End the War on Freedom

As promised, I bought a Ruger 10/22 and a Crosman BB gun yesterday morning. I planned to buy them at the Wal-Mart I visited a couple of weeks ago, but when I got there I noticed a Dick's Sporting Goods across the parking lot. They had a large hunting section with guns, bows, accessories, and good help. I picked out the rifles below, filled out the Brady questionaire for the .22, waited for the sales guy to call the FBI, got his help picking the accessories, plopped down my credit card, and walked out. I bought everything you see here except the lock for the ammo box, which I got at the Home Depot next door. I shot a few magazines of BBs at flowers in the field outside my house. Haven't fired the .22 yet. Click on the image for a bigger version (323K) and a few more details on the rifles.

Alwin Hawkins at View from the Heart - Oliver's Army - One man's reading of pictures of the killing by police of a protester at the G8 summit in Genoa. Alwin thinks it was self-defense on the policeman's part. The guy who collected and assembled the pictures said, "the actions of the carabinieri do not meet the legal definition of justifiable homicide according to the Italian code of law". From Alwin's description, sounds like self-defense to me. [heart]

There are four new articles in The Libertarian series by Vin Suprynowicz:

• And now, may I have the envelope please ... - Las Vegas is going to develop the last large piece of land zoned for unlimited gaming, as a minor-league baseball stadium. Guess whose idea that was? You got it. The current casino owners, who own the City Council. Hohohohoho! This one is good.

  Don't think of the structure that sits there now as a "parking garage." Think of it as "Not a Casino." And that's exactly what the aging monopolists of Fremont Street now want to see built on the Union Pacific Parcel: Not Another Casino.

• And he's taxing the stairway to heaven ... - Vin comments on the attempt by Los Angeles County to tax Hughes Aircraft satellites.

  The combination of a booming economy and confiscatory tax rates have combined to saddle governments everywhere with the kind of problem politicians love -- finding ever more black holes into which they can shovel the embarrassing surpluses that otherwise keep piling up in excess of inflation and population growth, combined.
  
  In this context, one wonders why the taxmen would continue to seek out new things to tax. But in the end, that's like asking why the scorpion stung the frog -- it was just in his nature.

• Get out the sandbags - Nevada has figured out a novel way to double the salary of their government welfare recipients, er... employees.
• Military base closings - According to the constitution, America should have no standing army whatsoever during peacetime. The least we can do is close a few military bases.

  How large should America's peacetime military establishment be?
  
  The question reminds us that America's founders wanted no "standing army" at all. In fact, they solemnly promised supporters and skeptics alike there would never be one. The clause "but no Appropriation of Money for that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years" was surely more than a mere bookkeeping reminder, back in 1787, that ongoing budgets and allocations needed to be rubber stamped again ever 24 months.
  
  ...
  
  Fortunately, once the initial fear of change is overcome, many states have actually found such base closings to be "win-win" situations. From the Presidio in San Francisco to Quonset Point in Rhode Island, local communities have found that replacing the bare-bones, peacetime military use of prime and strategically located real estate with tax-paying, private sector residential, commercial and industrial activity actually ends up generating more jobs and money for the local economy.
  
  (The only surprise is that this should surprise us. Were we under the impression the method of asset allocation practiced in the Soviet Union worked out well?)

  I must be paranoid; I still believe in communists - Clark County Nevada has finally caved in to union pressure and completely eliminated merit raises. Communism by any other name...

Ron Paul's Texas Straight Talk - UN Plans for Global Gun Control - Dr. Paul covers last week's meeting by the commU.N.ist gun banners.

The simple truth is that the UN is not concerned with our Constitution or our system of government. It is concerned only with expanding its power. It's hardly surprising that global government planners seek to impose global gun control, because disarmed nations will be that much easier to rule. Remember, the UN has much more power today than anyone could have imagined 50 years ago. So while it may seem far-fetched today that the UN could ever force U.S. citizens to turn over their arms, the current gun control conference could be planting the seed for such tyranny in decades to come. UN supporters like to ridicule the notion that the UN represents the beginning of one-world government, but what other label can be applied to an organization that seeks global laws, global courts, centralized legislative power, and a worldwide army?

I read last Monday's issue of The Libertarian Enterprise: "Locked, Loaded, & Lost To Us".

