July 12, 2006
Crime Emergency!
The old joke about Washington, D.C. was that if people were serious about removing the violent connotations, etc. from the Washington Bullets' name, they ought to drop the "Washington" and call the team simply, the "Bullets." Yuck, yuck. Anyway, now that D.C. finds itself knee-deep in violent crime, they can't very well blame the Wizards (poxes are at an all-time low), and one gets the sense pols will be fretting about gun violence, etc. and push toward the Michael Bloomberg model for crime-reduction: harassing legal gun owners and disarming tomorrow's crime victims with yet more layers of gun control. It won't work, of course, but they can say they tried. Ben Shapiro exposes the folly.
Posted by bill at 01:39 PM | Comments (1)
March 15, 2006
Against MySpace
It spreads, in viral style, the Los Angelization of the West. It refracts, endlessly, our teeming abyss of selves.
If I am the Guy Fawkes of the anticulture, this is my Gunpowder Plot.
V for Victory.
Posted by James G. Poulos at 09:53 AM | Comments (0)
March 06, 2006
NOLA's other legacy
In September I noted a piece by David Workman that exposed unlawful, widespread firearms confiscations in New Orleans in the post-Katrina chaos, motivated by what Workman noted was the "infuriating" sentiment that, "Only law enforcement are are allowed to have weapons." I also wondered why even conservatives seemed to be ignoring the issue, and still wonder the same thing.
Today Dave Nalle reminds us what happened, and why it matters:
At the height of the chaos in New Orleans, when gangs were ravishing the city the government decided to help out. Not by protecting neighborhoods and arresting looters. Instead they went after private citizens whose only crime was trying to defend themselves and their property.
Acting under an emergency statute which had never been used before, and on the orders of the Governor and Mayor, police in New Orleans, later supported by National Guardsmen, began going house to house and confiscating privately owned firearms in direct violation of the Second Amendment, leaving honest citizens who were already without water, food, electricity and decent shelter at the mercy of looters and other criminals. All these citizens wanted to do was to defend their homes and instead having already lost everything, they lost their last freedom, the freedom to defend themselves.
...this incident remains as an object lesson to all of us in how vulnerable we are in the face of government abuse of power, and how the interests of government are not always the interests of the people.
Read the whole thing.
Posted by bill at 12:15 PM | Comments (0)
November 29, 2005
DEW Unto Others
Directed-Energy Weapons have arrived -- and, one can surmise, are here to stay. I have covered this topic at length before. The proliferation of these weapons seemed no less inevitable or troublesome this summer, and the asymmetry of warfare that's brought us IEDs and nightmares of dirty bombs in backpacks will only be exacerbated by the possibilities of infinitely-variable handheld lasers. Thank R&D for its own sake, and an industry that puts institutional inertia as top priority. But an open universe eventually includes every problem along with every profit.
Posted by James G. Poulos at 11:37 AM | Comments (0)
September 28, 2005
Gun Rights? What gun rights?
With the barrage of stories coming out of NOLA in the past weeks, gun rights issues have been largely overlooked, despite an obscene record of government bullying and overreaching. This might someday see more attention, but until then at least we have a few notables like this, an important piece by David Workman. He writes:
A simple look at the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina reveals a disturbing chain of events that had the issue to do with anything but guns, there would have been an uproar in the media....
New Orleans police officials ignited this fire-storm by declaring that they would confiscate everybody's firearms. They didn't cite any statutory authority or emergency regulation -- they just did it. Why?
Because apparently that's the way that New Orleans Police Superintendent P. Edward Compass III wants it. His infuriating quote to The New York Times: "Only law enforcement are are allowed to have weapons."
This is a must-read if you care at all about individual rights. I wonder when the ACLU will get on board? Then again, what about the conservative bloggers? Powerline? Michelle Malkin? Maybe they've addressed this, but I haven't seen if if they have.
(H/T: Rob from down the hall.)
Posted by bill at 01:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
