Tag Archives: freedom

The Fiscal Cliff “Deal”

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It’s a bad deal, and the Republicans in the House should vote it down.  Indeed, they should refuse even to take up the bill until the Senate has actually voted on the budget bill which the House passed in spring of last year, which would obviate all of this, or on the House-passed fiscal cliff solution from last September (which CBSNews claims doesn’t address the fiscal cliff, even though it significantly reduces Federal spending).

If the House Republicans accede to this deal, there’ll be no meaningful spending cuts, no chance for deficit elimination, no chance for debt pay down, the coming debt ceiling “negotiations” notwithstanding.  No, the Republicans will only be confirming their failure in summer of 2011, and their Senate failure last night, and solidifying their habit of folding under pressure.  And so it will be easy for them to fold, yet again, in two months’ time.

But quite aside from that political failure, they will be creating an economic and social failure: there is no need for the Federal government to receive yet more revenue.  Yet allowing the government to expand its raids on the private pocketbook, they will be condemning Americans to existence as government wards.  After all, President Barack Obama is on record in his victory speech yesterday as saying he intends to use this tax increase to fund additional “welfare,” rather than to pay down the debt, and as saying he wants yet more tax increases in the next round of talks—with which to expand “welfare.”

Even the chump change spending cuts in this deal represent abject surrender for the emasculated party.  The deal agrees to slip the sequester by two months, but that only achieves a spending cut of $24 billion.  That’s one surrender, but it could have been choked down in favor of dealing seriously with spending in the coming debt ceiling debate.  However,

Republicans had insisted the cuts of $24 billion be offset with savings in other areas.  The White House wanted some of the offset to be in the form of tax increases, not just other spending cuts.

Republicans folded (there’s that habit, again).

The deal pays for delaying the sequester with a mix of new taxes and spending cuts[.]  …$12 billion would come from a shift in the rules affecting workplace-based 401(k) plans.

A tax increase from which President Barack Obama’s union allies are carefully shielded, no matter their incomes.

This is a bad deal.

Kill it.

NLMSM Strikes Again

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Just two days before Christmas last week, The Journal News kindly advised all readers of the locations of gun owners, and of the locations of their unarmed neighbors, in the two New York counties of Westchester and Rockland.  The JN‘s Putnam County outing is pending.

They write, with an absolutely straight face, in justification of this invasion of privacy:

Anyone can find out the names and addresses of handgun owners in any county with a simple Freedom of Information Law request….

So they thought they’d do the home robbers, second-story men, and leftist anti-gun kooks a civic favor by outing these private citizens themselves, and save those others the trouble.

The good citizens of New York know better, and they object to this arrogant abuse of journalistic”…practice.

One objected:

Do you fools realize that you also made a map for criminals to use to find homes to rob that have no guns in them to protect themselves?

Another

You have just destroyed the privacy of these law abiding citizens and by releasing this list, you have equated them to that of sex offenders and murders.

And another:

These are law abiding gun owners, they are no danger to anyone except for criminals.  And with this information you have made them targets for both criminals and anti gun lobbyist who i am sure are going to treat them like monsters.

And another:

Tom King, president of the New York Rifle & Pistol Association, said the release of additional pistol-permit information [beyond the currently releasable name and address] would endanger gun owners, some of whom have valuable collections of weapons.

You’re giving a shopping list to criminals.  Does it matter if you own 47 guns or you own one gun?  Everybody likes to think that someone who has all of these guns is evil, that there’s some nefarious reason they have all these guns.  There are collectors.

And another:

Paul Piperato, the Rockland county clerk, said he’s always uneasy providing it.

You have judges, policemen, retired policemen, FBI agents—they have permits.  Once you allow the public to see where they live, that puts them in harm’s way.

Only a fool thinks judges and law enforcement personnel don’t have a plethora of enemies.

And there’s the hysteria and illogic of the anti-gun folks.  Jackie Hilly, New Yorkers Against Gun Violence Executive Director, insists

You don’t have more success with more guns.  You certainly don’t want our schools turned into armed camps.

Never mind that armed guards, or teachers or school staff trained and armed, don’t make the schools “armed camps.”  This is just an hysterical exaggeration.

Never mind that, presently, we give more protection to our banks and the money therein than we do our children.

Never mind that when the bad man comes and seconds count, the police will be only minutes away.  Absent an armed presence at the scene of the murders, the killing just goes on until the police can, finally, get there.

Never mind, even, that guns are not involved at all in one-third of mass killings.

The Journal News, though, in all of its wide-eyed innocence, is careful to point out that their reporter

Dwight R. Worley owns a Smith & Wesson 686 .357 Magnum and has had a residence permit in New York City for that weapon since February 2011.

But his dot isn’t on the map of gun owners and of unarmed homes that the NJ so kindly published.  Oh, wait—Worley isn’t in the counties he outed; he’s in NYC.  How convenient.

Merry Christmas

Mass Shootings

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In the aftermath of the Newtown, CT, school massacre, there’s been a push to reapply a ban on “assault” weapons—whatever those are; not even the military has any such.  The term is purely legalist, cooked up in the back halls of Congress, and subject to change with the winds of political convenience.

One of the excuses used for this foolishness is one that Peekskill Mayor Mary Foster repeats:

We have seen a proliferation of these tragedies after the ban on assault weapons expired in 2004.  We cannot allow this to continue.

Let’s look at some actual facts.  The Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel published some of those just last August.  The graph below is built from their data, which cover roughly 35 years—from 1976 through 2010.

Note:   Mass shooting defined by the FBI as the shooter killing four or more people in a single incident (not including the himself), and typically in a single location.  Data compiled from the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting program by James Alan Fox, criminology professor at Northeastern University; US Census Bureau; Journal Sentinel research

Hmm….  Pop quiz time, and no peeking below: who can identify from this graph the period of effectivity of the “assault” weapon ban?

