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Labels: gun rights
Never forget!
I ran for Idaho state senate in 2008--didn't win
I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page).
Sorry, high pressure isn't included.
My nephew Shippy makes very pretty ceramic items. Click here to visit his online studio. Give someone one of these, and you can be sure that they don't already have one!
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Other blogs you may enjoy:
My civilian gun defense use blog
My daughter's blog
Pete Drum's Web Page
Gun Laws Don't Work
instapundit.com
Dissecting Leftism -- By John Ray
A courageous Briton arguing for relaxing Britain's gun control laws
Right Thoughts
Final Protective Fire
Amitai Etzioni's Blog
Scrappleface -- Dangerously Clever Satire
Michael Williams -- Master of None
Another Conservative Blogger
A Group Blog By Iraqis
THE MESOPOTAMIAN: TO BRING ONE MORE IRAQI VOICE OF THE SILENT MAJORITY TO THE ATTENTION OF THE WORLD
Specializing in discussions of discrimination and affirmative action
An Iraqi dentist
Promoting children being raised by their own parents
A federal law clerk opines about the law
Michelle Malkin's blog
Impearls: a blog as electic and interesting as mine
Proving that the United States military does more than kill people and break things.
May not agree with this group on everything, but stopping the ACLU is high on my list
A conservative/moderate black blogger.
Another sensible American
Sex, Crime, and Corruption in the Democratic Party
Music, Politics, Motorcycles
Maggie's Farm: Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
A blog dedicated to "Documenting Saddam Hussein's support of Terrorism"
The blog of one of my fellow bloggers on the Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog
J. Norman Heath's Blog--a circus rigger and Second Amendment scholar (really!)
Buckeye Firearms Association, for you Ohio gun owners and activists
Click here for a FREE NEWSLETTER on Ohio Gun Rights from Buckeye Firearms Association!
Another conservative.
Neocon Blues
Conservative Oasis
Other Idaho Bloggers
Bubbleheads is a retired submariner
An Idaho State University student. A Democrat. Someday, she'll start paying income taxes and change.
A retired Las Vegas stagehand, of all things.
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The ASC Conference in Chicago Next Week...
I have been tapped to replace Professor Bob Cottrol in a Second Amendment panel on Friday morning. I'm toying with a presentation like, "What Do Race and Class Specific Colonial Gun Control Laws Tell Us About the Original Intent of the Second Amendment?"
UPDATE: Title change (and no, I didn't have to torture the paper to give it the new title, even though it sounds like something that would get me a lot of favorable attention at the Left-Wing Historical Self-Congratulation Society): "Race, Class, & Gender in Colonial Gun Control Laws: What Do They Tell Us About the Original Intent of the Second Amendment?"
Political Indoctrination in Schools
Mark Kleiman asks this question:In a voucherized system, should a school receiving voucher funds be allowed to use a textbook with a question of the sort described above? How about if the lesson doesn't directly inclucate violence, but merely conveys some political message? ("If there are 100 African-Americans, and the racist cops kill 9 of them and prosecutors frame another 17 and put them behind bars, how many are left at large to fight for freedom?") If the answer is "No," what principle applies, who should make the decisions, and what process should operate?
To which my answer is this. What about public schools that practice political indoctrination? Should they be eligible fo public subsidy?
(For example, after the Good News Bible Elementary School is cut off for a question that reads, "If there are 12 baptized children and 5 are Catholics, how many are Christians?" should a new school with substantially the same personnel be eligible for vouchers the following year? If the answer is, "Depends on the curriculum," then who acts as curriculum censor?)
Obviously, these hypotheticals are far more outrageous than are likely to arise under actual current U.S. conditions. But the question in principle remains: If parents choose schools that practice political indoctrination, to what extent should those schools be eligible for public subsidy? I think I would give a different answer about grade schools than about colleges, and perhaps a different answer about grade schools than about high schools.
This isn't a hypothetical. Government classes definitely promote a particular view: pro-Bill of Rights, pro-democracy (usually with no awareness that the two are fundamentally in conflict). At least in California, public schools promote a leftist agenda: evil capitalism, evil robber barons, good Big Government, good Big Labor, evil Big Corporations.
California schools now are promoting a particular view of what constitutes "family," and it is one that is offensive to roughly 30% of Californians that are conservative or fundamentalist Christians, Orthodox Jews, and nearly all Muslims.
Public schools promote the ideas of racial equality and gender equality. While I agree with that point of view, it is definitely a form of political indoctrination.
The question isn't whether the government is going to subsidize political indoctrination or not. The question is whether the left, which controls the judiciary, is going to allow parents to send their kids to schools that don't promote the leftist political indoctrination.
