The Smallest Minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. – Ayn Rand
I went to see her yesterday in Cardiac ICU. They’d tried to take her off the ventilator, but she’s not breathing deeply enough on her own yet, so the tube went back in.
As a consequence, she can’t talk. As I stood at the foot of her bed, I said “It must be frustrating not being able to talk.” She nodded her head. “I’ll just stand here and savor the moment, then.”
That earned me the stink-eye.
“You can kick my ass later.” Vigorous nod.
That’s a line from Mark Steyn’s latest book, After America. Here’s another example:
Essex police charge man over water fight planned on BlackBerry Messenger
A 20-year-old is due in court after police discover alleged plans for a Colchester water fight circulating on BBM and Facebook
A man will appear before magistrates next month for allegedly trying to organise a mass water fight via his mobile phone.
The prime minister said last week that the government would investigate whether social networking platforms should be shut down if they helped to “plot” crime in the wake of the riots.
The 20-year-old from Colchester was arrested on Friday after Essex police discovered the alleged plans circulating on the BlackBerry Messenger service and Facebook.
The unnamed man has been charged with “encouraging or assisting in the commission of an offence” under the 2007 Serious Crime Act, police said.
He was arrested with another 20-year-old man the day the water fight was allegedly due to take place, and has been bailed to appear before Colchester magistrates on 1 September. The second man was released without charge.
Surely “water fight” is a euphemism for some kind of riot?
Well, no:
In 2008 there was a spate of mass water fights in British towns and cities that were organised through social networks. Most remained peaceful.
From that second link:
A GIRL was punched to the ground by a thug – after a public water fight organised on website Facebook spiralled into violence.
Nine men were held after punch-ups erupted among 250 people – some reported to be carrying knives – in a park.
One muscle-bound thug flew into a rage after a girl playfully squirted fizzy drink over his T-shirt. He chased after the laughing teenager and sent her flying with a right hook.
Then he stood over her menacingly until other shocked revellers pulled him away. One said later: “She was lifted completely off her feet.
Around 250 people had gathered in London’s Hyde Park to cool off with water pistols in the heat – but the event turned sour as visitors reported seeing men “flashing their weapons”.
So, let me get this straight: Setting up a fight with water guns and water balloons is now a crime??
Only in England. And apparently Iran.
My mom had open-heart surgery today – two valves replaced. She should be coming out of anesthesia late tonight, and will be in ICU for two to three days, followed by 9-10 more in CCU. She’s 77 and tough (she’s already had both knees replaced – and watched the surgery on a TV monitor as they did the first one.) I think if she could have been conscious for this, she’d have watched too.
Anyway, I’ll be spending some time after work at the hospital for the next few days, so blogging will most probably be light.
Well, this was the lightest turnout since I started running this match, only four shooters showed up. A year ago there were fourteen shooters besides myself. Hmmm….
Still, the five of us had a great time! This was the first month for a specific revolver class, and there were four of us with revolvers: Don M. came with a Ruger Super Redhawk with “bunny-fart” loads (though a couple of them sounded suspiciously loud), I brought my S&W Model 25 Mountain Gun in .45LC, Travis Higgins brought a beautiful 6″ Colt Python (shooting .38s), and Cliff Reed brought a Taurus 65 (also shooting .38s). Four of us also had automatics, two 1911’s, a Browning Hi Power, and a Sig 229, and four of us brought .22’s – three Mk IIs and one MkIII.
Since there were so few of us, we competed in pairs until one shooter was eliminated, then finished the match with the top three contenders vying for the overall win. Travis won the inaugural revolver competition, and I took .22 and the auto classes. Travis had to beat me four times to win with his Python, and did so with relative ease. I need more wheel-gun practice. (Or a lighter .45LC load. That thing THUMPS.)
There will be no match in September – I will be at the sixth annual Gun Blogger Rendezvous in Reno, Nevada that weekend. The next match will be in the fall – hopefully a cooler and less humid October 9. We will have a revolver class again – that was fun!
Hope to see you there!
Reader Phil B. emails a link to another outstanding piece: Untouchable, from the blog The View from Cullingworth. Read the whole post, but here’s a taste that qualifies for QotD:
Unlike Oborne – and unlike the left – I reject the idea of man’s perfectibility. Or indeed that we are in need of a “moral reformation” – it is an economic and political reformation we require, a change to the order of things. It is not moral decadence that links the powerful to the rioter but a belief that they are untouchable, that the normal rules of society do not apply.
Tam brings it so hard I had to do two QotD:
…look at Cameron’s résumé: He’s a blandly handsome guy who went to all the right schools and has never had a productive non-government job in his life… No wonder Obama hates him; they both wore the same dress to the prom.England used to be a cool place. It used to rule the world. Now it’s like an island of California, except without the nice weather and food.
I must entreat you, to consider the words of this authority (Sir John Kelyng, Lord Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, 1665-71); the injured person may repel force by force against any who endeavors to commit any kind of felony; if any of the persons made an attack on these soldiers, with an intention to rob them, if it was but to take their hats feloniously, they had a right to kill them on the spot, and had no business to retreat; if a robber meets me in the street and commands me to surrender my purse, I have a right to kill him without asking questions; if a person commits a bare assault on me, this will not justify killing, but if he assaults me in such a manner, as to discover an intention to kill me, I have a right to destroy him, that I may put it out of his power to kill me. — John Adams, History of the Boston Massacre, March 5, 1770
(My emphasis.) Adams’ point was that the inherent right of self-defense was not denied to soldiers by dint of being soldiers. They were entitled to the same rights as any man on the street when it came to defense of self and property.
