Uncle admonishes us to “Be Safe”.
Gah! I think, and then I ran into this:
… and as I say in his comments,
and I realized, this year, no, be safe, because the time may come when safety is not possible, and we will need all the fingers and eyes we can get, because there will barely be enough to start with.
So, yeah, while the crisis lasts:
Be safe. Enjoy. Celebrate our freedom, but remember what the fireworks symbolize, and treat them accordingly.
Practice hurting your enemies, not yourself.
“Plastic wrapper” raises an important point in response to my post below about “Jews in the Attic”.
On the other hand, while you’re doing your best to protect your Jews in the Attic, what if your neighbour is hiding a Bomb in his Burkha, and detonates himself killing you and the Jews in your Attic?
Liberty is hard.
Liberty is messy.
Liberty is not safe.
It’s just that tyranny is so very much worse, on such a very much larger scale.
When I say I’m prepared to die for liberty, it doesn’t just mean with a gun in my hands on the barricades.
It means I’m willing to get hit by a drunk driver who wasn’t caught by a road block. (But if they catch him, I want him charged with manslaughter, at least.)
It means I’m willing to see my niece raped by a thug whose lawyer had his last case dismissed “on a technicality”. (But if he’s convicted, I want him convicted of rape, not “assault”, and locked away for a long time, and I want my niece to be able to arm and defend herself in the first place.)
And it means I’m willing to let myself be blown up by my neighbor — but I want his motives honestly appraised, I want his associates honestly investigated, and if he was backed by a foreign organization, I want them hunted down and destroyed.
I also want my borders defended, and if a person commits a crime, and a check shows he’s here illegally, I want his punishment to be quote enhanced unquote accordingly, and if he survives his punishment, I want him deported — possibly by being driven across the border in leg irons and pushed out the door at speed, or by being flown over his home capital, and dropped out the bomb bay with a JDAM package strapped to him and targeted for his ruler’s hot tub.
What I do not want is citizens and legal immigrants harassed, arrested, and punished for violating rules meant to prevent them from having the tools and opportunity to commit crimes. In short, I want the law to be reactive, not proactive.
And thanks, PW, for raising the question, which is at the very heart of the debate.
Joe Huffman provides a clarifying filter:
To the best of my knowledge I am the originator of this test and the name I use to describe it.
…
People tend to understand the importance of freedom of speech and the freedom of the press pretty well and some of the other rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. But the Second Amendment was and is viewed as unimportant and perhaps even counterproductive by many in today’s society. I explained to the others in my little band of activists that I looked at all laws that restricted freedom with a view to the impact it would have in a worst case scenario of our government run amok. Will this law make it difficult or impossible to protect innocent life from a government intent on their imprisonment or death? Although I pretty much made everything up on the spot I told them I called this test my “Jews In The Attic Test”. Furthermore I told them that if it fails this test no further discussion is really needed, the law must be opposed in the most vigorous manner possible.
Some laws that fail the test and why:
- Government mandated ID cards and the authority to demand them at any time. The oppressed class will be unable to masquerade as a member of the neutral or oppressor classes.
- Searches without probable cause. Imagine you are attempting to smuggle your “Jews in the attic” to a safer hiding place. If the police at the roadblock can search all vehicles then you and your precious cargo are headed to the “work camps”.
- Government monopoly on medical care. This is a bit surprising — isn’t it? If it is illegal for you to pay someone for anonymous health care then how can your “Jews in the attic” receive health care?
- Firearm or firearm owner registration. The registration information can be used to confiscate the firearms used to protect innocent life — as it was under the 1938 Weapons Control Act in Nazi Germany.
- Elimination or severe restriction of anonymous financial transactions. The purchase of food and other supplies for your “Jews in the attic” would show up in the records as being excessive compared to what your needs were. Just as power consumption records are used today to catch home marijuana growers.
I’ll note that the recent Arizona illegal immigrant law likely fails this test; I’m not terribly happy about that because I think we’ve got to control our borders.
New York Times writes approvingly of armed defense.
Someone had called to say the Ku Klux Klan was coming to bomb Robert Hicks’s house. The police said there was nothing they could do. It was the night of Feb. 1, 1965, in Bogalusa, La.
Associated PressRobert Hicks in 1965, the year of a sit-in by blacks at a cafe in Bogalusa, La., where he lived.
The Klan was furious that Mr. Hicks, a black paper mill worker, was putting up two white civil rights workers in his home. It was just six months after three young civil rights workers had been murdered in Philadelphia, Miss.
Mr. Hicks and his wife, Valeria, made some phone calls. They found neighbors to take in their children, and they reached out to friends for protection. Soon, armed black men materialized. Nothing happened.
Less than three weeks later, the leaders of a secretive, paramilitary organization of blacks called the Deacons for Defense and Justice visited Bogalusa. It had been formed in Jonesboro, La., in 1964 mainly to protect unarmed civil rights demonstrators from the Klan. After listening to the Deacons, Mr. Hicks took the lead in forming a Bogalusa chapter, recruiting many of the men who had gone to his house to protect his family and guests.
