Gun Rights News Roundup

Articles, news stories, and op-eds of interest to gun owners:

On the media and hollywood's anti-gun bias:

... The media conducts a constant and insidious assault on our freedom by ridiculing and denigrating the American way of life and more importantly, the way of life that made America great. Hollywood and New York have forgotten that just about everybody between the two coasts does not subscribe to these values-or have they? Perhaps they know we don’t hold their values and this is a way to make inroads to changing our minds and numbing us into letting our freedoms slip away. If you say a lie often enough, it becomes the truth, for it is impossible to un-hear what you have heard. Some of you may have read Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister quoted saying, “if you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it” [3]. The danger of all this is the rumor, the lie, and the innuendo become fact and we in the 2nd Amendment fight don’t have near the resources or ability to combat these kinds of slander the left does. We don’t make movies or print newspapers. We can write letters to the editor, etc., but they still control what is printed and shown on the air. We are losing the war on the culture front by letting these huge Trojan Horses of the media right into our living rooms, and national consciousness, disguised as entertainment or news.

To combat this it is imperative we point out insidious derogatory references to the great American way of life when we see them. It is important to teach our children and our children’s children that freedom does not mean dragging down the rich heritage and culture that made America great. Teach them how to think critically about what they see in the movies, TV and print. Help them understand the biases that are introduced into each movie and television story line. Don’t censor their viewing, but help them understand the disparity between fact and fiction, ideology and reality. It means influencing everyone you can about what message some of these shows and articles are really trying to say. Eventually, the majority will understand the difference between trash and treasure, perhaps even changing what movies and television shows they watch, thus hitting anti-gunners right in the wallet. ...

[D.C.] Guns in D.C., one year after Heller:

It's been a year since a Northwest D.C. housewife carried a Ruger .357 Magnum into police headquarters in a blue plastic grocery bag and became the District's first legal handgun owner since the Supreme Court overturned a decades-old ban.

Today, Amy McVey's handgun is one of just 515 that have been legally registered with the Metropolitan Police Department -- a number that pales compared with more than 2,000 illegal weapons that have been seized in the same period.

She hasn't had to use it to defend her home. Nor has anyone attempted to steal it and use it against her or to commit some other crime -- undermining the most widely used arguments for and against permitting guns. ...

[Ohio] Buckeye Firearms Association says anti-gunner DeWine running for AG:

Montgomery County Republican Party Chair Greg Gantt is circulating an email to "Republican insiders" that Mike DeWine will announce his candidacy for Ohio Attorney General on Wednesday, July 22nd at 9:45am at the Greene County Courthouse.

That's right, Mike DeWine.

The same Mike DeWine who was thrown out of his U.S. Senate seat by voters in 2006, after running around sporting a Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence (formerly Handgun Control Inc.) endorsement because "his record really wowed the group."

The same Mike DeWine who Human Events Online named among the Top 10 anti-gun U.S. Senators, noting that he was "consistently the only Republican to speak in favor of anti-2nd Amendment legislation on the Senate floor."

The same Mike DeWine who, shortly before his defeat in 2006, took a position in opposition to legislation which barred gun manufacturers, distributors, dealers or importers from frivolous lawsuits designed to put them out of business.

The same Mike DeWine who consistently cast his votes on the side of the most rabid anti-gun Democrats in the Senate. ...

[Arizona] No retrial for Hal Fish:

There will be no new trial for Harold Fish says Coconino County Attorney David W. Rozema.

Rozema said today, July 16, that his office will not conduct a second trial in the Fish case, in the event that the recent decision to vacate Fish’s initial trial conviction is upheld by the Arizona Supreme Court.

Rozema says they are working with Fish’s attorneys to have him released from custody.

The Arizona Court of Appeals had ordered a new trial for the 62-year-old retired schoolteacher who shot and killed a Payson man four years ago at a trailhead north of Strawberry. The state legislature just passed new self-defense rules and made those new rules retroactive so they would apply to any new trial for Fish.

The court said the original trial judge — Mark Moran of Flagstaff — erred in not allowing the victim’s past behavior to be introduced into evidence. The court also ruled that the three dogs the victim, Grant Kuenzli, had with him could have been classified as “dangerous instruments” as defense attorney Melvin McDonald asked.

“There have been two recent, significant developments in the case involving Mr. Fish,” said Rozema. “First, the Court of Appeals reversed the conviction. Second, the legislature passed a bill requiring retroactive application of the new self-defense law.”

“The attorney general’s office has the decision-making authority with respect to the appeals process in this case. It is our understanding that they will be appealing the Court of Appeals decision through the filing of a petition with the Arizona Supreme Court. We will respect whatever decision is ultimately made by the Supreme Court regarding Mr. Fish’s jury trial conviction.” ...

[New Mexico] Gun sales still booming:

The confluence of the recession and the election of Barack Obama have made for boom times in the firearms business. New Mexicans have always had a love affair with weaponry, but fear has driven them to add to their collections. It’s not fear of crime but fear that big government is going to amend their Second Amendment rights by taking their guns away.

Gun buyers are not afraid to spend big bucks for the big bang. Truisms about the gun business – guns don’t wear out and their prices don’t go down. Many are buying guns as collector’s items.

Some gun shops are running sales increases in the 50 percent range since last November’s presidential election of Barack Obama and subsequent appointment of Attorney General Eric Holder.

“We are doing very well, strictly because of Obama and the anti-gun stance of his attorney general, Holder. Our customers are buying now in advance of anti-gun legislation,” says Ron Peterson, who has operated a gun shop in the Duke City since 1963.

His Ron Peterson Firearms LLC is located at 4418 Central Ave. SE and is generally acknowledged as the place to purchase high-end vintage guns. The Duke City metro area has around six gun shops, where everything, from the less expensive handguns to machine guns, is available.

“Our sales are ahead 50 percent as of June 1 and we could not get merchandise because the wholesale distribution has not been set up for this demand. We are still rationing ammo,” adds Peterson. ...

[New Jersey] David Codrea takes on Jersey City police chief's anti-gun nonsense:

Jersey City Police Chief Thomas Comey could not make it more clear. Pump action shotguns are "assault weapons."

"This weapon is manufactured for nothing other than to hunt man."

...
Left unsaid is why he considers weapons "manufactured for nothing other than to hunt man" suitable for police work:

"It's used as part of a tactical equipment for law enforcement agencies in this country."

Translation: We're the "Only Ones" who should have pump-action shotguns. You cannot. ...

[Louisiana] Ten year old uses gun to save himself and his sister from home invaders:

... Deputies say Dean Favron and Roderick Porter knocked several times on the apartment door. The two young children, a ten-year-old boy and eight-year-old girl, stood on the other side, terrified. "He told his sister to be quiet and seconds later, they started kicking on the door and finally kicked the door in," said Sheriff Mike Cazes. The two children ran to their mother's bedroom closet.

In a panic, the ten-year-old grabbed his mother's gun for protection. "He did what I told him to do. I never told him to get the gun, but thank God he did," she said. Once the two suspects opened the door, threatening the kids, deputies say the boy fired a bullet into the lip of Roderick Porter. The two men were taken to the hospital by a third suspect, who is a 15-year-old juvenile. Once they got to the hospital, they were later arrested. "It's just hard. I don't understand why they would do that. I know they have little brothers and sisters and they wouldn't want anyone to break into their house," said the mother. ...

[Illinois] Ninety percent of sheriffs support concealed carry:

BARTONVILLE, Ill. - National Rifle Association firearms instructor Lee Merriman says a lot of people fear the criminal elements around them.

That is keeping Merriman busy these days as he trains people from all walks of life to use a firearm safely.

“I have a lot of older people who live in bad areas of Peoria who are scared,” said Merriman.

“Most people are here because the crime rate is so high.

“I just had a guy and his wife who had never fired a gun in their lives. They live in the country and are on the road a lot. The wife wants to be able to protect her two young daughters. We’re seeing a lot of that. I recently has a contractor, his wife and 13-year-old daughter go through the class; two ministers; a private class for judges, doctors and so forth; and nine nurses together. You wouldn’t believe the people taking gun courses now.”

Merriman said the number of people requesting tutoring in gun usage is increasing. His August class is full. Merriman’s class may get fuller as more and more the push for concealed carry comes to the forefront in Illinois.

In recent weeks the city of Peoria volunteered to be a test city for a concealed carry law. Bartonville promptly followed suit, requesting to be a part of any pilot program agreed to by the state.

The Bartonville City Council and the Bartonville Police Department passed a resolution on July 9 supporting concealed carry in the state of Illinois and delivered it to the Illinois General Assembly. The resolution comes in response to an Illinois Sheriff’s Association survey of all sheriffs in the state which showed that 90 percent support concealed carry of weapons, the resolution said. [emphasis added] ...

Comment: Don't expect any concealed carry bill to pass as long as Chicago's King Daley opposes it. Which probably means don't expect a concealed carry law while Daley remains in office.

Czarist Amerika

Czars, czars everywhere:

California open carry

A fairly balanced article in the San Diego Weekly Reader on the open carry movement in California:

It’s a beautiful day in Pacific Beach as Nate approaches the bronze pelican statue on the boardwalk. He’s slight and blond, spectacled and clad in jeans and an army-green T-shirt. He squints. The sun’s so bright overhead that he is prompted to spray a fine mist of sunblock over his fair skin to stave off a burn.

