Sebastian – Page 486 – Shall Not Be Questioned

Some Good and Bad News on the Job Front

Posting yesterday was light due to a job interview in Philly. It went well. It’s a very good fit, and I think it would be a great work environment. I interviewed with another outfit Monday, and it also went well. Both are outfits that interviewed me for other jobs, turned me down, but have brought me back to consider me for other positions. So I am happy about that.

But the company I interviewed with Monday just has clues here and there that it might not be a great work environment. There are certain warning signs you can kind of pick up during the interview process, and I’ve been getting those kinds of vibes. It’s little give aways that kind of let you know that people aren’t all that happy and relaxed. If you’ve never been on the other side of the table, interviewing people for a position in an environment you know is miserable, you might not know what I mean. I could be completely misreading the situation, but I just have a gut feeling. If not for that, the work sounds pretty interesting, and it would get me back into engineering and out of IT, which is an interesting proposition, but not something I’m completely sure I want to do yet.

The place I interviewed with yesterday seems to be a happy, relaxed place to work, and I’ve been favorably impressed with the people I’ve met during the interviews. The outfit is extremely stable, so for once I would not be worrying every month that I might not have a job the next month. I’d have some people under me, so it would get me some better management experience than I currently have. But this is a large employer, and I expect they will not be able to move as quickly as the other outfit. I believe that the other outfit is progressing toward an offer.

So the job that puts off some bad vibes is likely to plunk cash on the table before the job that I think I would really enjoy. But when you’re unemployed, cash on the table is cash on the table. So what to do? My inclination is to proceed with the offer, and set a start date to mid-November. That will hopefully buy enough time to see if the other opportunity can be progressed to an offer. If they can move quickly enough to telling me their intention is to hire, I will withdraw from the other outfit before my start date. It’s a bit of a shitty thing to do, I think, to accept a job then pull out before you start, but it’s probably better than starting and quitting after a few weeks.

I’m curious if any readers have had experience with this situation, on either side of the table, and what you think the best policy is? You begin to understand why employers are wary of the unemployed. I have to wonder if it’s not so much the stigma of the person being let go by someone else, so much as that unemployment makes you consider doing things you’d never do looking to switch jobs. I have always held myself to high standards, and this is not a natural thing for me to do. Do you tell the one employer they are a second choice? What if the first choice falls through? I’m afraid I’m not going to be relaxed until I’m settled in a job.

Philly Mayor’s Opposition to HR822

WyattÂ offers his opinion to the Mayor on blaming the Â the city’s problems on guns. Nutter’s noting that many Florida permits are going to high crime areas does not surprise me. Philadelphia routinely uses the “character or reputation” clause to deny people improperly. You can appeal, but that goes to a Board stocked with the Mayor’s cronies, and they always uphold denials. You can appeal a denial to the Court of Common Pleas, but you have to hire a lawyer to do that, and a Florida license is a lot cheaper than a lawyer.

This Florida issue wouldn’t be an issue if Philadelphia issued LTCs under the same standards employed in the rest of the state.

The Tech Industry Today

Campus Carry …

… who needs it?

“Go Obama!” Or Not.

As a reddish-purple Pennsylvanian who hates living in a sea of blue, I find this heartening:

Minutes stretched on awkwardly after U.S. Labor Secretary Hilda Solis spoke to local Democrats. Yet that was less uncomfortable than one man’s attempt to break the silence.

“Let’s go Obama!” he shouted, clapping loudly.

No response.

Obama’s Pennsylvania Problem, in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

Obama has a Pennsylvania problem, particularly with working-class Democrats and women who supported Hillary Clinton in 2008.

Looks like we get the fun of being a swing state yet again. Maybe this time we’ll actually swing.

The Nanny Corporation

Megan McArdle details some of the lengths employers are going through to control health care costs:

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I’m pretty skeptical. Â Let’s start by asking what the selection bias was. Â Cleveland fired two high-profile doctors who wouldn’t quit smoking. Â One imagines that employees who do not want their employer nannying them about their gym time and alcohol consumption probably decline to work at the Clinic.

As someone who is currently unemployed heading on 4 months now, I would starve and lose my house before I took a job with an employer who took such a vibrant interest in my personal life. Certainly if this was the cost of employer provided health care, I would go elsewhere. Maybe that’s the point.

