Rights, Morality, Idealism & Pragmatism, Part IV

(Continued from Part III)

In regards to reaching an agreement, I think we're going to shortly reach a point where, unless Dr. Cline changes his mind, we're going to have to agree to disagree.

If I grasp Dr. Cline's position correctly, he believes that rights - human rights, individual rights, fundamental rights, however you want to describe them - are like mathematical axioms, where an axiom is defined as:

A fundamental element; a basic principle; something assumed without proof as being self-evident or generally accepted, especially when used as a basis for an argument

He believes further that the corollaries to these axiomatic rights can be discovered a priori from the application of logic to a knowledge of these rights, and an an objective system of morality that is valid for all people, everywhere, at all times can be constructed from these rights.

To that I say, and not as flippantly as it sounds, "Welcome to the United Federation of Planets." I mean no insult. Please bear with me as I explain the problems I see in Dr. Cline's philosophy.

Dr. Cline and I have agreed, I think, to at least one fundamental right. That right was described by philosopher Ayn Rand as "A man's right to his own life." Rand also stated that all other rights "are its consequences and corollaries." He and I both agree that this fundamental right is the basic postulate, the self-evident truth, upon which a system of morality should be built. But it's necessary here to reiterate what I stated in Part II: we have to understand the difference between rights and morality, because the two are NOT equivalent.

Dr. Cline wrote:

Your note that rights are not completely interchangeable with morals is at least possibly true.

No, it is absolutely true, as I tried to explain before. Morals are the rules of behavior of a society, what is and what is not acceptable from its population. This is a critical thing to understand: morality can exist independent of any concept of individual rights, and has for the overwhelming majority of the history of man. Rights may exist as logical postulates, but they have had little to no effect upon human history until very, very recently.

A society is defined by its morality. A society is described as:

A group of humans broadly distinguished from other groups by mutual interests, participation in characteristic relationships, shared institutions, and a common culture.

They usually live in the same general geographic area, and they share a common belief system that defines the limits of acceptable behavior - their morality.

Rights may exist independent of society, but morality cannot. Morality is the set of rules by which people interact, whether those people belong to a band of hunter-gatherers, a tribe of farmers, a chiefdom, or a State. Their morality tells them how to deal with each other, and (hopefully) how to deal with "outsiders" - people with different moralities. The purpose behind having a set of rules of behavior is, at its base, survival. An individual, alone in the wild, has no need for morality. His right to his own life is absolute - and dependent entirely on his ability to survive in the wild. Only when confronted by other people does a question of morality arise - how to best survive as part of a group. Groups of people have a survival advantage over individuals, but membership in a group requires acceptance of the rules of that group - and those rules are learned. They're first learned through direct experience, and as the society matures, they are learned through instruction.

This brings me back again to Heinlein, and the "History and Moral Philosophy" speech where Col. Dubois states that "man has no moral instinct." This is the first major problem I have with Dr. Cline's philosophy. In What is a "Right" Revisited, Part II I stated "I think Dr. Cline believes that man has an innate moral instinct," to which he replied in his next piece:

Well, I'm not going to argue much against this statement. I do indeed believe that man has innate moral knowledge (I wouldn't say an instinct, but that's a pretty minor problem). I should say rather that I believe that I have innate moral knowledge. I've never been very convinced of the applicability of knowledge about one's self to knowledge about others. So instead let's say that I believe that I have moral knowledge and I suspect that some others do as well.

Yet, in that same piece I stated:

When Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, he stated:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

He and the other Founders may have held those "truths to be self-evident," but for centuries if not millenia before they were neither self-evident nor true. In fact, even today those "self-evident" rights are not acknowledged in much if not most of the world.

In Dr. Cline's reply to that he says:

This statement is only half-correct, and in that half you don't go far enough. In the millennia before, the statements were true - but they were not then, nor were they in Jefferson's day, nor are they now self-evident. These truths, like all a priori knowledge are not things that we can prove, but are things that we must discover. It is not easy to uncover reality or truth - not in mathematics, not in morality, and not in science.

I see a problem here. Dr. Cline's philosophy is based on a concept of rights that exist and are self-evident, as axioms requiring no proof, yet he concurs with me that Jefferson's "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" rights weren't self-evident, then or now, though he holds them as true (and in retrospect, I agree with him - largely - on both accounts.) As I said before:

Dr. Cline believes that he has a personal "innate moral knowledge" and he "suspect(s) that others do as well," but by stating that I think he admits that such knowledge may not be and probably is not universal. That "innate moral knowledge" is akin to Newton's ability to develop the Calculus by his pure logic, or Einstein's conception of the Theory of Relativity through his. These are talents that are rare in humans, and when such people apply themselves to the questions of morality, we call them "philosophers" - people like Rand, Kant, Popper, and Aristotle, and also Marx, Neitzche, and Kierkegaard. It is important to understand that when humanity is the topic, "irrational" implies much more than "the square-root of 2."

Dr. Cline objected to the tale of the Maori and Moriori, saying:

Your claim of the tale of the Maori and the Moriori as evidence of a lack of an objective standard of morality seems false to me. Again, morals are not inviolable. Saying that the fact that not everyone obeys whatever moral rules there might be is evidence for their absence seems to be expecting a little too much of morality. I might wish morality was self-enforcing, but that will not make it so. Anyone can choose to live how he wants; the Maori (at least those involved) made their choices. Your claim that condemnation of them is inappropriate as their behavior was moral according to their society is simply wrong. Any such claim negates entirely the validity of the rights of the individual, subjecting them to a test by opinion poll or ballot. My claim is that the primary position is that of the individual (a thing with both physical form and, more importantly, a mind) and the individual ONLY. Your earlier claim (following Ayn Rand) was that "the whole purpose of morals is to ensure survival, and whatever works to ensure survival is, for that society, 'moral.'" I’m not quite so sure that the source of morality is survival only, but whether or not I agree with that, the survival that Rand was alluding to was NOT survival of society, but rather the survival of the individual.

First, the story of the Maori and Moriori wasn't presented primarily as "evidence of a lack of an objective standard of morality." It was presented as an illustration that there are many moralities, one for each society extant, each based on the experiences learned by the members of that society, and passed on to other members. Dr. Cline states that "Anyone can choose to live how he wants; the Maori (at least those involved) made their choices." If I'm reading this correctly, he's stating that the Maori "made their choices" to not accept his "objective standard of morality."

But how could they choose it? What opportunity did they have? Is this objective moral standard self-evident, or isn't it?

The point I was trying to illustrate was that they had no concept of his objective moral standard, no concept even of individual rights, at least outside their own culture. The Moriori were "others," and as such the Maori attack was moral in accordance with Maori custom. Any attempt to convince the Maori that their behavior was immoral would have been met with a blank stare if not outright hostility. They had no concept of any moral standard other than the one they lived under. They didn't "make their choices" - they had no choices, because man has no moral instinct. They believed and acted on what their culture told them was moral. An agrarian tribal warrior society doesn't support much in the way of a philosopher class, and their morality worked until they met Europeans who could overpower them.

