Second Amendment

Following up to the March revelation that the Bush Administration had concluded that it had the legal authority to effectively suspend civil liberties, comes a piece in the New York Times about how they almost used that authority in 2002:

Bush Weighed Using Military in Arrests

WASHINGTON — Top Bush administration officials in 2002 debated testing the Constitution by sending American troops into the suburbs of Buffalo to arrest a group of men suspected of plotting with Al Qaeda, according to former administration officials.

Some of the advisers to President George W. Bush, including Vice President Dick Cheney, argued that a president had the power to use the military on domestic soil to sweep up the terrorism suspects, who came to be known as the Lackawanna Six, and declare them enemy combatants.

...into what had me busy last week(end): The big list. Shooting the damned derringers was brutal. But you hafta be ready for the Zombie apocalypse.

Jim Downey

(I posted this over on dKos, thought it might be of interest to people here.)

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xxdr zombiexx's diary on Thursday provoked a lot of good discussion, and brought out in high relief some of the differences here on the left regarding attitudes towards guns. One very insightful thing he said in the 3rd update to his diary particularly got me to thinking:

The point is that I do think that some people take this "right to own guns" bit too seriously and have elevated it to a religion.

OK, let's use that as the launching point for an analogy. It is not a perfect analogy, but I hope it is an illustrative one - please keep an open mind, and give it a chance to work. My intent here is to explain, not argue.

The First Amendment to the US Constitution states:

One of the stations I listen to in the morning is 105.7 out of Baltimore. It used to be a rock station, then it turned in to a talk radio station (one that carried Penn Jillette's broadcast) and now it's a sports radio talk station. One show that has remained on the station in the last couple of years, though it's been moved around a lot, is Ed Norris' show. I like listening to Ed because a lot of the time he voices what I would voice if I had the medium. There are some exceptions, especially related to his religious views...but that's a topic for another post.

This morning, on the Ed Norris show, Ed told a story from his time on the NYPD. His primary profession was police work and he ended that work as commissioner of the Baltimore police department. According to his story, while he was working for the NYPD, there were some tourists coming through the station where he was working. From the details I garnered from the story, I was unsure whether or not he was just in the vicinity or actually giving a tour. He relates the story of 2 Canadians that were touring the facility, a father and son. Ed worked in a precinct where there happened to be a lot of police officers who were killed on the job. On the walls of the precinct there were plaques commemorating the service of these dead officers. Ed pointed out these plaques to the Canadian tourists and explained what they were. The child then innocently asked why there were so many dead policemen. His father replied that (and I must paraphrase here I'm afraid) the reason may be that because American police officers carried guns and often pointed them at people and that the potential criminals felt that they must respond in-kind. This, he surmised, may have lead to the many deaths.

This was a short segment on the show today but it really stuck with me. Ed's response (again paraphrased) was that he simply refrained from pointing out how stupid the Canadian's sentiment was to avoid embarrassing the father in front of the son.

more after the break

No, not from blogging. Rather, from visiting some of my usual gun forums - the upcoming inauguration has caused a resurgence of hatin' on "LIEBRALS and DEMONCRATS", and I just don't have the stomach for it right now. As I said in a diary I posted on dKos a month ago:

I have given up participation in some gun forums for being told that I cannot be a gun owner and still be a liberal. Seriously, sometimes it is impossible to get other gun owners to understand that this issue does not need to be one which breaks down according to party alignment (and isn't good for gun rights if it does). Even my family and some of my gun-owning friends have a hard time wrapping their head around it. The most common refrain is that no "true" gun owner can possibly be a liberal, or vote for a Democrat.

Yeah, he says it was an accident, but I think he just has a hard time with metaphors.*

Unlucky loo: Man's gun fires, shatters toilet

CENTERVILLE, Utah (AP) -- The man escaped with a few cuts to his arm, but the toilet made out much worse.

Police say a man's gun fell out of its holster while he pulled up his pants after using the bathroom at a Carl's Jr. restaurant. The gun fired when it hit the floor and shattered the commode.

A few shards of porcelain hit and cut the man's arm. A woman in an adjacent restroom reported chest pain after she was scared by the shot. Both people were checked at the scene and released.

Police say they confiscated the 26-year-old man's firearm while they review the Tuesday incident. The man had a concealed weapons permit. No charges are being filed.

Jim Downey

*Do I really have to explain it to you?

Couple of weeks ago I got my notice from the state that it was time to renew my CCW permit. The whole process was fairly straight forward: go to the sheriff's office, hand over my driver's license and other ID, have them renew the paperwork on their end (checking to make sure I hadn't done anything which would warrant losing my permit); then over to the Driver's License center for a new ID.

