Pushing the “Reset” Button – Part II

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Quite a while back I wrote a short essay on this topic, inspired by a question posed by Jay Solo:

Do you expect the “reset button” to need to be used in our lifetimes? For the sake of a common number, let’s define “our lifetimes” as the next fifty years. Hey, I could live that long, given my genes and medical technology.

I was recently discussing with someone the concept of the Second Amendment as the government’s reset button. Ultimately a major reason it exists is so the populace cannot be prevented from being armed, or easily disarmed through registration or excess regulation for that matter, in case we must ever take back the government and start again if it gets out of hand or something akin to a coup happens and the imposters must be reckoned with.

It says that the government provides for the national defense, but we retain the right to self-defense, and to keep and bear the tools needed for that, including defense against the government if it ever turns its might inward or ceases to represent us at all. It’s not a separate entity, after all. It’s us. If it ceases to be us, it ceases to be in our control, it needs to be taken back into the fold.

Do you think this will ever be needed?

I left a comment there, and turned it into a post here.

My conclusion:

I’ve quoted Jefferson’s letter to William Smith several times recently, but this part is the one I find most interesting:

Where did it ever exist, except in the single instance of Massachusets? And can history produce an instance of a rebellion so honourably conducted? I say nothing of it’s motives. They were founded in ignorance, not wickedness. God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, & always, well informed. The past which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive; if they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty.

It seems, in the main, that we aren’t informed at all, much less well. Lethargy? For the overwhelming majority, yes indeed.

Until it happens to you. Then you get pissed right quick, and wonder why nobody hears your side of the story.

I think a lot of people are getting fed up with ever-increasing government intrusion into our lives. With our ever-shrinking individual rights. More than one of Jay’s respondents noted the apathy of the majority, though, and I agree. Government interferes lightly on a wholesale basis, but it does its really offensive intrusions strictly retail. So long as the majority gets its bread and circuses, it will remain content.

But not everyone.

I then recounted the story of the Bixby family, of Greenwood, S.C. Son Steven Bixby shot and killed two Sheriff’s deputies who came on to his property over a 20-foot easement taken under eminent domain law. I concluded my previous piece:

Yes, these people were extreme. Killing two officers and then engaging in a gunfight with many more over 20 feet of property certainly is excessive.

But I don’t think this is going to be an exceptional case as time goes on.

I think more and more individuals will be pressing the “RESET” button in the future.

With about the same effect.

Yesterday, in a comment thread, I discussed the case of 72 year old Melvin Hale, who in 2000 shot Texas DPS trooper Randy Vetter to death when Vetter pulled him over for a seatbelt violation. Hale had stated previously that he would kill any officer who tried to cite him for not wearing a seatbelt. My correspondent “Adirian” stated about Hale, “Live free or die. He proves that some of us still mean it.”. Hale pressed the “Reset” button, just like Steven Bixby did. As of 2005, Hale was still alive at 77, serving a life sentence for Vetter’s murder.

So much for “live free or die.”

Still, I stated back in 2003, almost five years ago, that I thought more people were going to find their own personal limits with respect to government overreach and press the “reset” button individually. Today over at Rodger’s place I found the story of Stuart Alexander, “The Sausage King” of San Leandro, California. Mr. King murdered three meat inspectors, also in 2000, who, according to Rodger, were harassing Alexander until his limit was crossed. Under the view of surveillance cameras he himself installed, he shot three of the four inspectors, and pursued the fourth who escaped. Mr. King died of a pulmonary embolism while on Death Row.

In following that story, I found this Vin Suprynowicz column that collects a number of similar incidents in one place. Also included in his list are Carl Drega who in 1997 killed two police officers, a judge and a newspaper editor, and Garry DeWayne Watson who killed two city workers and wounded a police officer, also over an easement issue and also in 2000. Drega died in a police shootout. Watson killed himself.

Then there was Marvin Heemeyer of Granby, Colorado. He killed no one but himself, but he wreaked a lot of destruction with his armor-plated bulldozer in 2004. Heemeyer’s rampage was also over property rights.

So here we have seven incidents in which individuals reached their own personal “line in the sand.” Were they crazy, or were they just serious about defending their rights as they understood them against government intrusion? Most of them did, indeed, decide to “live free or die,” but what did their acts accomplish? I’d never even heard of Melvin Hale until yesterday, or Stuart Alexander and Garry DeWayne Watson until today.

I repeated as the conclusion to my first post on the Supreme Court’s Boumediene decision yesterday that “Claire Wolfe Time” passed us by long ago. For those few of you unfamiliar, Claire Wolfe’s most famous quote is this:

America is at that awkward stage. It’s too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards.