As an aside, I don't attribute my assertion that "the whole purpose of morals is to ensure survival" to Rand. For one, I ammended that statement, and second it's not her idea, to my knowledge, it's Heinlein's if not some other, earlier philosopher. What I said was this:

There are at least two bases for morality: survival, and individual rights. For the overwhelming majority of the existence of Man, the morality of any society has been based strictly on survival - anything that worked to ensure survival was, by definition, "moral."

--

Man has existed for hundreds of thousands if not millions of years, and our social structures have struggled slowly and painfully up from the band, to the tribe, to the chiefdom, to the state over that long time period. Throughout all of it we have done so without an ideal system of morality, just as we did without mathematics, agriculture, metallurgy, chemistry, or physics. We've been too busy just surviving. A theory of individual rights is much like mathematics - something of great value that requires time and resources to explore and develop.

It's not a matter of the Maori (or any other culture) choosing to reject Dr. Cline's objective moral standard. Such a standard is still largely undefined today. And one reason it is still undefined is because, aside from Rand's "one fundamental right," very few rights of the individual are axiomatic. For example, the right to arms isn't an axiom, it's a corollary to "a man's right to his own life." It's the means by which he can defend his life and property. ("IF we know that P implies Q AND we know that P is true THEN we know that Q is true.") It is the work of philosophers to do the logic necessary to "prove" the corollaries, and I don't believe that there were too many Maori Jeffersons, or Poppers, but probably a couple of Neitzches.

Morality is, then, by Dr. Cline's definition, a "science." It's based on hypotheses formed from observation, and it's tested constantly in the laboratory of life. If a particular morality is ever disproved, as the Moriori's was, the society generally fails and is replaced by a new society, often but not always made up of members of the previous society who have learned that their morality was inadequate the hard way, no matter how well it worked previously. The failure may be catastrophic, as it was for the Moriori and uncounted thousands before and after them, or it may be almost unnoticeable culturally, as it has been for America over its history, as our morality has slowly and incrementally morphed from seventeenth-century agrarian state to twenty-first century information-age state.

But all this takes opportunity and effort, and we've only had that opportunity and effort available to us for a short while historically. We're still working on it, and Dr. Cline alludes to this when he states:

I have suggested in my previous letters that we can know certain rules of morality (of what is right and what is wrong) such as "murder is wrong" or whatever. However, my main point is rather not that we know specific rules of morality with absolute certainty – at least not without a great deal of work (as even rules as seemingly obvious as "murder is wrong" may contain subtleties as, indeed, "murder is wrong" seems to in regard to the difference between murder and other forms of killing). Rather my main point was that we know, with whatever level of certainty possible in knowledge, that there are such rules. We must accept that such rules exist before we can find them.

But accepting that such rules exist is not the same as knowing what they are. Figuring out what they are is the job of philosophers, and they have yet to reach anything resembling a consensus after at least 5,000 years of considering the questions.

Dr. Cline argues that rights, at least the fundamental ones, are axioms. Acted on with logic, we can determine their corollaries. From these we can build an objective morality.

I agree, mostly, with the primary argument - fundamental rights are axiomatic; unverifiable and (hopefully) self-evident, given the opportunity to consider them. Once you've overcome the problems of day-to-day survival, you might actually have the time to consider them, if you are of a philosophical (and socially benign) bent. Most people are not though, and through most of human history, the problems of day-to-day survival denied the opportunity anyway.

I agree that some corollaries can be discovered a priori through the application of logic, but as with the greatest problems in mathematics, the greatest problems of those corollaries will take long years to wrestle with, and we may never get a "right" answer. But when it comes to morality, we're going to remain stuck in the realm of science: Apply the theorem, test in the laboratory of life, and keep testing until it fails. Learn from the failure, work up a new theorem, and try again. Heinlein's "scientifically verifiable theory of morals" (as he meant it) is nonsense, as science doesn't prove a scientific theorem the way that a mathematician "proves" a mathematical theorem.

Science just tests to destruction.

Dr. Cline states:

In the end, the existence of a society must be of (distant) secondary importance to the existence of the individual. The individual does not exist to serve society; the individual exists for his or her own purposes. Society, inasmuch as it exists at all, exists only to further the purposes of the individual. If we grant... that the existence of society is the primary purpose of morality and even existence, we should not be surprised when individual rights are denied, even by those agreeing with us. In any case, whether we regard the individual and its existence as primary (as I do) or the society and its existence as primary (as you seem to), we may (and probably will) have to fight for the continued practice of our rights, but their protection and their existence are not the same things. If we grant society the top spot in existence, we lose the justification we have in our fight.

I believe Dr. Cline has misinterpreted what I've said on this point, and I have to correct him here. What I have illustrated is that, throughout history, the individual has existed to serve society, but - and historically very recently - that has started to change. Rand said it, and I quoted it before:

The concept of individual rights is so new in human history that most men have not grasped it fully to this day.

The idea that society exists to to further the purposes of the individual,

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, - That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

is very, very new. Our own government, in the case of Kennedy v. Mendoza-Martinez as recently as 1963 stated:

...for while the Constitution protects against invasions of individual rights, it is not a suicide pact.

Survival, it seems, is still the primary basis of our morality, not individual rights.

I was not endorsing the idea that "man serves society," but recognizing the fact that it has been that way for millennia. Dr. Cline judges these previous societies against his "objective moral standard" based on the rights of individuals and finds them wanting. I judge them against the question "did they work, and for how long?" because I understand that Dr. Cline's "objective moral standard" has yet to be even mostly defined. It may exist, I think it does, but we haven't discovered it all yet.

I repeat: No society currently exists based on that ideal single objective standard, and I honestly think it will be centuries - if ever- before one might. If we do, perhaps then we can build an anarcho-capitalist paradise where coercive governments no longer exist, and we can all live in harmony.

But I severely doubt it.

Even the United Federation of Planets had conflicts with other societies who didn't share their morality. ;-)

Until we do, rights will remain what the majority of a society believes and is willing to defend.

Edited to add: I hardly ever do this in these philosophy pieces, but I ran across a Mark Steyn column that said something I think is related to this discussion and illustrative of the point I'm trying to make about how the role of the individual in society is shifting:

The most vital economic resource is people, and that’s the one thing much of the Western world is running out of. The anti-globalists can demonise sovereign states and sovereign companies — the Dells and other multinationals — but we’re entering the age of the sovereign individual, and that will be a lot harder for the anti-glob mob to attack. By 2010, a smart energetic Chinaman or Indian will be able to write his own ticket anywhere he wants.

Read the whole piece, but that quote directly relates to my point that, more and more, society is beginning to serve the individual, and not the other way 'round.

More Idiocy from the Other Side of the Pond.

Reader Doug sent me a link to the Daily Telegraph to an article informing me that now even a butter knife is considered an "offensive weapon" in Merrie Olde England.

A butter knife can be an offensive weapon, the High Court ruled yesterday.

The decision came in the rejection of an appeal by Charlie Brooker, of Welling, Kent, who had been convicted under the Criminal Justice Act of carrying a bladed instrument.

Mark Hardie, appearing for Brooker, argued that the knife had no handle, sharp edges or points and therefore could not fall foul of a law intended to protect people from dangerous weapons.

But Lord Justice Laws, sitting with Mr Justice David Steel, disagreed. He said: "I would accept that a sharp or pointed blade was the paradigm case - however the words of the statute are unqualified and refer to any article that has a blade."

