Electronic Lycanthroplasty

The internets are telling me that Obama has picked Biden to be his veep.

Biden.

A man who has been in the Senate for over half of his entire life!

And this is after Obama has been telling us for the last two years how he’s sick of partisan politics as usual, Washington insiders, and how McCain is a bad guy becuase he’s been in the Senate so long?

Bwaahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!

So, yea, the Democrats released a preview of their 2008 platform a few days ago. Here’s the bit about the Second Amendment contained therein, in case you missed it:

We recognize that the right to bear arms is an important part of the American tradition, and we will preserve Americans’ Second Amendment right to own and use firearms. We believe that the right to own firearms is subject to reasonable regulation, but we know that what works in Chicago may not work in Cheyenne. We can work together to enact and enforce commonsense laws and improvements – like closing the gun show loophole, improving our background check system, and reinstating the assault weapons ban, so that guns do not fall into the hands of terrorists or criminals. Acting responsibly and with respect for differing views on this issue, we can both protect the constitutional right to bear arms and keep our communities and our children safe.

I could go on at length about the mythical “gun show loophole” or “assault weapon ban,” but after seeing this link on Fark a while ago, I will instead focus on keeping guns out the “hands of terrorists.”

“Who could be against that?!1!one!eleventy” I hear you ask. Well, it all depends on how you define terrorist. From the linked article:

James Robinson is a retired Air National Guard brigadier general and a commercial pilot for a major airline who flies passenger planes around the country.

He has even been certified by the Transportation Security Administration to carry a weapon into the cockpit as part of the government’s defense program should a terrorist try to commandeer a plane.

But there’s one problem: James Robinson, the pilot, has difficulty even getting to his plane because his name is on the government’s terrorist “watch list.”

There you have a retired general who is not only trusted to operate a piece of equipment similar to the kind used to murder three thousand people, but is also trusted to carry a firearm by the Federal government to keep it safe. Yet it seems the very same Federal government cannot discern him from the terrorists they have armed and trained him to protect against.

In case you’re not familiar with the “terror loophole” propaganda, Senator Lautenburg, the Brady Bunch, and, now, apparently the entire Democratic party essentially want to add all the names on the no-fly list to the category of persons prohibited from buying/possessing firearms. Which means the pilot in the article above would instantly become a felon for touching the gun the Feds authorized him to carry.

Oh, sure, Lautenburg claims that his bill “includes due process safeguards that afford an affected person an opportunity to challenge a denial by the Attorney General,” but if it’s anything like the relief from disability program in the 1986 Firearm Owners Protection Act, his pal Chuck Schumer will perpetually block funding for it so that nobody can ever be removed from the list.

Which, in turn, brings us to the most stunning thing in the CNN piece:

Besides the airline pilot, there’s the James Robinson who served as U.S. attorney in Detroit, Michigan, and as an assistant attorney general in the Clinton administration; and James Robinson of California, who loves tennis, swimming and flying to the East Coast to see his grandmother.

He’s 8.

The third-grader has been on the watch list since he was 5 years old. Asked whether he is a terrorist, he said, “I don’t know.”

So, in other words, if the Brady Bunch get their way, and Lautenburg and Schumer play their legislative shell game, this third-grader(!) would be barred for life from ever touching a firearm. Because he’s a “terrorist.” All by administrative fiat at the hands of non-elected bureaucrats in some “homeland security” agency somewhere.

And I thought Democrats were supposed to “think of the children” and stuff..

But, yea, even if you don’t particularly like guns, this should seriously terrify you. Whether you agree or not, the Supreme Court did kind of rule that it is an individual right (and even four the dissenting Justices agreed that there is an individual right of some sort in there somewhere). As such, if the government is given the power to remove your Second Amendment rights with no trial or evidence (or without even telling you for that matter..), what’s to stop them from applying the same technique to the rest of the Bill of Rights?

So, yea, I’ve been somewhat hesitant to wade into the whole debate over Mike Vanderboegh’s letter to the editor. Other than a couple of comments on other sites, I figured it would be best to just stay out of it since I’m pretty much a noob to the whole blogging thing and there’s no reason anyone would/should listen to me.

Well, that, and, I wasn’t really sure what to say anyway. On one hand, I agree with the pragmatists that it’s not time to start shooting the bastards yet, and that there is still much that can and should be done politically. On the other, I also think it’s in poor taste to ridicule those who would publicly draw their personal line in the sand and dare the other side to step over it.

After all, this nation was founded by folks who drew their line in the sand (and started shooting) over gun confiscations and a couple of things that would be shrugged off today as a paltry sales tax. Yes, there was also the fact they couldn’t vote on these things, but, still, the grievances they sought to redress seem somewhat minor in retrospect. Especially compared to the leviathan that is the modern, Federal government.

Two hundred years from now, historians might look back and say Mr. Vanderboegh was on the cutting edge of a second American revolution against tyranny. Or they may very well look back and say the more polite activists helped secure freedom while preventing unnecessary bloodshed. Who knows. Only time will tell.

One thing is clear from all of this now though.

