2013 – Page 59 – Shall Not Be Questioned

Binders Full of Women vs. Underage Prostitutes

I’m a woman, and I’m having some trouble following the media narrative on women’s issues in politics. If I’m following it correctly, I believe these are the highlights:

1) I am under attack in a war that has been declared on my gender.

2) Those attacks are only from men who may want to tell me about how to use my reproductive organs to make babies, but not by the men who want to restrict my right to defend myself from a rapist who may want to make use of said reproductive organs without my consent.

3) I attended an all-woman college that was founded on the principles that women, even those of very modest means, could contribute more to society than just pleasing men and required high academic standards for women of the day. Yet, in the last election, the message to women on campus was that the only way to define a woman’s role in elections is through the interest of her reproductive organs (that she should not be able to protect from assault using a personal firearm).

4) The candidate for president who made a remark about seeking out qualified women for administration jobs was the leader of the opposition in this war on women, but the President who appointed an ambassador who may have been screwing underage girls is absolutely on the side of women. Oh, and since the Department of State was under the leadership of a woman (who also attended a single sex institution), it’s okay that investigators looking into these allegations were ordered to stop their work.

I’m just making sure that I’m able to keep up. Maybe it’s because I’m in a relationship with a neanderthal gun owner that I’m a little slow to keep up on these complex matters. According to the media, this should all be clear to me (and my reproductive organs that define who I am). Regardless of what they tell me, I’m just having a hard time wrapping my head around this so-called war.

The New Realities

Jim Geraghty made this remark in light of the NSA spying leaks: “Of course, you can do the right thing and still break the law.”

Meanwhile, Sesame Street debuts an education kit for helping kids deal with an incarcerated parent.

Clearly, there’s not such an epidemic of questionable spying document dumping in this country that these two things are directly related, but I don’t think they are completely unrelated, either. It’s a sad day when we pretty much joke about how practically everyone is a criminal these days because they’ve probably cross some regulation they never even knew existed.

It reminds me of a Kindle book my mom bought me that I really need to read soon: Trapped: When Acting Ethically is Against the Law

Unfortunately, since the answers to these issues don’t fit into a soundbite, don’t expect any serious discussions about the topic from our political leaders.

A Free Speech Issue or a Funding Issue?

Opponents of the NRA-backed anti-Bloomberg bill in Kansas are using free speech arguments against the bill. I think state and municipal employees have all the free speech rights they want, off the clock. What they don’t have is a right to spend my tax dollars lobbying to undermine my rights. As was mentioned when this bill first came up, Bloomberg had been using taxpayer subsidized professionals to lobby against your Second Amendment rights. This ought to stop, and the Kansas bill is hopefully the first of many.

Project Much?

I normally don’t publish letters to the editor, because most of them don’t often have any particular insight, and are often factually challenged.Â Every once in a while though, I have to make an exception. Because this guy was apparently a raging sociopath of a four year old, apparently the rest of us aren’t responsible enough to teach gun safety to our children.

Five-year-olds today are no more mature than I was, and the NRA thinks thatâ€™s the ideal time to begin teaching children about guns.

You gotta be kidding me.

I’m pretty sure as a five year old I knew not to hurt other children. Also, no one is talking about handing guns, BB or otherwise, to five year olds and telling them to go to town. But five is not too soon to talk to kids about gun safety. In fact, if you have guns in the house, you have a responsibility to teach your kids to be safe around them.

Mixing Issues

GOA is fighting against the immigration bill, arguing that all those foreigners will vote to take away our guns. Maybe that’s so, but maybe it’s not so. Italians were big Democratic voters when they first came here too, but GOP politics around here is now full of people of Italian heritage.

I think GOA is attempting to shoe-horn gun rights into other right issues, and I think that is a mistake. It only serves to make the tent smaller. Approximately 35% of Democrats own firearms, and I don’t believe those votes ought to be written off or marginalized. That would pretty much assure that our fortunes rise and fall with the GOP, and given that all political party fortunes rise and fall, that’s not a recipe for long term protection of the right they claim to preserve.

Taking My Rights Won’t Bring Anyone Back

The Washington Post ran a story over the weekend lamenting that Sandy Hook didn’t change anything on guns, with this bit of grief porn. I don’t know how I’d react if I lost a kid, but I can be pretty sure I’m not going to involve anyone else in my grief, and damned sure I’m not going to let anyone write stories about it. I generally tend to view such external and public displays as fundamentally selfish. That might be harsh, but that’s just how I view it.Â Newsbusters Tim Graham has moreÂ on this story, and notes:

The other politically interesting part of this story was how the distraught parents are molded and shaped by P.R. consultants to say the market-tested things so they can win.

Yeah, I also don’t see myself hiring a PR firm if I ever lose a kid either.

h/t The Gun Wire for the Newsbusters link.

True Liberals in Houston

I’ve heard it said that real liberals would be concerned that the poor cannot afford to exercise their enumerated, fundamental right to keep and bear arms, and this a true liberal would support programs to help the poor afford firearms. Somehow I doubt very many will support this, however, given their penchant for making this particular right as expensive and time consuming to exercise as possible. I think it’s a great idea, personally.

h/t Instapundit.

It’s Not the Guns, it’s the Crazy

Clayton Cramer takes a look at the Santa Monica mass shooter. California’s gun laws, in this case, didn’t help anything. He was a prohibited purchaser under California law, because he had been committed for observation:

Gun-control advocates, at least the more rational ones, will usually admit that these laws only work at the margins, by making guns harder for criminals and the mentally ill to get.Â I can buy that argument; all laws work only at the margins, and that is all that they have to do to justify their existence.Â I can also agree that when there is a large stockpile of illegal goods in circulation, it can take a while before laws aimed at those goods will remove them from the illegal marketplace.Â Still, when I see that laws that are decades old failed to disarm a 24 year old who could not possibly have legally acquired this weapon, I find myself wondering in what century Californiaâ€™s gun-control laws are going to be effective.

I think it’s questionable whether these laws even work at the margins. The problem is that anyone determined to get a gun can, generally speaking, obtain one. Banning in-demand products doesn’t seem to have very much success, even at the margins.

A Humorous Review of a Tactical Pen

From Robb Allen. When those titanium pens come out, they are going to be something else.

Thought on the Recent Mass Shooting

This is essentially my sentiment:

So, letâ€™s see here, carrying a gun in Cali is illegal. Carrying onto a school, also illegal. And carrying in a library, illegal. But one more law should do it!

They’ll never admit it just doesn’t work. We just haven’t tried it hard enough, you see. Hard enough means you can defend yourself with soda straws. Well, until you do, then we’ll take those away from you too.