Gun Tyrants

Hube covers a recent pro-gun control letter in one of his regular "Dopey WNJ Letter of the Week" posts. From the letter in question:

For every argument the National Rifle Association makes, one can find an equally valid counterargument. The whole issue comes down to values. Values are built by families and communities. Neighborhoods of families with high values will be safe.

As Hube correctly points out, this is not an argument for gun control. If it doesn't matter whether people have guns or not, then the question becames this: Do you prefer tyranny or freedom? The original writer, Brent Grant of Kennett Square, has let everyone know that he prefers tyranny.

Unfortunately he isn't alone. QandO and Geek with a .45 both have pieces reacting to Dan Simpson's recent opinion piece in the Toledo Blade. In it he outlines the type of police state necessary to rid the nation of private firearms ownership:

The disarmament process would begin after the initial three-month amnesty. Special squads of police would be formed and trained to carry out the work. Then, on a random basis to permit no advance warning, city blocks and stretches of suburban and rural areas would be cordoned off and searches carried out in every business, dwelling, and empty building. All firearms would be seized. The owners of weapons found in the searches would be prosecuted: $1,000 and one year in prison for each firearm.

Clearly, since such sweeps could not take place all across the country at the same time. But fairly quickly there would begin to be gun-swept, gun-free areas where there should be no firearms. If there were, those carrying them would be subject to quick confiscation and prosecution. On the streets it would be a question of stop-and-search of anyone, even grandma with her walker, with the same penalties for "carrying."

Random, warrantless searches and seizures? Searching old ladies on the street? What Simpson proposes doesn't just break the 2nd Amendment, but takes aim at the rest of the Bill of Rights as well. This is America? No, this isn't any America I'd recognize and it certainly isn't an America I am willing to defend. If anything it is an America I am willing to defend against.

There is one good thing about Simpson's suggestion, the people carrying out these oppressive acts will be in special units. That means the patriots will know who to shoot first.

Spit Out by the Sea

Recent earthquakes have released the hulk of a WWII PT boat from the briny depths. Complete with all the boats stored explosives.

I must now make the legally required historical reference and say that this is just like the infamous torpedo boat that the great American, Ernest Borgnine, sailed around in on McHale's Navy.

Real 3D

I really liked the 3d process used in Meet the Robinsons and now IGN has a piece about that technology.

Free Comic Book Day

Just a reminder that Free Comic Book Day is coming this Saturday. Woo Hoo!

Global Warming

But on a different globe. Since 1970, Mars has experienced global warming similar to Earth. But of course the causes are completely different.

Or are they? It seems to me that the US landed our first spacecraft on Mars in the 1970s. This must be all the fault of the USA, polluting even neighboring planets. We obviously should have done more to ensure that the Viking, Pathfinder, and Exploration landers were EarthMars smart.

TIAs

My grandmother left the hospital on Saturday afternoon and there was much rejoicing. She is under doctor's orders to stay at my parents place in Pennsylvania for at least a month. My grandfather is decidedly unhappy about all of this. He's 90 and is "set in his ways" to put it mildly. He didn't want to come to my parents house. He is comfortable at his home (in Connecticut) and not particularly comfortable at my parents place. Among other things my parent's split-level requires him to climb stairs to get anywhere.

The doctor is classifying my grandmother's stroke as a Transient Ischemic Attack or TIA. This means that she should make a full recovery but she is at heightened risk for further TIAs and strokes. She's on medication and has orders to take it easy for a while.

Cutest Cat

The News Journal has their cutest cat poll back up so vote for Milo. Again. And this time it will count.

Mortality

One of my ex-coworkers died Wednesday after a brief hospital stay. Jack was a colorful character and one of the few people at work who was louder and more opinionated than I am. He put up with a me a lot considering I was the young whippersnapper and he was the old codger. He retired around a year ago after repeated health problems like gout and a recurrence of cancer. I'll miss him more and pray for his family.

In more personal news, my grandmother had a minor stroke yesterday. She and my grandfather didn't want to bother anyone, so they didn't mention it until my mother came home from work. While being mild-mannered is a virtue, not when time is of the essence. Fortunately she seems to have made a strong recovery and has most of her speech and motor control back on her right side. Any prayers you can offer for her would be most welcome.