I use a non-driver's ID for my CCW permit. It costs me an extra couple of bucks to have a separate ID, but that way if I have to hand over my DL to someone, they don't know that I have a permit to carry. It's not an issue for the police, should I get pulled over or something, since the CCW info is tied into the driver's license database. And this way, I always have a second photo ID.

So, I got to the Driver's License center. Light crowd, and it only took me a minute to get to a clerk. Who took my paperwork, pulled up the info on her computer, and said that since none of my information had changed, the simple thing to do was just to issue a renewal with the updated CCW expiration date. Cool.

Then she asked if I had a birth certificate or passport.

I had never even heard of Sarah Palin until Vox Day picked her as the VP nominee two full days before it was announced by the McCain camp. (How the heck did you see that one coming, Vox?)

Now, a week or so later, I am a bit worried.

You see, like Mrs. Palin's future son-in-law Levi, I'm also a fuckin' redneck. I like to to camp, hunt, ride dirt bikes, shoot guns, and hang out with the boys. Like Todd and Sarah, I too have five kids. I worked in blue-collar, 12 hours a day, up-to-your-elbows-in-grease jobs most of my adult life. I like country music. I wear a cowboy hat. I ride horses. I drink Coors Light. I listen to the Blue Collar Comedy guys, and think Larry The Cable Guy is an unsung comedy genius.

Like I said - a redneck.

The one thing I don't share with my farmer-tanned brethren is god belief. I don't have any, but most of them do. This places me into a really weird position politically. For most of my life I voted Republican. Heck, I was a conservative Republican. But the overt and covert religiosity, and the growing dominionist, theocratic themes in the GOP turned me away. I switched over to the Libertarian Party - but it's not a great fit for me either. I don't think I'll ever be a registered Democrat. I just don't identify with enough of their platform. That's not to say that I won't vote for a Democrat though, or for a Republican for that matter, if I decide that they happen to be the best person for the job.

In any case, my point is that Sarah Palin could have stood up at the Republican National Convention and read the phone book (well, People Magazine, anyway,) and the redneck "Get 'er Done!" folks would have still voted for her - not McCain alone - in droves.

I am *already* hearing it from my redneck friends and family members. "She's just like us!" They exclaim. "That nice Levi boy is going to marry Bristol, and she's not going to kill her baby! And her mom supports her!" And what about "Iron Dog" Todd Palin, commercial fisherman, champion snowmobile racer, and oil field worker? "The First Dude is a real man - did you hear how he finished a snowmobile race with a broken arm? Very cool. I think it'd be awesome to hang out with him and have a beer." Not to mention the absolutely golden video of little Piper Palin licking her hand and smoothing down Baby Trig's hair was about the cutest thing they say they've ever seen.

Do not underestimate the redneck vote. They will rise up in a flurry of mullets and "Who Farted" hats and absolutely crush Obama and Biden if those two don't get their poop in a group and do something quickly. (Here's a tip, Barack my friend; I like you, but ease up on the anti-gun stuff, and please try to stop coming across like an Ivy League asshole when you talk to us regular joes. It's going to lose you this election if you're not careful.)

I don't know if McCain made this choice, or if it was orchestrated by Rove, but whoever did it thought it through. It is either an act of sheer genius that will sweep McCain into the Oval Office, or Palin will self-destruct even past the point where getting the redneck vote can save her. The Republicans are betting that she holds it together, obviously, and she well might.

If she does hold it together, then we might all be in a lot of trouble. Because make no mistake about it, she is a far, FAR right religious theocrat who has used her political power in the past to endorse her own wacky theology. She seems to believe that she was chosen by her God to do well in the political arena, spurred by her prophetic pastor's encouragement from his pulpit - and the VP nod is only going to fuel their conviction that she is being supported supernaturally by Binky The Magic Space Clown (or whoever she thinks made the universe with magic.)

In short, we've got to win this one folks. If we don't, we're screwed. McCain is just too damned frail to have someone like Palin sitting in the on-deck spot.

Your thoughts? What am I missing here? Is it as bad as I think it is?

Hmm. I posted a piece about the Tom Willis nut over on my blog, and noted in comments there that I seem to never have cross-posted this essay from Daily Kos on either my site or here on UTI. So, I thought I would.

Jim Downey

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Do you own a fire extinguisher? Why?

There's a line from a Babylon 5 episode (I'm a big fan of the series) which has always stuck with me. Several characters are discussing the political situation on Earth following the imposition of martial law. One character says that people love it - crime is down, things are calm, peaceful.

"Yeah, the peace of the gun," replies another character.

And that, my friends, is what we have today, here in the US. Specifically, in one small city in Arkansas:

HELENA-WEST HELENA, Ark. - Officers armed with military rifles have been stopping and questioning passers-by in a neighborhood plagued by violence that's been under a 24-hour curfew for a week.

On Tuesday, the Helena-West Helena City Council voted 9-0 to allow police to expand that program into any area of the city, despite a warning from a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas that the police stops were unconstitutional.

