2012 – Page 89 – Shall Not Be Questioned

The Stupid Party Strikes Again

I would like to congratulate House Majority leader Mike Turzai for giving the lawyers who will eventually challenge Pennsylvania’s voter ID law their core argument, which is that, rather than being aimed at preventing voter fraud, it was aimed at delivering Pennsylvania for Mitt Romney. I can understand why Turzai wants to brag about having accomplished something, givenÂ how many slam dunk causes, like liquor privatization, the Pennsylvania GOP hasn’t been able to accomplish.

You could probably make a case, even under strict scrutiny, for an ID requirement for voting, with an aim to prevent fraud. It’s not slam-dunk, because voting is among the fundamental rights recognized by the Supreme Court. You can’t make a case for an ID requirement aimed at limiting the voting franchise. Turzai has, essentially, just admitted that Voter ID was not about prevention of fraud.Â I would encourage gun owners to think about this from the point of view of gun rights. If Mayor Rahm or Bloomberg suddenly admitted the purpose of their gun laws was to limit gun ownership as much as possible, rather than to prevent crime, we’d be quietly saying, “Jackpot! Keep talking buddy.” But neither Rahm nor Bloomberg are that stupid. Only Pennsylvania Republican leaders are that stupid.

Another Deflective Tactic for Fast and Furious

The other deflection seems to be to try to tie Mike Vanderboegh around the neck of Fast and Furious and hope it sinks. The most telling example of this comes to use courtesy of Rachel MaddowÂ (h/t Kurt Hoffman), who would have you believe that this scandal was cooked up in Mike’s tinfoil hat, and was latched on to by the Republicans in Congress. In Maddow’s world, there was never whistles blowers. There were never mainstream media outlets that found Fast and Furious to be credible. Maddow isn’t the only example of this tactic, however. It can also be found in the Baltimore SunÂ and the Los Angeles Times.

The idea that this whole scandal depends on the credibility of one person is, well, incredulous. There have been whistleblowers, there have been documents that point to other documents that are not in possession of Congress as they should be. It’s been no big secret that Vanderboegh and I are not exactly fond of one another, but the media really is reaching quite a bit with these ad hominem attacks on him to attempt to discredit the scandal. His role in this, of connecting whistleblowers to media contacts and Congressional officials, discredits the scandal exactly how?

These people in the media, who are ordinarily just soooo concerned about “gun violence”, seem perfectly willing to make excuses for our government actively facilitating it, rather than trying to prevent it, in the name of getting Obama re-elected.

RMGO Loses Its Tax Exempt Status

I’ve often been pretty critical of Dudley Brown and the National Association for Gun Rights, but it’s looking like another one of Dudley’s outfits, Rocky Mountain Gun Owners, has lost its tax-exempt status from the IRS, because they have not filed tax returns for three years. I wonder how long it will take the inevitable fundraising letter to go out, talking about how the Obama Administration, through his Internal Revenue Service, is trying to silence the voice of gun owners, and surely won’t you donate some money to fight Obama.

To be fair, most any tax-exempt political organization is pretty shameless when it comes to fundraising, but I’ve always thought Brown’s organization was an extra shade of shameless. I’ve also never really understood what they are really contributing. From what I’ve been able to find, NAGR doesn’t even have a lobbyist registered on the Hill.

Rahm Backs Down

As I had speculated last week,, it would appear the City of Chicago has decided to revise its ordinance rather than appeal. I didn’t think Mayor Rahm would be making noise about protecting Chicago’s gun laws if he wasn’t planning a strategic retreat. The proposed ordinance revision will bar anyone from a gun license who has a violent misdemeanor conviction in the past five years. I would imagine the courts would uphold temporary prohibitions on violent misdemeanants, but that’s not completely certain. It will take some time, to bring cities like Chicago and New York into compliance with the Bill of Rights, but it’ll be a bit, metaphorically, like sculpting marble. We will make precedent one hammer strike at a time, hopefully without striking poorly and having to start all over again.

Anti-Virus Triggering on Gun Bogs?

John Richardson’s blog, “No Lawyers, Only Guns and Money” seems to have gotten blocked by Norton’s anti-virus software. I use ClamAV when I use anti-virus at all. It’s not as critical in the Mac and Linux world except to scan file servers for stuff deposited by Windows users. If anyone notices this blog on such a list, let me know. Let John know too. Could be that perhaps this is only blogspot. And stop using Windoze :)

A Partisan Shift

A little commentary by Jeff Bishop of damnum absque injuria about a decision that came down today:

Falwell v. Hustler Magazine, the case widely misrepresented as “People vs. Larry Flynt,” was decided 8-0 on First Amendment grounds in favor of a corporation. Citizens United and today’s American Traditions Partnership decision were both decided 5-4, with all four liberals arguing in dissent that legal persons (corporations, LLCs, etc.) aren’t really “people” and therefore, any natural person with the audacity to form one should check his own First Amendment rights at at the door.

So for all four liberals on the Supreme Court, along with an overwhelming majority of self-described liberals outside it, corporations are “people” with First Amendment rights when they peddle porno and smear public figures, but cease to be “people” as soon as they contribute anything of value to national political discourse.

What Isn’t News Today

So no healthcare decision today. According to SCOTUS Blog, they weren’t too far from having 100,000 people on their live coverage site today. They have planned for Thursday and realize that they could reach 250,000.

