Shall Not Be Questioned – Page 766 – The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State …

National Opt Out Day

Given that Bitter is flying back home today, from visiting her niece, nephew, brother and sister in law in Nashville, I have to mention that this is an effort I highly approve of. November 24th is one of the most heavily traveled days of the year. We have to do our best to avoid flying as much as we can, and when we have to fly, to stand up for our rights. The airlines should be natural allies in the struggle against TSA, but as of yet they are not.

I would point out that the Democrats, that we just kicked out of power, demanded the creation of TSA in exchange for the Republicans getting us the <sarcasm>wonderfully necessary and efficient Department of Homeland Security</sarcasm>.Â I’ll start having a lot more faith in the Tea Party movement if they start to take up the mantle of dismantling the federal security theater apparatus we implemented during the Bush years in response to 9/11. I really do believe this is one of the great civil liberties issues of our time.

Now that we have pushed the Democrats off the throat of our Republic, it’s time to remind the Republicans that we still don’t really appreciate them getting us drunk and taking advantage of us in our susceptible state in those dark moments after the towers fell.Â I’m not going to demand the Republicans stand up for gay marriage or abortion rights, but they damned well ought to stand up for our right not to have pseudo-naked pictures of our wives, husbands and children paraded before TSA bureaucrats, under threat of groping. I think that’s a pretty basic principle we all ought to agree on. Who would really be against that as a family value?

ATF Ruling on Airsoft Replicas

John Richardson points to a copy of an ATF ruling on Airsoft replicas, which has since disappeared. The end result may be kind of absurd, but the fact is, if you can pop out the Airsoft bits, pop in an AR-15 or M16 trigger group, throw on a real AR-15 upper and bolt assembly, and get the thing to go bang, the Airsoft receiver is by law a firearm, and if it goes full auto, then the receiver is also a machinegun. The law regulates firearms or receivers of firearms. An AR-15 lower does not undergo all that much mechanical stress. Most of that is in the upper receiver. It would be perfectly safe to fire an AR-15 with a pot metal lower receiver. Might not stand up to abuse, but you’ll be able to use it.

So I don’t think this is really something ATF deserved to be mocked over. It sounds as if some of these Airsoft replicas are indeed close enough to AR-15/M16 receivers to function as such. The law might be absurd, but that’s Congress’ fault, not ATFs.

It is Easy, Comparatively

Looks like other people have noticed influencing a political landscape isn’t that hard:

Funny, after I taped my PJTV interview yesterday with David Kirkham â€” whose Utah Tea Party toppled Bob Bennett and brought a new Speaker into the Utah State House to boot â€” and Mike Wilson, whose Cincinnati Tea Party helped paint Ohio red last week, they stayed on the hookup and were talking about how the biggest surprise to both of them, each a political neophyte, was how comparativelyÂ easy politics was compared to running a business.

It’s absolutely easier than running a business. It’s easier than managing even a small group at a company. Running for office takes people skills, and a certain moral flexibility, but the game is pretty straight forward. If you have the right kind of defective personality, you can go far.

Veterans Day

I was privileged to see a this video previewed at an NRA board meeting, which is now being promoted to honor the work of veterans on behalf of other veterans on Veterans Day. Watch it, it’s pretty moving.

Surprise

Federal bureaucracies enjoy trumping up issues that tend to get them more funding from Congress. The Mexican Gun Canard has been a fantastic issue in this regard for ATF and the DOJ. It’s also been a bonanza, and will continue to be, from our opponents. When bureaucratic interests line up in our opponents favor, that’s never a good thing for gun rights.

Hohenwarter Q&A

Because we’ve had a voting session scheduled for Monday, where Castle Doctrine could possibly come up, I’ve informed NRA that we can wait until after Monday for the Q&A. John is going to have to be in Harrisburg, and I do not wish to distract him from the task at hand. Plus, it’ll add more to the story about the Castle Doctrine efforts. After Monday’s voting session is over, I will get questions in and get then answered as best I can.

In the mean time, probably better to contact your House rep, along with Rep. Eachus and Speaker McCall, and tell them you want them to vote on Castle Doctrine.

Teaching Slavery

Apparently now being the subject of lawsuits. I agree with Clayton that slavery is a lot for a fifth grader to wrap their heads around in its entirety, but it would seem to me a discussion with the teacher, principle, and school board (in that order) might be a more productive path forward rather than a lawsuit.

