute wealth and power more broadly. For short, the goal of the right wing is perpetuating and increasing injustice, whereas the goal of the left wing is increasing justice.

People do not like injustice. The knowledge that injustice is being done to others offends their sense of morality; the knowledge that injustice is being done to them makes them angry and resentful. Both these emotions contribute to a desire to use the political system in order to counter injustice. So it is very helpful for the right wing to achieve its goal if the existence of injustice, and the unjust effects of the policies it endorses, can be concealed.

Providing this concealment is the role of right-wing political writers. Thus, a priori, given that injustice exists and that right-wing policies are unjust, you might expect the ample use of lies, misdirection, and sophistry from these guys. (In fact, my intimate knowledge with right-wing political writing provides ample evidence that what you might expect is exactly what you get.)

By contrast, the role of left-wing political writers is to cause people to believe that there is injustice, and that right-wing policies make it worse. Given, once again, that both these points are true, all that left wing political writers need to do is report the truth.

(Via Francis Porretto)

Polemicists such as Mr. Vitello cannot report “truth.” It isn’t frightening enough. They must lie to achieve their ends. They must mislead, obfuscate, twist, mangle, spindle and mutilate the truth, because otherwise “the people” won’t fear enough to be lead to the safety the Anointed have engineered for them.

Fuck you, Mr. Vitello.

Open Invitation

I’ve left an open invitation over at The Fabulous Baker Boys. Spread the word.

Hmm…. Looks Like I Need a New Image Server

My old one won’t let me link anymore, apparently. Bummer.

Anybody know of a free image server that allows links?

A point well made by Dave Kopel in this NRO piece, The Return of a Legislative Legend. Opening line:

As the Senate considers legislation to prohibit abusive lawsuits against Second Amendment rights, Sen. Ted Kennedy is offering an amendment to ban ammunition. Kennedy claims that he is aiming at “cop-killer” bullets, but he appears to be badly misinformed on the issue.

Well! Color me shocked.

If Ted Kennedy was anything but misinformed I’d be amazed. Wasn’t Senator Kennedy quoted as saying that the .30-30 was armor-piercing?

Quote:
————
…Another rifle caliber, the 30.30 caliber, was responsible for penetrating three officers’ armor and killing them in 1993, 1996, and 2002. This ammunition is also capable of puncturing light-armored vehicles, ballistic or armored glass, armored limousines, even a 600-pound safe with 600 pounds of safe armor plating. (What has Senator Ted been smoking?)

It is outrageous and unconscionable that such ammunition continues to be sold in the United States of America. Armor-piercing ammunition for rifles and assault weapons is virtually unregulated in the United States. A Federal license is not required to sell such ammunition unless firearms are sold as well. Anyone over the age of 18 may purchase this ammunition without a background check. There is no Federal minimum age of possession. Purchases may be made over the counter, by mail order, by fax, by Internet, and there is no Federal requirement that dealers retain sales records.

Via the Geek with a .45.

Why is it that the only people who really get their underwear in a twist over the “armor-piercing” capabilities of ammunition – especially the “magical” ability of rifle ammo to penetrate “armored limousines” – are the high and mighty lawmakers who ride around in armored limousines?

Kopel’s article is quite informative, but he doesn’t mention the non-existant “Black Rhino” ammunition that was announced just about the time Congress was last debating “Cop Killer” ammo. I’m surprised that it wasn’t hauled out again.

Here’s an idea: Let’s just issue all police officers (and legislators) Level IV vests that’ll stop anything up to and including an armor-piercing .30-06 round. That’ll protect them!

Of course, they won’t wear the stiff, heavy bastards, but hey! It’s the thought that counts, right? We’re well-intentioned. We’re caring. And feeling is so much more important than thinking, right?

Just Got Home, Leaving Again Tomorrow

But boy am I glad to find out that – so far – the AWB is going to die. They still have time before September to try to ramrod an extension or expansion through as an amendment on something critical, but it looks like it’s going to croak on schedule! I’m looking forward to getting a collapsable stock for my AR.

Too bad the lawsuit preemption bill had to die to ensure that, but so it goes. Better luck next year. I hope there are still some manufacturers in business by then.

Kudos to everyone who followed this action so closely for those of us who could not. “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance,” and we’ve learned that the hard way. Hooray for the Internet, that allows us almost real-time updates and the links to our elected representatives so we can make ourselves heard.

Anyway, Triggerfinger has an excellent synopsis of today’s events up for anyone who wants it brief and to the point. And use the internal link to see how your Congresscritters voted.

My Senator, Kyl, isn’t too bad. But McCain’s GOTTA go.

Oh Crap! One More!

