Guns and Laws

 

The fundamental principle about law and guns is this: people have a right of self defense to defend lives and property against attacks. Since they do, they have a derived right to possess the means to do so. The dodge that they have the right in principle but have delegated it completely to the police will not do. It is only rarely that policemen will be on hand when crimes happen. Their function is to try to catch criminals after they commit crimes. The term “first responder” is inaccurate. In most dangerous situations, a person’s first responder is himself. The best to be reasonably expected from the police is that they sometimes would be fairly rapid second responders. There is also the question of whether the police always will be on the right side. The right to self defense includes the right to self defense against tyrannical government. The coming of a tyrannical government is not a serious threat at present in this country, but an armed citizenry are an important part of  keeping  things that way.   (If someone claims people do not have those rights, then his necessary conclusion must be that operationally any attackers – criminals, Nazi secret policemen, Putin’s Russian soldiers - may do what they want with people, and their only ethical option is submission. Some on the gun banning left left may have no problem with that conclusion.)

However, the principle that people have a right of self defense does not answer all the questions about citizens and their weapons, despite what some advocates of gun rights may claim. Since the right to possess arms for self defense is derivative from the right of self defense, it applies only to arms appropriate for self defense in each context, not to any weapon anyone might want to have at any time. If a person announced he planned to put an operational 81mm mortar or .50 caliber machine gun in his back yard to protect himself, his neighbors and the authorities would be right to stop him (and to worry about his sanity), since there would be no reasonable need for such a weapon for self defense.

The difficulty is with drawing a line somewhere in the large range between the pistols, shotguns, revolvers, and ordinary rifles which are appropriate for self defense and the mortars and the machine guns which are not. It is a hard problem, and reasonable people will reach different conclusions about it. For example, are thirty round or more detachable magazines  for AR-type rifles appropriate tools for self defense, or are they items which cannot be justified as tools for self defense? The same question comes up for the AR-type rifle itself. The present answer in most of this country is that the both AR-type rifles and the magazines are legal. In gray areas it usually is better to lean in the direction of the citizen rather than the direction of the politicians and officials.  I  think the rifles and thirty round magazines probably are appropriate for self defense, but I am not sure about very large drum magazines. There are reason to consider becoming more restrictive about some things.

These questions have gotten more attention since the murders in Uvalde this week. Normal people have had normal reactions to the slaughter, while repulsive politicians have had predictably repulsive ones. It would have been less repugnant and probably more expedient for Democrat politicians to have waited for the bodies of the victims to cool before dancing gleefully over an imagined opportunity to use the crime to enact some of their agenda on guns. Beto O’Rourke’s stunt the next day and Democrats’ refusal to condemn it were more of the same, perhaps a little more grotesque.

The Democrats’ behavior illustrates a reason many people who believe in self defense are often unwilling to support any new restrictions, reasonable or not. They believe their opponents’ real objective is to disarm them completely and leave them helpless and so think it better not to give an inch. (The same sort of worry keeps many people who are pro-choice on abortion from supporting any new restrictions there, reasonable or not. They believe their opponents’ real aim is to outlaw abortion completely and so think it better not to give an inch.)

Learning Not to Care

 

“That was the end, from then onward I no longer cared whether Hitler’s allies called me a counter-revolutionary.” -

Arthur Koestler on his reaction to the Nazi-Soviet pact

“Publish and be damned.” -

-attributed to the Duke of Wellington in response to threats from blackmailers

Everyone with knowledge of biology and evolution knows that among humans there are two sexes, male and female, determined genetically, and that, while people can present themselves as and alter themselves in various ways to more nearly resemble persons of the opposite sex, they cannot actually become persons of the opposite sex. Yet people who surely know better meekly accept or at least pay lip service to the idea that in our species only a male is anyone who claims to be a male, and a female is anyone who claims to be a female. Competent business executive know that punctuality, willingness to work, a desire to achieve, can-do attitudes, and the ability to plan a series of steps to take over time to achieve a goal are useful and desirable traits for their colleagues to have. Yet many executives pay their organization’s money to bigoted leftist consultants to teach employees that these things are oppressive aspects of racial “whiteness” and to be avoided. Competent engineers and scientists knows that reason, objectivity, and a focus of evidence are essential to their profession. Yet managers at national laboratories pay bigoted leftist consultants to tell employees that these things are just more superfluous, oppressive whiteness that people working with nuclear weapons will be better off doing without.

