September 2012 – Page 6 – Shall Not Be Questioned

Constructing Statutes

Sean Caranna brings up a very interesting issue in Florida, regarding concealed carry. Depending on how your state’s concealed carry statute is put together can depend on whether a police officer can lawfully stop, and sometimes arrest you, if he suspects you’re carrying a concealed firearm. Some states generally outlaw carrying of a concealed firearm, and make an exception for persons licensed to do so. Other states make it illegal to carry a concealed weapon without a license to do so. Pennsylvania’s Uniform Firearms Act is constructed the in the latter manner.

I remember speaking to a lawyer who told me the slight wording in language, even though it seems to be the same, could be used by the courts to determine whether or not suspicion that someone is carrying a firearm could be a pretext for a stop. In the former construction, where concealed carry is illegal except by exception, it could be read as allowing for a stop, because carrying a concealed is a crime, generally, so the officer is justified in the stop to ensure the person falls under the exception.Â In the latter construction it can’t be a pretext for a stop, because it’s only unlawful to carry without a license to do so, so an additional element is required to make a stop. An officer must not only have reasonable, articulable suspicion that the person is carrying a concealed firearm, but also reasonable, articulable suspicion that the person does not have a license to do so.

New Jersey guns laws are constructed entirely the same way Florida’s carry law is. Firearms in New Jersey are generally illegal. You can only own them under exceptions to the general law. While it’s difficult to see how that can be a proper means of regulating a fundamental constitutional right, it’s one reason New Jersey gets away with abuses that it’s difficult to get away with in other state. Hopefully Florida can change the wording of its statute to fix this.

If It Was Really About The Children

Groups we’d see before the gun control groups we have now, if they were really concerned about saving children:

Coalition for Better Seatbelts
Brady Campaign Against Swimming Pools and Large Buckets
Coalition Against Plastic Bags
National Coalition to Ban Dangerous Household Chemicals
Pedestrian Policy Center
Medical Community Against Bicycles
Mayors Against Tall Stairs

Why? Because all of these things kill children more often than firearms. Also, I was thinking what’s with the huge surge in poisoning among adults versus children? You’d think kids would be more prone to quaffing poisons than adults. But then I remembered most of us like quaffing a certain beverage that is poisonous in large quantities. Then you also hear stories about drunks on the wagon slamming down rubbing alcohol in a last, desperate act. But I wouldn’t qualify that last one as accidental.

The Partisans Are Lined Up. What’s Next?

Currently we are a nation divided. Everyone would love to think that people think the deficit is currently driving us off a cliff, but while many Americans will agree with that, when it comes to doing something about it, they want low taxes and big government. If we were not a divided nation, this election would not even be close. But it is close.

Ilya Somin notes that this is not a historically unprecedented election, and that Obama and Romney are not doing any better or worse than other elections with similar economic indicators. He also notes:

Some of the models also take account of foreign policy events. While one can certainly make a case against Obamaâ€™s foreign policy, he has not presided over a large and obvious failure that can clearly be laid at his door in a way that swing voters â€“Â most of whom have very low levels of political knowledgeÂ â€“ can readily grasp.

This is why I don’t really get political with events like the fiasco that just happened in North Africa, which resulted in the death of several people including our Ambassador. I don’t think it’s a very useful political club. The voters we need to reach won’t likely pin that on Obama, largely because the media won’t pin that on Obama, and the low information voters don’t care enough to seek out better information.Â This is a highly partisan election. Those who follow politics are already set in their decision, and the result is still very close. We will be depending on these low-information voters to decide the outcome. Zombie, at PJ Media, calls them Honey Boo Boos:

Honey Boo Boos is a term I just made up for the last remaining undecided voters in America. As you may have read at the time, the infantile and atrocious reality TV showÂ Here Comes Honey Boo BooÂ eitherÂ surpassedÂ orÂ tiedÂ the viewership totals of both the Republican and Democratic National Conventions. That means millions of people are so tuned out of politics and so uninterested in current affairs that theyâ€™d rather watch a family of obese rednecks abusing their young daughter than learn even the most basic facts about the next president of the United States. These Honey Boo Boo viewers are what pollsters like to call â€œlow information voters,â€ but that descriptor is not complete: Honey Boo Boos are also lowÂ interestÂ voters whose political ideology is either easily malleable or absent altogether.

As Professor Somin often points out, these aren’t stupid people — their decision not to pay careful attention to politics is rational, since the odds of their vote influencing the outcome of an election are vanishingly small. But they do still vote. Collectively, these are the people who will be deciding the 2012 election. Therefore rhetoric in this election will be more ridiculous than in an election where it wasn’t close, because much of the messaging will be aimed at low-information voters who aren’t persuaded by ideological or policy arguments. You see ads saying, “Obama is a nice guy, but hasn’t done a great job as President.” Those are aimed at those types of voters, who will tell pollsters that they are disappointed in Obama’s job performance, but they still personally think he’s a good man, and so are undecided.

