Articles by Herschel Smith

WWLTV.com:

“If this opinion in Louisiana is super unpopular,” Payton told USA TODAY Sports in a 33-minute phone conversation on Monday, his first interview since Will Smith’s death, “so be it.”

In the aftermath of the senseless shooting on Saturday night that left former defensive end Smith dead – and Smith’s wife Racquel wounded — amid a beef linked to a traffic accident, the New Orleans Saints coach is pleading for more gun control.

He isn’t merely talking about tighter laws. If Payton had his druthers we’d live in a country without guns.

“Two hundred years from now, they’re going to look back and say, ‘What was that madness about?’ “ Payton said. “The idea that we need them to fend off intruders … people are more apt to draw them (in other situations). That’s some silly stuff we’re hanging onto.”

Payton is still processing the death of a former team captain — who was weeks away from joining the Saints coach staff as an intern — and no one in their right mind can blame him for expressing his raw, human emotion. He wants to get this off his chest, and it hardly matters if Payton is bucking conventional NFL coach speak by coming out strong on a hot-button political issue.

“I’m not an extreme liberal,” Payton said. “I find myself leaning to the right on some issues. But on this issue, I can’t wrap my brain around it.”

Payton, who grew up in suburban Chicago, said that his philosophy was influenced by his father, an insurance claims adjuster whose line of work was filled with tragedies. He also spent six months playing in a British football league during the late 1980s, before launching his coaching career.

“I hate guns,” he said.

Payton said he is trying to remove his anti-gun bias in considering the matter, but even with that he reaches the same conclusion.

“I’ve heard people argue that everybody needs a gun,” he said. “That’s madness. I know there are many kids who grow up in a hunting environment. I get that. But there are places, like England, where even the cops don’t have guns.”

[ … ]

“It was a large caliber gun. A .45,” Payton said. “It was designed back during World War I. And this thing just stops people. It will kill someone within four or five seconds after they are struck. You bleed out. After the first shot (that struck Smith’s torso), he took three more in his back.”

Payton paused, then continued with his theme.

“We could go online and get 10 of them, and have them shipped to our house tomorrow,” he said. “I don’t believe that was the intention when they allowed for the right for citizens to bear arms.”

Hey Sean, I noticed that you went on to talk about the danger in New Orleans and your fears there.  You mentioned that you could go online and have ten pistols shipped to your home tomorrow.  You know that’s a lie, or maybe you don’t.  You have to go through an FFL when you cross state lines, and you certainly do when you buy from a dealer even in your own state.

And perhaps that wasn’t really the intent of the founders after all.  I agree with you.  It should be easier than that to get something to protect your very life.  And getting back to the issue of the danger in New Orleans, I noticed that you talked about cops in England not even carrying guns.  Well, that’s being revisited now in light of the threats posed by Islamists, and some of them do carry guns, but in any case, I also noticed that while you observed that cops in England don’t carry, you didn’t call for the disarming of cops in America.

That’s because this isn’t really about guns to you.  It’s about a monopoly of force.  Only the state should have the power to defend themselves and others.  You said so when you talked about waiting for cops if you get into a fender bender with a hot headed dude.

So you want people to have guns, just your kind of people.  That makes you a hypocrite.  Why don’t you just do your job and coach football and leave the public policy to men who aren’t hypocrites?

Stamford Advocate:

A city man cleaning his revolver Thursday night was charged with reckless endangerment after the gun accidentally went off and blew a hole through his apartment wall, police said.

Capt. Richard Conklin said Hadrian Gardner, 24, was in his Tresser Boulevard apartment cleaning the revolver when he pulled the trigger, thinking there were no bullets in the chamber, about 8 p.m. Thursday

The bullet went through the wall and entered the adjacent apartment where his neighbor dove to the floor for cover, Conklin said.

Gardner checked on his neighbor and found him unharmed and then reported the shot to police.

Gardner was charged with illegal discharge of a weapon within city limits and two counts of reckless endangerment.

Conklin said Gardner’s pistol permit was seized and will be sent to state police, who will hold a hearing to consider revoking his license to carry the gun. Two other handguns were also seized from Gardner.

