TFP Column: There Ought to be a Law

A good crisis shouldn't go to waste, so it was of little surprise that the White House used the opportunity to put forth an attempt at Gun Control.  As voices around the nation cry out that "There Ought to be a Law", few have bothered to discover that there are already some 20,000 laws on the books regarding guns that didn't manage to prevent Sandy Hook.  Fewer still have read the Department of Justice report that ten years of a Assault Weapons Ban had no impact on the number of the 'multiple murders' committed, that most of the murders committed were with hand guns, or that many of the cities with the most restrictive gun laws have the highest murder rates with guns.  (I know, these are just silly little details that don't go with the predominant narrative.)

Fortunately, there will be far more and far more cheerful narrative in this weekend's TFP.  There will likewise be plenty of pesky little facts and some narrative from both sides of the aisle that you might not only find factual, but interesting as well.

The again, what would you expect from Toledo's largest circulation Sunday and Ohio's best newspaper for the last four years ... The Toledo Free Press.


          

Sandy Hook Elementary is Deplorable

I've waited a fair bit of time since the heinous affair that occurred in Sandy Hook Elementary School, for no better reason than it seemed a good idea to wait until more the the facts are in and emotions weren't ruling the day.  It seems however that with the death of the perpetrator, that few additional pertinent facts will come to light.  It also seems that there's little chance that emotions regarding this case will not settle down until the next such horrific event.

Now let me begin by saying two things:

1. I can't begin to imagine the loss that the families of these 26 victims are feeling.  While I too have lost family members at far to young an age, such losses can never be comprehended by those not intimately involved with them (and eventually time begins to heal such wounds), and no rain-soaked stack of flowers and teddy bears will compensate them for their loss.  

2. I have not only never owned a gun, but in fact have never even fired one.  My opinions therefore, are not of the Charlton Heston 'prying my gun from my cold, dead hand' variety.

I do submit the following for your consideration however:

* Before we ban these so-called assault weapons, should we not recognize that more murders are committed with hand guns?  Are we therefore going to ban hand guns as well?
* If the fault is not the gun, then certainly it must be the size of the ammunition clip or magazine, which allow those committing such acts to shoot more people without reloading.  We should therefore ban those which hold more ten bullets.  
OK, but if you're in a house at night that's being broken into and you don't know by how many individuals, how many bullets would you like in your gun?  Considering what an emotionally charged situation this is, how close would you like more bullets?
* We currently have some 20,000 laws on gun ownership in this country, which is probably more than any level of law enforcement can remember, let alone enforce.  How many more unenforced or unenforceable laws would it take then to stop such events.

* These kinds of activities are not perpetrated by the average law-abiding gun owner, but by those suffering from some form of madness or delusion, or those who are just plain evil.  Even if you could get the medical profession to release private medical data to those doing the background checks (a dangerous situation in and of itself), do you really think that you can legislate against madness, evil, or even against stupidity for that matter. 

* If we're going to ban certain types of guns, or types of bullets, or the size of certain bullet containers; because of their contributing factor to a culture of violence, what else are we will to or should we ban?  Violent movies or TV shows (whose standards are increasingly relaxed), violent video games, books with violence (comic or otherwise)?  We've banned dodgeball in most schools because of its violence; should we add tag, cops and robber, and Cowboys and Indians to that list as well? 
                               
Sure, we could place armed guards in our schools and that would provide a modicum of safety, but how many should that be if all are to be held safe.  What implications would there be in the schools to the latent paranoia that accompanies the maturing process if such watchdogs were present in our educational institutions.  
  
Of course there's always the inconvenience of the 2nd Amendment.  Say what you will about the Founding Fathers, but they did a pretty good job in setting a government that was capable of lasting over 200 years, even with generations of politicians attempting to re-interpret them.  They were by no means perfect, but one could easily make the case that they did a far better job in writing it, than we've done in the last couple of centuries attempting to amend their original thinking (and in the end, doing damn little of that).

Like I'm sure all of you, I deplore what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary.  What I deplore equally as much however, are the sorry solutions that many in government and the media try to put forward in the wake of such a tragedy.

