Category Archives: rights

Gun Control

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Or just control.

One guy, Cody Wilson, worked out a way to make pistols out of plastic and a 3-D printer, posted the information on the Internet, and tried to start a business out of the thing. Nothing secretive here; he wasn’t trying to hide anything.

The technology will break gun control. I stand for freedom[,]

he said.

But

…Wilson’s invention also caught the attention of the State Department, which came after him with both barrels blazing. The feds claimed Wilson violated the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, which “requires advance government authorization to export technical data,” and as a result, could spend up to 20 years in prison and be fined as much as $1 million per violation.

Wilson was ordered to remove the blueprints for The Liberator from his web site. The government also told him they were claiming ownership of his intellectual property.

Never mind that the “international arms trafficking” beef has no basis, unless simply identifying where firearms can be obtained and how to obtain them are somehow trafficking. Never mind that the “technical data” are old technology: 3-D printing is years old, and anyone can write a printing program. Nor is there anything magic about the plastic that is the printer’s ink. Indeed, that’s a major drawback for these 3-D weapons: they wear out quickly.

No, this is just an overreaching government trying to control for control’s sake. Nothing else.

A Proper Ruling

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And by Article III judges….

The Second Circuit appellate court has ruled in favor of individual liberty, privacy, and free speech all in one ruling.

[The Second Circuit] ruled Thursday the National Security Agency’s controversial collection of millions of Americans’ phone records isn’t authorized by the Patriot Act, as the Bush and Obama administrations have long maintained.

The Court held, in part,

…we hold that the text of [the law in question] cannot bear the weight the government asks us to assign to it, and that it does not authorize the telephone metadata program. We do so comfortably in the full understanding that if Congress chooses to authorize such a far‐reaching and unprecedented program, it has every opportunity to do so, and to do so unambiguously. Until such time as it does so, however, we decline to deviate from widely accepted interpretations of well‐established legal standards.

Indeed. The question is a political one and not a judicial one. It may be that Congress will screw this up and authorize the thing, but in that event we have recourse: we can fire the blackguards in an upcoming election and select, instead, representatives who understand our rights as free men.

The court’s ruling was based on one of the core questions regarding this law:

[T]he government takes the position that the metadata collected—a vast amount of which does not contain directly “relevant” information, as the government concedes—are nevertheless “relevant” because they may allow the NSA, at some unknown time in the future, utilizing its ability to sift through the trove of irrelevant data it has collected up to that point, to identify information that is relevant. We agree with appellants that such an expansive concept of “relevance” is unprecedented and unwarranted.

Sorry guys—no fishing expeditions, either.

The Second Circuit’s ruling can be read here.

“We Are Not Citizens of Ukraine”

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That’s what Alexander Zakharchenko, a leader of the rebels in Donetsk Oblast of Ukraine, is quoted as saying in Christian Neef’s article of that name in Spiegel Online International.

Fair enough. Then you and your rebels should leave Ukraine and move to Russia, which you think is a better nation than Ukraine, anyway. After all, you’re in Ukraine illegally, now.

Wrong Answer

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The nation’s largest mass transit system is preparing to ban all political advertising on its subways and buses after a judge ruled that a pro-Israel group was allowed to display an advertisement containing the phrase “Hamas Killing Jews” on New York City buses.

New York City’s MTA is afraid that some such advertising would incite violence. Its answer, then, is to do its part to stifle free speech completely.

No. The right answer is to work toward the goal that violence isn’t the answer to unpleasant, or even incendiary, speech. Stifling speech just does even more violence. Words don’t force people into violence; they do that, as they do anything, of their own volition.

Loud disagreement, zealously put, is the noisiness of democracy. It’s the inherent noisiness of free speech. It’s the noisiness of a free people. What’s to be afraid of in that?

Change We Can Hope For

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A post-World War II-era program that forces raisin producers to give part of their annual crop to the government could soon be a relic of history.

Several Supreme Court justices expressed doubts Wednesday that federal officials can legally take raisins away from farmers without full payment even if the goal is to help boost overall market prices.

An immediately post-war New Deal law allows the Federal government to manipulate the market’s raisin supply by seizing a significant fraction of a raisin farmer’s crop and thereby prop up raisin prices—for the benefit of that farmer, you see.

Raisin farmers, over the specific period at issue (because law suits, quite properly, have to be specific in their allegations), were required to give up 47% (!) of their crop to the Feds. Marvin and Laura Horne were among the farmers so afflicted, and they demurred, refusing to give up their property, their raisins. For their effrontery, the Feds have fined them almost $700,000.

The law in question, though, is a follow-on from the Supreme Court’s earlier Wickard v Filburn case that gutted the Commerce Clause by allowing the Federal government to dictate to farmers how much wheat they could grow—and therewith to manipulate market prices. Wickard made possible all of the subsequent market interferences and farm diktats that the government has inflicted on the nation.

This case, Horne v Department of Agriculture, is an opportunity for the Supremes to begin correcting that original mistake.