The Smallest Minority |
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The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. - Ayn Rand Liberty is an inherently offensive lifestyle. Living in a free society guarantees that each one of us will see our most cherished principles and beliefs questioned and in some cases mocked. That psychic discomfort is the price we pay for basic civic peace. It's worth it. It's a pragmatic principle. Defend everyone else's rights, because if you don't there is no one to defend yours. - MaxedOutMama I don't just want gun rights... I want individual liberty, a culture of self-reliance....I want the whole bloody thing. Kim du Toit
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. . . and so are you Wahabism Delenda Est      Hey, FEC!  BITE ME! I'm a Member of the McCain-Feingold INSURRECTION!    "Jeez, Kevin... calling you an asshole would be a huge understatement, wouldn't it?" -Jack Cluth, The People's Republic of Seabrook (Coming from you, Jack, it's an honor.)  email: gunrightsAT comcastDOTnet INVITATION: If you have never shot a firearm, regardless of your position on the right to arms, and if you live near or visit the Tucson, AZ metropolitan area, I invite you to go shooting for a day. I will provide the arms, ammunition, targets, safety equipment, range fees and instruction. All you have to do is show up. 6 Takers To Date DO YOU LIVE SOMEWHERE ELSE and want to try shooting? Click HERE  Proud Gun-blogging member of the Pajamahadeen since May, 2003!
Debates: "The Commentary" A OLD discussion on gun control between me and an Irishman living in London Start here. UPDATED! Now with archive! Post #1 by Alex, a Guest A multi-post discussion hosted here at TSM My short exchange with Professor Saul Cornell of the Second Amendment Research Center Best Posts: The "Rights" Discussion: What is a "Right?" What is a "Right"? Revisited, Part I Part II Rights, Morality, Idealism & Pragmatism, Part I Part II Part III Part IV The United Federation of Planets Is the Government Responsible for Your Protection? Part I & Part II 1975 in Washington, D.C. vs. 2004 in Canton, Ohio Go Ahead, Rely on the Government for Your Protection The Other Side Liberal vs. Conservative: Both are Necessary The Mystery of Government The Blog that Ate Poughkeepsie Updated and restated as: Of Laws and Sausages Militias A Mistake a Free People Get to Make Only Once The George Orwell Daycare Center This is NOT What I Wanted to Read TRUST The Lying "News" Media, Pt. II Say WHAT? Bias? What Bias? Agenda? What Agenda? The Church of the MSM and the New Reformation Let's See if I Can "Germinate an Intelligent Thought" Here The ACLU Hasn't Changed its Tune They Never EVER Stop It is Not the Business of Government Five Reasons Why It ISN'T They Keep Making Better Fools Five Month Investigation, 10 Tracer Rounds, Two Felony Convictions That Sumbitch Ain't been BORN! On Guillotines and Gibbets England Slides Further Towards Bondage Pressing the "RESET" Button Freedom's Just Another Word for Nothin' Left To Lose A Terrible Resolve The Courts Will Not Save Us Trilogy: The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions "Game Over, Man. Game Over." An Important Question And the denouement: Hudson Was Wrong The Dangerous Victims Trilogy: "(I)t's most important that all potential victims be as dangerous as they can" Violence and the Social Contract Governments, Criminals, and Dangerous Victims In the same vein: Those Without Swords Can Still Die Upon Them The True Believers Trilogy: True Believers March of the Lemmings Reasonable People Also in the same vein: Tough History Coming The Culture Trilogy Culture Hubris Weltanschauung And its follow-on: In Re: Culture Technical Dissertations Why Ballistic Fingerprinting Doesn't (And Won't) Work Spin, Spin, Spin Speaking of Teddy Kennedy... This is the Kind of Thing That REALLY IRRITATES ME Questions from the Audience?