It “went off.”  Because he pulled the trigger.  Good grief.  Listen man, this isn’t even a semiautomatic where you have to cycle and lock the slide to observe the chamber.  This is a revolver, smart guy.  Open the cylinder, look for empty spaces in each of the chambers.  It’s that simple.

There is no excuse.

Wired: The Senate’s Draft Encryption Bill Is Ludicrous, Dangerous And Technically Illiterate.

As Apple battled the FBI for the last two months over the agency’s demands that Apple help crack its own encryption, both the tech community and law enforcement hoped that Congress would weigh in with some sort of compromise solution. Now Congress has spoken on crypto, and privacy advocates say its “solution” is the most extreme stance on encryption yet.

On Thursday evening, the draft text of a bill called the “Compliance with Court Orders Act of 2016,” authored by offices of Senators Diane Feinstein and Richard Burr,  was published online by the Hill.¹ It’s a nine-page piece of legislation that would require people to comply with any authorized court order for data—and if that data is “unintelligible,” the legislation would demand that it be rendered “intelligible.” In other words, the bill would make illegal the sort of user-controlled encryption that’s in every modern iPhone, in all billion devices that run Whatsapp’s messaging service, and in dozens of other tech products. “This basically outlaws end-to-end encryption,” says Joseph Lorenzo Hall, chief technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology. “It’s effectively the most anti-crypto bill of all anti-crypto bills.”

I just have a few comments.  First of all, it should be telling to you that a republican U.S. senator, Richard Burr, is aligned with a totalitarian like Feinstein.  That’s how desperate he is for a signature piece of legislation to go with his name.  He would sooner pick an awful piece of shit like this than simply turn government control on its head and give control back to the people in every way, something that would win him immediate loyalty by the voters.  Instead, he listens to his colleagues, that collection of gargoyles, demons, pit vipers and carnival barkers in Washington.

Second, remember what I said about the government’s desire for all of your information?

Soccer moms will do anything, give over any amount of privacy, give up virtually anything, in order to maintain a level of safety and security.  ISIS and nuclear power plants is the latest incarnation of the whole ISIS thing generically.  The government gets a chance to say, “Hey, listen to us, we’ll protect you if you’ll only give us access to your iPhone, all of your records, bank accounts, medical data, tell us whether you have any guns in the home, let us listen to and record your phone calls and all of your text messages, and in short be your protector.  We’ll take care of you, we promise!  We won’t let the mean bad men make the big bad thingy go BOOM and hurt your precious little babies!  Let me have the keys to your life, sweetie!”

Burr is taking advantage of ignorant soccer moms who believe that American national security will be better off if they give over their lives to the federal government and give up their constitutionally protected right to privacy.  Because Burr is just that kind of man.  Remember that he is the worm who said he would vote for Bernie Sanders before he would vote for Ted Cruz.  He is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad U.S. senator.

I think he’s saying don’t try to be cool.  Try to improve.  Yea, that’s a good idea, and he does a lot of things I would like to do, but I don’t know about you, I don’t have access to a range like the one he’s using and where he’s the only shooter.  The range Jerry Miculek shoots at is similar.  Where do these guys come up with resources like that?

Miami Herald:

Morris Copeland runs the Miami-Dade agency in charge of juvenile offenders, and he mostly listened during a Thursday panel discussion about youth and violence and what may be causing so many children to end up either firing fatal shots or dying from them.

After about 40 minutes, Copeland leaned into his microphone and delivered the bluntest theory of the day.

“They have unimpeded access to firearms,” said Copeland, director of the the county Juvenile Services Department, which processes most children arrested in the county. “We have 11-, 12-, 13-year-olds packing heat. I’ve been in this business for 28 years. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Kids are going to fight. Kids are going to disagree,” he continued during the Youth: Next Generation panel at the State of Black Miami Forum at Florida Memorial University. “A child with firearms is a recipe for disaster.”

Uh huh.  “The bluntest assessment of the day.”  Kids have unimpeded access to firearms.  That’s the problem, is it, Mr. Copeland?  Form 4473 doesn’t stop your kids from getting guns?  The gun store salesman at the counter doesn’t mind selling to a 12 year old?  I’ve seen them refuse people much older.

