Common Sense with Paul Jacob

An appeals court has shot down a lawsuit against gun makers filed by New York City.

New York is one of many cities that has sued gun manufacturers on the grounds that the gun makers knew their guns would be used in crimes and sold them anyway. Supposedly the companies failed in their responsibility by not policing retailers, vendors entitled by law to carry and sell those guns.

With equal logic one could go after knife manufacturers for selling knives. Or the manufacturers of any object heavy enough to hit somebody over the head with.

Or PC makers. Plenty of crimes have been committed using a laptop. Not to mention the various software on these machines. Or telephones. Cell phones. Have any crimes been committed using these instruments? Are all the manufacturers of these items properly liable for the conduct of costumers who use their products to break the law?

New York’s lawsuit was not about a lapse in any company’s legitimate responsibility. It was about a new way to try to impose gun control and further restrict the rights of citizens to acquire personal armaments . . . which people use not just to hunt or collect, as some presidential candidates would have it. Guns are also handy in defense against violent assault.

So, now that that this indefensible tactic has been shot down, will it stay down?

That, we’ll see.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Just “being a professor” doesn’t make you smarter than your students. Or more grounded in reality. Or common sense.

Take Priya Venkatesan, a Dartmouth academic who teaches a class in something-or-other to do with science, postmodernism and higher or lower consciousness or something.

She is suing some of her former students. Why? Maybe it’s like climbing Mount Everest: You do it to see if you can. And this professor apparently thinks modern anti-discrimination laws entitle her to go after students simply for criticizing her teaching.

Roger Kimball has the scoop over at PajamasMedia.com. He quotes Professor V’s minatory email to her students. In it she merely says she is suing “some of you” under Title VII of what she blunderingly calls “anti-federal” discrimination laws. She obviously didn’t like her students’ class evaluations, which she ominously says she will reproduce in a book.

Don’t wait for her to find a publisher. Many of the evaluations have already found their way onto the Internet. Typical criticisms include “awful,” “nonsensical,” “worst course ever.” Sure, we can’t know the quality of her teaching for certain without trekking to Dartmouth and sitting in. But from her course description and her email’s grammar and logic I’m willing to credit the students’ insights.

More I shan’t say, as I don’t wish to be named in Professor V’s lawsuit. My lawyer is overworked already.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Last November, Keith Sampson, a college student, was found guilty of “racial harassment.” He’d been caught reading a book while on break from a part-time job with the school. Uh-oh.

The book is titled Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan. It recounts a conflict between Irish Catholics and the Klan back in the 1920s. The book is clearly anti-Klan.

Reading such history cannot amount to “racial harassment,” even if somebody complains that it does. But such a complaint was all it took to get Sampson in hot water with the hall monitors at his school, Indiana University/Purdue University (Indianapolis).

According to Sampson, the “affirmative action officer” found him guilty without ever talking to him or inspecting the book. The official accusatory letter states that “repeatedly reading the book . . . constitutes racial harassment in that you demonstrated disdain and insensitivity to your co-workers.”

I’m sure Keith Sampson felt the university was being insensitive to his need to have the bogus accusation properly investigated.

Months later, the university is finally reversing itself, thanks to a lot of bad publicity and the involvement of outfits like the ACLU and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). But the school admits no wrongdoing.

If you ask me, the affirmative action officer has way too much time on his hands. Maybe he could spend it reading a book?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

The sign said “Beware of the Dance Police.”

It graced a wooden post at San Tan Flat, a restaurant in Pinal County, Arizona. It was part of the restaurant’s protest against the county’s busy-bodyish no-dancing rule. Owners Dale Bell and son Spencer appealed that decision. And won. Spencer gladly took the sign down.

The victory belongs to the San Tan Flat’s patrons — who just like to dance to country music — and to its owners, and to . . . new media.

I first learned about this at reason.tv. I reported how comedian Drew Carey has turned his celebrity status into a force for freedom. Here’s what San Tan Flat’s Dale Bell says about freedoms today, courtesy of reason.tv:

Government often times in America, in 2008, is intrusive and very corrupt in its approach to small business people and individual citizens. . . . [G]overnment will take your freedoms away, if you are willing to give them up.

For sticking up for the rights of their customers to dance, Dale and Spencer have been rewarded with . . . freedom. To allow their customers freedom.

And it wasn’t just new media that helped. It was new . . . legal assistance. Dale thanks the Institute for Justice for making the battle a lot easier.

So, go to reason.tv, and watch and listen . . . and tap your toes. Go to ij.org, to help these great freedom-minded lawyers.