I’ve never met Nate before, but I know it’s him (a) because I’ve seen his picture and (b) due to the handgun that sits on a holster against his hip. I’m about to get up from where I’m sitting and introduce myself when someone else beats me to the punch. A scraggly-looking beachgoer, a man of indeterminable age because he is so weather-beaten, approaches.

“What’s that for, bro?” he asks, pointing in the direction of Nate’s gun, a Taurus Tracker .44 Magnum revolver.

Before Nate can answer, the man continues.

“There are surfers at the beach looking to party, and you show up with that? That’s not right. Love life! Be mellow!”

This is when I walk up and introduce myself. The beachgoer looks at me for a moment with wild blue eyes, then looks back at Nate, as Nate is beginning to explain what he will have to reiterate time and time again to concerned and/or interested parties: he is open carrying.

The term “open carrying” refers to one who is in possession of a holstered, unloaded firearm on his or her person, displayed in plain view. Nate begins to explain the legalities of this to the beachgoer when Sean approaches, video camera in tow. In shades, a green shirt with double-breast pockets, green cargo pants, and a Sig Sauer P229 holstered on his hip, Sean looks not unlike a police officer.

The beachgoer does a double take.

“Another one!” he exclaims, as Sean greets us warmly.

The beachgoer, incredulous, excuses himself — with one final stare — to go “get baked.”

Soon we are joined by a third open carrier, Sam, who is Nate’s older brother. He’s a tall fellow in jeans and a T-shirt, and his gun, a Glock 17C 9mm semiautomatic pistol, sits squarely in a black holster, handle well visible against the blue of his shirt.

And now it’s my turn. ...

Article here. Kudos to the reporter for actually open carrying herself, to see what the experience is like.

Unfortunately, California open carry, which requires that the gun be unloaded, is an emasculated version of the real thing (open carry with loaded guns). Nevertheless, it's still good to see folks exercising their limited open carry rights.

And now, a word from the Vice-President ...

Another piece of, uh, "wisdom" from our Vice-President and the Obama administration's Idiot-in-Chief (many are called, but few are chosen), as reported by CNS News:

Vice President Joe Biden told people attending an AARP town hall meeting that unless the Democrat-supported health care plan becomes law the nation will go bankrupt and that the only way to avoid that fate is for the government to spend more money.

“And folks look, AARP knows and the people with me here today know, the president knows, and I know, that the status quo is simply not acceptable,” Biden said at the event on Thursday in Alexandria, Va. “It’s totally unacceptable. And it’s completely unsustainable. Even if we wanted to keep it the way we have it now. It can’t do it financially.”

“We’re going to go bankrupt as a nation,” Biden said.

“Now, people when I say that look at me and say, ‘What are you talking about, Joe? You’re telling me we have to go spend money to keep from going bankrupt?’” Biden said. “The answer is yes, that's what I’m telling you.” [emphasis added]

Article here. Listen to audio of the Sage of Delaware's comments here. We have to destroy the economy to save it! We have to spend our way out of debt! Or to avoid bankruptcy!

This is the type of thinking (and I use that word loosely) you get when you elect people who've spent most of their working lives in government, as parasites on the private economy and the American taxpayer's back.

Aerobatics, RC edition

Tonight's remote control aerobatics flight:

GOA: Right-to-carry vote coming up soon

From Gunowners of America:

A vote to protect your right to travel out-of-state with a firearm could come to a vote next week -- even as early as Monday!

Senators John Thune and David Vitter are the sponsors of S. 845 -- a bill that will establish concealed carry reciprocity amongst the several states.

Senators Thune and Vitter offered the bill as an amendment (#1618) to the Department of Defense authorization bill (H.R. 2647).

This provision will use the constitutional authority allowing Congress to enforce "full faith and credit" across the country, so that each state respects the "public acts, records, and judicial proceedings" of every other state (Article IV).

The benefit of the Thune/Vitter legislation is that -- unlike other, competing measures -- it would protect the right of any U.S. citizen to carry out of state (regardless of whether he possesses a permit), as long as he is authorized to carry in his home state. This is important because of states like Vermont and Alaska, where residents can carry concealed without prior approval or permission from the state... in other words, without a permit!

ACTION: Please urge your Senators to vote YES on the Thune/Vitter concealed carry reciprocity amendment that will be offered to the Department of Defense authorization bill and NO on any modifying amendments. This vote could come as early as Monday, so please act on this right away! ...

Read it here, with sample letter available at the link.

NRA will score Sotomayor vote

So reports Jennifer Rubin in Commentary Magazine:

As I noted in the last round of questioning of Sonia Sotomayor yesterday, Republican senators seemed increasingly focused on the Second Amendment. Sotomayor’s evasiveness did not help her cause. Shortly after her questioning ended, the NRA announced it would officially oppose her confirmation. Some question then arose in conservative circles as to whether the vote would be “scored” — that is, count for the score which the NRA uses to rate incumbents on Second Amendment issues. In a close race it can make the difference, particularly in a Red state. I contacted the NRA last night. A spokesman promptly replied by email: “It’s an important vote and it will count.”

What does that mean in practical terms? It may influence a shaky Republican or two who might think twice about “deferring” to the president’s nominee. But the real impact is not with regard to Sotomayor, but in the 2010 senate races. For each Democrat who votes for her, there will be at least a small price — a ding from the NRA. Might it be significant in races in Arkansas (Blanche Lincoln), Colorado (Michael Bennet), North Dakota (Byron Dorgan), and elsewhere? ...

This is a positive step. NRA ratings are an important data point for voters in gun-friendly districts, and politicians hoping to get reelected know this. It probably won't change the final outcome given the large Democrat majority in the Senate, but may at least cause a few of those Dems (and some faux Republicans) to vote against her.

Sotomayor: No constituional right to self-defense?

From the Los Angeles Times:

In a prickly exchange over gun control, Sen. Tom Coburn tried hard to get Sonia Sotomayor to explain what she actually thinks about the right to bear arms. “As a citizen of this country do you believe ... I have a right to personal self-defense?” he asked her.

Sotomayor said she couldn’t think of a Supreme Court case that had addressed the issue in that language. “Is there a constitutional right to self-defense?” she asked. “ I can’t think of one. I could be wrong.”

The Oklahoma Republican said he didn’t want to know if there was a legal precedent that would answer his question -- he wanted to know Sotomayor’s personal opinion.

She paused. “That is sort of an abstract question,” she said. “I don’t --"

“Well that’s what the American people want to hear,” Coburn said. Americans don’t want legalese from “bright legal minds,” he said. “They want to know if they can defend themselves in their homes.” ...

Article here.

National Review's Jim Geraghty weighs in on the Sotomayor credibility gap:

But if you were a Republican senator, and wanted to vote in good faith to confirm Sotomayor, you would have to believe:

· That her “wise Latina” argument was just a bad “rhetorical flourish” that accidently left listeners believing she disagreed with Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, when she actually agreed with her.

· That the misperception of the “wise Latina” argument remained uncorrected through six separate uses of it.

· That Sotomayor genuinely has “no idea” why George Pavia, a senior partner in the law firm that hired her as a corporate litigator, would say, “I can guarantee she’ll be for abortion rights.”

· That she did not read the legal briefs filed by the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund while she was on that organization’s board.

· That she genuinely does not have an opinion on whether citizens have a right to self-defense, and could not think of “a case where the Supreme Court has addressed that particular question,” despite the fact that the Heller case decided last year declared, “The inherent right of self-defense has been central to the Second Amendment right.”

· That she “actually agrees” with Justices Scalia and Thomas that judges have to be “very cautious” about using foreign law, despite a speech earlier this year in which she said, “Suggest[ing] to anyone that you can outlaw the use of foreign or international law is a sentiment that’s based on a fundamental misunderstanding.”

· That she really believes that “we don’t make policy choices in the court,” even though she said in a 2005 appearance at Duke University that the “Court of Appeals is where policy is made.”

· That she genuinely believes that “the process of judging is a process of keeping an open mind,” when she said in a 1999 speech that there is “no objective stance but only a series of perspectives. . . . Aspiration to impartiality is just that, an aspiration.”

· That she thinks the man who nominated her has a fundamentally flawed perspective on the role of judges, and that she will not “approach the issue of judging in the way the president does.”

That’s a lot to swallow. Essentially, the poised and affable judge who appeared before the cameras this week came across as almost completely unobjectionable — almost a photo negative of the judge portrayed in Sotomayor’s past speeches. “We’re left guessing as to what kind of judge she would be,” Sen. John Cornyn (R., Texas) said during a committee break. “We don’t know if we’re going to get Sonia Sotomayor the speech-giver or Sonia Sotomayor the judge. Once she’s on the Supreme Court, she can say anything she wants with no chance of reversal. The lack of clarity is creating some problems.” ...

Actions speak louder than words; don't listen to what a nominee says, look at what they've done. This is especially true for politicians.

Senator minority leader Mitch McConnell says he will oppose Sotomayor nomination.

