Is it a good thing or a bad thing when you’re quoted in HuffPo?

by 7 Comments

HuffPo referenced me as “a blogger,” but I’m still in there in an article about yet another school that has gone after quite obvious toy guns:

Multiple conservative bloggers and news outlets have come out in opposition to the way the school handled the incident.

“In a sane world, if a teacher or school bus driver saw the little boy bring out his orange-tipped cap gun, the adult would have said, ‘Put that away, and if you bring it to school again, I’ll have to confiscate it,’” wrote a blogger on Mr. Conservative. “America’s public schools, though, are not sane, at least when it comes to toy guns.”

Interestingly, the five comments that are on the HuffPo article now all come out against the school, saying it went too far.  In other words, they agree with me. Hah!  I’m sure, though, that there’ll soon be hundreds of comments lambasting America’s gun culture and applauding a public school that’s doing its bit to undercut the Second Amendment.

You need a scorecard to know the players — or yet another reason why citizens should be armed

by 7 Comments

I may not own a gun, but I cherish my right to own a gun should I want one.  Ever since Hurricane Katrina, I’ve realized that police cannot always be there to protect people.  What I’ve also realized, is the police officers can be just as dangerous when they’re on the scene as when they’re not.  This thought has been swirling around in the back of my brain ever since I started learning about a practice called “swatting.”  Swatting happens when a person, either as a (stupid) prank or from real malevolence, calls 911 and reports a hostage situation at the target’s address.  These reports always require a SWAT team to appear.  Homeowners find themselves awakened when the police surround their house or burst through their doors.  The there’s a high likelihood that something terrible will happen, such as the police shooting a befuddled homeowner who appears threatening.

Even without swatting, though, the police can be dangerous because they don’t know who the bad guys are.  With the best will in the world, in a confused situation, it’s impossible for them to tell who’s the homeowner and who’s the intruder.  In Fort Worth, Texas, police shot a grandfather who, hearing a ruckus from his neighbor’s house (police searching for drugs, as it turned out), grabbed his gun and went over to help out.  He never even made it off his driveway but was, instead, was shot dead by the police.  I’m not blaming the police.  I’m just citing this particular story as an example of the fact that, in fraught situations, police are justifiably nervous and can’t tell good guys from bad.  Neighbors, however, know each other, and a homeowner certainly knows who shouldn’t be in his house.

Colion Noir challenges those racists who claim he must be an NRA puppet

by 3 Comments

I know I’ve mentioned before how much I like Colion Noir’s pro-Second Amendment videos.  Let me just say it again:  I really like his videos.

What’s tragic is that Noir is being forced to defend himself against charges that he’s a brainless oaf who is being used by the NRA.  Even thought he has to defend himself against unspeakable racism, Noir manages to be funny and on point.  (And he’s certainly right about one thing:  he’s much better looking than Tyson Beckford.)

“Extremism” when it comes to late term abortion and guns

by 28 Comments

Kirsten Powers, one of Fox News’ resident Democrats, is the person who forced the Kermit Gosnell mass murder onto the front page.  Before Powers shamed the media into pretending, if only for a few days, that the trial of one the most prolific serial killers in American history actually mattered, the media had managed to ignore almost entirely Kermit Gosnell’s trial.  With Powers’ “J’Accuse” moment on USA Today, however, the media was forced to acknowledge the trial, if only momentarily, and to engage in a cursory analysis of its motives.  The analysis was pathetic, but they did it.  (E.g., “We’ve decided that we didn’t ignore the trial because it was about an abortionist; we ignored it because our incredibly savvy business sense, which has seen most liberal print media outlets totter to the edge of the grave, told us that there was no money in this one.”)

Powers has written another indictment of the Left’s fanatic support for abortion.  This time, her focus is on the pathological denial that sees the Left pretend that a fully matured fetus is just a clump of cells:

What we need to learn from the Gosnell case is that late-term abortion is infanticide. Legal infanticide. That so many people in the media seem untroubled by the idea that 12 inches in one direction is a “private medical decision” and 12 inches in the other direction causes people to react in horror, should be troubling. Indeed, Gosnell’s defense attorney Jack J. McMahon has relied on the argument that Gosnell killed the babies prior to delivering them, therefore he is not guilty of murder. His exact words were: “Every one of those babies died in utero.”

[snip]

We live in a country where if a six-months-pregnant woman started downing shots of vodka in a bar or lit up a cigarette, people might want her arrested. But that same woman could walk into an abortion clinic, no questions asked, and be injected with a drug that would stop her baby’s heart.

I’ll put my cards on the table: I think life begins at conception and would love to live in a world where no women ever felt she needed to get an abortion. However, I know enough people who are pro-abortion rights—indeed, I was one of them for most of my life—to know that reasonable and sincere people can disagree about when meaningful life begins. They also can disagree about how to weigh that moral uncertainty against a woman’s right to control her body—and her own life. I have only ever voted for Democrats, so overturning Roe v. Wade is not one of my priorities. I never want to return to the days of gruesome back-alley abortions.

But medical advances since Roe v. Wade have made it clear to me that late-term abortion is not a moral gray area, and we need to stop pretending it is. No six-months-pregnant woman is picking out names for her “fetus.” It’s a baby. Let’s stop playing Orwellian word games. We are talking about human beings here.

Powers is absolutely right.  I’m pleased and proud to say that, even in my most fiercely pro-Choice days, I wouldn’t have countenanced the abortion of a viable infant.  Nevertheless, I do have to part ways with the core premise in Powers’ article, which is that NARAL and the NRA are both equally extreme, and therefore both equally open to being castigated and disregarded

Speaking as a liberal who endorses more government regulation of practically everything—banks, water, air, food, oil drilling, animal safety—I am eternally perplexed by the fury the abortion rights contingent displays at the suggestion that the government might have a serious role to play in the issue of abortion, especially later-term abortion. More and more, the abortion rights community has become the NRA of the left: unleashing their armies of supporters and lobbyists in opposition to regulations or restrictions that the majority of Americans support. In the same way the NRA believes background checks will lead to the government busting down your door to confiscate your guns, the abortion rights movement conjures a straight line from parental consent to a complete ban on abortion.