I suppose if the left gave up its attempts at using public schools for the crude and repugnant political indoctrination that seems to have replaced useful skills as the primary goal, I wouldn't be quite so interested in seeing vouchers go through.
Snow-Capped Mountains
Summer in Boise is a brown and ugly time. But I can look out the window of my bedroom today and see snow-capped mountains behind the city. I'll try to take a picture and share it with you soon.
More About Why The Democrats Lost
My daughter does phone surveys for a variety of organizations, and she tells me that the post-election surveys that she is doing at the moment are getting some very interesting comments. A recurring comment from Democrats about why they voted Republican this time around was the incredible nastiness and lack of positive agenda of many of the Democrat ads. One Missouri Democrat she talked to indicated that Senator Jean Carnahan's ads so angered him that he voted a straight Republican ticket.
Let's see: Democrats attempt to do a whispering campaign against Linda Lingle implying that she was a lesbian. And who was elected Hawaii's first Republican governor? (Yeah, I know that there were Republican governors appointed during territory days, but you know what I mean.) While the Montana Democrats' subtle implication against Republican Mike Taylor probably isn't what won them the election, it can't have energized liberal Democrats who fancy themselves open-minded to rush out and vote Democratic. Maybe playing dirty doesn't win elections.
Salmon Rushdie's Back Handed Support For Bush
Remember that Rushdie is fundamentally a left-winger. That's what makes this column of his from the Australian newspaper The Age so astonishing. He doesn't trust Bush's motives for wanting to attack Iraq--as he makes clear, repeatedly--but:These are some of the reasons I, among others, have remained unconvinced by President Bush's Iraqi grand design. But as I listen to Iraqi voices describing the numberless atrocities of the Saddam years, then I am bound to say that if, as now seems possible, the US and the United Nations do agree on a new Iraq resolution; and if inspectors do return, and, as is probable, Saddam gets up to his old obstructionist tricks again; or if Iraq refuses to accept the new UN resolution; then the rest of the world must stop sitting on its hands and join the Americans in ridding the world of this vile despot and his cohorts.
For those wondering if Mr. Rushdie's first name has been misspelled--it looked fishy to me as well, but that's how the The Age spelled on their website.
Irony Overload!
Permagringirl's blog pointed me to this gem:Sixty-one-year-old James Welles has written books called "The Story of Stupidity" and "Understanding Stupidity." Both are about the dumb moves people make.
Welles now faces a charge in Lantana, Florida, with using the computer to set up a date with a 15-year-old girl. But the "girl" was really a 40-year-old undercover detective.
Nice To Get Positive Press...
This was an Scripps News Service piece carried by the New Haven Register:A book on guns and early Americans has been proven a fraud, and here's what I find most fascinating: The professional historians loved and praised the bogus offering — largely, it seems, because they thought it helped the cause of gun control — while initially scorning a software engineer who exposed its fallacies.
Lessons From Yesterday's Election
This article in the Washington Post makes the point that the Democrats didn't have a clear-cut vision that they were selling. But I think there's an even larger problem that needs to be addressed: what are mainstream political parties? They are coalitions of interest groups. The more interest groups, the more prospect there is that these interest groups will be in conflict, or at least working in different directions.
Gore Vidal's 1960 play The Best Man is about a Democratic contest for president, and at one point, one character points to another Democrat at a convention and says, "That's the only known connection between the ACLU and the Ku Klux Klan." The Democratic Party coalition back then was built of an unlikely combination of interests: labor unions; Southern populist Democrats; inner city blacks; first and second generation ethnic whites; civil libertarians. That coalition fell apart for a variety of reasons in the 1970s and 1980s.
Republicans had been a smaller and more cohesive set of interest groups up to that point. Because there were fewer special interest groups involved in the Republican coalition, there was less opportunity for conflict, and while Republicans simply didn't have the votes to be a nationally dominant party, their cohesion enabled them to win seats in Congress disproportionate to the number of voters that they actually had. (Republican voters also voted, reflecting their middle class values.)
In the 1970s and 1980s, the Democratic Party's collection dismembered itself. The labor unions were generally patriotic, and the antiwar movement's radical edges created some real discomfort in labor unionists who had made a conscious decision to drive out the Communists in the 1940s. Also, tax bracket creep meant that many union members were increasingly voting Republican in spite of hectoring by the union bosses. The racist history of labor unions, also, meant that efforts by the Democrats to satisfy demands by blacks for a fair shake created intraparty conflict.
