Category: Current Events

I think one never quite knows what to say when something like this happens.   This one hit closer to home because Bitter has a cousin at VT that we hadn’t heard from for several hours after the event (We have now, and she’s fine.  A friend of hers was shot in the leg).  I’m always reluctant to make political hay out of a tragedy like this, but we can’t just remain silent about it either, because if we do, there are certainly others out there who will make hay out of it for us.

I am very angry at the whole situation, because I know blame will be making its way around, and there will be finger pointing.   It was VT’s fault.  It was the police’s fault for not acting quickly enough.  It was the fault of our gun laws.  No one will blame one deranged man who decided to get up one day and ruthlessly murder his fellow human beings because he wanted to feel powerful, and make a name for himself.   We want blame the system, because to blame someone, rather than the shooter, it means there are things we can do to provide absolute safety.   It means we can just change this one thing, and there will be no more wolves roaming the pastures, hungrily eying up the sheep.

It troubles me greatly that as a society, we are increasingly accepting these delusions that we can, and should, rely on others to take responsibility for our personal safety, and that when the wolves come, it has to have been someone else’s failing, because the system was supposed to take care of this type of thing.   Well, it doesn’t, and the last thing we should be talking about is finding ways to turn more and more people into sheep.

The only way that a deranged individual, like we have witnessed today, is going to be stopped, once the bullets start to fly, is accurate and sustained return fire, until the threat ceases.  It matters little whether that return fire comes from a police officer’s gun, a security guard, or someone close by that happened to be armed.  We’ve had numerous cases of these types of attacks being cut short by armed individuals acting on their own personal initiative.  I fail to see how the Brady Campaign expects that making sure there are less good people with guns at the scene of these tragedies is going to help save people’s lives.

I’m not saying that there’s any way tragedies like this could be absolutely prevented; they can’t be.  I’m also not saying we shouldn’t look at how the system can react better in the future.  But I am concerned that as a society we don’t let our emotions cloud our judgement, and start a mad rush to implement public policy based on sorrow and grief.  I also hope that we don’t decide to pretend we can legislate wolves out of existence.   We can’t do that either.  The only thing that will work, is more people accepting they are responsible for their own safety, and the safety of people around them, and taking appropriate measures to deal with those realities.

I’m not suggesting that everyone have a gun, but everyone should most certainly have a plan.  People have to decide for themselves what that plan involves, and that is going to be something very personal to each individual, and not something government or society ought to be meddling in, and dictating over.  Everyone has a right to decide how to provide for their own personal security.

I don’t really have much to say or add, so I’ll just link to Uncle’s post.

Because everyone else has this headline, I figured I should too.  The fact is, I’ve never listened to the guy.   I really don’t care about what he said, or whether he apologized, or whether he gets fired.  But apologizing for racist comments to Al Sharpton seems like apologizing to a Kennedy for drunk driving.

Apparently the Keystone State has the 24th highest tax burden at 10.8 percent of income on average.  The highest?  Vermont, with a tax burden of 14.1 percent.  I guess there are some advantages to not having a graduated income tax.  Apparently New York, Maine, Ohio and Rhode Island are pretty tax crazy too.

An FBI agent was killed in a shootout with bank robbers in New Jersey. Not much in the way of details yet, as the agents family has yet to be notified.

UPDATE: It’s looking like the agent may have been killed by friendly fire.  That’s a real tragedy.  The death of an agent is bad enough, but the other agent who shot him will have to live with that for the rest of his life.

“Special Agent Bush and his team were in pursuit of heavily armed serial bank robbers who are believed to be responsible for four bank robberies,” according to a statement from the bureau. “In two of those robberies, the suspects, armed with assault weapons, fired rounds while inside the bank.”

I had heard about these robberies.   All the suspects were from New Jersey:

Prosecutors filed charges in federal court Thursday night against three people in the attempted robbery. Wilfredo Berrios, 28; Michael Cruz, 21; and Francisco Herrera-Genao, 22, all of New Brunswick, New Jersey, were charged with attempted armed bank robbery and with use and carrying of a firearm during a crime of violence.

These guys need to go away for a long time.   I question how they were able to get assault weapons, when they are illegal in New Jersey, and illegal for a New Jersey resident to buy anywhere.

Wretchard has a good post up describing what he thinks the British need to do next. Basically, he believes Tony Blair needs to take things off the diplomatic track, and put the ball in the Ayatollahs’ court:

 …
Now that the diplomatic basketball has rimmed out, what Britain may consider doing now is what I suggested in the first place. Take the whole thing off the diplomatic track without initiating any overt hostilities.

