Lefty Laments: “When Governments Go Bad”

Via HotAir, David Brooks at NYT wants so much more government involved in your life, but it’s so sad that sometimes so much more good government that will tell you how to live doesn’t turn out perfect like it should.  Aww.. poor statist tyrant:

Most government workers are amazingly dedicated and talented, and they put in a level of commitment that is far out of proportion to their salaries.

But we’re also seeing government workers, who, far from checking their own desire for control, have taken it out for a romp.

Brooks is an idiot.  At the bottom of the page, it notes that he’s filling in for Paul Krugman, who’s also an idiot, so he must be competing with Paul Krugman for some inter-office idiocy award.

Auditing low-level agents at the IRS do not “take their desire for control out for a romp”.  Doesn’t work that way.  They may agree with the IRS conservative crackdown plans and go along with them, but the guy doing the paperwork does not come up with schemes and machinations.  The mid-level manager gal doing the office paperwork to make sure the guy doing the lower paperwork doesn’t come up with these schemes.  She may go along with them, but they have to be passed down to her from someone with the authority to be able to waive all the concerns about repercussions for IRS personnel doing something wrong and getting fired.  Normal people do not get together to “take their desire for control out for a romp” at the low level, as though there’s some spontaneously generated lust for power in people who double-check math all day.

It’s hard to tell now if the I.R.S. scandal is political thuggery or obliviousness. It would be one thing if the scandal is just a group of tax people targeting the most antitax groups in the country. That’s just normal, run-of-the-mill partisan antipathy.

Sure, it’s okay if they target people who try to restore the nation to founding priciples.  That’s okay.  It’s fine if you’re tax collectors who target people who want the tax burden reduced through legal means and legislation.  Of course that’s fine.  No problem with that kind of targeted oppression by government whatsoever.

It’s just as okay as if the government targeted any other group that the government didn’t like.  Because after all, the citizen exists solely for the government to deem either worthy or unworthy.

It would be far worse if the senior workers of the I.R.S. have become so isolated by their technocratic task that they didn’t even recognize that using the search term “Tea Party” was going to be a moral and political problem.

Gee, it’s too bad they didn’t come up with a more clever way to target those sniveling teabaggers.  If only they had been smart enough not to outright say they were targeting the Tea Party.  Then they could’ve gotten away with it.

Everyone is treating the I.R.S. issue as a bigger deal, but the Justice Department scandal is worse. This was a sweeping intrusion that makes it hard for the press to do its job. Who is going to call a journalist to report wrongdoing knowing that at some future date, the government might feel perfectly free to track the phone records and hunt you down?

I would have thought a dozen Justice Department officials would have risen up and splashily resigned when they learned of the scope of this invasion. Aren’t there some lawyers in the Justice Department, and, if so, did they go to law schools where the Constitution is left unassigned?

The DOJ smuggled guns to narcoterrorist cartels and hushed it up and you and your reporter friends helped hush it up.  Brooks, when the DOJ decides to make you sign your own confession Soviet-style, you will have earned your statist utopia and all the hard labor it will sentence you to until the end of your days.  Maybe after a few decades in the ground, they’ll even take the time to posthumously rehabilitate you.

We clearly have a values problem in the federal government. We clearly have a few or many agencies where the leaders don’t emphasize that workers need to check themselves, or risk losing what remains of the people’s trust.

There is no “values problem” in the fedgov.  There is a fedgov that is unconstrained by the document that created it.  Men are the same, that’s why we have a Constitution.

We have a Constitution, and that creates our government.  The Constitution is what creates the government and limits it – it is the laws by which the government is created and those it must abide by.  When government ignores the Constitution, as it has been doing, it should have no trust – because it is an entity of domination composed of men with power – whether malignant or benign.   When it ceases to be an entity that exists at the behest of the citizen, it becomes oppressive.  A massive, distant power composed of men with power and no constraints are never deserving of any trust.

I generally support the little behavioral nudges that Cass Sunstein describes in his outstanding book “Simpler” — the subtle policy shifts that induce people to save more, or eat healthier.

