Here’s some, via The Daily Caller.
A Tulsa convenience store clerk took on four masked men during an attempted robbery earlier this week, shooting and killing two and helping bring an end to a serial robbery ring.
I wonder how that would have worked out had the clerk not been armed.
First we have the NSA collecting personal telephone call data. Now we find out about this shadowy program, which was uncovered only because DEA had to give up its existence pursuant to a criminal case involving a man accused of planning the export of technology to Iran:
The Drug Enforcement Administration has formally acknowledged that it maintained a sweeping database of phone calls made from the United States to multiple foreign countries.
And
…the program relied on administrative subpoenas to collect records of calls….
Not even a secret, but at least Article III, judge granting (or, rarely, refusing) warrants to search. Now we have, also, the same sort of warrant issued administratively (but just as sub rosa if not outright secretly).
What other secret databases is the Federal government keeping on its employers, us citizens?
These two programs, shrouded as they’ve been, are illustrations of why government cannot be trusted with such collections absent open, publicly sought and issued or refused 4th Amendment warrants. These two programs demonstrate instead that, without such public requests and issuances/denials, the Constitution will be ignored at convenience.
An aside: DoJ says this DEA collection program has been discontinued. There’s no evidence, though, that the database has been destroyed. DoJ is only willing to claim that the contents have been deleted. We know, of course, from IRS deletions that deleting doesn’t necessarily mean deletion.
King, NC, used to have a war memorial on its property—funded by private donations—that consisted of a statue of a soldier kneeling before a cross. Americans United for Separation of Church and State considered the memorial inappropriate, and they sued the city.
Last week, in abject surrender, the city not only settled by agreeing to remove the memorial, they agreed—agreed, mind you, no court outcome dictated this—to pay AUSCS $500,000 for AUSCS’ trouble and to pay the plaintiff represented by this atheist organization $1 for his trouble.
Both sides in this matter wish to avoid further costs,
the city said in making its excuses.
No. There’s no moral equivalence here. There’s none at all between atheists and memorials to those who’ve been killed or maimed defending the rights of the likes of Americans United for Separation of Church and State to behave as they do.
Timidity lost. And the cost to religious freedom is grievous.
There is a strong view that terrorists should be executed for their acts. In the main, I don’t disagree. Capital crimes desperately want capital punishment: prompt execution.
However.
Many of these terrorists are doing their deeds in order to become martyrs and to live in Allah’s heaven. For these, execution is a reward, not a punishment; for such as these, execution is a goal devoutly to be wished, not a deterrent.
Instead, I suggest, expensive as it would be, that wherever possible, those terrorists who are acting for martyrdom should be taken alive and allowed to die of old age in a prison cell. Here is punishment for the terrorist, and here is the possibility of deterrence: the price of failure being to live a long life in a cage, to be denied death except through the senility of old age.
The terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo raises a question in my mind and in many other minds. This was an isolated attack, á la a number of other isolated attacks. However, this attack also was associated in time with the murder of a woman cop on the south side of Paris and the murders of four citizens in a Jewish bakery in eastern Paris: these ancillary(?) attacks went in while French police and security units were occupied with the hunt for and capture of the Charlie Hebdo butchers.
I wonder, then, whether al Qaeda (I discount ISIS in this, for now; they seem to be focused on Syria, Iraq, and Jordan) is changing their tactics away from the larger, but harder to execute, attacks like blowing up an embassy or flying airliners into economically and militarily important facilities.
I wonder whether al Qaeda is moving toward smaller, easier to execute, coordinated “lone wolf” attacks whose purpose isn’t to stress police forces with a major one-off, but to try to overwhelm them with more, and simultaneous, attacks than a police force can handle.
Following its inability to cow the West with large, splashily destructive attacks, I wonder whether al Qaeda is moving its attacks on Western civilization toward lots of these smaller, coordinated attacks in a different effort to demonstrate our inability to protect ourselves, the impotence of our police forces, and ultimately to using that version of fear to break apart our various national societies.
I see this, though, as both a greater danger and an admission of defeat. They can’t beat us in the terrorist version of pitched battles, so they’re moving toward this. Many of these will succeed (Charlie Hebdo), but the damage done will be small in each case (if tragic for the victims). They can succeed overall, though, only if we give in to the fear. They can succeed overall only if we citizens choose not to be actively vigilant, keeping in mind that when seconds count, and the terrorists are coming, the police are (only) minutes away.
Armed, confident, and alert. They can’t beat us.