What To Do About Guns Now

The president announced today that he's going to put VP Joe Biden in charge of an effort to make us all safer; an effort which will include consideration of returning so-called 'assault weapons' bans from by-gone days.  The VP is an experienced politician, but is probably more well known for his unarmed assaults on English grammar than his knowledge of assault weapons.  VP Biden has previously been given a rating of 'F' by the National Rifle Association for his gun control regulations stance, so we can be sure that he will be taking an aggressive position on this new assignment.  There's no doubt that semi-automatic and automatic weapons can dangerous tools in the hands of madmen with a will to use them (something that Joe has proved he can do with nothing more than a microphone).  Before we seek to take away those tools or define those madmen however, perhaps we would be best served to look at the historical record.

After all, if you really want to see madness and the use of guns, you have to turn to .... governments.  Joseph Stalin is credited with the quote, "A single death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic."  Stalin should know, since during his reign of terror in the Soviet Union, he apparently had some 20,000,000 Soviet citizens eliminated.  Joe is not unique in his pursuit of it however, though most of those of a like mind did so in regulation-filled, totalitarian regimes where the private ownership of guns was restricted and the use of a gun was incidental to much of the killing going on.  When these kinds of governments are not killing their own citizens with guns, they normally try to amuse themselves by killing their neighbors with them.  This inevitable result is called War, and in War even good nations find themselves killing people with guns in order to protect themselves from these evil ones.  No one seeks to deny ownership of such weapons to these governments for such self-protection. 

One of the other things that governments like to do with such weapons when not using them on their own citizens or those of nations they're at war with is to sell them to other nations for similar purposes.  Should we then be concerned that the government that would like to create additional language to restrict gun ownership in this country is the one that has a history to handing not only guns, but far more sophisticated weapons to people like Mao Zedong in China, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt; only to see those weapons eventually turn up and be used against us.  In fact we've yet to be given a reasonable explanation for the government's recent effort to sell similar guns not to an allied government, but to Mexican drug cartels in an infamous escapade known as 'Fast and Furious'.  Some or all of this might lead a reasonable person to conclude that taking gun restriction recommendations from a group of people with a huge and consistent record of epic failure might be ludicrous at best.  It's also interesting to note that many of the same politicians now calling for denial of such ownership to citizens in this country have access to armed security details using these very weapons to protect themselves.

Of course the other component here is the madness involved with someone who takes up a gun (knife, axe, or homemade bomb) and thinks it would be a good idea to end people's lives.  The cries are going up already for society to be more diligent in identifying these people early on, and stopping them before they can commit their heinous acts.  I don't know about whether such a "Minority Report" world can even exist, but I do know that it's one that I would be afraid to live in.  It's a world of George Orwell's 'thought police'; a world full of government watchers and of even more government regulations on guns than there are now (currently some 20,000) from well-meaning politicians and bureaucrats attempting once again to prove in their misguided efforts, that they are incapable of defeating the law of unintended consequences.  Knowing all this, one can't help but wonder why those involved are attempting to get us into another situation in which we need to wonder both 'who gets to decide' and 'who watches the watchers'.  

The Framers of the Constitution understood that the danger from weapons comes not only from bad men who would seek to use them for evil deeds, but from bad governments capable of doing evil in the denial of what they called 'inalienable rights' and attempted to protect themselves and future generations.  They experienced such denial at the hands of what many considered to be a madman at the head of the government in England, and experienced how the use of arms almost exclusively held by that government (even to the point of bringing in foreign mercenaries) could be used to pursue evil intent.  They understood that like madness, Government too is a form of power; and that it can only be judged by the tools it uses and the ends it seeks.  While the tools may not be judged as good or evil, the ends pursued must be; and must be constantly guarded, lest they turn to evil.
                                        