Powers is wrong to claim that the two institutions are alike and that both are equally extreme.  They’re not the same and for one very specific reason:  the Constitution.

NARAL is predicated upon a Supreme Court case that found an emanation of a penumbra of an assumed, but never explicitly named, constitutional right to privacy and, from that, created an unfettered right to abort a fetus during its first trimester.  Somehow that limited right morphed into an equally unfettered right to abort a fetus, not just in the first trimester, but right up to, including, and after its birth.  Even the authors of Roe v. Wade would concede that those on the Left who defend late term or post-birth abortions have hit a high note on the extremist scale.  Extremism in defense of an illusory right premised on a magical interpretation of a clearly written historic contract between the people and their federal government is . . . well, extremely extreme.

But about the NRA. . . .  Where does it get the idea that the government should absolutely and completely stay away from law-abiding citizens’ guns?  Are those gun rights nuts also relying on an emanation of a penumbra of an unstated right?  In a word, no.  Instead, the NRA is ensuring that the government does not overreach its explicitly described limitation of power under the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution:

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

This is not even Goldwater’s “extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.”  There is no extremism here because the NRA, contrary to Progressives’ frequent attacks, is not pushing any boundaries.

Which brings me to one of the best pro-Second Amendment articles I’ve seen.  Iowa State University has a newspaper called the Iowa State Daily.  Until about yesterday, one of its writers was a guy named Barry Snell.  At some point before he attended the university, Barry Snell wore a uniform (police?  military?  He doesn’t say).  Attending an American university and writing for a student newspaper exposed Snell to a lot of anti-gun people.  He doesn’t shy away from the fact that many of them are extremely nice people.  (I know that to be the case when it comes to all the anti-gun people I know.  They’re not professional Leftists.  They’re just myopic.)  Snell’s word for these people, these nice Leftists who turn into slavering gun grabbers whenever a shooting occurs is that they’re “uninformed” — and how.

On his last day as a writer for the Iowa State Daily, Snell un-pented all the pent up irritation, frustration, and anger he has when it comes to those liberals who feel it is their obligation to tar all gun owners as crazy, baby-killing lunatics.  Admirably, Snell’s decency and intellect are such that, even when he let ‘er rip, he stuck to his facts and avoid ad hominem attacks.  Before I start discussing some of the points that specifically interested me in his article, I urge you to read it and share it, through any social media you have (email, Facebook, Twitter, a blog, etc.).  It’s that good.

What Snell does so well is to is explain why NRA types are so defensive when it comes to their Second Amendment rights.  They’ve learned over the years not to trust the Left, which speaks with forked tongue and, no matter what it says, wants to grab guns.  He makes more good arguments than I can count, so let me just give you a taste, and then hone in on my abortion point:

Gun people don’t trust anti-gun people because anti-gunners always talk about 90 percent of Americans supporting this gun control measure, or 65 percent supporting that one, as if a majority opinion is what truly matters in America. We don’t trust anti-gun people because you think America is a democracy, when it’s actually a constitutional federal republic. In the American system, the rights of a single individual are what matters and are what our system is designed to protect. The emotional mob does not rule in America.

Gun people don’t trust anti-gun people because they keep saying they “respect the Second Amendment” and go on about how they respect the hunting traditions of America. We don’t trust you because you have to be a complete idiot to think the Second Amendment is about hunting. I wish people weren’t so stupid that I have to say this: The Second Amendment is about checking government tyranny. Period. End of story. The founders probably couldn’t have cared less about hunting since, you know, they just got done with that little tiff with England called the Revolutionary War right before they wrote that “little book” called the Constitution.

Gun people don’t trust anti-gun people because they lie to us. President Obama directly says he won’t tamper with guns or the Second Amendment, then turns around and pushes Congress to do just that. We don’t trust anti-gunners because they appoint one of the most lying and rabidly (and moronically) anti-gun people in America, Vice President Biden, to head up a “task force” to “solve” the so-called “gun problem,” who in turn talks with anti-gun special interest groups instead of us to complete his task.

Snell neatly addresses the way the abortion makes the First Amendment sacrosanct, even while relegating the Second Amendment to the inner circle of Hell:

Gun people don’t trust anti-gun people because they look down on us for defending the Second Amendment as vigorously as they defend the First Amendment — a fight we too would stand side-by-side with them on otherwise. We don’t trust anti-gunners because someone defending the First Amendment is considered a hero, but a someone defending the Second Amendment is figured down with murderers and other lowlifes. Where the First Amendment has its very own day and week, both near-holy national celebrations beyond reproach, anti-gunners would use the First Amendment to ridicule any equivalent event for the Second Amendment, like they did for a recent local attempt at the University of Iowa.

Nicely, for purposes of my post here, Snell actually touches on the abortion question.  He doesn’t do so in a constitutional way, but I’m still throwing it in here, just because he makes such a good point, and manages to show how fundamentally flawed the Leftist position is:

Gun people don’t trust anti-gun people because when it comes to their “We need gun control to save the children” argument, many of us can’t understand how an anti-gun liberal can simultaneously be in favor of abortion. Because you know, a ban on abortion would save a child every single time. I’m personally not rabidly against abortion, but the discongruence makes less sense still when the reason abortions are legal is to protect a woman’s individual rights. That’s great, but does the individual rights argument sound familiar? Anti-gunners think that for some bizarre reason, the founding fathers happened to stick a collective right smack dab at the top of a list of individual rights, though. Yeah, because that makes sense.

Hmmm.  I got a little carried away and off-topic there, and ended up quoting a lot of choice paragraphs that don’t actually tie into the NARAL versus NRA argument.  They’re such good paragraphs, though, that I’m not going to delete them.  I’m just going to drag this post back to my original point, which is that, while Powers is right about late-term abortion, she’s wrong to compare NARAL and the NRA.

