Category Archives: culture

The Boston Lockdown

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While the second terrorist in the Boston Marathon bombing still was being hunted, Boston and a number of surrounding suburbs were put on lockdown, as police recommended (strongly) that everyone should stay indoors while they searched for the terrorist, a terrorist who, as it turns out, had escaped the perimeter the police had set up to enclose a small part of the city.

During that lockdown, Boston took a number of hits, and so I have some thoughts about the pros and cons of the matter.

  • Pros:
    • easier to spot the terrorist on the move (which the police never did)
    • clearer lines of fire should they need to engage
  • Cons:
    • citizens were unable to participate in the manhunt, even though part of a citizen’s duty is to aid the police
    • citizens were unable to go about their own business, except at government behest
    • economic activity in the city came to a halt for the duration
    • a “go inside and hide” mentality makes it easier for a government to dominate its people

The city and people of Boston took hits from the impairment of their individual freedoms (this time, brief) and to their economic activity (this time, both brief and local).  In the end, too, the lockdown contributed very little to the actual tracking and capture of the remaining terrorist.

There are a couple of things about this: for one, these now are tools for subsequent terrorists in their subsequent activities.  On an individual basis, the loss to Boston and to Bostonians was small—but scaled up, with terrorists now acting so as to prompt further lockdowns, the losses can easily mount to a scope far beyond the reach of any physical terrorist act or collection of them done in concert.  Disruptions to our lives get us dancing to the terrorists’ tune as surely as actually killing us.

Widespread lockdowns also get us in the habit of letting the government corral us, for our own good.

Keep in mind Benjamin Franklin’s warning:

Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, will have neither Liberty nor Safety.

Although the warning might be hard for some to understand, it being older than one hundred years.

Immigration and Assimilation

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National Review Online has an article on the unfolding (immigrant) terrorist attack in Boston (unfolded: the two proximate terrorists are dead or caught; unfolding: learning from the surviving terrorist whether they acted alone or as part of a larger op).  In the article, John O’Sullivan talks about the assimilation into British society of the immigrant terrorists who attacked the British subway system 7 July 2005.

For almost the entire youth of the 7/7 bombers, the British had acted as if they were ashamed of their national identity and history.  So young men, with the usual propensity of young men to want to identify with patriotic and idealistic causes, had been told that there was nothing admirable or heroic about being British.  It was a sort of swindle, and one, moreover, that had been perpetrated especially upon people of their ethnic backgrounds.  They had therefore looked around for a heroic cause they could identify with.  The radical Islamists provided them with the cause of radical Islamism—and they embarked on the relatively short road to mass murder.

Sound familiar?  O’Sullivan thinks so, too:

The fact that Senator Schumer has declared ex cathedra that the Boston bombings have no significance for the immigration bill before Congress merely shows that folly has no natural internal limit.

Particularly in light of the older brother’s continued feeling of alienation from American society:

I don’t have a single American friend, I don’t understand them[.]

2nd Amendment Rights and Steamrolling

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President Barack Obama, in his dismay that he couldn’t dictate his position on gun control via demagoguery, expressed his dismay thusly:

The gun lobby and its allies willfully lied about the bill.

The Senators who voted against it are cowardly and had “no coherent arguments as to why we wouldn’t do this.  It came down to politics.”

“A minority was able to block it from moving forward” through “this continuing distortion of Senate rules.”

What Obama chose not to mention, though, is the steamrolling tactics he tried while coming down with his own politics, attempting to impose his minority position through an attempt to preempt actual discussion of the bills—by distorting Senate rules and while outright lying about his behavior and his role in the gun control bills’ failure.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D, NV) could have forced an up-or-down vote on the Manchin-Toomey background check bill—it got 54 votes on the cloture motion, so he might have gotten the bill passed.  No, though.  He and Obama didn’t want debate, they didn’t want Americans—or our Senate stand-ins—to have a chance properly to study the bill and (the horror!) to propose amendments before voting on it.  We all would have gotten that chance because skipping the cloture vote would have required Obama and Reid to sit through 30 hours of public debate and amendment before the vote could happen.  The word came from on high: no scrutiny, do the cloture vote.

In the midst of his crocodile tears over the lost opportunity for the Newtown children, Obama angrily denounced fears over a national registry of gun owners—saying that the just defeated bill explicitly banned the creation of such a registry.  That ban was in the bill, true enough.  But the fears are no less real for that.