Somewhere along the line we started telling people that voting was a civic duty. That was the wrong lesson. Being informed and educated about the workings of your Republic is the civic duty, and voting follows as a natural consequence of being informed and educated.

Compare and Contrast

Miguel has a link to the latest CSGV protest at the White House. I count twelve people. Meanwhile, last week, we had our Friends of the NRA Dinner for Bucks County:

Bucks County FNRA

That’s 81 people, who paid 45 dollars to show up, and then also forked out an average of several hundred dollars a person on games. Granted, this is the non-political branch of NRA — Friends of the NRA raises money to fund grants to support shooting sport programs, particularly youth programs run by groups like the Boy Scouts and 4H. In a single county, we can attract nearly 7x more than CSGV’s White House protests.

And I’d note that our dinner is new, and we’re hoping to grow it. Why? Because 81 is a sad turnout by Friends of the NRA banquet standards. The Liberty Bell Committee puts on a dinner in the City of Philadelphia that regularly attracts 250 or more. Chester County FNRA, hosting their dinner in Kennett Square, attracts 300 people. Montgomery County, also a new committee, but a few years older than ours, is up to 160. Biggest of all in Eastern Pennsylvania is the Lancaster Friends, who put on a dinner with 800 or more, such that they have to run the dinner buffet style, and keep it running all night so that everyone can eat.

The gun control movement in decline (GCMD?) keeps denying they are up against real people. NRA? A toadie for the gun industry who just wants to sell more guns. NRA is an organization that’s brainwashed a small number of extremists. Guns are not a grassroots cause.

But the truth is that a small number of extremists would seem to more accurately describe their movement than ours.

The Mental Breakdown of the Gun Control Movement

Thirdpower has been diving the wreck, and finds a whole lot of crazy. Namely Elliot Fineman of National Gun Victims Action Council:

I wonder how he can claim this being that he’s previously claimed that ‘There is no such thing as a law abiding citizen‘? Is he saying there’s no gun homicides? Being that he’s in Chicago, how does he then explain Chicago Police Dept. reports stating that87% of the homicides committed in the cityÂ are by those w/ prior arrest records (pg56/57)?

I can probably clear up the gun control narcosis here. This seems to be a common claim now by the gun control crowd. It’s not true, but those in the gun control movement who’ve now made a hobby of erecting and tear down straw men focus very heavily on the “law abiding citizen,” and we’ve had to endure taunting and mockery from individuals who couldn’t argue their way out of a wet paper bag.

I say the other side is erecting straw men here because no one argues that the proxies we used to try to determine one’s proclivity toward criminal behavior are perfect. Given that the Minority Report was a work of fiction, the best we can do is to use some form of proxy, and there is no form that would be perfect. The only logical conclusion one can come to, based on the rhetoric of anti-gun activists, is that because some people may go on to misuse their guns, that no one should have them. Any time they use this argument, it’s neo-prohibitionism on display. This is the continued de-professionalization of the gun control movement. The professionals have left the building, leaving the people those professional were front for exposed to us. It’s a sad spectacle.

Which then leaves us with MAIG, the only professional gun control organization remaining, and the only one making arguments in a post-Heller world. MAIG’s focus is on the proxies we use. We categorically reject the lack of due process involved with many of their proposals, but they have, so far, avoided the kind of amateurish arguments you see from the groups in decline.

Today is Constitution Day

The day we pay our respects and celebrateÂ a document we’ve never really taken that seriously. It was a radical document when the founders wrote it. Reconstruction era Republicans made it even more radical — so radical our ruling elite starting ignoring the parts of it that didn’t suit them. The progressives hijacked it for a time, and later decided they didn’t need to bother with it anymore.

Perhaps a better way to celebrate this radical document would be actually trying to follow it for once.

Protecting Borough Council

Anyone who’s ever been civically active in a small town, can tell you that Borough Council meetings are often flypaper for the drunk, crazy, or attention starved. Usually switching off their mic is enough to get them to go away and/or sober up. Security can be an issue for Borough meetings, but generally the presence of a few officers, who would be there anyway, is generally regarded by most small Boroughs as sufficient for keeping order.

That is, of course, unless you’re a small borough in New Jersey, in which case nothing less than H&K submachine guns will suffice. I have to agree with Tam this won’t end well.