The Forbidden Topic

I know our opponents hate it when we bring up the ‘N’ word, but Dave Kopel quotes for us a 2009 article by Stephen Halbrook in the St. Thomas Law Review:

That brings us back to Alfred Flatow. [The article provides a case study of Flatow, a Jewish veteran of the German army, who competed for Germany in the 1896 Olympics.] What if he â€“ and an unknown number of other Germans, Jews and non-Jews alike â€“ had not registered his firearms in 1932? Or if the Weimar Republic had not decreed firearm registration at all? What if the Nazis, when they took power in 1933 and disarmed social democrats and other political enemies, or when they decided to repress the entire Jewish population in 1938, did not have police records of registered firearm owners? Can it be said with certainty that no one, either individually or in groups small or large, would have resisted Nazi depredations?

One wonders what thoughts may have occurred to Alfred Flatow in 1942 when he was dying of starvation at the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Perhaps memories of the 1896 Olympics and of a better Germany flashed before his eyes. Did he have second thoughts, maybe repeated many times before, on whether he should have registered his revolver and two pocket pistols in 1932 as decreed by the Weimar Republic? Or whether he should have obediently surrendered them at a Berlin police station in 1938 as ordered by Nazi decree, only to be taken into Gestapo custody? We will never know, but it is difficult to imagine that he had no regrets.

Now our opponents tell us we can’t talk about the mass disarmament that preceded the Holocaust, because that’s just a ridiculous thing, you know. But it seems to me that the firearms policies of mass murdering totalitarian states are highly relevant to the debate over the scope of a constitutional amendment that was meant, ultimately, to be a check on governmental power.

We’re told by our opponents that mass registration is harmless, and under normal circumstances it probably is. But I think there’s a strong argument to be made that registration infringes on the core purpose of checking governmental power, whether that power is a totalitarian murder on a mass scale, or the more common history in our country of local law enforcement colluding with domestic terror organizations for the purposes of keeping disfavored racial minorities subjugated.

We’d like to think we’re more enlightened than that now, but that strikes me as hubris. Where flawed humans are involved, it’s never a wise to rely on the better angels of our nature.

Civil Wars

Classical Values has a very insightful post on those who incite civil war:

Being human, we all want to get our way. There is, buried somewhere in each one of us, a spoiled, angry child ready to have a temper tantrum. Some control it better than others. Whether learning self control over that inner child that wants to throw a tantrum when he doesn’t get his way constitutes “adulthood” I don’t know, as such a pronouncement strikes me as awfully judgmental. I don’t get my way, and I’m used to it. Yet I think I am a very childish person who has yet to grow up, and learning to accept not getting my way has not helped much. I am still stubborn enough to cling to wanting what I want regardless of the likelihood of my getting it. That may mean that while I’m still a child, I’m just not given to childish displays. (At least, not in public.)

I also realize that it is unreasonable to demand that others control themselves simply because I think that’s a good thing to do, but still, there are few things I find more tedious than people who throw public fits when they don’t get their way, and then demand that others take their fits seriously. In that respect, I am so, so happy about the election results last week. Had the Republicans lost, by now I would be having to hear innumerable cries on the right about how the only alternative we have left is civil war, that the Declaration of Independence gives us the right to violently overthrow the government, etc., etc.,Â ad nauseam.

I’m glad we can go back to bitching about how the Republicans suck, rather than watch the Democrats floor the accelerator off the side of the cliff. People have been pretty amped up the past two years, and here’s hoping everyone’s collective pissed-off-o-meter goes from pegged back down to where it was around the time Bush nominated Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court.

Pushing RKBA In Iowa

Iowa is one of the states that has no Right to Keep and Bear Arms provision in its constitution. The one being proposed leaves little weasel room:

The NRA would like Iowans to add the following words to the state Constitution: â€œThe right of individuals to acquire, keep, possess, transport, and use arms to defend life and liberty and for all other legitimate purposes is fundamental and inviolable. Licensing registration, special taxation, or any other measure that suppresses or discourages the free exercise of this right is forbidden.

Except I think there’s a word missing from that, namely “bear.” Couldn’t we make this “acquire, keep, bear, possess, transport, and use arms,” is the same language that’s in the Second Amendment too controversial for Iowa? I mean, I’d love to use the word carry, but why not bear if carry implies too much?

UPDATE: Apparently the full text is as follows:

The right of individuals to acquire, keep, possess, transport, carry, and use arms to defend life and liberty and for all other legitimate purposes is fundamental and inviolable. Licensing, registration, special taxation, or any other measure that suppresses or discourages the free exercise of this right is forbidden.

The reporting paper apparently left a key word there out.