January 2010 – Page 16 – Shall Not Be Questioned

Scalia Defends His Position

Looks like he did so at a speech for the Mississippi College School of Law. Sadly they don’t go much into what he said about the Second Amendment, but they do cover Scalia’s warnings about appeal to international law. I have to agree with this part too:

Scalia also said that he was worried by a mounting trend of appointing career judges to the judiciary. Scalia, 73, is a former appeals court judge, but he had also worked in private practice, as a law professor and in the administration of President Gerald Ford before Ronald Reagan nominated him to the Supreme Court in 1982.

“Every aspect of your career broadens your outlook and the insights that you would have. It’s good for the Court to have people with varied backgrounds. One of the things I’m concerned about is that in recent years, nobody who has been appointed has come from another bench,” Scalia said.Â […]

[…] Calling European judges “the most blinkered bureaucrats,” Scalia said that career judges in European systems can develop a sympathy for the government’s side of a case, having worked for the government their entire professional lives.

“You contrast that with the Anglo-Saxon system, where in the most important courts the judges not only have not been spending their whole life with their snout in the public trough, they’ve been suing the government,” Scalia said. “They’ve been defending their clients against the government. (It’s) a different mind, a different mindset.”

I would love to have someone on the bench who’s built a career out of suing the government. Maybe someday a future president can put Alan Gura on the Court :)

Blogoversary

Man, has it really been 3 years? Though, it seems like a long way from where I started out. I wouldn’t have remembered if it wasn’t for the notice that my domain was about to expire. That was even before I met Bitter. I think my motivations for blogging back then were different, and I think this blog has certainly evolved a lot since the beginning.

In the beginning I started to blog just because I had something to say, and Bitter (who I had just started talking to) said I’d be good at it. So I figured I’d try to impress her. Originally I wasn’t much concerned with having my own voice, or writing style, if you will. I wasn’t much concerned with how my blog would fit in with the community. I was interested in attracting the attention of the larger blogs, and getting them to help me grow an audience with links, and I owe a tremendous amount of my success as a gun blog to SayUncle, Instapundit, Tam, Dave Hardy and Bitter (back when she was gun blogging over there instead of here).

After blogging for a while, you kind of get a sense where you fit in to the community, and what your strengths and weaknesses are as a blogger. I think I’ve developed Snowflakes In Hell to the point where it’s a reasonable source of political and legal analysis focused specifically on firearms policy and law, with a bit of a local focus on Pennsylvania issues in particular. This has brought me deeper into this issue than I ever really wanted, or imagined I’d be starting out.

But I also think I’ve made some mistakes in the past three years. A scrappy, confrontational style of debate probably helped me get noticed as an upstart blog, but I don’t think it’s always been an asset as a more established blog. I know I’ve rubbed more than a few people the wrong way when that was not really my intention. I’m also frustrated by how difficult it is to use blogs and forums to coordinate and promote local, targeted, grassroots activism. There are people out there who use new media effectively for this purpose, and it’s something we’ve been experimenting with, and trying to learn what works and what doesn’t. Despite my skepticism of Open Carry as a public relations tool, those guys have a winning formula when it comes to recruiting, keeping and mobilizing a dedicated core set of volunteers. While I’ve often been critical of their methods, I greatly admire what they’ve been able to accomplish in creating an issue identity, and building dedication to it. The Tea Party movement is another phenomena that’s cropped up, which is a great example of a core set of activists being able to mobilize large numbers of people. Something I’ll be thinking in year four of Snowflakes in Hell is how to take the strengths of these movements, and apply them in other contexts. See what works, and what doesn’t. 2010 will be a telling year for freedom advocates, and for gun rights. Let’s hope we’re celebrating after November.

Japanese Whalers 1 – Eco Pirates 0

What happens when you sail non-ice rated vessels down to Antarctic seas and tangle with vessels that are ice rated? Hilarity. I have to admit, I love Whale Wars. Not because I like these pirates, but because I enjoy chortling at their incompetent seamanship and gimmicky attacks that don’t really seem to faze the whalers all that much.

You can see my other coverage here. Though I was appalled when I first saw the show, I have since changed my tune. I don’t think putting these incompetent boobs on TV is doing anything to win people to their cause. If anything, I’m more sympathetic toward whaling than I was before watching the show. These guys make the Somali Pirates look like true professionals.