Where Powers’ analogy fails is that she believes that the two organizations — NARAL and the NRA — are comparable because both are single issue organizations and both have members who have staked out bottom line positions for their belief.  This is a false comparison, because it mistakes form for substance.  That is, it implies that, because they have a superficial similarity, their beliefs are equal — equal in morality, equal in logic, and equal in law.  They are not.  And this is where I can circle back to Snell.

My takeaway from Snell’s article is that there is no extremism in the defense of the Second Amendment.  It is every bit as important an inherent right as those jumbled almost carelessly together in the First Amendment.  When we defend it against anti-gun people, our actions aren’t motivated by our extremism, but by theirs.  We hew to the Constitution.  They hew to a false understanding of our republican form of government, dishonest statistics, political lies, emotional hysteria, fallout from their own bad policies, etc.  Gun rights advocates, unlike NARAL supporters are not denying reality, and they are not making up imaginary rights.

So while I applaud Powers’ for having the courage to take her Progressive brethren to task for their immoral position when it comes to late term abortion, I can’t give her a pass for pretending that abortion rights and gun rights are the same.  They’re not, and vigilance in defending against unconstitutional, illogical, and immoral attacks against the Second Amendment is not the same as extremism in defense of a made-up right that has been stretched and twisted to give legal cover to something that is, under any interpretation of law, morality, and biology, cold-blooded murder.

Hat tip:  Pierre LeGrand

Two stories about guns, each showing that the issue is how they’re used, rather than their existence

by 3 Comments

First, from the NRA, a really solid video about women and guns:

The point, of course, is that guns without people are simply inanimate objects.

Second, an article about the use to which Palestinians put guns — training their children to kill Israelis.

Guns aren’t the issue. Culture is.

You can help change the television landscape

by 1 Comment

I haven’t forgotten the collaborative post I put up after the election regarding the need for conservatives to create an alternate media challenging liberal paradigms.  I was therefore delighted to see that the Kochs are thinking of buying up old Leftist media outlets and reconfiguring them as honest news outlets — meaning outlets that either honestly report the news or honestly identify their own biases.

The Kochs are at one end of the economic spectrum when it comes to revitalizing conservative participation in the media.  At the other end comes a very good idea that is currently being crowd sourced (meaning that, if you donate money, the people with the idea can bring it to fruition).  Check out the proposal for a new gun show called Shoot to Thrill.  And if you like it, send a few bucks their way.  Game changers don’t have to be big moments.  They can be low-level trends that lead towards tipping points.  Demystifying the Hollywood treatment of guns — evil except when they’re in an action hero’s hands — will go a long way to changing the gun debate.

Is it racist to remind people that the American government first disarmed Native Americans and then decimated them?

by 16 Comments

A week or two ago, I put this poster on my site:

Guns in government hands

I think it’s an un-racist poster.  It reminds people that government will always be a minority’s worst enemies.

What I didn’t know was that, in Greeley, Colorado, someone put up a billboard echoing that sentiment:

The friend who sent me this video said exactly the right thing about those who are now crying foul:

I love the premise here: “Pay no attention to history, it may offend someone!”

Bill Maher almost gets it when it comes to terrorism

by 8 Comments

In fits and starts, Bill Maher is creeping towards an understanding that the enemy isn’t America when it comes to terrorism.  He’s unable to square the circle, though, because he’s so hung up on gun control.  That is, he’s incapable of appreciating that the best way for Americans to depend themselves is for them to be armed.  Anyway, I wrote the following post for Mr. Conservative, and I think it fits in well here:

Bill Maher has periodic outbursts of logic and reason that give one hope that he may yet figure out that his blind allegiance to the Democrat party is misguided. Friday, on his HBO show Real Time, Maher showed pictures of heavily armed police patrolling Boston streets and expressed concern that “This country is becoming a police state,” adding that he finds this trend “very troubling.”

(Read here about Maher’s unexpected defense of Christianity.)

Maher’s guests tried hard to downplay his concerns. For example, MSNBC contributor Robert Traynham said that what people saw wasn’t attributable to Boston but was, instead “a federal response after a horrific bombing.” Apparently Traynham was unclear on the fact that, when the feds go all “police state” on us, it’s even worse than if an individual city or state does.

Maher wasn’t deterred. Looking at the constitutionally improper house-to-house searches for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in Watertown, Maher again said that this isn’t right:

To me that’s out of hand. I agree we shouldn’t have given this kid his Miranda rights because he probably had information. We wanted to take him alive . . . if you agree with that then what the cops did there was unprofessional. That’s called contagious fire.

***

He has information, he had information and he was just lying in the boat. They knew that. They put that grenade up there. He wasn’t moving. It’s ridiculous. It’s out of control.

Where Maher is unable to square the circle is with his belief that everything would be better without guns. On Friday’s show, he noted that, while American police go in with tanks, “the British police don’t even carry guns.” On another occasion, he insisted that “the Second Amendment is bullshit.”

Maher seems incapable of making the logical leap that says that, if the public also has some police power – the ability to protect itself against criminals and crazies – then the police themselves don’t have to be so heavily armed. Rather than facing the entire world alone, the police in an armed, civil society, have law-abiding citizens at their back, helping out.

Americans show a much greater understanding of the situation than Maher. According to polls, an overwhelming number of Americans want to be armed when there’s a manhunt going on. Rather than being victimized twice – first by the terrorist and then by the police – they want to be active participants in their own security. This is a civic awareness that’s completely contrary to the arrogant Big Government idea that only the police are capable of protecting Americans from criminals. There’s a word for citizens who won’t and can’t take care of themselves: Victims.

Orwellian double think enters the gun grab debate

by 28 Comments

Second Amendment

George Orwell understood that good language clarifies and bad language corrupts.  He’d moved amongst Communists, so he understood how controlling people requires controlling language.  One cannot fully erase ideas if the language to express them still exists — so one changes the language.  In 1984, Orwell envisioned an Auschwitz-like world (“arbeit macht frei”) that takes old words and perverts their meaning so much that they become meaningless. He called this linguistic world “double think”:

“The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them… To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.”

