2009 – Page 209 – Shall Not Be Questioned

Holder Calls for New Assault Weapons Ban

At a press conference announcing the arrests, Holder also suggested that re-instituting a U.S. ban on the sale of assault weapons would help reduce the bloodshed in Mexico, where last year 6,000 people were killed in drug-related violence.

U.S. officials have a responsibility to make sure Mexican police “are not fighting substantial numbers of weapons, or fighting against AK-47s or other similar kinds of weapons that have been flowing to Mexico,” Holder said.

So we are going to lose our gun rights because our government can’t secure its borders, and the Mexican government can’t secure law and order and weed out corruption in its military, which is no doubt a large source of firearms for drug cartels.

Interestingly enough, it was not in his prepared remarks, so it must have been in a question. This is from the Administration, folks.Â Obama may be willing to burn political capital on this issue.Â Get ready.

UPDATE: Exact quote [previous article changed, quote now can be found here] “As President Obama indicated during the campaign, there are just a few gun-related changes that we would like to make, and among them would be to reinstitute the ban on the sale of assault weapons,” Mr. Holder said. “I think that will have a positive impact in Mexico, at a minimum.”

Remember 1994.Â That’s all I have to say.Â We’ll do it again.Â Don’t believe us?Â Try it.

UPDATE: Wayne LaPierre will make an appearance on Cam and Company in a few minutes to talk about this.Â Tune in to NRANews.com

Losing the Internet Generation

Texas Republicans need to stop this crap:

“While the Internet has generated many positive changes in the way we communicate and do business, its limitless nature offers anonymity that has opened the door to criminals looking to harm innocent children,” U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, said at a press conference on Thursday. “Keeping our children safe requires cooperation on the local, state, federal, and family level.”

Joining Cornyn was Texas Rep. Lamar Smith, the senior Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, and Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, who said such a measure would let “law enforcement stay ahead of the criminals.”

Two bills have been introduced so far–S.436 in the Senate and H.R.1076 in the House. Each of the companion bills is titled “Internet Stopping Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Today’s Youth Act,” or Internet Safety Act.

Each contains the same language: “A provider of an electronic communication service or remote computing service shall retain for a period of at least two years all records or other information pertaining to the identity of a user of a temporarily assigned network address the service assigns to that user.”

Technologically, that’s next to impossible to enforce, since user information is not currently built into any of the technologies.Â It would require businesses and providers to add an extra layer of authentication onto their networks.Â In other words, this is an IT nightmare of epic proportions, not even mentioning the civil liberties implications.Â Republicans have been driving educated voters from their party in hoards, and it’s especially true in the Philadelphia Suburbs, which even a decade ago was considered a Republican stronghold.Â Measures like this is part of the reason why.Â I believe the Texas delegation ought to seriously rethink the implications of this bill on the party as a whole.

Kiddie Porn is becoming the new drug war.Â There’s no civil liberty or aspect of commerce that where federal meddling can’t be justified in order to stamp it out.Â Next time Steele comes soliciting for funds, I might have to send a copy of this bill back in the envelope with “no thanks” written on it.

Hat Tip to War on Guns for the link.

Showdown with the Feds

Montana is getting closer to the idea, via SayUncle:

Under a proposed law before the Legislature, firearms, weapons components and ammunition made in Montana and kept in Montana would be exempt from federal regulation, potentially releasing some Montanans from national gun registration and licensing laws. The legislation could also free gun purchasers in the state from background checks.

I don’t see how this gets past Gonzalez vs. Raich, where The Court ruled that Congress may regulate intrastate commerce in items where such a scheme of regulation is meant to control the national market in a certain good.Â But that’s not really the point.Â States shouldn’t feel they have to accept every ruling that comes down the pike.Â They should undertake more measures like this to assert their interests as separate sovereigns in our federal system.Â The Supreme Court does not have a monopoly on interpreting the constitution.

Remember the Alamo

Why does Mexico want to ban Americans from having guns today?Â No doubt they remember what happens when you let a bunch gringos settle part of your country, bring their rifles with them, and then try to impose corrupt government upon them.Â Blackfork has a multi-day feature running of “Remember the Alamo”:

Keep reading throughout the week.Â He’s doing a post for every day of the siege.

