Category Archives: libertarianism

Patriot Goes Up Against Treason Lobbyist

BAB's A List, Crime, Ethics, Ilana Mercer, IMMIGRATION, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, libertarianism

Patriot Peter Brimelow, founder of VDARE.COM, debated Treason Lobbyist Jacob Hornberger on immigration.

I await footage of the debate, but I expect “Bumper Hornberger” was intellectually disemboweled.

He ought to be used to it, although the bitch-slap he received from Robert Bidinotto occurred some time ago, so “Bumper” may need a reminder. See “Shame on Bumper Hornberger,” reproduced hereunder.

I have no wish to revisit the manner in which he (and his ever-righteous ifeminist handmaiden, or hyena, rather) swarmed me. I’ll say only this: Hornberger and his backers seldom fail to bend over backwards to avoid imputing evil intent to bad elements or evil characters (as Bidinotto elaborates hereunder). Yet me Bumper and his gang accused of malicious intent in the absence of any. In other words, they implied I was a liar; impugning my person rather than my positions.

Again, notwithstanding the intellectual differences we hold on the issues; what makes these people–who’re forever posing as paragons of justice–so despicable is that they convicted me of malicious intent when there was none.

In the universe of these twisted individuals, some are more equal than others.

In any event, in “Shame on Bumper Hornberger,” Robert Bidinotto explains why “Bumper Hornberger” is a lousy exegete, not fit to defend truth. This is why I am quite confident Peter Brimelow, a class act, will have tossed and gored Hornberger “real good.”

The BIDINOTTO BLOG
Shame on Bumper Hornberger
posted 08/26/03

Bumper who?

Okay, apologies. This impromptu post refers to a matter more arcane than you’ll normally find here, and I beg your patience for a brief setup.

A feisty columnist for WorldNetDaily.com, Ilana Mercer, recently took on some fellow libertarians for their one-sided view of Middle East politics: the view that Israel is the root of all evil, and that the poor, downtrodden Palestinians are merely responding defensively and justly against the Zionist oppressor.

Ilana (she’s a friend, so I’ll call her that) has a perfectly good point. There’s a curious moral asymmetry among some self-styled lovers of Liberty and Justice, who rage against Israel for targeting the likes of Hamas terrorists in self-defense, yet who simultaneously exude boundless sympathy toward those who encourage their kids to strap on explosives and blow themselves up, along with scores of innocent noncombatants in buses, restaurants, and nightclubs. For most Americans, this is an easy moral call; but then again, most Americans aren’t libertarian anarchists.

Anyway, it so happens that one of Ilana’s targets was a writer and editor, Sheldon Richman. Not one to mince words, she wrote: “I understand that libertarians like Sheldon Richman (and the Holocaust-denying Institute for Historical Review) believe, mistakenly, that all ‘the land’ belongs to the Arabs.”

Mr. Richman, who is of Jewish descent, took great offense. He claimed that with this sentence Ilana had implied that he, too, was among those who denied the reality of the Holocaust. One notes, though, that in her sentence, Ilana had fastidiously segregated Mr. Richman from the Holocaust Deniers by means of a parenthetical barricade. I don’t think that any fair reading of the sentence (that is, a reading by someone not personally involved in the counterpunching) would construe it to mean that Mr. Richman was similar to the I. H. R. in denying the Holocaust–only in their shared beliefs about Arab claims to Israeli land.

Now Ilana Mercer is perfectly capable of defending herself, and she has. But a bit of piling on against her has begun, with one Jacob “Bumper” Hornberger–head of something called the Future of Freedom Foundation–now hyperventilating against the lady and her online publisher, WorldNetDaily.

Mr. Hornberger believes that Mr. Richman was grievously wounded by Ilana’s parenthetical bludgeon, and has publicly damned WorldNetDaily (“Shame on WorldNetDaily” is his screed’s title) for daring to defend their columnist, rather than muzzling or disowning her. Along the way, he accuses Ilana of a “false and despicable insinuation” and of a “smear”; and he further claims that she “knowingly, deliberately, and intentionally chose not to pursue the truth…”

I would have stayed out of this particular little spat except for two things.

