Articles by Herschel Smith

Immigration = corporate welfare + collectivist voters.  Remember that formula.  Sometimes a comment thread is the best thing to bring out false hope, whether salvation via Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney, Chris Christie or (yes), even Rand Paul.  Witness this.

John Galtius:

Romney is slick, and I don’t like slick. Slick will play games. Jeb was a great governor of Florida, did a good job, and would make a decent president – if we NEEDED a decent president. We don’t. We need a GREAT president.

Rand Paul – Rand Paul – Rand Paul – Rand Paul – Rand Paul – Rand Paul – Rand Paul – Rand Paul – Rand Paul – Rand Paul – Rand Paul – Rand Paul – Rand Paul – Rand Paul – Rand Paul – Rand Paul – Rand Paul – Rand Paul – Rand Paul – Rand Paul – Rand Paul – Rand Paul – Rand Paul

You media elite can try to shove these guys off on us if you like, but I will ONLY vote for Rand Paul.

Herschel Smith:

Rand Paul = Pro-Immigration (legal). He just wants to turn currently illegal immigration into legal immigration. He is an open borders fanatic just like his Dad. I’ll never vote for him.

John Galtius:

“I do not support amnesty, I support legal immigration and recognize that the country has been enriched by those who seek the freedom to make a life for themselves. However, millions of illegal immigrants are crossing our border without our knowledge and causing a clear threat to our national security. I want to work in the Senate to secure our border immediately. In addition, I support the creation of a border fence and increased border patrol capabilities.

Immigrants should meet the current requirements, which should be enforced and updated. I realize that subsidizing something creates more of it, and do not think the taxpayer should be forced to pay for welfare, medical care and other expenses for illegal immigrants. Once the subsidies for illegal immigration are removed, the problem will likely become far less common.

I support local solutions to illegal immigration as protected by the 10th amendment. I support making English the official language of all documents and contracts.

Millions crossing our border without our knowledge constitutes a clear threat to our nation’s security. Instead of closing military bases at home and renting space in Europe, I am open to the construction of bases to protect our border.

So what part of your lies, Herschel, do you want us to believe?

Herschel Smith:

” … the country has been enriched.” Yea. Only if you are on the board of directors for Monsanto or Archer-Daniels-Midland or the Chamber of Commerce.

“I support legal immigration …” Rand Paul knows exactly what that means.

http://www.wnd.com/2014/12/tic…

Apparently you don’t.

Oh, and make sure not to neglect what “legal” immigration means for gun control too.

http://www.captainsjournal.com…

John Galtius:

So, Mister Democrat, why are YOU supporting Bush?

And frankly, I really am not interested in your conspiracy theories.

Herschel Smith:

You must be joking. Seriously. Is this a joke? If the GOP puts up Bush, Romney or Christie, I’ve already said what I’ll do election night. I won’t even go to the polls. I’ll stay at home, grill steaks, walk the dog, clean my guns, and count my boxes of ammunition. And if they put up Paul, voters may as well put up a democrat. It’s all the same. Count them. Millions upon millions upon millions of new collectivist voters from South of the border to rob your paycheck. Bring on dystopia. Buy guns now. You’ll need them in the coming years.

livingthehighlife:

“clean my guns, and count my boxes of ammunition”

Another internet tough guy.

Herschel Smith:

Off subject. Full stop. Return to on-point comments. Immigration = corporate welfare + collectivist voters. Do you have anything useful to say about the subject? I thought not.

Generally folks don’t understand, but there is no voting our way out of this mess.  No candidate – Romney, Christie, Bush or Paul – has proposed to make a corollary of repeal of the entitlement state a condition of and stipulation for immigration.  Not a single one.  That means welfare, health care, SNAP, etc.  And my daughter is a nurse in an ER, and I know all about the penalties associated with receipt of a patient into the ER, discharge, and receipt of that same patient later for the same condition (meaning that the system is set up to provide beds and long term medical care for patients, regardless of immigration status, in order to avoid astronomical fines to the federal government).  Don’t allow anyone to tell you that we won’t be funding medical care for immigrants.  It’s a lie.  That’s all you need to know.  And immigration includes millions of Islamic voters as well as Hispanic and Latino voters who will vote your gun rights away.