That’s the opening line of her 1997 book 101 Things to Do ‘Til the Revolution. But she was wrong, and Jefferson was right. We should have pressed the “reset” button often – had a mini-revolution somewhere in the country about every 20 years or so – just to keep our political masters reminded of who it was who holds (now held) the reins, but after the one big one from 1861 to 1865, our stomach for it was (understandably) gone.

And now it’s too late. Instead of putting government back in its proper place, any overt organized resistance to government overreach generally results in government overkill these days.

In all, I think the normally pollyannish Peggy Noonan was right. There’s tough history coming.

UPDATE: In a comment at Xavier’s on the Melvin Hale incident, Oleg Volk writes:

This is a good reminder that ALL LAWS come down to the state’s willingness to imprison or kill non-compliant people. Minimizing the sheer number of laws would reduce the number of conflicts people have with those who pass those laws and those who enforce them.

I left a comment of my own that hasn’t posted yet, but basically, “minimizing the sheer number of laws” isn’t in the job description of lawmakers. When your only tool is a hammer, all your problems look like nails.

Not All the Education News is Bad

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Not All the Education News is Bad

Via Kitchen Table Math I found this piece about the Washington Math Science Technology Public Charter High School in Washington, D.C. An excerpt:

Mr. Boykie (director of development and fundraising) calls the school the “best kept secret in DC” because it has never received much publicity, despite its tremendous academic successes with a student population that is 100 percent low-income: a rigorous curriculum, including AP courses; an extraordinarily high graduation rate, with nearly all graduates receiving scholarships to attend college; and the rare achievement of adequate yearly progress. In addition to their success on standardized tests, WMST students have racked up top honors at math, science, and JROTC competitions. Giant trophies, as well as college acceptance letters, pack the display cases in the front lobby.

The general public may not know much about WMST, but parents certainly do. Its reputation among parents is so strong that most of the 400 students commute from far-away neighborhoods, some traveling for as much as two hours each way. Parents are willing to overlook the school’s lack of a gym, a library, and sports teams because they know that their kids will graduate knowing how to read, write, do math, and understand technology.

(My emphasis.) The piece ends with “Here’s hoping that it won’t remain a secret much longer.”

What I fear is that as soon as it gets some good publicity, the Teacher’s Unions and the Department of Education will move swiftly to destroy it.

As the Japanese say, the nail that sticks up gets hammered down.

Heller Observations

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Heller Observations

Concurring Opinions has an interesting post up, What to Watch For in D.C. v. Heller, a compendium of ten items the author Rick Mike O’Shea thinks we should pay close attention to when the decision is finally handed down. (I concur with his belief that it will be one of if not the last decisions released by the Court this term, on or after June 23.)

To me, the most interesting points raised are, of course, the questions of how the court will address U.S. v. Miller (and I expect both concurring and dissenting opinions to split on this, creating a nightmare of dicta for future courts to wade through), whether the Court will address the level of scrutiny at all (I’m voting for “no”), and – one I hadn’t really considered, the question of standing. As Concurring Opinions notes:

The Supreme Court litigation in D.C. v. Heller has been so rich and important that one forgets about the accompanying cross-petition for certiorari, Parker v. D.C. The Heller litigation originally involved six different plaintiffs, each raising slightly different challenges to D.C.’s gun laws. However, the D.C. Circuit panel dismissed five of the six plaintiffs (all but Dick Heller) under an unusual standing doctrine that the circuit had adopted in an earlier Second Amendment case. This is why the case was recaptioned from Parker to Heller when it reached the Supreme Court.

When the District of Columbia petitioned the Supreme Court for review of the D.C. Circuit’s opinion granting judgment in Mr. Heller’s favor, plaintiffs’ counsel cross-petitioned for review of the denial of standing to the other five plaintiffs. The cert petition on the standing issue, still captioned Parker, has been waiting in limbo on the Justices’ desks for seven months, while the Court has granted cert in Heller and held briefing and argument on the Second Amendment merits issue.

I predict that if the Court holds for Mr. Heller on the Second Amendment issue, it will consider this to be quite enough work for one day without also wading into the tangled complexities of standing doctrine. It will “GVR” (summarily Grant, Vacate, and Remand) the Parker part of the litigation back to the D.C. Circuit, which will have to reconsider the question of Second Amendment standing for the other plaintiffs, in light of what the Court says about the nature of the Second Amendment right in Heller.

