Grey Matters

Here’s a little thought game:

Suppose there were a bill in congress called “The Right To Keep and Bear Arms Infringement Act of 2013” (We’ll call it The Schumer Act for short) and it read simply: “The right of the people to keep and bear arms may be infringed.”

Suppose further that it passed both the House of Representatives and the Senate and was signed into law by President Obama. Would it be constitutional?

The Second Amendment says that the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall NOT be infringed. The Schumer act would clearly be in conflict with the Constitution. Constitution wins. The Schumer Act would be unconstitutional as written.

But suppose The Schumer Act were written to say: “The right of the people to keep and bear arms may be fifty percent infringed.” Would only a fifty percent infringement pass constitutional muster? Seems like a bit much. I think a fifty-percent infringement would be just as unconstitutional as a 100 percent infringement.

What about twenty-five percent? Ten percent? One percent? At what point would such an act no longer be unconstitutional?

Exactly how much infringement does “shall not be infringed” permit?

The Second Amendment sounds kind of absolute. It sounds like it permits no infringement whatever. The words are clear enough. How then is the current infringement justified and how, oh how, is the currently contemplated further infringement even considered by a Congress, all of whom swore an oath to defend the Constitution? What am I missing here?

How much wiggle room is there in the Constitution? Can we just set it aside when there’s enough public clamor? Is it really more just a set of guidelines than hard and fast rules? Can we, for example, elect a president who’s just 33 instead of the Constitutionally mandated 35 years old, if he’s a really nice guy? You know, make allowances for the current political climate?

I believe that the Constitution means what it says. I don’t see much wiggle room built into the Constitution.

I believe that the Constitution does not permit any infringement of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.

I believe that, just as the Constitution’s First Amendment Freedom of Speech protection exists to protect political speech, so too the Constitution’s Second Amendment protects the right to keep and bear military style firearms. Miller v. U.S. made that clear.

I believe that any legislation that infringes the Right to Keep and Bear Arms by any amount is unconstitutional, and those who vote for such infringement are in violation of their oath of office.

Aurora, Colorado wingnut James Holmes may not be as crazy as it seems. In choosing the theater in which to execute his massacre, he chose the one that banned customers from carrying concealed weapons.

Now, I knew he’d chosen a venue that was posted No Guns, but until today, I’d no idea that he passed on closer (closer to his apartment) and larger theaters to chose the one he did.

It’s clear that Holmes had an aversion to being shot. All that body armor was real, not some homemade Batman movie costume. So, when, of the seven theaters within 20 minutes of his apartment that were showing the “Dark Knight Rises” movie, he chose not the closest, not the largest (where one would think he could do the most damage) but the only one posted “No Guns” such that Colorado concealed carry permit holders were not permitted to be armed, I have to think that posting figured in his plans.

This is the simple, common sense fact that eludes the anti-gun crowd: Criminals *like* gun control; it minimizes their risk as they prey on society. They want to go home safe and healthy after a hard day of muggings and robbery. “Gun control” just makes their work safer for them.

The theater’s No Guns posting may not have been the only factor, but I’d bet my next pension check that it was *a* factor in Holmes’ choice of theater.

Colorado concealed carry permit holders may carry into most businesses but it is up to the individual businesses to decide whether to allow concealed carry in their own establishments.

Holmes wisely chose what we in the gun culture call a “Disarmed Victims Zone”.

A No Guns sign serves to give a false sense of security except, of course, to would-be shooters.

This definition of classical liberalism is from 1873 by England’s Sir William Harcourt, who made the point in a talk at Oxford. Liberty, said Harcourt, “…does not consist in making others do what you think is right. The difference between a free Government and a Government which is not free is principally this — that a Government which is not free interferes with everything it can, and a free Government interferes with nothing except what it must. A despotic government tries to make everybody do what it wishes, a Liberal Government tries, so far as the safety of society will permit, to allow everybody to do what he wishes.“

Two items much in the news these days are: 1) The rebels in Syria trying to bring down the dictator, Assad; 2) The U.N. Small Arms Control Treaty.

The Syrians rebels (we’re all pulling for them, right?) have been saying for months that they need more weapons, more ammo. They’re having to make their own grenades.

Meanwhile, President Obama is urging approval by the Senate of the Small Arms Control Treaty — a treaty that would make it all but impossible for freedom fighters like the Syrian rebels to get weapons.