After much virtual ink spilled trying to convince everyone to stop scaring the white people, the Brady Bunch took the pragmatists’ words out of context in order to *drumroll* scare the white people.

Do we forget so easily that fear is precisely what the entire gun-control “movement” is based on?

If we openly say we will use our guns to fight tyranny, they’ll say we’re “dangerous extremists.”

If we say we’re not all going to use our guns to fight tyranny, they will (and just did..) use that as “proof” that some of us must be “dangerous extremists.”

If we don’t say a damn thing, they’ll just claim our silence means we are “dangerous extremists” who are “secretly plotting” or something.

No matter what, they will lie and use fear to promote their agenda. So maybe it would be a good time to remember that and stop fighting amongst ourselves? But, again, I’m the noob here, so maybe I should just shut up.

Random fun from IRC:

JernejL: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/…

illy-laptop: lol

JernejL: actually that’s a damn clever idea

JernejL: and if all spyware did that, we’d have a facial recognition database of idiots.

JernejL: could be used as precog finding of potentional darwin awards candidates

illy-laptop: lol

steve-m: 😀

illy-laptop: should send that link to the anti-gun people

JernejL: why?

illy-laptop: tell them the NRA is watching them masturbate :p

JernejL: LOL

illy-laptop: they’ll all flip out and throw their computers away

illy-laptop: then try to ban computers

Later on today:

illy-laptop: and the plot thickens!

illy-laptop: http://www.bradycampaign.org/blog…

illy-laptop: x2923965

illy-laptop: http://www.snowflakesinhell.com/2008/08/06/quote-of-the-day-70/

illy-laptop: did someone send them that link earlier?

JernejL: LOL

JernejL: you must have forgotten your tin foil hat and broadcasted the paranoia to them telephatically 😛

I might post something more serious after work. But by the time I get around to anything anymore, everything has already been said by everyone else.

The Supreme Court finally issued their opinion in Heller v. DC, and the ban is overturned! Scalia’s opinion is pretty solid, though some of the dicta about what might be “reasonable” is kind of troubling. But, then, all of that would be decided in later cases, and at least now we have our foot in the door. Word on the street is that suits are being filed in Chicago and NYC tomorrow.

Equally troubling is the fact that four of the Justices dissented from a Constitutional right just because they don’t like the outcome. They rambled on a bit about the meaning of “to,” pretty much lied about the filings/holding in Miller, and, most bizarrely, said that the right to assemble and petition the government are collective in the same sense they think the Second is. And here I was thinking I was joking when I wrote this.

And all that was only like ten pages into the dissent. I had to take a break before my brain exploded..

(Oh, yea, speaking of breaks, between losing internet for a week, nervously waiting for this decision, and general business, it seems I haven’t blogged in a month now. Feels like I haven’t slept in half as long for that matter.)

GamePolitics has a rather odd piece today about the ACLU’s new claim that the US is violating the civil liberties of children by not censoring what they see. Or something like that.

[The US has] failed to uphold its commitments to safeguard the rights of youth under 18 from military recruitment and to guarantee basic protections to foreign former child soldiers… U.S. military recruiting practices… target children as young as 11…

And how have they failed?

The Army uses an online video game, called “America’s Army,” to attract young potential recruits at least as young as 13, train them to use weapons, and engage in virtual combat and other military missions… According to Army personnel testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, the goal of the then-new recruiting effort that included the “America’s Army” video game was to penetrate youth culture

Granted, yes, the government does not have a right to free speech. Children do, however, have a right to read/view/hear any material which is not deemed “obscene” by the archaic Miller Test. Ergo, the ACLU wishes to take away people’s Constitutional right to access speech and their right to free thought in order to protect their “right” to not be recruited by the military.

And where does this so-called right to be free of pro-military speech come from? A UN protocol. One which, as best as I can tell, only prohibits contractually signing up children as soldiers, not a ban on advertising where they might see it.

Or, in other words, the American Civil Liberties Union is opposing an American civil liberty in favor of a UN mandate. George Orwell couldn’t have dreamed this one up.

Oh, and, look, they’re also claiming that the America’s Army game can “train them to use weapons.” This line is straight out of Jack Thompson, Hillary Clinton, and the VPC’s playbook. This isn’t the first time I’ve noticed a convergence between the gun grabbers and the censors. It is kind of eerie how the talking points line up here though..

Via Of Arms and the Law comes this piece, in which Josh Horwitz defends.. tyranny? To be honest, I’m not quite sure where to start (or stop) quoting to make any sense of this, but these two bits kinda stick out.

Before we get carried away with the idea that guns are the ultimate guarantor of our civil liberties, however, we should consider what maintaining the capability to resist the decisions of a democratically accountable government really means.

…

If this insurrectionist logic were to be embraced by the Supreme Court, however, our democracy would be severely degraded.

He goes in so many circles that it’s hard to tell where he’s going, but to me it sounds like he’s saying (and perhaps unintentionally) that that tyrants need a monopoly on force to protect democracy and freedom. Or something. And no, I’m not making this up. Towards the end he says Saddam Hussein’s regime was tyrannical, but even then that the state needs a monopoly on force to enforce rights. And that the state is the “only hope of vindicating individual rights.”