One thing about cases like this that has always irritated me is the standing argument – that unless you can show that the law has directly adversely affected you, you have no standing to sue. That was the grounds on which the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decided Hickman v. Block – they said the Second Amendment didn’t have anything to do with an individual right to arms, therefore the plaintiff had no standing to sue. In his dissent to the denial to re-hear Silveira v. Lockyer en banc, judge Kleinfeld wrote:

The panel opinion holds that the Second Amendment “imposes no limitation on California’s [or any other state’s] ability to enact legislation regulating or prohibiting the possession or use of firearms” and “does not confer an individual right to own or possess arms.” The panel opinion erases the Second Amendment from our Constitution as effectively as it can, by holding that no individual even has standing to challenge any law restricting firearm possession or use. This means that an individual cannot even get a case into court to raise the question.

H. Wayne Fincher decided that the only way he could challenge the Federal machinegun ban was to get arrested for violating it. There’s something wrong with a system that essentially demands that you break a law before you can challenge its Constitutionality.

But Mr. O’Shea is right – I don’t expect SCOTUS to touch that ball of worms.

Balkanization Pushback (or: “Speaking of Ché…)

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Apparently the news coverage of the Tucson Unified School District’s “Ethnic Studies” program has resulted in some action. State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne released this letter this morning:

I. The TUSD Ethnic Studies Program Should be Terminated.

The citizens of Tucson, of all mainstream political ideologies, would call for the elimination of the Tucson Unified School District’s ethnic studies program if they knew what was happening there. I believe this is true of citizens of all mainstream political ideologies. The purpose of this letter is to bring these facts out into the open. The decision of whether or not to eliminate this program will rest with the citizens of Tucson through their elected school board.

II. Philosophy.

First, let’s spend a minute on underlying philosophy. I believe people are individuals, not exemplars of racial groups. What is important about people is what they know, what they can do, their ability to appreciate beauty, their character, and not what race into which they are born. They are entitled to be treated that way. It is fundamentally wrong to divide students up according to their racial group, and teach them separately.

In the summer of 1963, having recently graduated from high school, I participated in the civil rights march on Washington, in which Martin Luther King stated that he wanted his children to be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. That has been a fundamental principal for me my entire life, and Ethnic Studies teaches the opposite.

III. Personal Observations.

I personally observed this at the Tucson Magnet School. My Deputy, Margaret Garcia Dugan, who is Latina and Republican, came to refute the allegation made earlier to the student body, that “Republicans hate Latinos”. Her speech was non-partisan and professional, urging students to think for themselves, and avoid stereotypes. Yet, a small group of La Raza Studies students treated her rudely, and when the principal asked them to sit down and listen, they defiantly walked out. By contrast, teenage Republicans listened politely when Delores Huerta told the entire student body that “Republicans hate Latinos.”

In hundreds of visits to schools, I’ve never seen students act rudely and in defiance of authority, except in this one unhappy case. I believe the students did not learn this rudeness at home, but from their Raza teachers. The students are being ill served. Success as adults requires the ability to deal with disagreements in a civil manner. Also, they are creating a hostile atmosphere in the school for the other students, who were not born into their “race”.

Hector Ayala was born in Mexico, and is an excellent English teacher at Cholla High School in TUSD. He reports that the Director of Raza Studies accused him of being the “white man’s agent,” and that when this director was a teacher, he taught a separatist political agenda, and his students told Hector that they were taught in Raza Studies to “not fall for the white man’s traps.”

IV. Textbooks.

As I will describe, the evidence is overwhelming that ethnic studies in the Tucson Unified School District teaches a kind of destructive ethnic chauvinism that the citizens of Tucson should no longer tolerate.

The very name “Raza” is translated as “the race.” On the TUSD website, it says the basic text for this program is “the pedagogy of oppression.” Most of these students’ parents and grandparents came to this country, legally, because this is the land of opportunity. They trust the public schools with their children. Those students should be taught that this is the land of opportunity, and that if they work hard they can achieve their goals. They should not be taught that they are oppressed.

One of the textbooks is Occupied America (5th ed.). One of the leaders it talks about is described as follows: “José Angel Gutiérrez was one of the leaders, and he expressed the frustrations of the MAYO generation. His contribution was indispensable; it influenced Chicanos throughout the country.”

One of Gutiérrez’s speeches is described as follows:

We are fed up. We are going to move to do away with the injustices to the Chicano and if the ‘gringo’ doesn’t get out of our way, we will stampede over him.” Gutiérrez attacked the gringo establishment angrily at a press conference and called upon Chicanos to ‘kill the gringo,’ which meant to end white control over Mexicans.