Ah, David Brooks, lickspittle for tyrants.

I’d trust somebody with a minimalist disposition like Sunstein to implement these policies.

That’s so precious that you want to be dominated, David.  You’re so vanilla.

But I wouldn’t necessarily trust the people at the I.R.S. or Justice Department to implement them.

Guess who you’re going to get?  Guess who’s going to be running your health care?  Guess who’s been hushing up the murders of your Mexican neighbors to the south?

Cass Sunstein is a tyrant wannabe, along with all of his authoritarian ilk.  Revisit his rave review of “Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism”.  They want to coerce you – to force you – into something they think is good for you.  Brooks wants to be coerced – to be forced – into something someone else thinks is good for him – and he wants you forced as well.  Everybody knows what’s best for you, and they’re going to force it on you, because they’ve decided you need to be forced into what they think you should be.  Brooks wants to be dominated and be controlled by government.

Brooks wants a bad government to dominate him, he just wants one that doesn’t spank too hard.

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But I’ll end this with a quote from a tax collector and freedom fighter:

If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.

Watergate and Obama

From the UK Telegraph:

…Four decades after Watergate and two decades after his death, we still can’t stop talking about the dark anti-hero of American politics. …

The latest non-Watergate to be labelled its second coming is actually a combination of three separate scandals afflicting the Barack Obama administration.

The collective weight of this scandalabra threatens to derail the president’s ambitious legislative agenda, dragging him to premature lame duck status. But it doesn’t represent outright criminality emanating from the Oval Office or promise to provoke a constitutional crisis, however fervently Obama’s critics might wish it.

In fact the ritualistic invocation has the opposite to the desired effect, making the scandals look smaller than they are by comparison with Nixon’s. So, partisan projections aside, how do these scandals really stack up?

The Telegraph author criticizes the comparison of Watergate, then goes on to note how “the IRS scandal is the most serious”, but frankly, he’s got it backwards.

Fast and Furious, which was hushed up by a complicit media, was the most serious.  Then Benghazi, which is starting to get attention.  Hundreds have died from Fast and Furious.  Four have died from Benghazi.

The IRS scandal and the AP snooping scandal are chilling effects of tyranny, but they aren’t the administration covering up murders, or covering up leaving an ambassador and his staff to die.

Finally, there is the continuing inquiry into the killing of four Americans in Benghazi. After damning congressional testimony from former deputy chief Libya diplomat Greg Hicks, the White House belatedly released a barrage of emails – which showed that the editing of the now-infamous “talking points” used by officials in television interviews was largely the product of a bureaucratic turf war between the CIA and the State Department.

Yeah, except that doesn’t cut it.  The talking points are a question of who’s covering up what and why.  The “bureaucratic turf war between CIA and State Department” is a whitewash by the media.

Who ordered the stand-downs?  Why wasn’t there an F18 doing a low altitude flyby over Benghazi at supersonic speeds  and terrifying the terrorists by showing American air power was there?

This media look at the Obama scandals is entirely backwards, but it is right to recognize that Watergate and Obama’s four scandals are different.

Nixon had CREEP and the Plumbers out playing political tricks and breaking into hotels.

Obama shipped guns to narcoterrorist cartels that have killed hundreds (including two USBP Agent Brian Terry and ICE Agent Jaime Zapata), left a US ambassador and his staff to die and then lied about it and played politics with the coverup, then he went after political opponents with the IRS and went after media with the DOJ.

Nixon’s Watergate was some shady political tricks.  Obama’s scandals are murder.

Piers Morgan Finds Reality Conflicting

Via HotAir:

“Vaguely tyrannical.”

They say a conservative is just a liberal who’s been mugged.

Morgan isn’t mugged, but he’s been given a wonderful opportunity to see what tyrannical regimes do.  He wouldn’t care at all were it someone else, but when the AP and his fellow lefty media hacks are targeted because the party wants to make sure they’re towing the party line and not talking to whistleblowers, he’s taking a tiny bit of notice.

