October 2010 – Page 9 – Shall Not Be Questioned

Motion to Dismiss in Illinois FOID Case

It looks like Illinois is taking the position that the plaintiff falls under one of their exceptions, given that she can lawfully possess firearms in her home state. I’m not an expert on legal matters, by any stretch, but it seems like this motion is going to be tough to overcome. The plaintiff is saying she can’t possess a firearm in the State of Illinois. The State of Illinois is saying she can, and is arguing she’s failed to make a case.

I’m not sure it matters if they later arrest someone for possessing a loaded firearm in, say, a hotel while staying in Illinois. The person they arrest will have a case. But it’s hard to see how to defeat the state saying “Yes you can,” when you say,” No, I can’t.” Â It doesn’t seem to me that the state’s interpretation of the statute is wildly implausible either.

Why Hunting is Doomed

Hunters have never gotten the same jolt of reality that gun owners got in 1994, when it became apparent that the game really was about banning guns. It shows in the [UPDATE: link fixed] Â fact that they are basically willing to screw each other over depending on what they think “hunting” really is. What’s even worse is groups like the Mule Deer Foundation and the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation are willing participants in this charade. Both those groups should now be pariahs within the hunting community. Hunters should have nothing to do with them.

But they aren’t becoming pariahs, and plenty of hunters are still members. Why? Because ultimately a lot of hunters agree that hunting on a ranch of thousands of acres isn’t really hunting, and we probably ought to ban it. These people are willing participants in their own destruction, and it boggles my mind.

It took the Assault Weapons Ban to wake up gun owners. The Bradys foolishly overreached. HSUS is a much smarter organization, and when it comes to ethics, they make the Bradys look like paragons of virtue. In short, they are smart, and they are willing to get very dirty.

Mr. Regal says he’s gone on many hunts, including a week-long one in the 1960s in the Wyoming wilderness on horseback. Today, he says, “hunting public lands is a waste.” At Cedar Ridge, “you’re assured of getting game.” He says he feels the hunt was fair. “There’s enough territory there that [the elk] can outsmart you,” he says.

Mr. Swanke says that if Ballot Measure 2 passes, he’ll have to shut his business and go back to raising cattle.

“My operation isn’t for everybody,” he says. “But what I’m doing is healthy and legal. I’m not ashamed of it.”

Mr. Kaseman, the force behind the ballot initiative, thinks otherwise.

Roger Kaseman is a man entirely willing to promote the destruction of his own sport at the hands of the likes of HSUS. What I haven’t figure out yet is whether he’s a front for the animal rights groups, or merely the world’s largest fool.

You’d think the dove hunting ban in Michigan would have woken up hunters, or HSUS’s attempts to ban bear hunting in some states. But it hasn’t. My fear is that by the time hunters have their “Asssault Weapons Ban” it’s going to be too late, and they will have been outmaneuvered. They will, at that point, only be able to watch in anguish as animal rights whackjobs kills their sport in state after state. This will be the legacy guys like Roger Kaseman leave to hunting.

Definition: Activist Judge

Any judge who does something I don’t agree with. Irrelevance sucks, doesn’t it?

Details aren’t Important

I was thoroughly confused when sometime around 7:35pm on a Sunday night, Congressional candidate Bryan Lentz posted the following Facebook update:

This morning I will be at the Crum Lynne @SEPTA station. Come shake my hand and let me know what you’re thinking.

This morning? At 7:35pm on a Sunday?

It made Sebastian think of this:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vA_UfZnqBco[/youtube]

It’s also amusing because it’s the train station he used to go to college every day, and it’s a short walk from his sister’s house & the house that he grew up in.

Signs, Signs, Everywhere There’s Signs

I’ve been paying attention to the number of signs going up around our area during this campaign, and it’s not news that those going up are overwhelmingly GOP signs. What I find startling are the people who are putting up signs.

One property owner on a major road just a mile or so away has never put a single political sign up in all the years I’ve been visiting or living with Sebastian. He now has a massive plywood sign taking up his entire corner for the Republican congressional candidate – Mike Fitzpatrick.

