The recent Supreme Court decisions to overturn gun control laws in Chicago and Washington DC have a lot of people talking about the Second Amendment and what kind of authority it gives to the federal government to overrule state and local gun control laws.
Despite what anyone says, it’s a pretty complicated question. Let’s examine the text of the amendment.
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
The issue would be a lot more straightforward, I believe, if the amendment had not included those first four words. By including them, the right of the people to own and carry guns is tied to the concept of a “well regulated Militia.” Just what is meant by that phrase, and was it intended to limit our right to own firearms in any way?
That’s a question I’ve struggled with for some time. I suspect that the concept of a citizen Militia had a meaning that was relevant when the amendment was written that is lost on us today.
These days if someone tells they belong to a “Militia” you probably assume they are part of some fringe group with plans to overthrow the government. But I expect that back in the late eighteenth century every able-bodied male was considered to be a part of a citizen’s Militia in their state, city, and neighborhood, and when there was trouble they were all expected to rally in the town square locked and loaded.
We don’t live in that world today, and most of us don’t hold regular drills with our neighbors to practice defensive maneuvers in case we are attacked by marauding bandits. So a plain reading of those first four words of the Second Amendment can’t be applied to the reality of life in America today. What we have to do is try to discern the intent of these words and apply them to the modern world.
If you study the philosophy of the men who wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, you find that one of the concepts that turns up often in their thinking is a healthy distrust of the power of the government over a free citizen. They had witnessed firsthand what happens when a government is virtually all-powerful, and they didn’t want that to happen here.
One of the best ways to be sure that a government does not exercise absolute power over its citizens is to be sure that you never get into a situation where the only ones who have guns are people who work for the government. I believe the Second Amendment was created to guarantee that situation never happened in America.
On the other hand, it probably occurred to the founding fathers that allowing every man, woman, and child in America to own and operate any kind of weapon they wanted in every conceivable situation is not necessarily in everyone’s best interest either. They probably weren’t looking to preserve the sacred right of a convicted felon to walk down your street taking target practice on your mailbox in the middle of the night, for example. I think that may be why they included the reference to a “well regulated Militia.”
My interpretation of the Second Amendment, therefore, is that it was intended to protect the rights of law abiding citizens to own firearms and use them for their own protection. That should preclude cities from enacting virtual outright bans on handguns, but it would not preclude things like criminal background checks at the point of sale.
In short, I think the Supreme Court is following the spirit of the Second Amendment with their recent rulings. But gun control laws have to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis to measure their intent and effect before we can pronounce judgment on their constitutionality.
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
How dumb do they think we are?
H.L. Mencken said that no one ever went broke, or lost a political office, by underestimating the intelligence of the general public. That may be true, but sometimes it seems that public officials really abuse the privilege of treating us like idiots. A few recent examples of that were especially egregious.
Imagine if you will that you see a car swerving dangerously in traffic. Imagine that you call the police to report this apparently-impaired driver and the police locate said vehicle and pull it over. Now imagine that when the officer approaches the vehicle, the smell of alcohol wafts out of the driver’s open window.
What do you think would happen in that situation? Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the officer would likely administer a sobriety test to see if the driver was under the influence of alcohol, and rightly so. But on that one-hundredth occurrence, perhaps the driver is not just some average schmuck like you or me, perhaps the driver is someone important like Bibb County District Attorney Howard Simms.
When just such a set of circumstances occurred a few weeks ago, the Macon police officer who pulled Simms over did not choose to issue a sobriety test but instead drove Simms’ vehicle to his intended destination and sent him on his merry way. If this does not reek of favoritism, I really don’t know what does.
But Macon police officials deny that any impropriety occurred and claim that the officer on the scene was merely using “discretion” and was acting in “consideration for the driver.” Right. How about showing some consideration for those of us who don’t want to be flattened by an impaired driver? Come on guys, at least do us the favor of coming up with a better cover story when you are looking out for your own.
Another entry in the “how dumb do they think we are?” sweepstakes can be found in the state’s Republican gubernatorial primary. If you know anything about statewide Republican primaries in Georgia, you know that they invariably come down to a game of “who’s the most conservative conservative in this race?” And (for reasons that I don’t fully comprehend) the candidate who comes off as the most anti-gay and anti-abortion rights usually wins the title.
This year one of the candidates has a real problem on the anti-gay front. Secretary of State Karen Handel is running for governor this year, and her apparently cozy relationship with the Log Cabin Republicans (a gay advocacy group within the Republican Party) is coming back to haunt her.
It seems that Handel courted the support of the LCR when she was running for office in Atlanta, but she has tried to distance herself from that relationship now that she running in the (less gay-friendly) statewide primary. Marc Yeager, a past LCR president, has provided warm and friendly emails sent to him by Handel in 2002 and 2003 that seemingly confirm her support of gay adoption rights and domestic partner benefits. Yeager still supports Handel’s candidacy, but is understandably miffed that she is now shunning her former friends at the LCR.