Communities Digital News:

The Greenville News:

Jon Bailey spent a Friday afternoon over Christmas break taking his 13-year-old son, Connor, to shoot pistols at Allen Arms Indoor Range in Greenville.

He showed Connor how to load, aim and fire the weapon, but he also instructed him on what to do if he ever saw friends playing with a gun or found a gun lying around.

“He knows to get the heck out of the room and talk to adults,” Bailey said.

Bailey doesn’t call himself a gun fanatic. He wanted to demystify the idea of guns for his son.

But he does think more children should have knowledge of gun safety.

Who instructs children on the gun rights and safety has traditionally been left out of the state’s school systems, but bills pre-filed in both chambers of the South Carolina Legislature would bring gun rights squarely into focus in the classroom.

Whether schools are the right place to instruct students about firearms will be up for debate.

Zero-tolerance policies regarding guns at South Carolina schools has led to a backlash against citizens’ gun rights and a lack of knowledge on how to safely use firearms, Republican state legislators said as they prepared to open a new session in the state Legislature.

State social studies standards that instruct teachers to explain how the Constitution and Bill of Rights helps protect limited government. But schools don’t go far enough to explain gun rights, they said.

One bill — pre-filed in the state House — would create a Second Amendment Awareness Day to be held on Dec. 15 each year in all state schools, complete with a poster or essay contest centered on the theme “The Right To Bear Arms: One American Right Protecting All Others.”

Students — at every grade level — would receive at least three weeks of education on their gun rights based on a curriculum chosen by the state Department of Education and approved or recommended by the National Rifle Association.

[ … ]

His idea for the bill came after an incident in a Summerville high school in September where police were notified and a 16-year-old student’s locker searched after he wrote a fictional essay that mentioned purchasing a gun to kill his neighbor’s pet dinosaur.

The student was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct after police said he became belligerent.

Clemmons said the incident “shocked” and “offended” him.

“In this case, it squelched a student’s first amendment rights, in responding to an assignment, to talk about the second amendment,” he said.

Students are being punished when they choose to “write about one of their precious American rights,” he said.

Rep. Garry Smith, R-Simpsonville, who co-sponsored the bill, along with Rep. Richard Yow, R-Chesterfield, said the second amendment deserves more instructional time than other amendments because it is the lynchpin for the rest of democracy.

This is all well and good, but I have a better idea.  If South Carolina citizens really want to teach children about the second amendment, then get rid of gun-hater and elitist establishment ruler S.C. State Senator Larry Martin (from Pickens) and institute open carry throughout South Carolina.  Patriots need to initiate a beat-down to establishment GOP in South Carolina.  Until then, it’s just all bluster and hot air to me.

David Codrea:

With an administration policy abetting immigration by disparate cultures with incongruous goals, such attacks may be inevitable. If and when one does happen, the probability is that it will occur in an area where private carrying of firearms has not been normalized, and is discouraged or outright prohibited. As for any and all laws in place, the attackers will ignore them, as they always do.

I think David is saying – with some degree of regret for those to whom he refers – that there will be a price to pay for your collectivist voting history.  You are an easier target for the terrorists.

David Codrea:

New House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz took his first action for the new congress by renewing the subpoena to compel Attorney General Eric Holder to produce documents related to Operation Fast and Furious “gunwalking” …

We’ll see where this goes.  But Jason Chaffetz, for all of his appearances to oppose the establishment, is an establishment kid.  If he likes Boehner, that says something about his character.

