22 Days Until:
National Ammo Day/Week
Author: Kevin
Not In My Back Yard – or Anybody Else’s Either!
Arizona recently suffered through a gas shortage because a pipeline that runs gasoline from Texas to Phoenix through Tucson ruptured. Aside from the problem of tens of thousands of gallons of spilled gasoline, the pipeline was down for a considerable period of time. This affected prices not only in Arizona, but in California as well as gasoline was shipped by truck from there to Arizona to help cover the loss.
So, why am I not surprised to find that a proposed refinery in Arizona is being fought by environmentalists?
John Moore of Useful Fools has done a bang-up job of investigative journalism on the subject. Seems that the site of this proposed refinery violates the doctrine of “environmental racism.” Yes, the 33 people living within four miles of the site include five blacks and five Indians.
As John points out, this would be the first refinery built in the U.S. for 25 years, and would cost $2.5 billion to construct. You can bet your ass that Mobile, AZ wouldn’t be just a wide spot in the road anymore.
If you’re an “environmentalist” you can’t have that.
Go read the whole thing. You won’t be seeing it in the major media.
“Democrats give up gun control issue” – For Now…
MSNBC.com carries a Washington Post article on the Democrat abandonment of gun control as a policy topic. Money quotes:
Democratic presidential candidates are distancing themselves from tough gun control, reversing a decade of rhetoric and advocacy by the Democratic Party in favor of federal regulation of firearms.
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MOST DEMOCRATIC White House hopefuls rarely highlight gun control in their campaigns, and none of the candidates who routinely poll near the top is calling for the licensing of new handgun owners, a central theme of then-Vice President Al Gore’s winning primary campaign in 2000.
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“It’s very important for us as Democrats to understand that where I come from guns are about a lot more than guns themselves,” said Sen. John Edwards (N.C.), one of nine Democrats seeking the presidency. “They are about independence. For a lot of people who work hard for a living, one of the few things they feel they have any control over is whether they can buy a gun and hunt. They don’t want people messing with that, which I understand.”
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In the presidential race, several candidates said the gun issue contributed to Gore’s defeat in 2000 and could backfire on the party again next year if Democrats do not quickly lose their anti-gun image.
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Indeed, the Democrats’ shift away from gun control is rooted more in politics than in a belief that gun laws do not help prevent crime and death, several Democrats said privately.
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“The gun issue is the silent killer” of Democrats, said Deborah Barron of Americans for Gun Safety, which is tutoring candidates on the gun issue. “Democrats will be extinct in red states unless” they change how gun owners view their party.
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In some ways, the shift is more rhetorical than substantive.
No, REALLY? Color me shocked.
Remember, kiddies: Gun Safety = Gun Elimination, just like Gun CONTROL used to.
I Have Only One
There’s been a running thread of posts over at the Volokh Conspiracy and other sites concerning bumper stickers recently.
I have only one (aside from my NRA, GOA, Tucson Rifle Club and IHMSA membership stickers):
This Bumper Isn’t BIG ENOUGH
For What I’ve Got to Say!
Which is, of course, why I’ve got a blog.
It is Not the Business of Government
It is not the business of government to make men virtuous or religious, or to preserve the fool from the consequences of his own folly. Government should be repressive no further than is necessary to secure liberty by protecting the equal rights of each from aggression on the part of others, and the moment governmental prohibitions extend beyond this line they are in danger of defeating the very ends they are intended to serve.
Henry George*
Prohibition was introduced as a fraud; it has been nursed as a fraud.
It is wrapped in the livery of Heaven, but it comes to serve the devil.
It comes to regulate by law our appetites and our daily lives.
It comes to tear down liberty and build up fanaticism, hypocrisy, and intolerance. It comes to confiscate by legislative decree the property of many of our fellow citizens. It comes to send spies, detectives, and informers into our homes; to have us arrested and carried before courts and condemned to fines and imprisonments. It comes to dissipate the sunlight of happiness, peace, and prosperity in which we are now living and to fill our land with alienations, estrangements, and bitterness.