I Guess Paul Helmke Finally Switched Parties

Something odd has been happening on the Brady Twitter feed since yesterday afternoon.

Hashtags
They’ve gone full-on partisan with their tweets. Of their last 23 tweets, 21 have been labeled with either the #Democrats, #Liberal, or #p2 (progressive) hashtags.

I’m not naive enough to believe that most of their staff aren’t Democrats, but come on. One of the reasons they touted when they hired Helmke could be summed up as, “Lookie, we found a Republican who also hates guns. See, we’re bipartisan!” But with Rasmussen finding the number of self-identifying Democrats at an all time low last month and the number of self-identifying Republicans inching up to meet those numbers, it would seem like a bad idea to instantly wipe out half of your potential pool of support by tagging all of your commentary as geared for only Democrats.

I also would not suggest that it’s unwise to never use appropriate hashtags, even if they are party oriented. For example, if writing something about a Democratic Party activity, that would be a responsible and reasonable use. If complaining about Barack Obama, it might be relevant to use the party hashtag. But to label fundraising tweets, blog posts that aren’t political, and every other topic as for #Democrats only, that’s just madness for any group to do. Since it’s the Brady Bunch, I’ll just mock them. But if NRA started labeling tweets with party designation indiscriminately, I would hit the roof. I would be making every phone in Fairfax ring off the hook. Of course, that’s what happens when you have actual grassroots, not just donors who get a mailing once a year.

Service Use
During the holidays when DC basically shuts down, the Brady development staff hijacked the twitter account to send out tweets begging for donations. They abused it a little bit by sending them out too often and without any other good content, but I do applaud them for using HootSuite to both schedule their tweets and (assuming they were using it to the full ability) tracking which posts got clicks and resulted in donations. Lord knows how many times I’ve begged the daytime staff handling @NRANews to do the same thing so that they don’t flood my twitter stream with 10 posts at a time. If they just gave like a 20 minute buffer between news items, it wouldn’t be so bad.

But during the last day, the Brady feed has been updating every hour or so. They are also using a different shortner service that’s so underused, Twitter doesn’t even have its name featured in the tweets. (When using HootSuite, the tweets say that they are posted by that service, same with Seesmic and pretty much all other reputable sites.) Why make the sudden switch from a service so well-respected that even the White House uses it to some no name service? Why go from carefully timed posting to posting every single hour, even when there is no news?

Regurgitating Really Old Stuff
Whoever took over the Twitter account believes that all of the Democratic-only Brady supporters are best served by relinking really old blog posts that are more than a month old. Yes, the big breaking news late last night was Dennis Hennigan’s whine from early December that gun owners didn’t like his book. Or the equally urgent breaking news from December 10 that there was a memorial for police officers who have died in the line of duty hosted by a law enforcement group.

It’s not that I want to see the Brady Campaign succeed in meeting their mission, but man I have to wonder what kind of crack they are smoking in that office to think that posting month-old news every hour and limiting their posts to only attract the attention of Democrats is a good idea for their cause. I would love to pick the brain of the person responsible. Did Peter Hamm & Paul Helmke go on a new year vacation together and leave the interns in charge? Or did Helmke finally switch parties and decide to dive in by using the Brady Twitter feed to celebrate? What happened that made them go nuts with this social media abuse? Curious minds want to know…

The Perfect Lost Accessory

Sebastian had been watching Lost since the series started. Note the past tense. What happened? Well, me.

I didn’t watch Lost. I didn’t ban him from watching Lost, he just opted not to watch without me. So he DVR’d it while I’d leave the room since he didn’t want me to see “current” (i.e. Season 4) episodes without knowing the back story. Â He did have all of Season 5 on DVR until we needed the space for something else. Â So I deleted without him ever getting to watch.

But we got Netflix last month just so I could catch up. We’ve been watching and will receive the last two discs for Season 2 tomorrow. That means I should be starting Season 3 by the end of the weekend.

No, we won’t quite be done before the final season begins, but we’ll be close enough that we just have to record a few episodes. Â With that said, I have found the absolute perfect accessory for the ultimate Lost final season viewing party. A polar bear television. I mean, it’s a polar bear. Â How perfect can you get? Â I guess options like wild boar and black stallion would also make fine Lost accessories, but they wouldn’t be nearly as cuddly as a polar bear television.