Kurt Hofmann:

So now, any gunsmith or machinist who is hired by the “gun” owner to complete the machining is going to be ruled to have “manufactured” a gun, and will thus be held to the same restrictions that apply to all commercial gun manufacturers. The BATFE is insisting on having its cake and eating it, too. They have previously argued that an 80% receiver ceases to be an 80% receiver, and becomes a “firearm,” if the manufacturer does so much as scratch an outline showing where material needs to be milled away; but now, if the buyer of what the BATFE recognizes as an incomplete receiver similarly removes some of the material that must be removed in order to make the receiver function in a firearm, and then turns it over to a skilled professional gunsmith or machinist to finish the work, the professional ends up being considered the one to have “manufactured” the gun.

In order to understand how Kurt got to this point you have to read his entire article.  I was shaking my head.  I shouldn’t be, but I’m surprised almost daily at the control freaks who make up the federal government.

Mike Vanderboegh on the thin blue line.  So here are two questions.  First, when is the last time you “lost a rifle?”  Second, when is the last time you shot at a dog, missed and killed someone?  Readers can weigh in.

Mike Vanderboegh: Ghostly Echoes From History, Part IV.  Mike begins with my favorite quote from John Adams.  “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”  This is a pregnant statement and perhaps we’ll explore it in detail one day too.  In the mean time, read Mike.

Robert H. Scales wrote a piece for The Atlantic entitled Gun Trouble, with the catchy subtitle as follows: The rifle that today’s infantry uses is little changed since the 1960s—and it is badly flawed. Military lives depend on these cheap composites of metal and plastic. So why can’t the richest country in the world give its soldiers better ones?

Scales then proceeds to rehearse the history of flaws after the initial rollout of the M-16 in Vietnam, well known flaws (and failed to mention others, such as the fact that the chamber and barrel weren’t chrome-lined in the initial stages of production).  He pans the 5.56 mm NATO round, and ends up recommending two (what he considers to be) improvements.  First, he wants a larger caliber round, and second, he wants a gas recirculation system rather than the current DI system in use in the Eugene Stoner design (He fails to mention that the gas recirculation system weighs the front end of the rifle down and makes it more difficult to maneuver in CQB such as room clearing.  This is a point made to me by my son, who didn’t even like my quad-rail on the front end of my RRA rifle due to its weight).  Scales points to Wanat as proof positive that American lives are being wasted by a bad design.

The M4, the standard carbine in use by the infantry today, is a lighter version of the M16 rifle that killed so many of the soldiers who carried it in Vietnam. (The M16 is still also in wide use today.) In the early morning of July 13, 2008, nine infantrymen died fighting off a Taliban attack at a combat outpost near the village of Wanat in Afghanistan’s Nuristan province. Some of the soldiers present later reported that in the midst of battle their rifles overheated and jammed. The Wanat story is reminiscent of experiences in Vietnam: in fact, other than a few cosmetic changes, the rifles from both wars are virtually the same. And the M4’s shorter barrel makes it less effective at long ranges than the older M16—an especially serious disadvantage in modern combat, which is increasingly taking place over long ranges.

In spite of the high number of kills in the wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, Scales calls the 5.56 mm a “varmint round.”  We’ve seen all of this before, much of it coming from experience many decades ago.  But we’ve seen testing that simply shows much of the bad press for the Stoner design (and good press for the Kalashnikov design) to be false.  Recall the testing done on the Knights Armament rifle, and reader Pat Hines sends two more examples here and here.  The point is granted that Rock River Arms, Knights Armament, LaRue Tactical and Daniel Defense isn’t the Colt produced under milspec for the Army and Marine Corps (these are all superior to the Colt M-16 and M-4).  Furthermore, recall that we’ve discussed what it means to be milspec and what it doesn’t.  Not milspec isn’t always worse, and milspec isn’t always better.

Still, my own son Daniel tells me that he never had any problems with either his SAW or an M-4 when he used that in training and in Fallujah, Iraq (while still claiming that my RRA rifle was better than the Colt he used).  The biggest problem with Scales’ argument isn’t that it doesn’t rely on hard evidence regarding quality battle rifles today (and it doesn’t, and some AR-15s are better designed and manufactured than the M-4 it must be admitted).  The biggest problem with his argument is that it blames the wrong culprit.

