Standard Mischief

I really thought the opponents of the pre-existing Right to Keep and Bear Arms would be spilling out the seams by now, however the response has been muted. I have found a few.

This first person proves to me that Moscow, Idaho is not an exclusive oasis of bright and level-headed people (although I only had a few data points to begin with).

First off, you need to read this story, from which I’ll excerpt the following quote:

He told a woman who had been pulled from her car and beaten in the head that she or her mother needed to “purchase a weapon, obtain a gun permit and learn to protect yourself.”

Then you need to consider the mental gymnastics that needed to happen for this person to come up with this blog headline on the news story:

Tenessee Judge: Heller decision means it’s your fault if someone attacks you

Wow, what a leap. Besides the fact that the Judge never said anything like that, Sara here is obviously laboring under the impression that the police are able to and have a duty to protect everyone. First off Sara, I would suggest that the Judge was just offering some free advice. Second, consider researching the Warren v. D.C. case (links here, here, here and Google is your friend too.) Finally, if you do nothing else, click on this link (previously linked to by Uncle and Insty, but the URL has changed and it’s not redirecting properly).

Meanwhile, Jill over at Feministe - while not at all invoking the D.C. v. Heller decision - posts a timely opinion titled “Guns are a feminist issue?“.

Now, I was an active commenter on Feministe for well over a year. My intent was to understand this subculture and see what makes them tick and then blog about the experience. One thing I never understood was why these people pretend Feminism is a big tent philosophy that is wide open to everyone under the sun that believes in equal rights and equal protection under the law. In reality, to become one of the cabal you seem to need to have the correct liberal-left leanings and a firm conviction that the goverment is the solution to everything (crime, discrimination, wage differences, child support, the protection of the domestic supply of domestic partners from inexpensive overseas imports, the price that drug companies charge for birth control, everything). In the real world, every single weekend these people are revoking each others’ feminist membership cards.

I still don’t understand what an “anti-feminist” is, but it seems to cover a large swath of people from holy rollers who think that their religious book makes women chattel, all the way to people who support equal rights and believe that a firearm is an effective self-defense tool that can level the field between smaller, lighter and physically weaker people and their aggressors. I suppose that once you mentally sweep Laurel, Leah , Roberta, Tam, Kit, Breda, Mauser*Girl, Squeaky, Zendo Deb, and the rest of us equal rights supporters out of your pup tent, the echoes that you hear will surely agree that guns are icky-poo.

Anyway, she does the typical lying with a link to the Violence Policy Center statistics. There the VPC jumps to the horrible skewed presumption that the only self defensive records that should be deemed worthy of note are when a woman with a handgun (not a shotgun, nor a rifle) shoots and kills an attacker. Not counted are incidents where the attacker is wounded and lives. Nor is the incidents where the mere display of a firearm prevents an attack altogether, nor any incidents where a potential aggressor does not even decide to engage because the non-victim is not in a victim-disarmed-zone and might be carrying or be near someone who is discreetly carrying (see the map of this trend, Jill, and weep).

Update: added the “right to carry” image to the post instead of linking to it. It’s covered under the creative commons license and owned by Radical Gun Nuttery!

Yea, sorry about that, but this has been the biggest news since jackbooted thugs were kicking in doors in New Orleans and confiscating firearms under color of law.

If you’re annoyed by the wall-to-wall coverage just ignore all the posts that come across the RSS feed with Heller in the title.

Best Heller post so far is Laurel’s. She found an interesting excerpt:

In any event, the meaning of “bear arms” that petitioners and JUSTICE STEVENS propose is not even the (sometimes) idiomatic meaning. Rather, they manufacture a hybrid definition, whereby “bear arms” connotes the actual carrying of arms (and therefore is not really an idiom) but only in the service of an organized militia. No dictionary has ever adopted that definition, and we have been apprised of no source that indicates that it carried that meaning at the time of the founding. But it is easy to see why petitioners and the dissent are driven to the hybrid definition. Giving “bear Arms” its idiomatic meaning would cause the protected right to consist of the right to be a soldier or to wage war—an absurdity that nocommentator has ever endorsed. See L. Levy, Origins of the Bill of Rights 135 (1999). Worse still, the phrase “keep and bear Arms” would be incoherent. The word “Arms” would have two different meanings at once: “weapons” (as the object of “keep”) and (as the object of “bear”) one-half of an idiom. It would be rather like saying “He filled and kicked the bucket” to mean “He filled the bucket and died.” Grotesque.

Of course, I’m sure that it will take another lawsuit or four score before Fenty et al. allow any type of “shall issue” carry in D.C.

A few paragraphs pulled from a WaPo blog:

D.C. Attorney General: All Guns Must Be Registered

…

“All handguns have to be registered,” Nickles said.

Among the likely regulations: Gun owners would have to be 18 or older and could not have been convicted of a felony or any weapon-related charge or have been in a mental hospital for the past five years. Registrants also will be finger-printed and required to pass a written test to be sure they understand the city’s gun laws, Nickles said.

At least initially, he added, residents would be limited to one handgun apiece. The city will set up a hotline for firearm registrations.

…

Yea that’s about enough for one day. Don’t want to kill my good mood.

I’m getting back on my bike ’till I bonk.

The anticipation was killing me, so at 9:42 I left the phone, watch, and PDA at home, saddled up, and went for a bike ride. I wasn’t going to just sit there and refresh the screen until it was released. The highest court in the land said yesterday that all of the remaining opinions would be released today, starting at 10:00 AM.

After exploring neighborhoods nearby via petal power, around 11:15 I returned home and all I had to do was glance at the RSS aggravator. I’m real happy I won’t have to blog about Plan B.

So 5 out of 9 Supreme Beings agreed with the just mildly obscure language in the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States that the right to keep fully functional (assembled in working order and without a trigger lock) exists, and people who have them may move them from room to room without a permit err, I mean a permit that D.C. must now issue. It’s not much, but it’s a start. One useless liberty infringing law struck down ~10,000 or so more to go.

I’m not going to read the decision today. There’s plenty of time later for that. And while I may read some of the bloggers, I’ll be most interested in what the anti-freedom people - bloggers and people like Adrian Fenty, Mayor of D.C. - have to say.

I also most certainly want to write about the others in the suit - Parker and others - who’s pleadings to the court just didn’t have standing. There’s a post or two there too.