Slashdot Mirror

I don't use Google for much research; I use books. The best example is The Original Constitution: What it Actually Said and Meant by Robert G. Natelson. Natelson provides very specific, non-ambiguous, strong evidence that the Constitution is the equivalent to a power of attorney and that these powers cannot be delegated, largely because doing so would override the very purpose of the Constitution. You state "way back in 1935," but this is nearly 150 after the ratification of the Constitution, so in context of what Natelson discusses, this is long after the ratifiers created the document, so the evidence is not really valid when trying to determine the intent of the ratifiers. And as far as the Supreme Court rulings go, they are also not valid as they often are in direct contradiction to what the ratifiers intended as the evidence indicates.

To argue that the Constitution, as ratified, is no longer valid is to undermine the very foundation of democracy, because at the core of the argument is the belief that the state can redefine the governing documents, the dangers of which were so well described by people such as George Orwell.

Except, the Obamacare penalty is not a tax. See also the Obama administration's claim affirming this.

http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/ad+hominem

As for the definition of the word "racist": There are only a tiny handful of peoples who are capable of producing a man who can win a Fields Medal or a Nobel Prize in Physics: Largely they are Caucasians [to include the Ashkenazim & the Lebanese Christians], Pacific Rim Asians, and [only] the very highest castes from the Indian Subcontinent; conversely, the finals of the 100 meter dash at the Olympics will always consist almost entirely of men who are descended from the tribes of West Africa [or at least the finals would consist almost entirely of such men if national quotas didn't unfairly and unnaturally limit and restrict the participants at the Olympics].

No one - not even the most ardent marxist academic - bothers to try to convince himself otherwise anymore.

But, of course, the modern definition of "racist" does not identify, as the villain, he who notices these differences - we all notice them - but rather the word "racist" has come to apply to anyone who has the temerity [or foolhardiness] to verbalize the observation.

On the other hand, that's not what the word "racist" is supposed to mean: A racist is supposed to be someone who believes that a government should enforce [with the barrel of a gun] an agenda which:

1) Involves seizing the private property of dis-favored races.

2) Involves setting aside educational appointments and business opportunities for favored races.

3) Involves denying taxpayer-subsidized goodies to dis-favored races.

4) Involves the racialization of criminal arrests, prosecutions, and convictions.

5) Involves the seizure of entire continents from dis-favored races.

6) Involves the enslavement of dis-favored races.

7) Involves the slaughter of dis-favored races.

Etc etc etc.

So it's impossible for any classical liberal - one who believes that men should be judged not by the color of their skin, but by rather the content of their character, and who believes that governments, and their gun barrels, really ought not exist in the first place - it is impossible for him to be a "racist" within the bounds of any meaning which that word was intended to connote.

But, again, as I have said over and over in this little conversation of ours: NONE OF THE SEMANTIC DISTINCTIONS ARE OF ANY IMPORTANCE WHATSOEVER.

What is important is the underlying truth of the matter: Barring some unforseen tragedy [your being struck by lightning, etc], YOU WILL LIVE TO EXPERIENCE THE IMMINENT TRAGEDY [& CATASTROPHE] OF DYSGENIC FERTILITY.

In the meantime, perform your very small - yet almost infinitely important - role in making the future a better place for us all [both we who are already born, and those of us who are yet-to-be-born]: Go find the smartest girl yo

...anyone that is commiting a crime against you is typically a peice of shit that deserves to be hurt.

This is true. But that piece of shit (or his family, if you kill him) will find a lawyer and sue you for far more than the value of what would've been stolen from you. And that's if you're lucky.

If you're unlucky, the lawyer the piece of shit (or his family) finds will be able to spin the injury into some kind of racial shit, and you'll have Al Sharpton and a couple busloads of protesters picketing your home or business.

If you're really unlucky, you might wind up like this poor bastard, whose shotgun booby-trap, rigged in frustration after his business was repeatedly burglarized and he had exhausted all other means of trying to protect it, killed a burglar.

OK, now I'm really confused. Your exemplary checklist is the way it should be, however, how did it work in the Branch Davidian / David Koresh case, which in fact may be more of the norm.

Waco Search Warrant

"...Criticism of federal law enforcement actions at Waco has not been in short supply...Missing from the discussion of how the federal government handled the Waco disaster is how the government got into the problem in the first place. In particular, how and why did the government procure the search and arrest warrants which the BATF was attempting to "serve" with its unsuccessful raid? A careful study of the Waco search warrant reveals numerous flaws, not just with the warrant application but with search and seizure law as it has developed in the 1990s."