Finally, David Codrea has a roundup of Gun Rights Examiner articles on the Sotomayor nomination here.

Pennsylvania open-carrier acquitted

From the Keystone State [hat tip to reader Jim P. for the link]:

BEAVER, Pa. - A western Pennsylvania man has been cleared of criminal charges after bringing his handgun to a campaign rally for President Barack Obama.

John Noble, of Industry, wore the 9 mm on a holster and carried a Bible to the August rally to protest Obama's remark that Americans who felt left out by the system clung to guns and religion. The rally was in Beaver, about 30 miles north of Pittsburgh.

Police said the 51-year-old Noble wanted to be disruptive. They say he posted on the Internet that he was taking the gun to "test what would happen."

Friday, a jury acquitted him of a disrupting a public meeting and a judge acquitted him of disorderly conduct, but called his actions foolish.

Noble wasn't charged with gun offenses because he was legally carrying it.

Article here. This is another case where disorderly conduct charges were used to harass someone legally open carrying. And note that it took almost a year, and a criminal trial, to resolve the issue.

Mass murder and the unarmed citizen

From Howard Nemerov, on the slaughter of unarmed populations:

... Here is a partial list of countries that, in the 20th century, carried out government-sponsored mass murder, termed “democide” by Professor Rudy Rummel: People’s Republic of China (76.7 million murdered); Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (61.9 million); and Nazi Germany (21 million). Other countries listed by Professor Rummel include: Indonesia, Vietnam, Pakistan, and Yugoslavia, et al, resulting in another 13 million murdered by their own governments. Other homicidal countries included Imperial Japan (World War II) and Turkey (1.9 million), who murdered mostly ‘others’ in the name of racial purity and territorial conquest. All told, Rummel estimates that 262 million people were slaughtered by homicidal governments during the 20th Century alone. These numbers are beyond comprehension, as Professor Rummel explains:

But, who can digest a total of 1,000,000 or more murdered. It is near impossible to empathize with the human catastrophe such statistics dimly reflect when we have difficulty getting a feel for numbers greater than six or seven. A murderer tortures and kills three people, and that gets into our gut – three loving, feeling, human beings killed in agony. We can imagine this happening to our family or circle of close friends. But mention 10,000, 100,000, or 1,000,000, and that is beyond imagination and feeling; they are only numbers.

Here is a practical and relevant way to put this in perspective: Between 2001 and 2007, American criminals murdered an average of 16,520 victims per year. This means that it would take 15,860 years for criminal murderers to accomplish what was accomplished in decades by a few insane government leaders.
Here’s the last piece in the puzzle: None of these homicidal governments had any constitutional document providing for civilian firearms ownership. In most cases, any laws on the books allowing civilian gun ownership, at the time the dictator took over, were quickly removed. ...

Article here. History shows that mass murder on such a scale is only possible against an unarmed population. Governments are very efficient murderers of their own citizenry.

Free speech, so exalted by clueless intellectuals (and I use that term loosely) is both ineffective and easily silenced by tyrannical governments -- the government simply rounds up the noisiest and murders them. The message is unmistakable, powerful, and effective: talk against the government and you and your families will die. A heavily armed populace willing to fight back is the only true defense against such tyranny.

Emergency landing

Tonight's textbook no wheels landing:

NRA (finally) opposes Sotomayor nomination

From NRA-ILA:

Other than declaring war, neither house of Congress has a more solemn responsibility than the Senate’s role in confirming justices to the U.S. Supreme Court. As the Senate considers the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor, Americans have been watching to see whether this nominee – if confirmed – would respect the Second Amendment or side with those who have declared war on the rights of America’s 80 million gun owners.

From the outset, the National Rifle Association has respected the confirmation process and hoped for mainstream answers to bedrock questions. Unfortunately, Judge Sotomayor’s judicial record and testimony clearly demonstrate a hostile view of the Second Amendment and the fundamental right of self-defense guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution.

It is only by ignoring history that any judge can say that the Second Amendment is not a fundamental right and does not apply to the states. The one part of the Bill of Rights that Congress clearly intended to apply to all Americans in passing the Fourteenth Amendment was the Second Amendment. History and congressional debate are clear on this point.

Yet Judge Sotomayor seems to believe that the Second Amendment is limited only to the residents of federal enclaves such as Washington, D.C. and does not protect all Americans living in every corner of this nation. In her Maloney opinion and during the confirmation hearings, she deliberately misread Supreme Court precedent to support her incorrect view.

In last year’s historic Heller decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment guarantees the individual’s right to own firearms and recognizes the inherent right of self-defense. In addition, the Court required lower courts to apply the Twentieth Century cases it has used to incorporate a majority of the Bill of Rights to the States. Yet in her Maloney opinion, Judge Sotomayor dismissed that requirement, mistakenly relying instead on Nineteenth Century jurisprudence to hold that the Second Amendment does not apply to the States.

This nation was founded on a set of fundamental freedoms. Our Constitution does not give us those freedoms – it guarantees and protects them. The right to defend ourselves and our loved ones is one of those. The individual right to keep and bear arms is another. These truths are what define us as Americans. Yet, Judge Sotomayor takes an opposite view, contrary to the views of our Founding Fathers, the Supreme Court, and the vast majority of the American people.

We believe any individual who does not agree that the Second Amendment guarantees a fundamental right and who does not respect our God-given right of self-defense should not serve on any court, much less the highest court in the land. Therefore, the National Rifle Association of America opposes the confirmation of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the position of Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

At least they finally came out against this anti-gun nominee. Perhaps they were waiting to hear her testimony, although her record amply demonstrates that Judge Sotomayor is hostile to the Second Amendment. And actions speak louder than words.

I suspect the fact that Sandy Froman, past president of the NRA, and a bunch of current and former members of the NRA Board of Directors came out publicly against Judge Sotomayor, may have persuaded the NRA executives to (finally) take a stand against her nomination. We'll have to see whether they apply pressure to the Senators to vote against her, or whether they will consider a vote for confirmation as an anti-gun vote. They should do both: apply pressure to vote against confirmation, and count any vote for confirmation as an anti-gun vote, which it is.

United breaks guitars

Tonight's baggage handling incident video - musician Dave Carroll says United Airlines broke his guitar:



Read the backstory here. His YouTube video now has over three million views.

Private health insurance: It's not an option

From Investors Business Daily:

Congress: It didn't take long to run into an "uh-oh" moment when reading the House's "health care for all Americans" bill. Right there on Page 16 is a provision making individual private medical insurance illegal.

When we first saw the paragraph Tuesday, just after the 1,018-page document was released, we thought we surely must be misreading it. So we sought help from the House Ways and Means Committee.

It turns out we were right: The provision would indeed outlaw individual private coverage. Under the Orwellian header of "Protecting The Choice To Keep Current Coverage," the "Limitation On New Enrollment" section of the bill clearly states:

"Except as provided in this paragraph, the individual health insurance issuer offering such coverage does not enroll any individual in such coverage if the first effective date of coverage is on or after the first day" of the year the legislation becomes law.

So we can all keep our coverage, just as promised — with, of course, exceptions: Those who currently have private individual coverage won't be able to change it. Nor will those who leave a company to work for themselves be free to buy individual plans from private carriers. ...

Read the rest here. I suspect, just as with the "stimulus" and carbon tax bills, no one but the lobbyists, special interests groups, and the commie leadership will know, or be allowed to know, what's in the final bill that gets voted on. A thousand pages of legalese provides great camouflage for lots of malevolent, unconstitutional, and un-American ideas.

Exposing the great Global Warming swindle

From the UK Spectator, interviewing Australian geology Professor Ian Pilmer, whose latest book seeks to debunk the myth of manmade global warming:

Imagine how wonderful the world would be if man-made global warming were just a figment of Al Gore’s imagination. No more ugly wind farms to darken our sunlit uplands. No more whopping electricity bills, artificially inflated by EU-imposed carbon taxes. No longer any need to treat each warm, sunny day as though it were some terrible harbinger of ecological doom. And definitely no need for the $7.4 trillion cap and trade (carbon-trading) bill — the largest tax in American history — which President Obama and his cohorts are so assiduously trying to impose on the US economy.

Imagine no more, for your fairy godmother is here. His name is Ian Plimer, Professor of Mining Geology at Adelaide University, and he has recently published the landmark book Heaven And Earth, which is going to change forever the way we think about climate change.

‘The hypothesis that human activity can create global warming is extraordinary because it is contrary to validated knowledge from solar physics, astronomy, history, archaeology and geology,’ says Plimer, and while his thesis is not new, you’re unlikely to have heard it expressed with quite such vigour, certitude or wide-ranging scientific authority. Where fellow sceptics like Bjorn Lomborg or Lord Lawson of Blaby are prepared cautiously to endorse the International Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) more modest predictions, Plimer will cede no ground whatsoever. Anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory, he argues, is the biggest, most dangerous and ruinously expensive con trick in history.

To find out why, let’s meet the good professor. He’s a tanned, rugged, white-haired sixtysomething — courteous and jolly but combative when he needs to be — glowing with the health of a man who spends half his life on field expeditions to Iran, Turkey and his beloved Outback. And he’s sitting in my garden drinking tea on exactly the kind of day the likes of the Guardian’s George Monbiot would probably like to ban. A lovely warm sunny one.