Handel’s explanation for her apparent flip-flop on the gay rights issue is laughable: she says she never wrote the emails that were signed with her name and they don’t really represent her views on gay rights. I hate to tell you this, Karen, but saying that you don’t even have control of what your own staff is doing in your name is really not a big improvement over changing your position on an issue because of political expediency.
But hey, the Macon PD and Karen Handel are just carrying on a time-honored tradition of people in power who think that we will swallow any cockamamie explanation for their foolish behavior because we usually let them get away with it. As long as we put up with their nonsense we can just expect more of the same.
Imagine if you will that you see a car swerving dangerously in traffic. Imagine that you call the police to report this apparently-impaired driver and the police locate said vehicle and pull it over. Now imagine that when the officer approaches the vehicle, the smell of alcohol wafts out of the driver’s open window.
What do you think would happen in that situation? Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the officer would likely administer a sobriety test to see if the driver was under the influence of alcohol, and rightly so. But on that one-hundredth occurrence, perhaps the driver is not just some average schmuck like you or me, perhaps the driver is someone important like Bibb County District Attorney Howard Simms.
When just such a set of circumstances occurred a few weeks ago, the Macon police officer who pulled Simms over did not choose to issue a sobriety test but instead drove Simms’ vehicle to his intended destination and sent him on his merry way. If this does not reek of favoritism, I really don’t know what does.
But Macon police officials deny that any impropriety occurred and claim that the officer on the scene was merely using “discretion” and was acting in “consideration for the driver.” Right. How about showing some consideration for those of us who don’t want to be flattened by an impaired driver? Come on guys, at least do us the favor of coming up with a better cover story when you are looking out for your own.
Another entry in the “how dumb do they think we are?” sweepstakes can be found in the state’s Republican gubernatorial primary. If you know anything about statewide Republican primaries in Georgia, you know that they invariably come down to a game of “who’s the most conservative conservative in this race?” And (for reasons that I don’t fully comprehend) the candidate who comes off as the most anti-gay and anti-abortion rights usually wins the title.
This year one of the candidates has a real problem on the anti-gay front. Secretary of State Karen Handel is running for governor this year, and her apparently cozy relationship with the Log Cabin Republicans (a gay advocacy group within the Republican Party) is coming back to haunt her.
It seems that Handel courted the support of the LCR when she was running for office in Atlanta, but she has tried to distance herself from that relationship now that she running in the (less gay-friendly) statewide primary. Marc Yeager, a past LCR president, has provided warm and friendly emails sent to him by Handel in 2002 and 2003 that seemingly confirm her support of gay adoption rights and domestic partner benefits. Yeager still supports Handel’s candidacy, but is understandably miffed that she is now shunning her former friends at the LCR.
Handel’s explanation for her apparent flip-flop on the gay rights issue is laughable: she says she never wrote the emails that were signed with her name and they don’t really represent her views on gay rights. I hate to tell you this, Karen, but saying that you don’t even have control of what your own staff is doing in your name is really not a big improvement over changing your position on an issue because of political expediency.
But hey, the Macon PD and Karen Handel are just carrying on a time-honored tradition of people in power who think that we will swallow any cockamamie explanation for their foolish behavior because we usually let them get away with it. As long as we put up with their nonsense we can just expect more of the same.
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
Gulf spill a death blow to small government argument?
One would hope that all of us would be too shocked and saddened by the disaster unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico to spend any of our time and energy figuring out ways to spin the situation to score cheap political points against our ideological opponents. But of course politics never sleeps, and some liberals have been quick to trumpet the situation as an object lesson on the dangers of limited government.
A good example of that kind of opportunism could be found on these pages recently in the form of an editorial by Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts. In his column Pitt gleefully related the supposed “conversion” of Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal from small-government conservative to a guy begging on his hands and knees for Uncle Sam to ride in on his big white horse and rescue his state from ecological disaster.
” As there are no atheists in foxholes,” Pitts opined, “it turns out there are no small-government disciples in massive oil spills.” I have to admit the man is a gifted writer, but I have to respectfully disagree with his sentiment here. There is a big difference between a small-government conservative and a complete anarchist. It may seem like a small distinction to someone like Pitts, but it really isn’t.
Small-government conservatives believe that there are certain things that we absolutely need government for and there are many other things that it should keep its nose out of. And one of the things we need government for is to oversee and regulate activities by businesses and private citizens that could cause serious injury and/or death to other citizens.
