Sebastian – Page 474 – Shall Not Be Questioned

Ben Franklin on Police

I’ve heard it claimed recently that the idea of a professional police force was a foreign one to the founding generation. While I wonder whether our founders would approve of the militarization of modern police forces, the concept of modern policing was not unknown to them. From the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin:

I began now to turn my thoughts a little to public affairs, beginning, however, with small matters. The city watch was one of the first things that I conceiv’d to want regulation. It was managed by the constables of the respective wards in turn; the constable warned a number of housekeepers to attend him for the night. Those who chose never to attend paid him six shillings a year to be excus’d, which was suppos’d to be for hiring substitutes, but was, in reality, much more than was necessary for that purpose, and made the constableship a place of profit; and the constable, for a little drink, often got such ragamuffins about him as a watch, that respectable housekeepers did not choose to mix with. Walking the rounds, too, was often neglected, and most of the nights spent in tippling. I thereupon wrote a paper to be read in Junto, representing these irregularities, but insisting more particularly on the inequality of this six-shilling tax of the constables, respecting the circumstances of those who paid it, since a poor widow housekeeper, all whose property to be guarded by the watch did not perhaps exceed the value of fifty pounds, paid as much as the wealthiest merchant, who had thousands of pounds’ worth of goods in his stores.

On the whole, I proposed as a more effectual watch, the hiring of proper men to serve constantly in that business; and as a more equitable way of supporting the charge the levying a tax that should be proportion’d to the property. This idea, being approv’d by the Junto, was communicated to the other clubs, but as arising in each of them; and though the plan was not immediately carried into execution, yet, by preparing the minds of people for the change, it paved the way for the law obtained a few years after, when the members of our clubs were grown into more influence.

What’s even more interesting in here is Franklin’s notion that the fact that the rich paid the same as the poor, rather than taking on more of the burden, would seem to be an endorsement of the ideas that are used to justify a progressive tax system. Ben Franklin is only a single founder, but as a lot, they tended to be more pragmatic, and a lot less ideologically strict than many ideologues today give them credit for.

“F&F Was Not Botched”

I don’t know how many times she has to say it, but the mainstream media certainly doesn’t seem to be catching on.

Double Standard on Paterno and Holder?

Town Hall has an article which speaks about the double standard of Joe Paterno being fired with Eric Holder holding onto their jobs, even though they would appear to be similarly situated, in terms of their roles in their respective scandals. I can accept the logic here, and I agree that Holder ought to be fired or step down.

But I suspect the answer is that our society is just a lot more outraged over child rape than they are about gun smuggling. To be honest, I’m fine with that being the case, and I think it’s a good indication society as a whole largely has their priorities straight. I am reluctant to compare the two as roughly equivalent criminals acts. What Paterno covered up was far more heinous than what Holder covered up, even if I think they both deserve the same ultimate treatment.

The Gun Culture Has Changed, Professor Messner

I love me a good tale about gun owners and their psychology, especially those tales which are woven by lofty academics who pretty clearly haven’t been outside of the Ivory Tower for a while. Over at the HuffPo, there’s no clearer example of some of the nonsense of this type. I invite you, dear readers, to go look atÂ part oneÂ andÂ part two, of the HuffPo interview with Professor Michael Messner, author of King of the Wild Suburb: A Memoir of Fathers, Sons and Guns. Let me share with you some excerpts from the interview, and discuss why I think his thinking is antiquated, and most decidedly out of touch with the gun culture of today:

You write movingly that “those hunting trips with Dad and Gramps were actually about fathers and sons finding a way to love each other. These outings were not so much about hunting for deer: they were about hunting for each other.” You have two sons who are now young adults. Because you gave up hunting before they were born, you never had that as a catalyst to connect with them. Is that a continuing source of sadness? Did you find other less violent ways to bond with them that will stick with them throughout their lives, as your experiences hunting with your father and grandfather have stayed with you?

What exactly is flawed about men bonding through activity? Men and women are somewhat different, I think, in how they form friendships. Men tend to bond with each other more through activity, and I think this is not really different for father and sons. He speaks of this type of bonding as if it were a bad thing, but that strikes me as rather narrow minded.

