End the War on Freedom

Why Carry?

Hafiz,

Why carry a whole load of books

Upon your back

Climbing this mountain,

When tonight,

Just a few thoughts of God

Will light the holy fire.

(I Heard God Laughing: Renderings of Hafiz by Daniel Ladinsky)

From The Federalist:

Is campaign spending too high? No. In 2000, all campaigns -- including state and local elections and ballot referendums -- cost about $3.9 billion.... This is less than four one-hundredths of 1 percent of our national income. It's less than Americans spend annually on flowers ($6.6 billion in 1997). -- Robert J. Samuelson

From [kaba]:

A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul. -- George Bernard Shaw

Scott Bieser at KeepAndBearArms.com - Learn to Listen - cartoon commentary on what we say and what they hear. [kaba]

Libertarian Party - Help us tell the truth about the War on Drugs and terrorism! - The LP is running today in USA Today and The Washington Times, the following full-page ad. The text reads: "U.S. Drug Czar John Walters. This week, I had lunch with the president, testified before Congress, and helped funnel $40 million in illegal drug money to groups like the Taliban. The War on Drugs boosts the price of illegal drugs by as much as 17,000 percent -- funneling huge profits to terrorist organizations. If you support the War on Drugs or vote for the politicians who wage it, you're helping support terrorism. Get the facts at www.LP.org/drugwar." Bravo LP and generous contributors! They spent almost $70,000, most of it for the USA Today ad. Declan McCullagh reports on this story here.

Brian Puckett at KeepAndBearArms.com - A Simple Guide for Buying and Carrying a Self-Defense Handgun - Defines bullet, cartridge, caliber, revolver, pistol, & round, and then moves on to his recommendation: get a quality, short-barreled, spur-less or concealed-hammer revolver, a lightweight model made with titanium or aluminum alloys, in .38 special or .357 Magnum caliber, loaded with brand-name self-defense ammunition with jacketed hollowpoint bullets. Then some words on maintenance. Carry your revolver in an inside- or outside-the-pants waist, not shoulder, holster without a retention strap. How to gun-proof your kids, which works much better than attempting to kid-proof your guns. [kaba]

Get a revolver.

Why? Because revolvers are rugged, simple to operate, easy to maintain, will function with any commercial version of its proper cartridge, and are forgiving of grime, lack of lubrication, and other neglect. Furthermore, if you pull the trigger on a revolver and it doesn't fire, you can pull the trigger again and bring an entirely new cartridge into firing position. Incidentally, this is exactly why policemen, hunters, campers, and other experienced folks (including myself) frequently carry revolvers. Because revolvers are simple and rugged, a used revolver is fine if it's in good condition.

If you're not going to train regularly, do not buy a semi-automatic handgun (a "pistol"), and don't let anyone talk you into getting one. Although there are many excellent and reliable semi-autos available nowadays (Glocks being a prime example; I own several), their comparative mechanical and operational complexity and their potential failure modes are simply not compatible with use by inexperienced or untrained people.

Let me repeat: if you aren't a gun person, or if you don't trust yourself to regularly maintain or train with your gun, you should not carry a semi-automatic handgun. Get a revolver.

...

In some states, politicians (almost always Democrats) believe that only the lives of "special people" -- usually the politicians themselves, friends of these politicians, celebrities, or people who carry money/valuables -- are worth defending with guns. They have issued unconstitutional edicts making it a crime for their constituents (people like you and me) to carry guns to defend against vicious criminals (who carry any gun they want, any time they want). Yet almost all of these politicians are protected by armed guards at work and at home, usually 24 hours a day -- just like COA says in its national pro-gun radio and print ads (www.citizensofamerica.org).

I say to hell with them and their edicts. These politicians are immoral, unethical, hypocritical, elitist, and control-obsessed. They clearly don't care about your life, or the lives of your family members. I would describe them as evil. No politician will ever prevent me from carrying a gun to protect myself, my family, or my neighbor with a gun. I carry a gun whenever I feel the need to do so, which is frequently.

You must decide if and when you carry a gun. You may decide, as many people have, that you should carry it every day. The bottom line: It's your life (and/or your spouse/children's lives). You have the right to defend these lives. And you have the right -- not just morally, but Constitutionally -- to carry the most effective and convenient tool to effect this defense -- a handgun.

A final thought on this subject: simply owning a gun will not protect you from violent criminals; you must have the gun with you when they attack.

Brian Puckett at Gun Truths - The Drug War--Bad for America and the Second Amendment - Mr. Puckett not only defends our second amendment rights, he knows that the war on freedom, er... some drugs, should be strenuously opposed by all lovers of liberty.

The drug war has made every citizen a suspect of the government, because drug users exist in every economic level and in every category of age, race, occupation, and religion. It has turned children into snitches against parents and family, providing a pretext for governmental prying into our personal lives and finances. It has generated search warrants based on flimsy hearsay, or paid-for "information", and warrants extended to all things and places because drugs are easy to hide. These warrants have led to government home invasions in which innocent citizens are terrorized, humiliated, and sometimes shot to death. It has spawned terrifying forfeiture laws, in which property is seized and sold without due process, and- unbelievably-without the owner having committed any crime. It has led to police and enforcement agencies using military training, equipment, and tactics, which has caused these public employees to see their role as a military one-attack and destroy rather than serve and protect.

