"Faith" or "Science" based education?

What kind of education is this, "faith-based" or "science-based"?

An elementary school will hold a toy gun exchange Saturday, offering students a book and a chance to win a bicycle if they turn in their play weapons.

Strobridge Elementary Principal Charles Hill maintains that children who play with toy guns may not take real guns seriously.

"Playing with toys guns, saying 'I'm going to shoot you,' desensitizes them, so as they get older, it's easier for them to use a real gun," Hill said.

I'm sure that Principal Hill has good scientific evidence for this claim.

Not...

Weak tea

Over at Ace's place, they're in love with Ted Cruz, Senator from Texas, and think that he embarrassed Dianne Feinstein during a judiciary committee hearing on her proposed gun control bill




I'd love to love Ted Cruz, but this was weak.

1) Feinstein and Leahy and Durbin are right - we absolutely do have speech that is not protected, because we've decided that the negative consequences outweigh the absolutist interpretation.

 2) The idea that the Constitution demands that we allow anyone who wants one an atomic weapon is the absolutist position on the second amendment. Do we really want to be defending that position? I don't. 

Obviously, an AR-15 is not a nuclear weapon. But the absolutist position on the second amendment would include it, just as the absolutist position on the first amendment would include child pornography and "yelling 'fire' in a crowded theatre." We don't countenance those things; we draw lines. The fight is, has to be, where do we draw the lines. The absolutist, "we don't draw lines" position is lost before it's stated.

Steyn: Laws Are for Little People

Even among Steyn columns, this is a standout.

Which is saying something...

To Howard Kurtz & Co., it’s “obvious” that Gregory didn’t intend to commit a crime. But, in a land choked with laws, “obviousness” is one of the first casualties — and “obviously” innocent citizens have their “obviously” well-intentioned actions criminalized every minute of the day. Not far away from David Gregory, across the Virginia border, eleven-year-old Skylar Capo made the mistake of rescuing a woodpecker from the jaws of a cat and nursing him back to health for a couple of days. For her pains, a federal Fish & Wildlife gauleiter accompanied by state troopers descended on her house, charged her with illegal transportation of a protected species, issued her a $535 fine, and made her cry. Why is it so “obvious” that David Gregory deserves to be treated more leniently than a sixth grader? Because he’s got a TV show and she hasn’t?

Anything involving guns is even less amenable to “obviousness.” A few years ago, Daniel Brown was detained at LAX while connecting to a Minneapolis flight because traces of gunpowder were found on his footwear. His footwear was combat boots. As the name suggests, the combat boots were returning from combat — eight months of it, in Iraq’s bloody and violent al-Anbar province. Above the boots he was wearing the uniform of a staff sergeant in the USMC Reserve Military Police and was accompanied by all 26 members of his unit, also in uniform. Staff Sergeant Brown doesn’t sound like an “obvious” terrorist. But the TSA put him on the no-fly list anyway. If it’s not “obvious” to the government that a serving member of the military has any legitimate reason for being around ammunition, why should it be “obvious” that a TV host has?

Read it all...

Rights, guns and health care...

One variation on a theme, spotted ricocheting around various social media outlets:

There is something wrong with a constitution that guarantees your right to a gun, but not your right to health care.

That depends entirely upon what one believes the purpose of a constitution to be.

The first problem with that statement is one of definition. The people issuing this lament are taking advantage of a conflation of terms, using the word "right" in two different ways. The "right to a gun" that the Constitution guarantees, and which they do not support, is a restriction on Government action, a "negative" right. The "right to health care" that they wish the Constitution did support, is a call for Government action, the institution of an affirmative or positive right. If the Constitution said the same thing about health care that it says about guns, that would not be good enough. A health care amendment that paralleled the 2nd amendment would read something like this

A healthy populace being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to seek and obtain health care services shall not be infringed.

Which brings us to the second problem with that lament.  There's a reason that the Constitution does not forbid the Government from infringing on the right to seek and obtain health care, and that's because there was no need for it to do so. The framers of the Constitution had no concern that the government would infringe on liberty, and move towards despotism, by taking away people's doctor visits and hospitals. They had good reason to be concerned that a government would infringe on liberty, and descend towards despotism, by taking away people's guns, or taking away the right to freely assemble and criticize the government, or taking away the right to trial by jury, or by instituting excessive bails, or by performing unreasonable searches and seizures. All of those things are explicitly called out as limitations on the power of the Government. None of those are "affirmative" rights, requiring the Government to act - they are all "natural" or "negative" rights, defining the relationship of the Government and the Governed, and enumerating rights which the Governed are presumed to hold naturally, and which the Government must not violate.

If that "health care amendment" I included above were all that the supporters of a "right to health care" meant, then I would agree with their position, because it's self-evidently a legitimate negative right. But that's not what they mean, that's not what they want, and so I do not agree with them. They do not want a "negative" right to health care, in which the Government is enjoined from infringing on that right. They want a social contract that includes an affirmative right to health care, that the Government is required to provide.  That is to say, they wish to assert an obligation on the part of their fellow citizens to provide health care for them.  More than that, many of them believe that such a right is self-evidently an unadulterated good, so much so that those of us who think that such a "right" would lead to worsening the human condition rather than improving it, must be "greedy" and bad people.

And so, as with so many issues, it is almost impossible to have a discussion on the issue.  Those on the left have already made up their minds that the people opposing them are bad, so what they've got to say is irrelevant.  After all, who cares what bad people have to say?  It's the same thing that happens with abortion, and affirmative action, and gay marriage.  Once you've decided that your opponents are misogynists or racists or homophobes, well, obviously it doesn't matter what their arguments are...

When Grizzly Bears Attack …

"I'm from the government, and I'm here to help..."

