Global Tax on Guns? Never!
"Everyone should know that most cancer research is largely a fraud and that the major cancer research organisations are derelict in their duties to the people who support them." -- Linus Pauling
Gary Marbut at Sierra Times - Disarming The People Of Iraq - why the U.S. military should not be confiscating small arms from Iraqi citizens. It's the same reason that U.S. law enforcement may never confiscate small arms from U.S. citizens. [smith2004]
I have little problem (assuming we are in Iraq for the right reasons, which is another discussion altogether) with the U.S. military depriving Iraqi military units and military personnel of military hardware, including tanks, fighter aircraft and crew-served weapons, such as heavy machine guns, mortars, motorized rifles, etc.
However, that's about where I would draw the line. Our military in Iraq is confiscating the small arms most commonly available for personal protection there - AK47s and Beretta pistols.
Every human being has a natural right to life. A person may be deprived of that right to life if he attacks another person (self-defense); or if a person commits a sufficiently heinous crime, and is judged according to careful rules, he may forfeit his life as a punishment or deterrent. But innocent, non-attacking human beings all have a right to their own lives and to whatever property they've earned.
That right to life and property clearly includes a right to defend one's life or property. If you or I deprive another of his ability to defend himself against attack, we incur an absolute obligation to defend that person ourselves, at least as well as he could have defended himself had we not disarmed him. If we do this collectively, as a nation, the principle remains the same.
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Cops feel safer in Montana because the number of good guys with guns far outnumber the bad guys with guns. In fact, it is much more dangerous to be a thug in Montana than in Washington, D.C., specifically because so many good guys in Montana have guns (and the will and knowledge to use them appropriately).
Extrapolating this to Iraq, U.S. troops in Iraq would clearly be safer if all the good people had guns. How, you ask, do you tell the good people from the bad people, so you can make sure the good people get guns? The answer is, you can't. The best you can do is assume that the good people far outnumber the bad people, as they do in most any culture, and just give guns to everyone. After that, it becomes a simple matter of mathematics, and the ranks of the bad guys will shrink from attrition faster than the ranks of the good guys.
David Rennie at The Telegraph - Suburban wives arm themselves against terror - women in post-9/11 America are realizing that a gun in their hands and the knowledge of how to use it is the best protection they can get against terrorists. [rrnd]
Tim Evans at IndyStar.com - Armed activist testing gun ban - Will Hutchens of Plainfield Indiana is challenging in court the ban on firearms in county owned buildings. Bravo, Mr. Hutchens. [rrnd]
Sean Haugh at Liberty for All - The State Against God - a reasonable exposition of the current gross misunderstanding of the first amendment's establishment clause. [rrnd]
The Founders understood that when the State gets into the religion business, it is deadly to Liberty. That is why they phrased the First Amendment so precisely. They said, "no law." But today, as these examples and countless others prove, the law is very busy establishing exactly how we shall practice our religion.
The Founders described a freedom to do something, according to the dictates of each individual's conscience. They most emphatically did not describe a freedom from religion.
New Scientist - Electric shock weapons could go wireless - someone in Germany is developing a "plasma taser" that uses an aerosol spray as a conductor for an electric shock. You can probably already guess that we peons won't be allowed to own these. [birdman]
Ron Paul's Texas Straight Talk - The Federal Debt Spiral - A small, but real, tax cut was passed with huge fanfare. A huge increase in the federal debt limit was passed with no fanfare. $984 billion. That's over $3000 for each American man, woman, and child.
For perspective, this latest debt limit increase of nearly one trillion dollars is as large as the entire federal budget in 1985. The embarrassing increase was necessary because federal law limits the amount of debt the Treasury can carry, and the current $6.4 trillion limit had been reached. The federal government across the board has been spending money feverishly, at levels approximately 22% higher than just three years ago. This spending spree caused Congress to raise the debt limit from $5.9 trillion only six months ago, but the new limit was quickly reached.
Debt simply has lost any remnant of stigma in Washington. The point of the debt limit law was to shine a public light on government borrowing and make lawmakers more accountable for deficit spending. The original intent behind the law- to limit borrowing- has been abandoned. Today Congress can raise the debt limit at any time with virtually no media attention. More importantly, there is no political fallout. This puts Congress in the position of a spendthrift debtor who can authorize spending limit increases on its own credit card!
John Ross - Jean Simmons, Marlon Brando, StripperMom, and Me, or The Eternal Dance - no politics this week, just the dating scene.
World Net Daily - Global tax on guns? - that's what some "world leaders" at the G8 summit in France are proposing. They think they're going to end hunger by taxing firearms. Not! Hunger is a political problem. Pooring money into the problem won't help it. End the repressive political regimes in the countries with lots of hunger, and the hunger will disappear within a generation. That means that taxes need to be eliminated completely, not increased. [scopeny]
U.S. Submarines - Luxury Submarines - no prices here. If you have to ask, you probably can't afford it. But they sure are neat. [smith2004]