That’s a good thing, but it probably won’t stick with him.  He’s still a cretin who falsified stories about Tommy Atkins and was kicked out of the UK for it, but he’s showing that when confronted with the actual tyrannical force of government, at least he understands enough to be interested in his own skin.

David Gregory’s Magazinegate: NBC and the DC Police’s Little Coverup

Revisiting a big story.  From Emily Miller at the Washington Times, who has been sending some letters back and forth to DC officials:

…He sent back a Feb. 20 email from Victor Bonett in the attorney general’s office that said, “OAG is withholding the Jan. 9, 2013 letter from Lee Levine and certain responsive emails between OAG and MPD, pursuant to D.C. Official Code Section 2-534(a)(3)(A)(i), (a)(4) and (e).”

Mr. Levine’s letter provided new information, such as that the source of the “high-capacity” magazine. “Meet the Press briefly borrowed the empty magazine from a private citizen who lives outside of the District of Columbia and who ‘Meet the Press’ understood possessed the magazine lawfully,” he wrote.

The NBC lawyer also claimed, “The magazine was immediately returned to its owner following the broadcast.”

However, according to a police “property record” document, a Kay Industries 30-round magazine was recovered from Mr. Gregory (at a redacted address) as part of an active investigation. The document is signed on Jan. 9, two days after Mr. Levine said the magazine had been returned to its owner.

So the mag they claim they borrowed was returned and yet a mag was still seized.  So no matter what NBC’s story, if the DC police seized a mag, that’s all it takes to violate the law.  Mere possession, and that’s it.

Good to see folks with resources, regional proximity, and ability are pursing this.

No matter how it turns out, it’s a splendid case to use for anyone who’s arrested or charged from now on to illustrate a failure of equal application of the law.

Professor Jacobson at Legal Insurrection has a bit more.

First Woodward, Now Bernstein

Remember a few months back, Bob Woodward criticized the White House about the sequester limiting military movements, and then was threatened?

Of course, Woodward was blasted by his fellows in the media for criticizing Obama, and it’s not like Woodward was actually going to say anything serious, since Woodward never thought there were any questions worth asking about Benghazi or Fast and Furious.  He made one comment that wasn’t wholly in lock-step with the Obama-loving media and was verbally attacked and threatened for it.

Now today, Carl Bernstein is calling out Obama for targeting Associated Press reporters.

He’s not targeting the White House’s actual activities.  He’s not calling them out for suppressing Fast and Furious and targeting whistleblowers for retaliation.  Bernstein’s only mad because reporters who need to be monitored for party loyalty are now targets.

Bernstein said “the president should long ago have put a stop to this in his administration”.  Apparently he doesn’t understand or refuses to acknowledge that the president is a Chicago street organizer who was raised by Alinskyite communist thugs and terrorists.  This president does not favor freedom, he does not favor free speech.  His political agenda is one that would criminalize unpopular speech, and would actively targets opposition speech.  This is not a surprise to Country Class Americans.

Bernstein:

“There is no reason that a presidency that is interested in a truly free press and its functioning should permit this to happen.”

Y’know what that means, Carl?  Y’know what you should be able to get from that without having Mark Felt spoon-feed it to you?  It means this presidency DOESN’T favor a free press.

From the Obama administration targeting FOX news and calling it “destructive” for having a viewpoint that opposes his to Obama specifically blaming Rush Limbaugh for all the problems in America, to calling anyone who is opposed to the socialist manifest destiny an “obstructionist” or “destructive”, this administration, from the President down through all of his true-believer lackeys, are on the same page.  If you oppose them and their autocratic mania to tell you how to live, you must be destroyed.

Bernstein is a dinosaur.  He’s in the tank for the Democrats, but he still thinks they’re the same silly Democrats of yesteryear.  He’s still got some smidgen of journalistic integrity left, too, and he’s wondering why the Democrats are trying to crush and control journalists now.  He doesn’t understand what he’s dealing with, and he doesn’t understand that the ruling Democrats are tyrants.

He sounds mad because he can’t figure out why Obama’s doing these horrible things.  He’s like a battered wife who still thinks her abusive husband who just molested their children is a good guy, and she doesn’t understand all these horrible things that surely can’t be the truth.  The facts stare him in the face, but he refuses to understand.