A North Idaho man killed a grizzly bear that was threatening his family. Now he could face jail time if the Obama administration has its way.

Rachel Hill looked out her bedroom window on the evening of Mother’s Day and saw three grizzly bears attacking the children’s 4H club pigs’ pen. The Hill children had been outside practicing basketball a half hour earlier, so seeing the bears concerned her and her husband, Jeremy Hill. After calling for his kids and hearing no response, Jeremy grabbed his daughter’s rifle. After once more calling for the kids, fearing they were in danger, he shot at the closest grizzly bear, which was about 120 feet away.

The other two grizzlies fled while the wounded bear began to run off in the same direction, but then turned and came towards the house. Hill shot the bear a final time due to the danger a severely wounded grizzly bear posed to his family and others. Hill called two officials with the Idaho Department of Fish and Game. They came out, investigated, and unsuccessfully tried to capture the other two grizzly bears by placing bear traps on the property.

Regardless of the danger to Hill’s family, grizzly bears are listed as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act, thus the federal government is prosecuting him. If convicted, Hill could face up to one year in prison and a $50,000 fine.

Yup. Kill a grizzly. Save a woodpecker. Send your kids to school with a lunch. Leave a pocket-knife in an emergency kit in your glove compartment. Try to buy a cold medicine that works. It's all the same. Got to make a law, got to enforce a law, because that's the only way to legislatively enact Utopia.

Not new, of course. And it's been commented on before...

There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted -- and you create a nation of law-breakers-and then you cash in on the guilt.

- Ayn Rand

As a general rule, there is no situation so bad, no condition so dire and desperate, that it cannot be made worse by those with a vision of an earthly Utopia...

Note to Peter - it's not actually about the guns...

Peter King, writing in Monday Morning Quarterback:

Think we shouldn't do anything about gun violence in this country? Read this dispatch from Saturday's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

...((Horrible story omitted))...

I'm sick of stories like this getting ignored. We've got to do something to take guns out of the hands of gangs and other young criminals in this country. How many more of those idiotically horrible stories do there need to be on the front page of papers around the country before we do something tangible about gun violence?

Hey Peter - in England, they've done tangible things about gun violence. Guns are outlawed, and people who defend themselves against criminals are prosecuted. So that should fix everything, right?

Or not.

Toby Young, writing in the London Telegraph:

I’m writing this at 3.30am on Tuesday morning, unable to sleep thanks to the outbreak of lawlessness that has engulfed large parts of London. At around 10pm, a mob of several hundred youths ran amok in Ealing, about two miles from where I live in Acton, smashing shop windows, setting property ablaze and looting the local shopping centre. Sky News reported two separate incidents of homes in the area being broken into, with one elderly lady waking to find a masked boy at the end of her bed. According to eyewitnesses I’ve been corresponding with on Twitter, it took the police 90 minutes to respond, so overstretched are they.
...
Like hundreds of thousands of people all over London, I’m not relishing another night of feeling this vulnerable. David Cameron is going to have to come up with a suitably robust response at this morning’s COBRA meeting if he’s going to persuade ordinary Londoners not to organise themselves into vigilante squads to protect their families and their property on the nights ahead. It’s increasingly clear that the police are becoming overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the lawlessness.
...
The problem isn’t that the police aren’t equipped with effective enough weapons, it’s that the lawlessness is so widespread that the police aren’t able to get to the trouble spots in time.
...
Looking at the television pictures a few hours ago, I felt as if I was witnessing the collapse of Western civilisation as depicted in countless Hollywood disaster movies. We need to restore the rule of law by whatever means necessary and we need to do it now.

What is the cost to England of what's going on over there right now? The tangible monetary costs are going to end up being very large - the intangible costs are incalculable. And it's a populace that is unable to protect itself. How is that a good thing?

Obviously, the story he was reacting to in the Pittsburgh paper was horrendous, and no one wants to see it. But the question is, how do you avoid it? Banning guns may make people feel like they've done something, but the evidence that it's a practical and productive activity is non-existent. It's not the guns that are a problem, it's the culture in which the use of guns to harm innocents is accepted and/or glorified. If you look at an inner city culture of drugs and guns and blame the guns, you're missing the point. It's not the guns - it's the culture.

Utopianist idiocy

Because obviously this would have prevented the Tucson tragedy...

Rep. Peter King, a Republican from New York, is planning to introduce legislation that would make it illegal to bring a gun within 1,000 feet of a government official, according to a person familiar with the congressman's intentions.

Now it's possible that this information is not correct. I hope, for Congressman King's sake, that that's the case. But if it isn't, well, he's an idiot. I'm sorry, I don't know how else to put it. The idea that this law, if in place, would have done ANYTHING to prevent the incident which has provoked, or that it would prevent any other lunatic from attacking any other government official, is sub-moronic.

Again, the logic of bad laws:

Something must be done.
This is something.
Therefore, we must do this.

Idiocy. This would be a classic demonstration of the Utopian impulse that inevitably leads to increased government authority over the citizenry - "if we just pass the right laws, bad things will stop happening." It's idiocy, and anyone pushing it is, in this case, an idiot.

Coyotes in the State of Nature - Kevin Williamson - National Review Online

Coyotes in the State of Nature - Kevin Williamson - National Review Online

Just as state schooling is not about education, but about the state, gun control is not about guns: It’s about control. A citizen who can fend for himself when the predators come or the schools fail is less inclined to look to the state for sustenance and oversight in other areas of life. To progressives, that’s an invitation to anarchy. To the men who wrote the Second Amendment, it was a condition of citizenship in a free republic. It’s what free men did, and do.

Excellent piece - read it all...

Proper gun control

I'm Denny Crane. I'm a bigshot."