So go on then, Prof. What makes you sure that you’re right and all those scientists out there saying the opposite are wrong? ‘I’m a geologist. We geologists have always recognised that climate changes over time. Where we differ from a lot of people pushing AGW is in our understanding of scale. They’re only interested in the last 150 years. Our time frame is 4,567 million years. So what they’re doing is the equivalent of trying to extrapolate the plot of Casablanca from one tiny bit of the love scene. And you can’t. It doesn’t work.’

What Heaven And Earth sets out to do is restore a sense of scientific perspective to a debate which has been hijacked by ‘politicians, environmental activists and opportunists’. It points out, for example, that polar ice has been present on earth for less than 20 per cent of geological time; that extinctions of life are normal; that climate changes are cyclical and random; that the CO2 in the atmosphere — to which human activity contributes the tiniest fraction — is only 0.001 per cent of the total CO2 held in the oceans, surface rocks, air, soils and life; that CO2 is not a pollutant but a plant food; that the earth’s warmer periods — such as when the Romans grew grapes and citrus trees as far north as Hadrian’s Wall — were times of wealth and plenty.

All this is scientific fact — which is more than you can say for any of the computer models turning out doomsday scenarios about inexorably rising temperatures, sinking islands and collapsing ice shelves. Plimer doesn’t trust them because they seem to have little if any basis in observed reality.

‘I’m a natural scientist. I’m out there every day, buried up to my neck in sh**, collecting raw data. And that’s why I’m so sceptical of these models, which have nothing to do with science or empiricism but are about torturing the data till it finally confesses. None of them predicted this current period we’re in of global cooling. There is no problem with global warming. It stopped in 1998. The last two years of global cooling have erased nearly 30 years of temperature increase.’

Plimer’s uncompromising position has not made him popular. ‘They say I rape cows, eat babies, that I know nothing about anything. My favourite letter was the one that said: “Dear sir, drop dead”. I’ve also had a demo in Sydney outside one of my book launches, and I’ve had mothers coming up to me with two-year-old children in their arms saying: “Don’t you have any kind of morality? This child’s future is being destroyed.’’’ Plimer’s response to the last one is typically robust. ‘If you’re so concerned, why did you breed?’

This no-nonsense approach may owe something to the young Ian’s straitened Sydney upbringing. His father was crippled with MS, leaving his mother to raise three children on a schoolteacher’s wage. ‘We couldn’t afford a TV — not that TV even arrived in Australia till 1956. We’d use the same brown paper bag over and over again for our school lunches, always turn off the lights, not because of some moral imperative but out of sheer bloody necessity.’

One of the things that so irks him about modern environmentalism is that it is driven by people who are ‘too wealthy’. ‘When I try explaining “global warming” to people in Iran or Turkey they have no idea what I’m talking about. Their life is about getting through to the next day, finding their next meal. Eco-guilt is a first-world luxury. It’s the new religion for urban populations which have lost their faith in Christianity. The IPCC report is their Bible. Al Gore and Lord Stern are their prophets.’ ...

Read the rest here.

Professor Pilmer's book is available here: Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science




Meanwhile, from the Telegraph we learn that Australia's proposed cap-and-tax scheme may be derailed in that country's Senate:

Meanwhile a remarkable drama has been unfolding in Australia, where the new Labor government has belatedly joined the "consensus'' bandwagon by introducing a bill for an emissions-curbing "cap and trade'' scheme, which would devastate Australia's economy, it being 80 per cent dependent on coal. The bill still has to pass the Senate, which is so precisely divided that the decisive vote next month may be cast by an independent Senator, Stephen Fielding. So crucial is his vote that the climate change minister, Penny Wong, agreed to see him with his four advisers, all leading Australian scientists.

Fielding put to the minister three questions. How, since temperatures have been dropping, can CO2 be blamed for them rising? What, if CO2 was the cause of recent warming, was the cause of temperatures rising higher in the past? Why, since the official computer models have been proved wrong, should we rely on them for future projections?

The written answers produced by the minister's own scientific advisers proved so woolly and full of elementary errors that Fielding's team have now published a 50-page, fully-referenced "Due Diligence'' paper tearing them apart. In light of the inadequacy of the Government's reply, the Senator has announced that he will be voting against the bill.

The wider significance of this episode is that it is the first time a Western government has allowed itself to be drawn into debating the science behind the global warming scare with expert scientists representing the "counter consensus" – and the "consensus" lost hands down. ...

Balloon burlesque

Tonight's fun with balloons:

ObamaCare and the truth about Canada

Today's must see video - Pajamas Media's Steven Crowder takes a look at the "free" healthcare in our frozen neighbor to the North:




This is what we have to look forward to if ObamaCare passes. Remember, the rich will always have options that the poor and middle classes do not. If you think healthcare is expensive now, just wait until it's free.

Ammo shortages continue to plague Virginia gun shops

From Old Dominion:

In the world's most heavily armed nation, bullets are in short supply.

Gun shops have empty shelves. Stampedes mark the opening of gun shows. Rising prices are forcing police to bust their budgets. Some have cut back on shooting practice.

The ammo industry says factories are running wide open but simply can't keep up with a demand - particularly for handgun calibers - that spiked with the November elections, and just kept going.

Robert House, owner of Classic Firearms in Virginia Beach, has been selling guns and ammo in Hampton Roads for 30 years. From time to time, popular guns have been hard to keep in stock. But ammunition?

"I've never seen anything like this," House said. "There have been fistfights at gun shows over the last box of ammunition."

Rumors swirl about the shortage.

Yes, it's true that booming metal markets in China and India are consuming boatloads of brass, copper and lead.

No, it's not true that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are cutting into the civilian bullet supply. The Army says most of its small-arms ammo comes from a dedicated factory in Missouri.

Instead, blame politics, and the thoroughness of the Democratic victory in November. Gun owners have long viewed Democrats as enemies of the Second Amendment. With that party now in control of the White House and both branches of Congress: "People think they'd better buy while they can," said Ron Hess, a long time Norfolk gun shop owner. "Gun owners just figure that Democrats make screwed-up gun laws." ...

Article here.

Tennessee municipality bans guns in parks

From the Volunteer State:

Signal Mountain becomes the latest municipality to opt out of the state law allowing guns in parks.

Monday night the Town Council unanimously approved a resolution prohibiting guns in parks.

It essentially extends an existing ban.

It's a hot button issue that brought out opinions on both sides.

Lucas Marshall, Signal Mountain, "Play a couple times a week."

Lucas Marshall and his friend Scott Head would rather not play tennis at this Signal Mountain park if there's a chance someone is carrying a gun.

Marshall, "There's no real reason why you should have a fire arm in the park."Scott Head, "There's plenty of kids around the neighborhood plenty of kids at the park and if one of them got a hold of it it would be bad."

Signal Mountain town leaders unanimously agree.

They passed a resolution making sure guns will not be allowed in public parks and other natural areas. ...

Article here, with video report available at the link.

Of course, only those who scrupulously obey the law will obey this law. Violent criminals, as always, aren't affected by this latest infringement. Hopefully, the Tennessee legislature will address this nonsense in the next session, voiding any existing bans and preempting future bans.

New Jersey "one gun a month" law would end handgun sales

From Ammoland.com, on the latest from the anti-gun Peoples Republic of New Jersey:

Handgun sales and purchases by New Jersey Retail Dealers are going to virtually end after November 2009. This is because the New Jersey legislature hurriedly passed the so-called “One Gun a Month” bill (A339), which was known to be seriously flawed. The defective bill is absurd, as it address a non-existent problem. No self-respecting gun trafficker would obtain their handguns by first applying for New Jersey Handguns Permits, paying over $50 in fees, and insuring that any handgun he sells on the street was papered to him! Notwithstanding just how idiotic the law is, it awaits the Governor Corzine’s signature and there is no reason to believe he will veto it.
...
The law contains language exempting “transfers of handguns between licensed retail dealers.” The term “retail dealer” is defined by current law in 2C:39-1L, and essentially refers to persons engaged in the sale or repair of firearms for profit to ultimate consumers. The definition explicitly excludes “wholesale dealers,” which are defined elsewhere in 2C:39-1S (which essentially refers to persons who sell firearms to those who are not the ultimate consumers).

Because the law only exempts transfers between licensed retail dealers, the one gun per 30 days restriction still applies to transfers from all others, including wholesale dealers, manufacturers, distributors and individual sellers. Most firearms sold by Retail Dealers are obtained from wholesale dealers, distributors and manufacturers. Many Retail Dealers also buy used firearms from individuals and resell them. It is rare for a retail dealer to buy from other Retail Dealers, which is the only exempted class of transfer.

As a result, retail dealers would be cut off from their primary suppliers (wholesalers, manufacturers, distributors and individuals) and can only purchase one handgun every 30 days from these suppliers. New Jersey’s several hundred licensed retail dealers are destroyed by this law. ...

Article here. Naturally, there's a "law enforcement" exception.