First, I don’t much like it when men gang up on a lady–especially a lady whom I know to be honorable.

Second, it so happens that I’ve had a bit of first-hand experience with Mr. Hornberger concerning the matters that he says so concern him: false and despicable insinuations, smears, and deliberate misrepresentations of the truth.

This seems an opportune moment to revisit that episode.

The July 1990 issue of his Freedom Daily column, “The Forgotten Importance of Civil Liberties,” found Mr. Hornberger striking his favorite pose–that of a self-righteous moralizer–this time to attack me for what he described as “a tremendous intellectual assault on civil liberties.” My offense, he proclaimed to his readership (such as it is), was my three-part series, “Crime and Consequences,” which appeared during 1989 in The Freeman magazine.

While I am gratified that, to Mr. Hornberger, my series was both “tremendous” and “intellectual,” I certainly didn’t recognize any of my views in his characterization of them. According to him, here is what I said:

“Concerned with ever-increasing crime rates in America, Mr. Bidinotto argued that the solution, at least in part, turned on the curtailment of the safeguards enunciated in the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Mr. Bidinotto suggested that if Americans just loosened some of the strictures in the Bill of Rights which enabled so many criminals to go free, the crime problem could be significantly alleviated. Not spared from Mr. Bidinotto’s attack were civil liberties lawyers as well as such rights as trial by jury, right to bail, right to counsel, protection from unreasonable searches and seizures, and protection from self-incrimination.”

Now had I written any of those things, I would have been first in line to condemn myself, sparing Mr. Hornberger the strain of further moral posturing. But the reader will first note a curious fact: nowhere in his bill of indictment does one find a single word in quotation marks. [A technique “Bumper” and his ifeminist friend further perfected on me.]

That isn’t surprising, since not a single claim is true.

What Mr. Hornberger declared to be attacks on the Bill of Rights were nothing more than my unapologetic assault on the Warren Court’s infamous misinterpretations and manipulations of the Bill of Rights: their shameless departures from a “strict constructionist” approach to constitutional interpretation, and their wholesale invention of a category of criminal “rights” never envisioned, intended, nor codified by the Framers.

For example, I criticized Supreme Court decisions such as Miranda v. Arizona (1966) and Mapp v. Ohio (1961) for manufacturing evidentiary “exclusionary rules” that one finds nowhere in the Constitution or Bill of Rights. Yet Mr. Hornberger equated my criticism of this constitutional vandalism with criticism of the Constitution itself. Perhaps this is understandable. Mr. Hornberger is an attorney, and having gone through a modern law school, he may no longer be capable of grasping subtle distinctions–such as the difference between James Madison and Earl Warren.

To take another example, what exactly did I say that he declared to be an “attack” on the “right to bail”? Only this: “Career criminals–and anyone with a history of escapes or failures to show in court–should never get bail consideration.” That is hardly a radical assault on a “right”: in fact, it’s the essence of the 1984 federal Bail Reform Act, which grants judges the authority to deny bail to defendants who pose a danger to individuals or the community. My position is totally consistent with the wording of the Eighth Amendment, which says that “Excessive bail shall not be required”–leaving it to judges to determine whether defendants are trustworthy to appear in court, whether bail ought to be granted, and in what amount. I said nothing inconsistent with this established principle, leaving me to wonder if Mr. Hornberger believes that the Constitution guarantees bail to every defendant, no matter what his character or trustworthiness.

I could go on, but the interested reader can decide the matter for himself. The three-part series is available online: Part I, Part II, and Part III. [Links defunct.]

Afterwards, the reader may also decide for himself if the accusations Mr. Hornberger slings at Ilana Mercer more appropriately describe the accusations he made against me: “false and despicable insinuation” and “smear” by someone who “knowingly, deliberately, and intentionally chose not to pursue the truth…”

If Mr. Richman needs a defender concerned with the truth, it should be someone other than Bumper Hornberger.