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As just one more example, Sharyl Attkisson has been yelled at for being a journalist and actually reporting on a big story – gunrunning by the US DOJ/ATF, and the subsequent coverup by the Obama administration.  The media has already hushed up a few hundred murders in Fast and Furious, and hushed up Benghazi as much as they can, and they’re going to spin the IRS story as either justified because conservative=evil or as an accident.  They’ve been accomplices to tyranny for so long, are they just so blind that they’re now surprised when they’re the targets?

Somewhere, Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov are sharing a joke at the US media’s expense.

Media Hushes Up Benghazi Whistleblower Hicks’ Political Background

Via Drudge, from Breitbart:

NBC News “spiked” the story this week, prior to Hicks’ dramatic testimony before Congress.  

Toensing appeared on WMAL-FM in Washington DC Saturday with host Steve Malzberg.

“He voted for Hillary in the primary and Obama twice. NBC spiked the story where I told it before the hearings…

…It’s just amazing what the press is still trying to do to cover this up. So they try to make this partisan because of the lawyer. Well I’m not the messenger, he’s the messenger! The modus operandi is to find anything they can do to just attack.”

Thing is, if Hicks were reported as a Democrat supporter who votes Democrat all the time, it goes to show that there is actual bipartisanship – that people as Americans are saying something’s wrong, that this was a criminal coverup.  There are actual Democrats who recognize that what happened at Benghazi is wrong, and there are actual Democrats who are critical of the Obama administration.

That would go against the narrative that this is just a right-wing fiction, a right-wing kooky conspiracy theory that’s all about editing a document that gets edited anyway and nobody died and nothing happened and it was all a protest against a reich-wingnut who made a video on youtube to offend the arab world because he’s out to offend them so much.

It’s only natural that people take RPGs and mortars to protests, because right-wingers make people that mad, and they deserve it.  So it’s the right’s fault… according to the left.

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That part really is key, in case someone isn’t getting how the White House story of a spontaneous protest doesn’t fit with reality.  In the leftist worldview, it’s somehow “normal” that people take fire support to protest, and a “protest” with mortar support is a perfectly acceptable explanation for an attack on a 9/11 anniversary.

Yes on proposition 19!

Gunwalker Update: Fast and Furious Lawsuit Slowly Moving and the Wide Receiver Story

First update on the civil suit against the Justice Department, from UT San Diego:

WASHINGTON — A federal judge seemed skeptical Wednesday of the Justice Department’s bid to dismiss a congressional lawsuit seeking records related to Operation Fast and Furious, a bungled federal gun-tracking operation in Arizona.

It was not a gun-tracking operation.  It was not bungled.  It did exactly what it was set out to do, it sent guns to Mexican narcoterrorist cartels, and it forced US gun stores to sell to people who should never have gotten guns.  There was no tracking involved, as whistleblower John Dodson stated – they were not allowed to track guns sent south, and they were intended to be recovered at crime scenes.  People buying guns included felons who could not have passed NICS background checks, except that the government gave them permission to buy guns by letting them pass background checks.

When asked about the breakdown, Stephen Fischer, a spokesman for the NICS System, said the FBI had no comment. However, an ATF agent who worked on the Fast and Furious investigation, told Fox News that NICS officials called the ATF in Phoenix whenever their suspects tried to buy a gun. That conversation typically led to a green light for the buyers, when it should have stopped them.

From the UD SD story again, the judge is at least doing her job:

Judge Amy Berman Jackson sharply challenged the department’s claim that federal courts have no jurisdiction in the dispute. Department lawyer Ian Gershengorn said the battle over the documents should be resolved by the checks and balances between the legislative and executive branches.

“I’m a check and balance,” countered Jackson, an appointee of President Barack Obama. “The third branch exists.”

Well, she seems better than other Obama appointments.  And she seems to understand that there has been no “check and balance” when the Department of Justice and the president have simply claimed executive privilege and hushed everything up – which is the reason for the lawsuit.  She is seeing things up close, so she probably has to acknowledge what’s going on.  She’s being presented with information directly, and can’t just ignore things like the media does.