Whitehall should withdraw the entire British diplomatic mission from Teheran and deal with the Ayatollahs through their representatives to the United Nations; they can expel every Iranian diplomat and official from the UK. And if possible, they should convince their European partners — for whatever they are worth — to do the same. Make the Ayatollahs beg for a diplomatic solution. Make them ask, “what’s next?” Make them beg the British to talk to them. At the minimum this will create uncertainty in Teheran. It forecloses nothing, even a return to diplomacy. And in that atmosphere of uncertainty, the naval force in the Gulf will becoming truly menacing. They should have done this from the first day, in my layman’s opinion. But hey, every day is the next day of the rest of our lives.

From the comments:

…
The Ayatollahs are counting on the British to stay inside the box, where they can be harried and finally destroyed at leisure, politically speaking. The first thing to do in this ambush is to break out of the kill zone. That kill zone destroyed Jimmy Carter. And the number one priority of Tony Blair should be to escape from it.

Teheran has by now decided to use the British sailors for a long term game. The task before the UK is to shift the fight onto ground where it can develop more power than its foe. It cannot do this within the strict and stylized confines of diplomacy….

Read the whole thing, and read some of the comments. It’s a mystery to me why the British went to the EU and UN when both those institutions have demonstrated, over and over, that they are feckless in the face of any international crisis. I worry that these institutions have become a religion for the European political establishment.

Despite the fact that I don’t look too highly on legislators placing themselves above the laws that apply to the rest of us, from Instapundit:

I agree that he seems to have broken the law. But it’s within a prosecutor’s discretion not to prosecute, and cases of inadvertence like this are often dropped — and should be. (It’s not clear that Thompson even knew the gun was in the bag.) Reader Larry Boykin thinks I’m an elitist (“So, it’s alright to have one set of laws for the common man and another set of laws for the ‘elite’? That’s what you are advocating if you believe that charges should be dropped. “) but I think that charges should be dropped for anyone in these circumstances. Would they be? Well, I don’t know. I know of some similar cases where ordinary people weren’t charged — but it’s true that they weren’t at the U.S. Capitol. If charges are dropped here under public scrutiny, of course, that’ll be an argument for treating ordinary people in similar circumstances similarly in the future.

I don’t think Glenn is an elitist. I agree that prosecutors should use discretion in cases like this, and I wouldn’t want to see anyone get the book thrown at them under similar circumstances, even if they were in Congress or were a staffer, just because they made an unknowing mistake (and who would knowingly put a briefcase on an x-ray machine if they knew they had a gun inside?).

I have no problem with shaming Jim Webb or his staffer for what appears to be carelessness. I have no problem with frowning on, or speaking out against politicians who carry guns in places the rest of us can’t, because they can get away with it, while we can’t.

But I can’t ignore the fact that I believe Washington D.C.’s gun laws are unconstitutional. I don’t want to see anyone prosecuted for a law that shouldn’t be on the books, whether they are an ordinary Joe, or whether they are Jim Webb. The constitution protects all of us, even politicians.

If we don’t like the idea of politicians flouting even unconstitutional laws that apply to the rest of us, and believe me, I don’t, we can remedy that at the voting booth.

UPDATE: Eugene Volokh suggests that Webb’s aide should not be charged because he may be flat out not guilty.

The Jim Webb stuff is getting interesting just as I have to concentrate on stuff at work. Instapundit and SayUncle are on top of it. I agree that Webb should get on the repeal DC gun ban issue pronto. Some reciprocity would be nice too.

UPDATE: Should have been more clear.  I don’t actually want Congress to derail Parker by repealing the ban either.  I would like Senator Webb to acknowledge that the ban is an injustice to ordinary citizens and that he is against it, or something along those lines.

I won’t really say anything more about the Webb incident, because now that the details are coming out, we’re missing a key bit of information to determine whether this is something I really should be upset about or not.  Initial reports made it seem like Webb was bringing a gun into the Capitol, and mistakingly handed the bag with guns in it off to a staffer.  This would upset me, because I don’t take kindly to politicians privileging themselves with activities they’d throw me in the slammer for.  I can’t carry in DC without risking jail time, it should be the same for Senators.

If Webb was boarding a flight, he may not have been breaking any laws, as the airports are both in Virginia, except BWI, which is in Maryland.  If he handed a bag off to the staffer without telling the staffer there was a gun in it, he was an idiot, but it’s not something I’m going to get too worked up over.  It’s politicians holding themselves above the law that I get worked up over.

So I’ll reserve my indignation from the time being, and just leave it at this: I still won’t be impressed until I see Webb carrying a P90 under a trench coat.