Update III: On Libertarians Who Dismiss The NRA (& ‘Heller’)

Business, Constitution, Individual Rights, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Multiculturalism, Natural Law

Myron Pauli, a valued reader whose letters are always stimulating, has given in to the sin of abstraction so many libertarians are guilty of. (See the Comments Section of the previous
post.) The root of this error comes from being high on your own ideological purity. So high you walk around with a hangover that clouds clear thinking rooted in reality.

Such individuals have discovered libertarian theory (often from dubious sources), and have set about enforcing it with the zeal of soviet apparatchiks, instead of working with reality. Which is what the very flawed, non-ideological NRA does.

For example, the fact that the NRA has acquiesced to—or rather works around—licensing, causes libertarian purists to dismiss the NRA. This is silly, if not a non sequitur, given the enormous amount of good work the NRA does. And given the fact that libertarians have achieved precious little in this respect. Without the NRA and its formidable clout, there would be no Second Amendment rights in this country. The fact that they are hated by the Left is a notch on their Second Amendment scorecard. (But, as I said to Sean the other day, libertarians don’t share my visceral hatred of the left. Passionless people, for the most)

Myron’s particular argument goes as follows: Because the NRA is “suing private company Walt Disney for the ‘right’ to take their guns on Disney property,” they are useless, not to be supported, and, for good measure, let us call them props of the Republican Party who only pretend to recognize gun rights. More non sequiturs. (No evidence is offered for the accusation that the NRA doesn’t really recognize Second Amendment rights.)

The NRA’s ideas of private property are not my own. But, equally, very many libertarians reject my hard-core propertarian position. For example, lots of libertarians think the libertarian law should not countenance the right of a property owner to eliminate a home invader out of hand. (How many libertarians think Joe Horn is a hero?)

Liberty lovers, instead of being high on their own purity, should take a deep breath and work with reality. This does not mean compromising principles. With respect to the NRA, this implies recognizing and articulating its theoretical flaws but reconciling its realistic gains for liberty.

The NRA’s lack of libertarian purity on private property and their alliance with the GOP notwithstanding, they are a formidable force when it comes to their rather narrow mandate: Second Amendment rights.

Update I (July 13): Let’s see, in an imperfect, ideologically impure world, where corporations are second only to the state in their demands for compliance with diversity doxology, the cult of multiculti, and all manner of suppression–who do I root for; Walt Disney or the little guy with the gun?

It’s much like asking me who I support in the case of another of America’s leftist corporations, Pizza Hut, which sacked James William Spiers for defending himself during a delivery that was really an ambush. Writes blogger Big Dog:

“The details are pretty straight forward. A woman, an accomplice of a criminal, placed a [sic] order for a pizza. The delivery man, James William Spiers, attempted to deliver the pizza when he was confronted by a man who put a gun to his head. Spiers, who has a permit to carry a handgun, grabbed the assailant’s gun and pulled his own weapon. The attacker was shot three times.”

“When police arrived at the scene Spiers placed his hands in the air and dropped to his knees and told the police that he had both weapons in his pockets. So far no charges have been filed but Pizza Hut has suspended Spiers. The company has a policy against carrying a weapon, even for those who have a permit to carry one…”

Pizza Hut prefers for its innocent employees to die rather than defend themselves on the job. This is not the first time the company has followed through on this preference. Here’s a similar story.

Most Americans, who spend their days on the job, cannot carry to work. That rules out self-defense during a good part of the day. Even if workers leave the thing in the car—ill advised, of course—a colleague who discovers their “deviancy” might just tattle, and they risk being retrenched.

Corporations are not that different to government when it comes to rights. Yes, strictly speaking, in libertarian law, the former have a right to write the suspension of rights into their contracts, whereas the latter doesn’t. However, it must be obvious with who I sympathize given what I know of America’s corporate culture—extreme leftism, commitment to making the workforce as multicultural as possible (in the face of the misery and inefficiencies it breeds), a concomitant devotion to forced integration (or else); gay-centric propaganda and circulars routinely foisted on Christians, and a pervasive hostility to Christianity (while prayer rooms for Muslim workers are erected everywhere).