My coverage of the Battle of Wanat goes back to before the Cubbison report, from 2008 until recently.

Analysis Of The Battle Of Wanat

Investigating The Battle Of Wanat

The Contribution Of The Afghan National Army In The Battle Of Wanat

The Battle Of Wanat, Massing Of Troops And Attacks In Nuristan

Second Guessing The Battles Of Wanat And Kamdesh

And many other articles.  I am proud to have contributed in some small way to the Wanat report still on file at Fort Leavenworth (on page 255 three of my articles are cited).  Specifically, it was published by the Combat Studies Institute Press, U.S. Army Combined Arms Center.

The kill ratio was indeed lower at Wanat than has been noted at other engagements, but the fact that Soldiers had to put 400 rounds through their weapons in such a short time frame is indicative of a different problem than the gun.  First of all, with all due respect to the Soldiers who were there, fire control and long distance optics would have been a valuable commodity.  When training his “boots,” my son worked first, middle and last on rate of fire and fire control.  And use of a larger bore weapon wouldn’t have helped barrel temperature (have you ever shot a large caliber weapon?), and would certainly have hurt the ability to regain sight picture after firing due to significant recoil.

Use of DMs with M-14s or bolt action sniper rifles would have helped (the Marines make use of such tactics), as would have training in shooting uphill (to which very few units train – I know this from conversations with Army trainers).  But the biggest problems with Wanat were associated with command choices that could have been done differently.  Vehicle Patrol Base Wanat (it was a VPB rather than a FOB), took entirely too long to set up, allowing enemy massing of forces, something I’ve noted on a number of occasions in Afghanistan (it’s a favorite tactic when the Taliban think they can greatly outnumber their opponent).

Furthermore, terrain was critical in that the U.S. troops didn’t control the high country surrounding the VPB which was in a valley.  One Marine Captain commented to me as follows:

The platoon in Wanat sacrificed control of the key terrain in the area in order to locate closer to the population. This was a significant risk, and I don’t see any indication that they attempted to sufficiently mitigate that risk. I can empathize a little bit – I was the first Marine on deck at Camp Blessing back when it was still Firebase Catamount, in late 2003. I took responsibility for the camp’s security from a platoon from the 10th Mountain Div, and established a perimeter defense around it. Looking back, I don’t think I adequately controlled the key terrain around the camp. The platoon that replaced me took some steps to correct that, and I think it played a significant role when they were attacked on March 22nd of 2004. COIN theorists love to say that the population is the key terrain, but I think Wanat shows that ignoring the existing natural terrain in favor of the population is a risky proposition, especially in Afghanistan.

The force was simply too small (platoon size versus virtual battalion size Taliban force), and they were simply outgunned.  It’s remarkable that they didn’t have even more casualties.  Blaming the gun we deployed with the Soldiers is the easy thing to do.  It’s also the wrong thing to do, and it’s disingenuous.  Blaming the men who made the decision to deploy the way they did would be the hard thing to do because it gets personal.  But at least it would be honest.

See also:

Battle Of Wanat Category

War is Boring, The M-4 Carbine Is Here To Stay

Dan Morgan on Wanat

WeaponsMan Part 1 and Part 2

The Firearm Blog

As an update to my article on the arrest of Danny Gray Lambeth for open carry of a rifle, I do not know Mr. Lambeth and have no way of contacting him.  I would like to know more about the story, but cannot afford the time to travel and sit through a court hearing, especially given that hearings can be postponed on the spot multiple times depending upon what the lawyers and judge want to do.  I have also searched new reports every day since the original report, only to find no updates.

But I did forward a complaint to the office of the North Carolina Attorney General, and heard back the next day.  Basically, I stipulated to the caller (himself a former prosecuting attorney) that I didn’t know all of the facts of the case, and he stipulated to me (after I pressed the point) that arrest for open carry in the county of Davidson while leaving me alone in Mecklenburg County to open carry is capricious and arbitrary, unless there are other facts of the case such as brandishing or threatening (which are both illegal anyway).