...

The transference and blurring of "drugs" and "drug dealers" into "guns" and "gun dealers" as public enemies is ongoing. Consider these real-life drug/gun counterparts: drug-free school zone/gun free school zone; zero tolerance for drugs /zero tolerance for guns; drug dealer crackdown/ federal gun dealer crackdown; SWAT drug raids/SWAT gun raids; lawsuits against legal tobacco producers/lawsuits against legal gun manufacturers; media and government demonization of drugs rather than drug abusers/media and government demonization of guns rather than gun abusers.

The drug war's second negative effect on gun rights is the severe erosion of our other personal rights. The invasive, oppressive laws and mechanisms created to fight this war have made parallel attacks on the Second Amendment infinitely easier to accomplish socially, politically, "legally", and physically. A society accustomed to roadblock searches, bogus warrants, home invasions by law enforcement, hired criminal snitches, "accidental" police executions, pointless drug tests, property forfeiture, and random police surveillance by high-tech audio, electronic, and visual devices is a society primed for curtailment or abrogation of gun rights.

...

The solution is to legalize drugs for adults. This will make them cheap, instantly eliminating all crimes associated with drug dealing and drug use, and all the government's excuses for its tyrannical abuses. If necessary, re-classify drug addiction as a "disease" and deal with it on that level. If you consider drug legalization "immoral", then you must consider legal alcohol immoral, because alcohol is a drug whose legal use is far more inimical to society than all the rest combined.

Suggestions: If you don't like drugs, don't use them. If you don't like people who use drugs, don't associate with them. If you don't want your children to use drugs, teach them not to. If they ask why, warn them of the dangers.

Brad Edmonds at anti-state.com - Even Statists Are Anarchists - Mr. Edmonds uses a recent Fox News debate to show that even leftists think that there need to be some limits on government. He then tells us the proper limits. [anti-state]

Put another way, the founding fathers were right, as are recent anarchist philosophers such as Murray Rothbard: There are absolute moral rights and wrongs, and from these is derivable a set of natural laws. These natural laws are prior to government, and no government should be allowed to violate them. The first is the prohibition of aggression, and the second is the absolute right to justly-owned property. There can be no disputing that aggression against another, except in defense or punishment against an aggressor, is absolutely wrong. What of property?

bob lonsberry - Of Bobsledding and Life - the justice of Jean Racine's fifth place finish in Olympic bob-sledding.

Karen G. Schneider at The American Library Association - The Patriot Act: Last Refuge of a Scoundrel - one librarian advises her colleagues about how to respond to the recent tyrannical law from the District of Criminals. Bottom line. Either don't track who's using the library's internet terminals or make it a policy to destroy those records every day. The feds can't snoop what doesn't exist. [politech]

First of all, I'm a hawk. I believe we should be in Afghanistan, I'd like to see bin Laden oh, say, six feet under, and behind my bifocals, this middle-aged veteran cheers her colleagues in the armed forces defending our nation.

However, the USA Patriot Act (AL, Jan., p. 20) is treason pure and simple, and you need to know how and why, because it presents particularly pernicious issues for the users who rely on your Internet services.

John Clarke at Politech - U.S. Customs bars Canadian activist from crossing border - the Amerikan police state at work. Chilling. [politech]

Seitz, with the backing of another local officer, interrogated me for some considerable time. It was not a situation like an arrest by Canadian police where silence is the best option. Had I refused to talk to him, I did not doubt that he would order me detained and that it would be some time before the Canadian consular authorities came into the picture. If I was to avoid at least several days in detention, I determined that I had no option but to answer his questions. It was immediately obvious to me that I was dealing with a specialist in interrogation methods. He told the admiring locals at one point that he had been stationed in Yemen and I avoided speculating on how he had employed his talents there.

Joseph Rowlands at Sense of Life Objectivists - Sacred Cow - Mr. Rowlands tells, correctly, how to cook a flavorful steak (as rare as you can stand it) and then rants against vegetarians. I ask him two questions:

1. How do you know anything about the reason I don't eat red meat?
2. Have you ever killed and dressed a deer or other large game animal?

I have no problem with people eating animal cadavers, as long as they have a visceral experience, as I do, of what they're doing. I DO have a problem with people making generalizations about other people's reasons for living as they do. You don't know. You can't know. Unless you've asked me, personally. I avoid meat because I had a very deep "knowing" twenty years ago that I should do so. I started eating fish a while back because once again I "knew" that I needed to do it. As simple as that. Not rational, but very real, to me. As my former housemate used to say, "A vegetarian is someone who has never heard a head of lettuce scream." We eat each other on this planet. Everybody draws the line between food and non-food at a different place. Cannibals draw the line outside of their tribe. Vegans draw it at the boundary of the plant and animal kingdoms. I don't eat mammals or birds. In my experience, different people have different reasons for where they draw the line.

Paul Krugman at The New York Times - The W Scenario - Remember that $300 "rebate" you got last year. Hehe. As I said at the time, the joke's on you. When you get to line 47 of your 2001 tax return, you'll get to pay it back. [unknown]

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