Update II: To those who conveniently “forget” my immutable position on property rights, sympathizing with the Davids in this story doesn’t imply, not even remotely, a support for litigation against the Goliaths. But then those who read this site know I’m a strict propertarian.

Update III (July 14): one of the more vigorous libertarian battles being waged in this country with a good degree of success is that over the Second Amendment. This is one natural right that Americans who want it upheld understand perfectly well. Yet on my blog, there has been a great deal of obfuscation and negation of the gains made to date. Instead of the loopy libertarians who’ve been referenced on BAB (the same loopy sorts dissed Heller Vs. The District of Columbia), let’s listen to some “heavy hitting” clear thinkers.

Randy Barnett is one of the sharpest, most original legal minds in the libertarian community (which is why I was overjoyed when one of my formulations jibed with his, unbeknown to both of us). Dave Kopel is formidable on the Second Amendment. He lives and breathes this jurisprudence and assisted in its litigation. (Imagine; someone who’s been in the thick of the fight, instead of standing on the sidelines dissing everyone.) Here they are on Reason Magazine Online:

RANDY BARNETT: “Justice Scalia’s historic opinion will be studied for years to come, not only for its conclusion but for its method. It is the clearest, most careful interpretation of the meaning of the Constitution ever to be adopted by a majority of the Supreme Court. Its analysis of the “original public meaning” of the Second Amendment stands in sharp contrast with Justice Stevens’ inquiry into “original intent” or purpose and with Justice Breyer’s willingness to balance an enumerated constitutional right against what some consider a pressing need to prohibit its exercise. The differing methods of interpretation employed by the majority and the dissent also demonstrate why appointments to the Supreme Court are so important. In the future, we should be vetting Supreme Court nominees to see if they understand how Justice Scalia reasoned in Heller and if they are committed to doing the same. Now if we can only get a majority of the Supreme Court to reconsider its previous decisions—or “precedents”—that are inconsistent with the original public meaning of the text.”

Randy Barnett is the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Legal Theory at Georgetown University Law Center and author of Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty.

DAVE KOPEL: “Heller is a tremendous victory for human rights and for libertarian ideals. Today’s majority opinion provides everything which the lawyers closely involved in the case, myself included, had hoped for. Of course I would have preferred a decision which went much further in declaring various types of gun control to be unconstitutional. But Rome was not built in a day, and neither is constitutional doctrine.

For most of our nation’s history, the U.S. Supreme Court did nothing to protect the First Amendment; it was not until the 1930s when a majority of the Court took the first steps towards protecting freedom of the press. It would have been preposterous to be disappointed that a Court in, say, 1936, would not declare a ban on flag-burning to be unconstitutional. It took decades for the Supreme Court to build a robust First Amendment doctrine strong enough to protect even the free speech rights of people as loathsome as flag-burners or American Nazis.

Likewise, the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment was, for all practical purposes, judicially nullified from its enactment until the 1930s. When the Court in that decade started taking Equal Protection seriously, the Court began with the easiest cases—such as Missouri’s banning blacks from attending the University of Missouri Law School, while not even having a “separate but equal” law school for them. It was three decades later when, having constructed a solid foundation of Equal Protection cases, the Court took on the most incendiary racial issue of all, and struck down the many state laws which banned inter-racial marriage.

So too with the Second Amendment. From the Early Republic until the present, the Court has issued many opinions which recognize the Second Amendment as an individual right. Yet most of these opinions were in dicta. After the 1939 case of United States v. Miller, the Court stood idle while lower federal courts did the dirty work of nullifying the Second Amendment, by over-reading Miller to claim that only National Guardsmen are protected by the Amendment.