Democrats also managed to create new factions from people that formerly had been reliable Democratic voters, but now voted Republican. The religious right is a largely Southern (at least in origin) white population, not in the higher income brackets, and should have been solidly Democratic. But the efforts of Democrats to appease civil libertarians with respect to prayer in public schools, the teaching of evolution, and homosexuality, drove a significant number of Democrats into the Republican Party.
Democrats like to pretend that the move of the South into Republican hands is just because the Democratic Party repudiated racism and segregation, but I think this is an oversimplification. For Democrats who crossed over in the 1960s and early 1970s, racism and segregation might well have been the issue, but from the late 1970s onward, the Democrats alienated many Southerners strictly on religious and cultural grounds. Certainly, by the 1990s, gun control was causing many Democrats to think twice before voting for their party's candidates, and even President Clinton admitted that at least 20 House Democrats lost their seats in 1994 because of gun control votes.
In this election, the Democrats were in a difficult situation. Their coalition today is largely labor unions, civil libertarians, environmentalists, feminists, blacks, Hispanics, homosexuals, gun control advocates, and what I call the "Hate America" crowd, who seem to think that Saddam Hussein is less of a threat to world peace than George Bush. (Of course, remember that there any people who are union members, feminists, blacks, Hispanics, or homosexuals who think for themselves and vote Republican.)
The Democrats were reluctant to push for the economic class warfare nonsense required to energize the labor unionists. By and large, they didn't want to disagree with Bush on foreign policy, both for fear of being seen as unpatriotic, and, I think for many of them, because they know Bush is right about the Iraq problem. This lost them the "Hate America" voters, many of whom either didn't vote, or voted Green. The Democrats learned from the last several elections that gun control costs them at least as many votes as it gains them, and the votes it gains them are in urban districts that they are going to win anyway because of the black and Hispanic density. Democrats around the country generally avoided the gun control issue, and some of those who did not--like Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, in Maryland--went down to historic defeats. (A Republican governor in Maryland. Can you imagine it?)
The core problem is here is that the Democratic Party coalition of interests is so broad that if they pander too much to one group, the other groups lose interest. The Democratic coalition is too broad, and they have two choices here. They can move left, and accept being a minority party because they will lose the large number of Americans who vote Democrat because Mom and Dad did so, 40 years ago. They can move right, and shed their wealthiest and most energetic constitutents: environmentalists; "Hate America"; homosexuals; feminists. But without these energetic and wealthy constituencies, there is no passion to motivate, and they will then find themselves as the passionless "Me Too" party competing with Republicans who do have a vision that rouses activists.
Is The Quality of Customer Service Dropping Dramatically?
My daughter is off at college, and she signed up for long distance service with one of the best known telecommunications companies on the planet. I'm not naming names, but let's just say that they were, for more than a century, known for the quality of their telephone service before they were broken up to help us consumers.
Anyway, she signed up for service so that we could take advantage of an unlimited service plan that this three letter long distance carrier had available. She never gets a bill. Then, her long distance is blocked so that she can't make outgoing calls. She calls up the long distance provider. They tell her that her phone bill was returned as undeliverable. So why didn't they just call her up on the phone? Would it have been that hard?
It turned out that when she originally signed up for service, the clerk taking down the information had left off her apartment number. Okay, no problem. She gives them the updated address, and they tell her that a bill will be sent to her within five days.
A couple of weeks elapse. No bill. She calls up again, and they have her correct address, and assure that the bill is on the way.
Well, finally, she now has a bill. It's shockingly large, because:
1. Teenagers talk with wild abandon, losing all track of time, and for my daughter, this is especially true.
2. It's a lot more than a month's bill by this point.
She calls up and wants to know if she is paying late charges because they neglected to get her address right in the first place. They don't know. They also claim to have no record that she had called up repeatedly to get her bill sent to the right address.
So here are my questions:
1. If a bill--especially a starting bill--gets returned undeliverable, why wouldn't you IMMEDIATELY call that customer? They're a phone company!
2. What's the point in having elaborate database systems keeping track of customer contacts if they don't, apparently, use them?
3. This is apparently not an isolated problem. My daughter was doing customer satisfaction surveys a few while back for, among other clients, this unnamed three-letter blithering idiot of a corporation. What angry customers told her is surprisingly similar to our own experience: no customer service worth the powder to blow them up.
Not surprisingly, my daughter is about ready to tell these morons where to stuff their supposed long distance service.
UPDATE: I am getting emails from others with horror stories about other phone companies. It's spreading!
That Kitty...