It comes to bring us evil– only evil– and that continually. Let us rise in our might as one and overwhelm it with such indignation that we shall never hear of it again as long as grass grows and water runs.”
Roger Q. Mills**, 1887
Sorry Roger, sorry Henry. Nobody listened.
This post was inspired by a piece written by Clayton Cramer on his blog a few days ago. I’ve read a lot that Clayton’s written (I highly recommend his book For Defense of Themselves and the State if you’re interested in the judicial history of the right to arms) and I find his work on the right to arms exemplary, but he and I differ on some other topics. In this piece he discussed Rush Limbaugh’s addiction and talks about his support of the criminalization of drugs. The quote that got my attention was this one:
I still don’t think that prohibition of drugs is the most effective way to deal with the problem. It does have one positive effect, however: it encourages parents whose lives are built entirely around intoxication to move to places where those values predominate, like Sonoma County, leaving other parts of America relatively civilized.
That’s not the problem, though, in my opinion. Roger Mills foresaw the real problems, and he was right.
The Harrison Narcotic Act was passed in December of 1914:
To provide for the registration of, with collectors of internal revenue, and to impose a special tax on all persons who produce, import, manufacture, compound, deal in, dispense, sell, distribute, or give away opium or coca leaves, their salts, derivatives, or preparations, and for other purposes.
It was passed in response to an international treaty on the opium trade, and in response to the fact that the United States had just taken possession of the Phillipines where there was an established trade in opiates. On its face, the Act is not a prohibition, but part of the wording having to do with who can legally provide opiates was interpreted to mean that physicians could not legally prescribe drugs to addicts to support their habits. A drug addiction wasn’t a disease, so giving an addict a prescription for his fix was a perversion of a doctor’s practice. Shortly after passage, Roger Mills’s predictions began to become realities. Doctors were arrested and jailed for giving out prescriptions. Addicts, unable to get their drugs through legal channels, found illegal ones. A market to feed their needs (and build a market of new users) was established. The cost of drugs went up – and crime increased to supply money to fill the need. Users were arrested for possession of illegal narcotics. People who, while addicted, were able to provide an income for their families through honest work, instead went to jail and left their families destitute. Addicts relocated to major cities where access to (now illicit) drugs was easier, and crime came with them.
New drugs hit the market, and were in short order added to the Act. Heroin was banned in 1924. Boy, that was effective, wasn’t it? According to this site, in 1926 the Illinois Medical Journal carried an op-ed that said:
The Harrison Narcotic law should never have been placed upon the Statute books of the United States. It is to be granted that the well-meaning blunderers who put it there had in mind only the idea of making it impossible for addicts to secure their supply of “dope” and to prevent unprincipled people from making fortunes, and fattening upon the infirmities of their fellow men.
As is the case with most prohibitive laws, however, this one fell far short of the mark. So far, in fact, that instead of stopping the traffic, those who deal in dope now make double their money from the poor unfortunates upon whom they prey. . . .
The doctor who needs narcotics used in reason to cure and allay human misery finds himself in a pit of trouble. The lawbreaker is in clover. . . . It is costing the United States more to support bootleggers of both narcotics and alcoholics than there is good coming from the farcical laws now on the statute books.
As to the Harrison Narcotic law, it is as with prohibition [of alcohol] legislation. People are beginning to ask, “Who did that, anyway?”
Not enough people, and not the people who had just cracked a Pandora’s box of enormous powers – powers “…to confiscate by legislative decree the property of many of our fellow citizens. …to send spies, detectives, and informers into our homes; to have us arrested and carried before courts and condemned to fines and imprisonments.” Not those people.
In between passage of the Narcotic Act and subsequent “tightening of the loopholes,” America in another fit of Puritanism ratified the Eighteenth Amendment – Prohibition – and then went home and had a stiff martini in celebration. What followed paralleled the results of the other attempt “to regulate by law our appetites and our daily lives,” – abject failure. Increased crime. Increased misery. Increased prison populations. Increased poverty. Death. Mayhem.
