Tag: 2nd Amendment

Categories
Accountability First Amendment rights general freedom local leaders media and media people

The Steps Beyond Argument

North Dakota’s junior U.S. Senator, Heidi Heitkamp, a Democrat, FCC, Rob Port, censorship, freedom of speech, 2nd Amendment

Rob Port’s job is to have an opinion. Opinions breed counter-opinions. Unfortunately, they sometimes conjure up concerted campaigns to pressure opinion-makers to shut up.

So, no surprise that his reporting — on his radio talk show and in print — on the doings and not-doings of North Dakota’s junior U.S. Senator, Heidi Heitkamp, a Democrat, has riled up nasty “feedback.”

Earlier this month, Mike McFeely, a “left of center” columnist at the Fargo Forum, where Port also writes, published a column calling Port’s “obsession” with Heitkamp “suffocatingly limited and boring” and acknowledging, “I have often voiced my concerns about the one-trick-pony nature of Port to my bosses.”

Port notes that McFeely’s criticisms are based on subject matter, not content, and suggests that journalism doesn’t spend too much time holding politicians accountable.

It gets nastier, though. Senator Heitkamp’s brother, Joel, is also in the radio business, managing a competing station and hosting one of its morning programs. Mr. Heitkamp got his mitts on Mr. Port’s divorce papers and tweeted out, “The #FargoForum is paying him 71K for part time work! What do the full-time employees get? #Wow #790KFGO #wishicould.”

Meanwhile, here comes the Senate Leadership Fund, associated with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), to suggest the FCC remove Heitkamp’s station’s license due to his advocacy for his sister’s campaign.

Port, for his part, objects to the corrupt “help.”

“The FCC really has no grounds for getting involved,” he argues. “Free people should be allowed to speak freely.”

In the chaos of our current political battles, Rob Port stands on principle, offering equal freedom to his sleazy opponent.*

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* For the complete story, check out this weekend’s Townhall column, and the links at the column’s splash page.

PDF for printing

 

 

Categories
national politics & policies Second Amendment rights tax policy too much government

Was the Line Crossed?

Trump, Congress, budget, 2nd Amendment, guns,

Everybody has a limit, a point after which they reach for the nearest weapon and fire.

Or, in normal politics, withdraw support and go on the attack.

But it is not normal politics right now.

In mid-March, a Congressman from Long Island expressed his frustration with the Trump administration by saying, “This is where the Second Amendment comes in, quite frankly, because you know, what if the president was to ignore the courts?”

Days after this pol darkly implied insurrection, attacking gun rights became, on our Democratic Congressman’s end of the spectrum, a cause célèbre. Obviously, there remains a strong tension between politically opposing gun rights and the commonsense acknowledgment of the vital political function of the Second Amendment.* Lines are drawn all over the place.

But last week a very different line was crossed.

Donald Trump signed the latest Omnibus whopper. And a few of the gonzo president’s biggest Internet supporters — including the oddest, anarchist Stefan Molyneux — could take no more. Trump’s fatal flaw, Molyneux stated, “is his desire to shovel the money of the unborn into the Great White Shark maw of the military-industrial complex.” Molyneux identifies “the largest military budget in human history” as what Trump wanted in exchange for betraying his base.

So, you can see where Mr. Molyneux draws the line of support.

Meanwhile, others are wondering about Trump’s own line on trade policy. With much ballyhoo and bluster, he raised tariffs on steel — and then, quietly, exempted most of America’s steel trading partners.

Crazyman? Or genius?

The line between those two concepts is notoriously gray.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* In my weekend column I noted that “when the populace is armed sufficiently to realistically repel tyranny, the calculations of self-interested politicians per what they can get away with changes.” Guns can remain holstered, most of the time.

PDF for printing

 

Categories
crime and punishment education and schooling general freedom media and media people national politics & policies responsibility Second Amendment rights

Good Guy With Gun

Blaine Gaskill, school shooting, gun, gun control, Maryland, defense, 2nd Amendment

Short version of the story: a good guy with a gun at a Maryland high school stopped a bad guy with a gun. In less than a minute. How? Because the good guy had a gun and was inside the school with the gun.

