2016 – Page 3 – Shall Not Be Questioned

Truth Getting Harder to Find These Days

I’ve been seeing the ongoing controversy over Standing Rock and the Dakota Access Pipeline, but this is one of those cases I feel like everyone involved, regardless of the “side” they are on, is lying to me. I’d imagine that, given the intersection of US Tribal Law, rights-of-way, easements, etc, it’s probably a lot more complicated, in which case no one outside of a handful of lawyers really understands the actual issues.

Part of the problem in the return to partisan media is that you can’t count on anyone to give an impartial account of the issue, even if it’s complicated. Sure, the old media had bias, but it was easier to see through that. It’s a lot harder when you’re dealing with media outlets that are willing to outright lie to you to advantage their preferred narrative.

I remember in the golden days of blogging, back when we were all hobbyists thinking we were fighting the man. By that time the media might have been the sick old man, but they were still the man. Well, the man is basically gone, and in those days we never thought all that hard about what would replace us.

Defecting Electors are the System Working

I’m pretty confident that despite a few electors making noises about switching their vote, that Donald Trump will still occupy the Oval Office by the end of January. But people on the left and right are going nuts over this. To the extent that electors are receiving threats, that’s beyond the pale, but I have no problem with trying to influence electors to switch their vote through peaceful means. I also don’t have issues with electors actually switching their vote. While it’s not a popular position today, I’m a huge proponent of the Electoral College, for the following reasons:

It gives a voice to smaller states that would otherwise be completely irrelevant in National Politics. And yes, I’m OK with rural people having outsized influence. Why? Because city folks don’t understand or care about rural folks, and without rural folks, city folks starve. I think protecting their interests from a dismissive and smugÂ majority that doesn’t understand them is important.
It prevents variability in the election system from bringing the results into doubt. There was a lot of “selected, not elected” talk after Bush v. Gore in 2000, but there was never any legal doubt about Bush being a legitimate President because the Electoral College is the lawful body that elects the President. Likewise, a close popular vote count would be far more consequential, bring dozens of state electoral systems under the microscope.
The Electoral College is a final check against the people doing something extremely rash. Given the horrible choices in this election, I don’t feel too bad about a few electors going faithless. That lets me know the Electoral College might not actually rubber stamp a real Hitler or Mussolini. Hillary and Donald Trump were awful candidates, but I don’t believe either of them are potential dictators. I don’t think this election rises to the level of the Electoral College thwarting the will of the people, but a bit of controversy, from my point of view, isn’t unwelcome.

I suspect there’s going to be a lot of call for abandoning the Electoral College, but that would establish a true, national election. In every other instance in federal elections, we vote as states. I don’t think the Electoral College is an anachronism, and it’s an important buffer between the people and the Presidency. It may be that Hillary won the popular vote, but that is relatively meaningless, since the campaign strategy to win in a majority vote system would be very different from the system we have. It’s impossible to know whether Hillary Clinton would have won the popular vote if we were a 50%+1 takes it kind of system. I think we ought to keep the Electoral College in place.

Semi Auto Hunting the Law in Pennsylvania

I thought there might be a good chance that Governor Wolf would sign the bill. There are a lot of hunters in Pennsylvania, and this looked like the kind of fight he might not want to pick. I’m sure Pennsylvania going red in the Presidential race may also have played into Wolf’s thinking.

It’s really not any big deal, since Pennsylvania was one of the few states that everÂ restricted hunting with semi-automatics. I don’t hunt, so it’s not something I’ll personally take advantage of,Â but I’ve heard a few “you can’t hunt with them” arguments for restricting semi-autos, so it’ll be good to see that put to rest.

But Will Stu Greenleaf Get the Message?

Change the states, and this could easily be Republican State Senator Greenleaf’s political epitaph if he doesn’t quit blocking our bills:

A powerful south Florida state senator who repeatedly sidelined popular gun rights legislation lost his seat Tuesday, opening the door for campus carry and open carry in the Sunshine State.

Florida State Sen. Miguel Diaz de la Portilla, R-Miami, chairs the Senate Criminal Justice Committee and in 2015 refused to hold hearings on a bill to allow legal concealed carry on public colleges and universities. Diaz de la Portilla was also a fly in the ointment when it came to derailing an emergency concealed carry bill the year before and in 2016 was key in killing bills on campus carry and open carry, refusing to even meet with advocates.

The Dem replacing him is also rated F, but taking one F and replacing them with a more junior F who doesn’t chair a key committee can be a win overall. Senator Greenleaf, Chairman of the Pennsylvania Senate Judiciary Committee, who is the reason enhanced preemption had to be stuck on another bill, should think about that. Like Florida, the Pennsylvania GOP Senate majority could absorb the loss of one seat, and I’d be happy to donate to or volunteer, even for the most Kumbaya singin’, tree huggingist hippie, if they looked like they had a credible chance of getting him out of our way.