To some degree, this is also a story of how the media not only gets it wrong, but how the media is carrying water for Obama.

The department has turned over thousands of pages of material on the operation itself. The continuing dispute is over documents describing how the department responded once Congress started investigating.

That’s what the Justice Department sent as “documents”.  Page after page after page.

Gershengorn said that if the suit were dismissed, Congress had other powers at its disposal, such as the power of the purse. He said that negotiations and accommodation between the House and the executive branch are messy and contentious, but that the system allows for accountability with voters.

That is absurd, insulting, and the kind of thing that would get Sam Adams heating up the tar and sending somebody to get feathers.  The DOJ is hushing up a the murder of two federal agents and hundreds of mexican citizens, hushing up their program that is the kind of violent criminal conspiracy that would make headlines for years if it were done by organized crime, but instead, is hushed up because the media simply refuses to report it, and refuses to report the truth because they love their great leader.

Saying that Congress can simply use “the power of the purse” to reduce budgets for departments is absurd.  No one is held accountable for this:

People need to go to prison, not have their department funding meddled with.  The DOJ lawyer Gershengorn should be with them as an accomplice after the fact to murders.

House lawyer Kerry Kircher called the notion that there haven’t been meaningful negotiations and accommodations “preposterous.”

“We’ve been negotiating for four months,” Kircher said.

He also said the House was at a disadvantage.

“This is an asymmetrical relationship here,” Kircher said. “They have the documents. We don’t have the documents.”

As to Congress’ powers, such as reducing spending for the executive branch, he said, “All that means is they get less money” – not that the committee gets the documents.

Presented with this kind of thing, I’d like to say the judge won’t just rule in favor of who appointed her, but there’s little telling.

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David Codrea at Examiner.com has some info on “Guns Across the Border“, a book that tells the story of Operation Wide Receiver.

“Operation Wide Receiver,” a precursor to “Operation Fast and Furious” wherein U.S. guns were bought by straw purchasers and “walked” under the noses of ATF investigators into Mexico, has been the subject of numerous Gun Rights Examiner reports. The central figure in those reports was Mike Detty, a gun writer, a firearms dealer, and the confidential informant who literally risked his life over the course of years to do what he believed was right, only to find the obvious criminals weren’t the only ones he couldn’t trust.

Operation Wide receiver really was a botched sting.  The ATF in Mexico knew that guns were coming, the Mexican authorities knew guns were coming.  The smugglers turned out to be good at smuggling and got a lot of guns past both US and Mexican authorities through a variety of tactics.  Smugglers are good at smuggling?  Who’da thunk it?

Fast and Furious, by contrast, was not a botched sting.  The ATF in Mexico (ATF attache Darren Gil) and the Mexican authorities had no idea guns were coming, and the purpose was to find guns at murder scenes in Mexico, about which ATF supervisors were “almost giddy”.

Wide Receiver and Fast and Furious were two different things.  Bob Owens at PJ Media did a solid bit on this explaining it further:

Wide Receiver sought to track and interdict guns being smuggled south using a combination of RFID-tracking devices embedded in the shipments and overheard surveillance aircraft. Wide Receiver failed because of the limitations of the technology used, compounded by the ineptness of its installation and the unexpected resourcefulness of the cartel’s gun smugglers.

As a result of the mistakes made in Wide Receiver, guns were lost: approximately 450 made it into Mexico. As a result, the botched operation launched in 2006 — and in this instance, actually botched — was shut down in 2007.

Compare the mistakes of Wide Receiver to the operations launched under Eric Holder’s Department of Justice, which had the advantages of learning from the postmortem failures of Wide Receiver two years before.

Fast and Furious used neither tracking devices nor aircraft, ran interference for smugglers with local law enforcement on multiple occasions, and federal agents were not allowed to interdict weapons.