Oh, you mean those kids break the law to obtain those firearms?  I’ve got it now.  So what you’re really discussing is a moral and cultural problem within the black community, right?  I looked at the picture in Miami Herald.  I saw a lot of black folk, blacks who care deeply about their community.  Don’t get me wrong, I think you’re made in God’s image just like me.  But that’s exactly what makes you accountable before God for fathering families that have fathers, for churching your children, for teaching them about life and the difference between right and wrong, for forcing them to deal with failure by working harder rather than demanding a handout or a promotion up to the next grade level even though they can’t read.

So here’s what we really need from you.  I don’t think your statement was blunt or honest at all.  I think you need to look your own community squarely in the face and do some truth-telling.  Then I would stand up and take notice.  In the mean time, don’t even think of curtailing my rights because of a moral and cultural problem within the black community.  Handle the log in your own eye before you look for the speck of dust in mine.

College students are supposed to be getting world class educations on everything from the STEM courses to liberal arts and rhetoric and logic.  No, I’m just kidding, they really don’t study any of that today, except STEM in some of the more technical universities (thank God for that), but the fees they charge would hint that they must learn something.  Right?

Well, let’s put that to the test.

Imagine yourself sitting in class. It’s been a long day, and you’re not paying attention to your professor. Instead, you’re planning your evening. Maybe you have an exam the next day and you want to go study in the library. Maybe you have to go down to the KAC at 4 for practice. Maybe all you want to do is sit with your friends and eat.

Then you hear gun shots. Not from the shooting range nearby, but on campus. The school goes on lockdown. Your professors instruct you to stay in the classroom, turn off the lights, cover the windows on the doors, lock the doors from the inside and hide. The room is absolutely silent. Eventually, Campus Safety comes to tell you you may all go back to your dorms.

“Were there any casualties?” you ask. “We are not at liberty to discuss that information right now,” the officer replies. You call your parents to tell them you’re OK and then you call all your friends to make sure they are as well. One of them doesn’t pick up. You try again. Still no answer. The next day the president’s office sends out an email explaining the incident and those affected. Your friend is in critical condition.

This hypothetical situtation is similar to what the families and friends of the first graders at Newtown, the high schoolers at Columbine and the college students at Virginia Tech have experienced. I am not willing to allow my school to be added to that list. House Bill 48, Concealed Carry-Affirmative Defenses-Carrying Firearm in Certain Vulnerable Areas, or the “Guns Everywhere Bill,” which is currently in committee in the Ohio State Senate, would allow people to carry weapons on college campuses across the state.

This is a recipe for a disaster. College students are under a tremendous amount of stress, are often impulsive and inevitably have access to alcohol. The combination of these factors would produce a dangerous and potentially disastrous situation if guns were added to the mix. But it is more likely that impulsive students will hurt themselves, rather than their peers.

So her thesis is this.  Students will “inevitably” get access to alcohol.  Inevitably, says she.  And perhaps she’s right.  Prohibition never works.  But she advocates gun control that looks just like prohibition, thinking that rules against them will keep them off of campus if someone really intends to bring one on anyway.  Moreover, she advocates control over peaceable, law abiding students rather than the criminals she purports to control (by the way, more rapes, burglaries and assaults occur on our local campus – UNCC – than anywhere else in the metro area of my home city, that campus being a “gun free zone”).

But she switches midstream in order to move the target.  By the end she advocates all of this under the rubric of safety for students should they get access to guns in a panicked, diminutive or pathological state.  And yet getting access to alcohol and getting behind the wheel of a car doesn’t so much as grab her attention, even though others besides the student stand to be injured or lose their lives in an accident cause by inebriated driving.

She moved the goalposts in order to redirect your demurral, and when she did, she left unaddressed the perfect analogy to guns (in terms of laws of prohibition), simply assuming that such laws won’t and can’t work.  So there you have it.  The current state of scholarship in American universities.

This is a good report of a concealed carrier who both stops a burglary and detains the burglar.  But my goodness, watch the way he holds that firearm.  I’ve seen one other person do this in my life, and we asked him to stop and tried to teach him better, but to no avail.

I applaud the man’s determination, but you can do better than that.  Do not hold the gun this way.  And for heaven’s sake, tell him to get on the ground and put his hands behind his back.

