Posts Tagged ‘Second Amendment’

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Deacon For Defense Robert Hicks Dead at 81

Sunday, April 25th, 2010

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 Press

Robert 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.

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Posted in Bill of Rights, Fighting Back, History, Militia, Press, Right to Keep and Bear Arms, Self-defense | 1 Comment »

McDonald: NRA Files Brief

Tuesday, November 17th, 2009

National Rifle Association files “Brief for Respondants…in Support of Petitioners“. The NRA is, as I understand it, a party to the case, not just an amicus, but they had filed their own case, which is still pending. McDonald will resolve their case, too, most likely, hence the rather odd “respondent in support of petitioners” label.

I’m about 3/4 of the way through petitioner’s brief, which focuses more on the 14th amendment than the 2nd. Huge chunk of history there, and if the Supremes rule on the question, rather than on some minor side issue, a huge chunk of precedent, based on the much-maligned SlaughterHouse cases, will be vacated.

McDonald’s brief makes very clear how the 14th Amendment, and hence the 2nd, was blocked for profoundly racist reasons — to deny freed blacks full citizenship.

Naturally, though, the laws denying blacks the right to defending themselves against marauding whites ended up disarming the whites as well.

If this gets taken care of, then let’s dispose of Kelo.

And if Kelo goes, then we can work on the granddaddy of them all, the hook that about half the Federal Government hangs from: Filburn v. Wickard.

Ha ha ha, I can dream, can’t I?

Dave Kopel writes about McDonald at the Volokh Conspiracy. [If you have any interest in the law, particularly Constitutional law -- and the only reason you shouldn't be interested is because you choose to live outside the law, or beneath its notice) you really need to be following VC.]

Here’s why Petitioner’s Brief concentrates on Privileges or Immunities, while NRA’s brief focuses on Due Process:

Many folks have been wondering why the Gura brief concentrates so heavily on the bolder theory (Privileges or Immunities) rather than the one that courts have used over the last century (Due Process). Here’s the answer: After Heller, the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) and the National Rifle Association each filed separate lawsuits against the Chicago handgun ban. The cases were consolidated in the Seventh Circuit; after the panel ruled, SAF and NRA each filed separate petitions for certiorari. The Supreme Court granted cert. in the SAF case, McDonald v. Chicago. A few weeks later, the Court added NRA to the case as a party. So NRA is now a “Respondent in Support of Petitioners.” The suburb of Oak Park, which had been sued by NRA but not by SAF, was also added as a party.

So as a party, NRA filed its brief yesterday. The lead attorneys on the brief are Stephen Poss (attorney of record), Stephen Halbrook, and others. The NRA brief takes the more conservative approach. It mainly argues for incorporation via Due Process, with only a brief discussion of Privileges or Immunities. NRA does not ask for any cases to be over-ruled, since Slaughterhouse, Cruikshank, and Presser are all P or I cases, and predate the Court’s recognition of selective Due Process incorporation.

Because the Question Presented by the Court asked about both P or I and Due Process incorporation, it was appropriate that one party brief focused on the former, and the other party brief on the latter.

The comments at VC are especially well informed, as well, although frequently too many pile up to follow.

I especially like Alec Rawls’ comment here:

The 2nd Amendment is the one amendment that does not need incorporation, since it was written from the outset to apply to every level of government. It does not say “Congress shall pass no law,” but asserts without qualification that the the right “shall not be infringed.”

Too bad that so far, no court has seen this, and enforced the 2nd at state level and below.

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Posted in History, Law | Comments Off

A Step-by-Step Guide to Killing Kids With Guns

Sunday, October 4th, 2009

I’ve slept on this since I made my last substantive comment on the “76 Reasons” thread with venomlash, re-read the whole thread several times, and I want to change my strategy.

venomlash, the reason I moderated and deleted your comments, other than on the “76 Reasons” posts, was not to censor facts and ideas I couldn’t tolerate, but to focus your attention, to get you to step through the logic and evidence on a single point, the deal about accidental gun deaths among children.

You proved unable to do that on your own. So, please, let me show how to work a debate point like this.

You accused me thus:
“You have yet to post a single statistic or number. You just ask me to find them on my own. If you want to refute my arguments, refute them with EVIDENCE and I will do the same.”

It does seem unfair, doesn’t it, that I’m imposing a standard on you that I myself seem to be ducking.

I’m hearing your confusion and frustration, which is partially my fault, because I’ve been having way too much fun in this fight, and forgot that my goal here is not to win, but to explain. I apologize for that, truly.

I’m going to explain now why I’ve been holding back on the stats and other details, in order to demonstrate what’s been going on that you may well not be aware of. Think of this as me standing at the blackboard and working through a sample problem for the class, an experience you should be very familiar with. But remember, there will be homework, and if I help you with that, you won’t learn how to do it yourself.

Unfortunately, I’m going to have to say some things that will likely be very uncomfortable for you. I know this because I know how uncomfortable they were for me as I came to grips with them. Please, then, slow down, scan through the whole post, so you can see where I’m going, then go back and read through again, carefully, working the exercises as you come to them.

I’m not asking you to trust me, because you absolutely shouldn’t, but I am asking you to try to see the argument as I did, to follow my thoughts, and to see why I came to the conclusions I did. (This is, by the way, an excellent technique to find flaws in your opponent’s argument.)

I am now going to step through the argument on accidental child death from guns. Steady yourself, this is going to take some time.

You opened with “How about all the kids who die because their parents leave their guns lying around loaded?”

Now, to those of us who have been following the gun rights debate for more than a few years, this pops out as a standard line from the gun control play book. (And if you’re going to play this game on that team, you need to understand that there’s not much you can say that isn’t a standard line with a pretty widely accepted meaning. If you mean something else, you need to be very careful to say exactly what you mean.)

In fact, “kids die because their parents leave their loaded guns lying around” is usually shorthand for, “Gun owners are incredibly irresponsible, often drunken, idiots who leave their loaded, unlocked weapons lying around on the coffee table, and their neglected little kids end up shooting themselves and their playmates. And this happens all the time; it’s a major cause of child death. If we banned just a few more kinds of guns a little harder than we do, it would save the lives of many, many cute little innocent children.”

For instance, here’s a post where I responded to someone else making that claim, someone who did a better job of it than you did. I used WISQARS [explained below] on him, too. This why I say I’ve already done my homework.

Again, it doesn’t matter whether that’s what you meant or not. That’s the way it’s been used for many years now, and that’s the way it will come across in debate. Just so you know, almost everything in the gun-control playbook is loaded in the same way.

In your case, I elected to accept the statement as a fairly innocuous proxy for “accidental gun deaths of young children.” In other words, suspecting your inexperience, I gave you a lot of slack.

I responded: “Yeah, how about them? How many, exactly? Look ‘em up, and get back to us. And please, no outdated lies from the Brady Bunch or Violence Policy Center. Try the FBI, or the CDC, primary sources. Remember that ‘anecdote’ is not the singular of ‘data’. Give us the numbers, please.”

(The “anecdote” comment referred to a link you provided of a typical gun-related Darwin moment. Yeah, they happen, always will, and there’s not a darn thing we can do to stop them all. They’re necessary — please consider the true meaning of the word “Darwinism”)

I’ve learned not to trust the numbers from The Brady Campaign and the Violence Policy Center. That’s a long story, beyond the scope of this post. I’m not asking you to trust me on this, but please just accept, for now, for the sake of the argument, that I insist on numbers from a source that does not couch them in terms of the gun control v. gun rights debate on either side. A neutral source. (“Non-partisan” is meaningless. There are RKBA Democrats, and gungrabbing Republicans. To most of the gun-control groups, the parties are puppets.)

Instead, I strongly recommend the WISQARS tool from the Federal government Centers for Disease Control. CDC is by no means a Second Amendment advocate (it suffers from a close association with doctors, who treat gunshot wounds, and therefore have a bit of a skewed outlook), but as far as I know, the WISQARS data is honestly collected and reported. The tool is a little clumsy to use, but it can be massaged into presenting very enlightening reports at amazing levels of detail, and I strongly encourage you to play around with it for awhile. You will never have to trust anybody else’s numbers again. As I type, the last year for which data is available is 2006.

[One problem with it is that the charts are dynamically generated according to your specific request, so I can't, literally can't, link to specific results. You'll just have to play with it. Sorry about that.]

Your response to my demand for data was, “In 1999, 3,385 kids under 19 died from firearm-related deaths, according to the U of Michigan Health System, which got its facts from the 2002 edition of Injury Facts from the National Safety Council.”

I objected to this, strongly, because first of all, you did not provide links, as requested. And, second, when I searched on Google (what, you think I couldn’t find it from your hints? That I work blind?) I discovered your numbers came from a report with a specific, anti-gun bias — exactly what I wanted to avoid. Two strikes against you, albeit small ones. The implication was that you were running a script, but were probably not aware of it.

Most disturbingly, though, you shifted the terms of the argument, a tactic known as “moving the goal posts”, and you did so in two dimensions.

First, you moved from “accidental death” to “firearm related death”. As I noted at the time, “firearm related” includes anything and everything that results in a child getting shot. This is a much larger set than simple accident.

Second, you went from “kids”, which is meant to conjure up images of cute little grade school kids, toddlers, and infants, to “under 19″. That means, at 18, at least some “kids” who have graduated from high school. “Kids” who are old enough to vote. “Kids” old enough to drive. “Kids” old enough to be parents. Most importantly, “kids” old enough to be in gangs, something that starts in earnest around 14 or 15. Old enough to be in gang fights. Old enough to commit armed robbery. Old enough to commit rape. Old enough to be in juvie, even prison. These “kids” are not playing with guns found in their parents homes, as your “what about…?” implies; these “kids” walk around all the time with guns stuck in their pants, looking to shoot and waiting to get shot on purpose.

Do you understand now why this goal-post shift set off loud alarm bells? When you did that, you didn’t just shoot yourself in the foot; you cut yourself off at the knees. You blew the fight, right there, and if I weren’t such a nice guy, I’d have pitched you out the door on the spot as a lying jerk not worth the trouble of sparring with. I didn’t just flat-out ban you, though, because, again accounting for your evident inexperience, I actually felt sorry for you.

Sit tight, now, and learn. Here’s what the real deal is:

The number of gun deaths due to outright murder, as well as legitimate self defense on the part of intended victims, goes way up at about fifteen, which is why I encourage you to plot, year by year, in an actual graph, gun deaths as a function of age, newborns to twentyone. Do it now, please. I’ll wait.

See what happened when they included the fifteen-to-nineteen year olds?

Pretty sobering, eh?

For those of you playing along at at the office, here’s roughly what you get:

A quick glance at WISQARS shows these firearm-homicide numbers, by age group:

 5- 9    62
10-14   175
15-19 1,940

From the 5-9 group to the 10-14 group, firearm homicides double, which admittedly is pretty grim.

But when we look at the 15-19 group, homicides go up by an order of magnitude, a factor of ten. This one group completely swamps the numbers for the groups comprising what most of us think of as “kids”. Adding that group into the mix, as the study you cited did, tells a filthy, lousy lie with completely valid numbers. Neat trick, huh?

In these ranges, firearm homicide is the top cause of violence-related death. In the 1-4 age range, it’s third, with 42 deaths. However, firearms, apparently, are not the weapon of choice when dealing with the under-1 baby threat; they’re not even in the top ten.

Now look at accidental death.

For ages 5-14, firearms accidents are ranked eighth. In the 15-19 group, it’s still only fifth, at 100 deaths over the course of an entire year.

Now, here’s why I like WISQARS: the chart that I’m looking at shows all top ten causes of accidental death, not just the gun deaths of the report you referenced. Here’s what beats out guns:

For infants under the age of one, “Unintentional suffocation” is top-ranked. I bet this means that most of these babies died in their cribs, strangled by their pillows, blankies, and teddy bears. Eight hundred and forty three of them died this way in 2006. That’s right: 843, just under half the number of gun homicides among teen gang-bangers. You wanna pass a law that takes away the babies’ lovies that help them sleep through the night? You are going to have a lot more than 843 angry, exhausted parents beating on your door at three o’clock on a work day morning.

In the one to fourteen age group, the number one accidental killer is “accidental motor vehicle traffic”, at about 500/year. At 15-19, that category shoots up to just under five thousand a year, as those crazy teens get the car keys.

In any case, cars and traffic are ranked number one. Number two is drowning or poison.Then comes fire/burn or “other land transport”. A lot of kids seem to die of suffocation; I have no idea what that’s about.

Now do you understand why I asked you, in a later post, about what else you would have to ban if you want to save as many children as you (allegedly) would by banning guns?

Go back to WISQARS. Play with the charts. Study the age groups, look at the causes, the rankings, the numbers.

The ugly truth is, guns are simply not an important cause of death in young children, accidental or intentional. Guns only become a problem when kids get old enough to shoot each other with malice aforethought, and even then it’s a fraction of what cars do. What matches and stoves do. What bug spray and weed killer do. What, for crying out loud, water does. You really want to ban water?

Anyway, guns are not the problem.

Now do you see why I wanted you to do the research and run the numbers yourself? If I’d just come out and said, “According to the CDC, gun deaths are a negligible cause of death in children under the age of fifteen”, and spat a couple of numbers at you, would you have believed me? Would it have meant anything to you? (And you wouldn’t have learned how to use WISQARS.)

Now that you’ve spent some time looking at the details yourself, the real numbers, in context, are you beginning to feel as cheated and lied to as I did when I ran across this the first time (in a much cruder fashion), lo these many years ago on Usenet?

I know, I know, the pre-programmed defense lies are kicking in about now, and causing you to feel angry. They’re not there to defend you, venomlash. They’re there to defend the core boss lie, to re-direct your anger from the people who fed you those lies to me and people like me. We haven’t talked about the Core Boss Lie yet, but we’re close. Get up, pee, do some breathing exercises. Clear your head.

I’ll wait.

[While waiting, Good Old Uncle Dave reads through the comments again, and stumbles across -- Oh, lordy!]

Back now? OK, venomlash, here’s something else you said:

Give me a statistic and I will find one to refute it with.

Kid, I just gave you the entire United States of America Federal government National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (one of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) official Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System. Not just “a statistic”, but a whole dataset, along with the online front end tool to view it with. This dataset is what the U.S. government bases public policy on; Congress even uses it to design laws, when Congress can be bothered to look at the facts, not the polls. It’s as official and thorough and complete as this sort of thing gets.

What the hell are you gonna put up against that?

You tried to fight me with a half-lie and a grossly unfair tactic, stuff entirely typical of the gun-control movement and its propaganda.

I’ll bet you didn’t come up with this. I bet you read it somewhere.

Somebody fed you this lie. Somebody wound you up, gave you a nice safe can of dollar store pepper spray, and sent you out to do battle for the Glorious Cause of Citizen Disarmament.

Eventually, you ran up against a real opponent with real guns and real ammo.

If this were a real fight, I’d be wiping spray-can taco sauce from my face, and you’d be dying of two sucking chest wounds and massive blood loss.

Don’t hate me, venom. Not yet. Just wait. This next bit will be short, not least because I need to get up for work in less than six hours.

At some point in the original thread, it looks like you began to realize that the numbers really didn’t line up on your side. And you typed, “Personally, it does not matter to me if one kid dies in a firearm accident or one hundred do vis a vis safety-oriented gun regulation. One death is one too many….”

“One death is too many.” Is 843 deaths also too many? How about the six thousand five hundred kids between the ages of 1 to 19 killed by cars? Is that too many? Are you seriously gonna take people’s cars away from them? Really?

Compared to other risks, accidental child death by firearms barely rises above the noise.

Even if you could, in fact, take away the guns — which you can’t, particularly not from the bad guys — it would barely make a dent in accidental child death.

Do you really think you can make people safe by taking away their tools?

Do you really think you can make people safe by taking away their liberty, their freedom, their control over their own safety, their control over their own lives?

Do you really think that tyranny is safer than liberty?

That’s the Core Boss Lie, venomlash, that people cannot be trusted with their own lives.

Gun control isn’t about controlling guns, kid. It’s about controlling you.

That’s why the Second Amendment prohibits infringing the right of the American People to own and carry the only class of tools, other than the printing press, protected by the Constitution.

Together, the First and Second Amendments establish a Fourth Branch of government: We, The People, ourselves. We rule here, venomlash. We rule across every square inch of America. We have the right to speak our minds, the right to argue, even the right to shout at our Congress Creeps at town meetings ["peaceably assemble and petition the government for the redress of grievances", it says here] — and we have the right to back up the babble with deadly force if we can’t our dedicated public servants a.k.a. the State to pay attention any other way. Good help is so hard to find, you know.

Let me turn your comment around, venomlash. Vis a vis the Second Amendment, it doesn’t matter to me if one kid or a thousand die in gun accidents.

Not that I don’t care about the kids themselves; I do, and I hate it that we can’t save each and every one of them. Not because I love me my guns more than I love the lives of all the little children.

It’s because I believe history shows, unequivocally, that the alternative to a thousand accidental child deaths a year is children and their parents dying by the tens and hundreds of thousands, by the millions, at the hands of jack-booted thugs on the orders of tyrants who swear they are honestly, really, truly, only trying to protect us from ourselves and each other.

I may shoot myself in the foot. I may shoot my niece in a range accident. I may go crazy and shoot up the office.

But I will be go to hell and fry in the devil’s skillet before I will meekly get on that train, and take my free ride to the showers, or kneel in front of the ditch and wait for the bulldozer to push me in still breathing.

You’ve been lied to, venom. You’ve been lied to, and used, and wadded up and thrown away, by people who think you are an idiot who will shut up and do as he’s told, because, hey, it’s not like you can fight back or anything, you having voluntarily given up your arms, and the force of will to use them.

Here’s Poor Richard himself, good old Ben Franklin, “The only President of the United States who was never President of the United States”:

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

As I said, I’m opening comments, as a gesture of good faith.

But before you start shitting all over my blog again, comment here and let me know that you read this.

Don’t try to argue every point, because, guess what? I really don’t care. Just let me know: Are you still willing to stand by “all the kids who die because their parents leave their guns lying around loaded” debate point? If so, explain exactly what changes in the law will achieve that. (Note that “changes” means you will have to explain what the law is.)

Are you still willing to trade liberty for safety?

Read, study, think. Talk. Ask questions, even here. You’re still young, you may not even be a member of the unorganized militia yet (USC TITLE 10 > Subtitle A > PART I > CHAPTER 13 > § 311, by the way, if you want to check.), you’ve get plenty of time to get things straight now; before you’re an old fart like I was even ten years ago.

Please, please, please: Read the Reference links in my side bar. Look up the Washington D.C. v Heller Supreme Court case, read the decision[PDF], read at least the briefs of the two principals (That would be D.C. and Heller, themselves) if not the all the amicus briefs (there’s more than a hundred of those, and they’re heavy going.)

Check out the laws in your state, and figure out how hard your elected officials have made it for you to exercise one of your fundamental, constitutionally-protected, un-infringe-able liberties.

Go back to the original thread, and read my comments again. Every time I say “do your homework, and report back”, that’s a flag that I could do an analysis like this one on that point, because I myself have already done that homework. You should learn to do that too, now that I’ve showed you how.

Think about the people who set you up for this fight, and ask yourself if you really want to trust them with you life. They don’t trust you with their lives, or even your own.

That’s the big difference between them and me. They think that they are competent to judge you and me, to decide if we’re competent to take care of ourselves. (Answer: almost always “no”.) They’ve tricked you into agreeing with them.

I, on the other hand, assume you are competent to own, carry, and operate even a real, honest-to-Stoner assault rifle.

If you can, get a gun. Get trained. Practice. Become “well regulated”.

If you want to see the sort of thing “well-regulated” could turn into if the control freaks meant what they said about “right to form a militia”, the sort of thing that would be an actual compromise in gun policy, check out my plan for training a real citizens’ militia, here and here.

Choose your ground well. Stand your ground. And equip yourself to do so.

Understand that if you do all the homework I’ve assigned, and still don’t agree with me, you will have become a formidable debating opponent. You might have a career in the law, or even politics. You might even convince me. I’d rather have that, than continue to see you as the wishy-washy weakling you’ve shown yourself to be in this debate.

(The last time somebody made such a poor showing in front of me, it was my toddler niece, crumbs all over her face, trying to convince me that no, she hadn’t stolen any of the forbidden cookies, and besides, she didn’t know they were forbidden. She was a lot cuter than you are, though.)

You are my fellow citizen, and I trust you with my life, if only because I can shoot back if it turns out you are untrustworthy. (And because I frankly think you’re probably a decent guy, when you’re not being a statist mouthpiece.) I hope you can trust me in the same way.

The day may come, soon, before I die of old age, when we might meet in the trenches, in an alley, in some dark dungeon, and please that we would meet as brothers in arms, and not as enemies.

We will certainly not meet as fellow slaves, because I, for one, will be dead first.

Good luck, and God Bless, whatever that may mean.

[Good morning! I left this thing in kind of a mess last night, but I'm back at the keyboard again, briefly, and have made a few edits. There may be more edits later, particularly to the last part with all the fiery, ill-considered rhetoric, if I get the chance. Till then....]

[More edits, nothing substantial. Except for minor typos, I'm probably pretty well done.]

[More edits, mostly adding links. Fixes for clarity and flow. Thanks, venom, for goading me into writing this. I'm tweaking it because I have a feeling I'm going to be referring to it often.]

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Posted in Bill of Rights, Guns and Ammo, Militia, Self-defense | Comments Off

Introduction to McDonald v. Chicago

Friday, October 2nd, 2009

McDonald is plank two of putting a floor under the Second Amendment; Heller v. Washington, D.C. was the first.

If you do not typically follow these sorts of things, Brian Doherty’s excellent article in Reason will get you up to speed.

I’m adding a post category for McDonald, since I expect it will be receiving almost as much attention as Heller did.

The Chicago laws at issue are as significant a violation of a citizen’s right to bear arms as were D.C.’s. Chicago residents can’t have a gun without registration, can’t register handguns, can’t register a gun that’s already in their possession, and if they miss a yearly deadline to re-register, that weapon becomes forever unregisterable. Gura and the Second Amendment Foundation (with the Illinois State Rifle Association) have pulled together a set of plaintiffs with personal tales of having their quality of life lessened by the gun ban.
…
[A]s Gura has demonstrated at length in his McDonald filings—as have numerous gun-rights scholars, particularly Stephen Halbrook—the top concerns of the drafters and ratifiers of the 14th Amendment in 1868 were the ways the rights of African-American citizens were being violated with impunity in the post-Civil War South, often with the eager cooperation of local and state officials.

Among the fundamental rights noted by the amendment’s boosters was the right to bear arms. The 14th Amendment’s Senate sponsor, Jacob Howard, referred to the need to protect “‘the personal rights guaranteed and secured by the first eight amendments of the Constitution; such as freedom of speech and of the press;…the right to keep and bear arms….’ Howard averred: ‘The great object of the first section of this amendment is, therefore, to restrain the power of the States and compel them at all times to respect these great fundamental guarantees.’”

This is a crucial observation, and I’ll be watching the press closely to see how well they understand that gun control is historically racist.

he 14th Amendment contains two phrases that could be used to protect individual rights against state and local government encroachment. The one that seems most clearly designed to do so is what Sen. Howard referred to above as “the first section,” the Privileges or Immunities Clause, which says “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.”
…
And as Damon Root has written for Reason, “the 14th Amendment was specifically designed and ratified to protect a sweepingly libertarian idea of self-ownership. That idea includes the right to acquire property, run a business, and buy and sell labor without unnecessary or improper interference by the government.”

That’s exactly why so many jurists of all persuasions have been hesitant about reviving it as an active part of contemporary jurisprudence, although nearly all legal scholars agree that the Slaughterhouse interpretation of the clause was dead wrong.

All excellent. Go read.

And again: this isn’t about what the government allows we, the people, to do. You have the right to keep and bear arms no matter what the government says. This is about what we, the people, allow the government to do, and whether or not our current government understands that.

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Posted in Bill of Rights, Guns and Ammo, McDonald | Comments Off

More On 20/20′s Hatchet Job on Gun Owners

Monday, April 13th, 2009

Say Uncle links to David Rittger’s Cato Institute piece on ABC’s “If I Only Had a Gun” appalling anti-liberty propaganda.

Rittger does a good job summarizing some of the most important objections to the show, but he makes one misstep, which Say Uncle quotes:

Picking people without concealed carry permits to represent the armed citizen and rigging the scenario to ensure that they don’t defeat your narrative is propaganda, not journalism.

…And which I respond to, at length, in comments:

I don’t think “Picking people without concealed carry permits to represent the armed citizen” is a problem; after all, most armed citizens do not have concealed carry permits.

Rigging the scenario is a problem. Portraying spree shootings as a typical gun-crime is a problem. Choosing a highly trained, very disciplined police officer to portray the shooter is a problem.

Failing to mention that nowhere near all cops are that well trained is a problem. Failing to mention David Codrea’s “Only Ones” effect is a problem. Failing to mention that spree-shootings overwhelmingly take place in posted “gun-free zones” is a problem.

But setting concealed carry permit holders as typical gun owners is opening the door to calls for abusive registration and licensing requirements that reduce our rights rather than regulate them.

The fact is, most crimes stopped by law-abiding gun owners are one-on-crimes like rapes and robberies. Moreover, while my anecdotal impression is that many of those involve defenders with good credentials, many do not, including accounts like little old ladies shooting through-the-window intruders with their deceased husband’s all but forgotten nightstand gun. Then there’s the many, many crimes deterred by merely displaying a firearm.

Training is good. I like training. I think Congress should use its Constitutional mandate to establish a militia to fund and equip high school militia courses equivalent to drivers’ ed courses, and I have no objection to the kind of loose licensing drivers’ ed results in — the effort is to license everyone, not to limit licenses to a select few.

But the RKBA should not be dependent on any level of training, at all. A militia license should confer additional privileges above and beyond the simple right to keep and bear (along with additional responsibilities, such as being on the phone tree). Concealed carry would be a good example of such a privilege.

Nevertheless, if your only training is that you should point the barrel away from you before pulling the trigger, that’s enough to exercise the right, and my belief is that the more citizens we have who exercise that right, regardless of training, the safer we all will be.

I am immensely pleased to see the overwhelming response to “If I only….” This is typical of the gun control debate these days: The controllers trot out the same thread-bare excuses and lies, and the gunnies reply with an ever-increasing array of facts and arguments. The gun control camp is in decline, and simply has nothing new to say, while the liberty camp is vital and growing.

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Posted in Bill of Rights, Cool Stuff, Fighting Back, First Responders, Guns and Ammo, Militia, News Media, Press, Self-defense | Comments Off

Virtual Arms

Friday, November 14th, 2008

It's totally a reasonable modern analogue. Jefferson would have been all about crypto.
Dead on. I even seem to remember, back in the early days when high-end crypto was banned for international trade, that advocates were in fact invoking the Second Amendment in public, although I don’t recall that it was ever invoked in court. Pity, that.

The Right to Keep and Bear isn’t just about firearms. It’s about being able to resist the government with whatever tools come to hand.

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Posted in Bill of Rights, Comics, Computers, Government Idiocy, History, Laugh Dammit!, Web | 1 Comment »

The Nonviolent Lie

Monday, July 21st, 2008

[Welcome Smallest Majority readers! And thanks, Kevin, for Quote of the Day status. I'm honored.]

I know I have readers who I am about to make very uncomfortable. Please, as you call me friend, bear with me. Read all the way to the end. Talk to me in comments, in email, on the phone, across the dinner table. But please, read the whole thing.

I’ve linked before to Eric S. Raymond’s outstanding essay on how and why exercising the right to keep and bear arms (particularly firearms) helps maintain a free society: “Ethics From the Barrel of a Gun“.

ESR recently started blogging again, after a two year hiatus, and has just posted another crucial essay: “A Brief History of Firearms Policy Fraud“.

The Heller vs. D.C. ruling affirming that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms was a major civil-rights victory building on 15 years of constitutional scholarship….

But there was another trend at work; the beginning of public recognition, after the year 2000, that anti-firearms activism has been founded on systematic errors and widespread fraud in the academic literature on gun policy….

Now that the Heller ruling has come down and administered another salutary shock to a lot of people who thought they could dismiss the Second Amendment and its defenders, I think it’s time that civil rights advocates follow up by exposing the history of junk science and dishonesty in anti-firearms studies.

ESR then lists several of the most well-known studies allegedly supporting strong gun control, briefly explains what’s wrong with them, and cites detailed refutations. These are the studies from which almost all of the current gun-control rhetoric flowed, and it’s all grossly mistaken at best, often downright fraudulent:

I described this pattern as “fraud” … because the magnitude of these errors would be too great and their direction too consistent for honest error, even if we did not in several prominent cases have direct evidence that the fraud must have been intended. A further and very disturbing pattern is that conventional academic peer review has largely failed to point out errors that were later readily apparent to uncredentialed amateurs.

Yes, of course, read the whole damning thing.

Occasionally, in discussions about the right to keep and bear arms, I’ll challenge my debate partner on some point of law or fact. The usual response has two parts:

First, a kind of verbal shrug that says, in effect, only a gun nut wannabe killer would know or care about that, coupled with the accusation that I spend too much time studying the issue. This charge is usually leveled by folks who did a bit of reading twenty years ago, made up their minds, and never looked back. This is the only issue I’ve ever run across where knowing too much, having the actual facts on my side, is perceived as a liability in argument. (Oh, and this I love: after a year or so of study, I left the false safety of the gun control fold just before September of 2001. I looked in to the facts, thought long and hard, and changed my mind. And yet, because I will no longer politely suffer gun control arguments to go unchallenged, I’m the biased, close-minded, one.)

Second, I’m reminded that in this fight, both sides have distorted, misconstrued, covered up, and flat out lied. And again, this charge is often leveled by those who did their research and made up their minds twenty years ago.

Twenty years, people. There’s been a lot of water over the damn dam since then. That old dog won’t hunt, and isn’t learning any new tricks. The horse you’re trying to beat has long since died and gone to dust, and you look like an idiot beating the dirt where once it stood.

Since the eighties, there’s been a huge pile of research on the framing, history, and legal impact of the Second Amendment, and on the sociology and epidemiology of gun control, all culminating in the recent Heller decision. The Court unanimously, unanimously, people, found that the Second Amendment protects the right of individuals to keep and bear arms, including firearms, outside of any military or organized militia affiliation. The only disagreement is over how much regulation we must tolerate before it begins to “infringe” that right.

It turns out that Second Amendment advocates have gotten their story straight and their act together, while the gun control zealots have fumbled, fudged, and outright lied.

I’ll point to Heller for examples: Among the many briefs submitted on both sides of the question, one brief on Heller’s side became known as the “Errors Brief”, which did nothing but point out a few of the most important errors of fact in D.C.’s Plaintiff’s brief and associated amicus briefs.

After the decision was released, Justice Steven’s dissent (arguing that D.C.’s outright ban on functional firearms in the home did not constitute “infringement”) was found to have several factual errors, errors so severe that many observers think the opinion should be rescinded, rewritten, and re-released, even if correcting the errors does not change the opinion (although important parts of the dissent in fact rest on those errors). As it stands, it’s a profound embarrassment to the Court. [Note: the given link merely lists the errors; other commentators called for revision.]

The Second Amendment means what it says, in the simplest, most straightforward way: the Founders wanted The People, individual citizens, to be armed, particularly with firearms, independently of any military service, and they didn’t want the government to interfere with that in any way. Whatever damage an armed individual might do, the damage that an unchecked government might do is far, far worse (see the entire twentieth century for numerous horrific examples). The Founders did not limit the idea of “balance of power” to the traditional three branches of government, but meant it to work between individual citizens and their government as well.

Most of the Constitution defines the structure of the government, and enumerates its powers. Articles three through ten of the Bill of Rights further limit those powers. Amendments one and two, however, do something truly extraordinary: they declare that The People, acting out their lives solely in accordance with the dictates of their consciences, even in matters of life and death, are as crucial to the structure and stability of this nation of free states as any legislator, executive, or judge. The Second Amendment is not a mistake, not an oversight, not a misinterpretation, not a historical curiosity: it, along with the First Amendment, is the core of the whole enterprise. When you argue for gun control, you are declaring that free men are not fit to rule themselves, that the “balance of power” does not apply to the most crucial branch of government, The People; that We must be utterly subject to the other three branches. (Oh, except we’re allowed to whine. That’s OK, as long as we don’t actually, you know, do anything that might hurt somebody. Or somebody’s feelings.) And that, my friends, is the biggest, foulest, most toxic load of crap to have ever been dumped on our fruited plains, and it is poisoning our nation from the ground up.

From here on out, anyone who reads this blog, and wishes to discuss gun control with me, needs to show that they have read both Ethics and Fraud, and understood them. Let me say frankly, in all good will and friendship, if you haven’t, and if you aren’t willing to sit and listen to me make these points, and if you cannot refute them — not, mind, just wave your hand and tell me I shouldn’t worry my gunsmoke-rotted, troglodyte brain over such obvious offenses to the Way Things Oughta Be, but actually refute them — you are too ignorant and close-minded to be worth arguing with.

You are wrong. History says you are wrong. Sociology says you are wrong. Epidemiology says you are wrong. The U.S. Supreme Court says you are wrong.

It is no longer enough for you to say, Guns are bad, Dave. Good people, nice people, do not have or want guns. All well educated, right thinking, decent folk know this, and even if they sometimes err or exaggerate, well, gun folk do too, so that proves the nice decent people are right because they should be right, so there!

No. Sorry. That won’t cut it anymore.

I have a right, arguably a responsibility, to be armed. So do you. I am no longer required to prove this. I am no longer required to show that I need to have this gun, or meet that standard, or took this training, or got that license, or any such thing. (Not that I’m going to stop trying.)

If you wish to argue otherwise, the burden is entirely on you to show that The People’s unfettered access to arms causes unacceptable harm, and that your proposed remedy will a) significantly limit that harm while b) not significantly infringing the right. I’m sorry you don’t like guns, sorry that you’re afraid of them, sorry you once saw someone get shot, sorry that your friend got depressed and ate his pistol, sorry that someone’s child got into Daddy’s dresser drawer and played with the toy he found there, sorry sorry sorry, but you know what? Too damn bad.

We’ve tried your way. It doesn’t work. You’ve done your level best to make this a peaceable nation without guns, and all you’ve done is to create a flock of cowering defenseless sheep, while letting the wolves run free on parole, and all you can say is, we didn’t do it your way hard enough.

No. We’ve done it plenty. See Washington D.C., Chicago, California, New Jersey, even England. See gun-free schools, gun-free malls, gun-free churches. They’re not “gun-free zones”–they’re free-fire zones, where, just like the slogan says, only the outlaws have guns, and nobody can shoot back. Don’t agree? Fine. Prove me wrong. The burden is on you.

Your way does not work. You want to convince me I’m wrong, prove it. Find some facts, solid, current facts, not lies from the dusty, tattered, transparently fraudulent propaganda ESR exposes. No more you-thinks, and you’ve-heards, and you-wants. None, please, of your god-damned feelings. No, not even if you’re sure. Just cold, refreshing, free-flowing facts, please, and not from ESR’s poisoned wells.

Yeah, sure. Gun advocates make mistakes and stretch the facts a bit at times. We too have our wants and wishes, our blind spots and shortcomings.

But your whole position is nothing but a pack of cowardly lies.

From here on out, the burden is all on you.

In the meantime, please read ESR. Please overcome your irrational fear. Please find a range, and learn to shoot. Please try to buy a gun, if your jurisdiction allows, and find out how hard you’ve made it to exercise a fundamental human right, how hard you’ve made it to defend yourself against goblins who have never given two lumpy farts for your laws, your principles, or your feelings.

Please, please, please, learn that it’s OK to be free.

Here are links to other blogs linking to this post. Thanks, folks. (I should have done this long ago; I’ll do better next time. I’m also trying to figure out why trackbacks don’t seem to be appearing automatically.)

Crayton at 13 Crows
Hecate at Hecate’s Crossroad

New Jovian Thunderbolt links here, with fine comments of his own. Thank-ee!

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Posted in Bill of Rights, Guns and Ammo, Heller, Political Correctness | 11 Comments »

Heller Affirmed; Republic Kept; 5-4

Thursday, June 26th, 2008

The Supreme Court today voided the Washington D.C. laws banning functional firearms, including handguns, in the homes of D.C. citizens.

D.C. can impose licensing requirements, but ordered a license granted to Dick Heller.

Scalia reportedly tears the dissenters, and therefore D.C., new assholes.

Fireworks all over the pro-freedom blogosphere.

Links later, but…

Woo Hoo!

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Posted in Bill of Rights, Constitution, Guns and Ammo, Heller, Law | Comments Off

Heller Out Today?

Monday, June 23rd, 2008

Heller, the Supreme Court’s first ever in-depth look at the Second Amendment, may come out today.

[Update]Immediately after posting, I clicked over to SCOTUSblog, and discovered that today’s opinions have been released, and Heller is not among them.

There are seven remaining opinions. SCOTUS has said more will be released Wednesday. It’s very likely that at least one decision, likely Heller, will come out Thursday. Sigh. [/update]

Probably not, though. There are ten cases left for release this term. The Court is likely to space them out over several days. and Heller will likely be left for last. See Alan Korwin’s Page Nine email #48:

The Heller decision could actually come later than June 23, the widely anticipated last scheduled day of proceedings for the session. The Court can add days to its calendar for additional decisions if it needs to, but these would typically come before the end of the week (June 27). Absolutely no way to know for sure until they act.

Lead attorney Alan Gura pointed out in an email to me (6/19/08) that the Court still has ten decisions left to issue, including three biggies, so it’s highly likely they will add days to the calendar.

My conjecture: The decision must be signed and sealed now for at least days if not weeks, to allow for proofing, typesetting, printing, binding, pre-mail activity, web prep, syllabus draft, etc. My guess is they would rather release it at the end, so the national hub bub doesn’t impinge on other work they have. Requests for interviews, phone calls from friends and close associates, shouting in the press, a ton of activity can be expected, might as well finish off the term first, no?

[Page 9 is also a blog, although these particular observations do not seem to be there. Here's a link to an article linking in turn to the articles he wrote back in March, when oral arguments were made. Korwin is the author of the Gun Laws of America series.]

Just for the record:

No matter what the Court actually says, it cannot decide whether or not I have the right to arm myself with deadly force. I do, the Constitution plainly says that I do, and it was the intent of the Founders that ordinary citizens be able to understand in some detail what their government is allowed to do. The Court can only decide whether or not the Government recognizes that right, and, by extension, whether or not the Government still considers itself bound by the Constitution.

My predictions: The D.C. Circuit decision will be upheld, and the D.C. laws in question will be voided. That’s all. There will not be strong guidance on setting a standard of review, simply a finding that the D.C. laws are  infringing under any standard.

Nevertheless, as Korwin said in March, “Whatever direction the Court provides, D.C. will end up as a model for the rest of the nation, and the Pandora’s Box is open.”

Nor will there be broad declarations of the meaning and breadth of the Second, other than possibly torpedoing once and for all the “collective” interpretation that it only protects the power of the several states to raise militias (non-binding musings in dicta notwithstanding).

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Posted in Bill of Rights, Constitution, Guns and Ammo, Heller | Comments Off

Can We Trust Megan McArdle With a Gun?

Monday, June 2nd, 2008

Over at the Atlantic, Megan McArdle ponders:

So if Heller, as libertarians devoutly hope, legalizes gun ownership in DC, the question immediately arises for those of us who live here: buy one, or not? On the one hand, they are expensive, and shooting ranges far away. On the other hand, I live alone in an apartment that is something less than amply fortified. On the third hand, I’m pretty sure I shouldn’t handle a gun when I’m sleepy.

First of all, as one of her commenters noted, it’s not “the third hand”, it’s “the gripping hand“.

Beyond that, the short answer is, “Of course!”

And to answer Megan’s objections, perfectly acceptable home defense guns start at about $150; excellent choices can be had for around $500. That’s pretty cheap insurance.

And if you can’t deal with a firearm when sleepy, how will you deal with a rapist who will not accept “lemme go back to sleep” as an answer?

Click for the long answer: Show ▼

In a separate comment, I also responded to some of her commenters:

TW said: “Don’t buy a gun just because you can.”

In my mind, “Just because I can” is a fine reason to buy a gun. You do not need any reason or excuse to exercise a right, particularly one protected by the Constitution.

Oh, absolutely, as I’ve said in an earlier reply which appears to be still pending, take lessons and think hard about how you will use the thing.

However, do not let the training process daunt you. We’re talking about a couple of hours of classroom instruction and a couple of hours on the range, at most. You probably spent more time learning the far more complex task of driving.

And with no training or introspection at all, I trust you — Yes, YOU, Citizen! — with a gun far more than I trust the government with so much as a paperclip. A file cabinet is a far more dangerous weapon than any bomb.

Owning a gun is the only way to truly understand the rights and responsibilities appertaining thereto. Buying a gun is the best way of learning just how radically that right has been infringed.

Buy the gun, Megan. Join the free

Several folks recommended she get a dog. Well, yes, a dog is a fine companion and a pretty good goblin alarm. Do not, however, delegate your security to a critter who can be bribed with a piece of steak or a belly rub, or who can be repeatedly tricked into chasing after a ball that was, in fact, never thrown.

What is the deal with thinking that dogs can be trusted with life and death decisions but humans cannot?

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Posted in Cops, Guns and Ammo, Heller | 5 Comments »

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