The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State …
The day we pay our respects and celebrate a document we’ve never really taken that seriously. It was a radical document when the founders wrote it. Reconstruction era Republicans made it even more radical — so radical our ruling elite starting ignoring the parts of it that didn’t suit them. The progressives hijacked it for a time, and later decided they didn’t need to bother with it anymore.
Perhaps a better way to celebrate this radical document would be actually trying to follow it for once.
Anyone who’s ever been civically active in a small town, can tell you that Borough Council meetings are often flypaper for the drunk, crazy, or attention starved. Usually switching off their mic is enough to get them to go away and/or sober up. Security can be an issue for Borough meetings, but generally the presence of a few officers, who would be there anyway, is generally regarded by most small Boroughs as sufficient for keeping order.
That is, of course, unless you’re a small borough in New Jersey, in which case nothing less than H&K submachine guns will suffice. I have to agree with Tam this won’t end well.
Looks like it’s not a good idea to embarrass the regime. That’s pretty severe rhetoric for Glenn Reynolds, but I don’t blame him for being animated about this. The implications are serious. I had started to jump on this, but reading further about the fact that this filmmaker was on probation for Bank Fraud, and forbidden from using computers, having others use computers on his behalf, except for vocation, and was also forbidden from using an alias, I am less certain. A person on probation doesn’t ordinarily have rights as a normal, free person does. A person on probation agrees to give up certain liberties in exchange for not serving their sentence in federal prison. I’ll quote Popehat on this:
Based on 6 years as a federal prosecutor and 12 as a federal defense lawyer, let me say this: minor use of a computer — like uploading a video to YouTube — is not something that I would usually expect to result in arrest and a revocation proceeding; I think a warning would be more likely unless the defendant had already had warnings or the probation officer was a hardass. But if I had a client with a serious fraud conviction, and his fraud involved aliases, and he had the standard term forbidding him from using aliases during supervised release, and his probation officer found out that he was running a business, producing a movie, soliciting money, and interacting with others using an alias, I would absolutely expect him to be arrested immediately, whatever the content of the movie. Seriously. Nakoula pled guilty to using alias to scam money. Now he’s apparently been producing a film under an alias, dealing with the finances of the film under the alias, and (if his “Sam Bacile” persona is to be believed) soliciting financing under an alias. I would expect him to run into a world of hurt for that even if he were producing a “Coexist” video involving kittens.
Read the whole thing. I’m persuaded by the argument that if the FBI was the entity doing the questioning, that might pose an issue. But in the articles I’m finding, it sounds like he was questioned by federal probation officers, and it was the LA County Sheriff that brought him in. Not that Obama hasn’t shown himself to be about as useless as an ashtray on a motorbike as President, but I’m not sure this is thuggery yet, though I could be convinced. My bigger fear is that this is going to be taken as appeasement, and is just going to promote more violence.
UPDATE: Further follow-up at Popehat.
A thing hiring people tend to forget is that not only are they interviewing you, you’re interviewing them.
I worked very briefly for a company the last month of 2011, where the company failed the interview (from my point of view) but being unemployed, and against my better judgement, I took the job, hoping it wouldn’t be that bad. The company was complete chaos. Executive management berated employees, and whipped them to work longer hours, and weekends. They blamed employees for their own failings. I started getting drawn up into the dysfunctional vortex after a few weeks, and facing the threat of unexpectedly losing a weekend for which I had made plans which cost me money already, I drew up and turned in my resignation, and walked out. Surprised I wouldn’t give notice, I pointed out we were still in the “probationary period” of the employment relationship, and I did not feel notice would be mutually beneficial. The “probationary agreement” I signed recognized I would not get full full benefits for 90 days, and could be terminated at any point without notice. Surely they didn’t think that probationary period only worked one way?
I saved my weekend, got to take the trip I paid for. I had been talking to a friend whose company I had invested in years ago, who had suddenly developed a need for my skills. He had agreed to bring me on the day before, whenever I wanted. I never got so much as a call from an HR person at the company I left, telling me this was not an uncommon occurrence. I never thought I’d just walk out on a job, but having spend the better part of 5 of the 10 years at my last job putting up with abuse from a sadistic CEO, I wasn’t about to go through that again.
There’s a lot of etiquette out there that suggests you don’t do this or that, but I think that depends on a mutual respect, which is often absent among many employers. One bit of advice I give young people starting out in their careers, especially if they are particularly skilled or talented, is don’t take shit from employers, and don’t pretend courtesy is a one way street, where you have to be courteous to them, but they can abuse the hell out of you.
Fortunately, that part of my life is behind me. One of the reasons I invested in the I work for now company was because of the philosophy on how to treat employees, and how to build a company without selling your soul. I’ve known the CEO here for a long time, and if he gets uppity, I think I’m still like the 3rd largest shareholder of the company :) But we’re a small outfit, with ambitions to grow bigger. Speaking of which, I’m currently shopping for commercial real-estate, particularly a kind of industrial or warehouse space. If anyone knows about that process and can offer advice, I’d be grateful. Especially gotchas, or things to watch out for.
