“My faith in airport security has never been the same since I noticed that the man confiscating the shaving foam in my hand luggage (while leaving me with the razor) had the word HATE tatooed on his knuckles.”
|
|||||
|
There is a direct connection between this:
… and this:
The answer to the problem of gangsters terrorising unarmed populations is, and I know there are many who genuinely think that this is a cure worse than the disease (hence all the benign support for this malign UN repression): let the populations be armed. November 4th, 2007 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
 I was going to write the following comment on a blog article written back in 2005 by a US Muslim political activist who is calling for the repeal of the Second Amendment to the US Constitution:
But I decided not to. There is a well known axiom: “Never interrupt the enemy when he is making a mistake” I hope he is still writing such articles. October 23rd, 2007 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
Kim du Toit, a regular commenter on these parts with a blog of his own, links to this story about a self-defence shooting in Dallas, Texas. Just scroll down and read the comments from the cop at the end. Absolutely superb. The left-leaning Observer newspaper (UK), meanwhile, carries a hostile piece about gun ownership in the US and the amount of gun crime there. The problem is that the article does not really take into account the rather glaring fact that in Britain, a country with the fiercest gun laws this side of Alpha Centauri, there has been a lot of gun crime in our cities lately. Here is an except:
The problem with all these sort of statistics, I reckon, is that they need to be put into context. Cultures matter: in parts of Europe, such as Switzerland, gun ownership among the adult population is widespread, but gun crime is low, and that fact cannot just be attributed to all that healthy Alpine air. In the US, gun crime is closely linked to drug gangs, and I gently venture to suggest that the War on Drugs, which is a disastrous policy, is the culprit. The statistics given by the Observer – it provides no source – do not tell us whether gun crime is rising or falling, or is stable, or what other categories of crime are like. Nor does it adjust for population levels to compare with other countries where gun ownership might be quite high. It may of course be that some crime, such as acts of domestic violence, would drop if gun ownership was outlawed, but what would happen to things like domestic burglary, for example? I certainly would not want to burgle anyone’s home in Texas for the fairly obvious reason that I would end up very dead. October 17th, 2007 | Comments are closed
I first wrote this article intending it to be a comment on this thread at the Volokh Conspiracy. It grew so big and wandered ‘through every room in the house’, straying away from the specific topic so I decided not to inflict it on them. Instead, Samizdatistas are the lucky beneficiaries. Seriously, I presume most of you will skip it. That is fine. Here is the amendment as it appears in the US Constitution.
In reading the Federalist Papers it appears obvious, at least to me, that ‘the militia’ and ‘a well regulated militia’ are two entirely different things. Hamilton clearly describes in #29 a great deal of commitment and training required to “acquire the degree of perfection which would entitle them to the character of a well-regulated militia” [my underscore] and speculates that for “the great body of the yeomanry, and of the other classes of the citizens” it “would be a real grievance to the people, and a serious public inconvenience and loss”. In #46 Madison calculates the number of “a militia” at 1/8 of the entire population.
Clearly Hamilton’s “well-regulated militia” and Madison’s “militia” are entirely different and together with the title of the New York statute that Eugene Volokh cites,”An Act for Settling and Regulating the Militia …”, suggests that the degree of regulation of the militia was a continuous scale. October 14th, 2007 | Comments are closed
But for those of you who find discussing it a little dry, a picture is worth a thousand words. Thanks to Glenn Reynolds and Breitbart.tv for the pointer. October 14th, 2007 | Comments are closed
The Brave One is a good film, and I would encourage people to go and see it. Even though this means putting money into the pockets of Time Warner, which is hardly my favourite corporation. – warning: spoilers follow … → Continue reading: The Brave One: a film well worth watching October 1st, 2007 | Comments are closed
Burma is a good example of ‘gun control’, i.e. a state of affairs where firearms are a legal monopoly of the government forces. One side has good intentions and the other side has loaded rifles, and the result (so far) has been the same as it was in 1988 – or even back in 1962 when the late General Ne Win first set up his socialist administration. However, me being a cold hearted man whose mind starts to wander even when shown scenes of murder and other horror, the situation reminds me of the philosophy of David Hume. This mid 18th century Scottish philosopher claimed that government was not based on force – but rather that it was based on opinion. Hume did this to mock the claim that there was a great difference between the ‘constitutional’ government of Britain and the ‘tyranny’ of France – under the skin both sides are basically the same, was his point. This was part of David Hume’s love of attacking what his opponents (such as Thomas Reid) were to call “Common Sense”. David Hume was involved in what are now called ‘counter intuitive’ positions. Hume