The textbook’s translation of what Gutiérrez meant contradicts his clear language. In describing the atmosphere in Texas where Gutiérrez spoke, the textbook states: “Texans had never come to grips with the fact that Mexicans had won at the Alamo.” (P. 323.) It is certainly strange to find a textbook in an American public school taking the Mexican side of the battle at the Alamo.

Another textbook is The Mexican American Heritage (2nd ed.). One of the chapters is “The Loss of Aztlan.” Aztlan refers to the states taken from Mexico in 1848: Arizona, California, New Mexico and Colorado. This chapter states: “Apparently the U.S. is having as little success in keeping the Mexicans out of Aztlan as Mexico had when they tried to keep the North Americans out of Texas in 1830.” (P. 107.) In other words, books paid for by American taxpayers used in American public schools are gloating over the difficulty we are having in controlling the border. This page goes on to state: “…the Latinos are now realizing that the power to control Aztlan may once again be in their hands.”

V. M.E.Ch.A.

The extracurricular activity at TUSD related to ethnic studies is called M.E.Ch.A. When I was at Tucson high school, the librarian was wearing a M.E.Ch.A. tee shirt. If you Google M.E.Ch.A., you will find its goals and constitution. In the introductory paragraph, M.E.Ch.A. states:

We are Chicanos and Chicanas of Aztlán reclaiming the land of out [sic] birth (Chicano and Chicana Nation); 2) Aztlán belongs to indigenous people, who are sovereign and not subject to a foreign culture…

In section 2 of the M.E.Ch.A. Constitution it states:

Aztlán belongs to those who plant the seeds, water the fields, and gather the crops and not to the foreign Europeans. We do not recognize capricious frontiers on the bronze continent.

VI. Teaching the Wrong Things About Literature.

When I began speaking out publicly against ethnic studies, one of the ethnic studies teachers had his students write me letters. One of these letters states: “All that the English classes teach is mainly about some dead white people.” I believe schools should teach the students to judge literature by its content and not by the race or gender of the author.

VII. MacEachern Investigative Reports.

After my confrontation with TUSD over ethnic studies had begun, Doug MacEachern, a columnist for the Arizona Republic, ran a series of investigative reports on ethnic studies. This is the kind of thing that the Star and the Citizen should do, but thus far only the Republic has done. One of his sources was a former TUSD teacher named John Ward, who despite his name, is Hispanic. Ward reports:

But the whole inference and tone was anger. (They taught students) that the United States was and still is a fundamentally racist country to those of Mexican-American kids.

Individuals in this (Ethnic Studies) department are vehemently anti-Western culture. They are vehemently opposed to the United States and its power. They are telling students they are victims and that they should be angry and rise up.

. . .

By the time I left that class, I saw a change (in the students), he said. An angry tone. They taught them not to trust their teachers, not to trust the system. They taught them the system wasn’t worth trusting.

Because Ward no longer worked at TUSD, he was willing to be quoted. Many current TUSD employees have talked to me about the horrors of what they have witnessed in the Ethnic Studies Program, and the almost totalitarian climate of fear at TUSD which keeps them from being quoted. Here is what MacEachern found:

In the past several weeks, messages have filtered out from teachers and other TUSD employees (some directed to Horne; others who have contacted me, following two previous columns on this subject) about what an officially recognized resentment-based program does to a high school.

In a word, it creates fear.

Teachers and counselors are being called before their school principals and even the district school board and accused of being racists. And with a cadre of self-acknowledged ‘progressive’ political activists in the ethnic-studies department on the hunt, the race transgressors are multiplying.

The director of the TUSD Ethnic Studies Department, who keeps a portrait of Ché Guevara on the wall of his classroom, spoke to MacEachern: “Our teachers are left-leaning. They are progressives. They’re going to have things (in their courses) that conservatives are not going to like, he told me.”

VII. TUSD’s Intimidation of Its Employees.

Ward eventually wrote his own column. He describes how the TUSD administration intimidated him by removing him from his class, and calling him a “racist,” even though he himself is Hispanic. This tactic, he writes:

…is fundamentally anti-intellectual because it immediately stops debate by threatening to destroy the reputation of those who would provide counter arguments.

Unfortunately, I am not the only one to have been intimidated by the Raza studies department in this way.

VIII. The Time for Action Is Now.

TUSD can intimidate its employees. But it cannot intimidate you, the citizens. You are in a comfortable position. You can speak out. If the TUSD board eliminates ethnic studies, it will save $2 million a year of your money, the cost of ethnic studies administrators and consultants alone. That is your money. The school board represents you. I can use my pulpit to bring out the facts, but only you can bring about change.