Pikers

Some NYU students took over part of the school the other day.Â The video is not to be believed.Â By the end of the video, you’ll just be begging to see the NYPD come in and bash some skulls in.Â Â Sadly, that does not happen.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Q6KAg6qEGY[/youtube]

Somehow I have to believe that even radicals like Bill Ayers have to be shaking their heads and wondering what the hell is wrong with kids today.

Harder Questions on Political Disputes

Joe Huffman makes the legitimate observation that most of the issues I mentioned in the last post were pretty easy, but mentions they can be harder:

How about question such as banning all semi-automatic firearms? Or nationalization of the banking industry? Nationalization of the oil/energy industry? Nationalization of telecommunications industry? Nationalization of health-care? Nationalization of the software industry? Nationalization of all corporations? Confiscation of all real property?

With the exception of the banking industry, and possibly health care, most of those aren’t currently on the table, and I was more attempting to frame the issue in what we’re dealing with today.Â Even Obamacare doesn’t go as far as nationalization of health care (so far), and governments have been so heavily involved in banking since modern banking emerged, that I’m not as concerned about the prospects of some banks being nationalized, especially if it’s under the auspices of the FDIC process for insolvent banks.

But there’s little doubt we’re slowly moving toward many of these things.Â I don’t think there’s an easy answer to the problem. Unless there’s some majority, or even a sizable minority, I’m not sure how you have an organic “people” who can offer legitimacy to a government through their consent to be governed by it.Â If a majority of people are happy or indifferent with a slow creep toward social democracy, I’m not sure what can be done to stop it. In other words, I don’t think the Second Amendment provides a solution for the boiled frog problem.Â The idea being if you want to cook a frog, if you throw him into boiling water, he’ll just jump out.Â If you put him in cold water, and slowly turn up the heat, he’ll never realize he’s being stewed.

I heard it suggested tonight that John Edwards is actually right, and that there really are two Americas.Â I sometimes wonder if our political discourse is devolving to the point where the two Americas won’t be able to tolerate being in one America with the other.Â Last time that happened, things got ugly.

The Boundaries of the Second Amendment

SayUncle brings up a post from a blogger who is unhappy about some of the stuff appearing on the Free Republic.Â Â Stuff which is pretty tame by Internet standards.Â SayUncle comments:

Any way, I donâ€™t mind so much. The Bush years turned a lot of lefties into gun nuts. In fact, the picture that Mr. Fifth Of November Poser used was prominent on a lot of lefty, pro-gun sites. Looks like the Obama years will get a lot of righties back into the gun rights movement.

I agree with Uncle to the extent that it’s making people understand, in an abstract way, why the Second Amendment is important, but I can sympathize with concerns about people speaking of revolution as a means for resolving disputes among political factions.Â When I think about the Second Amendment philosophically, at least its collective purpose rather than its personal one, I think of it as a means for ultimately enforcing Popular Sovereignty as the source of government legitimacy.Â It restricts the government’s power only to those actions which embody a will of the people as a whole, and seriously raises the cost of defying that will.Â In other words, you “vote from the rooftops” because you can’t, in a meaningful way, vote from the ballot box. I’m less sanguine about arms as a means for resolving domestic political disputes between quarreling factions.Â Down that road lies disaster, and the end of our Republic.Â Political disputes should be resolved with words, ideas, activism, organization, campaigns, and civility.Â Arms are for extreme circumstances.

I am sympathetic to those that believe Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what’s for dinner, and the Second Amendment was meant to allow the well armed sheep to contest the vote.Â I do not believe we ought to worship at the altar of Popular Sovereignty to ridiculous levels.Â If a majority of Americans ever vote for a government that advocates exterminating an unpopular minority, I will agree we ought resist it, with violence if necessary.Â If a majority acquiesce to Congress unilaterally dissolving our Republic and reforming it around a Parliamentary model, I would agree that should be a deal breaker as well.