This is my first original post, so I hope I get the damned thing right.

Did you know that the Texas Supreme Court takes separation of Church and State very seriously? They do, really. In fact, they take SoCS so seriously that they ruled that they couldn't let a church be punished for abusing a girl because "the case unconstitutionally entangled the court in religious matters."

In a 6-3 decision, the justices found that a lower court erred when it said the Pleasant Glade Assembly of God's First Amendment rights regarding freedom of religion did not prevent the church from being held liable for mental distress triggered by a "hyper-spiritualistic environment."

So the Church's freedom of religion does mean that they can get away with abusing a girl (they call it "exorcism"), cutting and bruising her, and scaring the hell out of her (no pun intended). Ruling otherwise infringes not only on their rights, but "entangles the court in religious matters."

. . . because I sure feel like celebrating with the *good* scotch:

Court: A constitutional right to a gun

Answering a 127-year old constitutional question, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to have a gun, at least in one’s home. The Court, splitting 5-4, struck down a District of Columbia ban on handgun possession.

Justice Antonin Scalia’s opinion for the majority stressed that the Court was not casting doubt on long-standing bans on gun possession by felons or the mentally retarded, or laws barring guns from schools or government buildings, or laws putting conditions on gun sales.

In District of Columbia v. Heller (07-290), the Court nullified two provisions of the city of Washington’s strict 1976 gun control law: a flat ban on possessing a gun in one’s home, and a requirement that any gun — except one kept at a business — must be unloaded and disassembled or have a trigger lock in place. The Court said it was not passing on a part of the law requiring that guns be licensed.

I was poking around one of my regular gun-board haunts, and saw a thread about a news report on the BBC about how us gun-crazed Americans are actually more tranquil and civil than might be expected - moreso than British society. Since, as I've noted here recently, I enjoy the UK, I thought I'd check it out.

The discussion was about what I expected, right up until someone started spouting . . . well, here's what the guy said:

First they gave up their guns, then they gave up their God. No Jesus, no peace, know Jesus, know peace.

If you know me at all, from personal experience or just from my writings, you might be a bit surprised to know that when I was a kid I was considered bookish, uninterested in athletics, a bit nerdy. I distinctly remember being pushed to close whatever book I was quietly reading, and to go outside and play 'like a real boy'.

It's happened again: based on a tip, a local police department used SWAT-team tactics to kick in the door of a private home and invaded with over a dozen heavily armed officers, using smoke bombs and intimidation. The only problem: the tip was wrong, and the person they were looking for wasn't there. This happened in Elgin, IL, two weeks ago. From the Courier News:

Search warrant in hand, perhaps 15 officers with the department's tactical response team burst into the Ann Street home of Frank and Betty Granger about 7:30 a.m., looking for an individual and a weapon. The officers damaged doors and broke windows, scorched a carpet and handcuffed the Grangers, who both are in their early 60s, as well as their son and three high-school-age grandchildren, according to the couple. But the search turned up neither the man nor the gun.

I find that many Republicans have a specific stereotypical "liberal" that they think of and use in their own personal mental maps whenever a "liberal" is needed to fill out the position of "bad guy" or "ACLU enemy".

This strawman is generally an effete, tree-hugging environmentalist who is a current member of P.E.T.A., a card-carrying ACLU member, someone who favors gun control, and persecutes good, wholesome Christian folks for kicks.

Forgive me if I don't recognize this person.

I am a liberal in the sense that I agree with and favor progressive political positions. I think that gay folks deserve to marry each other, that abortions should be at the woman who happens to be carrying the baby's choice, and that church and state should be kept completely and utterly separate.

However, I am a hunter. Yup. I own many firearms, and I enjoy hunting. I strongly support the Second Amendment and believe that the right to keep and bear arms is one of the most important civil liberties that we Americans posses. In fact, I am going Javalina hunting in February and I hope like hell that I can bring home a good-sized pig so that we can have a fantastic barbecue out in the backyard and feed the family well.

My take on firearms is that they stand as a proxy for our essential right to defend ourselves against our own government if it happens to go insane and get too big for it's collective britches. What the heck else are we going to do to defend ourselves? Take our government to court? Plus, firearms serve as an wonderful tool for connecting with our roots as a predatory animal. There is nothing quite like bringing down your own kill and securing and preparing it for your family. I think that it is healthy to step out of our artificially-constructed, scripted lives and re-connect with the human animal that lives within all of us. And no, I am not romanticizing it. I do not advocate a return to a savage, primitive lifestyle because it's somehow "closer to nature". That's bullshit.

In any case, I am going hunting in February. I will hopefully bring down a Javelina. I am really looking forward to it.

Does anyone else like to hunt or shoot besides me - or am I the only one?