To Arms?

I find this post from the Reason blog persuasive. It deals with the advantage that gun control or gun-free zones provide to criminals willing to ignore those laws.

In numerous violent incidents that have occurred over the past several years I have often wondered whether the damage could have been limited if a legally-armed bystander had intervened. I certainly wonder about the potential for further injury if the intervening party hits someone else, but I might be willing to take that chance. Personally, I would prefer to be armed and have a fighting chance.

Given what happened in Fort Hood there has to be a better way, and removing all handguns from circulation is clearly not it.

Twisting

Watch this clip from MSNBC. It shows a man carrying an AR-15 and handgun while protesting against the Democratic Health Care plans in Arizona. (via Hot Air).

His presence and armed status leads the hosts of this show to discuss the alleged resurgence of white hate groups and the potential for harm to come to the president. There IS one problem with this particular instance-

HE'S BLACK!

I am NOT saying that President Obama faces no race-related threats, but there is huge overpromotion of the idea that current opposition to the health care proposals is primarily race-based. This is like saying that Bush was hated by the left for his racial or socioeconomic background (though the latter may have played a role with some).

President Obama and the liberal democrats in Congress have violated some principles that resonate with most Americans. That is the true source of these protests, legitimate loonies notwithstanding.

Bustin' a cap

I had a great Valentine's Day. Lacy and I went shooting with some friends. I purchased my pistol months ago but hadn't fired it yet. I am very pleased with it. It is smooth as silk and did the job just fine. My shooting was decent, but I'll need a lot more practice before I can call myself a good shot.

It was Lacy's first time shooting any kind of firearm. She doesn't like it as much as me, but we had a good time.

Plaxico & the 2nd Amendment

You may have heard of the accidental self-shooting of New York Giants wide receiver Plaxico Burress. He was foolish and careless in his behavior, but is the law that may send him to prison for a 3 1/2 years even consitutional?

In the Wall Street Journal Dave Kopel argues that it is not. Kopel points out that Burress is not being charged with discharging his firearm, shooting himself, or using a firearm while consuming alchohol. He is being charged with carrying an unlicensed firearm in New York:

In 40 states, including Connecticut, law-abiding adults are issued permits once they pass a fingerprint-based background check and a safety class. In New Jersey, carry permits are virtually never issued. In New York City, carry permits are issued, but to applicants with some form of political clout rather than on the basis of his or her need for protection.
The Second Amendment might not require New Jersey or New York City to issue as liberally as Connecticut does. But with a population of several million and only a few thousand (consisting mainly of politicians, retired police and celebrities) able to get permits, New York City's licensing process is almost certainly unconstitutional on a number of grounds, including sheer arbitrariness.
Some commentators contend that Plaxico Burress should have hired bodyguards, instead of carrying a gun himself. Mr. Burress might now agree. But people who aren't as wealthy as he is also deserve to be safe, and they don't have the money for bodyguards. New York City needs to regularize its carry permit system so that law-abiding people can protect themselves, especially if their circumstances (such as being a witness to a gang crime) place them at heightened risk.

Burress was licensed to carry a firearm in Florida, where he was a resident. Was he foolish for carrying in New York? Yes. Could he have seriously injured himself or others? Without question. Is the law of New York constitutional? Only time will tell, but in my opinion Kopel makes a good case.

I Dare to Bear (Arms)

It's a thing of beauty...

That is a picture of the Smith & Wesson M&P .40 caliber handgun, the newest member of my family. I actually bought it a few months ago, but wanted to save this post for the very important Supreme Court decision in DC v. Heller (complete majority opinion found here). An excerpt from the beginning:

1. The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home. Pp. 2–53.

It may surprise some of you that there could be disagreement on the question, as 73% of Americans already believed in an individual's right to own firearms, but in the 70 years since the last major court opinion on the 2nd Amendment that very question had emerged.

I decided to purchase a gun in part because of my belief in this right. I'm not concerned for my safety, nor do I live in an area where crime is a real problem. I just wanted to exercise my right to own a firearm. So I did, and now the Supreme Court has (according to the majority) simply affirmed a long-standing right. From the SCOTUS Blog:

The individual right interpretation, the Court said, “is strongly confirmed by the historical background of the Second Amendment,” going back to 17th Century England, as well as by gun rights laws in the states before and immediately after the Amendment was put into the U.S. Constitution.
What Congress did in drafting the Amendment, the Court said, was “to codify a pre-existing right, rather than to fashion a new one.”

SCOTUS blog also has an interesting roundup of quotes here. I also happen to believe this.

