Our opponents seem to be continuing the meme of “9/11 was really no big deal. Those icky guns have killed way more people than box cutters and well-fueled jets, so you should be paying attention to our issue,” even on the anniversary of 9/11 itself. What a winning PR message.
Year: 2011
Let the Hysterics Begin
Looks like the powers that be, owned by certain a egomaniacal Mayor, are nervous as hell about HR822, as can be seen in this article. It’s a really good mix of both hysteria and misinformation. For instance, the bill would not allow a resident of New York City to carry on a Florida license, only people who resided out of state. This won’t help people in may-issue states carry in those states.
The bill “effectively prevents a state from controlling who has guns within the state, which has always been a core police power function of state government,†said John Donohue, a professor at Stanford Law School, who said he thinks it would be held unconstitutional. “It is so ironic that it is the conservatives who are trying to push this encroachment, since they usually are very active in championing states’ rights.â€
Segregating schools used to be a core police power function too, you know. How about coming up with an argument that’s actually compelling, professor. Here’s some other interesting opinions:
While the Constitution’s commerce clause gives Congress authority to regulate commerce between the states, the reciprocity bill probably wouldn’t fall within that power, said Weisberg, the law Stanford professor who serves as faculty co- director of the Stanford Criminal Justice Center. Nor would it fall under Congress’ power to enforce such existing constitutional liberties as the right “to keep and bear arms,†he said.
That’s funny because the federal law barring felons from possessing firearms and ammunition is based on the exact same commerce power that the reciprocity bill is based on. So why is it constitutional for the federal government to prohibit possession by felons, and unconstitutional for it allow possession by the law abiding on the public streets?
Quote of the Day
One of my responsibilities was to read the Patriot Act and bring the bank into compliance. Â Yeah. Â I read the whole damn thing. Â I saw every bit of infringement on personal liberty. Â I suddenly became a lot more interested in what my Congress critters were doing out there in the pretty building. Â Any idea that I had about the government being benevolent went out the window. Â Our response to being attacked by pure evil was not to vaporize them, but instead to gouge the freedoms of the citizens of this great nation.
I don’t just want to remember the victims of 9/11, but the monstrous response of the federal bureaucracy to it. Never let a crisis go to waste. If it was only Rahm that believed that, there wouldn’t be much of a problem.
Remembering
I don’t have much to say about the anniversary of 9/11, except it’s one of those moments you remember exactly what you were doing. Ten years ago I had just started a job at an exciting new biotech start-up the past June. I was driving to work on a Tuesday morning, which I remember was a really pleasant morning. I tuned in the local news station for the traffic. About as I approached the on-ramp for Route 30 in Downingtown, which is where I lived at the time, the first plane hit the North Tower. No one knew, at the time, it was a terrorist attack. I remember from history that a small plane once struck the Empire State building in foul weather. But how did this happen? It’s a completely clear day. Not a cloud in the sky.
As the news story wears on during my commute, news reports a second plane has hit the South Tower. Well, if the first place was an accident, there’s no way two planes can accidentally run into an individual tower. This has to be deliberate. This is really worrisome. I know people who work in that tower. I know it can hold the population of a small city, and that it’s nearly impossible to fight fires in building that high.
I was at work by the time the plane struck the Pentagon. By now it was obvious to everyone what had happened, and it was pretty apparent who was responsible. Nobody really thought about the possibility of both towers collapsing. A few of us were huddled around a radio in our cafeteria when the first tower collapsed. We immediately went out to tell anyone who wasn’t listening to the radio. We could easily lose more people today than were lost at Antietam today. No one really knew how many people were in the towers. By this time there was talk of a plane crashed in Western Pennsylvania. We were told we could go home. On my way home is when the other tower collapsed.
Once I got home and got the cable news on, is when I saw the replay footage of people throwing themselves out of the burning building before the towers collapsed. No one knew how many people had died. It could be tens of thousands. I spent most of the night watching cable news wondering why we weren’t carpet bombing the shit out of Afghanistan by now. By this time they had grounded all aircraft. I remember my friend Jason was in Arizona on his honeymoon. They had to drive back. Several days with no contrails in the sky was eery. I seem to recall it wasn’t for several days that we had an idea of roughly how many people were killed in the tower. I did not know anyone directly. A relative who worked there hadn’t yet entered the building, and made a quick exit from the WTC subway station.
I spent the next several weeks eager for some paybacks. Call me a primitive Neanderthal, but you don’t come into my country, kill 3000 people, destroy two pieces of precious real-estate, destroy four planes, and disrupt the lives of millions of Americans and not expect our military to come into where you live and kill those responsible, and try to offer to the rest of the people living there a more civilized means for governing themselves. I supported the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. I still think both were the right thing to do. As a nation we have become weary of nation building, and I have too. If the radical Islamists attempt to up the ante post-911, I’m going to be considerably more in the camp of rubble don’t make trouble. We tried to do it the nice way the first time around, and that part of the world can take those lessons or leave them. It’s their choice. But we don’t have the patience, or quite frankly the money, to do it the nice way again.