Wide Receiver shut down within a year after 450 weapons went missing in a botched law enforcement operation. Fast and Furious purposefully ran at least 2,020 weapons to the Sinaloa cartel without any intention of arresting the straw purchasers and smugglers. Other operations in other states — CBS News’ Attkisson cites allegations of “at least 10 cities in five states” — allow the possibility that (if the other operations were as prolific as Fast and Furious) Holder’s Department of Justice may have intentionally sent more than 12,000 guns into criminal hands in the U.S and Mexico, enough to arm three U.S. Army brigades.

Law enforcement operations sometimes go horribly wrong, and every indication is that Operation Wide Receiver executed by the ATF during the Bush administration while Alberto Gonzales was the attorney general was a “keystone cops” operation of the first magnitude. It was a horrible failure.

But Fast and Furious was no accident.

High Capacity Magazine PSA

From MB Studio Productions:

They note in their youtube comments section that technically, they’re talking about standard capacity magazines, but they’re using the media term to garner attention.

It’s also reminiscent of this disturbing ad by the Montana Meth Project.

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To gun-hating tyrants, the magic number is ultimately zero, whether it be pistol or rifle or shotgun.

The Incessant Academic Argument For Tyranny and The Refutation of Freedom – Part 2

Part 1 here, mostly about food and people who want the government to dictate to them how they should eat.

And today, part 2, as we look at a Time Magazine piece titled “Tread on Me“.

America was born from resistance to tyranny, and our skepticism of authority is a healthy tradition. But we’re pretty free.

That’s good enough, right?  We’re “pretty free”.  It’s about time we move on in the Tytler Cycle and get back to bondage!  Woo-hoo!  Bondage!  The state will make us free from responsibility and dangers of the world!  They know what’s best for me!

the Don’t Tread on Me slippery-slopers on both ends of the political spectrum tend to forget that Big Government helps protect other important rights

Doesn’t work that way.  This is a question of whether people believe in more or less government control.  Americans believe in less government control, have traditionally always believed in less government control, and only ever believe in having government control them when they’ve been brainwashed and programmed.

But standby for incoming collectivist BS…

Like the right of a child to watch a marathon or attend first grade without getting massacred—or, for that matter, the right to live near a fertilizer factory without it blowing up your house.

There are no such rights.  To be free from danger is not only impossible, but even reduction of danger is not a right – it something paid for by someone’s work – whether it be the soldier, policeman, or factory manager and safety staff.

I guess you could call me a statist.

How about one who will lick the hand that feeds with his chains resting upon him, and someone who I would wish posterity would forget was my countryman?

Go ahead, quote the Ben Franklin line about those who would sacrifice some liberty for security deserving neither.

You forgot the last part – they deserve neither – and will lose both.

But what about the rights of 8-year-old Martin Richard, blown away after watching his dad finish the marathon? Who safeguarded the liberty of 6-year-old Charlotte Bacon, gunned down in her classroom in her new pink dress? What about Perry Calvin and Morris Bridges and the other victims of the West Texas explosion? Nobody read them their rights.

There are no such rights as to be free from danger – and there can be none.

This kind of high-minded utopian fantasy was cranked out back in the 1930s and 1940s by the FDR administration.  There were even oaths made to defend the freedom from want and freedom from fear.

Photo by ShortTimer

It is, by itself, nonsense.

Life? What ‘right’ to life has a man who is drowning in the Pacific? The ocean will not hearken to his cries. What ‘right’ to life has a man who must die to save his children? If he chooses to save his own life, does he do so as a matter of ‘right’? If two men are starving and cannibalism is the only alternative to death, which man’s right is ‘unalienable’? And is it ‘right’? As to liberty, the heroes who signed the great document pledged themselves to buy liberty with their lives. Liberty is never unalienable; it must be redeemed regularly with the blood of patriots or it always vanishes. Of all the so-called natural human rights that have ever been invented, liberty is least likely to be cheap and is never free of cost.

- Robert Heinlein, Starship Troopers

You cannot legislate industrial accidents out of existence (unless you obliterate industry entirely – which is a goal of the left as a tool to fight Manbearpig).

