Tag Archives: freedom

A Misunderstanding

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Ex-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in the emotional aftermath of the Parkland, FL, school shootings, thinks it’s time to discuss the 2nd Amendment.

She’s right, but for the wrong reasons.  She’s right because it’s always time for We the People to discuss our Constitution and every part of it, and not only in the 8th grade Civics classes we all slept through at the time.

She’s wrong, too.

I think it is time to have a conversation about what the right to bear arms means in the modern world.  I don’t understand why civilians need to have access to military weapons. We wouldn’t say you can go out and buy a tank.

Seemingly contradictorily, Rice also said this in response to a Hewitt question about her father, while Rice was a young child, sitting on the family’s porch with a gun across his lap:

I remember so well bombs going off in our neighborhood one night, and my father said, he put everybody in the car and we’re going to go to the police. And my mother said the police probably set that bomb off. And that’s the way that our community, therefore, the men in our community, protected us. And I think it’s a pure version of the 2nd Amendment, as a matter of fact, the right to bear arms.

Because then (and in the era when the Constitution with its Bill of Rights was ratified, and now), government was a much a threat to our individual liberties, rights, duties, as any thief, home invader, or murderer.

That’s why, also, the 2nd Amendment does not allow government to dictate to us our purpose in bearing arms.  Government’s lack of understanding about why we want this or that weapon simply is irrelevant.  And frankly, so is Rice’s lack of understanding.  We wouldn’t say you can go out and buy a tank.  Why not?  Keep in mind, the heavy weapons of our Revolutionary War, cannons, often were privately owned.  It was very impractical for a host of reasons for ordinary men to own cannons then, and it’s just as impractical, for the same reasons, for ordinary men to own tanks today.  True enough, what we were pleased to call a government in that war owned most of the cannons, just as our government today owns the tanks.  But the purpose of private ownership, for all those impracticalities, is irrelevant to government consideration.

…the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

There’s nothing in there that says unless Government disagrees with the people’s or any person’s purpose, nor is there anything that says Arms are limited to these specific ones, nor is there anything that allows a private citizen—a neighbor, say—to block the keeping or the bearing.

The text of the 2nd Amendment is inviolate and not open to reinterpretation at will.  Like each of the clauses of our Constitution, the text provides a very clear meaning, and that meaning does not change with the winds of grief any more than it changes with the evolving standards view of a judge.  If the meaning of the 2nd Amendment needs to be changed, it must be done legitimately, by the will of a majority of We the People in each of a supermajority of our several States.  That’s what Article V is for.

And for the record: I don’t agree that the 2nd Amendment needs change; it’s fine the way it is.  What is needed is for the Feds and the State government to enforce the—constitutional—laws that are on the books.  To have law enforcement actually perform instead of tarrying outside by a stairwell support column, instead of gathering law enforcement persons dithering until law enforcement officers from another department arrive.  To allow the real first responders—those already on scene, whether school, store, or public square, and whether trained and armed for the purpose or private citizen(s) who happen to be present and carrying when an incident starts—actually to respond.

It’s a wide-ranging interview, covering much more than just the 2nd Amendment.  RTWT.

A Justice Misunderstands

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The Supreme Court heard arguments the other day on an Ohio voter registration law.  That law removes voters from the roll if they haven’t voted over a two-year period and don’t respond to a follow-up notice from Ohio’s Secretary of State.

It’s a partisan case from the Left’s perspective: those opposing the law argue, with some justification, that those who live in urban regions (and who happen to vote Democratic) relocate more frequently than do those who live in the ‘burbs and out in the country (and who happen to vote Republican).  This would seem to put Democrats at a disadvantage in elections since they’re more likely to have not voted over a two-year period and not responded to the follow-up notice.

Justice Sonya Sotomayor put the thing nakedly: Ohio’s law

results in disenfranchising disproportionately certain cities where large groups of minorities live, where large groups of homeless people live

and, as the WSJ added,

including people who can’t make it to the polls because of the long hours they work.

The one is at best a misunderstanding, albeit entirely consistent with the Left’s view that responsibility lies with Government and not with the individual.  The other is just nonsense.

Urbanites may well have a higher turnover rate than suburbanites and [farmers], but nothing stops those who leave from registering to vote in their new jurisdiction, and nothing stops those arriving as “replacements” for the departed from registering in the current jurisdiction.  Turnover has nothing to do with it, skin color (I won’t address ethnicity; we’re all Americans in the voting booth) has nothing to do with it, homelessness has nothing to do with it (although this group has a beef in terms of demonstrating their residency so they can register).

The other is wholly irrelevant: Ohio has an extensive early voting time frame; there are lots of opportunities for those with long hours to go vote.

Privacy Innovation

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The FBI’s management says it supports strong encryption, but out of the other side of their mouth they claim that the FBI’s

inability to access data [is] “an urgent public safety issue” that requires “significant innovation.”

Here we go again.  Heads up for FBI Director making plain what he’s now only hinting at: he wants a backdoor into our encryption so Government can enter whenever it takes a notion to.