I’m starting to think the best way to deal with Bloomberg’s illegal mayors is to play whack-a-mole with them. When they express ambitions for higher political office, we squash them like bugs. We’ve have a reasonable amount of success spoiling the political aspirations of MAIG mayors here in Pennsylvania, and it looks like Jacob is managing to play whack-a-mole with MAIG mayors successfully in New York as well. This would be the strategy of waiting for the enemy to come to you, rather than engage in a costly and tiresome campaign of search and destroy. If we can make MAIG membership poison for seeking higher office, especially Republicans looking to win primaries, it’s one way to weaken Bloomberg substantively. *
* A note for our anti-gun friends, who seem to freak out on Twitter when I blog in metaphor: I am not speaking of literally going to war with Bloomberg’s Mayors, nor am I litterally speaking of search and destroy missions. I don’t even have the choppers for that (though I do have some loudspeakers that could blare Walkürenritt). Also, I am not literally speaking of poisoning anyone, nor do I think Bloomberg’s Mayors are small, burrowing rodents with poor eyesight who need to be beaten over the head. I do not mean to insult moles, which are fine and honorable creatures, by suggesting that.
I’ve been itching to build another AR for a while, but our Friends of the NRA Dinner last night got me the parts to get started, even though I didn’t quite win everything I wanted. The fine folks at Geissele Automatics, who are a local business right down the PA Turnpike in Norristown, donated a few free-float modular AR handguards, and three AR triggers, including one of their match triggers. Those items went to silent auction, except one of the triggers which went to the stretch raffle. I put bids in on all of them, and flooded the stretch raffle with tickets. I also bid on an AR-15 lower in the live auction, but that got  bit rich for me. So I ended up with the hand guards. The triggers got bid up and I ended up out. I was pleased there were enough AR guys there to keep the bidding going in the right direction for the dinner.
So now that I have a start with the handguards, I guess I should think about a barrel. I’m looking for a 20 inch barrel that will shoot military spec ammo decently, but can also do reasonably well with heavier, longer bullets. I realize these things are tradeoffs, so I’d be looking to trade to shooting lighter, shorter bullets. I’m thinking perhaps that has a Wylde chamber would be beneficial too, though I’m not sure about that yet. I’d probably be best off going with a stainless barrel. I’m not looking for super top of the line, because I don’t want to fork out 400 or more for a barrel. So if anyone has suggestions for how to proceed, I would be grateful for the advice.
Sorry for the absence, but we had our Friends of the NRA banquet tonight, and for just our county managed to bring in an order or magnitude more warm bodies than the typical CSGV protest I’ve seen outside the White House, and these people were actually forking over hard earned cash to support youth shooting.
But today’s quote comes from Tam, who comments on New York City actually adopting the Big Gulp Ban, opening up the market for smuggling high-capacity drink containers:
… and best of all, even if you get intercepted crossing the Hudson with your illicit Styrofoam cargo and the NYPD opens up on you, it’s not like they could actually hit you (and the Palisades make a safer backstop for them than Fifth Avenue does…)
Zing!
Via Dave Hardy, who notes “Not too surprising, since as I recall Florida never had a retreat requirement in the first place.” If I recall, Florida followed more closely to common law. Someone committing a felony you could shoot dead, which is going to be most cases in which a citizen defends themselves. You were required to retreat if you could do so safely otherwise.
The article is here, and of course, the best part is:
Gun control advocates immediately criticized the report as “disappointing,” saying it did not go far enough to determine the true impact of the Stand Your Ground law.
“If the state wanted to work with a real data analysis, then fund it. It became pretty clear that they are going to fail to do that,” said Ginny Simmons, director of the Second Chance on Shoot First campaign.
That’s Bloomberg’s group, for those of you wondering. The fact is that Stand Your Ground just doesn’t have much impact. The number of cases where duty to retreat would even have come up in Florida before the law are vanishingly small, and despite the fact that gun control groups lied their way into making SYG and issue in the Trayvon Martin case, it never would have been at issue either before or after the law went into effect.
Someone sure wants to know what deep blue states think of gun control. Consider this Quennipiac poll:
52. Do you think the laws covering the sale of guns in New York State should be made more strict, less strict, or kept as they are now? |
|
Tot Rep Dem Ind More strict 61% 40% 79% 55% Less strict 8 14 4 11 Kept the same 28 44 16 31 DK/NA 3 2 2 3 |
|
Men Wom Wht Blk Hsp More strict 50% 72% 56% 83% 78% Less strict 14 3 10 4 8 Kept the same 34 22 32 13 13 DK/NA 2 3 3 1 2 |
Of course, if you want to know where that attitude comes from in New York:
UpStat NYC Sub More strict 49% 74% 62% Less strict 12 5 7 Kept the same 35 19 29 DK/NA 4 2 1
The same poll also shows overwhelming approval for gun rationining, once again, mostly from NYC. I’ll bet if you excluded Long Island and the other downstate counties, New York would look a lot different in terms of its attitude on gun laws.
