Tag: “Make ’em Mad” Dept.

Barnes v. Indiana

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That’s the decision making all the rounds of the gun- and libertarian-blogs right now, in which a 3-2 majority of the Indiana Supreme Court held:

…that there is no right to reasonably resist unlawful entry by police officers.

What part of “unlawful” don’t they get?  OK, I’ll unreasonably resist.

This is a classic example of what a “living Constitution” philosophy eventually leads to.  Also from the decision:

The English common-law right to resist unlawful police action existed for over three hundred years, and some scholars trace its origin to the Magna Carta in 1215. The United States Supreme Court recognized this right in Bad Elk v. United States, 177 U.S. 529, 535 (1900): “If the officer had no right to arrest, the other party might resist the illegal attempt to arrest him, using no more force than was absolutely necessary to repel the assault constituting the attempt to arrest.” The Supreme Court has affirmed this right as recently as 1948. United States v. Di Re, 332 U.S. 581, 594 (1948) (“One has an undoubted right to resist an unlawful arrest, and courts will uphold the right of resistance in proper cases.”)

So it’s established Supreme Court caselaw, right? And inferior courts may not tell the Supreme Court it was out to lunch, right?

Nazzofast, Guido. Here’s that “living Constitution” philosophy:

In the 1920s, legal scholarship began criticizing the right as valuing individual liberty over physical security of the officers. One scholar noted that the common-law right came from a time where “resistance to an arrest by a peace officer did not involve the serious dangers it does today.” The Model Penal Code eliminated the right on two grounds: ―(1) the development of alternate remedies for an aggrieved arrestee, and (2) the use of force by the arrestee was likely to result in greater injury to the person without preventing the arrest. In response to this criticism, a majority of states have abolished the right via statutes in the 1940s and judicial opinions in the 1960s.

Really? They did? Under color of what authority? I’m unaware of any Supreme Court decisions post 1948 that established this new interpretation. I’m unaware of any amendments to the Constitution prior to or after 1920 that did so.

To quote Alan Gura from the oral arguments before the Supreme Court in McDonald v. Chicago:

States may have grown accustomed to violating the rights of American citizens, but that does not bootstrap those violations into something that is constitutional.

As 9th Circuit chief judge Alex Kozinski wrote in his August 2010 dissent to that court’s U.S. v Pidena-Moreno decision, another case involving Fourth Amendment protections:

Having previously decimated the protections the Fourth Amendment accords to the home itself, our court now proceeds to dismantle the zone of privacy we enjoy in the home’s curtilage and in public. The needs of law enforcement, to which my colleagues seem inclined to refuse nothing, are quickly making personal privacy a distant memory. 1984 may have come a bit later than predicted, but it’s here at last.

And I am reminded once again of our complete disconnect from the difference between the citizenry and the police as expressed by Sir Robert Peel’s Nine Principles of Modern Policing, most especially Principle #7:

Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.

That stopped when the public became “them” to the police.

One more quote, this one from a TV show, Battlestar Galactica the recent version. Admiral Adama, when asked to place his space Marines in the position of policemen to the refugee fleet demurred with some writer’s very cogent observation:

The police protect the People. The military defends the State. When the military becomes the police, the People become the Enemy of the State.

Our police forces are becoming more and more militarized defenders of the State every day, and rulings like this one are helping that happen.

Is Our Children Learning?

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In 1983 a report commissioned by President Ronald Reagan was released by the National Commission on Excellence in Education entitled A Nation at Risk: the Imperative for Educational Reform. In that report was the following statement:

Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world. This report is concerned with only one of the many causes and dimensions of the problem, but it is the one that undergirds American prosperity, security, and civility. We report to the American people that while we can take justifiable pride in what our schools and colleges have historically accomplished and contributed to the United States and the well-being of its people, the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people. What was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur–others are matching and surpassing our educational attainments.

If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.

I just watched a very important DVD on the subject of our public education system that was begun in 2008 and released in 2010. It is Waiting for Superman, and I strongly recommend you pick up a copy. It’s available via Netflix.

Mediocre?  I wish were were aspiring to merely mediocre.

If you’ve got friends with kids, invite them over for a viewing party.

2008 was the 25th anniversary of the release of A Nation at Risk. According to Wikipedia:

(T)he nonpartisan organization Strong American Schools released a report card of our nation’s progress since the initial report. The organization’s analysis said:

While the national conversation about education would never be the same, stunningly few of the Commission’s recommendations actually have been enacted. Now is not the time for more educational research or reports or commissions. We have enough commonsense ideas, backed by decades of research, to significantly improve American schools. The missing ingredient isn’t even educational at all. It’s political. Too often, state and local leaders have tried to enact reforms of the kind recommended in A Nation at Risk only to be stymied by organized special interests and political inertia. Without vigorous national leadership to improve education, states and local school systems simply cannot overcome the obstacles to making the big changes necessary to significantly improve our nation’s K-12 schools.