And ever-increasing, ever more intrusive government power at the expense of the rights of the individual.
I am not an advocate of “If it feels good, do it.” I’ll tell you right up front that I have never been intoxicated in my life. I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, the only drugs I take are over-the-counter medications when I’m ill, or prescriptions as prescribed. I’ve never wanted to take a mind-altering substance. But I know a lot of people who have and some who still do. I understand that, for some people, drugs lead to addiction and death. They fuck up families. They destroy lives. They’re best left alone, in my opinion.
But it shouldn’t be the job of government to protect us from ourselves.
Because it can’t. All it can do is oppress us. And in its effort to protect us, it doesn’t just oppress the people who abuse drugs, it oppresses us all. The “cure” is worse than the disease – except there is no cure – just a new (and in many ways worse) problem on top of the one it’s supposed to cure.
The Illinois Medical Journal saw it in 1926. The American public saw it well enough to repeal Prohibition in 1933. But drug users (other than of alcohol and nicotine) represent an unpopular and unsympathetic minority in this country, and our elected officials were unable or unwilling to tell the electorate “We don’t have that power.” The Founders understood the dangers of creeping expansion of government power and tried their best to ensure that our system inhibited that expansion, but in this they failed. Regardless of the best idiot-proof designs, human nature constantly provides unprotectable idiots. In volume. Congress didn’t have that power. Aside from the fact that protecting us from ouselves is impossible, Congress wasn’t given the power to try. But they went ahead and tried anyway.
Here are some of the results of the War on (some) Drugs© as we know them:
So what does that tell us? For one thing, all the drug laws on the books haven’t affected availability. For another, it’s possible to be a drug user and still hold down a job, be a productive citizen, and pay taxes. For a third, all that money we’re shelling out to interdict drugs is wasted. Fourth, we’re incarcerating only a tiny fraction of drug users. The laws aren’t preventing drug use.
Here’s some more:
Fundamental rights of individuals that were supposed to be protected against infringement by the Bill of Rights have been chipped at under the guise of “Drug Control.” A little bit here, a little bit there. Just in this special circumstance. Until they decide they need to widen that window. Just a bit, you understand. To make us all safer.
Alcohol prohibition created many problems not foreseen: Organized crime, gang wars, bathtub gin, just to name a few. But when Prohibition ended, beer truck drivers no longer shot at each other for infringing on their territories. The incidents of people being blinded by drinking poisonous homebrew dropped dramatically. And tax revenues went up. Yes, alcohol remains one of the most devastating drugs out there – responsible for violence, broken homes, ruined lives, and horrendous numbers of dead on the nations highways – but it was better than the alternative – which was all those things and government in everybody’s lives.
Legalizing drugs wouldn’t be a panacea. It wouldn’t make everything peachy-keen. Much damage is already done that cannot be undone, but you cannot honestly argue that it will make drugs easier to get. It might reduce the number of overdoses and unintentional poisonings due to inconsistent quality and cutting with who knows what. It would put a major dent in the illicit trade, and hopefully the violence associated with it. It should reduce the crime associated with supporting addiction. It might make drug abusers more employable – though that should remain a choice that businesses make for themselves. But it would end an ever-increasing intrusion on our lives and our rights by government. And hey! It might be a new source of revenue, so long as they don’t try to regulate useage (as they are now with tobacco) via onerous “sin taxes” that just lead back to a black market.
And it should save a considerable amount of tax dollars. But of course it wouldn’t. After just a few years of Prohibition the Federal agents tasked with that job weren’t let go when it was repealed, they were just given a different job – enforcing the new Federal firearms law. You can bet all those DEA agents would be put on something.
How about anti-terrorism?
