Shall Not Be Questioned – Page 851 – The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State …

Top Shot

I watched the premier, along with most others. I was all prepared for a drinking game, that I’d take a swig every time they mentioned Caleb, but they only mentioned Caleb once that I noticed, and that was 20 minutes into the show!Â Nonetheless, this probably speaks well, since we didn’t need to get to know Caleb in the first episode, since he wasn’t eliminated. We will get to know the little giant later. But nonetheless, he got on target, and helped the blue team win.

On the other side, I thought Kelly seems particularly strong. Knowing his background in shooting, it seemed like he’d have betterÂ fundamentalsÂ than many of them, and he came through the first episode well. I expect his fellow teammates will be looking for reasons to get rid of him, however. You noticed a good bit of that even in the first episode.

UPDATE: In the comments, Kevin points out how good the show is for non shooters. I agree. It presents shooting in an interesting and non-threateningÂ way to new shooters. NSSF couldn’t buy shooting sports coverage this good! Pretty clearly the show isn’t about shooting so much as human drama, as people try to work together as a team, but also win the competition. Now I see why they picked caleb. Caleb probably has that right kind of mix of personality traits that make him a good candidate for reality television.

UPDATE: A differing view here. I think most high power shooters would have no difficulty making those shots. But that’s not really the point of the show.

UPDATE: Continuing on the meme that this shooting should be easy. Yes. It should be. If you gave me my own rifle, on a quiet range, I could knock out that 100 yard shot offhand. But the contestants don’t have their own rifles. They have rifles who’s condition is unknown, who’s sight settings are dubious, and with which the contestants are only barely familiar, and spotters who are under time pressure and are presumably also using unfamiliar equipment. I’ve taken new rifles out that couldn’t hit paper at 100 yards because they were that off. I’d be reluctant to say I could do better under these kinds of constraints and on national television, with the adrenaline pumping.

MAIG Membership an Issue in Texas Governor’s Race

I wish we could make MAIG membership as toxic in Pennsylvania as it apparently is in Texas. Pennsylvania rivals Texas for top spot in terms of number of NRA members, but for some reason our members aren’t willing to hold politicians accountable to the degree Texans are.

â€œAnywhere in the civilized world you would be able to make the argument that everybody should be able to be against illegal guns. But weâ€™re not in the civilized word. Weâ€™re in Texas,â€ said Southern Methodist University political scientist Cal Jillson.

Except that Mayors Against Illegal Guns has very little to do with illegal guns, and everything to do with repacking the same old agenda the Bradys have been pushing into a more palatable pill for politicians to try to swallow. Like gun control groups of the past, their means to stop illegal guns centers around making gun ownership more difficult and risky for the law abiding. There’s nothing new about that. It’s good to see Texans are seeing through the smoke and mirrors. I wish Pennsylvanians would too.

Justice Souter’s Judicial Philosophy

Dave Hardy has some comments on a recent article speaking ofÂ Justice Souter’s philosophy when it comes to constitutional interpretation. To quote Justice Souter directly:

A choice may have to be made, not because language is vague, but because the Constitution embodies the desire of the American people, like most people, to have things both ways. We want order and security, and we want liberty. And we want not only liberty but equality as well. These paired desires of ours can clash, and when they do a court is forced to choose between them, between one constitutional good and another one. The court has to decide which of our approved desires has the better claim, right here, right now, and a court has to do more than read fairly when it makes this kind of choice.

The problem with this balancing interest is that it leaves entirely too much room for judges to make-up law from whole cloth, using their own preferences rather than being tied to the text of the document. The New York Times went on to note:

Justice Souter named no contemporary names. He did not mention Justice Antonin Scalia, whose â€œoriginalistâ€ doctrine of constitutional interpretation made inroads in recent years, most notably in the 2008 decision, from which Justice Souter dissented,Â declaring an individual right to gun ownership under the Second Amendment. But I have to think he had Justice Scalia in mind when he observed that â€œbehind most dreams of a simpler Constitution there lies a basic human hunger for the certainty and control that the fair-reading model seems to promise.â€

I don’t think it’s so much a dream of a simpler constitution, and even a textualist is going to acknowledge there are places where the text is less than clear. But where the text is clear, we should follow it. The big problem with Souter’s approach is that it’s hard to see how his balancing test keeps the judiciary constrained to its judicial powers. The kind of balancing of interest that Souter calls for is more properly the realm of Congress, and not the judiciary.

I don’t go as far as some conservatives that suggest the courts should never interfere with theÂ prerogativesÂ of the elected branch. Starting with a default presumption that Congress wouldn’t pass an unconstitutional law is just as much a fallacy as what Souter believes. Where the law is ambiguous, or where Congress’ claims of power are so wildly beyond their constitutional mandate, the courts needs to act. Souter brings up segregation. Segregation should have been outlawed by the 14th Amendment. That wasn’t any evolving constitutional doctrine, so much as a half century of the judiciary trying to escape its clear mandate. I agree with what Dave Hardy says on the matter:

Doesn’t that mean he accepts that Plessey was right when it was decided, “right here, right now,” and became wrong half a century later? I’d rather prefer to think it was wrong and odious from the beginning, for reasons entirely external to the judges…. it just took them half a century to see the light.

Yep

Killing Flash

If Apple actually manages to kill Flash with the iPad, I will definitely have to get one, despite my previous skepticism I had no use for one. I’ve hated Flash from the moment it started to get popular on the Internets. I didn’t think Apple would have the market power, but if they actually pull it off… great. Even for those of you with Androids, Flash will destroy your battery, crash your browser, and do all the things it’s known to do. The sooner it dies, the better off we’re all going to be, and if it takes Steve Jobs’Â narcissismÂ to kill it, it’ll be the greatest thing Steve’sÂ narcissismÂ has accomplished since the NeXT cube.