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PROTESTWARRIOR Some people who are taking the fight to the Left. And some GREAT T-shirts, too. DAILY READS I need a longer day! Day by Day InstaPundit Lileks' The Bleat Mostly Cajun View from the Porch Of Arms and the Law TFS Magnum Ravenwood's Universe Irons in the Fire Say Uncle The Adventures of Roberta X TRUE EXCELLENCE American Digest The Belmont Club Boobs, Injuries, and Dr. Pepper The Volokh Conspiracy Michael Yon Varifrank Eject!Eject!Eject! Eternity Road Oleg Volk ON INDEFINITE HIATUS USS Clueless The Safety Valve Ipse Dixit The Lopsided Poopdeck Acidman (RIP) Skywritings Publicola D.C. Thorton Kim du Toit Personal Effects Smoke on the Water OTHER GUN/RIGHTS BLOGS Airborne Combat Engineer AlphaPatriot Alphecca American Dinosaur A Day in the Life of an Ambulance Driver The Anarchangel Mrs. Anarchangel The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler Argghhh! The Bitch Girls Boots and Sabers The Breda Fallacy Gun Nuts Media Carnaby Fudge Clayton Cramer Cogito Ergo Geek Countertop Chronicles Cowboy Blob Critical Mastiff Cryptic Subterranean Found: One Troll FreedomSight From the Heartland Fun Turns to Tragedy!!! The Geek with a .45 Gunwatch Heartless Libertarian Hecate's Crossroad Hell in a Handbasket Individ Justin Buist's Blog The LawDog Files Lead and Gold Les Jones Live from the (upper) Texas Gulf Coast Mad Ogre The Michael Bane Blog Moral Flexibility Mr. Completely Murdoc Online The Munchkin Wrangler Ninth Stage No Looking Backwards No Quarters Oscar Poppa Outrageous Malfunction Pass the ammo Posse Incitatus Random Nuclear Strikes Reasonablenut Resistance is Futile! Sandcastles and Cubicles SlagleRock's Slaughterhouse Snowflakes in Hell Surly Curmudgeon Texican Tattler The Ten Ring South Park Pundit Triggerfinger The View From North Central Idaho Vox The War on Guns Weck Up To Thees! Wince and Nod Xavier Thoughts .45 Caliber Justice BLOGGERS I'VE MET A Keyboard and a .45  
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Tuesday, December 21, 2004 Thought Crimes Rivrdog has a post up concerning the brouhaha over Jason of Fish or Man's arrest, and he addresses something important: There are many fertile subjects here: The need for clarity in the gun laws, the need for education of the gendarmes in the gun laws, the need of the police to be professionally detached, and not make "asshole arrests", but above all, there is a need to be calm and deliberative in the face of such pressure. On both sides.He then goes on to make a list of recommendations for gun-bloggers to follow, with this caveat: Blogging is a hobby, right? Gun blogging is just a subset of a hobby, right? No sane person pushes their hobby so hard it threatens their life and liberty.On the surface, he's correct. But what he's saying is "Don't get caught committing a thought crime." I found Rivrdog's post through Rob Smith of Gut Rumbles. Rob understands. He wrote: I love my country, but I FEAR my government. Yeah, I "beard the lion" frequently on this blog, but I fully understand the risks I take when I do it. I may be hauled off to jail some fine day for something I WROTE, right here in the land of the First Amendment. We fought a Revolution over that idea, but the government our founders fought and died for can and WILL do that to you today.Jason wrote in a comment at Connie's now redacted post, I am at wits end. The loaded gun charge will likely be dropped on Thursday, it relies on what an officer claims my spouse said. Something which cannot be used in court anyway. So that leaves me with a cop claiming reckless driving and a prosecutor that will likely add a felony charge of threatening a peace officer, (from what I listened to while being held). After all this I will still need to go back to Ellensburg and clear my name from this “gun violation” they have waiting for me there. I only hope to be able to make that stand without being branded a felon.All I have to say to Jason is, if you weren't aware of the level to which we have fallen, you haven't been paying attention. I thought you understood that the fight was to get back what we've lost. When I started The Smallest Minority I was quite aware I'd probably end up on a list somewhere. I've kept the tone civil and polite (for the most part), and followed that list of recommendations Rivrdog put up (for the most part), but I've certainly committed a number of "thought crimes" by posting on those stories of government excess that I have seen, such as this one that John Ray recently found: Gun collector visited by Waterbury policeRead the whole thing. Mr. Bechard has fallen victim to Ayn Rand's dark and accurate vision. The government has made so many laws that he has violated one that brought him to the attention of the Powers That Be, who respond to his cry of "I'm a law-abiding citizen!" with "Well, now you're not." Time to cash in on the guilt. If he's lucky, he'll be offered a plea that will keep him out of jail, but will forever strip him of his right to arms. His entire collection, painstakingly built up over decades, will be taken. He will never legally be able