Today, that ugly chapter in the Court’s history is finished. Heller is the first step on what will be long journey. Today, the Court struck down the most freakish and extreme gun control law in the nation; only in D.C. was home self-defense with rifles and shotguns outlawed. Heller can be the beginning of a virtuous circle in which the political branches will strengthen Second Amendment rights (as in the 40 states which now allow all law-abiding, competent adults to obtain concealed handgun carry permits), and the courts will be increasingly willing to declare unconstitutional the ever-rarer laws which seriously infringe the right to keep and bear arms.
As the political center of gravity moves step by step in a pro-rights direction, gun control laws which today might seem (to most judges) to be constitutional will be viewed with increasing skepticism. The progress that the pro-Second Amendment movement has made in the last 15 years has been outstanding. As long as gun owners and other pro-Second Amendment citizens stay politically active, the next 15, 30, and 45 years can produce much more progress, and the role of the judiciary in protecting Second Amendment rights will continue to grow.”

Dave Kopel is Research Director at the Independence Institute, in Golden, Colorado. He was one of three lawyers at the counsel table who assisted Alan Gura at the oral argument on March 18. His brief for the International Law Enforcement Educators and Trainers Association was cited four times in the Court’s opinions.

Update III: On Libertarians Who Dismiss The NRA (& 'Heller')

Business, Constitution, Individual Rights, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Multiculturalism, Natural Law

Myron Pauli, a valued reader whose letters are always stimulating, has given in to the sin of abstraction so many libertarians are guilty of. (See the Comments Section of the previous
post.) The root of this error comes from being high on your own ideological purity. So high you walk around with a hangover that clouds clear thinking rooted in reality.

Such individuals have discovered libertarian theory (often from dubious sources), and have set about enforcing it with the zeal of soviet apparatchiks, instead of working with reality. Which is what the very flawed, non-ideological NRA does.

For example, the fact that the NRA has acquiesced to—or rather works around—licensing, causes libertarian purists to dismiss the NRA. This is silly, if not a non sequitur, given the enormous amount of good work the NRA does. And given the fact that libertarians have achieved precious little in this respect. Without the NRA and its formidable clout, there would be no Second Amendment rights in this country. The fact that they are hated by the Left is a notch on their Second Amendment scorecard. (But, as I said to Sean the other day, libertarians don’t share my visceral hatred of the left. Passionless people, for the most)

Myron’s particular argument goes as follows: Because the NRA is “suing private company Walt Disney for the ‘right’ to take their guns on Disney property,” they are useless, not to be supported, and, for good measure, let us call them props of the Republican Party who only pretend to recognize gun rights. More non sequiturs. (No evidence is offered for the accusation that the NRA doesn’t really recognize Second Amendment rights.)

The NRA’s ideas of private property are not my own. But, equally, very many libertarians reject my hard-core propertarian position. For example, lots of libertarians think the libertarian law should not countenance the right of a property owner to eliminate a home invader out of hand. (How many libertarians think Joe Horn is a hero?)

Liberty lovers, instead of being high on their own purity, should take a deep breath and work with reality. This does not mean compromising principles. With respect to the NRA, this implies recognizing and articulating its theoretical flaws but reconciling its realistic gains for liberty.

The NRA’s lack of libertarian purity on private property and their alliance with the GOP notwithstanding, they are a formidable force when it comes to their rather narrow mandate: Second Amendment rights.

Update I (July 13): Let’s see, in an imperfect, ideologically impure world, where corporations are second only to the state in their demands for compliance with diversity doxology, the cult of multiculti, and all manner of suppression–who do I root for; Walt Disney or the little guy with the gun?

It’s much like asking me who I support in the case of another of America’s leftist corporations, Pizza Hut, which sacked James William Spiers for defending himself during a delivery that was really an ambush. Writes blogger Big Dog:

“The details are pretty straight forward. A woman, an accomplice of a criminal, placed a [sic] order for a pizza. The delivery man, James William Spiers, attempted to deliver the pizza when he was confronted by a man who put a gun to his head. Spiers, who has a permit to carry a handgun, grabbed the assailant’s gun and pulled his own weapon. The attacker was shot three times.”