Part of the tension–and this is really only possible to see in retrospect–is that this 1950s identification with Davy Crockett was very much a pre-civil rights era celebration of white masculinity, and the violent subjugation of the continent from Native peoples, and eventually of the Southwest from Mexico. Still today, in a good deal of popular culture as well as in political debates about gun violence, we tend to think of white guys with guns as protectors and heroes, while reacting with fear to images of black or brown men with guns.

The Professor is making connections that I think only exist in his mind. You can embrace masculinity without racism or sexism. Because some of the people who embraced masculinity in the past, also happened to be racist and sexist, does not mean the two need to be forever connected. This strikes me as incredibly weak thinking for an academic. It also just amazes me we can’t have a discussion about gun ownership with people on the left without bringing up the whole “scared of brown people” motivation for gun ownership.

Well, I guess I’d be surprised to hear that sort of politicized passion about something like hunting coming from a young guy today. However I am happy to see so many young men today — including my sons Sasha and Miles — for whom ideas like equality with women, gay and lesbian people are taken for granted.

Professor Messner is a man living in the past. He’s had his thinking tainted by the left-wing baby boomer culture that focuses heavily on gender, and rejects a flawed conception of masculinity that is entirely of their own making. Would it surprise Messner that “equality with women, gay and lesbian people are taken for granted,” even among many gun owners and hunters today? Would it be such a shock to discover we’ve changed along with the rest of society?

Women are now the fastest growing demographic of gun owners. Most of us have not only been tolerant of this trend, but outright embraced the ideas of women being involved in our sports. Younger men want to share their hobbies with their wives. And why not hunting and shooting as a hobby for a couple to share? Many of us have also either been completely tolerant of gay gun rights groups, or have outright embraced their coming to our cause. I also think I’ve been a vocal advocate for legalizing gay marriage. Does it mean anything that I can announce this on a blog about gun rights without worrying about losing readers?

Get out of the past Professor Messner. We’ve come a long long way since the gun culture of your father and grandfather. The hunting and shooting culture has changed into something more tolerant and inclusive. I would invite Professor Messner to step out of the Ivory Tower of academia for a bit, an attend something like an Steel Challenge or USPSA national competition, and then talk to some of the women shooters about how they view their relationship with firearms, hunting, and shooting through the lens of their gender. Sure, you’ll give them a little chuckle about such a blast-from-the-past question, but some of their answers might just surprise you.

Campus Carry Debate at GMU

You’ll notice our best buddy, Ladd Everitt of Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, attended a counter-protest. As for activity on our side, I’m generally of the opinion that the campus carry movement needs to be an organic movement among students, which is one reason I really like the Students for Concealed Carry on Campus group. I think when it’s done by mainstream groups like NRA or VCDL, it can come off as a bunch of old dudes trying to impose something on the student body, rather than something the students want for themselves. I was happy to see a lot of student-age looking folks in the video, but also some folks that would qualify as your pretty stereotypical gun owner demographic. If I were organizing a protest like this, I’d stipulate we want people under thirty for the cameras.

Bloomberg Wins But Loses

The good news for Mayor Bloomberg is that he won all the races he was backing in Northern Virginia. The bad news, however, is the reason he backed these candidates was to prevent the Republicans for taking over the Senate, which they appear to have done. This means:

There are 10 gun bills that have passed the GOP-controlled General Assembly and now could also pass the Senate, including one that would repeal Virginiaâ€™s current mandate that a person can only buy one gun a month.

However, one of the stateâ€™s leading political experts noted that sweeping reform was unlikely.

But with the GOP controlling key committees, it will certainly be easier. The question is whether Bloomberg really believe that Virginia’s one-gun-a-month law help tamp down trafficking to New York City, or whether he’s concerned that if the law is repealed, and Virginia’s trace numbers do not precipitously increase, or in fact decline, whether it will repudiate the entire concept, which Bloomberg’s Mayors are pushing in other states.