FBI Director Chris Wray is seeking to reboot the privacy-versus-security debate surrounding law enforcement’s inability to access data on electronic devices protected by powerful encryption.

Over the past year, the FBI failed to access data from nearly 7,800 devices, Wray said Tuesday at the International Conference on Cyber Security in New York City, adding that the number continues to grow[.]

This is disingenuous.  The FBI, in the San Bernardino terrorist shooting, pretended it was unable to open decrypt the cell phone of one of the terrorists because they couldn’t hack the password.  They also pretended difficulty decrypting the contents when they did get the phone opened.  In both cases, when a private enterprise was allowed into the problem, that private company cracked both problems lickety-split.

But we can trust Government.  Nobody in Government would abuse that backdoor.

Here’s an innovation: do your own work at keeping up in the encryption/decryption arms race; don’t demand private enterprise hand you the keys to our kingdom.

Here’s another innovation: get a warrant.

Time to Visit

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Li Kexin, Minister, Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in the United States of America, says

The day that a US Navy vessel arrives in Kaohsiung is the day that our People’s Liberation Army unifies Taiwan with military force[.]

Kaohsiung is a major seaport on the southwest coast of the Republic of China.  Since the PRC now is threatening to invade and conquer a sovereign nation that is an ally and friend of ours, it has become imperative that we do a number of things, including:

  • send a USN combatant ship and a hospital ship to Kaohsiung for a friendly visit
  • resume patrols in the Taiwan Strait between the PRC and the RoC
  • upgrade the RoC’s Air Force with newer fighter and ground attack aircraft, and greater numbers of them
  • sell to the RoC, and train their personnel in the use of, missile defense systems, including Patriot and THAAD
  • broker deals between the RoC and Israel for the RoC’s acquisition of Iron Dome and Arrow rocket and missile defense systems (the latter to complement Patriot)
  • increase our sea and air patrols of PRC-seized islands in the South China Sea, sailing as close as the waters will safely allow, and making low-level flights over the islands
  • increase, in coordination with Japan, our sea and air patrols of East China Sea islands harassed by the PRC’s navy and air forces
  • patrol the Sea of Japan and the Yellow Sea with missile defense capable naval shipping

This also is an attempt by the PRC to distract from its decision to not enforce in any serious manner the sanctions against northern Korea and its decision to not persuade its new BFF, Russia, to seriously enforce those sanctions.  We need to make appropriate responses against those PRC and Russian entities, both business and government, that are disregarding the sanctions’ requirements.

The PRC has been asking after our cauldrons since early in the Obama administration; it’s long past time to respond to the PRC’s Warring Nations mentality.  For our allies’ and friends’ safety, not only the RoC’s, and for our own safety.

Porch Dogs

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Some of you may be aware of the protests in Iran, protests that are growing in size and becoming subject to increasingly violent attempts at suppression by the Iranian government.  “Some of you” because the NLMSM isn’t talking much about the protests.

It turns out that Iranian women are playing a prominent leading role in those protests.

  • a young Iranian woman standing atop a container and shedding her hijab…while simultaneously waving it as a flag
  • a woman confronting security forces and proclaiming “Death to Khamenei” while crowds around her join in
  • Another woman was seen on tape declaring “You raised your fists and ruined our lives. Now we raise our fists. Be men, join us. I as a woman will stand in front and protect you. Come represent your country.”

And on and on.  These women are risking their freedom, such as it is in Iran, risking arrest, beatings, perhaps their lives just to be in these protests, much less to lead many of them.

But, where are the Western “feminists” who were willing—anxious, even—to protest loudly against the inauguration of a President of whom they disapprove, protest against the perceived evils of Civil War heroes of the Confederacy, against sexism and sexual harassment and assault in the halls of Hollywood and Congress?

Never mind that these protests all were conducted wholly within the safety of a nation that proudly protects the freedom to speak one’s mind, to protest against government or any other ill, real or imagined.

Where, now, are Linda Sarsour?  Elizabeth Warren?  Nancy Pelosi?  Kathy Griffin?  Kamala Harris?  Kirsten Gillibrand?  Amy Klobuchar?  Debbie Stabenow?  Debbie Dingell?  Madonna?  Amy Poehler?

Others, like Catherine Ray, Federica Mogherini’s spokesman, has uttered only bland platitudes about rights to peaceful protest and free speech.  The High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy herself has chosen, so far, not to speak at all in her own voice.

What are these women, safe and sound in the bosom of the United States and Europe, saying and doing in support of those Iranian women?  Not much.

Susan Rice, ex-President Barack Obama’s (D) National Security Advisor and UN Ambassador, says the timidity is proper:

Stephen Miller, the author of the piece at the link, wants to know why these modern “feminists” don’t speak up or act concretely in support of those Iranian women.  I have a different bit of advice: stay up on the porch, ladies.  It’s safe there.  Real women are taking action.

Even porch dogs yap, though.