“When police arrived at the scene Spiers placed his hands in the air and dropped to his knees and told the police that he had both weapons in his pockets. So far no charges have been filed but Pizza Hut has suspended Spiers. The company has a policy against carrying a weapon, even for those who have a permit to carry one…”

Pizza Hut prefers for its innocent employees to die rather than defend themselves on the job. This is not the first time the company has followed through on this preference. Here’s a similar story.

Most Americans, who spend their days on the job, cannot carry to work. That rules out self-defense during a good part of the day. Even if workers leave the thing in the car—ill advised, of course—a colleague who discovers their “deviancy” might just tattle, and they risk being retrenched.

Corporations are not that different to government when it comes to rights. Yes, strictly speaking, in libertarian law, the former have a right to write the suspension of rights into their contracts, whereas the latter doesn’t. However, it must be obvious with who I sympathize given what I know of America’s corporate culture—extreme leftism, commitment to making the workforce as multicultural as possible (in the face of the misery and inefficiencies it breeds), a concomitant devotion to forced integration (or else); gay-centric propaganda and circulars routinely foisted on Christians, and a pervasive hostility to Christianity (while prayer rooms for Muslim workers are erected everywhere).

Update II: To those who conveniently “forget” my immutable position on property rights, sympathizing with the Davids in this story doesn’t imply, not even remotely, a support for litigation against the Goliaths. But then those who read this site know I’m a strict propertarian.

Update III (July 14): one of the more vigorous libertarian battles being waged in this country with a good degree of success is that over the Second Amendment. This is one natural right that Americans who want it upheld understand perfectly well. Yet on my blog, there has been a great deal of obfuscation and negation of the gains made to date. Instead of the loopy libertarians who’ve been referenced on BAB (the same loopy sorts dissed Heller Vs. The District of Columbia), let’s listen to some “heavy hitting” clear thinkers.

Randy Barnett is one of the sharpest, most original legal minds in the libertarian community (which is why I was overjoyed when one of my formulations jibed with his, unbeknown to both of us). Dave Kopel is formidable on the Second Amendment. He lives and breathes this jurisprudence and assisted in its litigation. (Imagine; someone who’s been in the thick of the fight, instead of standing on the sidelines dissing everyone.) Here they are on Reason Magazine Online:

RANDY BARNETT: “Justice Scalia’s historic opinion will be studied for years to come, not only for its conclusion but for its method. It is the clearest, most careful interpretation of the meaning of the Constitution ever to be adopted by a majority of the Supreme Court. Its analysis of the “original public meaning” of the Second Amendment stands in sharp contrast with Justice Stevens’ inquiry into “original intent” or purpose and with Justice Breyer’s willingness to balance an enumerated constitutional right against what some consider a pressing need to prohibit its exercise. The differing methods of interpretation employed by the majority and the dissent also demonstrate why appointments to the Supreme Court are so important. In the future, we should be vetting Supreme Court nominees to see if they understand how Justice Scalia reasoned in Heller and if they are committed to doing the same. Now if we can only get a majority of the Supreme Court to reconsider its previous decisions—or “precedents”—that are inconsistent with the original public meaning of the text.”

Randy Barnett is the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Legal Theory at Georgetown University Law Center and author of Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty.

DAVE KOPEL: “Heller is a tremendous victory for human rights and for libertarian ideals. Today’s majority opinion provides everything which the lawyers closely involved in the case, myself included, had hoped for. Of course I would have preferred a decision which went much further in declaring various types of gun control to be unconstitutional. But Rome was not built in a day, and neither is constitutional doctrine.

For most of our nation’s history, the U.S. Supreme Court did nothing to protect the First Amendment; it was not until the 1930s when a majority of the Court took the first steps towards protecting freedom of the press. It would have been preposterous to be disappointed that a Court in, say, 1936, would not declare a ban on flag-burning to be unconstitutional. It took decades for the Supreme Court to build a robust First Amendment doctrine strong enough to protect even the free speech rights of people as loathsome as flag-burners or American Nazis.