And, if in Pinal County, dine at San Tan Flats. You’re even free to dance.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

“Condign.” I’d read the word before, and still had to look it up. I looked it up again a little while ago. I think I’ll remember it now.

Some think of having to look up uncommon words as a special kind of punishment. Condign is for them, then: It has been relegated to modify punishment since the 17th century. It means “entirely in accordance with.” A “condign punishment” is due punishment: not too strong, not too weak.

So thank you, George F. Will, for reminding me, once again, what “condign” means.

Mr. Will used it to characterize what would happen if former Congressman Bob Barr, a Republican-turned-Libertarian, got into the presidential race and took enough votes from John McCain to hand the election to the Democrat.

Now, Barr has done just that — gotten into the race.

In his column, Will relates that Barr will shed no tears for John McCain. McCain’s campaign finance regulation trampled on free-speech rights and helped incumbents stay in office even better than before. Will gives a number of examples how McCain-Feingold has trampled on the ability of Libertarians to get on the ballot in some states, and to support their candidate in the next presidential outing. He said if McCain loses because of the Libertarian candidate, that would be “condign punishment.”

Yes. But would the Democrat winning be condign punishment for America itself? I’ll leave that to your judgment.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

We want to know what our government is up to.

If officials do bad things or just extremely clumsy money-wasting things, we need to know. Then we can try to do something about it. It’s called oversight.

Oversight requires transparency. If officials hide their activities it gets difficult to learn what they’re up to. I don’t say we should be told secrets the public unveiling of which would compromise our national security. But almost everything else is fair game.

Okay, I hear everybody nodding furiously. But government officials themselves aren’t always so agreeable. An example is Diane Oberquell, a commissioner in Thurston County in Washington. Last fall, Washington state auditors conducted a government performance audit to see how responsive local officials are to requests for public records.

According to the newspaper The Olympian, this Commissioner Oberquell — I guess it’s a coincidence that her name sorta rhymes with “overkill” — this Oberquell person went “ballistic” when she found out about the audit. Claimed it was an uncalled for “sting” operation.

Hey, if that’s what it was, so be it. Let’s have more of these sting operations.

The irony is that a draft report of the audit has just been released, and it seems Thurston County got an okay assessment. Not the best, not the worst. Middling. So why all the defensiveness?

Hmmm . . . seems mighty suspicious to me. Time for another audit?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Cato Institute has announced the recipient of the 2008 Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty. The $500,000 prize is awarded every other year “to an individual who has made a significant contribution to advance human freedom.”

This year’s winner is a 23-year-old Venezuelan law student named Yon Goicoechea. Yon leads the pro-democracy student movement that played a crucial role in stopping strong man Hugo Chavez from expanding his dictatorial control through a December 2007 plebiscite.

Earlier, in May of that year, the Venezuelan government had ordered the shutdown of the country’s oldest private television station. Since then, and despite death threats and other intimidation, Yon has organized dozens of mass protests against Chavez’s assault on individual liberties.

Most observers thought Chavez would succeed in dealing the final death blows to the rule of law. Just before the plebiscite, Yon was able to appear on national television to cheer on the troops. After the question was defeated, he declared that the result was a “victory of the Venezuelan people that today defended their freedoms. . . .”

The Milton Friedman Prize has been awarded to intellectuals and even a country president. This is the first time it has been awarded to a political activist, and to someone so young. Cato President Ed Crane says he hopes the prize will further Yon’s “non-violent advocacy for basic freedoms in an increasingly militaristic and anti-democratic Venezuela.” Amen to that.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Is the fire gone?

Let me quote the first sentence of an article from South Dakota, the Argus Leader: “An effort to end term limits on state lawmakers in South Dakota fits with a trend nationwide that suggests the fire might have left the movement.”

Okay, so . . . there was passion, once, for term limits. The fire raged. Now the fire has perhaps sputtered out. Slipped out the back, Jack . . . maybe. Taken the 3:10 to Yuma . . . possibly.

It’s okay for a journalist to be uncertain of a conclusion — even a lead-sentence conclusion — if he can report at least some evidence for it. So what evidence was offered in the article?

The first bit, obviously, is this “effort to end term limits” in South Dakota. So, what’s the deal? Spontaneous uprising by the people? Naw, just the same old rearguard action by incumbent politicians and special-interest allies. There’s still widespread popular support in South Dakota for term limits. Nothing new on either count.

The reporter also says fewer states are enacting legislative term limits these days. True. But that’s got more to do with institutional blockages than any slump in popular support. In 26 states, voters have no power to pass statewide initiatives. And where they have it, politicians are trying to hobble that process.

Meanwhile, voters continue to support term limits whenever they can, and to rebuff efforts to scuttle them.

So the fire isn’t gone.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.