You cannot legislate madmen out of existence.  You can forcibly disarm the populace, and leave them at the mercy of governmental ruler madmen like maniac cop Chris Dorner.  You can leave them at the mercy of government to make them “safe”.

You do all of those by destroying liberty, something that high-minded collectivist utopians have done in the past to construct human nature into what they want it to be – to “mold the world closer to their hearts’ desire”.

And it almost always looks the same in the end.

In contrast to those statist desires, you can safeguard the liberty of 6 year-old Charlotte Bacon.  You need a rough man ready to do violence on her behalf to safeguard that liberty – that liberty needs to be bought, but the left is terrified of the tools of violence to the point where they irrationally declare that to make the gazelle safe from the lion, you must strip the gazelle’s horns.

By the left’s logic, to make the child safe, you must leave her unguarded; and target those who would do her no harm but instead do seek to protect her.  There are people who are actively willing to put their own lives in harm’s way, but they are called monsters for demanding real security.  They are demonized for understanding the tools and nature of violence as defense and deterrent.

You can begin to defend the life of 8 year-old Martin Richard more by identifying the threat and dealing with the threat when it rears its head.  What killed him was islamic terrorism.  We know this.  We all know this, but our government denies it on the basis that their ideology rejects making that judgement.  By the response of the authorities in the Boston bombing case, there will be no more fatalities from those particular two terrorists.  The hundreds of lives saved, like the baker’s new suit in the Broken Window Fallacy, are easily forgotten because they never materialized.  There were no more terrorist attacks from those two because the terrorists were pursued (at a cost of life and harm) and stopped.

Yet there are still high-minded utopians who believe that if they just apologize enough, that if they are sensitive enough, they can stop people who chant for their deaths in the street through just well wishes.

And here’s where the Time writer gets worse:

Our rights are not inviolate. Just as the First Amendment doesn’t let us shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater, the Second Amendment shouldn’t let us have assault weapons designed for mass slaughter.

This is, as Jonah Goldberg would say, bonesnappingly stupid.

The First Amendment totally and completely does let us shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater.

If the government could mandate a white-noise generator that would specifically tune into the sound of a human voice shouting the word “Fire!” so that it could never again be said in a theater and the First Amendment were restricted, what would happen when there is a fire and no one can shout the word?  What happens when no one can give the alarm?  What happens when that lifesaving tool is denied?  It would result in people burned to death.

The Second Amendment totally and completely does let us have modern firearms.  I have yet to take or instruct a firearms class wherein I have taught or been taught to use an “assault weapon” for “mass slaughter”.  Sorry, just doesn’t work that way.

The Second Amendment protects the natural right of self defense.  It codifies it in the Constitution and ensures that the tools of self defense will not be denied.  It does the same in that sense as the First Amendment protecting the word “Fire!”.  It exists as the last full response against oppression, large and small, whether it be a lone criminal or the force of a dictatorial government.

If used improperly or abused, it’s a crime, just like yelling fire when there’s no fire.  If used properly, it’s a wholly necessary lifesaving right; and it protects tools that allow for lives to be saved.  And just like the loss of yelling “Fire!”, if it is taken away, it ends up the same – the result is people burned to death.

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To revisit this quote from the “Tread on Me” masochist:

Those of us who support aggressive government action to protect the public ought to acknowledge that it does, at the margins, limit individual rights—the rights of gun owners, the rights of business owners, the rights of the accused. Go ahead, quote the Ben Franklin line about those who would sacrifice some liberty for security deserving neither. But what about the rights of 8-year-old Martin Richard, blown away after watching his dad finish the marathon? Who safeguarded the liberty of 6-year-old Charlotte Bacon, gunned down in her classroom in her new pink dress? What about Perry Calvin and Morris Bridges and the other victims of the West Texas explosion? Nobody read them their rights.

The Bill of Rights is there to limit government.  Governments create oppression.  In a state of nature, there may be terror, but there is no all-encompassing institution that can deny you your natural rights.  The Constitution is there as a contract of free men that created a limited government with the intention of protecting all of our natural rights possible while providing us tools to ensure greater protection for all as well.