It's strange that I, who have not only never owned a gun, but have never fired one in my 57 years of existence (cap, water, and BB guns excluded of course) should seek to defend against additional ownership restriction.  Perhaps it's because I'm a reader of history however, and understand that the worst depredations of history come in societies that restrict ownership of guns exclusively to their government.  History likewise shows us that areas with additional restrictions on gun ownership does little more than take guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens while leaving them in the hands of criminals.  So what do we do about guns now?  Perhaps as little as possible.  Finding a way to protect the children in our schools at least as well as we protect our politicians is an obvious goal.  Finding a way to understand and to protect ourselves from the irrational behavior of troubled individuals should also become a greater priority.  Allowing those politicians to place further restrictions on law-abiding citizens attempting to protect themselves from things that government cannot and will not ultimately be able to however is unwarranted and unnecessary. 

It's Murder Out There

Since the tragedy in Aurora, CO early Friday morning, we are once more deluged with an outpouring of tears, a plethora of local vigils, and an over-the-top outpouring of sympathy for the victims.  Pardon me for noticing, but it certainly seems like a number of you are in serious need of reducing the drama (real or imagined) in your phony baloney lives.    

Such a statement is likely going to get me into a fair amount of trouble, but I'm not sure that I care anymore.  I find that while nothing can match the anger and disgust I feel for this lousy bastard and his actions in Colorado, I'm also becoming increasingly sick of the collection of weepy faces around the country that the media seems to think are also important to the story.  I've had it with the non-stop and over-the-top tears of those who never knew any of the victims, have no experience with such tragedy in their own lives, and somehow just suddenly felt the need to express their ability to feel someone else's pain. (And just when a television camera or microphone was around.  Go figure!) 

Hey listen though, if you'd really like to go off on a crying jag, let me share some statistics which might engender some additional flower purchases, candle lighting, and teddy bear placement on your part.  Last year in 2011, 33 homicides were committed in Toledo, OH, 114 in Kansas City, 433 in Chicago, and just over 500 in NYC.  Where were you when any of those lives were ended?  Too busy watching "American Idol" or "Dancing with the Stars" perhaps, or maybe simply catching up on your daily quotient of faked reality shows; the main character of which you would run from screaming if ever you came across their path in 'real life'?

Before we are forced to bring in the grief counselors to conduct the proper level of therapy for you to obtain closure, and lest your outpouring of sympathy become overwhelming for the number of those killed in the US; you should know that six other nations killed more of their citizens per thousand residents than we did last year.  Of course while the US having the 7th highest homicide rate in the world is nothing to brag about, it might mean that there are citizens of nations out there who you might want to save some of that random and anonymous sympathy for on your Facebook page. 

Then again, perhaps we must ask ourselves if we really are sympathetic to every one of those in this nation who've lost their lives through homicide.  USA Today was able to document back in 2007 that 91% of murder victims in Baltimore had a criminal record; while the numbers were 85% in Newark, NJ, 77% in Milwaukee, and 75% in Philadelphia.  Does anyone feel like lighting a candle for any of the member of these homicide statistics?  Can I get anyone a tissue?  

On a related subject ....

Lest there are any of you our there are seeking to turn your mourning for the victims of this particular tragedy into moaning that what's required to properly memorialize their loss is more gun control ... cut it out.  Not only does the fact that 35% of the homicides in the US are committed with things other than guns show your lack of imagination compared to those doing the killing out there, but continuing to beat this tired drum also begs the question as to what other things you'd like to control in your fervor to exert power over the behavior of society.  

Illegal immigrants (sorry, undocumented residents) in this country account for 21% of crime in this country according to Rasmussen (which must by implication include the murder rate).  Are you therefore calling for greater control of Illegal immigration and deportation of those in this country illegally as a way to reduce the homicide rate?  Shall we put a 3-day waiting period on cutlery purchases or ban certain blade lengths and kinds of knives?  How about axes, baseball bats, or plain old sections of pipe?  (Please note that I did not mention chainsaws, as I find that even the movies that depict their use on anything other than trees as at least a misdemeanor criminal offense ... to public taste if nothing else.)  What are we to about those nasty appendages on the ends of our arms that pull the trigger, hold the blade, or are simply used to choke? 