Is a Search Warrant Your Death Warrant

"...The Fourth Amendment of the Constitution protects us from unreasonable searches and seizures....However, the government can abuse the Fourth and Eighth Amendments to undercut the Second...

...A review of the evidence the BATF put forward to justify its first search warrant indicates that the case it had against Koresh was based more on his views than his actions... ...David Koresh had what most of us would consider strange religious views. However, there is no federal death penalty for believing oneself to be Jesus Christ. Koresh and his people owned firearms--more than one, in fact. There is nothing illegal about that. David Koresh didn't think much of the BATF. That appears to have been a crime. ...

...That this is the last charge made in the affidavit prior to the raid should be an alarm to every law-abiding gun owner. According to the BATF, it is suspicious for a citizen to believe in the right to bear arms, be knowledgeable about firearms laws and own video tapes critical of the BATF. If this is grounds for a search warrant to be served by an army, the rest of us had better step lightly...."

Sorry, the problem *is* the guns. Take away the guns, and nobody would be dead.

This seems so logical, and yet I encourage you to present any real world example proving what you claim. The truth is that only law abiding citizens obey laws in the first place. If someone is willing to commit murder, they are certainly going to be willing to break any gun law.


Some things to consider:

New Jersey adopted what sponsors described as "the most stringent gun law" in the nation in 1966; two years later, the murder rate was up 46 percent and the reported robbery rate had nearly doubled.

In 1968, Hawaii imposed a series of increasingly harsh measures and its murder rate, then a low 2.4 per 100,000 per year, tripled to 7.2 by 1977.

In 1976, Washington, D.C., enacted one of the most restrictive gun control laws in the nation. Since then, the city's murder rate has risen 134 percent while the national murder rate has dropped 2 percent.


Now these will surprise you:

In Kennesaw, Ga., the city passed a law requiring all households to possess a gun. Within seven months, the burglary rate dropped by 89 percent.

In Orlando, Fla., the police department set up a program teaching 600,000 women how to handle firearms. Subsequently, the rape rate dropped by 88 percent.

Among the six million Swiss, there are an estimated two million guns -- including 600,000 fully automatic assault rifles, and their murder rate is 15 percent of ours.



I challenge you, go ahead and give us an example of what you claim. You won't find too many. It would seem to make sense that if you take away the guns you stop the killing, but take a look sometime at a country like England that has stringent gun laws and look at the rate of murder and rape, in almost every case it increase with gun control. When you outlaw guns all you do is remove the right of law abiding citizens to protect themselves and the criminals have free reign. If, however, a person was going to break into a house in a neighborhood notorious for its gun advocacy, they might think twice as there is a higher risk of them losing their life.

Some sources and good references:
Article by the National Center for Policy Analysis
Article at the Independence Institute
Capitolism Magazine Article
Article on Heartland.org
An Article on Australia's Gun Control mistake, cut with some humor.

Now I wouldn't post a problem without a solution, so here is an article detailing an alternative to making all guns illegal.

In several states it was higher than it is today and in all states it was rapidly improving. There's no reason to think that government-run schools did anything to improve the rate at which literacy was improving. The modern common school was introduced in the US around 1840; compulsory schooling legislation was first introduced around 1890. Prior to 1840 in some of the northern states the literacy rate was 99% prior to the introduction of the modern government-run common school, and in all states it was already trending in that direction.

A brief google search on terms such as "literacy 1840" found a relevant partisan essay on the subject by Sheldon Richman and David B. Kopel called "End Compulsory Schooling". Here's the relevant part:

-=-=-=-

What Things Were Like before Compulsory Attendance

The defenders of public education have led us to believe that compulsory attendance is necessary to a literate, educated citizenry. They imply that before the state governments established school system, only the elite were educated and that poverty or parental neglect caused many children to be illiterate. It is not so.