One has to ask why they do it. I think a good guess in many cases is fear – fear of being attacked on social media or being called a racist or becoming a target of protests or government regulators - leading to a cowardly attempt to buy off the leftist fanatics. If so, it is a very unseemly fear. We are not in the Soviet Union or Medieval Europe. No one is able to threaten heretics and dissenters with torture and murder.

The scientific truth is that genes determine one’s sex. Stating the biological truth is important now for at least a couple of reasons. As a matter of principle, it is a good thing to hold out that two plus two is four when people are demanding you believe it is five. In addition, if one’s sex is a matter of choice, then the laws and mores benefiting and protecting women - from the fairly unimportant such as separate female only sports teams to the very important such as the customs and attitudes embodied in the notion of women and children first - become unjustifiable.

The simple fact is that willingness to work, a desire to achieve, the ability to plan for the future, rationality, objectivity, and focusing on evidence are neither oppressive nor characteristics of whiteness, but rather good and beneficial attitudes and traits for human beings. To say that convincing white people to feel guilty for them and convincing non-white people to believe they are not for them are harmful to both is an understatement. It is crippling.

It is surely time for people to no longer care whether Chairman Xi’s ideological allies call them racists and to tell any would-be enforcers of conformity on social media to tweet, bleat, and be damned. They owe it to themselves, their country, and their fellow citizens to overcome their fear and tell the truth.

These are only two examples of false beliefs people are been pressured to accept. There are plenty more out there and by no means only on the left. But this is a place to start. If a person tells the truth while facing pressure not to a few times, it might become a habit.

V-E Day

 

Yesterday was V-E day. It has been seventy seven years since the allied victory ending World War II in Europe. V-E and V-J day are now farther in the past than Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox was on the day Pearl Harbor was attacked. It took millions of Americans to win that war. Few of them are left, and soon all will be gone. My father and one of his brothers served in the Pacific. Another brother served stateside. Two of my mother’s brothers served in Europe. At least two uncles by marriage also served. They and all the rest need to be remembered. They saved civilization.

Unpleasant Choices

 

I think it is important for Republicans to win in the coming midterm elections – taking control of the federal house and senate, adding several Republican governors, and electing many more Republicans to state and local offices around the country. This is not because I think the Repubs are thoughtful, trustworthy, or fit to govern, but because the Democrats are too nearly under the control of their authoritarian leftists, and their actions and policies show it. Since the leftists have some very bad things planned for this country and have to be stopped, the Dems need to be routed in November. (One even can hope that a bad enough defeat, followed by another in 2024 might push the party back toward the so-called center for a while. That would be good for the country.)

Achieving that goal will require supporting and voting for some people one would rather not. These days the Democrats have been making it easy for even very repulsive Republicans to appear as the lesser evil. I live in Texas. Based on polls reported in the news, it is likely that the Republican nominee for attorney general will be Trumpist social conservative Ken Paxton. I voted against him in the primary, and I will vote against him in the runoff. But if he wins, I will have to vote for him in November. I do not like it, but I’ll do it. In a local race for the state legislature, the two candidates in the runoff are both highlighting how fond they are of Donald Trump. It is a sorry state of affairs.

Of course there is also a threat from the illiberal right. It is dangerous and probably growing. Illiberal right wing nationalists and traditionalists are easy to find. A piece today at The Federalist – which is not one of the wilder right wing sites -attacked leftists for their supposed belief in individual autonomy, in effect arguing that the problem with leftists is that they are too libertarian. The difference between the two threats is that the rightist authoritarians are much farther from having the power to achieve their illiberal goals and desires than are the leftists. That is why it makes sense to focus more now on opposing the left.