The bad guy was able to shoot a 16-year-old female student, apparently someone with whom he had a previous relationship, as well as a 14-year-old male before an officer on site responded. This officer, Blaine Gaskill, was on the spot in less than a minute. Gaskill and the assailant fired simultaneously. The assailant fell dead. What exactly happened is still unclear; there has been some media speculation that the bad guy may have shot himself.

But the 17-year-old shooter is dead. The female victim, though still alive, is unfortunately in critical condition. The male victim is in stable condition.

The good guy was armed — with a gun. And he was on site. If you’re learning about the incident here first, it’s because the story isn’t being plastered all over the place 24-7 as it would have been had the shooter been able to wreak much more havoc because nobody could quickly counter him.

So, is it okay to let responsible, well-trained administrators, teachers and others in schools be armed?

Well, ask the question a different way. If you happened to be inside the school at the time, would it be okay to survive when some maniac with a gun starts shooting at you and others inside that school?

Let’s defend our loved ones.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

 

Categories
Accountability crime and punishment education and schooling folly general freedom ideological culture moral hazard nannyism Second Amendment rights too much government U.S. Constitution

Insufferable Common Sense

Timothy Locke, Cherry Hill High School East in New Jersey, gun, gun control, 2nd Amendment, hysteria

Sometimes common sense and open discourse can’t be suffered — or won’t be, anyway.

So discovered Timothy Locke, a popular teacher at Cherry Hill High School East in New Jersey, after discussing the possibility of arming teachers to help protect adults and kids from would-be mass-murderers. Locke also suggested that he’d be among those bearing arms if allowed.

Most of Locke’s students were okay with his opining. But one student was bothered enough by the viewpoint to complain to administrators.

Without further ado, the school — the “Home of the Cougars,” which proudly proclaims its promotion of “a welcoming environment, community, diversity . . . participation . . . growth mindset, grit. . . ,” so forth — searched Locke’s belongings, subjected him to mental and physical evaluations, and suspended him.

Mental evaluation? Wasn’t that a ploy in the old Soviet Union: dissenters must be crazy, hence ought to be carted off to the loony bin? Let’s go nowhere near such sanctions against independent thinking here.

“The bottom line,” Locke summaraized, “is that I was very concerned about security at my school.”

Through an online petition and otherwise, hundreds of students have protested the shabby way that a teacher who inspires them has been treated.

Students less enthusiastic about Locke lament the teacher’s tendency to digress — still legal in all 50 states.

So what now? After a futile school board meeting deflecting questions on Locke’s fate, a second, special meeting is scheduled for tonight, March 6, at 7 pm in the Cherry Hill High School West Auditorium.

Let’s hope sanity prevails.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

 

Categories
meme

The Deadliest Mass Shooter

Democide is a term revived and redefined by the political scientist R. J. Rummel as “the murder of any person or people by their government, including genocide, politicide and mass murder”. Government-sponsored large-scale killings for racial or political  reasons would be considered democide under Rummel’s definition. Democide can also include deaths arising from “intentionally or knowingly reckless and depraved disregard for life”; this brings into account many deaths arising through various neglects and abuses, such as forced mass starvation. Rummel explicitly excludes battle deaths in his definition.

He put the total number of people killed by governments during the 20th century at 262,000,000 of which he says 148,000,000 were killed by communist regimes

  1. Summary and Conclusions [20th Century Democide]

I BACKGROUND

2. The New Concept of Democide [Definition of Democide]
3. Over 133,147,000 Murdered: Pre-Twentieth Century Democide

II 128,168,000 VICTIMS: THE DEKA-MEGAMURDERERS

4. 61,911,000 Murdered: The Soviet Gulag State
5. 35,236,000 Murdered: The Communist Chinese Ant Hill
6. 20,946,000 Murdered: The Nazi Genocide State
7. 10,214,000 Murdered: The Depraved Nationalist Regime

