The Smallest Minority

On my way home from work yesterday I was at the intersection that leads into my neighborhood waiting for the left-turn light to change to green, when I saw a young man riding his skateboard across the crosswalk. On that corner of the street was a small memorial for someone who apparently died in an accident there – white cross, flowers, etc.

The young man saw the memorial, stopped, stepped off his board, read the name on the cross, crossed himself, nodded his head at the memorial, climbed back on his board and rolled off.

I didn’t get a picture of him, but I did get a shot of the memorial:

This song speaks to me. Give it a listen.

From a Facebook friend:

Well said, Stephen. Well said.

Someone else offered up this:

He’s been waiting his entire professional career to write this opinion, and he made the very most of it. Line by line, detail by meticulous detail. It’s a Masterpiece.

One more:

Shot:

“Because the State of New York issues public-carry licenses only when an applicant demonstrates a special need for self-defense, we conclude that the State’s licensing regime violates the Constitution.” – NEW YORK STATE RIFLE & PISTOL ASSOCIATION, INC., ET AL. v. BRUEN, SUPERINTENDENT OF NEW YORK STATE POLICE, ET AL.

IOW, “Shall-issue” concealed carry for all!

Chaser:

Hangover:

“The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed – where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.” – Judge Alex Kozinski, dissenting from a decision not to rehear en banc the Silveira v. Lockyer case, May 6, 2003

And now this map will eventually lose all yellow and be either green or blue:

In relation to my previous post “If Personal Firearm Ownership Protects…, here’s an exhibit A:

West Virginia: Legally-Armed Woman Saves Lives By Shooting Would-be Mass Shooter. Details:

A good guy with a gun, in this case a woman, saved lives in West Virginia when she shot and fatally wounded 37-year-old Dennis Butler at a party taking place outside an apartment complex.  Butler was reportedly randomly firing his rifle at the attendees, miraculously not actually hitting anyone, when he was gunned down by the heroic woman who was legally carrying.

Shooter was a black male, 37, armed reportedly with an AR-15 style rifle. Defender was female, age and race not reported or necessary. This incident met only one requirement to be national headline news – an AR-15 was involved. Media boxes not checked:

1: White Male shooter. Nope.
2: Multiple dead/wounded people, preferably children, preferably of a race other than white. Nope.
3: Incident stopped by an officer of the law. Nope.

And to add insult to injury, the defender was female, and we are told that private citizens, women in particular, can’t defend themselves with handguns against attackers. Further, this was a graduation party, so there were “youths” in the crowd. She defended kids.

So this won’t appear in the national news for more than 30 seconds, if at all. A quick search of ABCNNBCBS and PBS found that CBS repeated the AP wire story on May 27, but none of the other major outlets have any record of it. CBS did not do a followup.

Doesn’t fit the Narrative™. It’s therefore mis- dis- or mal-information and must be suppressed.

…the Public, then why do mass shootings occur?”

Because when an armed citizen is present, it isn’t a “mass shooting.”

FBI Reveals How Many Active Shooters Were Stopped by Citizens Excerpt;

The FBI announced Monday that citizens stopped six active shooters in 2021, according to a report on active shooting incidents.

Citizens stopped six active shooters, whom the FBI defines as “one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area,” in 2021, killing four of them, according to the report “Active Shooter Incidents In The United States In 2021.” There were 61 active shooter incidents in 2021, 12 of which met the FBI’s criteria for a “mass killing,” up from 40 the previous year.

Carry your gun. It’s a much lighter burden than regret.

A couple of years ago I answered a question over at Quora: Why did the Gun Control Act of 1968 fail to solve the issue of mass shootings?

In light of recent events, I thought I’d share my answer:

Mathematics.

Because a mass shooting requires only three things: A gun, someone willing to acquire, load, point and shoot the gun, and a group of three or more people other than the shooter.

There are, by several estimates, something between 300,000,000 and 500,000,000 guns currently in private hands in the United States. We have population in excess of 330,000,000 people. If 0.001% of that population meets criteria #2, they can get criteria #1. Every single day you’re probably part of criteria #3.

You’re looking at 3,300 potential shooters based on that off-the-cuff estimate.

Welcome to reality. Life is not safe.

Shot:

It’s not just spending — Biden’s record regulations are driving inflation too, – New York Post 5/23/22. Excerpt:

In its first year, Team Biden added more than 72,000 pages of regulations, executive orders and agency notices. … Biden’s team also pushed through more major regulations in his first year than any president in modern US history….

Chaser:

The Trump Administration’s Historic Year in Deregulation, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, December 18, 2017. Excerpt:

President Trump issued Executive Order 13,771, in January, ordering the executive branch regulatory agencies to roll back two regulations for each new regulation issued. On December 14, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) unveiled a preliminary estimate of the regulatory reform actions taken by the Trump administration through the end of fiscal year 2017 (September 30). From the end of January through September, the administration completed 67 deregulatory actions to only 3 new regulatory actions and reduced the regulatory burden by $8.1 billion (net present value of lifetime burden) or $570.4 million annually.

Hangover:

I sure could use some mean tweets right now.

A Chink In The Armor Of The Progressive Administrative State.

I’ve read a lot of law, but I have not delved into the “Progressive Administrative State” as I should have. Excerpt:

The great mission of the early twentieth century Progressives was to transform our constitutional order without ever amending the Constitution itself. The intellectual leader of the movement was Woodrow Wilson. The fundamental idea was to replace the messy and contentious system of separated powers and slow bi-cameral lawmaking with a cadre of supposedly apolitical administrative “experts” who could run the country smoothly and efficiently.

The idea sounded rather benign to most people at the time, and probably still sounds benign to most people today. Who could be against having “experts” to run significant government agencies? But a hundred-plus years into this project, we have seen cancerous growth of vast administrative bureaucracies, outside the constitutional structure, and exercising great powers, but accountable to no one but themselves — the very antithesis of the constitutional structure that our founders attempted to bequeath to us.

Yes. This. Exactly. Read the whole thing.