Midnight Raid on Controversial Filmmaker

Looks like it’s not a good idea to embarrass the regime. That’s pretty severe rhetoric for Glenn Reynolds, but I don’t blame him for being animated about this. The implications are serious. I had started to jump on this, but reading further about the fact that this filmmaker was on probation for Bank Fraud, and forbidden from using computers, having others use computers on his behalf, except for vocation, and was also forbidden from using an alias, I am less certain. A person on probation doesn’t ordinarily have rights as a normal, free person does. A person on probation agrees to give up certain liberties in exchange for not serving their sentence in federal prison. I’ll quote Popehat on this:

Based on 6 years as a federal prosecutor and 12 as a federal defense lawyer, let me say this: minor use of a computer â€” like uploading a video to YouTube â€” is not something that I would usually expect to result in arrest and a revocation proceeding; I think a warning would be more likely unless the defendant had already had warnings or the probation officer was a hardass. But if I had a client with a serious fraud conviction, and his fraud involved aliases, and he had the standard term forbidding him from using aliases during supervised release, and his probation officer found out that he was running a business, producing a movie, soliciting money, and interacting with others using an alias, I wouldÂ absolutely expect him to be arrested immediately,Â whatever the content of the movie. Seriously. Nakoula pled guilty to using alias to scam money. Now he’s apparently been producing a film under an alias, dealing with the finances of the film under the alias, and (if his “Sam Bacile” persona is to be believed) soliciting financing under an alias. I would expect him to run into a world of hurt for that even if he were producing a “Coexist” video involving kittens.

Read the whole thing. I’m persuaded by the argument that if the FBI was the entity doing the questioning, that might pose an issue. But in the articles I’m finding, it sounds like he was questioned by federal probation officers, and it was the LA County Sheriff that brought him in. Not that Obama hasn’t shown himself to be about as useless as an ashtray on a motorbike as President, but I’m not sure this is thuggery yet, though I could be convinced. My bigger fear is that this is going to be taken as appeasement, and is just going to promote more violence.

UPDATE: Further follow-up at Popehat.

One Way to Look at Interviews

From SayUncle:

A thing hiring people tend to forget is that not only are they interviewing you, youâ€™re interviewing them.

I worked very briefly for a company the last month of 2011, where the company failed the interview (from my point of view) but being unemployed, and against my better judgement, I took the job, hoping it wouldn’t be that bad. The company was complete chaos. Executive management berated employees, and whipped them to work longer hours, and weekends. They blamed employees for their own failings. I started getting drawn up into the dysfunctional vortex after a few weeks, and facing the threat of unexpectedly losing a weekend for which I had made plans which cost me money already, I drew up and turned in my resignation, and walked out. Surprised I wouldn’t give notice, I pointed out we were still in the “probationary period” of the employment relationship, and I did not feel notice would be mutually beneficial. The “probationary agreement” I signed recognized I would not get full full benefits for 90 days, and could be terminated at any point without notice. Surely they didn’t think that probationary period only worked one way?

I saved my weekend, got to take the trip I paid for. I had been talking to a friend whose company I had invested in years ago, who had suddenly developed a need for my skills. He had agreed to bring me on the day before, whenever I wanted.Â I never got so much as a call from an HR person at the company I left, telling me this was not an uncommon occurrence. I never thought I’d just walk out on a job, but having spend the better part of 5 of the 10 years at my last job putting up with abuse from a sadistic CEO, I wasn’t about to go through that again.

There’s a lot of etiquette out there that suggests you don’t do this or that, but I think that depends on a mutual respect, which is often absent among many employers. One bit of advice I give young people starting out in their careers, especially if they are particularly skilled or talented, is don’t take shit from employers, and don’t pretend courtesy is a one way street, where you have to be courteous to them, but they can abuse the hell out of you.

Fortunately, that part of my life is behind me. One of the reasons I invested in the I work for now company was because of the philosophy on how to treat employees, and how to build a company without selling your soul. I’ve known the CEO here for a long time, and if he gets uppity, I think I’m still like the 3rd largest shareholder of the company :) But we’re a small outfit, with ambitions to grow bigger. Speaking of which, I’m currently shopping for commercial real-estate, particularly a kind of industrial or warehouse space. If anyone knows about that process and can offer advice, I’d be grateful. Especially gotchas, or things to watch out for.

NYSRPA Beats a MAIG Mayor

I’m starting to think the best way to deal with Bloomberg’s illegal mayors is to play whack-a-mole with them. When they express ambitions for higher political office, we squash them like bugs. We’ve have a reasonable amount of success spoiling the political aspirations of MAIG mayors here in Pennsylvania, and it looks like Jacob is managing to play whack-a-mole with MAIG mayors successfully in New York as well. This would be the strategy of waiting for the enemy to come to you, rather than engage in a costly and tiresome campaign of search and destroy. If we can make MAIG membership poison for seeking higher office, especially Republicans looking to win primaries, it’s one way to weaken Bloomberg substantively. *

* A note for our anti-gun friends, who seem to freak out on Twitter when I blog in metaphor: I am not speaking of literally going to war with Bloomberg’s Mayors, nor am I litterally speaking of search and destroy missions. I don’t even have the choppers for that (though I do have some loudspeakers that could blareÂ WalkÃ¼renritt).Â Also, I am not literally speaking of poisoning anyone, nor do I think Bloomberg’s Mayors are small, burrowing rodents with poor eyesight who need to be beaten over the head. I do not mean to insult moles, which are fine and honorable creatures, by suggesting that.