Several homes in our neighborhood have never had political signs up before, and they are now sporting signs for Fitzpatrick, and for the Senate candidate, Pat Toomey.

Almost every house with McCain signs out in 2008 has at least two more GOP signs out this year. Unlike 2008, I have yet to see a single Democrat in our area put up a sign. The only signs we’ve seen for Democrats have been posted by the campaign on public property instead of private lawns. I really didn’t see much in the way of bumper stickers when for Republican candidates in 2008, but now I see them on a few cars parked around the neighborhood.

To say there’s an enthusiasm gap in the signage is an understatement. I know the ultimate sign will be the results on election night, but so far, things are looking pretty good here in Lower Bucks County. In the meantime, I’ll take some time to also enjoy this snippet from the NYT on the Democratic incumbent’s attempt to campaign in the darkest blue portions of the district and getting yelled at by nearly everyone in the neighborhood.

Blogging From iPad

It looks as if finally the official WordPress App for the iPad and iPhone supports blogs that use a self signed certificate. I couldn’t believe that it didn’t have that bit of functionality before. Now it’s actually pretty nice.

It would even seem that posting pictures works too. These are Honu, Hawaii’s native sea turtle. These ones swam right up to me.

UPDATE: After a bit of fiddling, this App still has a lot of problems. For instance, it seems to time stamp posts to GMT so that they end up scheduled rather than posted. Easy to fix via the normal web interface, but the whole point of the App is convenience.

So Many Questions…

Every once in a while, there’s a tweet that can kick start your imagination. The other day, I came across one of those tweets. From @pgPoliTweets:

Watching Smart Talk. Hbg Mayor Thompson just said the solution to downtown crime is to have more vigilantes. Wow!

Harrisburg is bankrupt, so I suppose it could be a cost cutting measure. Regardless, it’s one of those things that makes me happy they accommodate those who choose to carry at the State Capitol since it sounds like folks should be prepared to carry a little more firepower in Harrisburg.

Oh, and I might add that this is a MAIG mayor calling for more vigilantes.

Should Consequences Be Considered?

One thing I’ve wrestled with, in thinking about whether our opponents on the gun control side of the debate are evil, misguided or just plain wrong (or some combination of the three), is the consequences of what they advocate. After all, “an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man,” so you’re putting an individual at some risk by taking away his ability to defend himself and his community against the criminal element, whether that criminal element comes under color of law or whether it is just commonly criminal.

It’s seriously business, restricting the tools of self-defense. To justify it to themselves, our opponents have tried to convince us that we’re misguided and paranoid, and that really, they only want to disarm us for our own good. They try to convince us they don’t want to do this, while trying to prevent us from exercising the right anywhere but our homes (and even there prior to Heller).

It is infantalizing, but America, since the first settlers hit Plymouth Rock, has always had an element that wanted to infantalize and control the population for their own good. It is a common streak through our history. Blacks were told slavery was for their own good. The Irish were told they were going to have to give up beer and whiskey for their own good. We were all told that people would go mad if we didn’t let the federal government ban reefer, among other things.

All these policies have grave and negative social consequences and have cost lives. All the people who advocated for them believed they were doing it for everyone’s own good. What was the mixture at work for these policies, between misguidedness and evil? I don’t think anyone can say for sure. Certainly slavery was evil. But were alcohol prohibitionists? People who advocate keeping drugs illegal? I think it’s much harder to say there. Since a great many Americans approve of these policies, there’s an awful lot of evil people out there if that’s the case. My grandmother, who had to live for many years with my alcoholic grandfather, was still to her dying day a believer in the value of prohibition, and I don’t think she was evil. Misguided, yes, but not evil.

I tend to think our opponents are more wrong and misguided than evil, though I do think their ideas are dangerous for a society that’s based on, and claims to value individual freedom.

You Can’t Vote for Him, He Kills Puppies

The Democratic Party in Illinois would like you not to vote for Bill Brady because he’s a sick puppy killer. I kid you not:

The bill they are referring to is here, and as you can see, it has nothing to do with puppy holocausts, and has more to do with approving a method of euthanasia, a practice widely accepted for suffering animals. The method that is being approved here is accepted practice by the American Veterinary Medical Association, an organization well known to advocate puppy genocide.