I did a quick Google search, and found a wee bit more information in The Scotsman. Excerpt:

Section 139 of the (1988 Criminal Justice) Act says any person who has an article "which has a blade or is sharply pointed" shall be guilty of an offence if they carry it in public without good reason or lawful authority.

Mr Hardie said it was important that, as the statute criminalised a person for possession alone and placed a defendant at risk of two years imprisonment, it should not be read too broadly.

The law should only be applied to blades which had a point or sharp cutting edge and were inherently dangerous.

But Lord Justice Laws, sitting with Mr Justice David Steel, disagreed.

He said: "I would certainly accept that a sharp or pointed blade was the paradigm case - however the words of the statute are unqualified and refer to any article that has a blade."

"In my judgment we should perpetrate a very great mischief if we construed this statute so as to invite argument in case after case on whether an object is sharp or not."

During the hearing, Mr Hardie said the law would now catch even plastic knives restaurants and cafes supplied to customers with take-away food.

The judge said they should be protected by the section of the Act which allowed such knives to be carried if there was reasonable excuse.

But don't be caught with a plastic spork if you don't have take-out food! What, Mr. Booker didn't have a "reasonable excuse" to be carrying a dull butter knife? It couldn't have been for self-protection, unless he expected his assailants to fall down laughing at it.

I swear, sometimes I'm convinced that two World Wars and emigration have thrice decimated England's gene pool; leaving most of the leadership brainless, too much of the population spineless, and the criminals vicious.

Me Too, Ravenwood. Me Too.

Ravenwood has reposted a righteous rant in (dis)honor of tax day. It's all good, and not excerptable.

Go read.

More on Professor Saul Cornell

I added an update to the post below, but this is important enough for its own post. Professor Saul Cornell is director of Ohio State University's John Glenn Second Amendment Research Center, funded primarily by the anti-gun Joyce Foundation. I first got involved in this when I fisked an op-ed written by Prof. Cornell that was published in several newspapers across the country. I emailed him a link, and he replied. His reply was, in my opinion, weak though very personally illuminating, and I wrote a post illustrating it. In the fisking I wrote:

Remember, Prof. Cornell is writing an opinion piece for a newspaper. He doesn't have to be right, he just has to be convincing. The ill-informed who read this piece think "Hey, he's an authority, he must be right." That's why his side has to keep repeating the big lies.

In my rebuttal to his reply I wrote:

You, an historian, have taken it upon yourself to distort history - something that you yourself claim is unacceptable. You claim that the Justice department's recognition of the "standard model" of the Second Amendment is somehow "well beyond" a "living document" re-interpretation. I'm sorry, Professor, but if you actually believe that you're delusional, and if you know better you're a bald-faced liar. I honestly cannot tell which.

In Randy Barnett's most recent entry on the topic at The Volokh Conspiracy he had this to say:

Saul asked in his reply: "Given that the gun lobby has plenty of money and places like CATO are strongly gun rights it seems a bit unfair to ask Joyce to fund your point of view." I do not expect Joyce to fund any point of view with which they disagree. It is not Joyce we are talking about, it is Chicago-Kent and Ohio State. Nor, to reiterate, do I have any problem with an individual scholar like Saul who agrees with Joyce accepting funding to support his or her academic research, provided the funding is disclosed. But Ohio State, like Chicago-Kent, is an academic institution, unlike Cato, or the Federalist Society. (I raised the Federalist Society because, even though it is not an academic institution, its programs have more balance than did Chicago-Kent's. (I did not compare the Fordham Law Review symposium to the Federalist Society—indeed, I did not mention that symposium at all in my post.)

Let me clarify this by posing the following question: Why did Joyce not organize its own conference, law review issue, or Second Amendment Research Center? The answer is plain: it wants its views to enjoy the academic respectability imparted upon it by the imprimatur of Chicago-Kent and Ohio State. It is that institutional imprimatur that enabled the Ninth Circuit to rely so heavily on articles published in the Chicago-Kent Law Review in his opinion in Silveira v. Lockyer. (BTW, the published opinion had to be modified later to remove its reliance on the discredited work of Michael Bellesiles.) This is what Joyce is buying from Chicago-Kent and Ohio State. This is what it is improper of these institutions to sell.

--

If Saul truly cannot distinguish between a "research center" at a university (and a public one, no less) and a think tank like Cato, an advocacy group like the NRA or Joyce Foundation, or a blog like the Volokh Conspiracy, then there is more trouble with the Second Amendment Research Center than the principal source of its funding. But the fact that he says he would include diverse opinions in his programs (paid for somehow by other funds) and tried - albeit unsuccessfully - to include divergent views in the Fordham Law Review symposium suggests that he can tell the difference.

(Emphasis mine.) The "delusional vs. bald-faced liar" question remains open, but I know which side I'm leaning towards.

That's Because You WEREN'T LISTENING

I love the internet. The interconnectivity. The eidetic memory. The instant recall, complete with footnotes.

Instapundit delivers a smackdown to St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorialist Sylvester Brown Jr.'s latest piece, where Mr. Brown states:

I've noticed that comedian Bill Maher has been doing a bit of reaching out himself lately. Several times on his show, "Real Time with Bill Maher," he's encouraged more conservatives to join his audience. Maher's even conceded that his criticism of President George W. Bush's activities in Iraq may have been at least partly wrong.

"Look, on the long-range, big picture of getting the freedom-and-democracy ball rolling in the Middle East, maybe these guys had it right," Maher said on his show Friday.

Sounds to me like Maher's buying into the bait-and-switch rhetoric of the Bush clan. Maybe I would, too, if they were straight shooters. But, before the Iraq invasion, the rallying cry was against an "axis of evil" and "weapons of mass destruction." I don't recall any prewar speeches about delivering democracy to the Middle East.

Ah, Mr. Brown, accusing the "Bush clan" of lying when it is YOU who are at fault for not listening, as Glenn and some of his readers point out.

Perhaps you should try removing the blinders and the earplugs, and listen to what the "Bush clan" acutally says rather than what gets through the media filter, eh?

If I recall correctly, the protests against Bush's call to "deliver democracy to the Middle East" was (and I paraphrase) that 'the wogs weren't up to it, and didn't want it anyway.'

Edited to add: Oh, and this reminds me of a July, 2004 post that drew some attention when Steven Den Beste linked to it for this cartoon:

The Internet = Total Recall

Yup. This is Why Our Ancestors Left Europe

Apparently this week's Carnival of the Vanities was hosted by some Leftist EUnuch who decided that his/her/its theme would be "trash America and Americans for not being Leftist EUnuchs." Take, for example it's intro to Zendo Deb's entry:

Not satisfied with being shot when they venture overseas, Americans like to shoot each other. Zendo Deb at TFS Magnum sure likes the notion. She is angry that those filthy liberals think the law is something to be respected. Apparently, this old geezer was arrested for concealing a weapon, which he used to shoot and kill an assailant. Deb asks what the old man should have done. Well, Deb, he should have just given the kids his money and rung the coppers. So he loses his wallet. Never mind. Get the criminal compensation board to pay him back what he lost. Don't have one? You would if you were a liberal. Human lives will never be worth as little as the contents of your wallet, Deb, not in any place Dr Zen has even the smallest say. I don't care who does the shooting, you or the mugger. The old guy should get life for murder, pure and simple, and idiots like you should cool your boots and learn what really has value in this life.