The three most famous examples of double think from 1984 are, of course, War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength.

Democrat Joe Manchin has flung himself with total abandonment into the world of double think.  In an interview on Fox News, Manchin vows to continue the fight to put limits on Americans’ rights to possess and use guns.  During that interview, he collapses into an Orwellian double think heap:

This not only protects your Second Amendment rights, it expands your Second Amendment rights.

Think about that for a moment.  The Second Amendment, as most recently interpreted by the Supreme Court, gives an un-infringeable right to bear arms, one that is predicated on a well-regulated militia as understood in the 18th century — a people’s army, not a standing army.  In other words, every American is a potential militia member and therefore has an absolute right to bear arms.

How in the world, then, can any legislation expand up on that absolute right that is inherent in every American?  By definition, our right to bear arms cannot be expanded because it is predicated upon 100% gun saturation.  That means that any legislation can only leave the right unchanged, in which case the legislation is unnecessary, or it can limit that right, in which case the legislation is unconstitutional.

Faced with this logical conundrum, Manchin does the only thing left to do, which is to pervert language:  By limiting your right to bear arms we will expand your right to bear arms.

George Orwell knew the Left and he knew how the Left thinks.  There are no surprises.  The only “surprises” that occur are when we let down our guard.

A debate about gun control (featuring a friend of mine)

by 8 Comments

My friend Johnny Sutton, who was a Texas prosecutor before becoming a U.S. Attorney during the Bush years, just gave me a call.  We got to talking about gun control, and he mentioned that he’d participated in a gun control forum at the LBJ Library.  What makes his pro-Second Amendment position interesting is that he’s a convert.  Although he grew up around guns and loves to hunt, his years as a prosecutor left him with a strong anti-gun bias.  If you look at Johnny’s bio, you’ll see that his work meant that he was constantly focused on the victims of gun crime:

From 1988 to 1995[9] Sutton served as a criminal trial prosecutor in the Harris County District Attorney’s Office in Houston, where he tried more than 60 first chair felony jury trials. In 1994, Sutton obtained the death penalty against Raul Villareal in the rape and murder of two teenage girls, Jennifer Ertman and Elizabeth Pena. Four other death penalty verdicts were rendered in the case.[10]

Bush administration

In 1995, Sutton accepted a position as criminal justice policy director for then-Governor George W. Bush, providing analysis and recommendations for proposed criminal justice laws for Bush to support or veto.[1]

Upon Bush’s election as president in 2000, Sutton became coordinator for the Bush-Cheney transition team assigned to the Department of Justice where he served as Associate Deputy Attorney General, initially advising on U.S.-Mexico border issues.

United States Attorney

On October 25, 2001, Bush nominated Sutton for U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Texas, one of the nation’s busiest criminal dockets, known for its high percentage of drug and immigration crimes and covering 68 counties including Austin, San Antonio, El Paso and 660 miles of border. Sutton returned to Austin, where he oversaw a staff of 140 lawyers and a changing mission. Traditionally focused on border-related crimes, the U.S. Attorney’s office increasingly focused on fighting terrorism.[1]

As U.S. attorney, Sutton prosecuted more than 400 prison gang members, including 19 members of the Texas Syndicate in 2004, and more than 100 public officials, including former Texas Attorney General Dan Morales in 2003 on mail and tax fraud charges. Sutton also supported the buildup of federal resources, from 9,000 to 20,000 border patrol agents, on the Mexico border, and pushed for prosecution of illegal immigrants previously deported, instead of just those who had committed a serious felony.[11]

Sutton was appointed vice chair of the Attorney General’s Advisory Committee of United States Attorneys on May 27, 2005.[9] On March 28, 2006, Gonzales elevated Sutton to chair of the committee.[12] In this role, Sutton frequently traveled to Washington to advise the Department of Justice on border-related issues and testify before Congress.[11]

As Johnny told me, this work left him pro-gun control.  What changed his mind was Gov. George Bush’s announcement that he wanted Texas to become a concealed carry state.  Johnny wasn’t happy, but helped Bush implement this policy.  To Johnny’s surprise, it worked.  Texas became safer, not less safe, once concealed-carry became law.  Johnny became a convert.

And as you know from me, there’s no zealot quite like a convert.  That’s why Johnny can debate with passion on the subject of gun control and the dangers it poses to the American people.

Anyway, if you’re interested, here is a link to the LBJ page with the gun debate in which Johnny participated.  Johnny starts speaking about 20 minutes into the video.  He’s charming (of course).

Obama whines and Biden cries when their gun grab bill fails

by 7 Comments

Obama frowning

Here’s another one that appeared first at Mr. Conservative, but I wrote it and I agree with every word I wrote:

With the failure of the Democrats’ gun grab legislation in the Senate, the President and the Vice President took the political blow like the sensitive, New Age, Progressive men that they are – Obama whined and Biden cried.

Standing on the White House lawn, along with the same sad, bedraggled group of people Obama has been dragging around for weeks as he made his emotional argument against guns, Obama hurled insults in every direction. Ignoring the fact that the gun control bill contained cute little provisions, such as the one giving liberal physicians the right to report for a national criminal background check patients seeking treatment for depression, Obama blamed his newest scapegoat – the NRA:

But instead of supporting this compromise, the gun lobby and its allies willfully lied about the bill. They claimed that it would create some sort of “big brother” gun registry, even though the bill did the opposite. This legislation, in fact, outlawed any registry. Plain and simple, right there in the text. But that didn’t matter.

And unfortunately, this pattern of spreading untruths about this legislation served a purpose, because those lies upset an intense minority of gun owners, and that in turn intimidated a lot of senators. And I talked to several of these senators over the past few weeks, and they’re all good people. I know all of them were shocked by tragedies like Newtown. And I also understand that they come from states that are strongly pro-gun. And I have consistently said that there are regional differences when it comes to guns, and that both sides have to listen to each other.