I didn’t think so.

The ban ran from 1994-2004.  The incident rate during that period is the same as the rates both before and after.  The number of victims per incident varies wildly—but is unchanged, in average or variability, over the same three periods.

Maybe it would be better for concerned communities to put trained, armed guards on duty in locations where there are masses of people—like schools and shopping malls, maybe.

Maybe it would be better for folks sitting in leadership positions—like, say, Mayor Foster—to think with their brains, rather than their emotions, and to consult some actual data.

Never Let a Crisis….

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The Democrats, led by President Barack Obama and Senators Diane Feinstein (D, CA) and Chuck Schumer (D, NY) want to “discuss” gun control and make it harder/impossible for us to retain our 2nd Amendment rights.  But this would make us more like Europe, and that’s a Good Thing, isn’t it?

Here’s what Europe is blathering on about in re the Newtown mass murder.

[The Newtown massacre] is once again the unavoidable result of a national culture….  Once again, the United States is debating its gun laws, even if the discussion is likely to be short and inconclusive.  But the real thing that must change (though it hardly will), is the misunderstanding that America’s formative myth of “freedom” allows for weapons to be as widespread as smart phones.

And from Süddeutsche Zeitung, this:

Their [Republicans and the gun lobby] opposition to almost any kind of gun control borders on political complicity in murder and manslaughter.

And from Die Welt, this, even as they “recognize” the legitimacy of private ownership of guns:

A country-wide weapons registry would make sense. … [A]t least a ban on semi-automatic weapons, such as the one that existed during the administration of Bill Clinton, makes sense.

And from Stuttgarter Zeitung, this:

[T]this variety of martial liberalism is a relic of a bygone era that no longer fits in the time.

Never mind our Creator’s endowment of rights and the expression of them in our Bill of Rights.  The latter exists to facilitate our satisfaction of our individual endowment of obligations, which includes our obligation to help each other enjoy those inalienable rights.  Which demands an ability to defend ourselves and our fellows by force of arms, if necessary, not only against other members of our compact and intruders from outside it, but also against an overweening, overly intrusive government that is a necessary evil and not the fount of our rights, responsibilities, and freedoms.  Which in turn demands a 2nd Amendment that explicitly acknowledges our inherent right to be adequately armed for executing that self- and mutual defense.

Disarming us, as even the Süddeutsche Zeitung understood elsewhere in its editorial, cannot have prevented such mass murders.  Disarming us would not disarm the criminals, or the insane, or the criminals who would use the insane.  Progressives dismiss this as ridiculous, a catch phrase, but it is no less a truth for that.

Nor has the threat receded in a modern, dangerous world, as the Stuttgarter Zeitung so innocently hopes.  Thinking so is dangerously naïve.

Government has no need to know what its employers have in our possession.  Fishing expeditions, which include a national gun registry with its associated limits on the purpose for which we might be permitted to possess and use a firearm, and of which restrictions on what we are in the end permitted to own are a subset, are at once an early step in the erosion of freedom and a textbook example of why another requirement was written into our Bill of Rights: the need for a separately court-approved search warrant before our government might pry into our private affairs.  A government that assumes, a priori, that its employers are dishonest is a government that, even more so, cannot be trusted.

What those who idolize Government, those who truly think that government is the origin of our rights, responsibilities, and freedoms—rather than an unfortunately necessary tool for helping us preserve our individual liberties and satisfy our individual responsibilities—do not understand is that these are truly individual; our liberties and obligations are individual and are inherent in us as individuals.  Thus, we cannot wish them away onto another entity for preservation or satisfaction.  They cannot be divorced from us any more than our lives can be.

In the end, the only ones who want to disarm a population are those in Government with guilty consciences about their own designs on liberty and those who truly believe that freedom flows from Government and not from God.  Both sorts are dangerous.

Misguided Conceptions

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Another example is “conservative” complaints that, with Obamacare here to stay (misconception number one; although its repeal has gotten harder), the states perforce must set up state health insurance exchanges, rather than leaving that to the Federal government.  One example is from Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Congressional Budget Office Director under President Bush the Younger, who has

repeatedly warned GOP officials that they will be “outfoxed and overrun” if they leave the exchanges to Obama administration officials.

He warned that the administration could impose too many regulations, ultimately ruining the exchanges and opening the door to a “Washington takeover of health care.”  He added, “If conservatives allow it to happen, they will be consenting to an unprecedented and potentially irreversible intrusion into states’ economies and health-care systems.”

Holtz-Eakin misunderstands, though.  With the Feds retaining the rules by which the exchanges will be allowed to operate—including what coverages must be offered and the rate bands within which they must be offered—and declining to discuss costs, a “Washington takeover of health care” is already in progress.  State-run exchanges, whose function is controlled by the Federal govenrment already represent “an unprecedented and potentially irreversible intrusion into states’ economies and health-care systems.”  That’s the primary misconception in this context: that the states have any useful control over “state-run” exchanges.

Moreover, any Federal funds allocated to state-run exchanges will be on the one hand, by design inadequate to cover the total cost of the exchanges and on the other hand are easily withheld or cancelled outright, leaving the whole of the expense to the states’ citizens to cover.  But this risk simply draws the states further into dependency on the Federal government.

The upshot is that these exchanges contribute to placing the states into the same relationship to the central government as counties are relative to their states: “merely as districts to facilitate the purposes of domestic order and good government,” in John Jay’s words.

The states are right to decline to share the costs, and they are right to decline voluntarily to participate in the continued derogation of their position vis-à-vis the Federal government.