Freedom is the alone unoriginated birthright of man, and belongs to him by force of his humanity; and is independence on the will and co-action of every other in so far as this consists with every other person’s freedom.
Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Ethics, trans. J.W. Semple, ed. with Iintroduction by Rev. Henry Calderwood (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1886) (3rd edition).
Sybil’s Ride
On April 26, 1777, Sibyl Ludington, aged 16, rode 40 miles to alert American colonial forces to the approach of the British. Her ride was over twice as long as Paul Revere’s more famous effort.
On the same day in 1805, United States Marines captured Derne under the command of First Lieutenant Presley O’Bannon, an important event in the First Barbary War.
In April 26, 1865, Union cavalry troopers cornered John Wilkes Booth, assassin of President Lincoln, in Virginia, shooting him to death. There was no interrogation.
This April, a Nashville homeowner shot an intruder intent on burglary.
Also this month, a St. Louis apartment dweller shot an intruder who threatened to kill his family.
A Newport Beach homeowner recently shot an intruder as well.
Aside from the obvious, what do such incidents, often in newspapers, have in common? The government is hiding research about them.
In December 2022, Fox News reported that to appease gun control activists, the Centers for Disease Control had deleted reference to a study on how often guns are used in self-defense from its
The CDC-commissioned study by Gary Kleck showed that “instances of defensive gun use occur between 60,000 and 2.5 million times” annually. But in 2021, after being lobbied by the gun control activists, the CDC pretended that Kleck’s study didn’t exist.
Kleck said: “CDC is just aligning itself with the gun-control advocacy groups. . . . ‘We are their tool, and we will do their bidding.’ And that’s not what a government agency should do.”
CDC’s conduct was not new. In 2018, Capital Research had asked why the agency was “Hiding Its Defensive Gun Use Statistics.”
For decades, we’ve had abundant data on how gun owners defend themselves from violent bad guys. CDC, which investigates something or other related to this subject, won’t share all that it knows.
We can’t legally require the media to stop hiding critical information. But we should be able to require our government to stop doing so.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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William Graham Sumner
If I want to be free from any other man’s dictation, I must understand that I can have no other man under my control.
William Graham Sumner, “The Forgotten Man” (1883).
Freedom Day
April 25 is celebrated as Freedom Day in Portugal.
One can be for free trade yet still demand, while sticking to principle, certain restrictions on international trade.
The State of Idaho has demonstrated one sort of restriction compatible with a free society’s free-trade rules. “As of July 1, it will be illegal in Idaho for health insurers to cover an organ transplant or post-transplant care performed in China or any country known to have participated in forced organ harvesting,” explains Frank Fang in The Epoch Times (No. 508, A5). The legislation had been passed unanimously in both legislative houses earlier in the month and was signed by the governor on
Idaho wasn’t the first state to do this, following Texas last year and Utah this year, with its law going into effect on May 1.
The problem to be addressed? The suspiciously short waiting time for organ transplants in China, especially after the Chinese government cracked down on the Falun Gong decades ago.
“In 2019, the independent China Tribunal in London concluded that the CCP had been forcibly harvesting organs from prisoners of conscience for years ‘on a substantial scale,’ with Falun Gong practitioners being the ‘principal source’ of human organs,” according
This is not protectionism. And it really isn’t any unwarranted regulation on trade. For even in the freest of societies, with 100 percent free trade and freedom of contract, the sale and purchase of stolen goods
Rightly prohibited.
If anything has been taken away unjustly, it’s the internal organs of political prisoners by
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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