illspirit.com

It’s kinda been a few weeks since my last post. Not that it really matters since only like three people read anything here. But, yea, aside from a bunch of anti-gun bills being shot down in the VA legislature after the VCDL and other gun owners showed up in large numbers, there’s really been a lot of nothing going on.

For the most part, I’m really kind of burned out from trying to keep up with the election nonsense, and don’t really have much to say. As of now, it looks like we’ll be seeing Hillobama versus McCain for the Republicrat face-off in November. Despite Obama’s “change” rhetoric, his agenda is filled with the same old big government, socialist garbage as Hillary!™, so it’s somewhat hard to say which is worse. McCain is a rather uninspiring candidate who will say whatever it takes to get elected (and pass laws limiting political speech to stay in power..), then randomly tosses constituents and bits of the Constitution under the bus depending on which way the political wind is blowing.

If the primaries do end up giving us such insipid choices, I guess they won’t mind if I “throw my vote away” and vote Libertarian..

Via Arms and the Law, I see that amici for DC are online now. After reading the rather confusing brief from the U.S. Department of Justice, my next stop was the one by the Violence Policy Center. Given that they have a long history of spreading misinformation (including the invention of the term “assault weapon” in order to intentionally mislead the public), I was prepared to find plenty of doublespeak..

..until I got to the first(!) paragraph and saw this:

If the Court were to hold that private individuals unaffiliated with a militia have a Second Amendment right to keep handguns for use in their homes, the Court should also hold that such a right is subject to reasonable restrictions, and that the
District of Columbia’s handgun ban is an eminently reasonable restriction.

Wait, what? A total ban on handguns is a “reasonable restriction” on the right to own them?! So then would a total ban on books or even vocal cords would be a “reasonable restriction” on the right to free speech?

I’m, well, speechless. Seriously. Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.

Then a couple of paragraphs down, we find this gem:

The reasonableness of the handgun ban has become even more obvious since 1976. Since 1976, handguns have evolved to become even deadlier. Today’s handguns are increasingly designed to maximize lethality and mimic military-style weapons. Replacing the revolvers of thirty years ago, modern high-capacity semiautomatic pistols have the alarming ability– demonstrated all too often in mass shootings and the tragic deaths of innocent people –to kill more efficiently and more
effectively than their handgun predecessors. Affirming the court of appeals’ judgment would open the District’s doors to these modern semiautomatic pistols and other deadly handguns. Such a result would have catastrophic consequences.

“Modern semiautomatic pistols?” “The revolvers of thirty years ago?!” But, err, these “modern” semiautomatic pistols have been around for over one hundred years! By the 1930s, the Mauser C96, which was designed in 1896, had forty round mags available for it. Is that one of those “modern high-capacity semiautomatic pistols” which didn’t exist before “the revolvers of thirty years ago?”

If you believe that, I’ve got a patent on a new invention to sell you. I call it the wheel..

And on that note, my brain just exploded, so I think I’ll call it a night.

The Northern Virginia Daily is reporting that Delegate Todd Gilbert has introduced legislation which would prevent public colleges from banning gun on campus. And just as they have before every other CCW law has passed, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Ownership is predicting the hallways will run red with blood and stuff.

Of their more absurd claims, Ahab and SayUncle smack down the idea that Cho would have gotten a permit before killing thirty two people (as if the lack of permit stopped him), and Sebastian takes them to task for the idea that all college students are drunken murder suspects in waiting. They pretty much have that covered, so instead of adding a “x2,” I’ll point and laugh at this:

College students often drink heavily and sometimes use illegal drugs and engage in other risky behavior, Siebel said. A number of college students also attempt suicide.

“If you introduce guns into that setting, you’re going to wind up with more dead college students,” he said. Nor will requiring permits to carry on campus keep alcohol and guns separated.

Um, guys, heavy drinking and drug use generally take place off campus. You know, the places where people are already allowed to carry. So unless universities have started offering Beer Bong 101 courses, or have chemistry labs for cooking crack, guns won’t be “introduced” into settings filled with alcohol or whatever. The very nature of a classroom setting would, by default, “keep alcohol and guns separated.”

It seems Delegate Gilbert figured this out too, and asked the following question in the NVDaily article:

“If they’re gun owners already, if they’re carrying concealed already, and if they’re drinking already — which I assume, according to the Brady Campaign that all our students are drunken idiots — then where are the instances right now of drunken students shooting up their apartments, or going out into the parking lot and getting into gunfights with people?”

Excellent question sir. But of course they won’t be able to answer it because it has never happened..

Slate has a rather interesting article today on the chorus of politicians crying out for bipartisanship so that the government can do, umm, well, they don’t really say. The article, however, lists a number of things that have gone wrong when government actually manages to agree on something.

When we devote ourselves to working together in the name of national unity rather than obsessing on our differences, injustice loves to strike. Writing slavery into the Constitution was perhaps the greatest triumph of nonpartisan compromise in U.S. history. The denial of suffrage to non-property owners and women ranks up there, as do prohibition, the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII, the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, and the so-called war on drugs, declared by President Richard Nixon in the early 1970s and waged bipartisanly by every president—Republican and Democrat—since.

From there they go on to to mention more current travesties such as the so-called Patriot Act, earmarks, and such. As well as discussing how the public and reporters love getting “drunk” off such fantastic “unity” speeches. It’s well worth a read if you haven’t done so already.

All in all, the urge to “do something” is probably the thing which annoys me most about modern politics. Especially when statists try to define progress as the process itself, with little regard given to the end result. For instance, in debates about Presidential candidates, one often hears claims that politician A is better than politician B because they wrote or sponsored more bills. What you seldom hear is any mention that 90% of said bills were useless things like naming post offices, or non-binding resolutions supporting an existing holiday. Even rarer is what percentage of said bills were actually bad, like, say, the Patriot Act.

But, hey, who cares just as long as it looks like they’re “doing something,” right?

Why is it that every time libertarianism comes up in a conversation, some statist buffoon inevitably asks ‘b-b-but what if the government stopped doing X or made Y legal?!!1!’ as if it’s some sort of amazing gotcha question? How hard is it to understand that we really don’t want the Federal government doing, well, much of anything really? Are most people really so helpless without a government bureaucrat to hold their hand that they simply can’t imagine anybody being able to do things on their own? Let alone the thought that some people might actually *gasp* want to make their own decisions and stuff.

Seriously. How do these people manage to make it through a day by themselves without walking in front of a bus or something?

As for the roads and education straw men that they always bring up as a smoke screen, do we really need the Feds to do that? Without even getting into privatization, public education is a disaster already in large part due to Federal interference. And roads, well, like 99% of them are actually built by State and local government agencies anyway. Why on earth are we paying the Feds to waste a large portion of the money in a bureaucratic (and pork-laden) maze before they hand it right back to the States which could have just done it all to begin with? It’s like they think DC is populated with fairies and elves.

But, yea, just think, these people will be voting in Presidential primaries starting tomorrow. What a depressing way to start the new year…