NRA Explains Its Endorsement Policy

I can’t recall NRA doing this in previous years, but maybe they did and I just didn’t notice. It’s a good idea to explain. A lot of people might question their incumbent friendly policy, but all you have to do is look at this to understand why that’s the case. That’s why John McCain gets an NRA endorsement over J.D. Hayworth. Endorsements and grades are political tools. They aren’t an affirmation of faith that many people would like them to be. If Hayworth wins, he’ll enjoy the same incumbent friendly policy that McCain currently enjoys.

Going Mainstream

Josh Horwitz seems to be having issues with the fact that insurrectionist thinking is going mainstream. I hate to tell him this, but many of the ideas he rails against have always been mainstream. Take a look:

While America began as a revolution against the king of England, revolution turned out to be a terrible form of governing, Horwitz says. â€œThere was no ability to tax, so (Gen.) Washingtonâ€™s army starved. State legislatures had an immense amount of power. There were mobbings in every city with no central authority to put any (revolt) down. Militias formed and closed down the courts.â€

This seems to be a tacit suggestion that perhaps we would have been better off staying under the British Crown. I have to wonder if Horwitz believes that. Because really, what Horwitz is rallying against is the very founding idea of this nation itself:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. â€” That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, â€” That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

If you had to pick one paragraph from the Declaration of Independence that you could say is really the philosophical basis of the United States of America, this is it. This was the sentence that gave birth to this nation. If the anti-gun people want to take the side of the loyalists, and suggest we ought to have remained under the British Crown, they are free to. But you can’t escape this passage. It is who we are, and it shouldn’t be surprising that people are still talking about it 234 years later.

What I can’t figure out is whether Horwitz is legitimately goofy about believing that folks who would suggest the Declaration of Independence is a blueprint for just revolution are just as radical and extreme as, say, a Timothy McVeigh, or whether he’s trying to chain the real extremists to those who are not in hopes that it pulls the whole issue under the water. If it’s the latter, he might want to rethink much of his rhetoric.

Top Shot Premiers This Weekend

There is little time left before fellow blogger Caleb’s giant premier on Sunday on the History Channel. Caleb was seen on NRA News last night with Cam talking about the show, which you can listen to here.

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Since the premier is on the anniversary of D-Day, I’m going to be very disappointed if the first episode of Top Shot doesn’t involve Caleb trying to scale a sea wall while the other contestants shoot at him.

The Lesson of Carthage

Thanks to commenter Sterling Archer for this story of Carthage:

History demonstrates that destruction awaits those who attempt to placate their enemies by surrendering their weapons. In 149 BC, half a million citizens of Carthage tried to appease Rome by turning over their armaments. But instead of buying peace, they only facilitated their own destruction. Ninety percent of the Carthaginians were killed, and the city of Carthage was razed. Those who survived were sold into slavery, and Carthaginian civilization was forever wiped from the face of the earth. The story of how the Carthaginians sealed their fate by delivering their weapons into the hands of their enemy is chronicled in my book,Â Science and Technology in World History, Vol. 1.

I’m trying to think of any point in history where appeasing an aggressive enemy has actually worked out pretty well for the appeaser.

“Enuf is enuf. Enough is too much.”

These people are educators. They are teaching your children. Remember that as you read and cringe.

Four peaceful protesters, some dressed in full-length black and yellow bee costumes, represented the American Literacy Council and the London-based Spelling Society and stood outside the Grand Hyatt on Thursday, where the Scripps National Spelling Bee is being held. Their message was short: Simplify the way we spell words.

Roberta Mahoney, 81, a former Fairfax County, Va. elementary school principal, said the current language obstructs 40 percent of the population from learning how to read, write and spell. …

According to literature distributed by the group, it makes more sense for “fruit” to be spelled as “froot,” “slow” should be “slo,” and “heifer” â€” a word spelled correctly during the first oral round of the bee Thursday by Texas competitor Ramesh Ghanta â€” should be “hefer.”
Meanwhile, inside the hotel’s Independence Ballroom, 273 spellers celebrated the complexity of the language in all its glory, correctly spelling words like zaibatsu, vibrissae and biauriculate.

My guess is that these people are part of the movement to do away with red pens for grading, too.

When challenged by a 15-year-old on the issue, the principal said that if spelling bees were so important, the bees could just make up their own dictionary of new words that would be harder to spell.

What Happened with DC’s Gun Laws

This is a great story in Washington City Paper about what happened with the DC Voting Rights Act that NRA was moving. It provides some interesting insight into what might have happened to scuttle the bill:

Some aides on the Hill believe the Childers changes ultimately provided a convenient excuse to escape the pressure. â€œShe got some bad editorials,â€ an aide to the Democratic leadership says of Norton. â€œShe was looking for an offramp and she found one.â€

â€œThe language on guns was still being finalized,â€ adds another aide. â€œIn that final go-around, Delegate Norton made a determination that it was not something the District could accept. She indicated that to the majority leader and a decision was made to pull the bill.â€ As reporters gathered Tuesday morning for Democratic Majority Leader Steny Hoyerâ€™s weekly briefing, they were first told the vote was a goâ€”and moments later they were told that it was being shelved. Again.

On the Hill, few people think that the bill will resurface. â€œAt this point in time I do not see the ability to move it in this session of Congress,â€ Hoyer told theÂ Washington Post.

So sounds like Norton might have been having doubts and getting cold feet, and the Childers amendment was her cover from pull out of a deal she wasn’t sure she wanted to make anyway. I can’t vouch for the authenticity of any of this account, as NRA does not share details of its legislative strategy with me, but it sounds plausible, and this is what the Dems are saying happened. Read the whole thing. It’s a great insight into the chess game Joe was talking about a few days ago.