And, had he not been armed, the three assailants should have gotten counselling, right?

In "It's most important that all potential victims be as dangerous as they can" I wrote this:

(The) recognition of the difference between violent and predatory and violent but protective illustrates the difference in worldview between people like me, and the (we'll call it) pacifist culture.

Britain today represents a perfect example of the pacifist culture in control, because that culture doesn't really distinguish between violent and predatory and violent but protective - it sees only violent. Their worldview is divided between violent and non-violent, or passive. There is an exception, a logical disconnect if you will, that allows for legitimate violence - but only if that violence is committed by sanctioned officials of the State. And even there, there is ambivalence. If violence is committed by an individual there is another dichotomy: If the violence is committed by a predator, it is the fault of society in not meeting that predator's needs. The predator is the creation of the society, and is not responsible for the violence. He merely needs to be "cured" of his ailment. If violence is committed by a defender, it is a failure of the defender to adhere to the tenets of the pacifist society. It is the defender who is at fault because he has lived by the rules and has chosen to break them, and who must therefore be punished for his transgression.

"Dr. Zen" is a Brit.

I rest my case.

Zendo Deb has a bit more to say, though. And as Eric at Classical Values points out in his cutting commentary on "Dr. Zen," Lawrence at This Blog is Crap has posted an alternate Carnival.

We Americans. So simplisme.

Did Anyone Watch O'Reilly Tonight?.

A poster at AR15.com reports:

The grandfather of the 5-year-old girl who called 9-1-1 after her parents were stabbed to death was on Bill O'Reilly’s show tonight. The grandfather is a retired LEO and they were discussing how the justice system had let the couple down…

As they were talking about the matter the grandfather said his son had called him 2 weeks before and told him they were afraid of the individual that eventually killed them…

The son asked his farther to get him a gun… the father told him no let the authorities handle it.

Thought he never said so you could see on the man’s face he knew he had really made a bad mistake not getting that gun for his son.

I wanted to get angry but just could not seeing the poor mans anguish.

Another "depend on the government for your protection" victim. Only this time, he was the vector.

Well, he's still got a granddaughter.

I hope he can sleep at night. Eventually.

You Want to Be Barbarians? Let Me Get Medieval On Your Ass!

Apparently we're not slouching towards Gomorrah, we're skiing our way there.

The AP reports the following:

Tuesday, April 12, 2005 2:32 p.m. ET

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) -- A 16-year-old disabled girl was punched and forced to engage in videotaped sexual acts with several boys in a high school auditorium as dozens of students watched, according to witnesses.

Authorities are investigating and no charges have been filed in the alleged attack last month at Mifflin High School. Four boys suspected of involvement were sent home and have not returned to class.

Also, the principal, Regina Crenshaw, was suspended and will be fired for not calling police, school officials said. And three assistant principals were suspended and will be reassigned to other schools. Crenshaw had no comment Tuesday. The girl was forced to perform oral sex on at least two boys, according to statements from school officials, obtained by The Columbus Dispatch. Part of the alleged assault was videotaped by a student who had a camera for a school project.

School officials found the girl bleeding from the mouth. An assistant principal cautioned the girl's father against calling 911 to avoid media attention, the statements said. The girl's father called police.

Her father said the girl is developmentally disabled. A special education teacher said the teen has a severe speech impediment.

If I were Daddy, those four boys would never sexually assault anyone again. WALKING would require years of rehabilitation. And the "assistant principal" who "advised" not calling the police would be in need of a full set of dentures.

This is a couple of orders of magnitude worse than some 12 year-old "chavs" on a bus in London.

They want barbarism? They ought to get it.

New Member of the Blogroll.

I just added fellow Tucsonan Billy Budd's American Dinosaur to the "Arizona Blogs" list on the blogroll. Billy's been keeping tabs on the Minuteman Project, and he's a member of the blog group Stop the ACLU, and gives a list of good reasons for it.

I'll be stopping in there from time to time. I may look into joining the Stop the ACLU group myself.

For reasons of my own.

BAD AMMO WARNING!!!.

If you shoot military surplus .308 (7.62NATO) ammo, STAY AWAY FROM INDIAN SURPLUS. Excerpt:

Currently there is .308 surplus ammunition on the market made in INDIA with the headstamp OFV M80 and then a date code (usually 97), and a headstamp of KF 762b and then a date code (usually 91). From my understanding this ammunition came from the factory installed in machine gun belts. The ammunition was designed to be shot in a belt fed machine gun. A rumor is that they removed the belts/links from the ammuntion, and during the process, many of the necks got crushed, tweaked, the bullets loosened, and the bullets pressed further into the case.

Having an inquisitive nature, i figured, i would try this stuff out to see if it was as bad as everyone on the internet was saying.

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Now, my initial test lot was 100 random rounds obtained by grabbing through the can after the obviously bad rounds were removed, and thrown away. I came up with 100 rounds that after a second look, showed zero signs of bad cases, crooked bullets, or anything

--

(O)ut of the 100 test sample rounds, i found a mixture of ball and stick powder (ball is round balls of powder, and stick looks like little sticks - two different things all together). out of 100 of the test samples, 93 had disk or ball type powder and 7 of them had stick type powder. for those not into reloading, that means they dumped whatever they had available into the cases to get them done. usually a lot of ammo is consistent in powder type. not so with the indian i had.


(A)fter weighing each powder charge inside each individual case, and charting it on paper, there was a powder variance of 6 grains between the lowest charge, and the highest charge. 6 grains of powder is an unsafe variance.

I'd say so.

The post has pictures of a blown-up CETME, a blown-up MG42 (!), and a blown-up 1919(!!).

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls; CHEAPER AIN'T ALWAYS BETTER.

Apparently this is common knowledge around the "black rifle" crowd, but it's the first I've heard about it, and I thought it important enough to pass along.

Just, DAMN!.

Via Kim du Toit comes this outstanding essay on The High Road message board entitled There Are No Barbarians at the Gates. This might be vain, but I mean this sincerely: I wish I had written that. PLEASE go read it.

I did write something roughly tangent to the subject a long time ago at Themestream.com. March 7, 2001, I published Barbarians in the Village:

This week there have been not one, but two shootings on primary school campuses. Two people have died and numerous others were wounded. Both shooters were minors.

William J. Bennett was quoted once on the problem in America's schools. "Teachers were asked in 1940", he said, "what the three largest problems were in America's schools. Their answer was noise, littering, and chewing gum. Teachers were asked last year (1992) what the three largest problems in America's schools were, and the answer was assault, rape, and suicide."

Kids have picked on and ridiculed other kids since there have been kids. Kids killing other kids is a fairly recent phenomenon, however. Is society at fault? Parents? Teachers? School administrators? Our elected representatives? The media? The kids themselves?

Yes. All of the above.

Since the 1950's parents have increasingly relinquished their parental responsibilities to the schools, where education is no longer the goal, state supported day-care is. The schools have increasingly relinquished their responsibility to educate, and cannot maintain order and discipline under the constant threat of lawsuit. This has resulted in repeated generations of kids who receive less and less education, attention, and discipline as they grow up to become teachers, administrators, elected officials, members of the media and parents themselves, all the while concerned about themselves first and foremost. After all, nobody spent any time on them when they were kids. The hard, critical job of being a parent has now been reduced to making sure little Johnny is wearing the fashionable shoe of the week and has a brand-new chrome scooter like all of the "in" kids do.

