Quote of the Day - New York Times Edition?!?

‘Most of Government Is Unconstitutional’

No shit, Sherlock.

Quote of the Day - the Four Rules Edition

I spend 24 hours a day with the person most likely to inflict a gunshot wound on me.

The safety rules of firearms are what they are for a reason. - Jeff Brosius

Wisdom.

It's a Feature, Not a Bug

I will not register.  Period.

Budget 2019: Money for gun buy-back scheme may not be enough (New Zealand):

Pullquote:

Police Association president Chris Cahill said it was a bit of unknown if the money would be enough because there had not been a gun registry.

"We really have no idea how many of these firearms are out there in New Zealand," Cahill said.

"Which really points to how bad our firearms legislation has been, that we have let this get out of control."

Hard to confiscate if you don't know who owns what. That's kind of the point.

UPDATE:

Once again, responding to a horrendous crime by inflicting knee-jerk, authoritarian restrictions on innocent people proves to be an ineffective means of convincing people to obey. Specifically, New Zealand's government—which also stepped up censorship and domestic surveillance after bloody attacks on two Christchurch mosques earlier this year—is running into stiff resistance to new gun rules from firearms owners who are slow to surrender now-prohibited weapons and will probably never turn them in.

Officials should have seen it coming.

"Police are anticipating a number of people with banned firearms in their possession won't surrender them," Stuff reported at the end of May, based on internal government documents.

As of last week, only around 700 weapons had been turned over. There are an estimated 1.5 million guns—with an unknown number subject to the new prohibition on semiautomatic firearms—in the country overall.

Traditionally relaxed in its approach to firearms regulation, and enjoying a low crime rate, New Zealand has no firearms registration rule. That means authorities have no easy way of knowing what guns are in circulation or who owns them.

"These weapons are unlikely to be confiscated by police because they don't know of their existence," Philippa Yasbek of Gun Control NZ admitted. "These will become black-market weapons if their owners choose not to comply with the law and become criminals instead."

Yasbek's organization advocates registering all guns in private hands. But that won't help with gathering guns already in the possession of owners appalled by the government's attack on the rights of innocent people—government attacks, it's worth noting, that come in response to the crimes of one man who explicitly anticipated just such a response.

"I chose firearms for the affect it would have on social discourse," the killer wrote in a document he released to explain his crimes. "The gun owners of New Zealand are a beaten, miserable bunch of baby boomers, who have long since given up the fight. When was the last time they won increased rights? Their loss was inevitable. I just accelerated things a bit."

Politicians fulfilled the murderer's predictions with panic-driven legislation.

That gun owners would, in large numbers, defy restrictions should have been anticipated by anybody who knows the history of government attempts to disarm their subjects—or who just glanced across the Tasman Sea to Australia.

"In Australia it is estimated that only about 20% of all banned self-loading rifles have been given up to the authorities," wrote Franz Csaszar, professor of criminology at the University of Vienna, after Australia's 1996 compensated confiscation of firearms following a mass murder in Port Arthur, Tasmania. Csaszar put the number of illegally retained arms in Australia at between two and five million.

"Many members of the community still possess grey-market firearms because they did not surrender these during the 1996–97 gun buyback," the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission conceded in a 2016 report. "The Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission continues to conservatively estimate that there are more than 260,000 firearms in the illicit firearms market."

RTWT.

Quote of the Day - Democracy Edition

Via Instapundit:

In days gone by, superannuated elites refusing to accept defeat on existential questions of this type finished up with their heads on pikes. Democracy put a stop to that by doing what democracy does best: facilitating the peaceful and orderly transfer of power. But democracy means you elect a new parliament, not a new people. That, in truth, is the only deal that matters. - Helen Dale, Brexplaining the UK's Future

 Today only Democrats and dictators fear elections.

Another "Dilbert is a DOCUMENTARY" Entry

Discuss.

Meanwhile in Climate News...

National Parks Quietly Toss Signs Saying Glaciers ‘Will Be Gone’ By 2020:

The National Park Service has quietly removed all the signs put up by the Obama administration that told visitors that the glaciers would “all be gone” by the year 2020 due to global warming… because… it’s 2019, and the glaciers are all still there and have been growing.

Glacier National Park quietly removed a sign at its visitor center saying the glaciers will disappear by 2020 which were originally placed because former President Obama believed the predictions pushed by the left’s climate change hypothesis.