From Publicola, as a matter of fact: Mail Barbara Boxer your unused gun locks!!

I’ve got a couple laying around here somewhere….

While I’ve Been Gone

The Geek and Publicola have been doing yeoman duty in keeping tabs on our congresscritters in the Senate. Please, stroll over and read. And the Geek’s got a link to a helluva Kerry-bashing story in The Village Voice, no less.

And now I must go to bed, because I have to get up at 4 AM again, and leave for more field work. Back Tuesday night, I hope.

It’s Over, I Think.

David Baker says:

I will have to agree with your last debate partner and say:

“I think that my position now is actually more liberal (in terms of my approach to gun control) than when we started.”

There are certainly regulations already in place that need to be strengthened by enforcement, and it seems I have much more to learn on the subject. I believe I am on the road to a possible core value change on this subject. (although I still have a usefulness issue with automatic weapons and probably always will. And no, not because they are scary, either. Just without need.)

So you may chalk up another “win” in your column on this issue. You are certainly a formidable advisory (sic) on this issue, and I have really enjoyed myself and learned a lot.

(I think he meant “adversary,” but “advisory” might have been a freudian slip.)

Damn, only thirty some posts and less than a month. I was just getting warmed up!

C’mon, c’mon… another challenger out there? I’m ready!

Give Me a Break, a Book Review

I recently finished reading ABC journalist John Stossel’s book Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media….

Excellent book, highly recommended.

The book runs just short of 300 very fast pages chronicling Stossel’s career to this point (it was published just before Barbara Walters announced that she would no longer be co-anchor of ABC’s 20-20 with Stossel). It begins with a short retrospective of his career. Opening chapter excerpt:

“I was once a heroic consumer reporter; now I’m a threat to journalism.

—

I won 18 Emmys, and lots of other journalism awards. One year I got so many Emmys, another winner thanked me in his acceptance speech “for not having an entry in this category.”

Then I did a terrible thing. Instead of just applying my skepticism to business, I applied it to government and “public interest” groups. This apparently violated a religious tenet of journalism. Suddenly I was no longer “objective.”

—

These days, I rarely get awards from my peers. Some of my ABC colleagues look away when they see me in the halls.

What follows is a description of the journey from rewarded “advocate” to shunned “gadfly.”

I found it interesting that Stossel repeats the “journalism is a religion” meme I first ran into in a Jay Rosen editorial. Stossel makes it explicit in the title to his book that there is such a thing as “liberal journalism,” yet he himself is not part of that orthodoxy. He explains this simply:

I never planned to be a reporter.

—

Every time a company sent a recruiter to Princeton, I volunteered for an interview. I got a dozen job offers and took the one that offered me a free flight that would take me the farthest: Seattle Magazine. They said they’d teach me how to sell advertising or do bookkeeping. But by the time I graduated, Seattle Magazine had gone out of business. I was lucky, though: Ancil Payne, the boss of the parent company King Broadcasting, called me to say, “We have a job available at KGW, our Portland, Oregon, TV station. Want to try that?”

And he did, starting as “gofer,” then researcher, newswriter, and finally reporter. Stossel says:

In retrospect, I see that it probably helped me that I had taken no journalism courses. Television news was still inventing itself then, and I was open to new ideas. I learned through fear. My fear of failure made me desperate to do the job well, to try to figure out what people really needed to know and how I could say it in a way that would work well on TV.

But what Stossel doesn’t say, outright, is that his lack of ordination in the Church of Journalism left his mind open to question what he saw. The first inklings of this willingness to question came shortly after he moved from Portland to the “big leagues”; WCBS in New York, where he met up with what I call the “union mentality” and was exposed to regimented reporting:

We’d show up for work at 10 A.M., and the assignment editor would tell us what we’d cover that day. I sometimes suggested we ought to report on someting else, and he’d tell me, “Do what you’re told.” Each correspondent would then grab one of the three-man union crews and drive to the scene of the fire, murder, news conference, or whatever the assignment editor wanted us to cover. We’d arrive like a lumbering army. It was remarkable how much time a cameraman, a soundman, and an electrician could take just getting out of the car. Every move was deliberate.

They had no reason to hurry because no one ever got fired. There was no reason to work harder because union rules demanded everyone be paid the same. Many union workers were masters not at just killing time, but at killing innovation. “Can’t be done.” “Against the rules.” “Equipment won’t do that.” It stunned me that so many of them could be indifferent to what I thought was important work.