*Henry George was, for want of a better term, a “social philosopher,” and a contemporary of Mark Twain and Thomas Edison. He wrote Progress and Poverty in his spare time and self-published it in 1879. It was picked up by a publishing house in 1880 and became an international best seller. It’s a book on economics. I’ve not read the book, and I have no other knowledge of the author, but the quotation that begins this piece is as concise an expression of the purpose of government as any I’ve ever seen.
**Roger Mills was a Democrat and (after fighting on the side of the South during the Civil War) served as a representative for Texas in the House from 1873 to 1892, and the Senate from 1892 to 1899. He died in 1911, so he never saw the 1914 Harrison Narcotic Act pass, and he missed the passage of Prohibition, but his warning was prescient, and I’ve often wondered why more people do not understand what he put so eloquently 116 years ago.
Update: Francis Porretto takes the basic premise and runs with it.
Update, 10/27: In a related issue, Ravenwood reports that we obviously haven’t learned anything yet.
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UPDATE: As of August 6, 2013, due to the herculean efforts of reader John Hardin, the original JS-Kit/Echo comment thread for this post (read-only) is available here.
Fisked by Phelps, So I Don’t Have To.
I read about this letter by idiotarian (but still fair musician) John “Cougar” Melonhead Mellencamp, and I wanted to tear him a new one, but The Everlasting Phelps has done a capital job of it, so I don’t have to.
I’ll just go back to work on my upcoming opus on the War on (some) Drugs™.
For the Children
With no sarcastic little ™ either.
Science fiction author L. Neil Smith has written an open letter and posted it on Usenet – and it’s a doozy. I hereby submit for your consumption said letter without comment (which I leave up to you, gentle readers):
The October, 2003 issue of Discover contains one of the saddest letters I’ve ever read. Gil Bell, of Duluth, Georgia, writes
” … one would have to conclude that travel out of our solar system is impossible. The fusion, fission, and antimatter engines require too much fuel … The laser sail is doomed by the fact that building a 6,600-mile-wide collecting mirror is simply not feasible, and … a 600-mile-wide sail would be torn apart by cosmic debris on a daily basis. And why build a fusion ramjet when there’s no fuel in space to run it, and its design would not allow it to attain the speed it needs?
“The fusion or fission engine concepts would be useful in getting around out own solar system, but what’s the use in traveling to other planets in our neighborhood? Venus will never be inhabitable and neither will Mars or any of the Jovian planets or their moons, and changing the environment on another planet will never be within our capabilities. It is fun to speculate on way that humans might accomplish interstellar travel, but in the end it is just more science fiction.”
There are lot of unsupported assertions in Mr. Bell’s letter, and a great many factual errors (most of them, I’m afraid, based on an incredible ignorance of history), but the saddest thing about it is its spirit of defeat. As I said in a recent essay, Americans seem to have given up on the future. This letter from Discover is typical and symptomatic.
But it doesn’t speak for everyone.
I’ve been reading the works of Robert A. Heinlein (as the Brits say, “man and boy”) for forty-six years, having found his books when I was sent to the school library to spend several afternoons there as a punishment. After all these years, I don’t recall what for, more’s the pity.
In all that time (and earlier, in fact) I always expected that, sooner or later, I’d end up space myself, maybe even die there (after living a couple hundred years, like Lazarus Long). And although I didn’t necessarily want to move there, the one sight I always wanted most to see in person was Saturn and its rings, from one of its inner moons.
As I grew up, I became disappointed and disillusioned. The Mercury program came and went, the Gemini program came and went, the Apollo program came and went, followed by SkyLab, the Shuttle program, and the International so-called Space Station. What they all taught us (unless you actually care about fruitfly reproduction in microgravity) was that the only individuals who would ever be allowed to get into space were precisely the kind of government-approved jockstraps who were on the varsity football team when you were in high school — oh yes, and an occasional cheerleader — oops, make that public school teacher.
To all the rest of us, meaning those who are “encouraged” (at the point of a gun) to pay for these programs, the message was clear: “Get lost. Outer space, 99.99999999999999999999999999999999 percent of all there is, is government property, like the Lincoln Monument and Area 51.”