According to federal officials, several years in a row of high snowfall and cold temperatures totally obliterated a computer model that authorities relied on to claim that the glaciers would all be melted by 2020, Daily Caller reported.

This Kicked Over My Gigglebox

Quote of the Day - Things that make you go hmmmm.... Edition

So, with this whole sharia law thing, will transgender boys be able to put on a burkha and win all female sports contests? - Commenter "Dimsdale" at PowerLine

Quote of the Day - Glenn Reynolds Edition

Like he needs a link from me, but I wanted to archive this one.  In response to the New York Times deputy managing editor Rebecca Blumenstein stating:

‘We are in no way anti-Trump.’
Glenn zings back:

ALSO, NO ONE IS STARVING IN THE UKRAINE
That ought to leave a scar.

Comment Moderation

If you've been having problems posting or replying to posts, I apologize.  I haven't been paying attention to Disqus the way I should be, and the spam filters have been overactive.  I just approved several comments (and deleted a couple it caught).  Sorry about that.

Failure to Protect

Broward Ex-Deputy Sheriff Scot Peterson has been arrested and charged with seven counts of neglect of a child, three counts of culpable negligence and one count of perjury in the aftermath of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Peterson, a School Resource Officer, declined to intervene in that shooting, instead hiding behind cover for 45 minutes while the shooter killed seventeen and wounded seventeen others.

This is pretty much unprecedented.  Until now, officers of the law have been held not liable for the protection of any individual person or persons, as I explained in detail in my May, 2003 posts, Is the Government Responsible for Your Protection? Part I and Part II.  As I explained in Part I:

Carolyn Warren, Joan Taliaferro, and Miriam Douglas were the appellants in a lawsuit against the District of Columbia and its police department for failing to protect them. Fail them it did, but the court found against them. And here is its reasoning:

A publicly maintained police force constitutes a basic governmental service provided to benefit the community at large by promoting public peace, safety and good order. The extent and quality of police protection afforded to the community necessarily depends upon the availability of public resources and upon legislative or administrative determinations concerning allocation of those resources. The public, through its representative officials, recruits, trains, maintains and disciplines its police force and determines the manner in which personnel are deployed. At any given time, publicly furnished police protection may accrue to the personal benefit of individual citizens, but at all times the needs and interests of the community at large predominate. Private resources and needs have little direct effect upon the nature of police services provided to the public. Accordingly, courts have without exception concluded that when a municipality or other governmental entity undertakes to furnish police services, it assumes a duty only to the public at large and not to individual members of the community. (Emphasis is mine)

Note the quote: "without exception." This is not the first time someone has sued the government for not protecting them, not by a long shot. It's one of the most egregious examples, but far from the only one.

So, it isn't the government's responsibility to protect "individual members of the community," that is, you and me specifically.

This has been established for years, most recently in Castle Rock v. Gonzales from 2005. But in Part II of my essay I linked to a different case, Riss v. the City of New York, from 1968 in which a woman got a restraining order against her abusive boyfriend who had told her if he couldn't have her, no one else would want her - and then carried out his threat by hiring someone to throw lye in her face, blinding her in one eye and disfiguring her face. She begged for police protection before the attack and got nothing. After the attack she received 24-hour protection. She sued. She lost, for the same reason Carolyn Warren, Joan Taliaferro, and Miriam Douglas lost - there is no duty to protect any particular individual or individuals unless they're in custody or under direct care.

Here's where it gets interesting. There was a dissent in the Riss case, and here's the pertinent part of that dissent:

No one questions the proposition that the first duty of government is to assure its citizens the opportunity to live in personal security. And no one who reads the record of Linda's ordeal can reach a conclusion other than that the City of New York, acting through its agents, completely and negligently failed to fulfill this obligation to Linda.

Linda has turned to the courts of this State for redress, asking that the city be held liable in damages for its negligent failure to protect her from harm. With compelling logic, she can point out that, if a stranger, who had absolutely no obligation to aid her, had offered her assistance, and thereafter Burton Pugach was able to injure her as a result of the negligence of the volunteer, the courts would certainly require him to pay damages. (Restatement, 2d, Torts, § 323.) Why then should the city, whose duties are imposed by law and include the prevention of crime (New York City Charter, § 435) and, consequently, extend far beyond that of the Good Samaritan, not be responsible? If a private detective acts carelessly, no one would deny that a jury could find such conduct unacceptable. Why then is the city not required to live up to at least the same minimal standards of professional competence which would be demanded of a private detective?