Arizona Governor signs pro-gun bills

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer has signed into law the restaurant carry bill, a law providing for retroactive application of a pro-self defense law, and several other pro-gun bills:

On restaurant carry:

... Brewer signed into law a proposal that will allow the state's 125,000 carriers of concealed-weapons permits to bring their firearms into bars and restaurants. The measure allows bar owners to remain gun-free by posting signs prohibiting weapons. Permit-holders would be prohibited from drinking in a bar while carrying their firearms.

For gun-rights advocates, the law means greater freedom for gun owners.

For opponents, it blends a dangerous cocktail of alcohol and guns.

"Any time law-abiding gun owners can carry firearms into more places, the safer the public is," said Todd Rathner, a lobbyist for the National Rifle Association.

Rathner noted that carriers of an Arizona concealed-weapons permit must undergo a criminal-background check, be fingerprinted and take an eight-hour training course. He called such permit holders "the most law-abiding citizens we have," and he noted that 39 states have a similar law in place relating to concealed weapons in bars and restaurants.

State Sen. Ken Cheuvront countered that the new Arizona law has more potential for danger because the state's permit system is among the more lenient nationally.

"All I know is that guns and liquor do not mix," said Cheuvront, a Democrat and the owner of a wine bar in central Phoenix. "They're putting other patrons and my staff at risk by having a gun in my establishment."

Brewer's approval of a second proposal will prohibit property and business owners from banning guns from parking areas, so long as the weapons are kept locked in privately owned vehicles.

The law exempts parking lots that are fenced or guarded, as well as those that provide secure gun storage.

Brewer spokesman Paul Senseman said both gun laws "struck a good balance" between the rights of gun owners and private-property owners. He called the governor's action "consistent with her long track record of defense of Second Amendment rights."

Lastly, Brewer OK'd a proposal that allows any individual who feels threatened to indicate that they're carrying a weapon without violating intimidation statutes. The law only applies for instances of self-defense.

On retroactive application of the self-defense law:

Senate Bill 1449 directly impacts the case of Harold Fish, who was convicted of second-degree murder in the 2004 shooting of a hiker near Payson. Fish claimed the shooting was self-defense. During Fish's 2006 trial, the state changed its self-defense law to shift the burden of proof from the defendant (the person claiming to fire in self-defense) to the prosecution.

The new law allows the modified self-defense law to be applied retroactively to Fish's case, as well as to any others filed after April 24, 2006, as long as the defendant did not plead guilty or no contest.

A state appellate court recently ruled in favor of Mr. Fish on his appeal, and sent the case back to the lower court for possible retrial. Should the state retry his case, this law would shift the burden of proof to the state.

What a refreshing change Gov. Brewer is, after all those years of anti-gun Gov. Janet Napolitano. Of course, Napolitano is now head of the Department of Homeland Security, so it's a mixed blessing.

The war against producers

From Victor Davis Hanson, writing at Pajamas Media:

... We are beginning to sense the debate is not about “stimulus” (politicians did not even read the various bills that they rammed through and care little about the fiscal impact from them). Rather, we are witnessing an inversion of Reagan’s sort of playing chicken, once called “starve the beast” (which I thought was a wrong notion), a philosophy of cutting taxes to cut revenue to starve the federal government’s excessive spending in the face of spiraling deficits.

Under Obama’s “gorge the beast” version, America will simply write so many bounced checks, run up such an enormous $10 trillion debt, that taxes will have to rise on “them”– and wasn’t this really the point of it all anyway: to “spread the wealth around” and “never let a crisis go to waste”? Since new programs never shrink, but, like Johnson grass, grow with impunity, and since Democrats, even more so than wasteful Republicans, don’t worry about deficits, taxes must escalate to avoid catastrophe.

The Bad Guys

Ponder a simple fact: The Obama administration is dispersing income lavishly to those who do not pay taxes and it will have to be paid for by those who do. For all the talk of that awful percentile who make over $200,000, this administration has not distinguished the hyper-rich 1% that make untold money (e.g., the Buffets, Soroses, Turners, Gateses, Kerrys, Gores, etc), from the much more demonized, larger 5% of the population whose income does not come from investments and insider influence and deal-making, but rather from providing more tangible goods and services — the family doctor, the plumbing contractor, the small lumber company owner, the car dealer, the local family-held insurance company, the airline pilot, the car-leasing firm, the patent attorney, etc.

“Their Fair Share”

Last fall we heard that this percentile was unpatriotic, did not wish to spread the wealth around, and had made off like bandits under Bush. But the fact is, to quote Mayor Gavin Newsome’s “like it or not,” they are precisely those who decide most dynamically whether to hire, fire, expand, contract, buy/sell goods, etc.

And the results of the Obama war against them are threefold: 1) in major key states, the productive minority’s state income taxes will near or exceed 10%; their federal rates will go to 40%; the abolition of caps on FICA will ensure 15% plus of most of their income will go for new Medicare and Social Security bites; and they may well be eligible for a newly proposed punitive health-care surcharge tax of 4-6%.

Add It Up

If one were to add all that up (forget rises in sales taxes, inheritance taxes, luxury taxes, etc.), then one can get to 70% of one’s income. So right this minute, the electrical contractor is thinking:

“I made $412,000 last year due to Saturday jobs, overtime, risky bidding, gambles on new equipment, and new lines of credit, but under Obama I will pay maybe $50-80,000 more of my income to the government. In other words the cost of, say, hiring two more entry-level electricians, or the cost of outfitting an entire new van with boom and equipment, or what I cleared every Saturday last year — all that will go to the government.”

Ripples of Doubt

And that means rippling throughout this key sector of the economy — even before these taxes have been enacted — are hesitation, stasis, and ultimately constriction — at first for psychological reasons, soon confirmed by the actual facts of less money. In short, very bright people will be thinking how to hide income, how to barter, how to slow down and not produce goods and services, rather than blast full speed ahead and enrich angry others. ...

Read it all here.

Musical Interlude

Tonight's musical interlude - a capella singing group The Voca People:

Global Warming chills Big Apple

From Watts Up With That, comes this trivia from the NYC National Weather Service office:

PUBLIC INFORMATION STATEMENT
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE NEW YORK NY
455 PM EDT WED JUL 1 2009

...UNUSUALLY WET AND COOL JUNE FOR CENTRAL PARK...

FOR SOME PERSPECTIVE...HERE ARE THE TOP TEN COOLEST AND WETTEST
JUNES ON RECORD SINCE 1869 FOR CENTRAL PARK NY:

COOLEST WETTEST
AVG. TEMP. YEAR INCHES PRECIP. YEAR
64.2 1903 10.27 2003
65.2 1881 10.06 2009
65.7 1916 9.78 1903
66.8 1926/1902 9.30 1972
67.2 1958 8.79 1989
67.3 1927 8.55 2006
67.4 1928 7.76 1887
67.5 2009/1897 7.58 1975
67.7 1878 7.13 1938
67.8 1924 7.05 1871

DUE TO THE UNUSUALLY COOL AND WET CONDITIONS IN JUNE...HERE ARE SOME INTERESTING FACTS TO NOTE:

THIS JUNE IS TIED FOR THE 8TH COOLEST ON RECORD. THE AVERAGE TEMPERATURE WAS 67.5...3.7 DEGREES BELOW NORMAL...WHICH ALSO OCCURRED IN 1897.

THIS WAS THE COOLEST JUNE SINCE 1958...WHEN THE AVERAGE TEMPERATURE WAS 67.2 DEGREES.

BELOW AVERAGE TEMPERATURES OCCURRED ON 23 OUT OF 30 DAYS THIS JUNE...OR 75 PERCENT OF THE MONTH. [emphasis added]

CENTRAL PARK HAS NOT HIT 90 DEGREES IN THE MONTH OF JUNE THIS YEAR. THE LAST TIME THIS OCCURRED WAS BACK IN 1996.

CENTRAL PARK HAS NOT HIT 85 DEGREES IN THE MONTH OF JUNE THIS YEAR.THE LAST TIME THIS OCCURRED WAS BACK IN 1916. THIS HAS ONLY OCCURRED 2 OTHER TIMES...1903 AND 1886.

THE LAST TIME THAT CENTRAL PARK HIT 90 OR GREATER THIS YEAR WAS IN APRIL. THE LAST TIME THAT CENTRAL PARK HIT 90 IN APRIL...BUT NOT IN JUNE WAS BACK IN 1990.

THE LAST TIME THAT CENTRAL PARK HIT 85 OR GREATER THIS YEAR WAS IN MAY. THE LAST TIME THAT CENTRAL PARK HIT 85 IN MAY...BUT NOT IN JUNE WAS BACK IN 1903. THE LAST TIME THAT CENTRAL PARK HIT 85 IN APRIL...BUT NOT IN JUNE WAS ALSO BACK IN 1903.

THE LOWEST TEMPERATURE REACHED IN CENTRAL PARK IN THE MONTH OF JUNE WAS 50 DEGREES. THE LAST TIME THIS OCCURRED WAS BACK IN 2003.

THE LOW TEMPERATURE DIPPED BELOW 60 DEGREES 11 TIMES IN THE MONTH OF JUNE. THE LAST TIME THIS OCCURRED WAS IN 2003 WHEN IT OCCURRED 17 TIMES.