You Used to be Able to Expect Better from Reason

Articles like this are why I haven’t been a Reason subscriber or regular reader since Virginia Postrel left as Editor-in-Chief. As it says in the comments of this article, “Did this guy sleep through Sandy Hook?”

Not that NRA doesn’t sensationalize and scaremonger in its fundraising: it certainly does. So does every other advocacy group. What effect a Trump Administration will have on NRA’s ability to maintain membership at high levels and keep enough money coming in is something I wonder about too. But …

But under President Barack Obama, the NRA has occupied itself sowing groundless panic and fighting imaginary villains.

So Obama didn’t spend his second term promoting gun control? Justice Scalia didn’t die? Hillary Clinton didn’t run a campaign where the centerpiece was gun control and defiance of the NRA? Did I imagine all that?

The NRA insisted he planned to ban all handguns, ban “use of firearms for home defense,” increase federal taxes on guns and ammunition by 500 percent, and require a federal license to buy a gun.

That’s because as a Illinois Senator, he voted for these things, and was an outspoken supporter of Chicago’s handgun ban. This wasn’t a figment of Wayne LaPierre’s imagination, and it wasn’t just lip service. He voted this way.

DOJ Smart Gun Specs are Telling

John Richardson notes that we need to be vigilant about last minute gun control from the Obama Administration, and he’s right. But this DOJ spec for what a smart gun would need to look like in order to be acceptable to law enforcement is telling, in that it rejects much of the gun control groups sacred cows about what citizens do and don’t need for self-defense. Let us look deeper:

Pistols shall be semi-automatic, recoil-operated, magazine-fed, and striker-fired.

I thought semi-automatic weapons only belonged on the battle field?

Class I magazines shall hold a minimum of 14 cartridges.
Class II magazines shall hold a minimum of 16 cartridges.

But I thought these dangerous high-capacity magazines were weapons of war only suitable for mowing down school children, and are thoroughly unnecessary for self-defense? Law enforcement isn’t just demanding a maximum of 10, it’s saying their minimum is 14.

The pistol shall fire with the magazine removed and a live round in the chamber.

Pistols shall not have a magazine disconnect which prevents the firearm from firing when the magazine is removed from the pistol.

Why do law enforcement and military leaders hate their own children?

Pistols shall not have a manual external thumb, finger, or grip-actuated safety device.

But I thought this was good and necessary? Several states laws say this is an unsafe design! But here we get to the “smart” part:

4.18 Security devices

4.18.1 Pistols shall have an integrated â€œlock-outâ€ security device as a permanent part of the pistol that disables the firing mechanism except when in the control of authorized individuals.

4.18.2 The security device shall be understood to include any externally worn items, such as rings, wristbands, or tokens that perform functions associated with the security device

4.18.3 The security device shall include a programmable authorization system that can be set to allow one or more operators to fire the pistol.

4.18.4 The security device shall not inhibit the operator from firing in either hand, one-handed or two-handed, with and without gloves, in any orientation.

4.18.5 The security device shall not alter the normal operation of grasping and firing the pistol as a pistol of the same design that is not equipped with the security device.

4.18.6 The security device shall not increase the time required by the operator to grasp, draw from a holster, and fire the pistol as a pistol of the same design that is not equipped with the security device.

4.18.7 The security device shall not emit audible sounds or visible signals.

4.18.8 If the security device may be susceptible to electromagnetic interference, either intentional or unintentional, the device shall be equipped with countermeasure detection technology that permits the operator to fire the gun when an attempt to block the authorization process is detected.

4.18.9 The security device shall covertly indicate when the pistol is ready to fire.

4.18.10 If the security device uses batteries, the batteries can be rechargeble but shall
be replaceable.

4.18.11 Low power to the security device shall be indicated covertly with sufficient time to safely take action.

4.18.12 If the security device malfunctions, it shall default to a state to allow the pistol to fire.

4.18.13 The security device should be easy for an operator to quickly reset or disengage if there is a malfunction.

They also demand the following in terms of reliability:

5.2 Reliability and durability

5.2.1 Pistols shall exhibit a mean overall malfunction or failure rate of no greater than 1 in 2,000, or shall exhibit a mean rounds between failure of no less than 2,000.

5.2.2 Pistols shall be durable and exhibit no failures due to wear or damage for a total of 10,000 rounds. Parts may be replaced in accordance with the manufacturerâ€™s specification for regular preventative maintenance. The replacement of parts per the manufacturerâ€™s maintenance schedule does not constitute a parts failure. This durability specification also applies to the security device on the pistol as well as any periphery devices that may be required to be used with the security device.

Basically, if it’s not very Glock-like, in terms of design, operation and reliability, law enforcement doesn’t want it. Keep this in mind, folks, when the gun control crowd insists that civilians accept far far less than this. The reason they will insist that we accept less is because this specification is not possible to meet with any existing technology.