Mr. Hicks died of cancer at his home in Bogalusa on April 13 at the age of 81, his wife said. He was one of the last surviving Deacon leaders.
…
The Deacons, who grew to have chapters in more than two dozen Southern communities, veered sharply from the nonviolence preached by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. They carried guns, with the mission to protect against white aggression, citing the Second Amendment.
…
By 1968, the Deacons had pretty much vanished. In time they were “hardly a footnote in most books on the civil rights movement,” Mr. Hill said. He attributed this to a “mythology” that the rights movement was always nonviolent.
Read the whole thing. Make sure the Times knows that those of us who value the Second Amendment as much as the First want to see black folks, other people of color, and oppressed minorities generally, legally armed for self defense against tyranny and crime.
Heck, we even want to see gays defend themselves against bashing.
The Deacons were the very embodiment of the “well regulated militia” spoken of in the Second Amendment.
I originally saw this obituary in the dead-tree Houston Chronicle, but I cannot find it on line.
This is a good time to remind ourselves that, as Clayton Cramer has documented, gun control in the United States is firmly rooted in racism, in the desire to “disarm the Negroes“, as well as Indians and even white indentured servents of the ability to defend themselves against oppression and genocide.
I visit several cop blogs on a daily basis, mostly to learn how to behave in encounters with the police. As valuable as these sites are, and as much as I am sympathetic with their authors in their honest efforts to protect us, many of them strike me as having forgotten what it is like to be an un-badged civilian, to simply want to go about our daily business as quickly and painlessly as possible without drowning in the minutiae of the traffic code.
Second City Cop is an outstanding exception. (So is Law Dog, but sadly, he is more often than not MIA.) SCC concentrates on exposing the corruption of Chicago politics, especially as it affects police operations. You should go there at least once a week to understand the political hothouse in which Obama flowered.
SCC gets it. He understands his role in protecting the Constitution, not just enforcing the law. He respects the citizens in his jurisdiction, and he respects their liberty.
Witness today’s post on the Hutaree, writing about “all the hyperactive “reporting” tying a Michigan Militia group to Christians, right-wing hate groups, Tea Party activists and every other entity opposed to the Obama socialist agenda:”
There are people on both sides of the political spectrum that hate each and every one of us because we wear the uniform of a police officer. We are the most visible functionary of government. We are easily identifiable by our uniform and are tasked with carrying out the laws passed by the elected legislators, regardless of personal feelings. This makes us targets. And sometimes the targets are well-armed morons who dream up some scary shit.
We won’t get into the piss-poor reporting done on this story, nor the media smear jobs twisting this into something it obviously isn’t. Violence against the police and government isn’t the exclusive domain of either political wing, but it has been advocated and exercised far more often by the leftists than the right.
Even though he is a member of the target class, SCC refuses to allow himself to sucked into the hysteria. He is a staunch advocate of the Second Amendment, and understands who makes up the true militia: his fellow citizens, badged and unbadged.
Good on him, and thank you, sir.
[Incidentally, he appears to quote this article "by an old acquaintance of ours" at the Sun-Times.]
Look, this is all over the place. It’s so obviously, blatantly wrong, nobody’s saying anything insightful about it. All you can really do is bug out your eyes and scream incoherently, or just sigh and click on to the next post, or go watch a movie or something.
Ladies and gentlemen, the finest hands your country is in [0:30]
“Baghdad” Janet “Nappies” Napolitano, Head Nanny:
One thing I’d like to point out here is that the system worked. Everybody played an important role here. The passengers and crew of the flight took appropriate action.
Even CNN’s commentator can’t quite keep the disbelief out of her voice. CNN is not playing with The Team on this one.
Some of the passengers did indeed do the right thing, although Nappies and her minions have done everything possible to render the passengers helpless.
Then there’s this:
We have no suggestion that he was improperly screened.
He got on the plane despite being on watch lists and despite warnings from his own family. How is that not “improper screened”?
This is never going to work if both the terrorist’s and the Administration’s pants are on fire.
Jonah Goldberg says the obvious about as well as anybody:
It is her basic position that the “system worked” because the bureaucrats responded properly after the attack. That the attack was “foiled” by a bad detonator and some civilian passengers is proof, she claims, that her agency is doing everything right. That is just about the dumbest thing she could say, on the merits and politically.
…
If the White House wants to assure people that it takes the war on terror seriously (a term Robert Gibbs used this morning by the way), they could start by firing this patenly unqualified hack.
Although Goldberg is generous (“patently unqualified hack”), you should read the whole thing; it’s short.
Oh, and I can’t pass over this [0:39]:
Within literally an hour to ninety minutes of the incident occurring, all 128 flights in the air had been notified to take some special measures in light of what had occurred.
When seconds count, TSA is an hour away, at least. With advice, not actual, you know, help.
Goldberg is far too generous. Napolitano, and the administration she is a part of, is not unqualified.
They’re on the other side.
So Ambulance Driver went to Blogarado, a blogmeet/shootfest. And took pictures. And told stories.