On the “B” Word

Over at Common Gunsense, our host has taken unkindly to being called a “Bigot.” My American Heritage dictionary defines the word thusly, “AÂ personÂ whoÂ isÂ utterlyÂ intolerantÂ ofÂ anyÂ differingÂ creed,Â belief,Â or opinion.” In the modern American vernacular, we’ve largely forgotten about the latter two objects and concentrate almost exclusively on the first. In terms of the literal definition, we have all certainly met gun control advocates who fit it, by displaying a wildly condescending and contemptuous view of those who exercise their rights. I will leave it to readers to decide whether the proprietor of Common Gunsense fits that definition, but it’s not my purpose in this post to weigh into that particular debate. My purpose is to point out that I think Ms. Peterson has a point about the “pot calling the kettle black” in terms of some of our folks having bigoted attitudes towards people who merely disagree with us about the role of arms in American society.

Most of the tossing around I’ve seen of the word “bigot” seems to germinate from a belief that because these individuals are advocating against an enumerated civil right, that they aren’t any different than those that advocated against civil rights for blacks and other racial or ethnic minorities. I’ve said before that I think there has to be a distinction, morally, between hatred of someone because of immutable characteristics, and hatred of someone because you abhor a behavior of theirs, even if that behavior is constitutionally protected.

You can draw First Amendment analogies here, since speech is characteristically a behavior rather than an immutable quality, and speech, like firearms ownership, is constitutionally protected. I don’t necessarily consider someone advocating for a law preventing Fred Phelps and others like him from picketing a funeral to be an intolerant bigot. Misguided, yes, but not necessarily a bigot. Reasonable people can disagree about the nature and scope of the First Amendment, especially weighted against protecting the privacy and dignity of the families of service members who have been killed in action.

Advocacy of a position only really descends into bigotry when it’s based on an intolerant contempt for the individual or individuals who are engaging in a behavior, or holding a contrary opinion. It wouldn’t, for instance, be bigotry for someone to suggest “I really believe that jury verdicts shouldn’t need to be unanimous, because it costs taxpayers a lot of money for new trials, and often lets the guilty go free.” You could express the exact same opinion in a Â bigoted way, however, by saying, “I really believe that jury verdicts shouldn’t need to be unanimous, because your average working class rube, too stupid to get out of jury duty, is too ignorant in judgement to be trusted with the outcome of a verdict.” The latter expression of the same idea displays a bigoted attitude towards average, working class individuals. Both attitudes are treading into the territory of weakening a traditional civil right, but only one displays any evidence of the opinion having a bigoted origin for the opinion.

In our issue, someone saying “I believe in banning handguns, machine guns and assault weapons, because they are dangerous to society, and no one except the police and military should be allowed to have them,” is not displaying any hint of bigotry. The same person saying “I believe in banning handguns, machine guns and assault weapons because anyone who could possibly want to use one is certainly a homicidal manic out to mow down kindergartners,” is a bigoted viewpoint. It might be a surprise to many who support gun control, but when you call people of good will and character dangerous, mentally deficient, sexually dysfunctional, or insane, only because they engage in a behavior or have an interest you disapprove of or don’t understand, they tend to take that quite personally, and will lash back with insults of their own.

If there’s to be any dialog, even if that dialog only results in having to agree to disagree, both sides need to come to terms with exactly who the other side is. Gun owners who believe in a very strong, broad, and robust Second Amendment are not evil, dangerous, sexually challenged, or mentally deranged people just because the hold that opinion. They aren’t scary, wild eyed beasts out to cause mayhem. And by the same token, those that advocate for a narrow or inconsequential Second Amendment are not necessarily that either, nor are they the modern day equivalent of the KKK.

I think both sides owe the other more than that. We may end up doing nasty and underhanded things to each other as we struggle against each other in the court of public opinion, but we should be cognizant of keeping the political struggle separated from personal ones. It is fine to be dogged, unrelenting and aggressive in the political space. The personal space is something else, and from what I’ve seen I don’t think either side has a monopoly on nastiness in that arena.