I’ve been told that invoking the death of innocents is an emotional appeal rather than a logical argument. And I do admit these tragedies make me angry. But I think it would be logical for our government to try to limit these tragedies in the future.

The author thinks wrong.  There have been a million individual tragedies that are easily forgotten by their magnitude that were undertaken by free men (and sometimes conscripts) to preserve liberty, not to have it thrown away because some statist submissive grovels to beg for tyrants to enslave us all because he is a sniveling coward.

You want to protect people, do it yourself.  You want to prevent tragedies, do it yourself.  You want to tread on me because you’re a coward?  Then you become an oppressor, Mr. Grunwald, and you are trading bought-and-paid-for liberty for security that is not only fleeting, but wholly nonexistent.

We already sacrifice liberty all the time—our right to automatic weapons, our right to walk through airport security with our shoes on, our right to run our businesses however we please.

The writer is an amoebic poltroon who kneels before the might of the state.  We shouldn’t sacrafice our right to automatic weapons, our right to walk through airport security with shoes on, or our right to run our businesses however we please.  Excluding abuse of our rights, which infringes on someone else’s natural rights, it’s not the place of the government to do anything.  Just because the government has abused rights in the past, doesn’t mean we should tolerate it any further.

The rights of the next Martin Richard and the next Charlotte Bacon matter, too.

Yes, and the next Martin and the next Charlotte may be killed by leftists with utopian wishes who demand schools be gun-free zones, ensuring that only criminals and madmen intent on mayhem will be armed.  The next Martin and Charlotte, if they survived being left in a defenseless free-fire zone for 12 years of mandated government schooling, may not like being x-rayed by government lackeys who see them nude any time they get on a plane.  They may not like that when they go to start a business, that their government demands so much from them that it’s easier just to not start the business, that their freedom has been curtailed so much that they don’t have options for a business.

But they may grow up thinking they’re “pretty free”, because there’s always something worse.

The next Martin and the next Charlotte are not one or two children, they are millions of children who will grow into adults in a nation where they are less free.  The next boy may be bashed for being gay because he’s left disarmed against a mob, the next girl may be another Amanda Collins, who was raped because she was disarmed by government.  The next boy may have developed the motor that runs on static electricity, but will never make it because the government has regulated him into oblivion.  The next girl may not want to have her privacy violated by government every time she enters a private contract with an aircraft company to fly her somewhere.

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There are no shortages of people demanding destruction of liberty.  From Cass “We Must Dominate You For Your Own Good” Sunstein, to any of the intellectuals Thomas Sowell criticizes as dominating sheperds who demand you be their sheep, there is never a shortage of men who wish to dominate and control their fellow man.

There is always a question of how many people believe that becoming sheep is noble, and how many reject that destructive notion of bondage.

Media Forms “Human Shield” To Protect An Advocate Of Disarming You

From Real Clear Politics:

Ryan Grim, Washington bureau chief for The Huffington Post, explains to MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell how he and other “journalists” prevented Capitol Hill police from removing an anti-gun advocate from the Senate gallery after she yelled at Senators who voted down an amendment to expand background checks.

And so says the leftist reporter:

GRIM: I interviewed her along with a number of other journalists right afterwards. They were trying to escort her out of the building, but journalists kind of formed a human shield around her because they all had their microphone in front of her. The Capitol Police realized perhaps arresting a hero of Tucson, right after the Senate knocked down this sensible gun bill, wasn’t the best move, so they let her continue to talk.

There is nothing sensible about the bill.  It criminalizes citizens who have done nothing wrong, it would’ve subjected you to additional regulation while doing nothing to stop crime.

They claim a “hero of Tuscon” suddenly has moral authority over those who fought to defend rights, which disregards completely the heroes who fought to preserve those rights and why they fought.

But these are just, you know, 90%, 90% of people support this.

Lie lie lie, lie lie lie, lie lie lie lie.

And a 90% oppressor of a 10% minority is an oppressor.

There’s no Second Amendment right to 50 bullets, and yet here we are.

The Second Amendment covers arms.  There is no limit to one or 10 or 50 or 100 or 1000 bullets.