Nothing has happened in all that time to change that. Just look at the bewildering maze of impossible regulations the government relies on to keep anyone else from trying out a new vehicle design, or from launching anything without their permission and supervision. Or the way they squirmed and struggled, trying to keep that zillionaire space “tourist” on the ground. Or the way they’re employing the handy (if illegal) Homeland Security concept in an attempt to shut down model rocketry.
Novelist Victor Koman was dead right, when he said (in his great work, Kings of the High Frontier) that the actual mission of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration — its not-so-hidden agenda, having nothing to do with the development of space travel and exploration — is to keep scum like you and me from ever getting into space.
At the same time (as Victor also points out), NASA mouthpieces have been telling the public since the 1960s that our being able to visit space, perhaps even vacationing on the Moon, or in zero gravity at a space station, was “only about thirty years away”. That’s what they said in the 60s, that’s what they said in the 70s, that’s what they said in the 80s, that’s what they said in the 90s, and that’s what they’re still saying today. It’s always just about thirty years away.
In a way, you can’t blame the government. Being what they are, politicians and bureaucrats, they have a very unhealthy tendency to project their own ethical and psychological shortcomings onto others, especially members of the unwashed public. Even before September 11, 2001 — and before Luis and Walter Alvarez discovered what it really was that killed the dinosaurs — someone in government read Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (individuals are paid to do that; see James Grady’s Six Days of the Condor), in which penal colonists on the Moon ultimately achieve their independence by threatening major cities on Earth with boxcar-sized rocks, launched from an electric catapult.
Like politicians who push victim disarmament (erroneously known as gun control), they’re afraid they’re going to get what they deserve. So if you ever want to see Saturn’s rings (or any other astronomical wonder) up close, you must absorb the following truth and never forget it: given their way, governments will never let ordinary people into space.
Never.
Quite aside from the question of boxcar-sized rocks, think of the historically unprecedented savagery with which the Union prosecuted the War between the States. Think of similar savagery at Waco. Think about the War on Drugs — and recall why many folks use drugs to begin with.
You’re not allowed to escape.
Governments will do anything — absolutely anything, no matter how violent or morally repulsive it happens to be — to prevent anybody from getting out from under their authoritarian thumb. If you don’t shut your mouth, sit up straight, fold your hands, look at them when they’re lecturing you, and spit that gum out this minute, they’ll kill you.
However if there’s on thing I’ve learned about politics over the last half century, it’s that, when there’s something you need to do, and government (or anybody else) stands in your way, you simply say you’re doing it “for the children” — and it helps if you really mean it.
I really mean it.
I have a little daughter I sometimes regret having brought into this world because it’s become such a dark and horrifying place. If I believed that she could live her life in some of the places I’ve described in my novels — that I’m describing again in the novels I’m writing now — I would do virtually anything I could just to make that happen.
And if I could go there myself … Well, there just might be a way.
Roughly a hundred years ago, Lord Robert Baden-Powell was having a tough time, don’t you know, in one of Britain’s last fun wars, because the soldiers she shipped to South Africa by the, er, shipload, didn’t have a clue how to survive in the open country. Their foes were Dutch-African settlers — “Boer” means “farmer” — who lived and worked there very day. They knew what plants to eat and where to find decent water.
When Baden-Powell got home to Old Blighty, he created the group that was to become known as the Boy Scouts, to fix the shortcomings he’d seen in Africa. The idea was imitated in many other countries, including the United States to impressive effect. I was in the program myself, from 1954 as a Bear Cub, to about 1963, by which time I was an Explorer Scout, an Eagle, and a Brotherhood member of the Order of the Arrow. I also held 23 merit badges, a God & Country Award (believe it or not), a translator bar (German), and a whole ladderful of BSA/NRA sharpshooter bars. Although the roots of the Boy Scouts are sordidly statist, scouting was practically my whole childhood, and a very good one.