IT WAS THE SECOND WETTEST JUNE ON RECORD WITH 10.06 INCHES OF RAIN. THE WETTEST JUNE ON RECORD IS 2003 WITH 10.27 INCHES.

THERE WERE 19 DAYS THIS JUNE WHERE THERE WAS AT LEAST 0.01 INCHES OF RAINFALL. THIS HAS NEVER OCCURRED IN CENTRAL PARK.

AT LEAST A TRACE OF RAINFALL WAS REPORTED ON 23 OUT OF 30 DAYS THIS JUNE.

So NYC failed to hit 85 degrees F in June for the first time since 1916. Perhaps Al Gore was in town speaking on the evils of Global Warming last month. :)

Sperm

Tonight's reproductive lesson, courtesy of comedian Dave Allen:

Mexico: Economics and the arms trade

From Strator, via Right Side News, comes this well-written piece on the Mexican arms trade, and the mechanisms by which arms get into the hands of non-governmental actors such as drug cartels. An excerpt:

... Before we get down into the weeds of Mexico's arms trade, let's do something a little different and first take a brief look at how arms trafficking works on a regional and global scale. Doing so will help illustrate how arms trafficking in Mexico fits into these broader patterns.

When analysts examine arms sales they look at three general categories: the white arms market, the gray arms market and the black arms market. The white arms market is the legal, aboveboard transfer of weapons in accordance with the national laws of the parties involved and international treaties or restrictions. The parties in a white arms deal will file the proper paperwork, including end-user certificates, noting what is being sold, who is selling it and to whom it is being sold. There is an understanding that the receiving party does not intend to transfer the weapons to a third party. So, for example, if the Mexican army wants to buy assault rifles from German arms maker Heckler & Koch, it places the order with the company and fills out all the required paperwork, including forms for obtaining permission for the sale from the German government.

Now, the white arms market can be deceived and manipulated, and when this happens, we get the gray market - literally, white arms that are shifted into the hands of someone other than the purported recipient. One of the classic ways to do this is to either falsify an end-user certificate, or bribe an official in a third country to sign an end-user certificate but then allow a shipment of arms to pass through a country en route to a third location. This type of transaction is frequently used in cases where there are international arms embargoes against a particular country (like Liberia) or where it is illegal to sell arms to a militant group (such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known by its Spanish acronym, FARC). One example of this would be Ukrainian small arms that, on paper, were supposed to go to Cote d'Ivoire but were really transferred in violation of U.N. arms embargoes to Liberia and Sierra Leone. Another example of this would be the government of Peru purchasing thousands of surplus East German assault rifles from Jordan on the white arms market, ostensibly for the Peruvian military, only to have those rifles slip into the gray arms world and be dropped at airstrips in the jungles of Colombia for use by the FARC.

At the far end of the spectrum is the black arms market where the guns are contraband from the get-go and all the business is conducted under the table. There are no end-user certificates and the weapons are smuggled covertly. Examples of this would be the smuggling of arms from the former Soviet Union (FSU) and Afghanistan into Europe through places like Kosovo and Slovenia, or the smuggling of arms into South America from Asia, the FSU and Middle East by Hezbollah and criminal gangs in the Tri-Border Region.

Nation-states will often use the gray and black arms markets in order to deniably support allies, undermine opponents or otherwise pursue their national interests. This was clearly revealed in the Iran-Contra scandal of the mid-1980s, but Iran-Contra only scratched the surface of the arms smuggling that occurred during the Cold War. Untold tons of military ordnance were delivered by the United States, the Soviet Union and Cuba to their respective allies in Latin America during the Cold War.

This quantity of materiel shipped into Latin America during the Cold War brings up another very important point pertaining to weapons. Unlike drugs, which are consumable goods, firearms are durable goods. This means that they can be useful for decades and are frequently shipped from conflict zone to conflict zone. East German MPiKMS and MPiKM assault rifles are still floating around the world's arms markets years after the German Democratic Republic ceased to exist. In fact, visiting an arms bazaar in a place like Yemen is like visiting an arms museum. One can encounter century-old, still-functional Lee-Enfield and Springfield rifles in a rack next to a modern U.S. M4 rifle or German HK93, and those next to brand-new Chinese Type 56 and 81 assault rifles.

There is often a correlation between arms and drug smuggling. In many instances, the same routes used to smuggle drugs are also used to smuggle arms. In some instances, like the smuggling routes from Central Asia to Europe, the flow of guns and drugs goes in the same direction, and they are both sold in Western Europe for cash. In the case of Latin American cocaine, the drugs tend to flow in one direction (toward the United States and Europe) while guns from U.S. and Russian organized-crime groups flow in the other direction, and often these guns are used as whole or partial payment for the drugs.

Illegal drugs are not the only thing traded for guns. During the Cold War, a robust arms-for-sugar trade transpired between the Cubans and Vietnamese. As a result, Marxist groups all over Latin America were furnished with U.S. materiel either captured or left behind when the Americans withdrew from Vietnam. LAW rockets traced to U.S. military stocks sent to Vietnam were used in several attacks by Latin American Marxist groups. These Vietnam War-vintage weapons still crop up with some frequency in Mexico, Colombia and other parts of the region. Cold War-era weapons furnished to the likes of the Contras, Sandinistas, Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front and Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity movement in the 1980s are also frequently encountered in the region.

After the civil wars ended in places like El Salvador and Guatemala, the governments and the international community attempted to institute arms buy-back programs, but those programs were not very successful and most of the guns turned in were very old - the better arms were cached by groups or kept by individuals. Some of these guns have dribbled back into the black arms market, and Central and South America are still awash in Cold War weapons.

But Cold War shipments are not the only reason that Latin America is flooded with guns. In addition to the indigenous arms industries in countries like Brazil and Argentina, Venezuela has purchased hundreds of thousands of AK assault rifles in recent years to replace its aging FN-FAL rifles and has even purchased the equipment to open a factory to produce AK-103 rifles under license inside Venezuela. The Colombian government has accused the Venezuelans of arming the FARC, and evidence obtained by the Colombians during raids on FARC camps and provided to the public appears to support those assertions. ...

Read the article here.

Deadline

Tonight's stop-motion video - Deadline - Bang-yao Liu’s senior project at the Savannah College of Art and Design. From the video's description:

This is my senior project at Savannah College of Art and Design. Where my idea comes from is that every time when I am busy, I feel that I am not fighting with my works, I am fighting with those post-it notes and deadline. I manipulating the post-it notes to do pixel-like stop motion and there are some interactions between real actor and post-its.

Man, that must have taken some effort. And a lot of post-its. :)

Concealed carry permit applications double in Louisiana

From the Pelican State:

BATON ROUGE, LA (WAFB) - Louisiana State Police report the rate of applications for concealed weapons permits has doubled this year. Last year, 4,130 first-time permits were issued, but halfway through this year the number of new permits has already exceeded that. When you add in renewals, it almost doubles.

As American citizens, it is our Second Amendment right to bear arms. Judging by the number of permits issued this year more people in Louisiana are legally carrying concealed weapons. State police keep track of who's buying the permits. "We're not going to randomly issue concealed handgun permits to the general public," said Sgt. Markus Smith with Louisiana State Police. "We do have a very rigorous background check that's done, so we're making sure the criminals are definitely not getting these permits and only good law-abiding citizens." ...

Article here.

Heller and the Triumph of Originalist Judicial Engagement

Alan Gura, lead plaintiffs' attorney in last year's historic Heller Supreme Court decision, has written a law review article responding to Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson's criticism of Heller as an example of judicial activism.

From the abstract:

Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson criticizes the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in District of Columbia v. Heller through the lens of post-Roe judicial conservatism, a doctrine that exalts judicial deference to the political branches above the interest in individual liberty. But that vision is incompatible with the sort of judiciary the Framers established, and Wilkinson’s prescription does not lay out neutral guidelines for use of the judicial power. In Heller, the Supreme Court acted exactly according to Constitutional design, enforcing a fundamental right against recalcitrant political forces. Not just conservatives, but all Americans, should rejoice in the decision.

Read the law review article here.

Key questions for Sotomayor

From the Heritage Foundation, a list of ten questions for Judge Sotomayor as the Senate confirmation process gets underway:

Question #6: Second Amendment Rights

In Maloney v. Cuomo, you joined a three-judge panel concluding that the Second Amendment right to bear arms does not apply to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment. You also argued that the right to bear arms is not a "fundamental right."

In your incredibly short opinion, your panel cites Presser v. Illinois as the basis for its claim that "it is settled law ... that the Second Amendment applies only to limitations the federal government seeks to impose on [the right to bear arms]." Your panel neglects to mention, however, that Presser was decided before the courts began incorporating the Bill of Rights through the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which the Supreme Court in District of Columbia v. Heller describes as "the sort of Fourteenth Amendment inquiry required by our later cases."[14]

More disturbingly, your panel summarily stated in a scant 11-word conclusion that statutes restricting possession of weapons do not implicate a fundamental right--something that no court has done since the Supreme Court affirmed an individual Second Amendment right in Heller.