Unfortunately so is the perfunctory, self-seeking, and self-serving blubbering from a mostly superficial and largely uncaring public who use such events to display the same disingenuous fervor as they do for the next winner of "The Bachelor".  (As for the vultures of the mainstream media feeding them juicy tidbits 24 hours-a-day for little more than a cheap ratings boost, my scorn for you knows no bounds.)      

The bottom line here is that murders are committed by people who are evil, crazy, or crazy-evil.  No law, no regulation, and no mandated 3-day waiting period is going to keep them from committing their nefarious deeds.  And as a part of the twisted and malicious acts that these monsters commit, innocent people will sometimes pay the ultimate price.  Nobody wants to hear this of course; but whether you like it or not, their malignant nature is a part of the human condition that's impossible to eliminate.  Despite our best intentions and no matter how much we would like it to be otherwise; it's murder out there.  

(To those of you hoping or expecting that like most Saturdays, today's effort would be an attempt to find a bit of humor in our everyday existence; my profound apologies.  This is my blog however, to use as I see fit; and this nonsense had to be called out for what much of it is .... crap!)

Gun Control - A Retraction

I wrote a posting back in June on the subject of Gun Control: http://justblowingsmoke.blogspot.com/2007/06/right-to-bear-arms.html I must say that since then, I have done some additional research and a lot of soul searching on the subject, and have come to the conclusion that I was wrong. (Yes, you are actually admitting me hear that I was wrong on something. Write down this date, because it doesn't happen often.) I would therefore like to retract my earlier position.

Don't get me wrong here, this is not to say that I am going out tomorrow to buy some land in Montana, purchase a bunch of automatic weapons, and start to gather a cult following whose uniform involves a lot of camouflage. (Nothing against Montana, but it's just too damn cold and empty out there. Besides, camouflage doesn't go well with my eyes.) Nor is it to say that I am still not concerned with a lot of the guns that are out there. I just don't think that the government has any business interfering with a Constitutionally guaranteed right.

This recent epiphany is not even so much about guns as it is my growing detestation for the insidious, incremental encroachment of the government on the federal, state and local levels on the freedoms that I was guaranteed when the states signed the Constitution. I, like far too many people in this country recently, had been fooled into believing that I could gain some measure of safety from the horrors of life around me if I was only willing to give up a small portion of the personal freedom that the Constitution granted me. Well Benjamin Franklin put it best when he said:

"Those who give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

On the other side of the question, this does not mean that some level of monitoring or licensing is not required. You have to reach a certain age, take certain training, and pass a test in order to get a license to drive. (The truth of the matter is that we require far more from a person to allow them to drive than we do to allow them to vote. Try and figure out that one.) Similar monitoring could be applied where guns are concerned. I would not care to see weapons in the hands of convicted criminals or mentally unstable individuals. Likewise I would prefer not to see machine guns, grenade launchers, or hand-held surface to air missiles in the hands of anyone outside of the military. Some responsibility, balance, and order needs to be discovered and maintained; but that can and should be done with the least government involvement possible.

Few realize that as recently as September of 2005, we saw local law enforcement officers and military personnel confiscating legally purchased and owned firearms from people trying to defend their homes in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The government imposed its will in strict violation of the 2nd Amendment with no warning, little fanfare, and no outrage from either the national media or the rest of us. If such a gross encroachment on our freedoms can happen once, it can happen again. 

As for me, I still have no intention of ever owning a gun. I don't think that there is anything wrong with them, but I have no desire to be a gun owner. That decision is a free choice that I make, and should time and situation change, it is a decision that I would like to be able to reconsider at any future date. That being said, I am still considering a membership in the NRA for no other reason than to help insure that the 2nd Amendment is protected. I find these days that while I am still afraid of the violence that might be done to me with a gun, I am even more terrified of the "nanny state's" desire to protect me from anything that they feel might be a danger to me, and their confiscation of my liberties in the process.

The Right To Bear Arms

There is always a lot of talk about the "Right to Bear Arms" as a guarantee in the Constitution and that any discussion of regulation or restriction of that right as being unconstitutional. 