Indictment in Philando Castile Shooting

Something smelled fishy about this since day one, and it looks like a Grand Jury agreed. These days I’m always reluctant to jump on bandwagons, because it’s harder and harder to discern what really happened, and what the motivations are of people driving the bandwagon. So to some degree you have to fall back to having faith in the justice system to do the right thing. The problem is I had a hard time typing that with a straight face.

In this case, it may be that the officer made a horrible mistake, and he will have to explain himself before a jury, just like any of us would under the same circumstances. Remember Prof. Joe Olson’s report about his encounter with this department. I will hope that all the facts come out at trial, that the jury is wise and objective, and that justice will be done. Mr. Castile deserves no less.

Impact of Florida’s Stand Your Ground Law

Appearing in the Journal of the American Medical Association (what this has to do with medicine is dubious, unless you subscribe to guns as a public health menace, which I don’t), a study looking at the effect of Florida’s “Stand Your Ground Law.” Given the AMA’s anti-gun position, it should not surprise you that they found it increases homicide. But the study does admit to a number of limitations, and makes some further admissions that tell me this was cooked up. Take this statement, for instance:

A potential limitation of interrupted time series designs is the possibility that other factors that occur simultaneously may distort estimates of intervention effects. Such factors might include national changes in social or economic variables (eg, a recession) or events that have a profound and lasting impact on society (eg, natural disasters). Additional design elements can be added to interrupted time series designs to assess whether such factors are influencing statistical estimates.Â We employed 2 such design features: analysis of homicide rates in 4 comparison states (New York, New Jersey, Ohio, and Virginia), and analysis of control outcomes (suicide and suicide by firearm).

Why pick those states as controls? The demographics of Ohio and Virginia are nothing like Florida. Virginia and New York also follow the common law that when faced with someone committing a forcible felony, you may employ deadly force to stop the commission of said felony, and you have no duty to retreat. This covers the vast majority of circumstances a citizen is going to be legally entitled to use deadly force in self-defense. New York and Virginia are already, via common law, Stand Your Ground states, so they make a very poor comparison to Florida. Also, why study just Florida? Maybe this is why, as the study admits: “Evaluations of Arizonaâ€™s and Texasâ€™ stand your ground laws found no statistically significant impact on homicide.”

So keep studying the issue until you get the result you’re looking for? Pick the control states poorly to drive your desired result? Looks like it to me. The studies themselves usually do admit to their limitations, but the media never covers that. Therefore, these studies help drive a certain narrative, which is why Bloomberg spends big money to get them.

Crying Wolf

I think this blog post deserves a share. I tend to agree:

This, I think, is the first level of crying wolf. What if, one day, there is a candidate who hates black people so much that heÂ doesnâ€™tÂ go on a campaign stop to a traditionally black church in Detroit, talk about all of the contributions black people have made to America, promise to fight for black people, and say that his campaign is about opposing racism in all its forms? What if thereâ€™s a candidate who does something more like, say, go to a KKK meeting and say that black people are inferior and only whites are real Americans?

We might want to use words like â€œopenly racistâ€ or â€œopenly white supremacistâ€ to describe him. And at that point, nobody will listen, because we wasted â€œopenly white supremacistâ€ on the guy who tweets pictures of himself eating a taco on Cinco de Mayo while saying â€œI love Hispanics!â€

When you spend years saying nearly everything is racist or sexist, then nothing is racist or sexist.Â Jonah Goldberg, a card carrying Never Trumper, also think this accusation is being taken too far. Charles C.W. Cooke, another NRO Never TrumperÂ also speaks badly of all this hyperbole.

TakeÂ Trump giving Steve Bannon a place in his Administration as Chief Strategist, something I think people should rightly be concerned about. But from everything I hear from the left, he sounds like the reincarnation of Joseph Goebbels. I respect Ian Tuttle’s take on this. Also readÂ Ben Shapiro’s takeÂ on Bannon, since he worked for him and quit under unfriendly circumstances.Â This should legitimately be very worrisome. But it’s hard to convince people. In a world whereÂ everyone who disagrees is Hitler, then no one is Hitler. I don’t think Trump is going to bring Nazism or Fascism to America. I think such claims are overwrought. But there are warning signs that things need to change in our rhetoric. Trump might not be Hitler, but continuing down the current path risks the rise of a real one, and if that day comes, the people warning about it will be ignored.

Don’t Bring an Airsoft Gun to a Real Gun Fight

Looks like our local armed robbers showed up with Airsoft pistols. Fortunately, the customer showed up with a real one. The customer will not be charged, despite having an expired License to Carry. There is a six month grace period in Pennsylvania if your license is expired. No word on whether he fell into that period. Sheriffs are supposed to notify licensees of impending expiration, but not all do.