And I insist that readers and the legal system stipulate as follows: arrest in one county while allowing open carry in another allows LEOs capricious and arbitrary choices, and by the very definition this isn’t justice.

Via WRSA, this from Zero Hedge:

Here it is crucial to remember that no Ukrainian politician has any real power, not even Poroshenko, Iatseniuk or Turchinov.  The real rulers of the Ukraine are the US ambassador and the Kiev CIA station chief.  These are the people who literally administer the Nazi junta on behalf of the US deep state and its imperial interests.  As for the Ukrainian members of the junta, they all perfectly understand that their future is 100% dependent on being a faithful servant of the AngloZionist Empire.  They all understand that they came to power by means of an completely illegal coup, that the elections they organized this year were a total farce and that they will soon have to use repressive measures against their own population just to stay in power …

Simply put, there is nobody on this planet which has done more to oppose the AngloZionist Empire than Vladimir Putin.  I think that the hysterical and vicious demonization campaign against him in the western media is the best proof of that.

You can read all of it at Zero Hedge.  Good grief, and a thousand good griefs.  This comment best sums up my initial reaction to the post.

This guy is a moron. Example – “the AngloZionist Empire”. Nuff said. He’s just another facist with a Putin man crush.

No one has invaded Russia, but Russia has taken openly hostile action to regain territory lost in the Soviet break up. This is really quite undeniable unless you are a facist Putin man crusher. Poland and the Baltic states have been invaded by Russia so many times over the centuries. Their fear of Russia is quite real and well founded. When the Russians invade, there tends to be a lot rape and out and out murder of innocent people (like mass shootings of army officers, politicians, etc.) and the then general rape of the land and its wealth, with political and cultural oppression.

The idea NATO would ever invade Russia is perposterous (sic). A least the moron writer gets that right. It is not perposterous that smaller countries that have been invaded by Russians on numerous occassions throughout history might seek to voluntarily join a defensive alliance like NATO to ward off another Russina invasion. In fact, the act is quite rational.

Ok, so here come the America and Jews suck fusilade. If you think the USA is an opressive (sic) empire, how can you possibly support Russia? If you were logically consistant (sic), you would have to dislike both. The only conclusion is you are a facist with a supressed (sic) homo-erotic crush on Putin. I can really see no other alternative.

And I will say one more time, there is no grand plan, either by the Russians, or the US, or NATO, or the Jooooos. They are all people and, as such, are far too disorganized and incompetent to have anything close to a grand plan. Mainly, people just react to events.

Listen folks.  You can hate the EU/Fed/Banker cabal all you want.  But here’s a news flash for you.  Putin is a communist (or at the very least, a uber-nationalist and Fascist), and he wants to control the world like all Fascists.  He is a former KGB knuckle smasher and strongman, an enforcer for the state.  He has his own fan-boys, and he is the very definition of totalitarian.

Furthermore, the Soviet Union existed for one reason alone: communist-sympathizer FDR gave away Eastern Europe to create the communist bloc after World War II.  The very existence of the Soviet Union was illegitimate, and certainly the Ukraine wanting to exist as it did before being starved by the communists isn’t illegitimate.  It isn’t illegal, it is entirely understandable and sensible.  Most of the Ukraine doesn’t want to exist as communists, and they’re willing to perish for that belief.

The history of Russia is totalitarianism, witness the history of the Eastern Orthodox Church which has resolutely failed to speak truth to power, turning inward to liturgy and navel gazing exercises (as allowed by the state) rather than providing a check and balance on the power of the state.  Communists – whether Putin or Obama – are communists, and none of them deserve your support or advocacy.

The Putin worship I see around the web is both sickening and creepy, as sickening and creepy as Obama worship.  But specifically I’m saying to the American patriot community, it is unbecoming, weird and wholly inconsistent with your view of man, church and state.