III 19,178,000 VICTIMS: THE LESSER MEGA-MURDERERS

8. 5,964,000 Murdered: Japan’s Savage Military
9. 2,035,000 Murdered: The Khmer Rouge Hell State
10. 1,883,000 Murdered: Turkey’s Genocidal Purges
11. 1,670,000 Murdered: The Vietnamese War State
12. 1,585,000 Murdered: Poland’s Ethnic Cleansing
13. 1,503,000 Murdered: The Pakistani Cutthroat State
14. 1,072,000 Murdered: Tito’s Slaughterhouse

IV 4,145,000 VICTIMS: SUSPECTED MEGAMURDERERS

15. 1,663,000 Murdered? Orwellian North Korea
16. 1,417,000 Murdered? Barbarous Mexico
17. 1,066,000 Murdered? Feudal RussiaReferences Index

 

More information here

R.J. Rummel’s published work listed here

 

Categories
crime and punishment general freedom ideological culture media and media people moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies privacy responsibility Second Amendment rights too much government U.S. Constitution

He Applied Himself

pre-crime, PKD, guns, gun control, shooting, Parkland, Florida, prevention, freedom

“I need to make this count,” wrote a young man in Everett, Washington.

Unfortunately, it looks like he wasn’t attempting a big career-oriented project. He was planning a mass shooting.

“I need to get the biggest fatality number I possibly can,” is one of many damning journal passages the police have made public. Apparently he had settled on attacking the high school he attended. “I’ve been reviewing many mass shootings/bombings (and attempted bombings) I’m learning from past shooters/bombers mistakes.”

Ambition and rigor: missapplied.

Fortunately, his grandmother read his journal and discovered a rifle in his guitar case. She turned him into the police the Tuesday before the Florida shooting I wrote about last week. And maybe just in time.

Meanwhile, last week’s Parkland, Florida, shooting dominates the headlines. Fellow students and neighbors of the Florida shooting victims have ramped up their condemnations and demands — including at a horrorshow “town hall” on CNN.

Yet the nature of the difficulties in preventing such atrocities has become lost in the rhetoric and anger.*

In a free society, we cannot arrest people before they commit a crime. In the Everett case, officials were “lucky”: despite the young man’s lack of a criminal record, they were able to charge him with a burglary they allege he committed the day before arrest — and his extensive planning notes are being taken as evidence for intent. He’s also been charged with attempted murder.

We should be in inquiry mode, right now. It could be helpful to know the exact motivations for both the Florida shooter and the Everett wannabe — and similar cases.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Law enforcement is tasked with uncovering spree shooting plots today — and to protect, too. But the armed, uniformed school resource officer at the Parkland high school failed to protect. He heard the gunshots but never entered the building, while the shooter killed 17 innocents.

PDF for printing

 

Categories
Accountability crime and punishment general freedom moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies Second Amendment rights too much government U.S. Constitution

Government Control

gun control, shooting, church, government, violence, 2nd Amendment, rights

“When do we say enough is enough?” asked California Senator Kamala Harris after Devon Patrick Kelley murdered 26 churchgoing Texans in cold blood, last Sunday.

“The terrifying fact is that no one is safe so long as Congress chooses to do absolutely nothing in the face of this epidemic,” argued Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy.

President Trump, on the other hand, not only pointed out that criminals will violate gun laws to acquire weapons, he speculated that had Stephen Willeford, the former National Rifle Association instructor, not come upon the scene, armed, “instead of having 26 dead, you would have had hundreds more dead.”

After previous mass shootings, Democrats pushed legislation that, even if it had been the law, would not have prevented that particular killer from obtaining the weapons. This time it’s different, since the killer should not, by current law, have been allowed to purchase the firearms he used. Kelley’s conviction for domestic violence, while serving in the Air Force, disqualified him.*

But the Air Force did not do its job, failing to report his record to the FBI. So the background check found . . . nothing.

“The Pentagon has known for at least two decades about failures to give military criminal history information to the FBI,” the Associated Press informed, “including the type of information the Air Force didn’t report about the Texas church gunman.  . . .”