Were Progressives to win the 2014 mid-terms and regain control of the House, who can believe that the registry ban wouldn’t be promptly rescinded and a registry created making used of the now additional two years of background checks?

This is another failure of Obama’s doing.  As Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard has pointed out, Obama and his cronies have zero credibility after their shenanigans vis-à-vis Obamacare, border security, Dodd-Frank, the present gun control “debate,” demonizing—and slandering—all those who disagree throughout his administration’s rule, etc, etc, etc.  Obama’s blandishments about registry bans simply are unbelievable.

We’re Moving in the Right Direction

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At least on some things.  A Fox News poll, taken just after the recent Boston Marathon terrorist bombing had these results, among others (the full poll is at a link in the article).

On the question of trading some personal freedom for an increase in personal safety, Americans had this to say:

7. Would you be willing to give up some of your personal freedom in order to reduce the threat of terrorism?

Yes

No

(Don’t know)

16 Apr 13

43%

45

12

This compares with past results:

16-18 May 06

54%

36

10

10-11 Jan 06

61%

27

13

26-27 Jul 05

64%

21

15

8-9 Sep 02

61%

24

15

4-5 June 02

64%

21

15

17-18 Oct 01

71%

20

9

Those October 2001 results are just after the terrorists crashed the Twin Towers, damaged the Pentagon, and attacked (unsuccessfully, via United Airlines Flight 93) the White House.  Americans are recalling Benjamin Franklin’s remarks on that tradeoff, that without personal freedom, there is no security.  At all.

A Thought on Gun Control

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Recall that last November the 2nd Circuit upheld a New York law requiring those who want to carry handguns to show “a special need for self-protection.”

There is an underlying problem with this.  The Federal Constitution does not allow the Federal government to decide the purposes for which it will permit citizens to “keep and bear arms.”  The Constitution requires the Federal government not to infringe citizens’ right to keep and to bear, period.  There is no “except for when the government deems otherwise” caveat; the clause reads the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

This also is clear from the authors’ understanding of the terms of relevance here: from the 10th edition of Johnson’s Dictionary we have: Infringe: 1. To violate; to break laws or contracts.  2. To destroy; to hinder.  That definition has not changed much, if at all, in the intervening more than one hundred years since the Constitution was written.

Additionally, the right to keep must mean the right to bear anywhere, else the keeping has no import.  Moreover, the right to bear is as explicitly stated in the Clause as is the right to keep, and that right has no limit on where stated, and so there is no limit.

On top of that, in A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, “State” refers to the constituent States of the United States, not to the United States itself.  Again, the Federal government has no say.

Finally, Heller and McDonald made explicit the extension of these 2nd Amendment clauses to the inside of the individual States—all of them.

It should be clear, then, even to a New York-based 2nd Circuit, that the government has nothing to say on the purpose a private citizen, of any State or of the United States, might have for possessing or carrying about his privately owned weapon.  Indeed, as Judge Richard Posner of the 7th Circuit notes, a citizen’s need can be acute everywhere, and with particular reference to “a special need for self-protection,” Posner had this in his opinion in Moore v. Madigan:

Twenty-first century Illinois has no hostile Indians.  But a Chicagoan is a good deal more likely to be attacked on a sidewalk in a rough neighborhood than in his apartment on the 35th floor of the Park Tower.  A woman who is being stalked or has obtained a protective order against a violent ex-husband is more vulnerable to being attacked while walking to or from her home than when inside.  She has a stronger self-defense claim to be allowed to carry a gun in public than the resident of a fancy apartment building (complete with doorman) has a claim to sleep with a loaded gun under her mattress.

It’s certainly true that some reasonable State-level (but not Federal) limits on the where might be applied.  It’s reasonable, for instance, to uphold the right of a private business owner to bar weapons from his establishment.  It’s reasonable for a State to bar private citizens’ weapons from a courtroom.  It’s reasonable for a State to bar the bearing anywhere (and so to bar the keeping) by those convicted of violent crimes.  It’s reasonable for a State to bar the bearing in public by any other citizen absent that citizen’s possession of a license demonstrating his understanding of the handling and maintenance of his weapon.

But there’s very little else that a government might do to inhibit those 2nd Amendment rights.