Why did you fail to even consider the sort of inquiry that the Supreme Court said is required by the Fourteenth Amendment in your decision stripping Second Amendment protection from citizens in the Second Circuit? Do you believe that statutes restricting possession of weapons do not even implicate fundamental rights? How does that view comport with the text of the Second Amendment?

Read the others here.

Michigan AG on gun rights

From an op-ed by Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox, on his signing of the amicus brief in support of Second Amendment incorporation:

The Free Press editorialized Wednesday -- "Your taxes at work for the NRA (and Cox)" -- against my filing of a legal brief with the U.S. Supreme Court that supports the National Rifle Association's challenge of a Chicago ordinance banning the possession of most handguns.

My support for this challenge to the Chicago gun ban is rooted in Michigan's own Constitution, which states: "Every person has a right to keep and bear arms for the defense of himself and the state."

My defense of this constitutional principle is longstanding. In 2007, I filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in opposition to the District of Columbia's drastic ban on guns, arguing that the Second Amendment's right "to keep and bear arms" is an individual right. The Supreme Court agreed with that position and overturned the D.C. ban in its Heller decision.

The Free Press failed to mention that 34 attorneys general signed on to the NRA's challenge of Chicago's strict gun ban, including both Democrats and Republicans. This isn't about politics; it's about standing up for principle. ...

Op-ed here.

The Fourth Turning

From David Galland of Casey Research, via John Mauldin's Outside the Box, comes this summary of an interesting interview with historian Neil Howe and his take on where we're headed:

... Howe and Strauss have written many books on how generations determine the course of history and how they will shape America's future. Their forecasts on a wide variety of indicators have turned out to be amazingly accurate. They were among the first to predict (back in the late 1980s) the rise of Boomer-driven culture wars and the simultaneous rise of Gen-X-driven free agency and distrust of government. And they were completely alone back then in predicting, for the post-X "Millennial Generation" (a label they coined), a decline in youth crime and risk taking and an increase in youth civic engagement that would first become apparent around the year 2000. Guess what? For the last ten years, everyone has been noticing exactly these trends among teens and 20somethings.

Howe and Strauss also made extensive predictions, based on generational aging, on how America's entire social mood would likely change, in dramatic fashion, during our current 2000-2010 decade. To quote Doug's prescient 1997 article, which was reprinted in Outside the Box late last year...

"... an excellent case can be made the U.S. is approaching another time of secular crisis, a Fourth Turning, with an expected due date of 2005 – seven years from now – plus or minus a few years in either direction.

The Stamp Acts catalyzed the American Revolution, the election of Lincoln catalyzed the Civil War, the Crash of '29 catalyzed the Depression/WW II era. What might precipitate the elements now floating in solution? The answer is practically any random event that's sufficiently traumatic. Any of the theses of current disaster/action novels and movies will do nicely. Perhaps the accidental or intentional release of a super plague vector. The crashing of an airliner into the Capitol during a joint session. An all-out assault on the IRS computers by an armed group – or perhaps the computers just melting down due to the Year 2000 Problem. Perhaps a financial disaster that cascades into the Greater Depression. In any of these, or a hundred other scenarios, the federal government would almost certainly act precipitously and with a heavy hand, which would bring on a whole other set of consequences.

There's no way of telling where the Crisis will lead, or how it will end. That's going to depend not only on exactly who's in control, but what they do, who they're up against, and a hundred other variables we can't even anticipate.

One thing that seems certain is that real crisis brings out strong leadership. Because of its age and size, it will come from the Boomer generation, and it will be in the mold of Roosevelt or Lincoln – both very dangerous precedents. The boomers in elderhood will be dogmatic, harsh, puritanical, and quite willing to burn down the barn in order to destroy whatever rats they see. Admix that attitude to a time resembling the Revolution, the Civil War, or WW II, overlain with today's ethnic strife, urbanization, financial overextension, and powerful, compact new weaponry in the hands of foreign fanatics out to teach the Great Satan a lesson and it's a real witch's brew.

As eye-opening as Doug's predictions were, they brought us only to the onset of the current crisis. Consequently, we thought it both timely and important to check back with the source of much of the research he relied on. And so it was that I spent several hours talking with Neil Howe, co-author of the seminal work on generational cycles, The Fourth Turning, and, just recently, the subject of the DVD "The Winter of History." Howe is not just an historian, but also a Washington DC-based economist and demographer. While our conversation covered a great many topics, the overriding focus was on how things are likely to unfold from here.

Many bullish readers won't be thrilled to hear Howe's latest findings about the future, but given his predictive track record, dismissing them out of hand could be a costly mistake.

The summary outlook, according to Howe, is that we are in the very early stages of a 20-year period of economic and institutional upheaval – an era denominated by a crisis during which we'll likely witness the tearing down and reconstruction of many aspects of society as we know it. [emphasis added]

As individuals, understanding Howe's views and taking some reasonable precautions makes a lot of sense. As investors, those views also have the potential to make us a lot of money.

Following is my high-level recap of my long conversation with Neil Howe, along with some general thoughts on the investment implications of a 20-year bear market.

Remember the Sixties?

If you're old enough -- or possess even a rudimentary sense of history -- think back to the 1950s, with roller-skating waitresses, crew cuts, and nuclear families of the sort represented by the iconic Leave it to Beaver. Fathers worked, while many mothers stayed home. Life had a certain predictable quality and, as far as anyone knew, would continue along the same lines for time immemorial.

But then something happened... the 1960s. Literally no one saw it coming. It was as if someone had flipped a switch that electrified America and, quickly, the world. Most everything changed, and a society accustomed to conformity was blown away with a fierce individualism expressed with long hair, sex, drugs, and rock and roll, topped off with civil disobedience and bloody riots in the streets.

What happened?

According to Neil Howe, in the mid-1960s, generational change pushed society around a dramatic corner as idealistic, individualistic young Baby Boomers (born 1943 to 1960) rebelled against the midlife leadership of their G.I. Generation parents (born 1901 to 1924).

These periods of transitions are part of a larger cyclical pattern made up of four distinct eras, or "Turnings," each lasting approximately 20 years. It can be helpful to think of the four turnings as you might think of the four seasons, repeating predictably in their own natural rhythm. A full cycle of turnings takes place over a period of about 80 to 90 years -- roughly the span of a long human life. A new turning begins as a new youth generation comes of age, bringing a new social ethic that compensates for the excesses of the midlife generation then in power.

While we don't have the space here to go into the full details of Howe's research, it's important to the topic at hand that we quickly recap the Four Turnings.

The First Turning is referred to by Howe as a High. As this follows a period of crisis, one of the hallmarks of a First Turning is a heightened sense of community and collective optimism, driven in part by the fact that the society has just come through a difficult and challenging time. Consequently, during First Turnings, societal institutions tend to be strong while individualism is weak. The post-World War II "High" of the mid-1940s through early '60s is the most recent example of a First Turning.

The Second Turning, called an Awakening, typically starts out feeling like the high tide of a High, with signs of progress and prosperity everywhere. But just as everything seems to be going along swimmingly, large swaths of society begin to chaff under the social conformity of the High, beginning to gravitate to more individualistic pursuits and demanding that their personal interests come first. You may recognize the "Consciousness Revolution" of the mid-1960s through early 1980s, correctly, as the Second Turning.

Next up, the Third Turning, which Howe calls an Unraveling, is much the opposite of a High. To wit, individualism dominates, while institutions are increasingly weak and discredited. Quoting Howe on the Unraveling...

"This is a time when social authority feels inconsequential, the culture feels exhausted, and people feel bewildered by the number of options available to them. It is a time of celebrity circuses and a tremendous amount of freedom and creativity in our personal lives, but very little sense of public purpose.

The most recent Third Turning began in the mid-'80s with Morning in America, and continued through the '90s. Previous periods of Unraveling in American history were also decades of cynicism and bad manners. Think of the 1920s, the 1850s, the 1760s. And history teaches us that the Third Turnings inevitably end in Fourth Turnings.

Finally, there is the Fourth Turning, called a Crisis. The recent Third Turning appears to be winding down, and we are currently on the cusp of a Fourth Turning. This is a time of great turmoil, when society's basic institutions are torn down and rebuilt, and seemingly insurmountable problems are addressed. During Fourth Turnings, America engages in a struggle for its very survival and redefines its identity as a nation. Large wars are often a part of this process. The American Revolution, Civil War, Great Depression, and World War II were all features of past Fourth Turnings. [emphasis added]

In sum, Howe's research has shown that, with remarkable predictability, history is not a straight line extending toward a better and brighter (or increasingly awful) future, but rather a repeating cycle of the four distinct social eras. These four turnings have recurred with remarkable consistency throughout Anglo-American history, as Neil Howe outlines at length in Generations and The Fourth Turning. It is therefore no accident that America has experienced great cataclysms or "Crises" about every 80 years. Travel back eighty years from Pearl Harbor Day, and you land in the middle of the Civil War. Eighty years before that takes you to the Revolutionary War. If the rhythms of history hold, America is now poised to enter another Fourth Turning. ...

Read the rest here for an interesting perspective on the future. During the interview, Mr. Howe was asked where, on a scale of 1 to 10 (ten being as bad as the crisis will get), where he thought we were on that scale today. His answer: we're at 2 or 3.