So we have come to this - kids who kill because they're unpopular.

I'm not accusing all parents of doing a poor job, but how many does it take to destroy the system? Just a very few. Hillary Clinton wrote a much maligned book entitled "It Takes a Village:" in which she stated that it takes that village to raise a child. I may not agree with anything else the junior Senator from New York has to say, but on that point she's right. Whether we like it or not, the village raises our children. How much influence the village has is inversely proportional to how much influence the family has on the child. When the entire attention a child receives from his parents is clothing and material goods, the kids turn to the rest of society, our village, to tell them how to live. And our village tells them that violence is an acceptable method of solving our problems.

It took 50 years to get where we are today. The question now isn't how do we stop it, it is can we stop it?

In another column I wrote: "We don't live in the United States of America anymore, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. We live in `Merica, land of the free to do whatever we please, with no adverse consequences to our actions because that just wouldn't be "fair". Ain't Democracy wunnerful? Let's just vote ourselves bread and circuses and wait for the Barbarians to come over the walls." I was referring, of course, to the fall of the Roman Empire, whose death-knell was heralded by the empire being overrun by the barbarians they used to keep at bay.

I was wrong. Our barbarians are already inside the walls. Our barbarians are us.

"Control Group," the author of There Are No Barbarians at the Gates points out quite starkly that the barbarians have always been inside our gates. And as the post below illustrates, England seems to be re-learning this fact about now.

Perhaps the Momentum Really Has Shifted.

There have been a couple of stories lately on how the reaction to the recent "spree" shootings in Atlanta and Red Lake have resulted in unusual (from a historical perspective) reactions; a call for arming teachers and administrators by the NRA that wasn't immediately and loudly shouted down by all "right-thinking" people, a call for allowing judges and prosecutors to carry concealed in the courtroom, etc. There was a recent editorial protesting that the "humanitarian aid" to Darfur ought to include some guns so that the people being slaughtered could defend themselves. It included this classic line:

" Darfur is one more reminder that gun control is genocide's best friend."

Amen.

Congress may actually pass the "Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms" act this session. Nebraska may become the next "shall-issue" state. New Mexico is loosening its restrictions on CCW and looking at reciprocity, and its govenor signed the bill at the NRA's Raton shooting facility. After four safe years of "shall-issue" concealed-carry, Michigan is looking at allowing permit holders to carry in churches, hospitals, and schools. Florida has overwhelmingly passed a "no duty to retreat" law. A Wisconsin prosecutor showed remarkable restraint in the case of an Arkansas man who defended himself with a handgun he carried, illegally, in his vehicle. He will not be charged. The op-ed includes this:

It's not legal to carry a concealed weapon here, which many of you know because it's become one of those debates that are rallying cries for partisan groups.

The side that wants Wisconsin to consider adopting a concealed-weapons law - which most in law enforcement oppose - can point to the Goins case as a perfect example of why it's needed.

Because Goins possessed the determination to protect himself - and a convenient handgun under his seat - he gets to return to his family and friends in Arkansas instead of having them make a sad journey to Milwaukee to claim his remains.

The Associated Press (!) published an op-ed on concealed-carry laws that includes this line:

Violence this year - from courthouse shootings in Atlanta and Tyler, Texas, to the school killings at Red Lake, Minn., the most deadly since Columbine - has spurred something far different: that if the victims had weapons, they might not be victims.

Mr. V.O. Goins of Arkansas can attest to that fact.

This is not to say that gun control activists have rolled up their carpets and gone home. Hardly, but it's surprising (at least to me) to see so much support in the media and in the legislatures finally. It appears that the public is finally waking up and getting vocal, and the gun-controllers are getting desperate.

Now Arizona's govenor, Janet Napolitano, has signed legislation that will allow an elective gun safety class for public schools, that includes actual range time and familiarization with .22 rifles!

Will wonders never cease?

Words of wisdom, however: "Don't get cocky!"

And don't let up.

Randy Barnett on Joyce Foundation Funding

I mentioned this last week, when David Hardy picked up on Professor Saul Cornell's contribution to a Fordham University Law Review symposium, funded (of course) by the Joyce Foundation. Well, Professor Barnett commented at the Volokh Conspiracy on the similar symposium published in the Chicago-Kent Law Review in 2000. One zinger of a quote from Prof. Barnett:

Is accepting honoraria from a foundation, like the Joyce Foundation, that will support only one side of an issue unethical? So long as one does not change one's views to conform to the funding source's preferences, I do not think so (though I do think one should disclose one's funding sources to allow readers to evaluate for themselves whatever impact it may have on one's analysis). I do not see why foundations who wish to advance a particular view cannot ethically support the research of those who otherwise agree with its agenda. Ultimately, the soundness of one's scholarship should depend on the reasons and evidence one puts forth, not the source of any financial support one may have received. I think this is true even if the honoraria induced a scholar to write about an issue he or she would not otherwise have done, which I think probably applies to a number of contributors to the Second Amendment symposium. I feel the same way about campaign contributions. Contributing money to the campaign of politicians with whom one agrees does not corrupt the politician, unless he or she was already corrupt. Michael Bellesiles, who was paid to contribute to the Chicago-Kent symposium did not fabricate his evidence because the Joyce Foundation was paying him. He was a corrupt scholar before and after this payment was made.

So refreshing when someone is willing to call a spade a spade and not a "human operated soil relocation device."

Read Prof. Barnett's whole piece.

UPDATE, 4/14: Saul Cornell does it again, and Randy Barnett doesn't let him get away with it. Here's a key piece:

Saul asked in his reply: "Given that the gun lobby has plenty of money and places like CATO are strongly gun rights it seems a bit unfair to ask Joyce to fund your point of view." I do not expect Joyce to fund any point of view with which they disagree. It is not Joyce we are talking about, it is Chicago-Kent and Ohio State. Nor, to reiterate, do I have any problem with an individual scholar like Saul who agrees with Joyce accepting funding to support his or her academic research, provided the funding is disclosed. But Ohio State, like Chicago-Kent, is an academic institution, unlike Cato, or the Federalist Society. (I raised the Federalist Society because, even though it is not an academic institution, its programs have more balance than did Chicago-Kent's. (I did not compare the Fordham Law Review symposium to the Federalist Society—indeed, I did not mention that symposium at all in my post.)

Let me clarify this by posing the following question: Why did Joyce not organize its own conference, law review issue, or Second Amendment Research Center? The answer is plain: it wants its views to enjoy the academic respectability imparted upon it by the imprimatur of Chicago-Kent and Ohio State. It is that institutional imprimatur that enabled the Ninth Circuit to rely so heavily on articles published in the Chicago-Kent Law Review in his opinion in Silveira v. Lockyer. (BTW, the published opinion had to be modified later to remove its reliance on the discredited work of Michael Bellesiles.) This is what Joyce is buying from Chicago-Kent and Ohio State. This is what it is improper of these institutions to sell.

I've got a bit more to say here.

Quote of the Week.

