Stupid, Insane, or Evil
From The Federalist:
When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle. -- Edmund Burke
Christopher and I were out in the field shooting BBs at some plastic
bottles set on top of a cardboard box. He came close to pointing the
muzzle in my direction while handing the gun to me. I thought of a
good way to think about the muzzle of a gun, loaded or unloaded.
Imagine that there is a laser beam shooting out of the
muzzle. Anything the beam touches will be burned. You have to be
careful that the beam doesn't touch, i.e. the muzzle doesn't point at,
anything you don't want to burn. Not even for a moment. Of course,
I've also told him that there's no such thing as an unloaded gun. You
unload it, leave the bolt open, check it again, check that the safety
is enabled, and then proceed to treat the gun as if it were loaded and
might go off at any moment without warning. I have my Dad to thank for
my gun-safety awareness. He taught me well. Thank you, Dad!
I learned something about shooting BBs at plastic bottles. Some of the
BBs go through the front side of the bottle, but not the back side,
leaving the BB inside the bottle. Guess I never shot BBs at plastic
bottles as a kid, likely because the only plastic containers in those
days were detergent bottles.
Gwynne Dyer at The Register-Guard (Eugene, Oregon) via MAPInc - Drug Laws Foster Crime, Death - A good piece on why the war on freedom, er... some drugs, is doomed. The thing I don't understand is how the drug warriors look at this stuff, and I can't believe they don't know about it, and continue with prohibition. As L. Neil said about gun grabbers, they must be stupid, insane, or evil. [cures-not-wars]
That's how it used to be in Britain, in fact. Only two years after the U.S. Congress, fresh from banning alcohol under the Volstead Act, imposed prohibition on the heroin family of drugs in 1924, the Rolleston committee in Britain concluded that non-medical heroin use was a problem needing help, not a crime needing punishment. So Britain adopted the policy of providing heroin on prescription to registered addicts -- and over the next 40 years, the number of addicts in Britain scarcely grew at all.
Then in 1971, largely in response to intense U.S. pressure to fall in with American plans for global prohibition, British doctors were forbidden to prescribe heroin to addicts, and the black market came into being. The market then worked its usual magic, relentlessly expanding the customer base: since 1971, the number of heroin addicts in Britain has grown from fewer than 500 to around 500,000.
Since the heroin group of drugs do no long-term harm to the system if taken in pure form, this would have been an unfortunate but not tragic result, except that this is a black market, which charges them such a huge mark-up that they can support their habit only by crime. It also provides them with a highly adulterated product of unknown strength, often mixed with lethal substances. So they spend a lot of time in jail, and die young.
...
The "drug war" propaganda is so insistent and so brazen in its falsehoods that most people never even hear a fundamental criticism of the whole rationale for prohibition, and even fewer realize that it is a leftover from the war on alcohol launched by prohibitionists in the U.S. just after the First World War. Alcohol prohibition was eventually abandoned ( though only after creating the conditions for the emergence of large-scale organized crime in the United States ), and doubtless the drug prohibition will be ended too one day, after the scale of the damage it is doing has become impossible to ignore or deny.
In the meantime, the industry created to wage it will trundle on blindly, wasting money, ruining lives, and wrecking whole countries. And we can all sing the refrain that was first composed when the Wickersham Commission, having examined all the evidence that alcohol prohibition had been a disastrous failure in 1927, declared that it should continue anyway:"Prohibition is an awful flop; we like it.
It don't stop what it's meant to stop; we like it.
It's filled the land with vice and crime,
It's left a trail of graft and slime,
It don't prohibit worth a dime;
But nevertheless, we're for it."
Vilmos Levay at Albany Times Union - Intent of 2nd Amendment is individual gun rights - A response to a July 19 editorial, Mr. Ashcroft's gun view, that berated the new attorney general on his statement that the second amendment affirms an individual right to keep and bear arms.
The assumption upon which you and others predicate attacks upon the Second Amendment rights of your fellow citizens is that the amendment exists purely for the purpose of arming a state militia and therefore does not codify an individual right.
Leaving aside the terribly inconvenient fact that current U.S. code (10 U.S.C. 311(a)) explicitly states that "the militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males'' between 17 and 45 years of age who are not a part of the "organized militia'' (the National Guard and Naval Militia), your implication is manifestly false on semantic grounds.
Joseph E. Monterosso at Albany Times Union - Ashcroft states obvious on Second Amendment - Another mostly pro-freedom response to the same editorial. The TU is interesting. They print anti-gun editorials and pro-gun letters to the editor. This guy missed the fact that all of his allowable "regulations" are covered very simply by non-initiation of force. We really don't need any other law.
Secondly, all the rights specified in the Bill of Rights are individual rights. Just because a right is an individual right does not mean it cannot be regulated. On the contrary, freedom of speech and religion are regulated individual rights. One cannot shout "Fire!'' in a crowded public venue. One cannot freely exercise a religion involving human sacrifice. One cannot own a howitzer, hand grenade, aircraft carrier or thermonuclear device.
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