It doesn’t work that way in (formerly) Great Britain anymore.
I left this in a comment at Say Uncle this morning in response to the assertion that “There is no right of self defense in the English law system. The use of force is solely the right of the Crown.” I thought it would make a pretty decent post of its own, especially with the hyperlinks included.
OK, I’ve argued this question extensively. Here’s the deal:
In the UK, under the law you are permitted to use “reasonable force” to defend yourself or others.
Here’s the rub: Other people after the fact determine what was “reasonable” at the time of the incident.
Possession of anything “with the intent to threaten to cause injury or fear” is verboten – so if you pick up a baseball bat and stand outside your property as a deterrent to rioters, your intent is to “threaten to cause injury or fear” and you’re therefore guilty of being in possession of an “offensive weapon.”
Apparently you’re supposed to wait until you, personally are under physical attack before you can pick up anything with which to defend yourself, and then you are restricted in how you use that item to some “reasonable” level to be determined at some future time when the jurors can reflect calmly on the situation.
Further, as has been explained to the British public, the law 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 struck was deliberate rather than accidental – you can be guilty of murder and spend the rest of your life in prison.
As a result, the Crown Prosecution Service can (and has) prosecuted people for merely possessing anything they consider to be an “offensive weapon” whether or not said “weapon” was ever displayed. They have prosecuted people, like the man who beat a burglar with a milk bottle, for “unreasonable” use of force. One man was acquitted not too long back of murdering a home invader with his shotgun when his defense was that the gun “accidentally discharged” as he was pointing it at the huge, steroid-enraged bodybuilder climbing through his second-floor window and verbally threatening to kill the homeowner. Since there was no intent, fleeting or momentary, he wasn’t guilty of murder, apparently, even though he had to unlock the gun cabinet, retrieve his shotgun, unlock the ammo cabinet, retrieve his ammo, load the gun, aim the gun, and put his finger on the trigger. All of that was “reasonable,” but pulling the trigger intentionally would have been an act not of self-defense, but of murder.
The result of these laws is that the act of defending yourself is legally risky. Even if you’re acquitted, it may cost you a fortune in legal fees, and you very well might go to jail. If you actively defend your property, the chances are very high that you will be prosecuted for – at a minimum – possession of an “offensive weapon” and “causing fear,” and you will most probably lose in court.
All of this has what has been referred to as a “chilling effect” on the willingness of the British populace to actively defend themselves. You’ll note in the stories coming out of the UK that the people doing the “vigilantism” are almost exclusively immigrants – mostly Turks and Sikhs. They haven’t had their self-reliance beaten out of them yet.
Found at Walls of the City. He found it at Gun Free Zone. Somebody tell me the original source and I’ll link to it.
Dan Miller at PJ Tatler asks Will the United States have another Civil War? I addressed this question several years ago, and more than once. In that first piece my response was:
Jefferson suggested a small armed rebellion every 20 years or so. We didn’t take his advice. Our last one ended in 1865, and it was so devastating I think it put us off rebellion entirely too long.
Government isn’t “us” and hasn’t been for a long, long time. It represents the people who run the Democrat and Republican Parties, and those who pay them the most. Government-run education has ensured that the end product coming out of our schools is uniformly ignorant of how the system is supposed to work, and it’s done a damned good job of indoctrinating our children in the “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” philosophy, and the “if it feels good, do it” philosophy. Fifty-plus years of this has produced a very large, very ignorant, very apathetic population.
I think that “pressing the reset button” is going to happen, but all it’s going to get some of us is a tighter collar and a heavier chain.
In the second piece I wrote:
What prevents another Civil War here isn’t the Army or the fact that we hold a higher loyalty to our Nation than to our State of residence, it’s ignorance and apathy.
Well, we seem to be overcoming the apathy problem, but ignorance? Not so much.
In the third piece I returned to my original position:
I cannot help but wonder: Are we going to war again, against each other? And what form would that take?
I think the answer might very well be “YES,” and the form will be that of domestic terrorism.
Dan Miller, in a longer piece at his own blog expands on his take on the subject:
Although the persistent atrophy of states’ rights is among the causes of many problems from which discontent arises, that atrophy does not itself seem to concern great numbers of citizens. It is also a reason why a civil war is unlikely: states now are much weaker than were those that seceded in 1861. Then, the states were considered far more than now as sovereign countries. Before and during the war, many of the South considered “United States” to be a plural expression. Hence, it was often said that the United States “are,” rather than “is.” When the country was viewed as a consortium of separate and sovereign entities, the plural usage was grammatically correct. The plural form has fallen into disuse; I still use it as a reminder that the states retain the authority not delegated to the federal government even though they have forfeited much of the power to exercise it.
I’ve said the same myself. What we have isn’t people in different states clamoring to be released from the Federal yoke, it’s people in large cities wanting Federally-provided welfare versus suburban and rural populations that generally want benign neglect when it comes to Federal interference.
The States aren’t “red” or “blue,” they’re differing shades of purple, but the cities are “blue” and outside the cities are, on the whole, varying shades of “red.”
You’ll note, all of the rioting going on isn’t occurring in places like Lizard Lick or Henley-in-Arden or Arma, Greece. It’s occurring in Philadelphia, London and Athens.
So no, we’re not going to see another iteration of “The War Between the States.” But we very well might see our major cities burn.