Them Duke Boys

I'm sitting in my hotel room on business travel watching the Dukes of Hazzard. Good God that movie is awful. They took all the goodness of the original series and flushed it down the toilet, only to replace it with a bunch of hillbilly sleaze.

The original series worked because the Dukes were people with shady pasts looking to do right, be honest, and make the most of what they had. In comparison Boss Hogg and Roscoe were scheming but somewhat inept foils. In the movie everyone seems to be dishonest and I can't imagine wanting anyone to come out ahead.

Repealing the 2nd Amendment

Alphecca has a wonderful rebuttal to Walter Shapiro's call to repeal the 2nd Amendment. Shapiro's logic has the normal liberal flaws where they relate to guns. He assumes that the 2nd amendment is about militias not the people and that guns are only for sport shooting and hunting. It isn't. The 2nd Amendment is actually about providing the citizens the means to violently overthrow the government should it become tyrannical. It is the last line of defense for the rights of the people. It is the answer to Juvenal's "who watches the watchmen?" The answer is that we all do.

Penn & Teller are right, Walter Shapiro is wrong. Fortunately he's so wrong that I he doesn't have the votes to do what he wants. More importantly, if liberals did manage to repeal the 2nd Amendment, you can bet an attempt at the violent overthrow the government is going to be close at hand.

UPDATE: LawDog has a wonderful response to the other common liberal trope: "We license cars, so why can't we license guns?" He examines what the nation would look like if we did just that and I doubt the liberals would like it very much.

Balloon Geekery

You know this giant Darth Vader hot air balloon would be even cooler if the balloons burners made the proper breathing sounds when they were used.

Iraqi News

They never seem to put up graphics like this one that QandO brought to my attention. Always show the dead, never show the progress.

Gun Control on the Left

From Instapundit, Blogometer is reporting that the major bloggers on the left have been silent on the subject of gun control.

If you were expecting for the netroots to join more traditional Dem calls for increased gun control following the tragedy in Blacksburg, VA, don't hold your breath. At deadline, none of the top five netroots sites (Daily Kos, Eschaton, TPM, AMERICAblog, and MyDD) have called for any changes to gun laws...

By the end of the day this claim was no longer accurate. AMERICAblog actually called for a 'revisit' of gun control before the statement was made and then wentafter Bush for being a lackey of the NRA. More importantly though DailyKos goes into more detail:

I support licensing each gun owner after an extensive background check that explores possible criminality and mental instability. I support relicensing periodically. I think guns should be registered and that we should require extensive training for safety and proficiency in their use before a person is allowed to purchase one....

Such laws might - might - have stopped Cho Seung Hui from acquiring the two weapons he used to commit his murders at Virginia Tech. Or he may have acquired them illegally, as so many criminals do. But while there are legitimate concerns that these laws may constitute a slippery slope toward outright confiscation - an action that some Kossacks support - I still think it would be wise to pass them.

Essentially Kos proposes is an extensive licensing and registration scheme. These are generally bad ideas which raise the barrier for entry into firearms ownership (not to mention carry) and also have the effect of turning a fundamental right into a privilege which can be revoked by government authorities. As Kos himself points out, this is also a known slippery slope towards gun confiscation which has occurred in both US localities and foriegn countries.

The sad this is that he even acknowledges, it probably won't work. A fundamental abridgement of rights that won't even work. But hey we should try it anyway. It's for the children or something. Brilliant.

UPDATE: Heh. Indeed. And a resounding rant from Mrs. du Toit for once.

Cats

Heh. We've never gotten Milo close enough to a mouse to see what he'd do, but he does a great job exterminating crickets and other large bugs.

Wonderfully Unexpected

I'm going to be on travel most of next week. Do not be concerned, I will hopefully have a laptop with me. Blogging should continue.

What is great, and I didn't realize it today, is that this has the unexpected effect of giving me this Friday off. A Friday off I didn't see coming. Whoopie!

Have They Started Work on the Patlabors Yet?

Straight from Japan, it's a mecha! Granted it has tracks not legs, but with two full articulated arms controlled by sensors on the operator's own appendages, it's close enough. The original Japanese site probably has more info if you can actually understand it.