Prior: Do Not Ever Shoot A Gun This Way

PJM:

Trump is a master of the nihilist style of the web. His competitors speak in political jargon and soaring generalities. He speaks in rant. He attacks, insults, condemns, doubles down on misstatements, never takes a step back, never apologizes. Everyone he dislikes is a liar, “a bimbo,” “bought and paid for.” Without batting an eyelash, he will compare an opponent to a child molester. Such rhetorical aggression is shocking in mainstream American politics but an everyday occurrence on the political web, where death threats and rape threats against a writer are a measure of the potency of the message.

The “angry voter” Trump supposedly has connected with is really an avatar of the mutinous public: and this is its language. It too speaks in rant, inchoate expression of a desire to remake the world by smashing at it, common parlance of the political war-bands that populate Tumblr, Gawker, reddit, and so many other online platforms. By embracing Trump in significant numbers, the public has signaled that it is willing to impose the untrammeled relations of social media on the U.S. electoral process.

To be fair, I think this is right but I think there is more at play than this.  There are legitimate grievances, but voting for Trump to fix those grievances is sort of like placing your penis on an anvil and beating it bloody, shouting “you won’t do it to us again,”  while a Fascist does it again to them as he sings, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”  Turning now to the other parent, pro wrestling.

He parlayed his appearances on Monday Night Raw into a prime-time WrestleMania 23 match. The mega event was billed as the “Battle of the Billionaires” and featured a showdown between a wrestler sponsored by Trump (Bobby Lashley) and a wrestler chosen by McMahon (Umaga) — and was refereed by none other than famous McMahon antagonist Stone Cold Steve Austin. Even the taunt-filled ringside contract-signing showcased Trump, prefiguring his insult-laced debate performances. At stake was a golden head of hair: The loser would be forcibly shorn of his famous locks in front of a record pay-per-view crowd.

I’ve been toying with the idea that Donald Trump isn’t a human, but an apparition of some sort, designed by evil forces to have an adverse impact on behavior.  My thoughts still need to be fully formed before laying that out there as a mature idea, but Trump is certainly having a bad affect on behavior.

The goal is to harden men.  It is to force them to bare their asses, pull their pants down in public, use foul language, discuss obscene things, hurl baseless insults towards other people, to be able to do or feel anything without shame, and manifest utterly narcissistic feelings in all things.

The target is to destroy all etiquette, kill the notion of love, grace and kindness towards others, and coarsen the discourse, both private and public.  Trump has no ideology beyond this, and the increase of Donald Trump.  His values are “without form and void.”  He is an empty vessel, into which anything can be poured that benefits Trump and humiliates, trashes, denigrates and dehumanizes others.

And America is enthralled with the shameless reality show that is Donald Trump.  It is a sick society, sick unto death.

I stumbled across this interesting video.

I think the test is a little less than “scientific” regardless of the words they throw at it.  No gelatin tests, no discussion of terminal ballistics in tissue, etc.  The video could have gone on a lot longer investigating some of these things.

Interesting nonetheless.  I have always known that the 1400+ FPS velocity of the .357 magnum is a powerful thing, which is why I have two .357 magnum handguns (S&W R8 M&P and Ruger GP100 Match Champion).  I love shooting them both.  But it comes down to more than just what runs down the range faster.  What can you carry?  What can you conceal?  I cannot conceal the S&W R8 or my Ruger GP100 Match Champion.  But I can conceal a smallish compact 1911 on my waist or a S&W .38 Spl. +P Air Weight on my ankle.

Each tool has its own purposes.

I have said for a very long time to my family and others that the experience of parents having and raising children isn’t really about the children.  God will handle the children as He sees fit.  It’s about the parents, and there are two experiences that test your mettle more than any other: marriage and children.  It’s one of God’s way of sanctifying His own, but it has the opposite affect on others.

One reason I care about the election cycle isn’t because I think we can make a difference.  Oh, we can in some ways, we can’t in others.  We can make a difference in the medical care situation in the country, but we can’t in the global financial system.  This discussion is saved for another time.  But one thing the individual vote does at one and the same time is affect the soul and show the content of the soul of the voter.  It’s a deeply moral act that has eternal consequences for the one who is given stewardship of the vote.

Now let me turn for a moment to a recent commentary by Jonah Goldberg.  Sometimes I disagree vehemently with him, but other times he hits on all cylinders.  This day the engine was running to perfection on the dynamometer.