So if someone volunteered or was paid to protect her and failed as spectacularly at it as the NYPD did, THEY would be held liable, but the City is not.

Scot Peterson was paid to protect the kids in Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. It was his JOB. And he failed them. Criminally.

I hope he spends the rest of his life in prison contemplating his failure.

UPDATE:  Gun Free Zone has a different take.

#WalkAway Campaign

When I'm doing dialysis, I like to listen to YouTube videos. I came across this one, the guy who kicked off the #WalkAway movement. It's worth your time.

Need a Laugh? Pranking Spammers.

This is hysterical:


This man is my hero.

This I HAVE to See

I Love Michael Ramirez

...in a totally non-sexual way.  Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Quote of the Day - William Barr Edition

From his recent CBS interview:

I'm not suggesting that people did what they did necessarily because of conscious, nefarious motives. Sometimes people can convince themselves that what they're doing is in the higher interest, the better good. They don't realize that what they're doing is really antithetical to the democratic system that we have. They start viewing themselves as the guardians of the people that are more informed and insensitive than everybody else. They can - in their own mind, they can have those kinds of motives.

This echoes a previous QotD from Steve Green:

Once you’ve convinced yourself that your job is to protect the proles from themselves, any foul action you take becomes excusable, or even noble. That’s progressivism in a nutshell.

Toxicity

Give this some thought:

Vent of the Weekend

If you've read this blog for any reasonable period, you know I like to use other people's words when they say something well.  Today I give you, in its entirety, a comment by reader Grumpy Old Fart to my post Quote of the Day - P.J. O'Rourke Edition from a few days ago:

Democrats are the party of hatred, envy and bigotry. It's the basis of everything they do, and they use it at every opportunity.

If you disagree with them on race, it's because you're white (even if you're Thomas Sowell, Mia Love or Marco Rubio). If you disagree with them about women's rights, it's because you're a man (even if you're Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter or Megyn Kelly). If you disagree with them about gay rights, it's because you're straight (even if you're Jimmy LaSalvia or Chris Barron). They're not interested in empowering minorities, they're only interested in punishing white people. They're not interested in empowering women, they're only interested in punishing men. They're not interested in empowering gays, they're only interested in punishing straight people. They're not interested in helping people become successful, they're only interested in punishing the wealthy. They don't want justice, in fact they work hard to subvert it... because they pander to those who want revenge.

Of course, they always claim the opposite. But it wasn't the Republicans who wanted a Supreme Court Justice who thought she was better than others because she wasn't white or male. It wasn't the Republicans who called Condoleeza Rice a "house nigger." It wasn't the Republicans who coined the term "white hispanic." It's not the Republicans who to this day call Justice Thomas an "Uncle Tom." It's not the Republicans who delight in "Teabagger" as a derogatory term.

It isn't the Republicans who are proud to be associated with openly racist organizations like BLM, the NAACP and La Raza. It wasn't the Republicans who proudly put a proven rapist in the White House in the 90s. It wasn't the Republicans who were proud of voting for our last President because he's not white. It wasn't the Republicans who voted for Hillary because she's not male. It's not the Republicans who have fought tooth and nail to make it easy to get on welfare, but hard to succeed in business.

Democrats spent several years calling Republicans "terrorists," "suicide bombers" and "hostage takers." But the majority of Hamas supporters in America are Democrats.

I'm agnostic, and yes, I find it annoying when Christians act as if I'm some poor deluded soul who must be saved from his own stupidity. But at least Christians treat me as if I am a human being, and by their lights they are trying to help me. They'll try to change my mind, but they don't try to have me arrested or outcast when I don't. The anti-Christian left thinks I should be punished for daring to disagree with them, if they concede that I should be allowed to exist AT ALL.

"Diversity" my hairy butt. I want my doctor, my lawyer, my local police and firefighters, even the guy who sacks my groceries, to be the best, and I don't care what color they are, whether their underwear has a fly, or who they kiss when they go home in the evening. And because I have that attitude, I have been called a racist, a fascist, a white supremacist, a neo-Nazi, and just about any other derogatory name you can imagine. This is apparently what is known as "reasoned discourse" and "rational debate" among members of The Party of Tolerance™.

I have nothing to add to this.