Via Steven Den Beste.

Voter Fraud in the Cat Contest

It seems that the News Journal's Cutest Cat Contest has been called off for the time being due to suspected voter fraud. They are going to revamp the voting system for the kitten contest coming up and then they'll rerun the cats the next week.

Women's Earning Power

Hube is discussing a recent News Journal article on the income gap between men and women. Writer Kathleen Jacobs once again parrots the statistic that "women earned 77 cents for each dollar comparable to what a male worker earned across all occupational paths."

The problem is that "all occupational paths" makes for a poor comparison. All you learn is that the apples make more than the oranges. When you compare salaries and wages for men and women doing the same jobs for the same amount of time, the disparity drops to 92 cents on the dollar. 8 cents isn't very much, but it is still likely to be a statistically significant disparity.

So where does that 8 cents come from? I'm guessing it is from differences between the two in the workplace that have very little to do with direct discrimination. After one coworker had her first child two years ago, she didn't return to full time work for over a year. Even then it killed her to come back. Now a second female coworker is expecting this summer. She is planning to take off for an indefinite period. Most of the women I work with have similar stories to tell. Taking a year off from your career or choosing career paths that allow you to spend more time with your children will have an effect on your earning potential. Where I work women are far more likely to do these things because, oddly enough, it is the women who want to mother their children not the men.

Is this fair? Beats me. But at some point, especially when you are talking about fundamental anatomical differences between the sexes like bearing children, a line has to be drawn. Guess what, the two sexes are different in some places and the answer is not to ignore it an pretend they aren't. The answer is to make things as fair as you can within those limits.

Virginia Tech Shooting

The death toll is around 30 and is has nowhere to go but up. My prayers go out to everyone involved.

The other scary thing about these events is the number of "experts" who show up on TV and are completely ignorant. Initially some people thought this guy had a AK-47 solely because of his butcher's bill. We need to renew the Assault Weapons Ban! Turns out the gunman had a 9mm semi-automatic and lots of magazines. Oops.

It would also be wise to take "eye witness accounts" with a grain of salt for a while. The ones most likely to be correct are generally out of the action. The people involved in the action are unlikely to be reliable. Things happen too fast. Few people keep their head. Even fewer are trained to know what to look for in a firefight. Remember survivors firing on the rescue helicopters in New Orleans after Katrina? Didn't happen or at least no aircraft came home with bullets in them. Some pilot heard gunfire and panicked because they didn't know how to judge where the bullets were going.

A commenter over Wizbang is making statements like this:

And finally, MSNBC had a commentator who said that semi-automatic weapons were illegal in Virginia, and yet possessing all the components necessary to convert a firearm to semi-automatic *are* legal. This country needs gun laws that make sense...

Semi-automatic firearms aren't illegal anywhere in the US. Automatic weapons are regulated. Semi-automatic firearms cycle one bullet through the gun with each pull of the trigger. Automatic firearms cycle as many bullets as they can while the trigger is held down. Also possessing a conversion kit and the weapon to be converted is generally regarded as possession of a converted weapon by the ATF. Which is a felony. Sadly it is the people proposing new gun laws which generally don't understand the ones we already have on the books.

Unfortunately the desire to fill the news vacuum on this story is going to make for a lot of poor reporting for a while. The shooting is bad news, but the coverage is bad news of a completely different sort.

Heretics

According to Jerry Falwell, I am one. I blame my Presbyterian upbringing.

Some people are saying that this is an artifact of Falwell's Fundamentalism. It isn't really. The Fundamentals, which I've mentioned before, were designed as a construct to bind together like-minded Protestants against threats growing from Modernist philosophy. But the Fundamentals do not cover theological ground like Limited Atonement. In fact they purposefully avoided that kind of doctrinal boondoggle so that they covered the broadest group of believers under the umbrella of their particular brand of orthodoxy.

In many ways Falwell is actually shooting true Fundamentalism in the foot and indicating that the Fundamentals aren't fundamental enough for him. What foolishness. But then again I'm an Evangelical and quiet Calvinist so I suppose I would think that way.