Ooookay…

Speaking of circular logic, in the amicus brief he co-authored in favor of the DC ban, it was claimed that the Second Amendment was a federalist provision which “enhances state and local authority to protect life and liberty through the maintenance of militias composed of the local populace” and “prevents unreasonable federal intrusions into gun possession that would impair state authority by defeating the States’
ability to raise “well regulated militia[s]” to protect public welfare and order.” Or, in other words, just a few months ago, he said the Second was there to prevent the Feds from having the total monopoly on force he’s calling for now.

So which is it?

Even more amusing (or sad, depending on how you look at it) is the bit in the middle where he sings about all the wonderful things the Feds’ monopoly on force has given us.

Since the ratification of that document, our nation has been through much travail, but through some of our biggest challenges (i.e., the Civil War, World War II, and the civil rights movement) it was ultimately America’s ability to mobilize both a federal bureaucracy and military power that kept us free.

Civil War? That was a bit of a toss up since it freed the slaves (which is a good thing) but it saddled us all with a more powerful, repressive central government (which is a very bad thing to everyone but you, apparently). I’ll give you that one though.

But the civil rights movement?! If your anti-gun group had been around during the civil rights movement, you would have been on the side of the segregationists. All your precious gun laws are based on Slave Codes and Jim Crow laws, but now you want to claim your victim disarmament agenda played a role in the civil rights movement? Fuck you.

If it weren’t for folks like the Deacons for Defense and Justice or the brave, black veterans who took on a racist county in the Battle of Athens, the civil rights movement might have died (literally and figuratively) before the Federal government got off its ass to do anything.

And then there was United States v. Cruikshank in 1875. Let’s see here.. A group of KKK types attacked a group of freedmen. Said freedmen defended themselves with private arms. Then your beloved Federal government ruled in favor of the oppressors. Is that an example of this “only hope” you were talking about?

As for World War II, umm, are we forgetting the thousands of citizens with private arms who volunteered for Civil Defense programs to help secure the coastlines? Not to mention the Japanese admiral who said they couldn’t invade the mainland because there would be “a rifle behind every blade of grass.”

I’m not sure how many of my (maybe five) readers don’t follow the news on GTA IV, but last week I had the opportunity to fly to NYC for a pre-launch party with some other webmasters. I’ve been back in Virginia since Wednesday night, but just haven’t had the time and/or motivation to blog since then. While the party and the game were tons of fun, it was still nice to get back here and “cling to my guns” which couldn’t come along for the trip into victim-disarmament land.

And after checking out the other blogs, David Codrea has two pieces which made me extra happy to be home..

First up, it appears that the day after I left, Emperor Bloomberg unveiled his new “Hercules Teams” which will patrol the subways and stuff in full SWAT gear. If the idea of heavily militarized police doing daily patrols in what is supposed to be an American city doesn’t bother you enough, well, just take a look at this screen capture from the news report Mr. C. is talking about.

Yep. That’s right. Dark Helmet there is sweeping a dozen or so people with the muzzle of a select-fire M4 as he walks past. With his finger on the trigger. If that’s the kind of gun safety they see from the police in NYC, I almost understand why it’s filled with so many hoplophobes now..

Next up came this news from earlier today that race-card-poker champion Al Sharpton led a huge protest over the acquittal of the three detectives who shot the unarmed Sean Bell. While I actually agree with him that the shooting was dodgy, I don’t think my brain could have withstood being in such close proximity to the aura of cognitive dissonance which this man emits.

As I’ve said before, Sharpton has always been at the forefront of demanding slave code and Nazi-based laws which would make police the Only Ones with guns. Yet every single time these laws (predictably) backfire, he acts all surprised. Go figure.

David Kopel had a great piece in today’s Wall Street Journal about the comical attempts by Hillary and Obama to appear pro-gun.

Imagine an election race of Pat Robertson versus James Dobson, each of them appearing at organic grocery stores and Starbucks throughout Massachusetts, with each candidate insisting that he alone deserves the vote of gay-marriage advocates. An equally silly spectacle is taking place these days in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Indiana, West Virginia and Kentucky, as Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama compete for the pro-gun vote.

He totally nailed it with that comparison. And that’s just the first paragraph. By the end, he hasn’t just knocked the proverbial ball out of the park; he sent it into another timezone..

So, yea, we now know Obama thinks people in small towns in Pennsylvania are a bunch of racist, gun-nuts and religious zealots, but what do his cult members think?

Jeffery Toobin says Obama’s statement is “factually accurate” and that small town America is “lashing out” because the government won’t take care of them or something. So not only does he apparently agree that flyover country is filled with crazy hicks, he thinks of them like a bunch of petulant children having a temper tantrum as well.

Jack Cafferty follows him up by comparing small town America to “al Qaeda training camps.” So on top of being bitter, racist, Bible-thumping, gun-nuts throwing a childish hissy fit; small town people are also a bunch of terrorists? WTF?!

On second thought, that last bit isn’t really surprising given CNN’s institutionalized bias against gun owners..