claimed (at times) that there was no objective reality – that the physical universe was just sense impressions in the mind. This did not stop him also claiming (at times) that the mind did not exist, in the sense of a thinking being, that a thought did not mean a thinker – that there was no agent and thus no free willed being. Whether David Hume actually believed any of this – or whether he was just saying to people “you do not have any strong arguments for your most basic beliefs – see how weak reason is”… is not the point here. The point is that many people. including many people who have never heard his name, have been influenced by the ideas of David Hume. For example, Louis XVI of France did not actively resist his enemies, going so far as ordering others, such as the Swiss Guard, not to resist, because he had read David Hume’s History of England – it was his favourite book. In his history Hume claimed that Charles the First did not get killed because he lost the Civil War (as a simple minded ordinary man might think) – but because he had fought back against his enemies at all. If he had not resisted his enemies, they would have seen no need to kill him (a clever counter intuitive position). So Louis XVI did not resist. It is possible that he was given cause to doubt Hume’s wisdom right before his enemies murdered him, and so many others, but we will never know the answer to that I suppose. In Burma, as in so many other places, many people seem to have thought that opinion, namely the good intentions of the majority, were more important than firepower – they appear to be mistaken. “You are showing lack of respect for the dead” – perhaps, but I am warning people not to stand against men with rifles when you are unarmed. Get the firepower, one way or another, and learn how to use it, then you may have a chance at liberty – you can not have it, or keep it, without firepower. And that remains true even if you win some soldiers over to your side with appeals to their reason. September 29th, 2007 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
David Shayler, the ex-M15 spook, always struck me as being only 90 cents to the dollar. I bumped into this character a few years ago at a bash hosted by Privacy International, a perfectly sensible campaigning group. This item if it is true (via the Register), suggests I am right about the dark-haired one. Methinks M needs to tighten up the recruitment criteria. August 13th, 2007 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
A public service warning! You surf the internet at random using FireFox (which generally you should), you may stumble across a website, which could infest your machine with a virus. But this is nothing new, I have heard about these evil websites full of Trojans and other nasty viruses and I know better… I hear you cry. Apparently, this particular attack does not require a download. Which means that is unlikely to be trapped by your anti-virus software, certainly in the short-term. Protecting yourself for now is fairly simple. You will need to make a trivial modification to your FireFox settings.
Thanks to Alec Muffett and Geoff Arnold for the heads up and advice. July 28th, 2007 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
An article, found by via The Register , gives a new example of a taser self-defence device that is being marketed to women – in pink. That strikes me as pretty patronising, although maybe not deliberately so. After all, why would not any woman want a taser in a suitably no-nonsense colour like black or red? The makers of these things have obviously not met my wife. As far as I know, use of tasers by UK citizens other than the police or armed forces is illegal (I would be interested to know what the law is in various places). There is still quite a bit of controversy about their use by the police here. Here is an article on the subject. July 21st, 2007 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
It will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog that when I come to the USA, I use the opportunity to and do some shootin’ and visit my weapons-in-exile (such as one of which is featured on the Karl Popper book at the top of the page, although technically that particular 9mm weapon belongs to my fairer half, my otherwise identical piece is in .40 cal). Of course this trip was no exception and so I have been rescheduled my ongoing homages to the Yuengling Brewing Company until the evening and headed to one of the more remote parts of Pennsylvania to frighten the wild life and try to resurrect some rusty rifle and pistol skills.  As mere possession of a handgun is illegal, it is at times like this that just how far Britain has fallen really hits home. For all its many and variegated flaws, in the USA enough people with some attachment to liberty have managed to fight off the worst excesses of those authoritarians who favour crime victim disarmament. It is interesting that many PA Democrats are actually quite pro-gun, even though many politicos in that sinkhole called Philadelphia are quite authoritarian and anti-gun (note that NRA ratings are not all that good an indication of a politician’s true position). It is good to see that the right to self-defence and to own and shoot guns is widely respected even on the political left. However man does not live by guns alone and the USA has many other things to offer… 
Apple pie and a dawg… how American is that, eh?
Big Ice Cream, Big Bikes, Short Shorts… I must be in the USA again! Back in London tomorrow. Oh crap. July 9th, 2007 | 49 comments - (Comments are closed)
|
   |
||||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||