The treaty would make all sales and transfers of small arms contingent upon approval of the governments involved. That is, the U.S. could not supply arms to Syrian rebels without the Syrian government’s approval.

Now, officially, the treaty is needed, we’re told, to keep weapons out of the hands of terrorists and criminals. I would hasten to point out, however, that genocidal governments have killed many times more people than terrorists and criminals combined — tens of millions.

Preventing genocide is the best reason not to approve the small arms treaty. Disarming the populace is a necessary precursor to genocide. Governments have a much harder time committing genocide when citizens can fight back. Why would we want to sign this treaty and make the world safe for genocidal governments? Connect the dots.

The small arms treaty is all about creating / preserving the monopoly on projection of power to benefit governments world-wide. It’s about letting governments prevent the very thing going on in Syria.

Our own government tells us we need tougher “gun control” laws to prevent crime but crime typically increases as “gun control” gets tougher. So, they’re lying.

And the countries pushing world-wide gun control in the form of this small arms treaty are lying too. It’s not about terrorists or cartels. It’s about preventing overthrow of repressive governments.

Someone (who will remain nameless) recently posted on his FaceBook page that, while socialism doesn’t work, neither does an unfettered free market. “Can’t we find a ‘middle ground’?” he asked.

I’ve got news for him. This is it. This is the “middle ground.” How’s it working out? Where we are now is the middle ground, It is not pure socialism but it is certainly not a free market either.

What has this middle ground gotten us? The longest recession since the Great Depression, that’s what. But hang in there, they might yet turn it into Great Depression II by trying to “fix” it. That’s how we got Great Depression I.

Sure the free market is not perfect, if by perfect you mean no ups and downs, no inconvenience to anyone, full employment and so on. But the free market is waaaayyy better than the middle ground.

The free market is self-correcting. Sometimes these corrections are small, sometimes larger — a recession. But recessions are corrections, they are a necessary mechanism. of the free market. Ups and downs are normal. It takes government interference to turn a minor bump in the road into a pothole or worse — a sinkhole.

Ask people what caused the Great Depression and they’ll probably tell you it was caused by the stock market crash of 1929. But the crash of ’29 resulted in merely a recession, and one that was largely over before government decided to take action.

Following the stock market crash, unemployment rose to nearly ten percent. But, eight months later (June, 1930), unemployment was just 6.3 percent and falling. The recession was largely over. Then Herbert Hoover and the Congress, against the advice of smarter people than they, passed the Smoot-Hawley tariff act to “protect” American jobs from low-priced imports.

A year later the unemployment rate was 15 percent and a year after that, it was 25.8 percent. There followed a decade of misery only government can create. When FDR was elected to the presidency, he added to the problem with more taxes and government programs.

You see, five months after Smoot-Hawley “protected” American jobs from cheap imports, unemployment started going up again. Why? Because other countries passed tariffs in response to ours and that reduced American exports, costing countless American jobs. An action intended to protect American jobs had exactly the opposite effect. (This is often the case in government.)

The Great Depression did not start with the stock market crash, it started with Smoot-Hawley. It started when government tried to “fix” the stock market crash recession (which was already largely over). Historically, that is, before 1930, government had always just let things run their course and recessions fixed themselves. But in 1930, government passed tariffs, raised tax rates on rich people and the Federal Reserve handled the money supply terribly — all while trying to fix what they perceived to be what was broken about the free market.

Our current recession is the longest since the Great Depression, and for the same reason — government is trying to “fix” things and going about it all wrong. It is impossible to tax, borrow and spend our way to prosperity. Yet we seem determined to follow Greece, Italy and others down this path.

During the recession of 1987, President Reagan was roundly criticized for doing nothing to aid the recovery. The recession fixed itself in short order and the economy went on to more than 20 years of prosperity (for which Bill Clinton took credit).

The current recession started when the housing market went kablooie due to the sub-prime mortgage crisis. Of course, there would have been no sub-prime mortgage crisis if Bill Clinton’s H.U.D. secretary had not forced lenders to loan money to people who could not afford to repay it (in another attempt to fix a perceived fault in the free market system). There’s your “middle ground” in action.

Like Hoover and FDR, most politicians know lots about politics, but little about economics. When you try to fix something you don’t understand, you’ll likely make things worse.

No, the free market may not be perfect but it’s way better than any “middle ground” you can find.