Tag Archives: law

Gun Control

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This one in Bend, OR. A mass-shooter wannabe, after firing into nearby cars, broke into a locked elementary school by shooting out the door locks. The violence began around 1300 last Thursday. More precisely,

The violence started and ended within minutes, with police saying they received an initial call at 12:59 pm local time and then arriving at the scene with the suspect dead at 1:02 pm.

A teacher armed with a cell phone as a throwing object and her own physical courage and a bystander armed with a firearm had responded and stopped the mass shooter and his butchery by the time the police arrived. The teacher had followed her thrown phone by charging and tackling the shooter. She was still struggling with him (I speculate in an ultimately losing effort) when the bystander arrived and shot the shooter, killing him.

The shooter had already killed three children and another teacher and severely wounded another child and teacher; his butchery was cut short at that point by those two civilian first responders, one of whom was armed.

Yet, gun control…persons…insist on disarming and keeping disarmed civilians already on scene—the true first responders—in favor of police, who won’t arrive for some few minutes (three of them in the present case, which is a fast response. For those in the peanut gallery, the police failure in Uvalde, TX, was an extreme exception; most police response times in urban areas are quite good, in the range of 3-7 minutes.). These gun control persons don’t seem to care that the butchery will continue apace until the police do make it to the scene.

Go figure.

Short Memories or Blinders

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Or both. In their house editorial about the ongoing kerfuffles throughout France, the sages of The Wall Street Journal closed their piece with this.

France is in a violent democratic funk, and it will probably get worse. Don’t think it can’t happen in the US given the current state of American politics.

On the other hand, the French Left haven’t yet started trying to assassinate politicians of whom they disapprove; they’re merely rioting in the streets and burning and looting mom-and-pop businesses and historical buildings. Those editors seem to have missed what’s been going on in the US for some years. Our Left has moved beyond mere rioting, looting, and arson.

School Fraternities and Sororities

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In their WSJ article regarding Fraternities at Cornell University and school management teams’ efforts to “reign them in,” the news writers had this remark:

…fraternities that are both a disproportionate source of trouble and a fixture of campus life.

Neither of those need to be. Schools have no intrinsic obligation to host fraternities or sororities, and neither fraternities nor sororities have any intrinsic right to a presence on campus. It’s completely straightforward, if requiring more courage than school managers seem to possess, to ban these organizations altogether and thereby eliminate that particular disproportionate source of trouble.

Of course, that would move the misbehavers that so heavily populate and take advantage of those fundamentally insular organizations into the school’s dormitories or to off campus locations, including to fraternity and sorority houses that might set up off campus. Frat and srat houses, after all, collect a fair amount of dollars in the form of dues and donations, so they’re likely to hang around nearby, never minding the troublemakers in their membership.

Dormitories, though, are much easier to monitor, inspect, and control, than are these houses. Off campus, on the other hand, gives the city and State police direct access and better ability to deal with the criminal behavior that’s all too common in frat and srat houses. The authorities possessed by campus police are severely limited by those too timid school…administrators.

If a fraternity or sorority wants onto a school’s campus, let it demonstrate its worthiness first with several years of trouble free operation off campus and on other schools’ campuses.

Government Rules

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James Freeman asked, in his Wednesday WSJ op-ed, how many of these are necessary.

How much government could we all do without? President Donald Trump says that red tape, when cut, becomes beautiful. Truer words were never spoken, and last week this column noted his encouraging progress in repealing misguided rules enacted by his predecessors. Now a few recent examples [not repeated here] suggest that half or more of government regulation is completely unnecessary.

I submit that we already have a nearly complete set of government rules in our Bill of Rights, backed up by the Bill’s overarching document, our Constitution.

I would add two rules to flesh the list out to completeness. One would enforce the sanctity of contracts. When two or more parties agree on a thing, that contract should be entirely enforceable as it stands, with severe sanctions applied to those who violate it. There really are only two legitimate ways to deviate from a freely done agreement. One way is if all of the parties involved agree to alter the contract or to dissolve it altogether. The other way is through the bankruptcy of one or more of the parties, making it impossible for them to uphold their parts of the bargain. Current bankruptcy law deals quite nicely with this sort of eventuality.

The other government rule centers on truth in advertising. Advertisements are contracts between the advertiser and the buyer, and so within the sanctity of that contract, not being truthful should be a felony if the distortion can be shown to have been deliberate, or a civil offense if the distortion can be shown to result from either party’s negligence.

Such a cleanup of our rules and regulations regime would result in how many pages of the Federal Register becoming obsolete and without effect. It also would virtually eliminate compliance costs and very greatly simplify our lives and our economy.

Even better it would render the vast majority of the Civil Service unnecessary, with those personnel returned to the private sector, all to the profit of a greatly downsized and so more efficient government, of the civil and now private employees, and to our economy writ large, through no longer having to compete so much for the same resources that the government had heretofore competed for.

Yes, I’m ignoring environmental and climate regulation in this. Those milieus are well enough covered by our Bill of Rights and the proposed contract sanctity rule.

Understanding our Constitution

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Professor Emeritus Michael Polelle, of the University of Illinois Chicago’s School of Law, in his letter to The Wall Street Journal, disagreed with Justice Samuel Alito’s originalist view that the words of our Constitution should be understood to mean what the public would have taken them to mean when they were adopted.

The problem is that the Constitution wasn’t adopted by an Athenian democracy where all citizens were lawmakers. … Legislatures appointed the Framers. It follows that the most relevant and practical frame of reference is what the Framers….

I disagree with Polelle. The Framers didn’t ratify the Constitution; they only wrote it. Their final draft, also, was flawed enough in the view of the population outside of and much larger than those Framers that the debates about it—the Federalist Papers and the less well organized Anti-Federalist Papers—extracted an agreement for the people to ratify that draft if a series of Amendments—the Bill of Rights—were passed by Congress and put to the people for additional ratification or rejection.

Then most of the States artificially expanded their franchise so a larger subset of We the People could vote on ratification. That ratification vote was on the basis their interpretation of the words of the Constitution, not the Framers’. And so was the subsequent ratification of the Bill of Rights.

It’s entirely appropriate for our Constitution’s words to be understood to mean what the public would have taken them to mean when they were adopted.