Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms – Page 17

Why Would Anyone Need a Semi-Automatic Rifle?

A sweet old lady in the pool the other morning asked me this question. Actually, she asked a much stupider question,"Why would anyone need an assault weapon?' I smiled indulgently and refused to engage her. I knew she wasn't baiting me, and I like her, and 'tis the season to be jolly, and so in the interests of comity I let it slide, realizing that no good would come of giving her the dialectical thrashing she so richly deserved.

First a point of history and a bit of terminology.

Fully automatic rifles, ‘machine guns,’ are heavily regulated. The National Firearms Act of 1934 " requires that before a private citizen may take possession of a fully-automatic firearm he must pay a $200 tax to the Internal Revenue Service and be approved by the Treasury Department to own the firearm, which is registered to the owner with the federal government." (reference) A semi-automatic pistol, rifle, or shotgun fires exactly one round with each pull of the trigger until the magazine is exhausted, unlike a fully automatic which does not require a separate trigger pull for each round fired. The distinction is important and is blurred by use of the emotive phrase 'assault weapon.'

Why would anybody need a semi-automatic rifle such as an AR-15? Well, you might be a Korean shopkeeper who needs to defend his life and livelihood from rampaging ghetto blacks in South Central Los Angeles. (Remember the aftermath of the acquittal of the cops who took the 'motorist' Rodney King into custody using perfectly legal and reasonable methods?) Or perhaps you live along the southern border and need to defend yourself and your family against heavily armed drug cartel members from the corrupt narco-state to the South. Your snub-nosed .38 special is a nice walk-around piece, and better than nothing, but insufficient for the defensive task at hand.

(A gun enthusiast acquaintance of mine referred to my Colt .38 Detective Special as a nice 'heirloom,' recommending that I get a 1911 model semi-auto .45, which I did.)

Any conservative can continue with answers like the above ad libitum, but the best strategy for a conservative is to reject the question altogether.

The right question is not: Why does the citizen need to be armed? The right question is: By what right does the government violate the liberty of the law-abiding citizen? Gun-ownership is a liberty issue similarly as taxation is a liberty issue. With respect to taxation, the right question is not: Why should citizens be allowed to keep their wealth? The right question is: What justifies the government in taking their wealth? The onus justificandi is not on the citizen to defend his keeping of his money; the onus justificandi is on the government to justify its taking of his money. The same goes for guns. The burden is on the government to justify its curtailment of individual liberties, not on the citizen to justify his keeping of his liberties. This is because governments exist for the sake of their citizens, and not the other way around.

You might think that liberals would understand all of this. Although liberals are absurdly sensitive about First Amendment rights, nary a peep will you hear from them concerning Second Amendment rights. And yet it is the Second Amendment that backs up the First. Chairman Mao was right about one thing, namely, that power emanates from the barrel of a gun. Power to the people!

There is a curious inconsistency here, is there not? If liberals believe that our civil liberties are under serious assault from Ashcroft & Co., and continue to be as Obama continues Bush-era policies, then why are they so unwilling to ensure that real power remain in the hands of the people?

There is something schizophrenic about contemporary liberals. They have a libertarian streak: they want to be able to spout any kind of nonsense, no matter how offensive and irresponsible, and have it protected as ‘dissent.’ Fair enough. Though I find Michael Moore contemptible, I would defend his right to pollute the air waves with his ideological flatulence. But when it comes to gun rights, liberals become as collectivist as Hitler or Fidel Castro. It’s curious, and a worthy theme of further rumination.

When Guns are Used to Thwart Crimes . . .

. . . it is rarely news, and it is never big news, unless the liberal media can put a 'vigilante' spin on it. Remember Bernie Goetz. the NYC subway gunman? As I reported about a year ago:

Bernard Goetz, mild-mannered electronics nerd, looked like an easy mark, a slap job. And so he got slapped around, thrown through plate glass windows, mugged and harrassed. He just wanted to be left alone to tinker in his basement. One day he decided not to take it any more and acquired a .38 'equalizer.' And so the black punks who demanded money of him on the New York subway in December of 1984 paid a high price for their thuggishness to the delight of conservatives and the consternation of liberals. To the former he became a folk hero, to the latter a 'racist.' It was a huge story back then. One of the miscreants, James Ramseur, has been found dead of an apparent drug overdose.

Ramseur was freed from prison last year after serving 25 years for a rape, according to NBC NewYork.com. He was one of four black teens shot by Goetz on a train on Dec. 22, 1984, in a shooting that earned Goetz the nickname of "subway vigilante" by city newspapers.