But no one is seriously proposing these things, and what is being proposed is in the realm of peaceful partisan politics.Â I’m not going to machine gun my fellow man over medicare, or take out a tank over taxes.Â I won’t shoot it out with a subgun over the stimulus, nor defend my construction of the commerce clause with continuous cannonade.Â We have a system that allows us to redress that peacefully, and without annoying, aggravating alliteration.Â While I share Uncle’s sentiment about making more people see the importance of the Second Amendment, I worry greatly about what people are thinking it’s actually for.

Iowa Exercise in Arcadia Canceled

It’s for sure now.Â The Des Moines register is reporting it.

“This was completely blown out of proportion,” Kohorst said. “They were going to come through and meet with the townspeople and just practice going in and out of their homes. They were never, ever going to confiscate guns or anything like that.”

I agree that it was blown way out of proportion.Â The Mayor seems to not quite understand the objections to the exercise.

Talk show host Alex Jones of Austin, Texas, whose syndicated radio program is carried on about 60 stations, said he had received phone calls on and off the air from people in Arcadia and nearby towns who objected to the plans.He said he believes oil companies, in concert with central banks, are creating a worldwide economic crisis to set up a world government.

“This is part of an acclimation for martial law,” Jones said of the National Guard’s plans.

If that’s his paranoia, I don’t understand it either.Â There are certainly good reasons to object to the military using civilian communities in exercises, but that it’s part of an internationalist conspiracy is not among them.

Company A is an infantry unit that served in Afghanistan for 13 months in 2004 and 2005, and it is expected to receive orders to return overseas within the next 24 months, Hapgood said.

OK, so I was wrong about one thing.Â They were training for Afghanistan rather than Iraq, as I speculated over the weekend.

“We have been doing training in our communities for decades, so this is very routine business for us,” Hapgood said. “We were quite surprised when we received e-mails from out of state criticizing the event. We have a responsibility to have our men and women ready to go into combat, and we are not going to change that.”

Well, that’s what they’re saying now, of course.Â After the paranoidosophere blew the lid on their secret plans, what else are they going to say?

A man who described himself as a “Nevada citizen” wrote that it was good the exercise was called off: “It is possible that there would have been some dead Iowa Guardsmen.”

Way to win hearts and minds, good citizen of Nevada!

The Swiss Example

They pushed for ammunition restrictions in the home, now they want to the whole kaboodle:

He said a national register had to be created to keep track of the weapons, something police had long been seeking.

Lang said the weapons had to be “banished” from homes.

Barbara Weil, of the Swiss Medical Association, said it had been scientifically proven that if the guns were less freely available the number of suicides would drop.

Despite the fact that the Swiss have one of the lowest rates of crime in the industrialized world, the anti-gun groups in Switzerland managed to get registration, and now, what do you know, they are pushing for confiscation.

Confiscation always seem to follow registration.Â It’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you.

Figuring Out the NRA Ballot

There is always some confusion about the NRA ballot.Â There are so many seats – many more than most people are used to in any organization – and the Nominating Committee supports more candidates than seats.Â But what happens when people get it wrong?Â Easy, their ballot is considered to be invalid.Â The folks who scan the ballots don’t aim to be Florida election officials, so they tend not to try and determine the proverbial hanging chads.

nrainvalidballots06-08 I will confessÂ that one of my favorite times of the NRA Annual Meeting is when Jim Land gets up to read the election results.Â Included in that report is a summary of how many invalid ballots they received, as well as the reasons why various ballots were declared invalid.Â I find it quite amusing.

nrainvalidballottypes06-08 I realize that lines may make this chart a little confusing.Â However, they were easier to follow year-to-year than just plain dots.

Yes, as you can see, there are between 10 and 50 people who, for the last three years, have saved a ballot from a previous year and submitted that one.Â That’s impressive.Â It’s one thing if they just hold on to a copy of the old magazine, but to actually take the time to send in the ballot during the voting period the next year, that’s just crazy.

The most common problem is clearly too many votes.Â This year, you may vote for up to 26.Â However, if you don’t have 26 people that you’re just dying to vote for, then it is advised you limit your votes.Â So-called bullet voting helps your favorite candidates more than spreading out votes across the entire ballot.