The New Yorker:

The news that the parents of the children massacred two years ago in Sandy Hook, near Newtown, Connecticut, by a young man with a Bushmaster semi-automatic rifle, were undertaking a lawsuit against the gun manufacturer was at once encouraging and terribly discouraging. The encouraging part is that those parents, suffering from a grief that those of us who are only witnesses to it can barely begin to comprehend, haven’t, despite the failure to reinstate assault-weapons bans and stop the next massacre, given way to despair. Like Richard Martinez, after his son was murdered by a weapon that should never have been in the hands of a lunatic, or anyone else, for that matter, they’re allowing themselves to be angry, and then turning their anger into action: they’re naming the business that helped kill their children and asking a court to hold that business responsible.

The filed complaint—the numbered paragraphs give it an oddly religious feeling, like theses nailed to a church door—is worth reading in full, however painful that might be, not only because of the unbelievable suffering and cruelty it details on that terrible morning but also because it offers, in neatly logical fashion, an indisputable argument: the gun manufacturer is guilty of having sold a weapon whose only purpose was killing a lot of people in a very short time. Despite the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives having previously declared that such weapons “serve a function in crime and combat, but serve no sporting purpose,” Bushmaster sold it anyway—and precisely on the grounds that it could kill many people, quickly. “Forces of opposition bow down. You are single handedly outnumbered,” the advertising copy read.

… one of the ironies of the whole story is that there already is a long-standing ban on truly automatic weapons—machine guns—whose legality not even the N.R.A. or their allies dispute. If anything, they tend to make a sniffy point of discriminating actual machine guns from mere semi-automatic ones, among them the Bushmaster. (Back in the twenties, the availability of the tommy gun to gangsters meant that the police were often brutally out-gunned.) But all of the talk about legal and illegal weapons, automatic and semi-automatic—as about the treatment of the psychologically troubled—evades the simple, central point: it ought to be very, very difficult, as it is in every other civilized country, to get your hands on a weapon whose only purpose is to kill people quickly. The N.R.A. and their allies make it very, very easy.

There are replies to Gopnik, but thus far I have yet to see one that targets the fundamental flaws in the argument.  To begin with, I don’t stipulate at all to the notion that the ban on fully automatic weapons is legal regardless of what the NRA believes.  I believe that the Hughes amendment is an unconstitutional and obscene abomination.  Adam needs to get out of Manhattan a little more and see the world.

Second, his categorization of weapons “whose purpose is to kill” shows fundamental ignorance of guns and the history of them.  The sporting purposes test applied by the ATF and codified into law is circular reasoning as I commented on the ATF study on importability of certain shotguns.

Wrapped up in this paragraph we have not only an amusing logical blunder but also the real crux of the problem. Authors have presupposed the answer (so-called circular reasoning) at which they must arrive, i.e., the statute must remain useful. Thus, all interpretations by ATF are biased to yield that result. It is not the responsibility of the ATF nor is it within the purview of their authority to ensure the continued usefulness of a statute, if in fact it is rendered useless by advances, common practices, evolution in sporting, or lack of wise crafting of the statute (such as the fact that nowhere in this discussion of “sporting purposes” is there any latitude given for personal protection and home defense under the second amendment to the constitution of the United States). This single paragraph renders the study itself as useless as the statute has become.

Let’s use another example in order to make the point clear.  Short barrel revolvers.  While some hunters use long barrel revolvers with scopes for hunting, no one uses a short barrel revolver for hunting.  It has no purpose except to kill (whether used in crime or in self defense).  And yet these aren’t the weapons Adam refers to when he discusses guns with a single purpose.  He is referring to AR-15s and other similarly-styled weapons, which ironically are used quite a bit for hunting (as well as for other sporting purposes such as 3-gun competitions).  You see, the ATF has written the rules by formulating a list and then trying to ban anything on the list – which is circular reasoning.

Scoped bolt action rifles are used as sniper rifles – or for hunting deer.  Shotguns are used for turkey – or to clear rooms in Now Zad Afghanistan by the U.S. Marine Corps.  There is no list that doesn’t ‘beg the question’ (as a formal logical fallacy) when it comes to military or sporting purposes.