About the same time I first got into scouting — and well before the Soviets’ Sputnik scared the Eisenhower Administration shitless, spitless, and witless — I began to collect newspaper clippings and magazine articles about space and space exploration. I also bought a book about going to the Moon on a visit to the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry — the author opined that no single government would ever be able to afford such a trip, so the idea must be turned over to the United Nations; and wouldn’t that have been interesting? — and I’d vowed that very evening to stand, someday, on the Moon, myself.
So what have I found in all my experiences that might be useful in solving our little space problem? The basic idea is simple, it’s just a lot of hard work. At the moment, I’m writing Ceres (a sequel to my 1993 novel Pallas) which concerns itself with terraforming asteroids and preventing “extinction level events” like the one 65 million years ago that killed the dinosaurs. Ceres is not meant to be anybody’s fantasy (although one of my former editors informed me that I’m not qualified to write on this subject); it’s meant as a blueprint for the future.
I’m also doing research now for another novel, Ares, which will stand, chronologically, right between Pallas and Ceres. It’s about the men and women who terraform Mars, despite violent opposition from Earth.
At the same time, I’ve begun collecting ideas and material for a third book, the working title of which will be (for lack of anything better) The Space Scout Manual. That book will try to do three things.
First, it will help young people (I’m aiming the book at a certain mindset, rather than a given age group; it should appeal at some level to everyone of both sexes between the ages of 5 and 20) to prepare themselves for working, living, and eventually settling in space, in more or less the same way that my old Boy Scouts of America manual, A Handbook For Boys (1955 edition), helped to prepare me to survive — and even prosper — in several different kinds of wilderness on this planet.
The book will also contain detailed instructions and suggestions for establishing your own local chapter of what I’m presently calling (again, for lack of anything better) the “Space Scouts” and everything necessary to affiliate it with a national organization of the same name. Unlike a great many other organizations I’ve been involved with, I want this one always to grow from the ground up, not from the top down.
The The Space Scout Manual‘s third mission will be to establish a political constituency for abolishing NASA and getting government out of the way of space exploration. If the book, and the organization it creates, are useful and interesting enough, then within a few years, there should be hundreds of thousands of young Space Scouts and maybe, a few years after that, millions. Politicians and bureaucrats will eventually be up against an enormous group of voters who are educated, tough, who won’t take “No” (or even “Give us another 30 years”) for an answer.
I want this book to get into conventional distribution channels and to show up on paperback racks everywhere. I want this book in airports and grocery stores where the words SPACE SCOUT MANUAL will leap out at all those who had almost — but not quite — given up the dream.
Please note that the manual will not be about the current hardware of government space exploration (which is constantly changing anyway) but about personal physical, mental, and moral preparation. It will draw on history, and on both factual and fictional sources. Also, it will give its readers the beginnings of a decent science education (another thing public schools were never up to), and encourage in them a proper skepticism with regard to public education and the democratic process.
Another reason not to get bogged down in such details is that there’s no telling what methods of spaceflight will evolve if this idea works.
The book’s moral outlook will be rooted in the Bill of Rights and the libertarian Zero Aggression Principle, but it will not preach. It will assume from the outset that individuals own their own lives and the products of their lives, and that no one has a right to initiate force against another human — no, make that sapient — being for any reason.
The book will advocate “Reconstitutive Unanimous Consent” as the preferred means of making group decisions and settling disputes. It will also advise politicians and bureaucrats that, from the moment that the first off-planet settlement is created, on Mars, on the Moon, in the Asteroid Belt, or wherever, it should reasonably be expected to become politically independent of Earth whenever its people want it to be.
Don’t let any of the above mislead you, however. This will not be a book about libertarian or constitutionalist philosphy. It will be a book about getting into space and staying there. It will be guided as much by the scientific method as it will be by the Zero Aggression Principle. Its largest section, by far, will be a detailed survey and commentary (despite that editor’s view that I’m not qualified to write it) on everything that’s known, at the moment, about the Solar System, including its constituent star, its planets, moons, planetoids, and comets.