Now don't get me wrong, the document does contain that guarantee. Of course this might have something to do with having been written at a time when most of the country was full of wild animals and hostile humans (actually not much different than now). I for one, have no objection to someone who wants to own a gun for the purposes of hunting or to defend their home and family. Unfortunately though, we don't get to have discussions on this or anything else where gun laws are concerned without being accused of being unAmerican. Instead, we have extremists and wackos defining the argument, and it is to this that I most object. (OK, maybe its the extremist and the wackos themselves that I object to and not their arguments, but that's a conversation for another day.)  

Hunting is an interesting hobby, and though I am personally unprepared to get that close to, let alone kill myself, anything that I intend to eventually eat. I have no objections moral or otherwise to the practice, just no interest in participating. I occasionally ask myself why someone who hunts would then decide to have the creature dispatched in such a manner stuffed and mounted so that their former meal could look at them, but not too often as the resulting confusion makes me dizzy. I do ask myself, and those around me however, what need the hunting public might have for a fully automatic weapon (or one that can be converted into one). If someone can explain to me the need to empty a magazine or two of ammo from a deer or duck blind, I will be skeptical, but willing to listen. I have to think that when the phrase "rate of fire" becomes part of the discussion in such a pursuit however, that the word "sport" should be removed. If this begins to sound reasonable and there is some agreement on this, can we begin to think about taking these kinds of weapons off of the table and off the market, and relegate their use to the military? As for the defense of one's home let's face it, the world is an increasingly scary and dangerous place. 

One could easily make the case for the concept that anyone who feels that they need a weapon to defend home and castle should have the right to. Now personally I am not ready to go down this path either, but I won't stand in anyone else's way. Again there is no moral or ethical objection to the practice, it's only that I am not the brightest bulb on the tree, and in a panic situation am as likely to injure myself as any person breaking in. I should also note that I have angered a woman in my life from time to time and would not like to tempt them with the opportunity to end me as the problem that I have become for them. 

Again, I would like to think that some common sense would put limits on what kind of guns might be permitted for such use (and that rate of fire would figure into this discussion as well), but I don't expect that to ever happen. Not being an expert, I would think that when in doubt, a shotgun could always be a considered a valid solution.  

As for concealed carry permits, you people just scare me. I can't even stand in a line for any length of time without getting mad enough to want to pummel someone. Rush hour traffic, cell phones in restaurants and theaters, and the manners of children in public places all make me a little crazy and I am usually grateful afterward that I didn't have a gun in my possession. I have a little trouble understanding the threat that someone might feel that they are under (with rare exceptions of course), that carrying a weapon would appear to be the only answer to their continued survival. 

I won't attempt to object to such permits however (or the people who absolutely feel the need to have them), as you might be carrying now. I can however recommend a couple of very good doctors who treat paranoia. I will also ask that you wear special clothing, or at least a sign, that tells me when you are packing so that I can keep my distance and stay out of the line of fire.  

There is a whole other issue of the ammunition for these weapons, but I have to admit that I don't know enough about such things to be able to speak with any authority (I'm a wimp, I know). I will say however that I don't know why any non-military personnel would need or be able to purchase ammunition that could (or has been) labeled "cop killer" and leave it at that.

Now I am sure by now that many gun advocates are already feeling like their heads will explode and that they would like to get me up close and personal with their particular weapon of choice for suggesting that limits on their constitutionally given rights are possible (which only makes my point by the way), but don't responsibilities come with rights? We have the right to free speech, but not the right to shout "fire" in a crowded theater. We have the right to assemble, but still need to obtain a parade permit for some types of gatherings. We have a right to worship as we choose, but not to make that worship into law (see Islamic Terrorist).  

We don't have a right to guns that fire faster than a politician talks, bullets that pierce body armor, or clips that are larger than the guns they go in to. We do have the right to "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" however, and current gun legislation doesn't seem to contribute to any of those things. As to rights, in the end and at the very least, don't we have the right to talk about it?