Meanwhile Goetz, 64, flourishes and runs a store called "Vigilante Electronics." A
heart-warming story on this, the eve of Christmas Eve.

Now let us assume that you desire a balanced understanding of the gun issue. It seems to me that you would have to take into consideration the many cases in which guns are used to save lives, protect property and livelihoods, thwart rapes and muggings and massacres, etc. If you care to gain this balanced understanding, if, in other words, you are not a liberal, you can start here, and then go here, in both cases following out the hyperlinks.

Why Israel Has No Newtowns

Excerpt:

If the United States, itself awash with weapons, wishes to benefit from Israel’s experience, it must make sure it learns the right lessons. The first and most universal one is that ever more stringent gun control is bad policy: As is the case with drugs, as was the case with liquor during Prohibition, the strict banning of anything does little but push the market underground into the hands of criminals and thugs. Rather than spend fortunes and ruin lives in a futile attempt to eradicate every last trigger in America, we would do well to follow Israel’s example and educate gun owners about their rights and responsibilities, so as to foster a culture of sensible and mindful gun ownership.

On Calls for a ‘Conversation’ About Guns

Liberals often call for 'a conversation' or a 'dialogue' about this or that. Didn't Eric Holder a while back call for a 'conversation' on race? What have we been talking about for 150 years? Same with guns. Our liberal pals must know that the gun debate has been raging for decades. So what does a liberal mean when he calls for a 'conversation' about guns?

He means: You conservatives and libertarians shut up and acquiesce in our position. Kurt Schlichter gets it right:

. . . we’re not supposed to have what people might commonly describe as a “conversation” at all. We’re supposed to shut-up and listen as liberals, barely masking their unseemly delight at the opportunity, try to pin the murder rampage of one degenerate creep on millions of law-abiding Americans who did nothing wrong. The conversation is then supposed to end with us waiving our fundamental right to self-defense.

Because that is what the goal is – a total ban on the private ownership of firearms. There’s always another “common sense” gun law which fails because it is targeted at law-abiding citizens and not criminals, thereby inviting another round of onerous new restrictions until finally no citizen is keeping or bearing anything more than a dull butter knife.

Well, almost no citizens. “Gun control” means all guns under the control of the government and available only to it and, of course, to politically connected cronies. Gun-grabbing poser Michael Bloomberg is going to be surrounded by enough fire power to remake the movie Heat. He’s always going to be protected. The purpose of gun control is to ensure that we aren’t.

So let’s have that conversation, and let’s lay the cards on the table. Modern firearms (which really aren’t that modern) are highly effective weapons in the hands of an evil little freak who gets off shooting children. They are also highly effective weapons in my hands when defending my children from evil little freaks.

Liberals ask why I need these weapons. The answer is simple. I’m going to be as well-armed or better armed than the threat. Period.

Nasty Gun Grabbers

There are some really nasty folk among liberals. Read these librul letters to John Lott.

UPDATE 12/19: Lott has apparently deleted the post in question. Probably just as well given how vile the hate mail he receives.

More Reasons Not to be a Libertarian: Abortion and Guns

This from the Libertarian Party Platform:

1.4 Abortion

Recognizing that abortion is a sensitive issue and that people can hold good-faith views on all sides, we believe that government should be kept out of the matter, leaving the question to each person for their conscientious consideration.

1.5 Crime and Justice

Government exists to protect the rights of every individual including life, liberty and property. [. . .]

The contradiction fairly jumps off the page. Government should be kept out of the abortion matter, we are told, and yet we are also told that government exists to protect the rights of every individual, including the right to life. This is contradictory. Consider a third-trimester healthy human fetus. If it is an individual, then government exists to protect its right to life by (1.5). But by (1.4) government has no role to play. Contradiction.

Will you reply that the fetus is not an individual? What is it then, a universal? Will you say it is not a human individual? What is then, a canine or bovine or lupine individual? Will you say that the fetus is not alive? What is it then, dead? Or neither alive nor dead? Will you say that it is not a biological individual, but a clump of cells or mere human genetic material? Then the same is true of you, in which case either you have no right to life, or both you and the fetus have a right to life. Will you say that the fetus is guilty of some crime and deserves to die? What crime is that, pray tell?

Will you say that a woman has a right to do anything she wants with her body? But the fetus is not her body. It is a separate body. Will you say it is a part of her body? But it is not a part like a bone or a muscle or an organ is a part. Nor is it a part like hair or mucus or the contents of the GI tract. Is it a part like a benign or pre-cancerous or cancerous growth? No. Granted, the fetus is spatially inside the mother, but that does not suffice to make it a part of her. I am spatially inside my house, but I am not a part of my house.