Buy One Get One Free
Thanks to the generosity of some fellow bloggers and NRA friends in Arizona, we have three tickets for our Friends of the NRA dinner this Thursday to give away to the first three people who buy a ticket. So for the first three folks, if you can make it, and buy a ticket, you can bring a spouse, child, or friend with the freebie. If you bought a ticket in response to my previous post, feel free to chime in to the comments if you want one of those tickets. I’ll announce if/when the three tickets are spoken for.
More on the Guns Laws of the Old West
A quite excellent post from Extrano’s Alley that quotes several books which suggest that gun control in the old west was, at best, selectively enforced, and generally speaking not enforced at all. I think that would suggest, again, at best, that law enforcement in those towns used it as a tool to lock up troublesome outsiders.
I’ve also heard, anecdotally, from people who lived in the South prior to the advent of shall-issue laws, that carry laws were generally not terribly well-enforced there either, and it was common practice for law enforcement to look the other way if the gun you were carrying wasn’t some cheap piece of crap more commonly carried by criminals rather than respectable folks. It would be interesting to study, given that gun control laws were mostly passed in order to keep undesirables (who varied a bit depending on where you were in the country) from carrying, whether the advent of the shall-issue concealed carry movement came about when those laws started to be more more equally and fairly enforced.
Brady Jobs Program
Kaveman notes they are looking for a few good (wo)men. Concentrating on building grassroots is the top priority of their next President. I hate to break to the Bradys but grassroots are generally a bottom up thing, not a top down thing. NRA exists from the bottom up. It did not create its grassroots, it’s grassroots created it (or took it over, more accurately). I don’t predict Brady will have much success in this, because they are going about it wrong. The big disadvantage they have over us is that anti-gun is not a hobby. Shooting is, and one that is practiced by millions of Americans. That gives a natural base of support on which you can build a grassroots-based movement.
What, strategically, are the Brady’s are facing? They need grassroots, but they are also desperate for funding. There are communities who would probably be natural sources of anti-gun activism and energy, but those are going to tend to dwell in inner cities and aren’t going to be worth much as sources of funding. The natural source of funding for anti-gun groups are going to be upper middle class to upper class urbanites and suburbanites, who honestly don’t have much in common with the folks who will end up being the organization’s public face when it comes time to put people on the ground. Brady’s natural funding reservoirs are more interested in gun control as a means of battling other elites, who’s political attitudes and lifestyles they find revolting, than they are interested in allying with inner city leaders to combat violence in those communities. To maintain themselves, the Brady Campaign will have to seek fewer donors with deeper pockets, probably drawing heavily from the issue friendly foundations, who would be happy to fund an inner city grassroots anti-gun/peace movement. There may even be a few wealthy individual donors out there who’d be willing to contribute money. But my feeling is the Brady Campaign is not going to be any more successful with this new strategy than they were under Paul Helmke. If anything, I think they will be less successful.
Gun Control in the Old West
Professor Adam Winkler is one of the true moderates on our issue, and though I think comes at this more from the other side, at least takes pro-gun arguments seriously, and makes serious arguments in favor of his position. Such is the case with his observation that some towns in the old west had some fairly serious gun control laws. The professor concludes with:
Even in the Wild West, Americans balanced these two and enacted laws restrictin
Âg guns in order to promote public safety. Why should it be so hard to do the same today?
Who is to say we haven’t? I don’t think there are too many serious arguments that the prohibitions on felons or the mentally ill possessing firearms are unconstitu
I don’t find the argument to be that remarkably compelling that because some towns in the Wild West enacted prohibitions on carrying firearms that such prohibitions must therefore be constituti
Righthaven’s Uppance has Come
I was delighted to start the weekend with this bit of news:
Despite its backing by the billionaire Warren Stephens family, Las Vegas copyright lawsuit filer Righthaven LLC warned today it may have to file for bankruptcy because of a series of setbacks in its litigation campaign.
Personally, I think the CEO of Righthaven, and his Stephens Media masters need to be personally ruined for doing what they did. But nonetheless, I find this highly satisfying.
Castle Doctrine Hysteria
When Gov. Corbett signed a law June 28 expanding the right to use deadly force outside the home, gun-control proponents predicted every thug would have a new defense to pulling the trigger.
It didn’t take long.
Just eight days after the new “castle doctrine” law took effect, it has been raised in the defense of a North Philadelphia man charged with killing a neighbor over $100 owed in the purchase of a pit bull puppy.
Of course, they are going to raise self-defense, since that’s one of the main defenses used against the charge of murder. That was true before castle doctrine, and it’ll be true after. The way they continue to describe the case, it looks like a pretty run of the mill self defense claim. In this case, Johnson was threatened by several men:
Cruz testified that Jetson Cruz asked Johnson why he threatened Samantha, then shoved him, and that “Lydell pulled a gun from his waist and started shooting.”
That’s likely going to hinge on whether he had a reasonable fear of imminent death or grave injury, rather than a duty to retreat. Multiple attackers against one can be reasonable under certain circumstances. The Inquirer is making mountains out of molehills here. This is a fairly ordinary self-defense claim, and I don’t think Castle Doctrine is likely to pay a big role in it, or a role at all.