Henigan Carrying the Water

You almost have to feel sorry for Dennis Henigan sometimes. To spend your entire life working on an issue only to watch it circling the bowl the past few years can’t be easy on anyone. It also has to be difficult to try to justify something I have to believe Henigan knows was wrong, but since the Administration’s heart was in the right place, so maybe that’s all the matters in Henigan’s mind. Otherwise, to try to carry the Obama Administration’s dirty water, after everything he hasn’t done for them, just makes you a tool.

I have a difficult time following Henigan’s logic, suggesting that “grievously weak federal gun laws” are to blame here. If our government is going to sanction criminal trafficking of firearms, what federal law is going to make a bit of difference?Â Henigan suggests,

If dealer sales of assault rifles were restricted, as they were for 10 years until 2004 when Congress and President Bush allowed the federal assault weapon ban to expire, it would not be necessary for law enforcement to track down the guns after they leave the gun shop.

Except in most cases the weapon an issue here is the Krinkov pistol, which were readily available during the ban, because they did not qualify as assault weapons under the federal definition, and most certainly aren’t rifles by any definition. Henigan further asserts,

The Attorney General’s most severe critics even oppose the new ATF rule requiring real-time reporting to ATF when border state dealers sell multiple semi-automatic rifles to a single buyer, a red flag for trafficking. The same members of Congress who denounce ATF for failing to stop trafficked guns from crossing the border into Mexico also oppose a rule that would give ATF the information it needs to arrest the traffickers and interdict the guns, before they get to the border.

Henigan has to be insane if he truly believes the nonsense he’s spewing here. The multiple sales requires accomplishes nothing in terms of interdicting guns. A piece of paper sent to a bureaucrat at ATF is not going to physically intervene and prevent that weapon from being illegally trafficked over the border, or illegally sold to a criminal in this country. Data is worthless if it is not acted on, and to act on it requires significant resources.

Even accepting Henigan’s position that this was a case of “flawed enforcement tactics,” one has to wonder how he expects, given that ATF lacks “the leadership and authority it needs to do its job well,” and was thus unable to track the weapons the dealers were voluntarily telling them about, how it’s going to cope when it gets hundreds of times that data, with the criminal transactions drowning in the noise of the legal ones. Dennis doesn’t mention that in his simplistic and naive analysis.

But the Administration certainly went through a lot of trouble to try to drive up the trace numbers in an attempt to justify bigger budgets and more laws and regulations, so I suppose carrying its water is the least Dennis Henigan can do.

Pro-Gun “Heros”?

This seems to be a common theme among our opponents, to try to make us wear the shame of Tennessee State Representative Curry Todd, sponsor of Tennessee’s restaurant carry bill, who was caught in a DUI while he also had a pistol holstered inside his vehicle. To do this, they are classifying him as our “hero.” While forcing responsible, law-abiding gun owners to accept responsibility for those who misuse guns is a tried and true tenet of our opponents philosophy, this one I think is particularly laughable.

I can’t think of too many politicians I would regard as heroic figures, even ones that are on my side on the gun issue. In addition, many of the politicians who are on my side on the gun issue are decidedly not on many others. Just thinking here in Pennsylvania, I’ve always appreciated Rep. Daryl Metcalfe’s tenacity on the issue of Pennsylvanian’s Second Amendment rights, but I disagree with him pretty strongly on just about every other social issue of the day, and have always thought him a demagogue on a number of those issues.

Politicians aren’t our heroes. They are instruments that the interests of citizens are represented through. No more, no less. Todd is certainly not a hero of mine, as I had never even heard of the guy until this incident, and I certainly hope he’s appropriately punished for his transgression. But our opponents will continue to try to make us wear his shame as if it were our own. As if we were the ones who were caught in an aggravated DUI with a pistol strapped between the seat cushions. That is part and parcel for how they operate, and likely how they justify their intrusion into our personal choices.

The D.C. Standard

Emily Miller went through the D.C. process for legally obtaining a gun. In this article, she mulls over the questions asked on the form the D.C. police require before approving you:

Also, if youâ€™ve ever been convicted of â€œvagrancyâ€, youâ€™re out of luck. Iâ€™m not sure why hanging around the 7-Eleven parking lot too long makes you unqualified to have a gun, but someone in the city government does.