A fetus is a separate biological individual with its own life and its own right to life. The general prohibition against the killing of innocent human beings cannot be arbitrarily restricted so as to exclude the unborn. I could go on but I have said enough about this topic in other posts in the Abortion category.

Now consider this:

1.6 Self-Defense

The only legitimate use of force is in defense of individual rights — life, liberty, and justly acquired property — against aggression. This right inheres in the individual, who may agree to be aided by any other individual or group. We affirm the individual right recognized by the Second Amendment to keep and bear arms, and oppose the prosecution of individuals for exercising their rights of self-defense. We oppose all laws at any level of government requiring registration of, or restricting, the ownership, manufacture, or transfer or sale of firearms or ammunition.

This is basically on the right track and vastly superior to what your typical knee-jerk liberal gun-grabber would spout. Second Amendment rights are very important. And of course they are individual rights, not collective rights, as even SCOTUS came to appreciate. But the formulation is objectionable on the ground of extremism. Look at the last sentence: "We oppose all laws at any level of government requiring registration of, or restricting, the ownership, manufacture, or transfer or sale of firearms or ammunition.

This is just ridiculous. It implies that felons should be able to purchase guns. Felons should no more be allowed to buy guns than they should be allowed to vote. It implies that the sale of guns and ammo to children is permissible. It implies that there should be no safety laws regulating the manufacture of guns and ammo. It implies that citizens should be permitted to enter post offices with grenade launchers and machine guns.

On Suing Gun Manufacturers

Suppose I sell you my car, transferring title to you in a manner in that accords with all the relevant statutes. It is a good-faith transaction and I have no reason to suspect you of harboring any criminal intent. But later you use the car I sold you to mow down children on a school yard, or to violate the Mann Act, or to commit some other crime. Can I be held morally responsible for your wrongdoing? Of course not. No doubt, had I not sold you that particular car, that particular criminal event would not have occurred: as a philosopher might put it, the event is individuated by its constituents, one of them being the car I sold you. But that does not show that I am responsible for your crime. I am no more responsible than the owner of the gas station who sold you the fuel for your spree.

Suppose I open a cheesecake emporium, and you decide to make cheesecake your main dietary item. Am I responsible for your ensuing health difficulties? Of course not. Being a nice guy, I will most likely warn you that a diet consisting chiefly of cheesecake is contraindicated. But in the end, the responsibility for your ill health lies with you.

The same goes for tobacco products, cheeseburgers, and so on down the line. The responsibility for your drunk driving resides with you, not with auto manufacturers or distilleries. Is this hard to understand? Not unless you are morally obtuse or a liberal, terms that in the end may be coextensive.

The principle extends to gun manufacturers and retailers. They have their legal responsibilities, of course. They are sometimes the legitimate targets of product liability suits. But once a weapon has been legally purchased or otherwise acquired, the owner alone is responsible for any crimes he commits using it.

But many liberals don't see it this way. What they cannot achieve through gun control legislation, they hope to achieve through frivolous lawsuits. The haven't had much success recently. Good. But the fact that they try shows how bereft of common sense and basic decency they are.

There is no wisdom on the Left.

“No Day Without Political Incorrectness” Department

Image credit

In the Face of Totalitarians

In the face of totalitarians one cannot retreat into one's private life for they, being totalitarians, won't allow any private life. So the conservative is forced willy-nilly to become an activist against his natural tendency. He must draw a line in the sand and say "This far but no farther."

A minor example. My friends Peter and Mike who teach at community colleges in Maricopa County, Arizona, were on the rant once again yesterday morning over the smoking ban that went into effect on 1 July. This draconian ruling forbids smoking anywhere on campus, including parking lots and closed cars in such lots. Bear in mind that reasonable smoking restrictions were already in effect and that my friends, only one of whom smokes, had no objection to them.

Now what is behind the new ruling? Nothing but lust for power and a desire on the part of its promoters to outdo themselves in pursuit of PC thereby earning 'brownie-points' with the higher-ups. (I intend 'brownie-points' as a double-entendre with an allusion to brown-nosing.)

And so the breakfast conversation turned to means of combating the insanity: massive disobedience, smoke-ins, and libertarian 'flash mobs': the tweets go out, the students and faculty assemble quickly to blow some smoke and then just as quickly disperse. Imagine several such mobs assembling and dispersing at different open-air campus locations on a single day.

The people charged with enforcement would be overwhelmed, the ruling would be flouted into risibility, and then ignored.

Mockery and derision are powerful weapons and perfectly legitimate when one is dealing with willfully stupid and morally stunted Pee-Cee power-heads.