Covering IDPA In the New Media Space

The Gun Nuts Gang is announcing that they are partnering with IDPA to produce IDPA.tv. We wish them luck. We were supposed to wish them luck two days ago, but it slipped my mind, which is kind of funny because now I remember having a conversation about Caleb where I told him I was likely to forget over my weekend brain dump.

Forcing a Response from Bloomberg’s Office

Looks like the Mayor’s office has felt the need to officially respond to our little finding from yesterday, which has spread around Al Gore’s Internets quite nicely today:

“With more than 600 mayors in cities across the county, there are always going to be changes to keep up with. We actually called every one of our 169 mayorsâ€™ offices in Pennsylvania this summer to confirm status. The staff in Freeland never returned our calls, so we relied on the government websites, which still list him as Mayor.”

So how many other towns “never returned our calls,” who’s mayors you still kept singing onto your gun control agenda, or to block pro-Second Amendment legislation in Congress?

Freeland Borough is a small town in Northeastern Pennsylvania, having only a few thousand inhabitants. It’s not atypical of Pennsylvania towns. Many of these local municipalities don’t have full time staff to return Mayor Bloomberg’s calls. Nor do they always keep their web sites up to date. The greater point here is that Bloomberg is using the names of his mayors without doing so much as asking each mayor whether or not they want to get behind specific initiatives.

In all likelihood, a great many MAIG mayors sign up thinking “Who could be for illegal guns?” and don’t bother to pay much attention to what Mayor Bloomberg is using their names for. That’s why it’s incumbent on gun owners who live in towns with MAIG mayors, to try to get their mayor to quit. In a lot of cases, all it takes is talking to them.

Assault Clip

A graphical explanation. Needs a shoulder thing that goes up though.

Compromise Happens

Referring again to the discussion thread previously, and over at Weer’d World, and Common Gunsense, in regards to compromise: I think it’s important to understand the nature of compromise to know why it can’t really work even if we could find some. This is a topic I’ve covered before, or at least I feel like I have, but it’s worth renewing the conversation, I think.

You have to start with the base assumption that neither side wants to give up anything. This is a true state. We’d obviously just like to get, say, suppressors deregulated, without having to give up anything. Our opponents, meanwhile, would love to pass, say, a ban on all private transfers of firearms, without having to give up anything. The art of compromise is figuring out what’s most important to you, and seeing if you can trade something you don’t care that much about for something you do. If what you don’t care so much about is something your opponent values highly, then a deal can be struck, especially if what they are giving up is something important to you. In that case a deal is quite likely. The problem is that doesn’t happen too often.

One of the rare cases of something that was at least somewhat close to a true, brokered compromise was HR 2640, where we agreed to funding to improve state reporting to NICS for mental health, in exchange for some important easing of the prohibited persons laws, especially as it applied to people adjudicated of mental illness. The Bradys, in my opinion, actually gave up more in that deal than we did, because what was really important to them at the time was being able to tout a legislative victory. But if Brady could have rammed that bill through without making any concessions, it surely would have.

Most of the time compromise happens through struggle rather than agreement.Â You start with what you really want, which may not have the votes to pass, and then agree to change it to something less than that to pick up votes. If you’re still looking at improvement once you get to a majority, you have something that can pass. This happens on both sides. HR822 today does not go as far as the effort in the Senate a few years ago. That’s because the Senate effort failed by a few votes, so you need to make changes to pick up the extra votes. On the other side, the Assault Weapons Ban never would have had a sunset provision in it if it wasn’t necessary for our opponents to concede that to pick up needed votes for passage.

So any collaborative effort of a democratic nature is going to tend to, by the nature of the beast, be a compromise. It won’t be something forged on blogs, or by discussion between the sides. It’ll happen through the political process of either trying to pass or defeat a piece of legislation. Both sides will struggle for their own interests, and through lobbyists, will do what they need to achieve a victory, and to scuttle the other side’s best laid plans. The Brady folks don’t want to compromise, and neither do we. That’s why we’ll never be marching, hand in hand to Congress, embracing us each giving up something.