Year: 2009
Want to Be a Blogger?
Pennsylvania Firearms Owners Association (PAFOA) is looking for volunteers to help run its blog.
DIY Climate Modeling
Iowahawk shows us how you too can be a climate scientist. Very good explanation for how you can replicate your own hockey stick at home.
Washington Times Op-Ed on McDonald
The Washington Times seems to be a bit nervous about the idea of McDonald, not for gun reasons but because of how it might be incorporated:
Many have heard about the historic gun rights case going to the Supreme Court. Fewer have heard that this is also a major case for businesses and family values. It could lead to anything from court-ordered Obamacare to same-sex marriage. This is the biggest case of the year, and everyone has a stake in it.
I think that’s more than a bit hysterical. Dave Hardy points out why. The Supreme Court, if they choose to overturn Cruikshank, or even go so far as to overturn SlaughterHouse, can offer any structure like they for incorporation under “Privileges or Immunities“. In other words, they can limit it, just as they have limited incorporation under the Due Process Clause.
I am hoping the Court goes with overturning SlaughterHouse, quoting the Petitioner’s Brief in McDonald:
SlaughterHouse’s illegitimacy has long been all- but-universally understood. It deserves to be acknowledged by this Court. Because SlaughterHouse rests on language not actually in the Constitution, contradicts the Fourteenth Amendment’s original textual meaning, defies the Framers’ intent, and supplies a nonsensical definition for Section One’s key protection of civil rights, overruling this error and its progeny remains imperative. No valid reliance interests flow from the wrongful deprivation of constitutional liberties. The reliance interest to be fulfilled remains Americans’ expectation that the constitutional amendment their ancestors ratified to protect their rights from state infringement be given its full effect.
Remarkably well said I think. I don’t think conservatives should be frightened of this ruling, as it is correcting a wrong that should never have been perpetrated in the first place.
Mass Shooting in China
China is a gun-free society with a totalitarian government that offers no protection against unreasonable search and seizure, which gun control advocates would probably think means this could never happen.
Tam on the Times Square Shooter’s Gun
Allow me to offer an alternative explanation: The gun malfed because it was a wretched, pulsating ball of crap.
The cheap, closed-bolt copies of the MAC-10 and KG-9 are made primarily to look cool; actually functioning is lower on the priority list. With most I’ve seen, firing a full magazine without a stoppage of one sort or another is a noteworthy event, and it doesn’t matter whether the gun was held upside down, sideways, or clamped in a Ransom Rest.
I had a carbine version of one of these called the CM-11 at one point in my early collecting days. Hey, it was cheap, and at that time I was buying stuff mostly because I was pissed off about the ’94 AWB and considered that the gun’s pant shitting factor might make a target for elimination, thus making my grandfathered model worth something at some point.
Well, first time out on the range with it, it broke before it could even get all ten of the cartridges down range (back then, they were sold with 10 round magazines, per the Clinton ban. I tried that first, even though I also bought 30 rounders when I bought the gun). What happened was the sear plate on it was made of such soft, cheap metal, the hammer managed to bend back a small lip which hung up the sear plate, and kept the trigger held back so the gun would not function. I shaved bent back bit of metal lip, which fixed the problem for a little but, but then it went again. I eventually had to fix it by ordering a replacement hammer and replacement sear plate, because if I had kept shaving, eventually the sear wasn’t going to catch, and we’d have a hammer follow, which would have either made an even more broken gun, or made me a felon. I wasn’t about to find out. Never had a problem with the replacements, but I never shot it much either. Ended up getting rid of it. The only one of two guns I’ve ever sold.
I’ve never understood anti-gunners desire to ban these guns. Shouldn’t we want criminals to be armed with pieces of shit? Clearly in the Times Square case, it saved lives.