In most democracies gun rights are not enshrined and are often severely limited, if not eliminated. Author and legal analyst Dave Kopel discusses whether gun control presents a danger to human right in this article. It is an interesting concept to think about.

It will be interesting to see the many questions that come from this ruling. Already the National Rifle Association has sued to overturn Chicago's ban on firearms. As someone said today, the job security of 2nd Amendment lawyers is pretty good right now.

Awesome Video Saturday XXXVII

This video is truly AWESOME. That is why it gets its very own AweVidSat.

SPOTD E-mail #125

I've finally put some new pictures of the kids up on the SPOTD website. Some of them were taken by our friend Lisa Emmerich, who has a local photography business.

As always, check the blog.

Today's phrase:
Good words, from a German proverb:

Actual:
El aburrimiento es consecuencia de la pereza.

Phonetic with emphasis on bold syllable:
Ell ah-buurr-ee-myen-toe ess cone-see-kwen-see-ah day lah pay-ray-zah.

Translation:
Boredom is a consequence of laziness.

Blog Recap
I've been very active on the blog, more so than in any other month. See below:
-Bo Jackson
-Venezuela continues to become less free under Chavez
-A great memorial day article
-The introduction of Awesome Video Saturday
-America IS the best country on EARTH (American Exceptionalism)
-LOST!
-Cuban Independence (or lack)
-Warming Shwarming
-The new Transformers trailer
I've been busy. Have you been keeping up?

HarryPotterLand
There are plans to renovate an area of Universal Studios Islands of Adventure Theme Park in order to create a Harry Potter-themed "land." Sounds like a great idea, and I'm all for visiting it, but read the comments on this blog and see some people who are REALLY excited, and in the nerdiest sense.

Loch Ness
Did you know that Loch Ness is over 750 ft deep at its mas profundo? That's deeper than the North Sea! The Loch's purported monster is in the news again as a man claims to have captured footage of Nessie in action.

Enchanted
I really like the look of this movie. I think it is a smart choice by Disney. Watch the trailer.

Freakish
I don't know why this site surprised me. Anyone who has visited Ripley's Believe it or Not has seen his "mermaid." These are other bits of high-priced creative taxidermy. Animal-lovers beware.

HD
Popular Mechanic has a really helpful article about the biggest myths about High-Def TV. I have been watching HD at home now for a few months and I love it.

Conversion at the Point of a Gun
This is a story about a man whose views on gun ownership changed when he was the victim of violent crime. It's especially interesting because he is a politician.
These are some helpful facts and insights from Michael Barone about how gun ownership affects a community.

Link of the Day
Flight of the Bumblebee on the accordion:

Gun Rights Evolve

There has long been criticism from the right about judicial activism. Wikipedia defines it as:

Judicial Activism is a term used by political scholars to describe a tendency by judges to consider outcomes, attitudinal preferences, and other public policy issues in interpreting applicable existing law. Formally, judicial activism is considered the opposite of judicial restraint, but it is also used pejoratively to denote judges who are perceived to endorse a particular agenda.

There is a change in the way that some legal scholars, and as a result, some judges see gun rights. Some say that this change in viewpoint is evidence of judicial activism, as it is evidence of change in legal precedent established over decades. I disagree with that interpretation (legal scholar that I am) on the grounds that the precedent was wrongly conceived to begin with. Overturning existing precedent based on what is deemed the intent of the Constitution's framers is an originalist viewpoint, and that is the camp that I often side with.

The point of this post is to examine an article in the New York Times that discussed the role of liberal law experts in recent gun cases:

In March, for the first time in the nation’s history, a federal appeals court struck down a gun control law on Second Amendment grounds. Only a few decades ago, the decision would have been unimaginable.
There used to be an almost complete scholarly and judicial consensus that the Second Amendment protects only a collective right of the states to maintain militias. That consensus no longer exists — thanks largely to the work over the last 20 years of several leading liberal law professors, who have come to embrace the view that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own guns.

Follow the link for more.

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Finally, a note on the French Presidential elections: I'm glad to see that conservative candidate Nicolas Sarkozy won the election, defeating the socialist candidate Segolene Royal. Despite Sarkozy's adherence to the European obsession with climate change, this can only improve U.S.-Franco relations, and that is a good thing as we continue the difficult War on Terror.

Miss America Strikes Back

She's more than a beauty queen. To give you the quick version. She is in her 80's and shot the tires out of the truck of some would-be thieves.

Not too shabby.

VT Massacre & Aftermath

This is a long post so I'll cut to the chase:

Gun Control is NOT the answer to the horrific events at Virginia Tech.