In fact, Senators – the Democrat Senators — backed away from the bill because their constituents recognized an unconstitutional gun grab when they saw it — and they let their displeasure be known. In addition, these same constituents understood what Obama refuses to acknowledge: that nothing in the bills before the Senate, including the background check, would stop a future Newtown, while everything in the proposed bills was intended to undermine the Second Amendment.

We know that more guns in law-abiding hands, not fewer, will protect students; we know that, despite the dog-and-pony show not all Newtown parents support gun control; and we know that both Biden and Obama are hostile to and neither understands the Second Amendment. No wonder the NRA prevailed.

While Obama whined, Biden looked as if he was seconds away from tears. With his mouth pinched shut in a frown, and his eyes squinted closed, Biden, the same man who cackled maniacally through the Vice Presidential debate, was the personification of tragedy.

Biden near tears

Obama and Biden represent the debasement of American politics. Government is no longer the preserve of intelligent gentlemen – it’s the home of emotional actors who try use tragedy to bully through an agenda that has as its sole purpose depriving the American people of their individual rights. It’s true that bad things happen because of guns. Bad things also happen because of pressure cookers, and cars, and baseball bats. We cannot legislate away risk. The Founders understood, though, that, even though guns do present the risk of accidental and intentional injury and death, they are the only reliable tool standing between an individual’s freedom and his government’s overreach.

Dianne Feinstein responds to the failure of her gun control bill

by 9 Comments

I wrote this for Mr. Conservative, but it works just as nicely here:

When the Sandy Hook tragedy occurred, Senator Dianne Feinstein ghoulishly whipped out of her filing cabinet a gun control bill that she’d had waiting for just such a moment. She shilled it endlessly. She schmoozed with British carpetbagger Piers Morgan, with both of them decrying how evil the gun owners and the NRA are. She assured Americans that all veterans suffer from dangerous PTSD, making them too mentally ill to own arms (a loathsome theory that the Veterans Administration is apparently acting upon). She even said that, in today’s America, it’s legal to “hunt humans.” She made all these statements despite being the kind of liberal hypocrite who thinks her life is worth protecting with guns – it’s your life that’s not worth protection.

In additional to almost delusional, and definitely selfish, behavior, Feinstein also put forward a nonsensical ban that attacked imaginary “military style assault weapons.” Her bill was a little bit of personal vendetta against certain guns and manufacturers, and a lot of fashion commentary about what a “bad” gun looks like. It was clear early on that her bill didn’t have a snowball’s chance of surviving.

Still, one has to give Feinstein credit for fighting on. Today, she made a last gasp push to shame her fellow Senators into voting for a bill that is meaningless, inconvenient, unconstitutional, and statistically unlikely to protect any of the nameless “families” to whom she called out:

I know how this is going to end — and the despair and the dismay of families standing out there whose safety we need to protect, and we don’t do it. I am really chagrined and concerned. If anybody cares, vote at least to prospectively ban the manufacture, the sale, the importation of military style assault weapons. Show some guts!

Fortunately, not only did those who believe in gun rights stand strong, but Democrats also recognized that, unless you’re lucky enough to be a Democrat Senator from California, voting for Feinstein’s bill would have been political suicide – proving that supporting Second Amendment rights saves lives, at least in the political sense.

A matched set about gun control and crime

by 3 Comments

From John Lott, describing what happened in Washington, D.C. when the Supreme Court decided District of Columbia v. Heller, reversing D.C.’s draconian anti-gun laws:

When the Heller case was decided, Washington’s Mayor Adrian Fenty warned: “More handguns in the District of Columbia will only lead to more handgun violence.” Knowing that Chicago’s gun laws would soon face a similar legal challenge, Mayor Richard Daley was particularly vocal. The day that the Heller decision was handed down, Daley said that he and other mayors across the country were “outraged” by the decision and he predicted more deaths along with Wild West-style shootouts. Daley warned that people “are going to take a gun and they are going to end their lives in a family dispute.”

But Armageddon never arrived. Quite the contrary, murders in Washington plummeted by an astounding 25 percent in 2009, dropping from 186 murders in 2008 to 140. That translates to a murder rate that is now down to 23.5 per 100,000 people, Washinton’s lowest since 1967. While other cities have also fared well over the last year, D.C.’s drop was several times greater than that for other similar sized cities. According to preliminary estimates by the FBI, nationwide murders fell by a relatively more modest 10 percent last year and by about 8 percent in other similarly sized cities of half a million to one million people (D.C.’s population count is at about 590,000).

From the New York Post, describing what’s been happening in Manhattan since New York State enacted its draconian anti-gun law:

Some of Manhattan’s wealthiest neighborhoods are exploding in a wave of violent crime that hearkens back to the bad old days when people feared going out at night, according to NYPD data obtained by The Post.

Chelsea, Gramercy Park, TriBeCa, SoHo and Midtown South all posted a frightening rise in rapes in the first three months of 2013 compared with the same period in 2012. Felony assaults in the usually peaceful West Village nearly tripled, the new crime statistics show.

Greenwich Village’s 6th Precinct tied the Rockaways’ grimy 100th Precinct for the city’s biggest year-to-date overall crime spike.

A graphic tells the story:

New York's meaner streets

I wouldn’t presume to draw any conclusions from these two sets of data. I’ll leave you all to draw your own conclusions.

Gun control advocates crash children’s event in Marin

by 1 Comment

The Marin YMCA just wanted to host its annual “Healthy Kids” day.  “Organizing for America,” the perpetual Obama campaign, had a different idea, crashing the event by setting a table in an adjacent parking-lot in such a way that it looked like part of the YMCA sponsored event.  To its credit, the YMCA said “Leave!”:

Two Marin organizations interested in slightly different aspects of children’s health bumped heads Saturday in Marinwood.

The Marin YMCA hosted its annual Healthy Kids Day event at its facility at 1500 Los Gamos Drive, and the Marin chapter of Organizing for Action, a grass-roots group formed to support President Obama’s legislative agenda, decided to take advantage of that fact to recruit supporters for gun control legislation.