Companion post: The Conservative Disadvantage

Mayor Bloombrain

Lawrence Auster on the good mayor's latest outburst. Auster is much more of paleocon than I am. I'm still a bit of a liberal in a good sense of the term. Or is there no good sense of the term? I hope to post later on Auster's hostility to such conservatives as Dennis Prager.

Government Did Not Build Your Business

A very good Reason magazine article. The author, Ronald Bailey, explains a distinction between tangible and intangible wealth. Human, social, and institutional capital are forms of intangible wealth.

And while you are at Reason.com, read Sheldon Richman's article on the right to self-defense. It makes a number of obvious points that liberals seem incapable of understanding. Part of the problem, of course, is that liberals live in enclaves in which the truths Richman enunciates are simply not heard. Liberals hang too much with their own ilk. They need to get out more and 'expand their horizons.'

Conservatives are not 'sheltered' in the same way. There is no way a conservative or a libertarian can avoid liberals. Liberals dominate the mainstream media, the universities, the courts, the other branches of government, the entertainment industry, and many mainstream churches. Conservatives and libertarians cannot help but confront liberal ideas.

But what happens when conservative and libertarian ideas are presented to the public via an outlet such as Fox News Network? Liberals scream their pointy heads off in protest. That is clear proof that they are not 'liberal' in any classical sense. They would be better described as left-wing fascists.

How can anybody object to a John Stossel simply presenting his ideas and his arguments? Most of what he says makes good sense. I disagree with his open borders policy and his ideas about drug legalization. He and libertarians generally are dead wrong on those two points. But I don't want to shut him down — or up. I want to hear his point of view.

One night Stossel hosted a discussion between Pat Buchanan and Reason magazine's Nick Gillespie. Paleo-conservatism met libertarianism. Great discussion. Are you going to find something like that on MSNBC? They dumped Buchanan. Leftist scumbaggery!

Gun Laws and the Supposed ‘Politicization’ of the Aurora Massacre

Last year, when Republicans were being accused of 'politicizing' the national debt crisis I made the point that one cannot politicize that which is inherently political:

The Republicans were accused of 'politicizing' the debt crisis. But how can you politicize what is inherently political? The debt in question is the debt of the federal government. Since a government is a political entity, questions concerning federal debts are political questions. As inherently political, such questions cannot be politicized.

If to hypostatize is to illicitly treat as a substance that which is not a substance, to politicize is to illictly treat as political what is not political. Since governmental debt questions are 'already' political, they cannot be politicized.

Then I was criticizing Democrats and liberals. But now I find that some Republicans and conservatives are making the same mistake. They are accusing liberals of politicizing the Aurora massacre. Example here.

But as I said, you cannot politicize what is already political. Now guns are not political entities, but gun laws are, whether federal, state, or local. Whether there should be gun laws at all, and what their content should be are political questions.

Now we all agree that we have to have laws regulating the manufacture, sale, transporting, and use of firearms. So we all agree that we have to have 'gun control.' Gun control is not what I display or fail to display at the shooting range, but is a phrase that refers to gun control laws. Since we all want gun control, we all want (enforceable and enforced) gun control laws, even the dreaded NRA.

It is a liberal lie to say that conservatives are against gun control. It is similar to the liberal lie that conservatives are anti-government. If I am for limited government, then I am for government, whence it follows that I am not against government. (Anarchists are anti-government, but no conservative, and few libertarians, are against government.) Likewise, if I am for laws that prevent the sale of guns to felons, and for other such laws, then I am not against gun control.

By the way, the preternaturally obtuse Bill Moyers got a nice and well-deserved slap-down from Bill O'Reilly the other night for his idiotic remarks about the NRA. Bill Moyers is a one-man argument for the federal defunding of PBS and its affiliates such as NPR. (See National Public Radio Needs Your Support!) Listen to the whole of O'Reilly's speech. He is a moderate on gun control, too moderate perhaps. He is moderate on many issues. Is that why the Left can't stand him?

But I digress. We all agree that we need enforceable and enforced gun control laws. But we don't all agree about the content of these laws. Now that is a political question the answering of which presupposes a political theory, a theory of man in his relation to the state. The gun debate is political from the ground up. It is silly so speak of 'politicizing' it.

Here is what I say. I have a right to life, a right to defend my life, and a right to appropriate means of self-defense. No government has the right to interfere with these rights. This is nonnegotiable. If you disagree, I have to put you down as morally and intellecually obtuse, as beyond the pale of rational debate. I will do my best to make sure that you and your ilk are defeated politically.