Mr. Howe's book, The Fourth Turning, co-authored with William Strauss and published in 1997, is available on Amazon here: The Fourth Turning



His earlier work from 1992, Generations, is available here: Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069

Drink Milk

Tonight's dietary advice - a collection of ads for the Drink Milk campaign:

Britain most violent country in Europe

So much for the image of peaceful, formerly Great Britain:

Britain's violent crime record is worse than any other country in the European union, it has been revealed.

Official crime figures show the UK also has a worse rate for all types of violence than the U.S. and even South Africa - widely considered one of the world's most dangerous countries.
...
In the decade following the party's election in 1997, the number of recorded violent attacks soared by 77 per cent to 1.158million - or more than two every minute.

The figures, compiled from reports released by the European Commission and United Nations, also show:

* The UK has the second highest overall crime rate in the EU.

* It has a higher homicide rate than most of our western European neighbours, including France, Germany, Italy and Spain.

* The UK has the fifth highest robbery rate in the EU.

* It has the fourth highest burglary rate and the highest absolute number of burglaries in the EU, with double the number of offences than recorded in Germany and France.

But it is the naming of Britain as the most violent country in the EU that is most shocking. The analysis is based on the number of crimes per 100,000 residents.

In the UK, there are 2,034 offences per 100,000 people, way ahead of second-placed Austria with a rate of 1,677.

(Credit: UK Daily Mail)

The U.S. has a violence rate of 466 crimes per 100,000 residents, Canada 935, Australia 92 and South Africa 1,609. ...

Article here. It's a good thing they banned guns in 1997, huh? There's nothing like a gun ban to increase violent crime because, hey, gun bans don't apply to violent criminals.

And you can bet the BritGov has been trying to fudge the crime numbers as best they can by underreporting (not taking or discouraging crime victim reports) and misclassifying or reclassifying crimes and their severities, etc. Do a search and you'll find reported examples of this type of manipulation. And still the Brits' crime rate is the highest in Europe.

Guess what the bans on guns and knives have achieved? Answer: Crimes committed with guns and knives have skyrocketed. Of course, this will come as no news to residents of such urban utopias hellholes as Washington, D.C., or Chicago, where the same failed policies have resulted in the same failed results. Both D.C. and Chicago are perennial favorites for murder capital of the United States.

Port life

Tonight's stop-motion video, a day in the life of a port:

Assault Swatter

Sometimes, having the right weapon makes all the difference. :)

Lies, damned lies, and the media

With apologies to Mark Twain for the title. From Investor's Business Daily, on the 90% lie:

Big lies die slowly.

After a claim by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives that 90% of Mexican drug dealers' military weapons (machine guns, hand grenades and missiles) come from American gun stores was exposed as a lie several months ago, it's back — this time with the imprimatur of the Government Accountability Office.

A June 21 CBS "60 Minutes" report by Anderson Cooper was clearly coordinated to coincide with release of the GAO report and a similar one by "activist" Josh Sugarmann.

You are likely to soon hear and read that the GAO report commissioned by Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., confirms what Mexico's attorney general, Eduardo Medina-Mora, told Cooper: "Two thousand two hundred grenades, missile and rocket launchers!"

Cue Cooper as a video of machine guns, hand grenades and other weaponry fill the screen: "It turns out 90% of them are purchased in the U.S."

That's not all. You will hear from Sugarmann that Mexican drug dealers are buying FN Herstal Five-seven pistols from licensed U.S. gun merchants because those pistols fire bullets that penetrate protective body armor.

What you are unlikely to hear and read is that all such military weapons are illegal in the U.S., that Mexican criminals are supplied through an international black market and that this black market prominently features weapons the U.S. sold to the Mexican military and that are resold to drug cartels by corrupt Mexican officials.

Neither are you likely to hear or read that the vest-penetrating ammunition made for the FN Herstal Five-seven is available only to military and special police units.

The facts don't matter. Reinstatement of the federal "assault weapon" ban that lapsed in 2004 matters, and is nothing short of a fetish among powerful supporters who will tell almost any untruth to achieve it. ...

Article here. The problem for politicians and new gun bans is that when you play with fire, you might get burned (see, e.g., the 1994 mid-term elections).

Light show

Tonight's proof that college students have too much time on their hands - students at a university in Poland put on a college dorm light show, turning their dorm room lights on and off synchronized to the theme from Knight Rider:

D Cups

Sometimes, you catch the light just right, and ...

:)

U.S. number one in arms imports

From the warm-and-fuzzy file, via an article in the Arizona Daily Star:

GENEVA — American demand for handguns has fueled a 28 percent jump this decade in world exports of pistols, rifles, shotguns and other small arms, a global report said Thursday.

The 2009 Small Arms Survey reported that the Untied States alone was responsible for about half of the worldwide increase in legal international gun sales between 2000 and 2006. The U.S. now accounts for over half of the world’s imports of pistols and revolvers and 45 percent of shotguns, it said.

“No other country imports more than 4 percent of the global total,” the 344-page report found.

It illustrated how U.S. purchases of hand guns — which averaged $173 million annually — have driven a sharp rise in exports from a number of countries.

Austria remained the world’s largest seller of pistols and revolvers with a 25 percent jump since 2000. Seventy-five percent of its exports go to the United States. Croatian exports soared almost 24 times in value since the start of the decade. The U.S. accounted for 98 percent of its 2006 sales of $27 million.

Gunmakers in Brazil and Italy also have been helped by booming American demand for small arms. ...

Article here. I'll bet the Austrian imports were mostly Glocks.

More anti-gun regulations proposed in Massachusetts

The anti-gunners in the Bay State are at it again, this time looking to effectively shut down shooting club sponsored firearms training and education related events open to the public via new regulations:

If you know you can’t win by passing more draconian laws through the State Legislature, why not regulate firearms ownership out of existence?

That’s exactly what the Patrick Administration is proposing with a new set of regulations to be approved by the Secretary of Public Safety, Kevin M. Burke.
...
These regulations, if passed as written, would effectively eliminate firearms education and training courses, affect in some manner nearly all shooting events open to the public, including junior shooting programs, Women on Target, Becoming an Outdoors Woman, and club field days enjoyed by thousands of responsible, licensed, firearms owners and shooting enthusiasts. Any events open to the public where a machine gun was in use would also be eliminated.

Today, Trap, Skeet, and 5-Stand, International Practical Shooting Confederation (IPSC) Pistol, Cowboy Action Shooting, and Scholastic Clay events are held on clubs all across the Commonwealth during the week and on weekends where the public is invited. If that a non-member were to show up as a guest of a club member, or just stopped in and wanted try the sport – the club would have to deny that non-member that request until all of the above regulations were satisfied.

Even if the club were to satisfy all of the above an arbitrary or capricious denial of a police detail would be enough to deny the public participatory access to these events. ...

Read all about it here, including the text of the proposed regs. Basically, a quick read shows that the proposed regs would impose significant additional costs on any group sponsoring a firearms related event open to the general public. Which I guess is it's purpose.

Gun rights advocates call for "No" vote on Sotomayor

Via the Committee for Justice blog:

In a letter released today and attached below, more than two dozen leaders of the Second Amendment community from across the nation urged senators "not to confirm Judge Sonia Sotomayor as the next associate justice of the United States Supreme Court," citing their "grave concern" over her Second Amendment record.

The individual signers include 14 members of the National Rifle Association's Board of Directors and Executive Council, including two past presidents of the NRA. Another five signers head the NRA state affiliate in their respective states - Pennsylvania, New York, Arizona, New Jersey and Massachusetts. The signers also include the heads of other leading national Second Amendment organizations, including the Second Amendment Foundation, the Gun Owners' Action League, and the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms. ...

Read the whole post here, which includes the text of the letter.

ABA all warm and fuzzy for Sotomayor

From an Investors Business Daily editorial, on the ABA's double standard in rating judges:

The media are treating the American Bar Association's top rating for Judge Sonia Sotomayor like a dispassionate report card. The record shows that the ABA applies a politicized double standard.

The ABA's Canons of Judicial Ethics have a lot of high-minded language. Such as: "To ensure impartiality and fairness to all parties, a judge must be objective and open-minded." And: "A judge shall not . . . by words or conduct manifest bias or prejudice," including but not limited to "bias . . . based upon race, sex, gender, religion, national origin, ethnicity . . . ."

And why not? Because "a judge who manifests bias or prejudice in a proceeding impairs the fairness of the proceeding and brings the judiciary into disrepute. A judge must avoid conduct that may reasonably be perceived as prejudiced or biased."

The very definition of "conduct that may reasonably be perceived as prejudiced or biased" can be found in Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor's statements on race. She has claimed — over and over, it turns out — that "a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life."

The unmistakable assertion: A "wise Latina woman" is morally superior to those of another race and the other sex.

The ABA further insists that "a judge shall not hold membership in any organization that practices invidious discrimination on the basis of race, sex, gender, religion, national origin, ethnicity or sexual orientation."

But Sotomayor violated that too, until recently holding membership in an all-female "old girls" club whose only purpose is networking to empower its already elitist members. ...

Read the rest here.