I drove up last night to meet my daughter in Riggins, Idaho, to pick up her cat, Tater Tot. She couldn't bear to take it to an almost certain death, and I wasn't thrilled about that either, so I drove three hours north on sometimes icy roads to get the creature. On the way back, just over my shoulder in the cat carrier, there would be the occasional mewing noise. He has spent most of his short life in her apartment, and here he was moving at high speeds through the darkness. (The Corvette behaved the way that you would expect a Corvette to behave on a windy mountain road: it kept begging for more speed.)
When I reached home, we introduced the cat to our dog, Biscuit. Biscuit started sniffing. "Is this a toy? Or food?" I don't think they are compatible, so if you live in southwestern Idaho, follow the link above to see a picture of this cute little creature, then email me to arrange pickup.
I'll Try Not To Gloat...
I'm sorry to see Gray Davis re-elected in California, but that's sort of a lost cause out there anyway. There's too many multimillionaires floating around California to expect a Republican to win that race. But picking up seats in the House and the Senate! Wow! Yahoo!
Amusing Probate Inventory Categories
I'm reading Plymouth colony probate records lately, constructing a data base of gun ownership, and some of the categories of these probate inventories are quite amusing. (Remember that these numbers are pounds, shillings, and pence.)Item desparate debts 00 15 00
Well, then again, I'm easily amused.
a Gun and half our fathers wearing apparrell; 1 Gun and a square and a syth and a Chamberpott
1 Gun and 2 bibles
UPDATE: This next line sounds like the title of a Bergman film:to things unseen & forgotten 00 10 00
The sume totall if noe Mistake in Cashing up is 133 06 06
We Will Not Tolerate Intolerance!
In Kentucky, almost half of the students at Boyd County High School boycotted school today to protest the decision to allow a gay students group to meet on campus. This isn't too surprising. What is amusing is the ACLU's response:James Esseks, litigation director for the ACLU's lesbian and gay-rights project, said the boycott represented ''the first time I've heard of a reaction of this kind or this size'' to the creation of a gay-straight alliance at a school.
Yup. That's right. The ACLU--which has argued that people should be free to burn the American flag, produce pornographic art, and use the F-word on a jacket in a courthouse--is concerned that "people feel so free in expressing their intolerance." Unlike the ACLU's concerns, which involve governmental power and people being sent to jail, this expression of intolerance is simply a refusal of students to attend classes as an expression of disapproval.
''The level of reaction or resistance they're encountering illustrates the need for a safe place for these kids to meet,'' Esseks said. ''Can you imagine being a gay or lesbian student in a community where people feel so free in expressing their intolerance? That must be a difficult place to be.''
The ACLU has lost its way.
Okay, Someone Took Offense At My Remarks...
And since it's my mother, I can't really ignore it. Last week, I pointed out that Oregon's Measure 23 wasn't even intelligent socialism because it had no co-payment for doctor visits, and I mentioned that even the National Health Service of Britain had been forced to impose a one pound co-payment to keep "lonely old ladies" from wasting the doctor's time.
Obviously, not every "lonely old lady" does this. (Certainly, my mother doesn't do this, but then again, she has a life.)
Enough did it in Britain that the NHS felt a need to impose a charge as a mild discouragement. If you spend any time at all in emergency rooms, or worse, talking to people who work in emergency rooms, you find out that this is hardly limited to "lonely old ladies." There are a surprising number of people who, because they don't have health insurance, use the E/R as a family physician. In many cases, they wait until the problem is very serious because the E/R experience is so frustratingly slow. But I also hear that there are plenty of others using the E/R for utterly trivial matters. These must be people who have nothing better to do than sit in an E/R waiting room. I can't understand that at all.
So Much For Canadian Gun Control...
This news story is ostensibly about how the new, much stricter enforcement of the U.S. border post-09/11 caught a Canadian who crossed into the U.S. to buy cheap American gas. But what makes this interesting isn't just that he was arrested for crossing the border into the U.S. with a gun (he was going hunting), but this:But on Oct. 11, they zeroed in on Jalbert, who was carrying a gun and who has a criminal record in Canada, Harrow said. Jalbert could be jailed for up to 10 years if convicted on the felony charges facing him.
Wait a minute! I thought Canada had very strict gun control laws. Here's a guy with a criminal record and a gun. Have the gun control advocates been misleading us?
Sorry For The Lack Of Activity...
I've been getting emails asking about the lack of activity. It's been a busy weekend, working my way through American Archives to complete my database of early American gunsmiths, and preparing overheads for the American Society of Criminology conference next week. I will be on a panel Thursday morning discussing the "problems" with Arming America. Professor Lindgren is talking about probate records; Don Kates is talking about the ever moving San Francisco probate records; I'm talking about the disconnect between Bellesiles's description of colonial gun control laws and what the laws actually say.