Likewise, the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment was, for all practical purposes, judicially nullified from its enactment until the 1930s. When the Court in that decade started taking Equal Protection seriously, the Court began with the easiest cases—such as Missouri’s banning blacks from attending the University of Missouri Law School, while not even having a “separate but equal” law school for them. It was three decades later when, having constructed a solid foundation of Equal Protection cases, the Court took on the most incendiary racial issue of all, and struck down the many state laws which banned inter-racial marriage.

So too with the Second Amendment. From the Early Republic until the present, the Court has issued many opinions which recognize the Second Amendment as an individual right. Yet most of these opinions were in dicta. After the 1939 case of United States v. Miller, the Court stood idle while lower federal courts did the dirty work of nullifying the Second Amendment, by over-reading Miller to claim that only National Guardsmen are protected by the Amendment.

Today, that ugly chapter in the Court’s history is finished. Heller is the first step on what will be long journey. Today, the Court struck down the most freakish and extreme gun control law in the nation; only in D.C. was home self-defense with rifles and shotguns outlawed. Heller can be the beginning of a virtuous circle in which the political branches will strengthen Second Amendment rights (as in the 40 states which now allow all law-abiding, competent adults to obtain concealed handgun carry permits), and the courts will be increasingly willing to declare unconstitutional the ever-rarer laws which seriously infringe the right to keep and bear arms.
As the political center of gravity moves step by step in a pro-rights direction, gun control laws which today might seem (to most judges) to be constitutional will be viewed with increasing skepticism. The progress that the pro-Second Amendment movement has made in the last 15 years has been outstanding. As long as gun owners and other pro-Second Amendment citizens stay politically active, the next 15, 30, and 45 years can produce much more progress, and the role of the judiciary in protecting Second Amendment rights will continue to grow.”

Dave Kopel is Research Director at the Independence Institute, in Golden, Colorado. He was one of three lawyers at the counsel table who assisted Alan Gura at the oral argument on March 18. His brief for the International Law Enforcement Educators and Trainers Association was cited four times in the Court’s opinions.

I Too Speak English ‘Goodly’

Business, English, Journalism, libertarianism, Media, Outsourcing

The Orange County Register is trying a new way to cut costs:

[O]utsourcing to India. Mindworks Global Media will copy edit some of the papers stories for a one-month trial starting next week. And a community newspaper owned by the O.C. Register’s parent company–it didn’t name which one–will outsource page layout to Mindworks, which is based outside New Delhi. …
Copyeditors do a lot more than spell checking; they also take on syntax and grammatical issues, thinking about local idioms and sayings.
Is that outsourcable? Chief copyeditors at places like the New York Times and New Yorker are revered. If that part of the newsroom is sent overseas, what’s next, reporting?

As a matter of interest, I had offered my weekly column, “Return to Reason,” to the Orange County Register. I had proposed to undercut any of the crappy syndicated columns the paper features. I had promised to suitably tone down and tailor the tenor of the column too.

You’d think a libertarian paper would give preference over its editorial pages to a few of America’s underappreciated libertarian writers. Or, at the very least, choose to “reinvent itself” with something interesting, instead of the banal, boring, oft-immoral columns that are distributed to hundreds of newspapers across the country.

(I even submitted a shortened version of the fiercely libertarian “They’re Coming For Your Kids,” whose passion and reason only writer William N. Grigg approached. I’m sure he too would not mind replacing the syndicated Larry Elder in the OCR.)

But, I was lucky to get a reply. Courtesy is scarce among the American editorial-page establishment. On the odd occasions my column was published, it was expected to be gratis.

I’m a little tied up now with writing obligations—columns and book—but hey, OCR, if India disappoints, I’m an ace editor. I speak and write English goodly; exceptionally goodly. I’ll both outperform and undercut Delhi.