Furthermore, a weapon’s capacity to kill is precisely what makes it valuable when it comes to the amelioration of tyranny, which is what the second amendment is all about anyway.  You see, death comes to us not from an imperfect society that lacks the proper state supervision, needing just one more law or the right kind of leadership in order to be the utopia on earth envisioned by Gopnik.  Death comes to us at the hands of criminals, petty and state-sanctioned, due to something called federal headship in Adam and original sin.  Gopnik must return to Genesis Chapter 3 in order to craft a meaningful and consistent anthropology that explains reality.

As with all statists, their god fails them.  They will forever be waiting on the providence of an impotent totem, and may as well slash their wrists and bleed before Baal.  God sits in the heavens and mocks them (Psalm 2:4).  Their attempts to bring heaven down to earth through lawfare and social programs will only end in failure and suffering.  Statistics on guns and crime aren’t relevant to Gopnik’s problem.  He needs to jettison his fundamental world view in order to understand who he is, who man is, and what man must do to be saved.

David Codrea:

It’s not often I find myself in agreement with a “gun control” zealot, but in this case, I’m on board with Rejina 100 percent. By all means, if you don’t want her to think you are a coward, please share. Some may even want to start with these guys.

It might actually be rather nice if the whole thing got a little more legal scrutiny than it has to date.

David Codrea:

Perhaps when enough citizens realize the police can’t protect them and won’t allow them to protect themselves, their attitudes and political choices will change, or at least their inclination against proud and defiant civil disobedience. Some of us would love to help, but we can’t force people not to enslave or harm themselves. Meanwhile, those of us who already know the score will continue to protect ourselves and our rights, and oppose that New York state of mind whenever the fascist Mayor of Everytown tries to impose it beyond the five boroughs.

I’ve said before and will continue to drive the point that totalitarians will answer for every crime committed upon their people that could have been prevented or ameliorated if they allowed their people to defend themselves.  Politicians and police who lobby against the God-given right of self defense will ultimately answer to the one who gave those rights.

Kurt Hofmann:

And that’s another problem for your side, Diamond–the principles on which our republic (as opposed to your “democracy”) was founded are indeed worth dying for, in the eyes of many of us, and perhaps an even bigger problem for you, worth killing for. So if you and your “decent Americans” decide to appeal to “authoritarian government” to deal with us, bring it.

As I survey the ideological landscape, it’s not entirely clear to me yet that the totalitarians get the fact that the civil disobedience we see now in New York, Connecticut and Washington are based on irreducibles, axioms that define character and circumscribe actions.  Let’s hope they do before they do things from which there is no return.

Mike Vanderboegh:

Faith in God (Part III)

The Long Game (Part II)

Squirrel Away As Much Powder As Possible (Part I)

Read them all.

Kurt Hofmann sends this along.

First of all, the folks carrying the cartoon are rude and ill mannered.  The cartoon is poorly done.  I don’t mean just in poor taste, I mean poorly done.  It’s an awful cartoon.  My dog could draw better than this.  Second, the cartoon is in poor taste.  Blood dancing is in bad form no matter who the dancer or victim.

There are good cartoons and bad ones, and I don’t even have to agree with the cartoonist in order to appreciate good art and clever ideas.  For example, a very liberal cartoonist with whom I seldom if ever agreed, Doug Marlette, once gave us this after the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.

The Eagle cries.  Now one doesn’t have to agree with huge government programs in order to appreciate Doug’s having captured the moment with a cartoon.  Furthermore, as an engineer I know full well how Morton-Thiokol had ignored their own engineer’s warnings concerning temperature and O-rings.  The failure never had to occur.

Still, whether one agrees with the cartoon or not, Doug wasn’t blood dancing.  He was showing true grief and sorrow over needless deaths.  The folks at CSGV have latched on to crap and made it their own.  Very well.  It suits them.