It will also talk — again in detail — about all of the many reasons we might want to see these things close up, and even go to live on, in, or among them. Those reasons will range from what might be called the “spiritual” — because it’s the destiny of humankind and a good first step to the stars — to the exceedingly practical: our species won’t survive another rock like the one that put an end the Cretacious; we’re 15 million years overdue, so we have to go out and stop it, the topic of a lecture I delivered to the Eris Society in 2000.
Your thirty years are up, NASA.
They’ve been up a couple of times over.
There will be no more waiting politely. Even if it has to be done like the moldy old joke — the hotel clerk admits that a room is available, but you’ll have to make your own bed; upstairs you find you’ve been supplied with a hammer, saw, and lumber — it will be done.
So this is what I’ve given up electoral politics for — at least this decade, when the goodguys are powerless. But I think I’ve traded up. I’m ready to make my own bed. And to plant the seedlings for the lumber.
How about you?
OK, NOW I Understand the Attraction of Ebay
Via Acidman comes this Ebay auction which is one hilarious read.
Looks like the guy is going to have a good time at Home Depot and the liquor store. Hope he doesn’t operate a power tool under the influence.
What are the Gun Laws in Detroit, Again?
Via Clayton Cramer comes this Detroit Free Press story of a drive-by by the good guys:
Police seek shooter who saved teen girl
They say passing car stopped and passenger opened fire, killing pipe-wielding assailant
A man was beating a 16-year-old girl with a pipe Wednesday morning on Detroit’s west side.
Something people need to remember, firearms are used in violent crimes only about 18% of the time. If neither party has a firearm, the bigger one with the most effective weapon generally wins. And a 22 year-old man with a pipe wins out over a 16-year-old girl – until…
Suddenly, the man was dead, shot several times by a passenger in a passing car.
A good guy with a gun shows up, be it citizen or police officer.
Police are looking for the driver of the car and the gunman, who might not be a criminal suspect, but a much rarer species — a drive-by vigilante.
“Under certain circumstances, a citizen taking violent action to protect themselves or others is warranted,” said Detroit Police Cmdr. Craig Schwartz of the major crimes division. “We need to know if these actions are justified.’
With the assumption being “guilty until proven innocent.”
The dead man was identified as Johnny Donaldson Jr., 22, of Detroit. Police said he was swinging a metal pipe at several women and girls at Northlawn and Plymouth at 7:45 a.m.
That’s when the motorist, with the passenger next to him, rolled by in a silver Pontiac. The driver stopped, and the passenger opened fire from inside the car. Then, police said, the car might have driven over the man.
Just to be sure?
Police were investigating Donaldson on Wednesday evening and had no motive for the pipe attack. It was not known if he knew his victims.
Several children and adults suffered minor injuries from the pipe, police said. At least two of the girls were on their way to Mackenzie High School.
So this will end up as another incidence of “school-related” violence, I’m sure.
Police said they do not have a description of the two men.
For that I’m glad.
“We need them to come in to talk to us and tell us exactly what happened,” Schwartz said.
“The information is that a girl was being violently assaulted at the time of the shooting. We really need to talk to these guys to get their side of it.”
Let me translate: We really need to identify the people who took the law into their own hands. We know that the shooter and the driver probably have long records, because honest law-abiding citizens don’t drive around with loaded firearms and drive over the body of the SOB they just shot. So we want to get their side of the story, then charge them with illegal possession of a firearm, discharging a firearm within city limits, and any other charge we can come up with.
The peons should not be defending themselves. This must be Nipped. In. The. Bud!
That’s Not Logic, My Friend
Fedup Citizen has a post up about why he can’t understand how good people don’t believe in Jebus. (His links appear bloggered, so scroll down to “How can such logical people be so illogical”.) I’d have responded to him in an e-mail, but he doesn’t have an address up. Perhaps someone will point him to this.