The public schools were not established to make up for any deficiency in people's ability to learn to read, write, do arithmetic, and acquire knowledge of other subjects. Educator Robert A. Peterson has noted that from the middle of the 17th century to the middle of the 19th century "public schools as we know them were virtually non-existent. "In these two centuries," however, "America produced several generations of highly skilled and literate men and women who laid the foundation for a nation dedicated to the principles of freedom and self-government."(5)

As Jacob Duche put it in 1772,"Almost every man is a reader."(6)

The proponents of public schools seem to believe that without government compulsion, many parents would not look at after the education of their children. But Jack High and Jerome Ellig found that

Private education was widely demanded in the late 18th and 19th centuries in Great Britain and America. The private supply of education was highly responsive to that demand, with the consequence that large numbers of children from all classes of society received several years of education.(7)

Contemporary observers tell the same story. After researching education among the working-class, the British economist James Mill, in an 1813 article in the Edinburgh Review, wrote:

We can ourselves speak decidedly as to the rapid progress which the love of education is making among the lower orders in England. Even around London, in a circle of fifty miles radius, which is far from the most instructed and virtuous part of the kingdom, there is hardly a village that has not something of a school; and not many children of either sex who are not taught more or less, reading and writing. We have met with families in which, for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.(8)

That was written well before England, in 1880, adopted universal compulsory elementary schooling.

High and Ellig also show that government involvement in education "displaced private education, sometimes deliberately stifling it [and] altered the kind of education that was offered, mainly to the detriment of the poorer working classes."(9)

Historian Robert Seybolt has written that private education was dynamic and responsive to families, as one would expect when parents control the spending:

In the hands of private schoolmasters the curriculum expanded rapidly. Their schools were commercial ventures, and, consequently, competition was keen.... Popular demands, and the element of competition, forced them not only to add new courses of instruction, but constantly to improve their methods and technique of instruction.(10)

Schooling in that early period was plentiful, innovative, and well within the reach of the common people. What effect did it have? High and Ellig note that 80 percent of New Yorkers leaving wills could sign their names. Other data show that from 1650 to 1795, male literacy climbed from 60 to 90 percent; female literacy went from 30 to 45 percent. Between 1800 and 1840, literacy in the North rose from 75 percent to between 91 and 97 percent. And in the South during the same span, the rate grew from 50-60 percent to 81 percent.(11)

According to historian Carl F. Kaestle, "Literacy was quite general in the middle reaches of society and above. The best generalization possible is that New York, like other American towns of the Revolutionary period, had a high literacy rate relative to other places in the world, and that literacy did not depend primarily upon the schools."(12)

Indeed, Senator Edward M. Kennedy's office reported that before Massachusetts became the first state to force children to go to school, literacy was at 98 percent; in 1990, the rate was 91 percent.(13)

Other indicators of the high rate of literacy are book sales and the booming publishing trade in the colonies and young nation. Thomas Paine's pamphlet Common Sense sold 120,000 copies in a colonial population of 3 million (counting the 20 percent who were slaves)--the equivalent of 10 million copies today. In 1818, when the United States had a population of under 20 million, Noah Webster's Spelling Book sold over 5 million copies. Novelist Walter Scott sold that many books between 1813 and 1823, the equivalent of selling 60 million copies in the United States today. The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper sold in the millions. And as former teacher John Taylor Gatto notes, Scott's and Cooper's books are not easy reading. Nor are The Federalist Papers, which were originally published in a newspaper for the common people. European visitors to early nineteenth-century America--such as Alexis de Tocqueville and Pierre du Pont de Nemours--marveled at how well educated the people were.(14)

In the late 18th century, du Pont de Nemours wrote:

The United States are more advanced in their educational facilities than most countries. They have a large number of primary schools; and as their paternal affection protects young children from working in the fields, it is possible to send them to the school-master--a condition that does not prevail in Europe.

Most young people, therefore, can read, write, and cipher.... In America, a great number of people read the Bible, and all the people read a newspaper.(15)

High and Ellig sum up the experience of the 18th and 19th centuries by noting that "the available evidence strongly indicates that Americans of the period took an active interest in education.... The private supply was extensive, not only in the number of children served but in the spectrum of social classes involved."(16)

Did attendance increase when governments began passing compulsory-attendance laws? Professor West replies:

The laws that were actually established did not in fact secure in the nineteenth century an education that was universal in the sense of 100 per cent school attendance by all children of school age. If, on the other hand, the term "universal" is intended more loosely to mean something like, "most," "nearly everybody," or "over 90 per cent" then we lack firm evidence to show that education was not already universal prior to the establishment of laws to provide schooling that was both compulsory and free.(17)

In other words, without command of the law, children went to school.