The Organizing for Action group set up an information table and hoisted picket signs in a private parking lot adjacent to where the fair was taking place from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. The gun control advocates, which included Corte Madera Mayor Diane Furst and Larkspur Councilwoman Ann Morrison, were later ordered to move out of the parking lot after the YMCA complained to the property manager in charge of the lot. The YMCA declined to comment on the dustup.

Here’s something for OFA to think about:  children are not healthy in the slums of Chicago, which has extremely strict gun control; they’re not healthy in the slums of South Central LA, which has extremely strict gun control; they’re not healthy in the slums of Oakland, California, which has extremely strict gun control; they’re not healthy in Mexico, which has extremely strict gun control; they’re not happy in Russia, North Korea, Cuba, and a whole bunch of other places that have extremely strict gun control.

Maybe the problem isn’t the gun control; maybe the problem is a Democrat control that does everything it can to destroy respect for individual life, to destroy families, and to leave people — or, in socialist talk, proles or drones — dependent on a state that has no conscience and no respect for individual life, and that, therefore, breeds people who have no conscience either.

This seems like an appropriate video to expose the deep-thinkers that support OFA’s drive for gun control:

Kenny Roger’s “Coward of the County” is a very good argument for the Second Amendment

by 5 Comments

I’ve been introducing my children to the music of my youth, and Kenny Roger’s Coward of the Country came up on my mental playlist. I always liked that song, because it ends with the worm turning, which is a satisfying moment:

Listening to the song with my children, though, I got depressed.  You see, the song told from Tommy’s point of view — how he forswore violence because his “Daddy died in prison,” and then, after three men gang raped Becky, he wept over his father’s photograph, and bravely beat the gang rapists up, having suddenly realized that violence sometimes has a purpose.  Hooray!

Until today, however, I never thought about Becky:

There’s someone for evr’yone and Tommy’s love was Becky.
In her arms he didn’t have to prove he was a man.
One day while he was workin’ the Gatlin boys came callin’.
They took turns at Becky… there was three of them!

When I was younger, I don’t think I quite understood that “taking turns at Becky” meant she was gang raped.  I just kind of . . . I don’t know, mentally skipped that part.  Now, though, I fully understand what happened.  Poor, poor Becky, who was married to a man who had made it very clear throughout his life that he would not lift a hand to defend her.

my_neighbor_wants_to_ban_guns_yard_sign

If Tommy had made it plain from the start that he was opposed to gratuitous violence, but that he would fight to the death to defend those he loved, as well as other innocents and defenseless people, he still wouldn’t have ended up in jail.  The big difference had he shown his willingness to fight if necessary is that Becky wouldn’t have been gang raped.

That’s the thing about owning a gun.  It doesn’t mean that everyone who owns one is going to go crazy, shoot up bars, rob banks, kill people, and end up dying in prison.  What it means is that you’d better not mess with a gun owner.  Just because the gun owner isn’t proactively violent (i.e., a criminal), doesn’t mean that he (or she) won’t be violently defensive when his/her back (or the backs of those s/he loves) are up against the wall.

This is fundamentally a Democrat song.  Democrats disarm themselves and everyone else, and then, when the damage is done, they turn vicious.  What’s left behind is a blood bath.

The conservative way is better:  warn people in advance that they’d better not mess with you, and then no one dies.

Michelle Obama confuses herself with dead Chicago teen

by 10 Comments

(I wrote this for Mr. Conservative, but it’s another one that could just as easily have been written here.  Indeed, for the writing I do at Mr. Conservative, it’s unusually snarky . Michelle really rubs me the wrong way.)

When the Clintons were in the White House, they loved to insult their political opponents by quoting to them Einstein’s classic definition of “insanity” — “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Under that standard, Michelle Obama is quite obviously insane. Despite the fact that Chicago pairs the strictest gun urban control laws in the nation with the highest urban gun homicide rate in the nation, Michelle took time out from her heavy-duty social schedule to appear in Chicago and tearfully beg for more gun control.

Making this display of Einstein-defined insanity even more appalling, Michelle added to it the typical Obama habit of inserting herself into the story, front and center (because, of course, the Obamas are the most important people in the world, at least in their own minds). While Bill Clinton felt your pain, Michelle feels only her own. When she spoke of Hadiya Pendleton, a teenager who performed at Obama’s Second Inauguration and was soon after killed by gun-fire on Chicago’s strictly gun-controlled streets, Michelle just couldn’t keep herself out of the narrative:

Hadiya Pendleton was me and I was her. But I got to grow up and go to Princeton and Harvard Law School and have a career and a family and the most blessed life I could ever imagine. And Hadiya, well we know that story. Just a week after she performed at my husband’s inauguration, she went to a park with some friends and got shot in the back.

What does that even mean? It sounds as if Michelle had a Beatles’ flashback and was trying to sing I am the Walrus (“I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.”) More likely, though, that mess of words is just a terrible and typical example of Michelle’s “me-me-me” approach to governance. Even in the Valley of the Shadow of a child’s death, it’s all about Michelle’s life, or her alternative life, or her hallucinatory life.

Worse than that, Michelle wrapped up this narcissistic wallow by offering what she claims is the only cure for the horror of Chicago’s homicide rate: Even stricter gun control laws in Chicago. There’s that Einstein-esque insanity. Stricter gun control ensures that Chicago’s violence continues as the bad guys know with certainty that their potential victims, or the community’s potential heroes, have all been disarmed.

But here’s the really irony of it all. Hadiya may be Michelle and Michelle may be Hadiya, but Michelle never travels an inch out of her home without an armed guard surrounding her. Her children get guards too, wherever they go. If Michelle really is Hadiya, and vice versa, the very least Michelle could do is to ensure that Hadiya, and all the other enthusiastic, innocent Hadiyas in Chicago, get the same Second Amendment rights that Michelle freely claims for herself.