Let me see if I can explain it to him:
I start from the question of, “Where did all of this (universe, earth, life) come from?” If you answer chance, sorry. Chance is not a creative force. Chance merely describes a condition of mathematical odds. There only three possible explanations for the existence of everything you see around you. Either it always was, or it created itself, or some intelligent entity created it.
Um, you missed one – it just is. More on this later.
Point number one gets thrown out by the laws of physics. Second Law of Thermodynamics. Look it up. Created itself? Think about it. Imagine the computer in front of you not existing, but then deciding it needed to exist and willed itself into existence.
You failed physics, didn’t you? The Second Law of Thermodynamics essentially states that for a closed system (that’s critical) the amount of entropy contained within must increase. That’s essentially it. What it does not say is that order cannot occur within a closed system either spontaneously or with intent. All that takes is the application of energy – and in that application of energy, the net entropy of the system must increase, even if the entropy of a locality is decreased. If the Second Law was as you apparently interpret it, planets could not form, the sea could not be separated from the land, hell, you couldn’t build elements heavier than hydrogen. That’s not the case.
People misapply the Second Law of Thermodynamics quite a lot. This is just another example.
Let’s dispense with the ignorant question, “Well, who created God?”
Let’s not.
Sorry, but using linear logic, that question is pointless.
It is? I’ll give you that point if you agree that asking “Where’d the Universe come from?” is exactly the same question.
The assumption is that God always was, (and here I’m going to really offend some people) just as the Bible asserts. It is perfectly logical to assume that if only one answer fits the given conditions, it must be correct. If points one and two are obviously wrong, point three has got to be it.
Here’s where your ‘logic’ fails. You believe God exists and is responsible for the creation of the Universe. You admit that you cannot know where God came from, and that therefore he has always existed. I don’t believe that God exists, and I admit that I cannot know where the universe came from. But it’s here – I can detect it, measure it, perform experiments on it. The fact that it exists is not a matter of faith. Whether or not it was a billion-to-one chance, it doesn’t matter because we hit the jackpot! Else we wouldn’t be here discussing it. Or, as some believe, the Universe has always existed and is cyclical – ever expanding then contracting then starting over again. Or, it may be steady-state and will some time in the incomprehensible future become a vast volume all at one uniform temperature. We don’t know, but we keep trying to understand.
Look at biology. Living systems are incredibly more complex than that of our most sophisticated technology at NASA or the DoD. But even a mousetrap or a handgun illustrate irreducible complexity. For those unfamiliar with the concept, tell me which item you can remove from a common mousetrap and it will still function as intended. Even Darwin admitted that the eye gave him fits because you just couldn’t explain it apart from an intelligent designer. This was more than a century before Watson and Crick discovered DNA. The chance of a single nucleotide forming by accident is one in 10 to the 23rd power, yet it takes millions of such nucleotides to make up all the genes necessary to create a human being.
To look at that incredible amount of design and figure there is no God is tantamount to looking at the space shuttle launching and saying, “gee, wonder how that happened.”
There’s that Second Law problem again. There is no reason that life, in all its complexity could not be chance. If it were impossible, we wouldn’t be here discussing it. The fact that we are here, as we are, is not proof of a designer. Because if there is a designer, you just pushed the question of “faith” back one level. That is all. Because, as flippantly as you tried, you cannot dismiss the question of “Where did God come from?” It’s exactly the same question as “Where did the Universe come from?” And the answer is the same: You cannot know. The difference between those of us who do not believe in a God and those who do, is that we who do not believe don’t require that there be an all-powerful being in charge of it all. The only difference between my faith and yours is that I believe I can’t know where the universe came from. You believe in a God you cannot measure, test, or even detect. As someone once said:
“I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.”
I’m not an atheist – I accept that, just as I cannot know where the universe came from, I cannot know that there is no God, but I find the idea quite illogical. Occam’s razor says, in my logic, that the existence of a God is a more complicated explanation for the existence of the Universe than “it just is.”