Category Archives: Individual Rights

Updated: Virginia Tech Massacre: What To Expect

Crime, Individual Rights

For the time being, the Virginia-Tech massacre, where an Asian young man shot and killed 32 students (I don’t include the killer; media do, hence their reports of 33 dead) and injured at least 22 more, will end the insufferable Imus autopsies, and start the assaults on Second Amendment rights. Rosie will be mouthing what she regards as a given (ditto Bill Maher, the so-called libertarian): If all Americans are denied their right to defend home and hearth, it follows that all criminals will be unable to obtain weapons (NOT). Disarming law abiding Americans, with the exception of her security detail, is absolutely essential in order to prevent the odd evil individual from acting on his or her criminal impulses (NOT).

EVIL. Banish reference to that existential reality from your lexicon, won’t you? The “experts” have been dragged in to “explain” why a bad individual, described by his victims as calm and calculating during the executions, commits mass murder. To MSNBC’s credit, they mentioned that most such shootings have been carried out by individuals of foreign origins. Having brought that “out in the open,” to use the title of Paula Zahn’s putrid program about alleged, endemic, American racism, the network commenced the root-causes rabbiting. Society and the family must be saddled with the blame for the culprit’s actions.

You know the drill: crimes are never committed, but caused. Perpetrators don’t do the crime, but are driven to their dastardly deed, victims of larger, uncontrollable societal or familial forces. In the case of the common criminal, the exculpatory idiom is, “Daddy didn’t love me”; in the case of the terrorist it’s, “America loves Israel more than me.”

What we don’t need but will get in abundance is the staple mumbo jumbo from the experts, whose bag of tricks includes pharmacology (even though there is no scientific proof that these evil actions are fueled by misfiring neurons or defective levels of neurotransmitters), unconditional love (although adulation, with little or no corrective feedback, contributes to the creation of these monsters), and anger management.

Readings:

Coddling Killers: The Liberal Root-Causes Racket (The American Spectator), Mel’s ‘Malady,’ Foxman’s Fetish (WorldNetDaily.com) Trading Morality for Medical Mumbo-Jumbo (WorldNetDaily.com), Broken Brains? (WorldNetDaily.com), Sloppy Science Justifies Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (The Calgary Herald)

Update: Who knows? If not for the legislator, an armed student or faculty member might have been able to take the killer out before the body count reached 32. As WND reports, “More than one year before today’s unprecedented shooting rampage at Virginia Tech, the state’s General Assembly quashed a bill that would have given qualified college students and employees the right to carry handguns on campus… Most universities in Virginia require students and employees, other than police, to check their guns with police or campus security upon entering campus.”

A Triumph for Individual Rights

Individual Rights, Rights

From Breitbart.com:

“A federal appeals court overturned the District of Columbia’s long- standing handgun ban Friday, rejecting the city’s argument that the Second Amendment right to bear arms applied only to militias.”

Here’s an excerpt from the decision, courtesy of Volokh Conspiracy:

“In determining whether the Second Amendment’s guarantee is an individual one, or some sort of collective right, the most important word is the one the drafters chose to describe the holders of the right — ‘the people.’ That term is found in the First, Second, Fourth, Ninth, and Tenth Amendments. It has never been doubted that these provisions were designed to protect the interests of individuals against government intrusion, interference, or usurpation. We also note that the Tenth Amendment — ‘The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people’ — indicates that the authors of the Bill of Rights were perfectly capable of distinguishing between ‘the people,’ on the one hand, and ‘the states,’ on the other. The natural reading of ‘the right of the people’ in the Second Amendment would accord with usage elsewhere in the Bill of Rights.
The District’s argument, on the other hand, asks us to read ‘the people’ to mean some subset of individuals such as ‘the organized militia’ or ‘the people who are engaged in militia service,’ or perhaps not any individuals at all — e.g., ‘the states.’ These strained interpretations of ‘the people’ simply cannot be squared with the uniform construction of our other Bill of Rights provisions….
The District points to the singular nature of the Second Amendment’s preamble as an indication that the operative clause must be restricted or conditioned in some way by the prefatory language. However, the structure of the Second Amendment turns out to be not so unusual when we examine state constitutional provisions guaranteeing rights or restricting governmental power. It was quite common for prefatory language to state a principle of good government that was narrower than the operative language used to achieve it.
We think the Second Amendment was similarly structured. The prefatory language announcing the desirability of a well-regulated militia — even bearing in mind the breadth of the concept of a militia [which the court had earlier concluded ‘was a large segment of the population’ rather than just a government-selected National Guard-like subgroup -EV] — is narrower than the guarantee of an individual right to keep and bear arms. The Amendment does not protect ‘the right of militiamen to keep and bear arms,’ but rather ‘the right of the people.’ The operative clause, properly read, protects the ownership and use of weaponry beyond that needed to preserve the state militias….
[I]f the competent drafters of the Second Amendment had meant the right to be limited to the protection of state militias, it is hard to imagine that they would have chosen the language they did. We therefore take it as an expression of the drafters’ view that the people possessed a natural right to keep and bear arms, and that the preservation of the militia was the right’s most salient political benefit —” and thus the most appropriate to express in a political document.”

‘Conservatives For Killing Terri’

Bush, Individual Rights, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, libertarianism, Neoconservatism

“I can think of only two occasions on which I agreed with George Bush. Both involved the upholding of the people’s negative, or leave-me-alone, rights.
The first was his refusal to capitulate to the Kyoto-protocol crazies. Not surprisingly, some conservatives denounced this rare flicker of good judgment. And I’m not talking a ‘Crunchy Con’ of Andrew Sullivan’s caliber—he does proud to Greenpeace and the Sierra Club combined. No less a conservative than Joe Scarborough commiserated with actor Robert Redford over the president’s ‘blind spot on the environment.’ (Ditto Bill O’Reilly.)
The other Bush initiative I endorsed was the attempt by Congress to uphold Terri Schiavo’s inalienable right to life—a decision very many conservatives now rue.
Upholding rights to life, liberty, and property is a government’s primary—some would say only—duty. But, bless their cruel little hearts, this cast of conservative characters is at least consistent. It relished the launch of a bloody war in contravention of fact, law, and morality, and now, fittingly, it’s atoning for its incongruent attempts to forestall a killing…”

The excerpt is from my new WorldNetDaily.com column, “Conservatives for Killing Terri.” Comments are welcome.

'Conservatives For Killing Terri'

Bush, Individual Rights, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, libertarianism, Neoconservatism

“I can think of only two occasions on which I agreed with George Bush. Both involved the upholding of the people’s negative, or leave-me-alone, rights.
The first was his refusal to capitulate to the Kyoto-protocol crazies. Not surprisingly, some conservatives denounced this rare flicker of good judgment. And I’m not talking a ‘Crunchy Con’ of Andrew Sullivan’s caliber—he does proud to Greenpeace and the Sierra Club combined. No less a conservative than Joe Scarborough commiserated with actor Robert Redford over the president’s ‘blind spot on the environment.’ (Ditto Bill O’Reilly.)
The other Bush initiative I endorsed was the attempt by Congress to uphold Terri Schiavo’s inalienable right to life—a decision very many conservatives now rue.
Upholding rights to life, liberty, and property is a government’s primary—some would say only—duty. But, bless their cruel little hearts, this cast of conservative characters is at least consistent. It relished the launch of a bloody war in contravention of fact, law, and morality, and now, fittingly, it’s atoning for its incongruent attempts to forestall a killing…”

The excerpt is from my new WorldNetDaily.com column, “Conservatives for Killing Terri.” Comments are welcome.