If you’re interested in reading about other grotesque examples of liberal hypocrisy, be sure to check out this list of the 25 ridiculous things gun hating liberals have said. And if you want to learn more about the appalling ignorance that powers the Progressive press for the Second Amendment’s total destruction, you need to know that Obama thought that the Sandy Hook shooter was using an automatic, rather than a semi-automatic; that a legislator in Colorado had no idea gun magazines could be reloaded; and that Michael Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns created an ad using an actor who’d obviously never handled a gun.

About Bloomberg’s coalition of mayors, the group that wants to grab your guns

by 4 Comments

I blogged at Mr. Conservative about hypocritical gun-grabbing politicians.  There, I noted that one of the mayors excited about the program is a former police officer who believes in concealed carry — for himself.  What others have noticed is that a lot of the mayors, and other Progressive government types, who are trying to round-up the usual suspects (law-abiding citizens who don’t take lightly to having their constitutional rights infringed) probably have somewhat more mixed motives for trying to nab guns from their fellow towns people — it turns out that lots of these politicians have criminal backgrounds and would be hard pressed to pass their own background checks.

Then, on Facebook, one of my conservative friends posted this handy-dandy chart.  Please note that these guys and gals aren’t just guilty of parking tickets — Mayor Bloomberg’s cohort has committed some very serious crimes.  I haven’t studied them, but what do you bet that they’re all Democrats?

Gun grabbing mayors with records

 

Illegal immigrant and pedophile kills: uses single rifle blast to kill woman protecting her daughter from him

by 8 Comments

(First published at Mr. Conservative, but I wrote it, and it’s vintage Bookworm Room)

Maria Saucedo, who was only 31, died the other day in Arizona when Jose Zarate shot her in the chest with a rifle after she refused to let him date her daughter. This sounds like a very ordinary tragedy, but it isn’t. Instead, it perfectly represents the way the Left has used bad ideas and corrupt language to allow terrible things to happen in this country.

Jose Zarate, who is 25-years-old, wanted to date Saucedo’s 13-year-old daughter. When Saucedo objected, Zarate pulled out a rifle and shot Saucedo in the chest, killing her. After his arrest, Deputy Joaquin Enriquez stated that “Sheriff’s deputies say Zarate is a non-U.S. citizen who has been living in the country without proper authorization.” In other words, Zarate is an illegal alien, a pedophile, and a murderer.

Gun grabbers have been noticeably silent about this horrible crime – perhaps because speaking up about it would force them to acknowledge that none of their proposed new laws would have stopped this man. He couldn’t have passed a background check, yet he had a gun; and he needed only one shot to kill Saucedo, so gun magazine sizes would have been irrelevant to his crime.

The only thing that might have stopped Zarate was to keep him out of this country in the first place. That, however, is not something the American political class is willing to do. Democrats want all those potential voters, legal or not. Instead, Leftists are trying to use language to massage away the fact that it’s illegal to enter this country without permission.

Watch reporters contort themselves and distort the language to avoid saying anything negative about people who become criminals the minute they step into this country:

The Leftist AP, which is one of the primary news sources in America, just announced that in future reporting, it will no longer use the phrases “illegal alien” or “illegal immigrant.” Instead of judgmental nouns, it will opt for less judgmental verbs. AP Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll explained that AP will henceforth refer only to people who happen to be “living in or immigrating to a country illegally.” Deputy Enriquez (quoted above) clearly knew the AP rules when he spoke to the press.

George Orwell, who knew Leftist thinking from the inside out, and viewed it with both fear and disgust, famously said that “political speech and writing,” by which he meant Leftist influenced political speech and writing, “are largely the defense of the indefensible.” He warned, too, that “if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” In the story of Jose Zarate, we are seeing both corruption of language and thought, as a flurry of deadening words are used to hide the fact that a man whose very existence here was criminal, attempted pedophilia and, when blocked, committed cold-blooded murder.

The fundamental unconstitutionalism of Obama’s presidency

by 22 Comments

Much has been made of Obama’s statement that the gun rights crowd should stop worrying, because Obama contends that he is “constrained” by the system the Founders put in place.  If you don’t read his actual words with great care, it sounds as if he’s saying he’s contractually constrained — or, to put it in political language, he’s constitutionally constrained.  Without actually listening to him, we assume he’s saying, “Stop worrying, because even I understand that the Constitution stops me from grabbing your guns.”

The reason that there’s been such an uproar, though, is because that’s not what he’s saying.  Here’s the entire statement:

You hear some of these quotes, ‘I need a gun to protect myself from the government.’ ‘We can’t do background checks because the government is going to come take my guns away.’  Well, the government is us. These officials are elected by you. They are elected by you. I am elected by you. I am constrained, as they are constrained, by a system that our Founders put in place. It’s a government of and by and for the people.

That short paragraph breaks down into three distinct thoughts:

Thought one:  Crazy gun rights nuts fear the government.

Thought two:  People elect their government.

Thought three:  Those who are elected “are constrained by a system that our Founders put into place.”

Obama’s nasty language (and it is nasty, to the extent it calls at least 50% of Americans paranoid and ill-informed) says two things that are wrong.

The first wrong thing Obama’s implication, in thoughts two and three, that politicians are charged with taking care of our Constitutional rights.  That’s bass ackwards.  We are charged with taking care of our Constitutional rights — they’re natural rights, inherent in us, and the Second Amendment exists to make sure that if too many elected officials forget that those are natural rights, and begin to think they’re merely legislative rules that legislators can change, we can rid our country of these politicians’ tyranny.

The second wrong thing, which is more subtle, is that Obama is implying in thoughts two and three that, if a sufficient number of Americans elect anti-gun politicians, that majority overrides the constitution.  What he says in those last five sentences (“the government is us,” “you elect yourselves,” “the election is for you”) is that, if a majority of people elect politicians who support an unconstitutional idea, those politicians get to move forward enacting that idea irrespective of the Constitution.  That is a staggering misreading of the Constitution and the Gettysburg Address.

