Because we’ve had a voting session scheduled for Monday, where Castle Doctrine could possibly come up, I’ve informed NRA that we can wait until after Monday for the Q&A. John is going to have to be in Harrisburg, and I do not wish to distract him from the task at hand. Plus, it’ll add more to the story about the Castle Doctrine efforts. After Monday’s voting session is over, I will get questions in and get then answered as best I can.
Apparently now being the subject of lawsuits. I agree with Clayton that slavery is a lot for a fifth grader to wrap their heads around in its entirety, but it would seem to me a discussion with the teacher, principle, and school board (in that order) might be a more productive path forward rather than a lawsuit.
That brings us back to Alfred Flatow. [The article provides a case study of Flatow, a Jewish veteran of the German army, who competed for Germany in the 1896 Olympics.] What if he – and an unknown number of other Germans, Jews and non-Jews alike – had not registered his firearms in 1932? Or if the Weimar Republic had not decreed firearm registration at all? What if the Nazis, when they took power in 1933 and disarmed social democrats and other political enemies, or when they decided to repress the entire Jewish population in 1938, did not have police records of registered firearm owners? Can it be said with certainty that no one, either individually or in groups small or large, would have resisted Nazi depredations?
One wonders what thoughts may have occurred to Alfred Flatow in 1942 when he was dying of starvation at the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Perhaps memories of the 1896 Olympics and of a better Germany flashed before his eyes. Did he have second thoughts, maybe repeated many times before, on whether he should have registered his revolver and two pocket pistols in 1932 as decreed by the Weimar Republic? Or whether he should have obediently surrendered them at a Berlin police station in 1938 as ordered by Nazi decree, only to be taken into Gestapo custody? We will never know, but it is difficult to imagine that he had no regrets.
Now our opponents tell us we can’t talk about the mass disarmament that preceded the Holocaust, because that’s just a ridiculous thing, you know. But it seems to me that the firearms policies of mass murdering totalitarian states are highly relevant to the debate over the scope of a constitutional amendment that was meant, ultimately, to be a check on governmental power.
We’re told by our opponents that mass registration is harmless, and under normal circumstances it probably is. But I think there’s a strong argument to be made that registration infringes on the core purpose of checking governmental power, whether that power is a totalitarian murder on a mass scale, or the more common history in our country of local law enforcement colluding with domestic terror organizations for the purposes of keeping disfavored racial minorities subjugated.
We’d like to think we’re more enlightened than that now, but that strikes me as hubris. Where flawed humans are involved, it’s never a wise to rely on the better angels of our nature.
Being human, we all want to get our way. There is, buried somewhere in each one of us, a spoiled, angry child ready to have a temper tantrum. Some control it better than others. Whether learning self control over that inner child that wants to throw a tantrum when he doesn’t get his way constitutes “adulthood” I don’t know, as such a pronouncement strikes me as awfully judgmental. I don’t get my way, and I’m used to it. Yet I think I am a very childish person who has yet to grow up, and learning to accept not getting my way has not helped much. I am still stubborn enough to cling to wanting what I want regardless of the likelihood of my getting it. That may mean that while I’m still a child, I’m just not given to childish displays. (At least, not in public.)
I also realize that it is unreasonable to demand that others control themselves simply because I think that’s a good thing to do, but still, there are few things I find more tedious than people who throw public fits when they don’t get their way, and then demand that others take their fits seriously. In that respect, I am so, so happy about the election results last week. Had the Republicans lost, by now I would be having to hear innumerable cries on the right about how the only alternative we have left is civil war, that the Declaration of Independence gives us the right to violently overthrow the government, etc., etc., ad nauseam.
I’m glad we can go back to bitching about how the Republicans suck, rather than watch the Democrats floor the accelerator off the side of the cliff. People have been pretty amped up the past two years, and here’s hoping everyone’s collective pissed-off-o-meter goes from pegged back down to where it was around the time Bush nominated Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court.
The NRA would like Iowans to add the following words to the state Constitution: “The right of individuals to acquire, keep, possess, transport, and use arms to defend life and liberty and for all other legitimate purposes is fundamental and inviolable. Licensing registration, special taxation, or any other measure that suppresses or discourages the free exercise of this right is forbidden.
Except I think there’s a word missing from that, namely “bear.” Couldn’t we make this “acquire, keep, bear, possess, transport, and use arms,” is the same language that’s in the Second Amendment too controversial for Iowa? I mean, I’d love to use the word carry, but why not bear if carry implies too much?
UPDATE: Apparently the full text is as follows:
The right of individuals to acquire, keep, possess, transport, carry, and use arms to defend life and liberty and for all other legitimate purposes is fundamental and inviolable. Licensing, registration, special taxation, or any other measure that suppresses or discourages the free exercise of this right is forbidden.
The reporting paper apparently left a key word there out.
Activists are looking at five states for legalizing open carry this next coming legislative session. I may not agree with the wisdom of open carrying in all situations, but it ought to be an option for people, and certainly not illegal. It may surprise some, but I have OC’d on a few occasions while hiking, and also at the NRA convention one year.
I’ve generally been pretty hostile to its use as an activism method, in the belief that it had the potential to cause a serious backlash, but to date we’ve demonstrated the Brady’s can’t raise money on the issue, and even in California, they couldn’t pass an outright ban. I’m not going to become an advocate, but I will at least accept that, based on current evidence, it’s not creating any kind of backlash, or giving our enemies anything they can really use against us.
I was floored listening to NRA News the other night to learn some more details of the PA Department of Homeland Security, which was called out a few months ago for issuing an alert about the annual Second Amendment rally in Harrisburg. Now more details are coming out as to exactly what these people are up to. Have a listen:
