Thoughts on the Florida school shooting and gun issue

Yesterday there was a mass shooting in a Florida High School.  Of course there is going to be an angry uproar about gun control.   Today Rush Limbaugh is talking about different states trying different solutions, which is a position I have always taken -- from anything from taxation, to schools to any other issue or problem.  50 different attempts to solve a problem are more likely to find a single solution than imposing a federal solution on all 50 states.  Why wouldn't you want 50 different chances to solve a problem instead of 1.  With 1 you need 100% success, with 50 attempts by 50 states you only need a 2% success rate which can then be replicated in other states.

BUT,

These tragedies continue to happen, and if the Republicans are to not look like knee-jerk second amendment reactionaries, they need to propose a solution as an alternative to gun control.  Just leaving it to the states appears to be an endorsement of the status quo, which is unacceptable on both a political and moral level.  Americans rightly do not want children to continue being killed by mindless violence.  States' rights is not the entire answer.  Even if it does work, it does not work right away, and in this day and age, the expectation for everything is NOW. Do it now, take my order now, deliver my package now.  That's reality.

I have not thought about this long enough to propose a solution, but I will, every other conservative should do so too.  That's part of the 50 state solution scaled up to millions of thinkers.  If that doesn't work in this instance, we maybe don't deserve a nation endowed with states' rights.

Donald Trump did NOT suggest 2nd Amendment voters assassinate Hillary Clinton

This is beyond ridiculous and it shows how far the media and Clinton voters will go to twist the truth or distort the obvious in order to steer the election to Hillary Clinton.

If you are a second amendment supporter you know that it meant to get out and vote in numbers to stop Hillary Clinton from winning the presidency.  That's how I took it.

Look at the sentence that precedes it - if she gets elected and gets to appoint judges there's nothing you can do.  Well, yes there is - make sure she doesn't get elected.  The second amendment comment was to single out that voting block.

If you are a Clinton supporter, stop lying to yourself and others. At a minimum you are guilty of a confirmation bias.  I'm sure you assume Trump is so beatable that any other Trump pronouncement should be enough to tank his chances of winning.  If you need to lie to win, look in the damn mirror and ask yourself who you are as a person.

Steven Crowder's 2nd Amendment Rebuttal of a Young Turk

This stands on it's own, so I thought I'd share it.

FYI

Guns, guns, guns.

So, I'm a Canadian. I don't have the Constitutional right to bear arms like you in America. It's never really bothered me, because I haven't felt the need to have one. But I do understand and appreciate the notion behind the second amendment, and apparently better than many liberals in the United States.  And regardless of whether or not I wanted to have one, I would be extremely dubious about people trying to roll back a Constitutionally guaranteed right.

The right to bear arms is meant in the context of the framers as yet another check on government power. Yes, in the 1700's they needed guns to hunt. They needed guns for a well-regulated militia. But the entire framework of the Constitution surrounds the notion of checks on government abuse of power. Government cannot be for the people if it comes before the people. I like that. I've never heard it before. I think I'll tweet it. Anyway, the entire document is designed to protect liberty. An oppressive government cannot be fought with wishes, but an armed population would certainly make a government think twice about repealing freedoms.

But liberals will argue that we now have the internet, people can think for themselves (unless they march lockstep with other liberals) and can tweet out the latest government abuse of power (like say in the Ferguson situation). Right. I'm going to allow my freedom to rest on the ironclad foundation of Facebook, Youtube, Instagram and Twitter. Maybe I'm wrong but I'd rather have something a little sturdier backing up my concern about the NSA.

Even if I grant that the liberals are right about social media being a powerful tool (and in many ways it is), I still have a problem with their logic. Riots like the one in Ferguson will not stop because the lack of availability of weapons. On a large scale or a personal scale, if someone wants to do harm or rob a grocery store, not having a gun isn't going to stop them. They can just google how to fashion a weapon out of chemicals.

If guns were to disappear from the face of the earth today, someone would still be murdered by some other means tomorrow. There's chemistry, there's knives, there's clubs, and rocks and bricks and poison and a million other ways for people to hurt and kill other people. You can't ban everything.

Lumberjacks are going to need those axes and chainsaws. Those things could be weapons.

It's not rocket science. If you can't stop every violent problem by restricting guns, then maybe guns are not the root of every problem. Maybe it's part of human nature. Maybe you need to start thinking about banning our DNA. Good luck with that.

Some truths are timeless

This morning I was watching a lawyer's commercial that was really quite odd. The commercial was the lawyer talking the whole time about the Second Amendment. The whole time he had to promote his business he spent to argue that those who supported the right to bear arms (singling out the NRA) were wrong simply because the Founders lived in another era, and the Constitution needed to be brought up to date. No mention of course of how that could be done.

He of course used a straw man argument, and reductio ad absurdum to ask why not give everyone the right to possess thermonuclear weapons. It was too ridiculous to not just laugh. I wouldn't want this guy being my lawyer, because the argument he made was so easily deconstructed that surely he would be a feeble opponent in court.

But it's interesting that he probably would not make the same argument for updating the First Amendment. Is that too an outdated notion?

Some truths are timeless. Forget the First Amendment, are the Ten Commandments out of date? Thou shalt not kill - too old fashioned?

No. But progressive liberalism is characterized by the selective application of principle, and the distortion of the opposition's point of view. So I'm not surprised by this at all.

But the Founding Fathers knew that the moment you turn your back on protecting liberty from tyranny, that's when liberty begins to decay. The Second Amendment is designed to keep the government accountable to the people. Without that accountability the government starts to think that it can do whatever it pleases with no consequence. Oh, wait...

North Korea is a problem guns might have to solve

This is a mobile post.  Don't expect any fancy formatting or an embedded photo.  I haven't mobile posted in a few years or a few phones. 

In any case, I don't have a lot to share except one observation.  Attention it seems has drifted from gun rights/gun safety to the apparently existential nuclear war threat from North Korea.   The irony is that there is a belligerent actor in the scenario and in order to prevent any dangerous attacks, the United States has ensured that it has armed itself effectively in order to counter any aggressive or hostile acts.

You know, because a well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

What would Phil say?

After a string of unfortunate and sickening mass killings, there's been a misguided and ongoing push from the left to make gun ownership by law abiding citizens who may be bitter clingers, much more difficult and limited in scope.

What do you think this guy would have to say about that?

You want to take my guns?

He's probably not "happy, happy, happy".  Maybe this quote would be more appropriate:

"Where I live, I AM 911." -Phil

That about covers it.

Obama statement vs. the Constitution

The president issued a statement yesterday regarding gun control, or as the president put it, gun violence.  Let's for a second disregard the fact that a gun is incapable of violence, it's just a tool that can be used for violence just as it can be used for defense and security.

We've entered the matrix?

Here's the president's statement in full.  I've added the emphasis for discussion purposes.  It is not emphasized in the original.

I thank the Senate for taking another step forward in our common effort to help reduce gun violence by advancing a bill that would reinstate and strengthen a ban on the sale of military-style assault weapons and set a 10-round limit for magazines. These weapons of war, when combined with high-capacity magazines, have one purpose: to inflict maximum damage as quickly as possible. They are designed for the battlefield, and they have no place on our streets, in our schools, or threatening our law enforcement officers.

The Senate has now advanced legislation addressing three of the most important elements of my proposal to help reduce the epidemic of gun violence in this country. Now the full Senate and the House need to vote on this bill, as well as the measures advanced in the past week that would impose serious penalties on anyone who buys a gun as part of a scheme to arm criminals, improve school safety, and help keep guns out of the hands of criminals, people with a severe mental illness, and others who shouldn’t have them. Each of these proposals deserves a vote.

The highlighted section sounds powerful at first blush, but not as powerful as this, the Second Amendment to the Constitution:

AMENDMENT II

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

The part people tend to focus on is "shall not be infringed".  Infringed: Act so as to limit or undermine. Seems like the president's proposal (notice he takes credit for a liberal plan but won't take the blame for his own liberal failures?), tends to infringe the public's second amendment rights.

But what about "being necessary to the security of a free state"?  It is quite necessary that weapons that are in fact designed for the battlefield be available to the people.  Whether the framers were arguing that the security is to face an external threat or to the face an overbearing domestic government, does not matter.  The intent was to allow people to both keep and bear (carry) arms.  Further, if the purpose is to raise a militia when needed, then should not the arms suitable to a battlefield be not only available but indeed required?

The president seems to view the Constitution, at best, as malleable or unequally applicable.  At worst he sees it as archaic and not up to snuff.  He did  say at one point that the Constitution was a document of negative rights.

“We still suffer from not having a Constitution that guarantees its citizens economic rights.” By positive economic rights, Obama means government protection against individual economic failures, such as low incomes, unemployment, poverty, lack of health care, and the like. Obama characterizes the Constitution as “a charter of negative liberties,” which “says what the states can’t do to you (and) what the Federal government can’t do to you, but doesn't say what the Federal government or State government must do on your behalf.”

Disdain for the Constitution is unbecoming for a Commander-In-Chief.  The president is as agenda driven as he is political, and as much as he is eager to take credit and eschew blame.  This simple release, shows once again each of those first three points.  He's attempting to sound-bite himself into convincing the public to support his 'perfectly reasonable' position.  He is eager to take credit for the work being done by Senate Democrats.   And finally his agenda is a pure liberal agenda.  Rolling back gun rights is a progressive liberal wish list item, and Obama is fully on board with it.

As for eschewing blame - he's had over four years of track record showing that.

Armalite versus Zombie

The real reason for the Second Amendment?  It's actually pretty simple.

This:

defeats this.

The founders knew this, and they perhaps also knew that zombies were inevitable in America.  All you had to do to get a zombie horde was to pass them some free health care.  Of course zombies don't need health care being undead already.

Then again, there's plenty of people alive today getting things from government that they don't need.  But they get it because it's free.

There's a mandate now (for now) to buy health insurance.  There should be a mandate to buy Armalites.  Now that would be interesting!  

By way of non sequitur, today is April Fool's Day. But I digress. 

The real reason for this post is that I wanted to use the word Armalite.  It's a cool-sounding word, and a hip reference.  But it's not as cool the Adam 12 reference posted on The Last Tradition.

Mayor Tommy Shanks on Guns

Because guns don't kill people, baseball cards do. This has all the logic of a anti-Second Amendment liberal Democrat, only it's funny instead of annoying.