All of which gets me back to gay marriage and abortion, not because I’m specifically concerned with gay marriage and abortion, but because I’m concerned about the Constitutional implications when the Left takes on gay marriage and abortion.  First, neither is in the Constitution.  In 1973, Supreme Court justices used an emanation of a penumbra based upon an inference to find a “constitutional right to abortion” in the first trimester, with that individual woman’s right decreasing steadily until the third trimester, when the viable fetus became the state’s responsibility.

Since 1973, that trimester by trimester calculation has been abandoned so completely that a Planned Parenthood representative felt comfortable telling the Florida legislature that it was okay to “continue” an abortion if the baby manages to emerge alive.  In some places, that’s called murder.  Indeed, that’s why Kermit Gosnell is being tried for murder.  In Planned Parenthood’s world, however, his work was constitutionally legitimate.

As for gay marriage, it’s being cast as an inchoate civil right because no one can contend the Founders thought about it.  They certainly knew about abortion, although they made no mention of it, but they definitely didn’t consider the possibility of gay marriage.

In the Founders’ time, marriage was thought to be only one possible thing:  the joining of man and woman.  If the Constitution had made mention of it (which it didn’t), that it is what it would have meant.  The Left, though, is now recasting marriage as the uniting of two people who love each other.  The Founders would have been surprised.  In those days, after all, marriage was still very much a business proposition, one that gave a woman children and the assurance of care for those children, and one that gave a man the right to his wife’s financial estate, and the promise of progeny to inherit that combined estate.  If a marriage included love, such as John and Abigail Adams had, or George and Martha Washington enjoyed, that was a pleasant byproduct of a sexual and economic transaction sanctified by religion and sanctioned by the state.

The Obama administration has already used ObamaCare as a bludgeon by which to force conservative religious organizations to sponsor abortion. Before, those organizations preached against it; now, they’re being forced to pay for it.

What happened with abortion matters because the same thing is happening with gay marriage.  During the gay marriage debate’s first iteration, when California’s Prop. 8 was on the ballot, and before ObamaCare, we were promised that there was no way that the State could force religious institutions to perform gay marriages.  “After all,” said Prop. 8 opponents airily, “the state doesn’t force churches to perform abortions.”  Well, in Obama world — secure in his sufficient majority — the State does force churches to perform abortions.

The same will be true with gay marriage.  People dismiss the fact that religious institutions in other countries have been forced to perform gay marriages, or been punished for not performing gay marriages. Those countries, they say, don’t have a constitution.  We know, though, that this constitutional argument is meaningless in Obama’s America.  Last year, his administration made clear that it is unconstrained by Constitutional concerns.  And last week, Obama explained why:  if he feels he has the power, that power overrides the constitution.

At least now we know where we stand.

The question is whether, by 2014, we can convince a majority of American voters that their constitutional rights are at risk and that, even if they agree with the Obama plans so far (abortion, gay marriage, gun control), they may not like the next plans he has lined up down the road.  If I were Obama, I’d go after the 4th and 5th Amendments next.  After getting Americans to understand this comes the harder task:  keeping their focus all the way through 2016.

The problem when it comes to educating Americans is that these ideas are so horribly complex.  They don’t reduce to a poster.  It’s not going to resonate with most Americans to see a poster of a sad priest being forced to perform a gay marriage ceremony.  They’ll probably just say that the priest deserves to suffer because his organization once turned a blind eye to pedophiles.  (Under that standard, of course, the University of Pennsylvania should be razed and the earth sown with salt.)

When the liberals in my world catch hold of the fact that I don’t support gay marriage, they attack me as a homophobe.  I’m really not.  What I am is someone deeply concerned by the Constitutional implications of a mad rush to create implicit constitutional rights where none existed before, and then to use those inferred rights to destroy explicit ones.  They should be just as concerned.  If they want gay marriage as a Constitutional right, they should amend the Constitution, rather than trying to destroy it.  For all they know, they may be the next in line when the Obama state turns its destructive beam on yet another constitutional right.

First they came for the communists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.

Then they came for the socialists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist.

Then they came for me,
and there was no one left to speak for me.

Found it on Facebook — ranking Constitutional rights

by 4 Comments

For copy right reasons, I can’t produce the image here, but I can describe the cartoon that Joel Pett drew.  It shows two young, earth-mother types sitting at a coffee shop.  One is reading a newspaper with a headline stating “Restrictive abortion laws.”  She turns to her friend and says “I’ve changed my mind…  We may well need high-capacity fire arms to protect our rights…”

This cartoon is wrong at two very profound levels.  The first thing that’s wrong is the constitution hierarchy.  In the cartoonist’s world, which is the Left’s world, the lower ranked right in the Constitution is the Second Amendment, despite the fact that the Founders came up with it and the fact that it explicitly states that nothing and nobody can infringe in any way on the People’s right to bear arms.  For Pett and his crowd, it’s still subordinate to a “right” that doesn’t show up anywhere in the Constitution but that is, instead, a judge-made emanation of a penumbra of an inference.  He could just as easily have had his cartoon character state “I will reluctantly, and temporarily, support an explicit right in order to kill those who would try to deny me a “right” that can only generously be called implicit.”

The second reason that the cartoon is profoundly wrong is because it essentially advocates a sickening world view.  It says that the right to kill a fetus is so overarching that it’s okay to drag out a stale, old, white-men created Bill of Rights doctrine in order to enable abortion supporters to kill their opponents.

The same people who protest against the death penalty (which is also explicitly acknowledged in the Bill of Rights, provided that it is neither cruel or unusual), believe that the judge-made right to kill fetuses should be reinforced by killing those who oppose killing fetuses.

As always, I’ll pause here to say that I remain somewhat ambivalent about abortion.  I recognize circumstances where it is appropriate, and I still can’t entirely shake my old pro-Choice leanings.  Nevertheless, I continue to be sickened by the way in which the Left advances abortion.  You cannot have an honest debate on the subject without acknowledging that the fetus is a life, and then further acknowledging that society has always recognized instances in which one life is allowed to trump another.  That’s a worthy debate.  The game the Left plays, however, is disgusting.  “I’ll see (or rather, ignore) your Constitutional rights and raise you two mob rules.  Hah!  I win.”