Drilling for oil many miles beneath the surface of the ocean is, we should all realize by now, a very risky venture that could cause great injury to the earth and all of its inhabitants if things go wrong. Therefore, even many small-government conservatives would agree that the government had a responsibility to look over the shoulder of BP when this well was being drilled and make sure they were proceeding with extreme caution. It is beginning to look like they did not do a very good job of that.
Consider the following:
- The Deepwater Horizon rig that is at the center of this catastrophe was exempted from a detailed environmental impact assessment by the Minerals Management Service.
- The blowout preventer devices used on this well had exhibited an unreliable track record since testing requirements for them were relaxed in the 1990s.
- The well was not equipped with a $500,000 acoustic safety device that countries like Norway and Brazil require for their deepwater wells.
- There is evidence that a BP executive overruled rig workers who did not want to replace heavy drilling fluid in the well with saltwater. Making the switch was supposed to save the company money, but it may have contributed to the blowout. Perhaps there should be a government safety expert in the room when decisions like this are being made.
I think it’s fair to say that when all the investigations are complete we’ll find that higher level of proper oversight on the part of the federal government would have likely prevented this disaster from occurring. Will this information cause me to abandon my libertarian leanings and jump on the big government bandwagon? Not a chance.
The government has a role to play in society and in the business world. It should most certainly scrutinize and regulate potentially dangerous enterprises like deep sea drilling. But I don’t think an exploding oil well lends any legitimacy to the argument that the government should take over the health care industry or pressure banks to lend money to people who don’t have the resources to pay their mortgages.
Allow me to sum up my theory of government by paraphrasing a famous saying by Albert Einstein - government should be as big as absolutely necessary, but no bigger.
A good example of that kind of opportunism could be found on these pages recently in the form of an editorial by Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts. In his column Pitt gleefully related the supposed “conversion” of Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal from small-government conservative to a guy begging on his hands and knees for Uncle Sam to ride in on his big white horse and rescue his state from ecological disaster.
” As there are no atheists in foxholes,” Pitts opined, “it turns out there are no small-government disciples in massive oil spills.” I have to admit the man is a gifted writer, but I have to respectfully disagree with his sentiment here. There is a big difference between a small-government conservative and a complete anarchist. It may seem like a small distinction to someone like Pitts, but it really isn’t.
Small-government conservatives believe that there are certain things that we absolutely need government for and there are many other things that it should keep its nose out of. And one of the things we need government for is to oversee and regulate activities by businesses and private citizens that could cause serious injury and/or death to other citizens.
Drilling for oil many miles beneath the surface of the ocean is, we should all realize by now, a very risky venture that could cause great injury to the earth and all of its inhabitants if things go wrong. Therefore, even many small-government conservatives would agree that the government had a responsibility to look over the shoulder of BP when this well was being drilled and make sure they were proceeding with extreme caution. It is beginning to look like they did not do a very good job of that.
Consider the following:
- The Deepwater Horizon rig that is at the center of this catastrophe was exempted from a detailed environmental impact assessment by the Minerals Management Service.
- The blowout preventer devices used on this well had exhibited an unreliable track record since testing requirements for them were relaxed in the 1990s.
- The well was not equipped with a $500,000 acoustic safety device that countries like Norway and Brazil require for their deepwater wells.
- There is evidence that a BP executive overruled rig workers who did not want to replace heavy drilling fluid in the well with saltwater. Making the switch was supposed to save the company money, but it may have contributed to the blowout. Perhaps there should be a government safety expert in the room when decisions like this are being made.
I think it’s fair to say that when all the investigations are complete we’ll find that higher level of proper oversight on the part of the federal government would have likely prevented this disaster from occurring. Will this information cause me to abandon my libertarian leanings and jump on the big government bandwagon? Not a chance.
The government has a role to play in society and in the business world. It should most certainly scrutinize and regulate potentially dangerous enterprises like deep sea drilling. But I don’t think an exploding oil well lends any legitimacy to the argument that the government should take over the health care industry or pressure banks to lend money to people who don’t have the resources to pay their mortgages.
Allow me to sum up my theory of government by paraphrasing a famous saying by Albert Einstein - government should be as big as absolutely necessary, but no bigger.
Oil spills and fish tales
I never ceased to be amazed at how an event can be interpreted in many different ways by people depending on their point of view. Take for example the big oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that has already caused massive environmental damage and as yet has still not been contained.
Before the spill happened I was sort of on the fence about whether offshore drilling for oil was really a good idea given the risks involved. Seeing what can happen (and now has happened) when things go horribly wrong pushed me off of the fence and into the “strongly opposed unless someone can convince me this sort of thing is very unlikely to occur again” camp.
I would have assumed that most Americans would feel the same way. But according to a poll I saw this week published by Public Policy Polling that was not a good assumption. The poll showed that a solid 55% of Americans are completely undaunted in their support for offshore drilling despite the millions of gallons of crude oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico.