Via Instapundit comes an interesting story of in-sourcing - importing Turkish tailors to hand-craft suits, a skill largely lost here. But here's the quote of the week:

"It's hard to leave home," says Aydin Olcum, 36, one of the company's Turkish master tailors. "But now the world has changed. You're not supposed to live where you're born. You're supposed to live where you can feed your family."

On the Question of Rights.

Just to let you know, Dr. Cline emailed me yesterday with the latest update in this ongoing saga. It's about four and a half pages in Word document form. I'm reading and re-reading and digesting it now. Expect a reply post some time later this week.

I think we're nearing the end of the discussion. We're going to reach some accomodation, I think, and agree to disagree on the rest.

For anyone wondering what the hell I'm talking about, read these, in consecutive order. (Fix a BIG bowl of popcorn and your favorite soft drink prior to starting. Hard liquor is only justified when you get to the fifth installment.)

What is a "Right"?

What is a "Right"? Revisited, Part I

What is a "Right"? Revisited, Part II

Rights, Morality, Idealism & Pragmatism, Part I

Rights, Morality, Pragmatism & Idealism, Part II

As before, I'll post Dr. Cline's reply and then my response as separate posts, one above the other.

(No, really! It's fun!)(To a point.)

Will Nebraska Be Next?.

Maybe! The Omaha World-Herald is reporting that State Sen. Jeanne Combs is making a pretty damned good run at it:

Guns a part of life for state senator

BY LESLIE REED
WORLD-HERALD BUREAU

LINCOLN - She has a .38, and she knows how to shoot it.

State Sen. Jeanne Combs believes she can accomplish what three male lawmakers in 10 years before her could not: to persuade the Nebraska Legislature to authorize carrying concealed handguns.

A nurse at the Farmland Foods meatpacking plant in Crete, Combs is a down-home woman with roots in Kentucky and the mill towns of Ohio.

Now 49, she grew up around hunting and often ate squirrel for supper at her Grandma Della Hacker's home in Kentucky's Clay County.

She came to believe that people couldn't count on police for protection after her home was burglarized - twice - while living in Southern California.

Amazing, isn't it, that exposure to the reality that the government can't be responsible for one's safety tends to make one appreciate the right to arms?

She purchased her stainless steel Smith & Wesson revolver when she was a home health-care and hospice nurse in Jackson County, Ky., 11 years ago.

She felt she needed it for protection as she traveled alone, often at night, visiting patients along backroads and in the hollers around Daniel Boone National Forest.

"I never had to use it, I just had it with me," she said. "It was in my black bag, with my stethoscope and my blood pressure cuff. It was right in the bottom, in a little snap pocket."

She drove up to 100 miles to visit dying patients and people suffering from injuries or chronic disease. Most qualified for government health assistance and few had indoor plumbing.

"In that culture, everyone has a gun," she said. "They carry them clipped to their belt, like people around here do a Vise-Grip."

I think she meant a Leatherman, but you get the idea.

Was she carrying the gun legally? "I don't know," she said.

Actually, she wasn't.

Since moving to Nebraska nine years ago, Combs has stored her gun in a locked box in a closet. She's no longer in a job where she feels she needs a firearm. Until recently, she hadn't gotten the pistol out for more than a year.

But if she needed it, Combs said, she'd like to be able to legally stow it in her purse or glove compartment. In Nebraska, she said, it's not socially acceptable - though it's legal - to carry a gun in the open.

"I'd be the talk of the town to walk around with a gun on my hip," she said.

Lawmakers are expected to soon begin debating Combs' proposal, Legislative Bill 454, perhaps as early as this week.

This weekend, she planned to attend three days of handgun training at Front Sight Resort in Nevada, described on its Web site as the "World's Premier Resort for Self Defense and Personal Safety Training."

The training, which normally costs $900, is being provided by the Michigan Legislative Sportsmen's Foundation. Combs is a member of the Nebraska Sportsmen's Foundation.

The Front Sight course is accepted for concealed-handgun permits in 23 states. Combs wants to be able to describe, first-hand, the training typically required for obtaining a concealed-weapon permit.

Coverage of THAT would be fascinating! So you can bet no one will.

Combs learned to shoot using her father's and brother's guns while growing up in New Miami, Ohio. Her father, a ninth-generation resident of Clay County, Ky., moved to Ohio after World War II to find work. He died when Combs was 14.

Her mother was the daughter of Sicilian immigrants who grew and sold vegetables and plants in Hamilton, Ohio.

After earning a nursing degree from Miami University of Ohio, Combs moved to California with her first husband and young daughter in 1980. She worked as director of nursing for a retirement community.

While living in Riverside, Calif., her housing development became caught up in a turf war between two gangs, she said. On her days off she rode her bike around the neighborhood to cover gang graffiti with spray paint.

Doesn't that job come with combat pay?

The second time her home was burglarized, she said, police were slow to arrive. A suspect was arrested only because a neighbor got his license plate number. He was sentenced to three years in prison, but court officials warned her he could be released well before that.

You don't say. And the subtext: "You'll be on your own, in that case."

Later she moved to Kentucky, and in 1995 to Friend, Neb., with her second husband, Ronald Combs, whom she recently divorced.

She now lives in Milligan in a home near her mother and stepfather, Shirley and Bill Lewis. They fell in love with Nebraska after attending her 2000 graduation from Concordia University in Seward with a degree in health care administration.

Combs compares her handgun to seat belts or a fire extinguisher.

"You want to be prepared," she said. "It doesn't mean you're living in fear. You want to take a practical approach to living in safety."

Senator Combs is, of course, a Republican.

Good luck, Ms. Combs. Good luck, Nebraska.

If you want to help, copy and paste the link to the Omaha World-Herald's front page, http://www.omaha.com, for their current poll question, "Do you agree with a Nebraska state senator's efforts to authorize the carrying of concealed weapons in the state?" At the time of this writing the poll is running 3124 "Yes," 1594 "No," 99 "Undecided," and 26 "I have no opinion (but I'm willing to click on the survey anyway.)"

UPDATE 4/13: From the Heartland reports that things look good.

Range Report!

I finally got out to the range today. It was a bit windy the last few days here, and I wanted to test my .223 handloads at 300 meters, so I put it off until this morning. Absolutely perfect morning to go shooting. I didn't have sight settings for 300m, so I stapled up a bunch of sight-in targets and picked the target in the middle. After the first five rounds it was obvious that I was hitting VERY low, so I dialed in a few minutes of elevation, and like a moron I picked a HIGHER target for the second go-around. Five more shots, but I couldn't see the impact points through my 45x not-so-great quality spotting scope, so I hopped in the truck (I had the 500m range ALL TO MYSELF!) and drove down.

Good news: A beautiful 2" (4-shot) group! (Best group of the day, as a matter of fact.)

Bad news: Right through the top crossbrace of the target frame. My range charges $1 per hole in the target frame. I know it was a 2" group because the frame is made of 2x2's. I figure the fifth shot went just a bit high.

So now I know my sight settings for 300, 385, and 500 meters with that load, (75 grain Hornady BTHP) and it shoots about 1.5-2MOA at 300 meters which is, realistically, about as well as I can see at that range through a 10X scope.