Thus, the rise of public, or government, schools was not a response to an inability on the part of society to provide for the education of its children but rather a manifestation of what later came to be called the "Progressive" mindset, the belief that life increasingly needed to be subject to control by experts and central government planning. As education historian Joel Spring has written, "The primary result of common school reform in the middle of the nineteenth century was not the education of increasing percentages of children, but the creation of new forms of school organization."(18)

Given the deep differences between America and some countries that have successfully implemented gun control, I doubt that strict gun control would help much with the American's horrid record of violent crime. Gun control in the USA would likely reduce sucides and accidental death's, but I doubt it would reduce violent crime much. Still, gun control would save many lives.

As quoted in the next section, the main problem with guns is that they make it much too easy to kill. It lets one excalate violence much faster than other weapons - often causing uncessessary death. A rational person does not arm themself with lethal weapons for everyday life. A drunk armed with a knife isn't likely to kill a friend in a drunken rage, while this happens all to often when the drunk has a gun. I have never heard of anyone knifing a son or daughter to death by accident, but guns bought for 'home defense' kill more family and friends than intruders.

A Lucid Gun control Sight and Some quotes from it: http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~zj5j-gttl/guns.htm

The problem with guns

The problem with guns is fairly straightforward: they make it easy to kill or injure a person. In Jeffrey A. Roth's Firearms and Violence (NIJ Research in Brief, February 1994, found at http://sun.soci.niu.edu/~critcrim/guns/gun.viol), he points out the obvious dangers:

Approximately 60 percent of all murder victims in the United States in 1989 (about 12,000 people) were killed with firearms. According to estimates, firearm attacks injured another 70,000 victims, some of whom were left permanently disabled. In 1985 (the latest year for which data are available), the cost of shootings--either by others, through self-inflicted wounds, or in accidents--was estimated to be more than $14 billion nationwide for medical care, long-term disability, and premature death. (Editor's note: the number of gun victims has increased since 1989 to 15,456 gun homicides in 1994. Source: FBI UCR report.) In robberies and assaults, victims are far more likely to die when the perpetrator is armed with a gun than when he or she has another weapon or is unarmed.

Suicides

Residents of homes where a gun is present are 5 times more likely to experience a suicide than residents of homes without guns

Self-defense

But research has shown that a gun kept in the home is 43 times more likely to kill a member of the household, or friend, than an intruder.

Research by Dr. Arthur Kellerman has shown that keeping a gun in the home carries a murder risk 2.7 times greater than not keeping one.

Other weapons

"People kill with knifes, too. Do you want to ban knifes?" From Dr. Roth's study: The overall fatality rate in gun robberies is an estimated 4 per 1,000--about 3 times the rate for knife robberies, 10 times the rate for robberies with other weapons, and 20 times the rate for robberies by unarmed offenders.

Gun Control, a History of Candian Gun control http://i2i.org/SuptDocs/Crime/Canadian_Gun_Control .htm

Kopel's National Review article on the same subject.

The Independence Institute -- Kopel's organization. Note that the link on this page has the following quote regarding the bill:

Note: the bill's sponsors have recently agreed to remove all objectionable items, except for the encryption provision

Anyone remember Rebecca Schaeffer?

The problems that caused the Littleton and other shootings are the same as they've been for ages -- intolerance, parental incompetence, lack of emphasis on the importance of education.

Intolerance, yes, but why is it there? Some marks for working out, but not the correct answer.

Incompetence, yes, but why is it there? More marks for working out, but again not the correct answer.

Lack of education - oh, sure! Literacy went down and crime went up as compulsory education was phased in. This has been well documented in the USA, where pre-compulsion literacy ran to 98% in many northern states, and has never exceeded 92% since (ie 4x more illiterates). No marks at all for this one.

Now, riddle me this: if your child is whisked away to day-care, then pre-school, then school, and in each institution is regimented to some degree and dealt with always at a shallow level by a bunch of relative strangers, where and how are they to learn any principles of life?

In Oz, this soaks up 33 of their 98 waking hours each week. Bear in mind that many of the other 65 hours are spent before the idiot box or solely with others of their age, also desperate for emotional and social input.

As another poster here points out, the most impressive US school bombing was done by a member of the school board. Obviously, emphasis on the importance of education wasn't a crying need there!

[...] being a parent is a full-time responsibility, more important than your hobbies, your friends, even your career.

I can't agree more. Abdicating this responsibility to a school should be named as it is: criminal negligence.