Sincerely,
Tom Horne

Yup. “Progressives” who like Ché teaching that the white man victimizes everyone else, that Western Civilization is just the history of “dead white people”.

And tax dollars pay for it all.

Marvelous.

And how long has this been going on?

What Did YOU Learn in High School

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What Did YOU Learn in High School?

In my last überpost, The George Orwell Daycare Center, I included a link to a Civics quiz that a lot of people took. The results were mixed, but overall the people who read this blog did far better than the average Ivy League college student.

However, here’s a test for you – no graphing calculators, just pencil and paper – and see how much you remember:

The California Standardized Testing and Reporting Program, Algebra I Quiz. (Requires Flash)

In the interests of fair disclosure, I missed three two.

UPDATE: The test displays better in Explorer than in Firefox, apparently.

Quote of the Day

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Quote of the Day

We expect ideas to go away when they are proven to be bad, much as we tend to expect that the pinnacle of human evolution is really someone that resembles Doc Savage. We can understand why an idea spreads under force of threat, but we scratch our heads when the same thing that failed spectacularly before keeps getting picked up, brushed off, and tried again by purely persuasive and even democratic means. We usually explain this by deciding that some bad ideas won’t die because of their pure emotional appeal, but this isn’t quite adequate either after a certain scale of failure.

—

(M)ore than a hundred million deaths are credited to the destructive meme of communism- which are probably very much underestimated, as we only tend to get figures from relatively well-organized regimes- and god alone knows how much lost productivity and wealth can be credited to its milder cousins. The various strains of collectivism in practice have ranged from merely a dubious idea that results in countries with chronically sclerotic and declining economies, to a truly catastrophic one that kills off half a population. And it remains an extremely successful meme that seems to require no threat at all to perpetuate itself; well-educated people around the world who have read all that history persist in insisting it’s a brilliant idea that has always been somehow poorly implemented. As memes go, it is incredibly robust and fit. No matter how many people it impoverishes or kills, it still seems like a good idea to so many people that it not only keeps being tried, but winds up as fashionable iconography for t-shirts and political campaigns. – LabRat, Parasite memes and monkeyspheres

Paul Helmke and Super Dangerous Weapons

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ABC News interviewed Mr. Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Disarm America. He had some interesting things to say:

(W)ith the Supreme Court poised to hand down a potentially landmark decision in the case, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence fully expects to lose.

“We’ve lost the battle on what the Second Amendment means,” campaign president Paul Helmke told ABC News. “Seventy-five percent of the public thinks it’s an individual right. Why are we arguing a theory anymore? We are concerned about what we can do practically.”

As I noted in my comment there, Mr. Helmke once again avoids mention of the fact that he and his ilk were attempting to change the Constitution without recourse to the Amendment process through REDEFINING the meaning of “right of the PEOPLE to keep and bear arms”. They failed. Spectacularly. That doesn’t mean we think they’ve given up. And his mouthpiece confirms:

Brady Campaign Attorney Dennis Henigan said there are multiple gun control measures that would not run afoul of a Supreme Court decision striking down the D.C. gun ban.

“Universal background checks don’t affect the right of self-defense in the home. Banning a super dangerous class of weapons, like assault weapons, also would not adversely affect the right of self-defense in the home,” said Henigan. “Curbing large volume sales doesn’t affect self-defense in the home.”

Yet the Brady Campaign supported the D.C. ban at least in part because they believe that handguns are a “super dangerous class” of weapons. The Violence Policy Center, of the same ilk, has been trying to get a national handgun ban passed since its inception. They even sell a book on the topic: EVERY HANDGUN IS AIMED AT YOU.

But somehow Mr. Helmke thinks that “assault weapons” – which I doubt he could define – are “super dangerous.” Apparently only when they’re in the hands of people not on the .gov payroll, since almost every police force in the country (including, most recently, Chicago) is armed or arming with AR-15 or M16/M4 rifles and carbines. You know, those spray-firing bullet hoses designed to be fired from the hip and that are only good for mowing down crowds?

In current news, Utah’s Hill Air Force Base has apparently misplaced a crate of M-16 select-fire rifles (read: “machine guns”). Apparently since these are official government firearms, the Salt Lake Tribune notes that they are “small caliber rifles,” though they are “worth up to $5,000 each on the street.”

“Small caliber rifle” doesn’t sound like a “Super Dangerous Weapon,” does it?

They’re missing twelve of them.

Helmke must be having kittens.