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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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Saturday, April 02, 2005 I Answer Five Questions. I don't know who started this, but I found that Mike from Feces Flinging Monkey had taken up the gauntlet from Xlrq at Damnum Absque Injuria, and had posted an open invitation at his site to quiz someone else. Being bored, I said I'd take him up on it. Here we go: 1) You're serving on a jury. The defendant is a young man, a gang member, who is being charged with the murder of a rival gang member. The defendant admits to shooting the victim dead, but claims it was self defense. The only witness is a friend of the defendant, who backs up his story. There is no additional evidence to sway your opinion either way. Would you vote guilty, or not guilty? It's up to the prosecutor to prove "beyond a reasonable doubt" that a murder took place. Failing that, I have to find for the defendant. 2) Do you generally consider women who are skilled with firearms to be more attractive than those who are not? If so, can you describe why? (If not, can you explain what the hell is the matter with you, anyway)? This goes back to an OLD post, when Courtney was still blogging. The answer: Hell yes. As I said then, I think it's the self-confidence I find attractive. 3) All things being equal, if you could not live in the United States, where would you go? (Assume that job opportunities, willingness of your new country to accept you, language barriers, etc. were not an issue). Yeesh. All other things really cannot be equal. America isn't perfect, but it is still, in my opinion, the best, most free nation on earth. If Australia or New Zealand would give up their pursuit of socialist statism, they could be very nice places for an expatriate American. Rob Smith, Acidman of Gut Rumbles, advertises for Costa Rica, but I don't speak Spanish, despite several years of studying it in college (don't use it, you lose it.) Given no other choice, I think I'd have to go with Middle-Earth, and move to New Zealand. 4) Cats or dogs? .45 or 9mm? .308 or .223? Plastic or steel? No fair. That's four questions in one. Cats and dogs. They aren't the same, cannot be compared, and I like both. But BIG dogs (35-100 lbs or so). Toy breed dogs have none of the charm of cats, and none of the charm of big dogs, either. They're just rats with attitude. .45. Hands down. But .45 ACP or .45 LC. I'm not too hip on the .45GAP for reasons best elucidated below. I'm also not a fan of the .45 überblasters like the .454 Casull et al. But more power (pun intended) to those who like them. .223 for plinking & paper-punchin, .308 for serious work. Steel. I just don't care for the esthetics of tactical tupperware. Aluminum alloy if you're really insistent on weight savings. Titanium and Scandium are, in my opinion, just a marketing ploy. 5) I promised one hardball question... Justice Holmes once wrote that human rights were nothing more than what "a given crowd ... will fight for". Holmes also agreed that his worldview came "devilish near to believing that might makes right." How does your view of rights differ from a simple "might-makes-right" position? Because I believe in the rights of the individual, who has the hardest time defending his rights from the tyranny of the majority. A belief in the rights of the individual means often having to make decisions that tell the majority, in the words of Justice Scalia, "to take a walk." Quoting (again) from Sanford Levinson's The Embarrassing Second Amendment, (W)hat it means to take rights seriously is that one will honor them even when there is significant social cost in doing so. If protecting freedom of speech, the rights of criminal defendants, or any other part of the Bill of Rights were always (or even most of the time) clearly costless to the society as a whole, it would truly be impossible to understand why they would be as controversial as they are. The very fact that there are often significant costs--criminals going free, oppressed groups having to hear viciously racist speech and so on--helps to account for the observed fact that those who view themselves as defenders of the Bill of Rights are generally antagonistic to prudential arguments. Most often, one finds them embracing versions of textual, historical, or doctrinal argument that dismiss as almost crass and vulgar any insistence that times might have changed and made too "expensive" the continued adherence to a given view. "Cost-benefit" analysis, rightly or wrongly, has come to be viewed as a "conservative" weapon to attack liberal rights. Yet one finds that the tables are strikingly turned when the Second Amendment comes into play. Here it is "conservatives" who argue in effect that social costs are irrelevant and "liberals" who argue for a notion of the "living Constitution" and "changed circumstances" that would have the practical consequence of removing any real bite from the Second Amendment.In Justice Holmes's world, what the majority wants, the majority gets. In mine, the majority ought to understand what the tyranny of the majority leads to, and short of that, ought to be told from time to time to "take a walk." I've stated that a right is what a majority of a population believes it is, also quoting Scalia when he said: To some degree, a constitutional guarantee is like a commercial loan, you can only get it if, at the time, you don't really need it. The most important, enduring, and stable portions of the Constitution represent such a deep social consensus that one suspects if they were entirely eliminated, very little would change. And the converse is also true. A guarantee may appear in the words of the Constitution, but when the society ceases to possess an abiding belief in it, it has no living effect. Consider the fate of the principle expressed in the Tenth Amendment that the federal government is a government of limited powers. I do not suggest that constitutionalization has no effect in helping the society to preserve allegiance to its fundamental principles. That is the whole purpose of a constitution. But the allegiance comes first and the preservation afterwards.This is because, from a pragmatic point of view, Justics Holmes's and Justice Scalia's positions reflect reality. But I advocate educating the majority so that they understand why an individual-rights outlook is empirically better for everyone in the long run, and why they ought to fight for that even though it doesn't give optimum solutions to every day-to-day incident. While it is true that what a given crowd will fight for is what that given crowd gets, we're far better off if the crowd is educated rather than ignorant, and a pack rather than a herd. | | |