The shootings at VT do not stem from the wide availability of guns, but from an absence of social and moral restraint that is growing in our country. The Wall Street Journal republished an Op-Ed from 1993, in which they examined the shooting of an abortion doctor as evidence of

"how small the barrier has become that separates civilized from uncivilized behavior in American life. In our time, the United States suffers every day of the week because there are now so many marginalized people among us who don't understand the rules, who don't think that rules of personal or civil conduct apply to them, who have no notion of self-control."

It is a compelling piece, and I think it points more directly at the proliferation of these violent attacks.

I am concerned that this tragedy will bring calls for restrictions on the right to own firearms. James Q. Wilson is a professor of public policy at Pepperdine University. In an L.A. Times op-ed he argues against gun control:

Let's take a deep breath and think about what we know about gun violence and gun control. First: There is no doubt that the existence of some 260 million guns (of which perhaps 60 million are handguns) increases the death rate in this country. We do not have drive-by poisonings or drive-by knifings, but we do have drive-by shootings. Easy access to guns makes deadly violence more common in drug deals, gang fights and street corner brawls. However, there is no way to extinguish this supply of guns. It would be constitutionally suspect and politically impossible to confiscate hundreds of millions of weapons. You can declare a place gun-free, as Virginia Tech had done, and guns will still be brought there.

Fred Thompson, former Republican senator (TN), actor, and possible presidential aspirant has an excellent commentary on gun ownership as a crime deterrent:

The statistics are clear. Communities that recognize and grant Second Amendment rights to responsible adults have a significantly lower incidence of violent crime than those that do not. More to the point, incarcerated criminals tell criminologists that they consider local gun laws when they decide what sort of crime they will commit, and where they will do so.
Still, there are a lot of people who are just offended by the notion that people can carry guns around. They view everybody, or at least many of us, as potential murderers prevented only by the lack of a convenient weapon. Virginia Tech administrators overrode Virginia state law and threatened to expel or fire anybody who brings a weapon onto campus.
In recent years, however, armed Americans -- not on-duty police officers -- have successfully prevented a number of attempted mass murders. Evidence from Israel, where many teachers have weapons and have stopped serious terror attacks, has been documented. Supporting, though contrary, evidence from Great Britain, where strict gun controls have led to violent crime rates far higher than ours, is also common knowledge.

Continuing Thompson's line of thought is this Opinion Journal "Hot Topic" piece:

But over the past decade and a half, evidence of another sort has been accumulating. Violent-crime rates peaked in 1991, according to the Justice Department, and have fallen steeply since. Over the same period, gun-control laws in many states have been relaxed. Correlation does not equal causation, but it does make it difficult to argue that greater legal access to guns drives up levels of violent crime.
Whether concealed-carry laws and the like have held down crime rates remains a hotly debated subject. Certainly, more aggressive and effective policing, especially in big cities, has been a major force in driving down crime. One irony of this is that law-enforcement types have long been a major pro-gun-control force, even though it would seem that how their job is defined and performed has much more to do with crime levels than whether guns are available legally.

In fact, according to the preceding piece, recent court rulings may lead to a more open interpretation of citizen's 2nd Amendment rights, disallowing some of the more restrictive measures in places like Washington D.C. In an op-ed from Wednesday's Wall Street Journal, gun rights advocate David Kopel ended with the following statement:

The founder of the University of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson, understood the harms resulting from the type of policy created at Virginia Tech. In his "Commonplace Book," Jefferson copied a passage from Cesare Beccaria, the founder of criminology, which was as true on Monday as it always has been:
"Laws that forbid the carrying of arms . . . disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes . . . Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man."

In due time I plan to be among the armed, and I'll feel safer for it. Truthfully, I'm a little ashamed that I don't own a gun already.

A More Proper Draw Out and Up

A county commissioner in Knox County, TN made news when he drew his weapon to defend himself last weekend. A man entered Greg "Lumpy" Lambert's auto dealership purportedly to buy a car, but later drew a pistol and threatened Lambert. Lambert awesomely defended himself (hoorary 2nd Amendment, and I urge you to click on the link for Lumpy's AWESOME picture.

Crime and Punishment

This is a tragic story of a good man that seems to have made the wrong decision under incredible pressure. I don't think that I could not judge him on the decision he made, because the brutality of the circumstances leading to it is too intense to be imagined. We can make all kinds of judgements based on cognitive reasoning, but until understood experientially, I think we are unqualified to do so accurately.

Billy Anders, a longtime member of the Otero County Sheriffs office, killed a killer. I think the outcome of the case seems to satisfy the law, but it is tragic.