The Obama administration, through its command of the military, failed to execute the law designed to keep guns out of dangerous hands. And it sounds like this failure dates back to Bush and Clinton days.

Where does the buck stop?

We don’t need gun control; we need government control.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Note also that the murderer, as Ben Shapiro recounted at National Review: “escaped from a mental institution in 2012, threatened his superior officers and attempted to smuggle weapons onto a military base to carry out those threats, cracked the skull of his infant stepson, beat his wife, abused a dog.”

PDF for printing

 

Categories
crime and punishment general freedom ideological culture meme moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies

10 Out of 10

Muslim, terrorist, Jihadist, guns, gun rights, 2nd Amendment, illustration, meme

10 out of 10 terrorist Jihadists agree…

American gun rights must be restricted!

 

Categories
ideological culture national politics & policies Second Amendment rights

Second Amendment People

Donald Trump, 2nd Amendment, gun rights, Hillary Clinton, assasination

Donald Trump states things in a manner simultaneously ambiguous and incendiary.

Of course, he has help from the media, the Clinton camp and other embittered opponents, all elated to act as firestorm propellants . . . through as many 24-hour news cycles as possible.

At a rally this week, Trump claimed that a President Hillary Clinton would appoint justices to the Supreme Court committed to undermining our individual right to bear arms. “If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do folks,” he told the crowd, before adding, off-the-cuff, “Although the Second Amendment people — maybe there is, I don’t know.”

The Clinton campaign and much of the media (but I repeat myself) immediately took this as a clear call to Second Amendment activists to . . . well, summarily execute Mrs. Clinton.

A leap? As Hillary would say, “Let’s unpack this.”

Would Mrs. Clinton curtail gun rights as Trump charges? She recently told Fox News that she would not choose justices seeking to overturn the High Court ruling in the Heller case, which interpreted the Second Amendment as guaranteeing an individual gun right.

Do I trust her? Stop laughing and read on.

Was the Donald attempting to incite violence against Hillary? No.

But what should be the people’s response were a future president or court to declare our right to defend ourselves null and void?

Remember, musket-armed American patriots met the British redcoats at Lexington and Concord for the shot heard ’round the world. Why? Specifically to stop the Brits from rendering the colonists defenseless by confiscating their arms and ammunition.

The implication? Clear.

So, with a chill down the back of our necks, let’s hone and redouble our peaceful support for our most basic right, self-defense.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Printable PDF

Donald Trump, 2nd Amendment, gun rights, Hillary Clinton, assasination

 

Categories
Accountability general freedom moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies Second Amendment rights too much government U.S. Constitution

The Freak-out Factor

gun, control, 2nd Amendment, Republican, police

Most folks are so unused to seeing normal people carrying guns around, out in the open, that when they it, they freak out.

Among those who are at least, well, unsettled by the spectacle? The police.

Funny, the gun freaker-outers don’t usually freak when they see police with guns. But that may be changing as more and more video footage comes out regarding police shootings of suspects under suspicious circumstances.

It is not exactly by accident that there are protests in numerous cities.

So, police being human, we cannot be surprised when, after the Dallas and Baton Rouge killings of police, “[t]he head of the Cleveland police union called on the governor of Ohio to declare a state of emergency and to suspend open-carry gun rights during the Republican national convention. . . .”

The governor’s office responded that Gov. John Kasich had no authority to do such a thing. Open carry was a law in the state. Only inside buildings could carry rights be suspended (as they have been, selectively).

Steve Loomis, the Cleveland Police Patrolmen’s Association head, said that he did not “care what the legal precedent” may be, and “couldn’t care less if it’s legal or not.”

If Loomis, a leader in “law enforcement,” boasts this attitude, no wonder police have had so many trigger finger incidents, sparking so much anguish, protest, and debate.

It’s time for police to rethink their approach to people who have rights to carry weapons.

Perhaps more importantly, we should all try not to freak out so easily.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Printable PDF

gun, control, 2nd Amendment, Republican, police