Quote of the Day
Bruce responds to the notion floating around the lefty blogosphere that the country is ungovernable:
A country founded on the principles of economic freedom and individual liberty, and populated with people who believe in such things should be ungovernable by a devoted disciple of Karl Marx, raised on the tenets of radical leftism, with the raw sewage of Chicago thug politics flowing in his veins, and who finds such principles offensive and considers them an obstacle to power.
This “ungovernability” of which he speaks is a feature, not a bug.
Yep, which is why our founding fathers gave us a federal government of limited and enumerated powers. Obama and the Democrats are figuring out what our founding fathers knew 220 years ago: that that the country was too large and diverse to be controlled by an all powerful national government. If the political class feels like the country is ungovernable, that means the federal government is doing too much. Let’s get back to the original vision, and if someone wants to live in a lefty paradise, there’s always California.
Dear God …
… please no! Santorum got bad enough that I voted for Bob Casey in 2006. Here’s why I’m not going to be voting Rick for the GOP nod in 2012:
In 2001, Santorum tried unsuccessfully to insert language which came to be known as the “Santorum Amendment” into the No Child Left Behind bill that sought to promote the teaching of intelligent design while questioning the academic standing of evolution in public schools. The amendment, crafted with the assistance of the Discovery Institute, would have required schools to discuss possible controversies surrounding scientific topics, and gave the theory of evolution as an example, opening the door for intelligent design as an opposing theory to be presented in science classrooms.
I don’t have any problem with Intelligent Design being taught in a class on religion, but it’s not science, and does not belong in science classrooms. But it gets better:
On April 14, 2005, Santorum introduced the National Weather Service Duties Act of 2005 to “clarify the duties and responsibilities of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service (NWS), and for other purposes”.[39] This legislation, if enacted, would prohibit the NWS from publishing weather data to the public when private-sector entities, such as AccuWeather, a company based in Santorum’s home state, perform the same function commercially. Accuweather employees have contributed at least $5500 to Santorum since 1999, according to the Federal Election Commission.
So my tax dollars are paying to gather this data, but we can’t have them present it to the public? If the NWS is useless, then get rid of it. But if it’s useful, which I suspect it is, then it’s data ought to be presented in a form that the public can read. I’ve used NWS’s site for years because it’s got no flash, and no ads. But gets even better:
“If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything.”
Hyperbole much? I might have a problem with how Griswold was reached, but I think it’s difficult to argue that the state’s police powers are so unlimited that citizens don’t have some unenumerated right to be left alone by it. I have a big issue with a politician who thinks the government’s powers extend into the bedrooms of consenting adults.
I am not a fan of Santorum’s social conservatism, and think he was partly responsible for destroying support for the GOP in Pennsylvania, so count me among those who wish he’d just go away.
Pennsylvania Society Talk
The Pennsylvania Society dinner in New York City is happening as we speak. Capitol Ideas has the scuttlebutt.
UPDATE: Capitol Ideas wraps up with observations of Politicus Pennsylvanius, not as rare a species as we wish it was, probably.
NRA’s Take on MAIG’s Polling
I was holding onto a bit of information on the company that did MAIG’s poll that I planned to release next week, but it looks like NRA-ILA beat me to it:
This week, anti-gun New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s anti-gun group, Mayors Against Illegal Guns, released the findings of a poll conducted by a political consulting firm called “The Word Doctors,” whose slogan is “It’s not what you say, it’s what people hear.” Word Doctors’ president is a pollster who has been reprimanded by the American Association for Public Opinion Research and censured by the National Council on Public Polls, and who says that the key to polling is “to ask a question in the way that you get the right answer.”
Not only that, but if you look at Word Doctor’s expertise page, they say:
If you need to create the language to build support for legislation, we’ll find the right words. If you need to kill a bad bill, we’ll show you how. Either take control of the debate, or the debate will take control of you. It really is that simple.
This doesn’t sound like a polling firm to me, it sounds like a political consulting agency. In other words, they are spin masters. I think it’s safe to say that this poll isn’t worth much factually, but you can bet they will be peddling this in front of decision makers.