More on “regimented reporting” and how Stossel avoided it:

At WCBS I was steadily growing more frustrated with following the assignment editor’s vision of what was “news.” Perhaps because of my stuttering, I’d always avoided covering what the pack covered. I didn’t think I could succeed if I had to compete by shouting out questions at news conferences, so I seldom vounteered to report the day’s “big news.” That turned out to have an unexpected benefit, It helped me realize that the most important news happens slowly. The assignment editor aw WCBS was focused only on that day’s events: government pronouncements, election results, grisly fires and murders. But the world’s real life-changing developments were things like the women’s movement, the shrinking of computers, the invention of the birth control pill. They mattered more but happened quietly, well off the radar screen of my assignment editor, because they weren’t in that day’s news releases, the AP daybook, or that morning’s paper. (That would be The New York Times in this case.) I decided I wanted to search out those trends and cover health and science news, the environment, sociology, psychology. The assigmnent editor wasn’t interested.

One day, with great trepidation, I went over his head. I brought Ed Joyce a list of the stories the assignment editor had rejected. I said I thought my ideas were better. I feared Joyce would fire me or tell me to shut up and do what the assignment editor had told me. Instead he said, “You’re right – yours are better. Do them.”

And Stossel was unleashed upon unsuspecting hucksters, cheats, scam artists and the liberal media.

What follows are 14 chapters on the evil and idiocy practiced upon the American public by those Stossel exposes. In Chapter 2, Confrontations, Stossel recounts how he started doing “In-your-face” consumer reporting, and his shock at the reactions of those he exposed – blasé. Generally “stonewalling, lying, and weird politeness.” It’s an excellent look, psychologically, at the people who make their living out of cheating others. Especially the concluding paragraph:

Donald Trump was offended when I called him a bully for trying to force an old lady out of her house to make more room for his Atlantic City casino. After the interview, the producer stayed behind to pack up our equipment. Trump came back into the room, puffed himself up, and started blustering, “Nobody talks to me that way!”

Well, someone should.

Amen.

Chapter 3 recounts Stossel’s continuation down his path to journalistic heresy, his “Confusion” over the fact that his consumer-advocacy work wasn’t having any results, or at least not positive ones.

It was satisfying to confront the bad guys, but it wasn’t enough. I’d expose them, and a month later, they’d be back at it. I wanted the government to do something to stop the crooks, to compensate the victims. After I spent time with the victims listening to their sad stories, I was angry. I wanted someone to help those people. What was the purpose of government if it couldn’t protect them?

But that’s not what happened:

Occasionally the government did act, but its actions rarely worked out well.

Every regulation seemed to have an unintended consequence. Taxpayers’ dollars wound up in the pockets of the rich instead of the poor. Well-meaning regulation designed to protect consumers often hurt them by narrowing their choice.

As an idealist fresh out of college, no wonder he was confused. The chapter goes on with example after example of how government regulation of business hurt innovation and profited established business: Hair salons, milk producers, unions, public transportation, the FDA. It’s angering to read, but the honesty is refreshing.

Chapter four is aptly entitled “Epiphany” and is a scourging of regulators and regulating:

I had moved from seeing regulation as a good thing to seeing it as a necessary evil. More years of reporting led me to conclude that much of it is also unnecessary evil. We don’t need a million rules because free markets police themselves.

And here we see in print Stossel’s small “L” libertarianism really take off.

By contrast, government almost never polices itself. When government agencies lose money, or fail at their missions, they ask Congress for more money. They usually get it, citing their failure to achieve their goals as proof they need more funds.

Followed by example after example.

I’m not going to go through all the chapters, but I will comment on the one that is one central theme of the book: the need for tort reform. The chapter entitled “The Trouble with Lawyers” begins:

I don’t hate lawyers. We need lawyers.

We need them to preserve the rule of law. We need them to defend if others cheat us, steal from us, trample on our rights. However, we also need nuclear missles – to keep other nations from trampling on our rights. We try not to use them, because they harm innocent people.

We should treat lawyers the same way. Lawsuits are necessary, but evil.

And he goes on to make a very cogent case. His conclusion? We need a “loser pays” system of tort. I recently read John Grisham’s The King of Torts which I found to be a fascinating and repelling look into the business of “personal injury law.” Stossel’s right – it’s got to change.

Everyone needs to read this book, right and left alike. The right for ammunition, the left for reflection on their failures. I would have preferred some more in-depth information on each of the examples Stossel relates, but then the book would have been a thousand pages at least. I imagine his research archives must be a gold mine. Stossel makes an outstanding argument for small “L” libertarianism, and concludes with this:

My epiphany was seeing that we don’t need experts to “run the country.” We need limited government, a referee that keeps the peace. But that’s all. Then free minds and free markets will make good things happen.

Sounds remarkably like the system our Founders envisioned, doesn’t it?