• In Memoriam - a tribute to Mark Penman, aka "Laissez Firearm", including links to his three TLE articles and a photo.
• Letter from James J Odle - Mr. Odle liked L. Neil and Aaron Zelman's new book, Hope. You may remember that I liked it too. Big time. Go ahead. Click on the link, or the picture in the left-hand column. Order yourself a copy. Find out how you'd feel if you no longer feared your government.
• The Fifth of July by L. Neil Smith - I reviewed this when it first came out. If you haven't read it, please do so now.
• All Things Being Equal by Minority Mike - the joys of communism, compliments of your local congress. Mike's got a little not-so-humble pie for them.

  Being a blind parapalegic shouldn't disqualify ya from being a wide receiver for the Packers! Hell, they're even gonna make sure two thirds of the parking spaces out at the stadium are handicapped only! Wanna fly the Concorde? Bein' 8 years old shouldn't stop ya. Let's put a stack of phone books in all the pilots' seats. Buckle up now! Ya say yer a crack-addicted, fifth-generation welfare recipient with a cash flow problem? No sweat, they'll get the workin' folks to dig a little deeper come tax time. Guns givin' yer inner child the vapors? We'll take 'em away from the 80 million lawful gun owners in America an' then only a few assorted murderous criminals will have 'em. Feel better now?
  
  ...
  
  5. In keeping with the legislator's desire to disarm all of us, we shall now disarm all of them. No bodyguards either! Now that you're unarmed and defenseless, waddle down a street in any inner city in America after dark. Take a part-time job on the night shift in a convienience store. Take pride in knowing that you were raped and murdered while keeping the streets safe "for the children."

• An Application for Employment by L. Neil Smith - L. Neil proposes to Charles Moore to write a weekly 2000 word article in London's Daily Telegraph. Hope he gets the job. Great Britain needs a good weekly dose of freedom.

  To me, it appears that the entire civilized world has cancer at the moment, or, if you prefer, gangrene, in the political form we call socialism, and Britain has what looks to my practiced eye like a terminal case. The medicine your country badly needs is a good, stiff, uncompromising dose of doctrinaire libertarian argument.
  
  ...
  
  One of my favorite mentors, Robert LeFevre, used to say, "Aim at zero": even if you don't advocate shutting government down completely, you must always act as if you do. There's simply so much inertia to civilization that if you don't overshoot the mark deliberately, you'll never get anywhere near what you really want. (This is an important principle in martial arts, as well, where you never strike at a face, but through it.) Don't worry, Bob would say, if you suddenly discover that by some terrible accident you've abolished government altogether, you can make a few phone calls and have a new one up and running that same afternoon.
  
  ...
  
  You have to start tough and stay tough. Every time the parasites running your country come up with a new scheme just short of (but ever closer to) killing you, cooking you, and eating you, you have to make it cost them something. You don't oppose intrusions and violations by whimpering, "Ooh, pwease don't do that to me!". You have to argue to millions of readers that the possession or use of metal detectors, surveillance cameras, or facial recognition software by any government agency or employee must be a felony punishable by life in prison -- although I'd greatly prefer making it a hanging offense, myself.

• When the Levee Breaks by Jeff Elkins - commentary on the latest reported adultery in the nation's capital, beginning with a nice Douglas Adams quote. Mr. Elkins proposes a "voting is immoral" campaign with the goal of 60% none-of-the-above in 2002 and 75% by the presidential election of 2004. Good idea. We're already at 50%, so it's definitely an achievable goal.

  Do we have any ethical national politicians? Perhaps, but offhand I'm having trouble coming up with names. Even those who may not be sexual predators are serial rapists of our constitutional freedoms. The power of national office has always attracted its fair share of scalawags and scoundrels, but the breed inhabiting the swamps of Washington today would make Burr blush and Hamilton hurl.

• LibBits - Amen! Quoted in its entirety:

  PREACH ON, BR'AH!
  
  Gen. Wesley Clark, who commanded NATO's unprovoked attacks on Serbia, says that [former Serbian president Slobodan] Milosevic's [United Nations "war crimes"] trial "is a clear signal that governments cannot attack, torture and murder their citizens." Does this mean that we can look forward to Bill Clinton and Janet Reno joining Milosevic in the dock for attacking, torturing and murdering their citizens at Waco?
  
  Source: Paul Craig Roberts
  http://www.townhall.com/columnists/paulcraigroberts/pcr20010712.shtml

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