What's an appropriate means of self-defense? The tactical shotgun is the most effective tool of home defense. Holmes, the Aurora shooter, had one of those. It looked like a Remington 1070. He misused it for evil ends. That is chargeable to his moral and legal account, not to the gun's. Guns lack such 'accounts.' No gun is a free agent. No gun ever lilled anybody. Killing is an action (action-type); actions are actions of agents. Pay attention, liberals.

There will always be massacres and murders regardless of the stringency of gun laws. Norway.

Can anything be done? Yes. Enforce existing gun laws. Execute miscreants such as Holmes, after a fair trial, in a speedy manner. There could a be a judicial fast-track to expedite the execution of such people within a year, at most. Put limits on the quantities and types of vile and soul-destroying rubbish that HollyWeird liberals dish out. Stop attacking religion, that most excellent vehicle for the delivery of moral teachings. If Holmes had internalized the Ten Commandments as a boy, could he have done what he did? Do you think he would have been less likely to do what he did?

But liberals are morally and intellectually obtuse. So they will fight against all reasonable proposals. A liberal would far rather violate the rights of decent citizens than mete out justice to vicious criminals.

Why Dennis Prager Voted Against the California Tobacco Tax

Excerpt:

I warned 20 years ago that the war against tobacco was morally misguided. If morality was the animating impulse, why was there no similar war against alcohol, attempting to tax it out of existence, banning its ads, etc.? Cigarette smokers can hurt themselves, but alcohol is frequently involved in murder and other cases of violent crime, particularly sexual assault; drunken drivers kill and maim tens of thousands of Americans each year; and most child and spousal abuse is accompanied by alcohol. No one rapes, drives into vehicles filled with families, or abuses a spouse because of having smoked a cigarette or cigar.

Exactly right. I would add that nicotine increases alertness which can come in handy when you are piloting your behemoth SUV on a freeway full of distracted drivers.

The Myth of Second-Hand Smoke

Tobacco Insanity in Maricopa County

Tobacco Insanity in Maricopa County and the Need for Smoke-Ins

Peter and Mike teach in the Maricopa County Community College system. One teaches at Scottsdale CC, the other at Glendale CC. Over Sunday breakfast they reported that, starting 1 July (if I got the story straight), no smoking of tobacco products will be allowed anywhere on any CC campus in Maricopa County, Arizona. And that includes parking lots and closed cars in parking lots.

Now I would like to believe that our liberal brethren possess a modicum of rationality. But with every passing day I am further disembarrassed of this conceit of mine. The evidence is mounting that liberals really are as stupid and lacking in common sense as many on the Right say they are.

What does common sense suggest in a case like this? Well, that no smoking be allowed in classrooms, libraries, laboratories, restrooms, administrative offices, hallways, etc., and perhaps not even in individual faculty offices during consulation hours or if the smoke will make its way into occuppied public passageways.

This is a common sense position easily buttressed with various aesthetic, safety, and health-related arguments. The underlying principle is that we ought to be considerate of our fellow mortals and their physical and psychological well-being. It is debatable just how harmful are the effects of sidestream smoke. What is not debatable is that many are offended by it. So out of consideration for them, it is reasonable to ban smoking in the places I listed above. But to ban it everywhere on campus is extreme and irrational. For no one but Tom is affercted by Tom's smoking in his car and while striding across the wind-blown campus.

You say you caught a whiff of his cigaratte as he passed by? Well, he heard you use the 'F' word while blasting some rap 'music' from your boom box. If Tom is involved in air pollution, then you are involved in cultural and noise pollution. You tolerate him and he'll tolerate you.

You say you smell the residual ciggy smoke on Peter's vest? That's too bad. He has to put up with your overpowering perfume/cologne or look at your tackle-box face and tattoo-defaced skin. Or maybe you are a dumb no-nothing punk wearing a T-shirt depicting Che Guevara and you think that's cool. We who are not dumb no-nothing punks have to put up with that affront to our sensibilities.

But there really is little point in being reasonable with people as unreasonable as liberty-bashing tobacco-wackos. So I think Peter and Mike ought to think about organizing a smoke-in. In the 'sixties we had love-ins and sit-ins, and they proved efficacious. Why not smoke-ins to protest blatantly extreme and irrational policies?

There must be plenty of faculty and staff and students on these campuses — and maybe even a few not-yet-brain-dead liberals — who would participate. Hell, I'll even drive all the way from my hideout in the Superstitions to take part. We'll gather in some well-ventilated place way out in the open to manifest our solidarity, enjoy the noble weed, and reason – if such a thing is possible — with the Pee-Cee boneheads who oppose us.

By the way, that is a joint old Ben Franklin is smoking in the graphic. In this post I take no position on the marijuana question.

Companion post: Is Smoking Irrational? Other such posts are collected in Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.