I have a few quibbles with the video, but they’re relatively minor. One, no effort was made to discuss or even mention the problem of disruptive children and the inability of staff to deal with them and their “my baby didn’t do nothin’ ” parents in this age of litigation at the drop of a hat. Perhaps I am mistaken, but it is my belief that such children can and their gamete-donors present a serious problem to public education. Second, no mention of homeschooling as an option is made. The only models pursued are the public education and private parochial education ones. Since the focus of the piece is about “fixing” the public education system, I suppose that’s understandable.

But the information that’s in this video is very important, and you’re not hearing it in the MSM. Please, if you have children or grandchildren, watch it. Educate yourself. Understand the unmitigated disaster we’ve allowed to develop. There are people out there with solutions, but enough people have to grok the problems before the solutions will be allowed to be implemented. Too many people have the wrong priorities.

And if I ever hear a NEA flak say “It’s about the CHILDREN!” in my presence, I think I’ll vomit on their shoes. It’s not about the children to the teachers unions, it’s about the adults. Period.

“When dealing with guns, the citizen acts at his peril.”

KevinLeave a comment

Sorry about not posting. Life intrudes.

Most of the gunblogosphere has been commenting on the case of Brian Aitken who is now serving a seven year sentence for doing something perfectly legal in almost every other state in the union.  It’s even legal in New Jersey, unless a prosecutor can convince a jury otherwise.  A New Jersey jury, but a jury all the same.

The title of this post comes from a New Jersey Superior Court decision wherein a man was convicted of possessing an “assault weapon” – a Marlin Model 60 .22 caliber rifle he’d won in a shooting competition and had never even taken the manufacturer’s tags off the triggerguard – because said .22 could hold more than fifteen rounds in its tubular magazine.  Another law unique to New Jersey.

Do you want to know why McDonald v. Chicago was such a big deal?  Because laws like the one that put Mr. Aitken in jail exist only because of the 1875 Supreme Court case U.S. v. Cruikshank wherein the Court stated that the Second Amendment protected the right to “keep and bear arms for a lawful purpose” only from FEDERAL infringement.  The states were free to infringe to their heart’s content.

And New Jersey has.

McDonald says that the right is and should be protected against state infringement as well, and if the Federal government can’t make it illegal, no state government can either.  Make no mistake, this fight is going to take decades, but if we don’t keep it up people like Brian Aitken and Albert K. Kwan, and people you’ll never hear about will continue to get railroaded.

Quote of the Day – Shameless Edition

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Quote of the Day – Shameless Edition

Whether or not you believe the authenticity of Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau’s quote of 1939 – “We are spending more money than we have ever spent before, and it does not work. After eight years we have just as much unemployment as when we started, and an enormous debt to boot” – the substance is true. The New Deal made the Depression worse – and we are doing it again, only with bigger numbers and more zeros. Furthermore, now the Chinese own us. We enact this nonsensical budget and we might as well give them the whole thing – the Statue of Liberty, McDonald’s and Apple Computer. No backsies. They can have Steve Jobs’ next iPad extravaganza in Shanghai. They build everything over there already anyway.

But unfortunately this is no joke. The passing of this budget is a straight out act of economic insanity. Everyone knows it. The 217 Democrats who passed it surely know it too. Only they are too corrupt to face it honestly. Shame on them. Shame on them. Shame on them. – Roger L. Simon, 217 Democrats take suicide pact

They have no shame, Roger. They haven’t for decades. They’re politicians elected to national office who have made, as Mencken described, so many compromises and submitted to so many humiliations that they have become indistinguishable from streetwalkers. The shame has been campaigned out of them.

And this isn’t limited to Democrats.

But What Happens When One Becomes the Other

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But What Happens When One Becomes the Other?

I found a very interesting quotation from Henry Louis Mencken tonight that raises that very question:

THE VALUE the world sets upon motives is often grossly unjust and inaccurate. Consider, for example, two of them: mere insatiable curiosity and the desire to do good. The latter is put high above the former, and yet it is the former that moves one of the most useful men the human race has yet produced: the scientific investigator. What actually urges him on is not some brummagem idea of Service, but a boundless, almost pathological thirst to penetrate the unknown, to uncover the secret, to find out what has not been found out before. His prototype is not the liberator releasing slaves, the good Samaritan lifting up the fallen, but a dog sniffing tremendously at an infinite series of rat-holes.

H.L. Mencken, The Scientist, first printed in the New York Evening Mail, March 25, 1918

What happens when someone who should have a “boundless, almost pathological thirst to penetrate the unknown” instead becomes enraptured with the idea of doing good?

We get Anthropogenic Global Warming Climate Change.

And when these people are exposed for what they are, they pull themselves down those rat-holes and try to disappear.