They are also worried about someone who has operated a “bawdy house” from possessing guns. And even after she’s done with this particular form, and gets it notarized, there’s still 17 more steps to go. There is no way we can allow this to stand, and I don’t care what the courts say. After we get HR822, repealing DC’s gun laws and removing the subject of firearms regulation back to Congress needs to become a priority.

It could be argued that Washington D.C. has so few gun owners, this is not a wise use of limited legislative resources, but I disagree. If the D.C. City government had taken the Supreme Court decision in Heller seriously, it easily could have restructured its laws with due respect for the fact that it was a fundamental constitutional right. It chose not to. D.C. chose to see what it could get away with. This charade is now being repeated in Chicago.

I want to set up D.C. as an example, to convince other jurisdictions that it’s better to accept the inevitable than to continue playing games with people’s Constitutional rights. The only way to do that is to say D.C. is bound only by the United States Code and federal regulations when it comes to gun laws, and take their toy away from them by modifying home rule so they can never regulate firearms again. Right now jurisdictions like D.C. and Chicago are betting they can thumb their noses at us with impunity. We have to show them that this is a grave error, and will only result in losing more than they would have if they had just behaved themselves from the beginning.

NAGR’s Continuing Opposition to HR822

Here’s some excerpts from Dudley Brown’s latest e-mail alert:

Subject: Anti-gun bill getting worse!

I can see suggesting letting the feds involve themselves in concealed carry is a bad idea, but let’s not get ridiculous here. Unfortunately, ridiculous is where this is headed:

As I type this, all-out war has been declared on your gun rights in Washington, D.C. by the House Judiciary Committee.Â Your National Association for Gun Rights has been warning you that H.R. 822 is a Trojan Horse.

Those bastards! Wanting to enforce the Second Amendment against the states using their 14th Amendment powers. If this is all out war, bring it on. I’m also incredulous at the implication this is a TrojanÂ Horse. The fact that HR822 could, perhaps later, open the door to more serious federal involvement in an issue we might come to later to regret is arguable. But you can’t, out of one side of your mouth, argue that the people pushing HR822 are “well-meaning” and out of the other side suggest they are foisting a Trojan Horse on gun owners. Perhaps Brown is only guilty of using poor metaphors here, but Trojan Horse has implications as to the intentions of the people offering the gift.

Just today, Republicans helped pass an amendment that orders the Feds to investigate the â€œsafetyâ€ of mail-in CCW permits from states like Florida, Utah and New Hampshire.

This is a common tactic to pick up more votes. Some softy gets an idea in his head that he’d like to have more information about something or another and you get things like this. I would also point out that our opponents have done quite a bit of this, where they commission studies that are sent to committees intended to reach a fore drawn conclusion. Turnabout is fair play, and that’s all I have to say about this particular amendment.

So-called â€œpro-gunâ€ Republicans even KILLED an amendment that would have allowed permit holders to defend themselves in the District of Columbia, one of the most dangerous cities in the country.

A more aggressive bill was tried before and died in the Senate. We’re going to want something that can pass. Every time you tweak a bill, you’re either going to pick up or lose votes. Passing legislation is about holding on to a majority needed to get a bill passed, and that’s going to mean HR822 needs to be less aggressive than its predecessors. You can always go back later and tweak with a separate bill when everyone realizes the sky hasn’t fallen. This isn’t about the Republicans on the committee being anti-gun, it’s about keeping the bill in a form that’s more likely to see passage.

Brown continues on to speak of the many anti-gun amendments which were defeated in Committee markup, which was entirely predictable. He suggests that the Senate has a whole host of anti-gun Amendments they would like to tack on as well, so that’s where the bill is going to certainly become anti-gun. I think that’s unlikely, but it’s worth noting that the Senate can’t pass a bill unilaterally. If we can’t get a clean bill out of the Senate, the bill can die right there.

His letter ends with a plea to call judiciary members and get them to oppose HR822, which puts Dudley on the same side as groups such as MAIG, the Brady Campaign, CSGV, and the Violence Policy Center, as well as big city police chiefs, and your usual Joyce funded puppets.

As I said, I don’t bemoan anyone who’s nervous about or opposed to federal intervention in this area. Before Heller and McDonald, and before we had a court strategy, I agreed with those folks. But Brown is way out of line here with his rhetoric and tactics, which have gone way beyond the line of good faith disagreement. He has joined with our opponents in word and in deed.