More surprising than that was the fact that when asked how the spill had affected their support for offshore drilling, a jaw-dropping 21% of those polled said the gulf disaster has made them MORE likely to support offshore drilling than they were before it occurred. Among Republicans in the poll the number was even higher at 28% and was equal to the number who said that the spill made them less likely to support offshore drilling.
That seemed very hard to believe at first, but other data from the same poll provided some possible perspective on why some people might have answered the way they did. 9% of those polled believe the spill was actually caused by environmentalist whackos who wanted to give offshore drilling a bad name. Another 22% were “unsure” if it might have been an environmentalist plot. This was the first time I’d even heard this suggested, but apparently Rush Limbaugh tossed out the idea on one of his recent broadcasts so I guess it’s been out there for a while.
Now I invite anyone who has better information to correct me if I’m wrong here, but I am not aware of a shred of evidence that anyone has produced or even suggested may exist that the oil spill was an intentional act of eco-terrorism. It is amazing to me that Rush Limbaugh or anyone else would throw out such an idea unless there was some factual evidence behind it, but maybe I’m just being naïve because that appears to be exactly what has happened.
The only explanation I’ve been able to come up with is that people who staunchly support the idea of offshore drilling see this spill as a real, tangible, incontrovertible impediment to their cause and have created this fantasy explanation out of thin air to relieve the cognitive dissonance that would otherwise trouble their thoughts. People do this sort of thing all the time I guess, creating alternate explanations for things when the reality disagrees with their world view. This one just seems especially bizarre and desperate.
I have no beef with people who have carefully weighed the pros and cons of offshore drilling and are still of the opinion that we need to continue the practice. Like most anything there are arguments to be made on either side and the current spill is just one facet of that argument. But it’s scary to realize that there are so many people who can easily divorce themselves from reality and swallow fish tales about diabolical environmental terrorists who blow up oil wells while magically leaving no trace of their actions.
If anyone has evidence that this oil spill was anything other than an unintentional screw-up of epic proportions, please come forward. Otherwise they should shut their traps and leave the grown-up discussions to people who live in the real world.
Before the spill happened I was sort of on the fence about whether offshore drilling for oil was really a good idea given the risks involved. Seeing what can happen (and now has happened) when things go horribly wrong pushed me off of the fence and into the “strongly opposed unless someone can convince me this sort of thing is very unlikely to occur again” camp.
I would have assumed that most Americans would feel the same way. But according to a poll I saw this week published by Public Policy Polling that was not a good assumption. The poll showed that a solid 55% of Americans are completely undaunted in their support for offshore drilling despite the millions of gallons of crude oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico.
More surprising than that was the fact that when asked how the spill had affected their support for offshore drilling, a jaw-dropping 21% of those polled said the gulf disaster has made them MORE likely to support offshore drilling than they were before it occurred. Among Republicans in the poll the number was even higher at 28% and was equal to the number who said that the spill made them less likely to support offshore drilling.
That seemed very hard to believe at first, but other data from the same poll provided some possible perspective on why some people might have answered the way they did. 9% of those polled believe the spill was actually caused by environmentalist whackos who wanted to give offshore drilling a bad name. Another 22% were “unsure” if it might have been an environmentalist plot. This was the first time I’d even heard this suggested, but apparently Rush Limbaugh tossed out the idea on one of his recent broadcasts so I guess it’s been out there for a while.
Now I invite anyone who has better information to correct me if I’m wrong here, but I am not aware of a shred of evidence that anyone has produced or even suggested may exist that the oil spill was an intentional act of eco-terrorism. It is amazing to me that Rush Limbaugh or anyone else would throw out such an idea unless there was some factual evidence behind it, but maybe I’m just being naïve because that appears to be exactly what has happened.
The only explanation I’ve been able to come up with is that people who staunchly support the idea of offshore drilling see this spill as a real, tangible, incontrovertible impediment to their cause and have created this fantasy explanation out of thin air to relieve the cognitive dissonance that would otherwise trouble their thoughts. People do this sort of thing all the time I guess, creating alternate explanations for things when the reality disagrees with their world view. This one just seems especially bizarre and desperate.
I have no beef with people who have carefully weighed the pros and cons of offshore drilling and are still of the opinion that we need to continue the practice. Like most anything there are arguments to be made on either side and the current spill is just one facet of that argument. But it’s scary to realize that there are so many people who can easily divorce themselves from reality and swallow fish tales about diabolical environmental terrorists who blow up oil wells while magically leaving no trace of their actions.
If anyone has evidence that this oil spill was anything other than an unintentional screw-up of epic proportions, please come forward. Otherwise they should shut their traps and leave the grown-up discussions to people who live in the real world.
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