All of that said, here are my thoughts on Lost through the first 40 episodes: Continue reading “The Perfect Lost Accessory”

Poor Choice of Words?

Hat tip to reader Carl from Chicago for pointing out this hilarious poor choice of words on the part of the Joyce Foundation:

I’m sure what they meant to say was research into ways to ensure that guns are only owned by the law abiding, but it can be read another way, which humorously is closer to Joyce’s actual position on private ownership of firearms.

Washington Times on Multiple Shootings

They point out that the media only really follows body counts, and look at this example:

In Oklahoma City the previous week, an armed citizen singlehandedly stopped an attack that surely would have resulted in a multiple-victim public shooting. The media gave the event scant attention. The scene went down when a Marine, who was on leave and came home for the holidays, started firing in an apartment parking lot. Before anyone was harmed, another man aimed his permitted concealed handgun at the attacker and ordered him to put down his weapon. The shooter dropped his gun and ran into his father’s apartment, barricading himself in. Three-and-a-half hours later, the man surrendered to the police.

Such scant attention, it escaped even my attention, and I have this stuff Google alerted out the wazoo. No bodies, so it’s not a big news story. I have to say, it took a lot of guts to tell the guy to drop his weapon rather than just open fire.

One More Form

We talked a while ago about proposals afoot in Trenton that would essentially make the one-gun-a-month law in New Jersey meaningless. That proposal has cleared a major hurdle. That it would boil down to one more form you had to fill out, one more hassle. We’re supposed to believe that illegal gun traffickers are going down to their local police, filling out the paperwork for a permit. Submitting fingerprints, going through a multi-point FBI background check, getting their friends and neighbors interviewed, all to sell guns on the streets on Trenton and Newark. We’re also supposed to believe, now, that this one extra form for multiple purchases is going to be what breaks this cycle of gun trafficking.

“This is a common sense compromise that does nothing to impair the goal of protecting public safety by keeping criminals from obtaining multiple weapons at once,” Burzichelli said. “These changes would correct some unintended consequences while also protecting law-abiding citizens and legitimate businesses.”

Johnson said, “These changes would allow us to continue targeting straw purchases and other illegal handgun trafficking, but would provide reasonable exemptions that make sense. In the end, these changes are simply clarifications that don’t interfere with protecting public safety and combating handgun trafficking.”

Don’t get me wrong, it’s better to make the changes than not, but the fact that they can say, with a straight face, that all the hoops New Jersey makes gun owners jump through doesn’t work well to combat gun trafficking, but this one extra form is certain to do the trick.

If it’s not obvious at this point that the emperor has no clothes, I don’t know what will convince people.

Stopping Power

Don Kates, civil rights attorney and Second Amendment litigator, has a useful addition to the tired of debate about stopping power. Mainly that it’s a tired old debate.

Why Finns are Going to Lose Their Guns

The Finns have traditionally had a strong shooting culture, often centered around using Russians for target practice, but that’s not going to last much longer because their shooting organizations are weak:

Shooting hobbyists and hunters campaign on behalf of responsible gun use. They want to secure the right to use guns as a hobby, while conceding the need for control.

â€œSello involved an illegal weapon. Tougher gun legislation would not have been a solutionâ€, says Markku Lainevirta,, head of a project on the development of the shooting hobby launched by the Shooting Hobby Forum.

â€œIt is a step in the right direction that tougher restrictions are coming for the granting of a personâ€™s first handgun licence.â€

The Shooting Hobby Forum includes shooting hobbyists, hunters, and military reservists.

How is increasing the restriction on licensing going to help your sport? Will it help bring in more people? Will it help convince the general public that gun ownership in and of itself is not a social ill? I mean, by conceding that we need to increase restrictions, you concede that guns in the hands of individuals contributes to Jokela and Kauhojoki. You’re accepting blame for something in which you are blameless.

This will backfire. Next time this happens, they will come knocking on your door again, and again, and again, until they ask for something you don’t want to give up. By that time, you will have willingly reduced the number of people in your sport to such a degree that you will be politically powerless to resist their demands.