This week there have been some cracks in the façade. Trump’s attacks on Heidi Cruz unsettled even Ann Coulter. And his abortion remarks are still sending tremors through the granite foundations of Trump can-do-no-wrong-ism. Joe Scarborough and Breitbart’s John Nolte are talking about what a bad week he’s having and gravely warning Trump to get his act together. As Jim Geraghty has been writing, the problem with such second thoughts is the assumption that something is amiss with Trump or his campaign. This is Trump. This is his campaign. The Trump we see before us is the same Trump. It’s a bit like when Barack Obama said that the Jeremiah Wright he saw denouncing America wasn’t the man he knew. That was nonsense. Obama knew exactly who Wright was, having attended his church for 20 years. It was only when Wright’s act moved to a larger national stage that all of a sudden he became inconvenient to Obama.

The analogy isn’t perfect, of course. But the basic point is the same. The Donald Trump of the last week is the exact same Donald Trump many of us saw a year ago or five years ago. He’s always been full of sh*t. He’s always been a total ignoramus when it comes to public policy, lacking the simple sense of patriotic duty to do his homework on the issues. He’s always been a nasty and boorish cad. He’s always pretended to be a conservative while working on liberal assumptions of what conservatives want to hear.

His “punish the women” comments were of a piece with his refusal to condemn the Klan on CNN. It’s not that he wants to punish women who have abortions — I’d bet he’s paid more abortion bills than he will ever sign — it’s that he thinks that’s what pro-lifers want to hear. It’s not that he’s a Klansman or that the pillowcases at Mara Lago come with eyeholes cut out in advance. It’s that Trump thinks lots of his fans like the Klan and he wants to pander to them. I have heard first-hand stories from people who’ve worked with Trump about how he disparages women’s appearance routinely. That’s who he is. If you’re attacking him because he retweeted a bad picture of Heidi, that’s not you being principled, it’s you getting cold feet. Indeed, I am sure that the same opportunism that has caused so many supposedly principled conservatives to hitch their wagons to Trump is now causing some of them to question their choices, not because Trump has changed but because the climate might be changing around them. By all means, if Trump continues to unravel (a huge if), please abandon Trump. But don’t think for a moment that the rest of us will automatically take your word for it when you say this or that statement changed your mind about the man. He hasn’t changed, your calculations have.

[ … ]

Like all demagogues, he’s using his lies as a loyalty test for his followers. He’s exploiting his popularity and abusing the devotion of his fans to force them into going along with his fictions, until they are in so deep psychologically, they have no choice but to carry on. It’s an ancient psychological tactic of authoritarians, Mafia dons, and the like: Force your followers into sharing the blame for your misdeeds so that they can’t break ranks.

Jonah is right.  He thinks we want to see women who have gotten abortions in the town center in stocks and chains.  He’s pandering to the social right, but he missed on this, and he missed badly.  His other positions – support for the second amendment, advocacy for closed borders – can only be assumed to be pandering as well.

Not to worry, though.  Just about as soon as he said it, he triangulated his position again, to something like abortion laws are already set and we have to leave it that way.  Trumps views on abortion aren’t the topic here.  Trump is the topic.  He is a mirror in which everyone sees what he or she wants to see, its just that the mirror has to be adjusted based on the onlooker and Trump isn’t really as good a triangulator as he is made out to be.

And that brings me to the conservative voters who have already cast their votes for Trump in the primaries heretofore.  Do you remember when socialized medicine was the most important thing about the Obama administration, the holy grail of the progressives?  It still is.

And yet, you have jettisoned that most important piece of your world view to support a man who sees things far differently than you, who supports socialized medicine, and who has said that the only thing he would change about the current system is to allow it to cross state lines.

Trump has woven you into his deception, his lies, his evil.  And when socialized medicine is codified and solidified for you, your children, and your children’s children to the tenth generation of your progeny, when you see that your seed will hate you and this generation for what has been done to the country, it will be far too late.

Open wide, and suck it down.  This is what you voted for, whether in the end it’s Hillary or Trump, or some replacement for Hillary.  Own it.  It’s yours.  The Mafia don asked you to pull the trigger and do the deed.  It’s no longer about him.  Now it’s about you.