to handle a firearm again. But the law that is supposed to keep guns out of the hands of felons will, again, serve only to punish an otherwise law-abiding person who merely made an error. Last Monday I posted a piece from AR15.com where a contributor there related the story of taking his son to a birthday party at the local pizza and video game parlor and shocking the socks off a gun-fearing wussy. In my comments, that same contributor posted this follow-on from another poster: That reminds when my 8 year old daughter was at a gunshow with me and we were staffing a "gun rights" booth. The discussion was HOT and heavy with a large group of people around.......I caught only a piece of the discussion that my daughter was having with the LEO.......the LEO said "What if the President gives the order for the Police to take all the guns?".....my 8 year old told the LEO "Don't come to my house! We'll shoot you and bury you in the backyard!"That family is probably on a list. They've committed a thought crime. Rob Smith says "I FEAR my government." Connie du Toit fears being the target of some government action. Rivrdog recommends not making such a target of oneself. Thomas Paine is credited with the quotation: When people fear the government, there is tyranny. When government fears the people, there is liberty.It's pretty apparent where we stand now. Blindingly apparent now to Jason and to William Bechard, long apparent to Rob Smith, the du Toits, me, Rivrdog and many others. Blogging is a hobby, yes, and gunblogging is a subset of that hobby, but most of us do it for more than just the enjoyment a hobby brings. We do it to remind our government that, while fearful, we're not cowed. We do it to remind them that we understand what our rights are and what they're supposed to be, and that we resent the distance between those two points. And we do it to remind them that we are not powerless. One of the first posts I put up on this blog was Why DO I Own a Gun?, and I made the point plain from the start: The last reason I own a gun is probably the most controversial. It's the one that gets gun owners branded as "nuts", "kooks", and various other derogatory terms.Bill Whittle wrote in Freedom: In the Warsaw Ghetto, in Solzhenitsyn's Gulags, in countless other miserable terrifying pits of murder, some people woke up to the idea that resistance is NOT futile. Which is why that old saw, which in my terribly, tragically misspent liberal youth I used to sneer at as the mark of a real idiot - "they can have my gun when they pry it from my cold dead fingers" - suddenly makes a new kind of sense to me.That's it, precisely. Armed citizens, committing thought crimes in public, should act as a check on those officials who seek to overstep their powers. (I'm willing to bet that Sherrif's deputy will now think twice if he's ever actually given an order to confiscate weapons wholesale.) Granted, many of our freedoms have slid down the slippery slope over the past two centuries, but bear in mind that ours is the longest-lived Republic republic still in existence, too. An armed citizenry may or may not factor in to that, but I know which side of that argument I'm on. So, like Rob and (I'm certain) like Kim du Toit, and the Geek and many others, we'll continue to commit thought crimes and stay on those lists. We will do it in the (possibly forlorn) hope of keeping the Powers That Be attentive to the fact that they can only push so hard before another Marvin Heemeyer or Steven Bixby or someone like them has had enough, and only so much harder before what is now a tiny trickle might become a flood, because there are a number of people in this country who read this advice, and nod their heads in silent agreement: Lesson No. 1: If a bureaucrat, or a soldier sent by a bureaucrat, comes to knock down your door and take you someplace you don't want to go because of who you are or what you think-- kill him. If you can, kill the politician who sent them. You will likely die anyway, and you will be saving someone else the same fate. For it is a universal truth that the intended victims always far outnumber the tyrant's executioners. Any nation which practices this lesson will quickly run out of executioners and tyrants, or they will run out of it.Oops! I think I just committed another thought crime. Put another tick-mark next to my name. UPDATE, 12/22: Kim du Toit informs me that Rivrdog misconstrued the reason behind the redaction, and has a post up explaining what they did and why. Connie has one, too. Excellent, as usual. Makes sense to me. I had not read the original post prior to writing Thought Crimes, so I took Rivrdog's explanation at face value. Having met Kim & Connie, I ought to have known better, but hindsight is always 20/20. I have just one comment on Kim's explanatory post. There are supposed to be four boxes on which liberty stands: the soap box (which includes the mailbox), the jury box (which has been essentially stripped from us since the practice of jury nullification has been destroyed), the ballot box, and the cartridge box. The box I use here is, of course, the soap box. | | |