While we wait, I thought there were parts of this NYT article that gave a preview of how little thought many in Congress and the White House gave to the idea of any kind of legal challenge:

In passing the law two years ago, Democrats entertained little doubt that it was constitutional. The White House held a conference call to tell reporters that any legal challenge, as one Obama aide put it, â€œwill eventually fail and shouldnâ€™t be given too much credence in the press.â€

Congress held no hearing on the planâ€™s constitutionality until nearly a year after it was signed into law. Representative Nancy Pelosi, then the House speaker, scoffed when a reporter asked what part of the Constitution empowered Congress to force Americans to buy health insurance. â€œAre you serious?â€ she asked with disdain. â€œAre you serious?â€
…
The first lawsuits were filed the day Mr. Obama signed the plan in March 2010. By the end of January 2011, judges in Florida and Virginia had ruled it unconstitutional. Only then did the Senate and the House hold hearings on its constitutionality, and the administration grew worried.

The Lame Deflections of the Anti-Gun Crowd on Fast and Furious

A common deflection by our opponents in the gun rights movement is that we Second Amendment supporters are making a big ado about nothing, considering Fast and Furious only represented a fraction of the overall number of guns trafficked into Mexico unlawfully. Let me take this analogy to another form of crime, and show why the anti-gun groups are phony baloney when they speak about their desire to reduce gun violence (rather than just wanting to reduce gun ownership).

Let’s take this to another form of crime, and to a smaller scale. Let’s talk about a neighborhood that has a problem with home break-ins. The community is small enough that people have a pretty good idea of who the bad apples are, and the local police have worked with the hardware stores in the town to ensure that they don’t crowbars or other burglary tools to the bad apples in town until they solve the rash of home break-ins. The local police catch a few burglars, all of which got in with crow bars, but the burglaries generally continue.

Let’s say that the state police then decide to sweep in, and announcing this is all part of a much bigger burglary ring, not only tell the hardware stores they should sell as many crowbars to the bad apples as they can, but actively encourage them to do so, so that they can infiltrate the ring and bring it down. So the only result is that burglaries in town shoot way up. This raises the question:

Are the citizens of the town correct to be angry at the state police?
Would it be paranoid and unreasonable to suggest the state police might have had selfish reasons, like boosting their own budgets, to inflate the crime problem?
Because burglars still get a hold of crowbars, is it correct to blame the hardware store?
Is it correct to blame the manufacturer of the crowbar?
Would you say citizens that are concerned greatly about the police facilitating a rise in crime are just misdirected from the overall problem of burglars getting crowbars? Or the fact that hardware stores sell them?

Smuggling guns to Mexico is illegal. Buying guns from federal dealers to smuggle guns into Mexico is illegal. We expect the police to catch people who are doing it. Aside from disagreements we may have with anti-gunners about mutli-sale reporting requirements, of gun show loopholes, etc — is it not rational and healthy, when the police are found to be facilitating an illegal activity, to apparently no rational end, to be outraged and demand answers? What The Brady Folks, CSGV, and other anti-gun people are disingenuously suggesting, is that because we care about law enforcement not facilitating crime, that means we don’t care about crime. This is a ridiculous leap in logic, even for our opponents. Their reaction to Fast and Furious is further evidence the whole gun violence shtick is just that. If you have a situation where law enforcement is facilitating crime, if you’re interesting in fighting rime, the first order of business is to get the government to stop facilitating crime. Then we can talk about what to do next.

A Little Weekend Mindless Consumerism

Who can’t use a set of Presidential Rubber Duckies or Patriotic Rubber Duckies?

As Sebastian noted when I found these, the patriotic set needs a militiaman in the group.

More on Commercial Blogging

A reader took some exception to my post previously on commercial blogging, and I just wanted to clear up some things. As a supporter of Capitalism,Â I don’t blame anyone for trying to make money, and therefore I don’t blame anyone for the mere act of making money off their blog. I’ve linked to plenty of commercial blog content, and I still link to The Firearm Blog, even though that is now pretty clearly a money making venture. So I don’t particularly have a problem with the idea of people making money off blogging, writing, etc. On balance I’d say that commercial blogs actually do a better job of generating quality content than the many if not most hobby bloggers.Â But the techniques one uses to optimize a blog for the purpose of maximizing monetary return is going to lead to a very different blog experience.

The main area of concern I have with commercial blogs, is that a core philosophy behind blogging, which is linking to other blogs and content, is in direct conflict with making money off running a web site. It’s never a good idea, from a money making standpoint, to give your readers a reason to click off your content and onto someone else’s. But that’s exactly what blogging is as a matter of core philosophy. There are commercial blogs out there that still make good money, and still largely follow the core tenants of the medium. Most of those started out as hobby blogs and went commercial. Many newer entrants into commercial blogging try to make their blogs communities unto themselves, which is great for keeping an audience, driving loyalty, and in the end, making money, but my fear is the community as a whole will suffer for it. For instance, I’d take Tam‘s advice on an old Smith or other curio any day over most of the commercial gun reviewers out there. I consider Tam’s expertise well and above most other gun writers out there on that subject, and most blog readers won’t get too far in the amateur community without being exposed to some of Tam’s writing. By the same token, Dave Hardy is my go-to source when I have 2nd Amendment legal questions. Clayton Cramer has forgotten more on early American history than most of us know, and I’m not convinced there’s much he’s forgotten. Being in the same community with these minds has greatly enhanced my own knowledge, and through the community of blogging, we’ve all been enriched. My fear is that the spread of commercial blogging will results in the dilution or destruction of the community that’s an important part of what Brian Anse Patrick calls “Horizontal Interpretive Communities.”

So my concern with commercial blogs is not that they make money. I have no problem with the idea of making money. It’s that in order to make money efficiently, your commercial venture has to make like it is theÂ source for gun information online, and that by nature is going to weaken what has, I think, become a key part of our success as a movement.