Then there was this:
Saturday dawned bright and early with KatyBeth sitting astride my chest and patting me gently on the face, saying, “Wake up, Daddy! It’s time to go shoot!”
However, no pictures of Katy Beth shooting followed, and accordingly I whined in comments:
Wait, no pictures of Katy Beth shooting? I need that for my Kids Having Dangerous Fun collection.
And lo, today I ventured on to AD’s site, after taking all appropriate safety precautions, and under the heading “From the ‘Kids Having Dangerous Fun’ Files”, found:
Plus two more piccies of wonderful squee! value.
AD, what can I say? In gratitude, I promise that if I ever have to fake a seizure for you, I’ll pee my pants.
Sipsey Street Irregular Mike Vanderboegh writes to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, and explains that there’s an ugly fight coming. “No more free Wacos”, says Mike, and he’s not talking about religious whackos having free reign to to rape children and kill cops; he’s talking about the Federal Government burning men, women, and children who do not toe the line, and then blocking any investigation.
The inspiration for this piece is the case of David Olofson, now rotting in prison because he was in possession of a malfunctioning semi-automatic rifle. He threatened no one, he didn’t offer to sell it, he didn’t claim it was a machine gun. The malfunction was a dangerous one that could easily injure the shooter; there is video of the BATFX technician holding it well away from his body while testing, in case it blew up in his hand.
And yet Olofson was charged and convicted with possession of an unlicensed full-auto machine gun.
- By your department’s failure to restrain [BATX Field Agent Jody] Keeku’s outrageous conduct in returning the weapon to the ATF Testing Branch after it had been found by them NOT TO BE A MACHINEGUN but simply a malfunctioning semiauto rifle, with the demand that they retest it until they came to her opinion;
- By the trial judge’s refusal to allow defense experts to even examine the weapon; and
- By the appellate court’s blind refusal to allow a new trial based on these and other prosecutorial misdeeds,
Those are issues specific to Olofson’s case. Here are the broader implications:
if we can no longer count on a fair trial in a case of obvious ATF misconduct, then rationally, we have no reasonable expectation of a fair trial at all. In that case, we then are faced, when approached by any law enforcement officer attempting to enforce any gun law, with a Hobson’s choice:
- Submit, and be railroaded unfairly into prison, or
- Resist, and endure not only the personal consequences of that defiance, but also the likely consequences of a regional or even national conflagration.
Read the whole thing, please, as you value your life of peace and freedom.
Right now there’s a debate raging about whether or not gun owners should go about openly carrying and displaying their firearms, particularly handguns in a holster, in states that allow them to do so legally.
Read that again: informed, reasonable, law abiding, gun owners, people who have up till now been strong advocates for the right to keep and bear arms, are afraid to exercise their legal, lawful right. It might upset people. It might bring them in conflict with law officers, many of whom are very unaccustomed to and nervous around unbadged law-abiding citizens who happen to be armed.
There was an incident recently where a woman was threatened with arrest or shooting for wearing an empty leather holster at a Second Amendment protest.
A right is not a right if you can’t use it. I don’t care if it upsets people “scares the white folks”, to echo the response to Negroes eating at whites-only lunch counters, and riding up front in the bus.
This isn’t about “recruitment”. Not even about “acclimatisation”.
This is about putting our government, and our fellow citizens, on notice. We’ve been pushed right up to the line, and the trench grave lies on the other side.
Not backing down. Not hiding.
Not compromising.
Especially not compromising, because we’ve been compromising since nineteen thirty four, and all we have to show for it is a single, 5-4 Supreme Court ruling that yes, the Second protects an individual right, but no, the government can infringe it pretty much any way it wants, short of a total ban.
For all that, we at least want to be able to carry our legal weapons on our hips, in public.
Our empty holsters, even.
Listening, Mr. Holder? Hear the trumpets, hear the pipers? The one hundred million angles singing? The multitudes are marching to the big kettle drum, and they’re coming for you.
You swore an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic, Mr. Holder. Uphold that oath, live it, breath it — or wait for the day when you can no longer escape being caught out as one of those the rest of us are defending it from. Your oath is wearing pretty god damned thin.
Wake up. Listen.
You will lose if you fight us.
This is anecdotal, not data, but I’m nevertheless very encouraged by it.
I had a long conversation with a Texas CHL holder, who also tends to drive perhaps a little faster than the law allows, and therefore has fairly regular contacts with the police. He explained that Texas cops, including Troopers and Rangers, often approach him with a very aggressive manner, but that when he presents his CHL, they immediately calm down, and typically remind him to watch the limit, and let him go with at most a warning.
It’s not, as my mom surmised when I told her this, that the cops are fearful of a citizen carrying a weapon.
It’s that they know that a CHL holder is far more likely than average to be a peaceable citizen. More importantly, they regard CHL holders to be allies. They know that if they get in trouble, a CHL holder who happens on the scene will more likely come to their aid than a non-licensed citizen.
In effect, Texas cops are extending the much-ballyhooed “professional courtesy” to CHL holders, at least with regard to traffic violations.
Bad Behavior has blocked 150 access attempts in the last 7 days.