Tag Archives: rights

A Grievous Error

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The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board had one in its piece last Wednesday. In that opinion, the Editors touted the gun control “compromise” then-soon to be passed by the Senate (and actually passed the next evening). One of the things of which the Board is so enamored is this mandate:

The state laws must contain due-process protections—including the right to an in-person hearing, to know the evidence used to justify a red-flag order, and to have counsel present.

Noting Orwellian here.

It isn’t possible for red flag laws to have due-process protections. The accused’s weapons are confiscated solely on the accusation of another, and the accused must then prove his own fitness in order to get them back—a process that takes weeks, at best. On his success, it then takes additional weeks to months actually to get his weapons returned. So much for the government’s requirement to prove the charge.

That’s the destruction of the accused’s due-process, not the protection of them.

Red flag laws also are destructive of due-process protections for related persons. If another, unaccused, is in the same household and legally owns weapons, those are seized too, all in the name of denying the accused any access at all. That ancillary person then must then go into court and defend her possession, taking weeks to do so, and taking additional weeks to months actually to get them back. So much for the government’s requirement to prove the unrelated person’s unfitness to have her weapons.

That’s the destruction of the related person’s due-process.

A 2nd Amendment Ruling

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The Supreme Court, by a 6-3 ruling, has struck down a New York law that required citizens to show a proper cause and good moral character in order get a license to carry a firearm outside the home. That “proper cause” and the goodness of a citizen’s “moral character” were as defined by the State’s government personnel, and if they didn’t feel like it, or if the “need” didn’t suit them, or if these Moral Superiors didn’t like the man, they blithely could deny the applied-for license.

Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the Court, said that was unconstitutional.

“The constitutional right to bear arms in public for self-defense is not ‘a second-class right, subject to an entirely different body of rules than the other Bill of Rights guarantees,'” Thomas wrote.
Thomas added that there is “no other constitutional right” that requires an individual to demonstrate some sort of special need to government officers in order to obtain a concealed carry permit.
“That is not how the First Amendment works when it comes to unpopular speech or the free exercise of religion. It is not how the Sixth Amendment works when it comes to a defendant’s right to confront the witnesses against him. And it is not how the Second Amendment works when it comes to public carry for self-defense,” Thomas added.

And

New York’s proper-cause requirement violates the Fourteenth Amendment in that it prevents law-abiding citizens with ordinary self-defense needs from exercising their right to keep and bear arms.

Here’s New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s (D) preemptive reaction to the then-pending ruling:

Hochul vowed in May to call for an emergency legislative session this summer to craft new gun legislation as a means to work around the expected high court decision that curtailed the state’s concealed carry permit law.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D) announced that his office is

analyzing this ruling and crafting gun safety legislation that will take the strongest steps possible to mitigate the damage done today.

These are canonical examples of why the 2nd Amendment is so necessary.

Notice, too, that this ruling looks like the beginning of the end for the concept of a second-class right, subject to an entirely different body of rules than the other Bill of Rights guarantees.

The Court’s ruling can be read here.

The Fed and Equity

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And, no, I’m not writing about house ownership type equity. This concerns the Fed’s potentially increasing role in “social equity.”

The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board expressed concern about Progressive-Democrats trying to legislate into the Federal Reserve’s mandates the matter of “racial equity.” They’re correct as far as they went, but they based their concern on the Fed’s existing workload and on the question of how to assess “racial equity” in the Fed’s pronouncements and enforce the concept in its controls.

The Editors, though, missed the most important distinction and problem.

Whether or not “racial equity” is a matter to be taken seriously, it’s a political matter only, and so belongs only to the political branches of our Federal government—Congress and the White House.

The matter has no place in any Central Bank, including ours. The Federal Reserve’s function, in particular, is to protect our currency by protecting our economy—by working, under its existing statutory instructions, to maintain stable pricing, maximum employment, and moderate long-term interest rates (which means working to maintain stable pricing, since employment and interest rates fall out of that).

The Fed has no business or place in the political environment.

I Disagree

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(Surprise.)

Oklahoma’s Attorney General John O’Connor (R) thinks banning “assault weapons” (whatever those are in the real world) looks like a big action, but it really isn’t.

Banning assault weapons looks like it’s a big action, but it really isn’t a big impact. We’re going to dance around all this, Neil, for a long time, but the fact is it’s criminals and people with some type of either long-term or temporary mental illness or depression. That’s the culprit. Only those people shoot people outside of our military.

He’s wrong. While such a ban would have little impact on availability to criminals and the insane, it would have a very large impact on us average Americans‘ ability to see to our own needs and purposes.

But the truly large impact would be on our Constitution and so on our individual rights (and duties). If allowed to stand, such a ban would degrade our 2nd Amendment, weakening it against additional and steadily broadening bans until our 2nd Amendment no longer exists in any material form.

Rank Cowardice

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Did these European nations learn nothing from WWII, or are they gone soft in their wealth and safety under our American umbrella? Or do they ignore the fresh lessons the nations of eastern Europe—freed from Russian occupation only a generation ago—would teach them?

Some European Union states have floated the idea of giving President Vladimir Putin an off-ramp that would make it easier for him to justify a de-escalation to his domestic audience in Russia, while a peace plan drawn up by Italy proposed autonomy for Ukraine’s Crimea and Donbas.

Our own Henry Kissinger—who negotiated our preemptive surrender in Vietnam—is an especial embarrassment. Pontificating in Davos, he actually said with a straight face

…”ideally, the dividing line should return to the status quo ante,” suggesting that Ukraine should allow Russia to retain the Crimean Peninsula, which it annexed in 2014, and swaths of the eastern Donbas region seized by Moscow-backed separatists the same year.

And

pursuing the war beyond that point would not be about the freedom of Ukraine … but a new war against Russia itself.

That is Kissinger once again practicing his politics of preemptive surrender, ceding to Russia the occupied territories of Ukraine, a Kissingerian ownership based solely on their seizure by Russia at gunpoint.

It’s certainly easy enough for those far away from the fight for national survival, sitting in their air-conditioned offices, blithely to tell that nation to just give up some land and we’ll have peace in our time.

Never mind that giving away any square inch of a nation’s territory is giving away pieces of that nation’s existence. Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had the right characterization of Kissinger’s words.

I get the sense that instead of the year 2022, Mr Kissinger has 1938 on his calendar. And that he thought he was addressing an audience not in Davos, but in erstwhile Munich.

One of Zelenskyy’s advisors, Oleksiy Arestovych, was more blunt:

Get lost with suggestions of this sort, that Ukraine should trade some of its territory. Children are dying here, soldiers are stopping shrapnel with their own bodies, and they’re telling us to sacrifice territory. It will never happen.

And from the second link just above:

they are telling us to sacrifice our land? Bite me, f*ckers.

Indeed.