I also took out my freshly restocked 1943-era M1 Garand and my .50 caliber ammo can full of Korean surplus ammo in clips on bandoleers. After a bit of sight tweaking, I was able to consistently drop the steel pig silhouettes with that combo, shooting off sandbags. Iron sights!

After a hundred and fifty rounds of .223 and probably ten or twelve clips or so of .30-06 (it's so much fun, who's counting?), it was starting to warm up and get windy, so I shifted down to the Law Enforcement range for a little pistol practice. The new S&W 60-14 I picked up on Saturday is a SHOOTER! This is the first revolver I've ever been able to shoot halfway decently double-action. At seven yards I was able to keep all five 125 grain Federal .38 Nyclads in the chest just as fast as I could pull the trigger. I even practiced double-taps and was able to get the two rounds with 2-3" of each other. I'm quite impressed with this little revolver. The hi-viz fiberoptic front sight is definitely a plus. It's VERY easy to pick up and makes follow-up shots much faster.

What a great day at the range. I've got to do this more often.

Edited to add:

I forgot to mention, I tested out my two free MWG Co. magazines, a 10-rounder and a 5-rounder. Each held the advertised capacity and no more. Each was a bit of a tight fit in the mag well, but I'd imagine they'll wear in. Each fed properly.

Except the last round. Both mags. Repeatedly. The last round out would jam. I don't know if the problem is with the follower or what, but I'd be interested to know if anyone else has had this problem with theirs.

One Man's Misfortune is Another's Opportunity

I just had a fascinating and thoroughly enjoyable evening. Clayton Cramer noted on his blog that he was going to be in Tucson this weekend to contribute to David T. Hardy's Second Amendment Documentary. As soon as I saw that, I went to David Hardy's blog, Of Arms and the Law, and left an invitation to buy these men a beverage of their choice.

Well, Clayton's flight home today got cancelled due to snow in Denver, so I got to go one better. I had dinner with them both tonight. I also got Clayton to autograph my copy of For The Defense of Themselves and the State: The Original Intent and Judicial Interpretation of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms. For almost two hours we got to discuss a wide variety of topics, including Prof. Saul Cornell, Originalism, Silveira v. Lockyer, 9th Circuit Justice Alex Kozinski, and a lot more. It was GREAT! And I have (bad) photographic evidence, taken with my el-cheapo camera:

That's David Hardy on the left, Clayton Cramer on the right. (They're much less blurry in person.)

Thank you, gentlemen. Thank you very much.

Update: Clayton's home and blogged about his trip.

Oh, and Clayton? The last name is Baker! ;-)

BAG Day, 2005 - I Jumped the Gun a Little.

...so to speak. I put off doing my taxes a bit longer than normal, and because of a little complexity I had them done professionally rather than doing it myself this year. So today we went to the accountant and ran all the numbers.

I contributed a bit more to the non-interest-bearing payroll savings plan than I had expected. The refunds, both state and federal, will be substantial.

So, with my wife's blessing I went out and bought my BAG Day gun. It's not for my wife. Really. I passed on the beautiful S&W model 25 Mountain Gun in .45LC ($699), and instead went for a 3" S&W .357 Model 60, used, with adjustable sights and the green Hi-Vis fiberoptic front sight, complete with Hogue monogrip. But it's not hers. She doesn't want one.

But when I'm gone on a business trip, this little beauty, filled with five Federal 125 grain .38 Nyclads, will be in the quick-access safe for her.

Edited to add: By request, also using my crappy little camera, a picture of said Model 60:

Anybody from England Want to Weigh in on This?

This is taken, verbatim, from a SomethingAwful forum post. I find it believable, given what else I've read is going on over there, but I'd like some first-person commentary on it. If true, the situation is far worse than I thought it was, and if the populace ever grows a pair, there's literally going to be some blood in the streets.

Yesterday I was in town with a friend. I did some shopping and then I got on a bus to go home. I caught on the 2A, a double-decker, and embarked on a journey that generally lasts about 30-40 minutes. It was pretty busy. I found a seat at the back of the top deck and sat down.

A couple of stops later, four girls boarded the bus and came up to the top deck. I will attempt to use my humble grasp of the written word to convey these girls' appearance and general attitude as best as I can, but I am making no promises. It was one of those cases where you wish you could record the whole thing because otherwise the story will lack the full impact it needs when you tell it afterwards. This is quite an exciting and dramatic story, however-- well, not really, but it is by my standards-- so do read on.

Only British people will fully understand me when I explain that these girls could be fitted with no uncertain ease into the social group called 'chavs'. I consider myself to be a reasonably well-travelled individual for someone of my age and nowhere other than Britain-- and only within the past two or three years or so at the most-- have I observed these fascinating new breed of people. I also consider myself, or used to consider myself, to be a reasonably fair-minded and unprejudiced kind of guy, which is why it pains me so greatly to feel such a pang of apprehension whenever I spot someone in a baseball cap and designer sportswear approaching me and am almost always rewarded for my hesitation to deal with them with nothing other than sincere mistrust and apprehension. To accept a chav with welcoming arms is usually to invite a fist into your mouth, which quite often happens anyway (as this story will demonstrate). I don't have it in me to type out a detailed summary of everything that makes a chav a chav, but I will, for the benefit of the uninitiated Americans reading this, explain that they are almost invariably ignorant, aggressive, offensive people and something I consider to be quite an alarming (and growing) social problem in the United Kingdom at the moment. For more (and even less forgiving) details, visit www.chavscum.co.uk.

The girls that got on my bus were in their very early teens-- they could have been ten or eleven, even, but no older than fourteen years old. They wore expensive (stolen) sportswear, baseball caps and hoop earrings. They held mobile phones in one hand and packets of cigarettes in the other. They were all scowling. Their arrival was unmissable. They shrieked, screamed, and filled the air with expletives. They fought their way to the back of the bus and I felt my heart sink, because it is at the back of double-decker buses that these people feel most able to violate the anti-smoking laws. I sunk into my seat and read a travel brochure, and listened to them.

They were unbelievable. Unbearable. I've never witnessed such screaming obnoxiousness from anyone. They sat around calling each other every name under the fucking sun, rang people up on their phones and had epic domestics with them, accused one another of stealing one another’s' boyfriends-- oh, and, of course, lit up their fucking cigarettes and blew the smoke all over the fucking bus (which is a pet peeve of mine as it is, as a non-smoker). Once again I'd like to stress that I can't fully convey how incredibly, cosmically vile these four girls were-- these weren't just eye-rollingly irritating, they were offensive, harmful, obnoxious, selfish cunts. And I don't call people cunts a lot. (Although the girls did.)

After about five minutes of loudly entertaining themselves, they started voicing even louder opinions about the other people on the bus. One of them screamed "Eurgh! Why are there fucking foreigners on my bus?" when a black man and his baby arrived and found a seat. (Incredibly, as we were all attempting to do, he ignored them.) They started discussing someone sitting a few seats in front of me, a man with vaguely long hair, and (still very loudly) debating whether or not "it was a man or a girl". Eventually one of them said "go up and ask it!"-- and they did. They strutted up to the poor bastard's seat and demanded to know his gender. When he said "I'm a man", they told him to get his hair cut. This general behaviour continued for several minutes.

What I found most incredible about this situation was everyone else's reaction to it. Everyone just stared out of the window. There was absolutely no way that any of them could have missed any of this— the girls clearly had hearing difficulties and found it necessary to communicate with one another by shrieking in one others' faces. I debated for a long time as to whether or not I should risk trying to ask them to shut the fuck up, but couldn't work up the courage. Eventually, however, someone else got on the bus and restored some semblance of balance to the Force-- a guy in a bus company jacket.

Instead of putting their cigarettes out and shutting the hell up, they rose to the challenge. The girls and the bus company dude clearly knew each other from a previous engagement, because they approached him and said "'Ey, you're the fuckin' twat who told us to stop smoking last week!". He told them yes, and that he'd have them kicked off the bus again if they didn't quieten down. They didn't quieten down. They persisted in winding the guy up until finally he snapped, spun around, and started screaming at them in turn.

At this point the Drama level on this bus shot from a 6 to a 9.2. The four girls began pushing and shoving the bus company guy, who was clearly having some difficulty resisting the urge to just pick them up and throw through the window himself. The level of verbal abuse involved here beats anything, I think, I have previously witnessed in my life (and I should once again remind everyone that these girls were about twelve years old). I have experienced louder events, but only because I've seen Muse in concert. It was amazing to witness-- and most amazing at all was the British public's sustained ability to simply turn a blind eye and pretend it's not happening. I watched in horror. And then one of them let off a stink bomb.

They started screaming that "everyone on the bus fuckin' stinks", writhing around in disgust and mock-vomiting. One of them spat on the floor and proudly exclaimed "I've just been sick!! I've just been sick!". The bus guy looked lost for words, frozen with disbelief and horror.

I said, "Jesus Christ-- if you think it stinks so bad, get off the bus!". The bus guy said "Thanks, mate, thanks!". The girls turned to me and started screaming at me instead. The term "a word in edgeways" came to mind; it was like being repeatedly pummelled by a giant verbal battering ram and all of its shrieking friends. One of them screamed that if I 'said another word' they would 'hit me and blind me because my glasses would smash and go in my eyes'.

I said another word. One of them hit me in the face. This did not especially hurt, but, rather than shattering them, sent my glasses onto the floor. I grabbed one of them and realised there was nothing I could particularly do here without being arrested; and as I did it, they screamed "that's assault, that's assault!". I don't know where the bus company guy was at this point; I think he must have gone downstairs to get the bus driver (something he seemed to have done a few times before, although the bus hadn't stopped). I managed to fish around and locate my glasses before one of the other fuckers did first, which would have spelled disaster for me in the long-term. I sat back down again, boiling with rage, as they circled my seat, shouting abuse and laughing like they were fucking gangsters instead of prepubescent girls. And still none of the other passengers did anything.

This led me into something of a stalemate. I was effectively trapped, as the bus was moving and wouldn't reach another stop for a few more minutes. One of them thrust a lighter behind my head and singed my hair. I grabbed her wrist, and one of her friends stubbed her own lit cigarette out on my knuckles. This made me feel a bit like The Terminator because having a cigarette stubbed out on you does not hurt as much as you think it's going to and thus I was able to maintain an air of preserved cool. However, the girls didn't seem particularly impressed, so I let go of the girl's wrist and stood up. I grabbed my bag and shoved past them. One of them attempted to block my path.

I am a 19 year-old, heavily-built male. I could have reduced the girl's idiot skull to a broken Easter egg. I knew that if I did this I would not be given any kind of prize, despite administering a great deal of justice to the universe at large. Instead I kind of flipped out and screamed to the other people on the bus: "Will somebody fucking help me?!" This seemed to do the trick, because as everyone finally stopped pretending and turned to look, the girl seemed to lose her nerve.

As I made my way to the stairs to go to the bottom deck, I noticed my wallet had fallen on the floor. The girl who had blocked my path stamped on it; I lunged towards her and she fell backwards. I grabbed the wallet and went downstairs. As I went down the steps the girl spat on my hair.

The bus company guy was pleading with the driver to stop the bus. The man seemed terrified; not of us, but, I suppose, from what he'd been watching on the camera monitor (and choosing to ignore). We managed to persuade him to pull over and confront them. I don't know how he managed to get them to respect any variety of authority, but he managed it, because a moment later all four of them marched downstairs. As they did so, one of them shoved at me and attempted to spit at me again (but missed this time). This caused everyone on the lower deck to gasp in horror and mumble things like "disgusting" and "atrocious behaviour". As we pulled away, they banged and spat on the windows, and, as a final insult, managed to open the vehicle’s rear engine, meaning the driver had to pull over again a moment later to close it.

The whole experience cost me £2.60.

I have learnt two things from all this.

1) My worst fears about the social problem in Britain are confirmed. I don't mean to get political, but there is an increasing growth in the amount of aggressive and violent crime in the United Kingdom at the moment, and that's only one measurable facet of the problem. I also don't mean to come across as prejudiced when I say that it's an entirely working-class phenomenon; low-income, broken families are giving birth to this rising generation of aggressive, ignorant, cheating pricks. They're the same people who I have to serve in my shop every week (although, thankfully, I am leaving the job very soon, having been abused, deceived, threatened and nearly stabbed too many times); and they're the same people who spend their time punching people on buses.

2) I am increasingly convinced that the reason they are able to survive in society is because we tolerate them. An unfeeling sociopath who cannot be reasoned with has incredible power over any unprotected, reasonable individual, because the sociopath is prepared to do things that a 'normal' person will not. On that bus, unhelped by anyone other than the bus company guy, I was helpless; if I'd attempted to defend myself I would have been held legally responsible for assault, whereas a 12 year-old hitting a 19 year-old in the face is practically encouraged by the law. But if everyone on that bus had immediately addressed the problem and stood up to those arrogant, unfeeling cunts, then the problem would have been quashed immediately. It filled me with relief to see everyone openly damning them as they were kicked off the bus, but also enraged me to see how most people will only do it when they feel they are safe.

When I got home, I found that I had lost my house keys-- they must have fallen out of my pocket too, at some point. My sister let me in.

I smelled of cigarette smoke and stink bomb gas and I had idiot DNA in my hair. I took a shower. It didn't wash away my PAIN.

EDIT: a lot of people are questioning why I didn't attempt kill my aggressors. This is for a few reasons.

1) I do not enjoy physical confrontation and do not believe that hitting any of these prepubescent girls would have helped matters. Similarly, I'm in the camp that says that hitting someone who hits you simply for the purposes of revenge doesn't restore balance to the universe.

It's not revenge, it's DISCIPLINE.

2) It was easier and smarter simply to keep pushing them off me and try and get downstairs than actively attempting to wrestle any of them to the ground.
3) When I 'squealed for help', as one kind poster put it, I was not, in fact, in tears, or physically unable to move my obstacle. I was attempting to draw peoples' blind eyes to the mess that was going on in front of them, because it was at that point that I just snapped and thought "Why is everyone allowing this to happen?"

Because that is the way the State has trained you to behave, that's why.

At the end of the day, I basically won: I inflicted no harm on them, and got them kicked off the bus. I was 100% in the right the whole time. However, I will acknowledge that I did effectively get owned by a bunch of 12 year-old girls and agree that part of my masculinity will now be gone forever.

No sir. You lost, and so did your culture.

Sweet bleeding jeebus.