When Guns Are Outlawed Only Outlaws Will Have Guns

The talking heads at the New York Times penned an editorial in response to the terrorist attacks in San Bernardino and it was about what one would expect from that august body: End The Gun Epidemic In America. It is an eminently forgettable screed that only serves as a self-righteous echo chamber for leftists. However some of what they wrote demands a response because it exposes not just a hatred for private gun ownership but a distressing naivete and an all too common disdain for common sense and the Constitution. Exhibit A where we treat every crime where a gun is involved as a "gun crime" even if the actual crime being committed is terrorism or gang violence.

But motives do not matter to the dead in California, nor did they in Colorado, Oregon, South Carolina, Virginia, Connecticut and far too many other places. The attention and anger of Americans should also be directed at the elected leaders whose job is to keep us safe but who place a higher premium on the money and political power of an industry dedicated to profiting from the unfettered spread of ever more powerful firearms.

So according to the sages at the New York Time, the purpose of our government is to "keep us safe". That sounds great! But is it true? The framers of the document that created our Federal government explained why they were making the Constitution in the preamble. Is there a mention of safety being the "job" of our elected officials?

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Notice please that something is missing. There is no mention of our elected officials keeping us "safe". The Federal government was given very limited powers to adjudicate disputes between the states, provide for a common military for the defense of the nation and generally to do collectively only what the states could not easily do separately. In fact the Founders were highly suspicious of an armed government, having fought a war against the British and their standing army. They didn't write the Constitution creating the Federal government to keep us safe from criminals, they wrote the Constitution and intentionally limited the Federal government to keep Americans safe from that same government. This is Civics 101. The New York Times (All the news liberal opinion that's fit to print!) editors apparently skipped the day in class when the formation of the Constitiution was discussed. The Times continues with an unusual display of honesty:

It is not necessary to debate the peculiar wording of the Second Amendment. No right is unlimited and immune from reasonable regulation.

I wonder if they hold the same opinion of the right to an unfettered press? What if Donald J. Trump becomes President and decides that some news stories and opinion pieces like this one are dangerous and need to be controlled via "reasonable regulation"? One can imagine the outcry of "Freedom of the press!" from the New York Times. If you can count on anything besides death and taxes, it is that the news media have a schizophrenic relationship with the Constitution, defending with their dying breath certain parts of the First Amendment but ignoring or discounting entirely the very next Amendment. To the media the only truly important part of the Bill of Rights is the freedom for them to print drivel without regulation. The rest doesn't matter much. The Times goes on:

Certain kinds of weapons, like the slightly modified combat rifles used in California, and certain kinds of ammunition, must be outlawed for civilian ownership. It is possible to define those guns in a clear and effective way and, yes, it would require Americans who own those kinds of weapons to give them up for the good of their fellow citizens.

Riiiiigggghhhhtttt. If you have half a brain and even the most rudimentary powers of reasoning you will see the problem right away. Expecting to eliminate gun violence by, at first, outlawing certain types of guns and then relying on the goodness of law abiding citizens to turn them in means that the only people who are giving up "assault weapons" or other firearms decreed "bad" by the Times are people who obey the law. As it turns out, those sorts of people are not the criminals who use these weapons in the commission of a crime by definition. In the Fascist fantasyland where the Times editorial board lives, would-be terrorists and criminals will glumly line up to turn in their weapons. "Shucks, I wuz gunna shoot up an office party but I have to turn in my assault weapon." In real life that is not going to happen. One of the truths about the New York Times that makes it useless for national discourse is that it thinks that only people in New York, and to a much lesser extent Boston, Chicago and L.A., have opinions that matter. If the editors of the New York Times ever lowered themselves to listen to people in "fly over" country they would realize that calls to turn in guns is a joke. I am not turning in my firearms and no one else I know would either. In fact the response would be kind of like this (the Persians in this case being the Federal government)

What is truly insidious about this is that the Times and other liberal anti-2nd Amendment types is that they are not in favor of eliminating guns, just eliminating guns in the hands of private citizens. Federal agents in possession of firearms are great because they need those guns to make citizens obey every whim of the government, no matter how asinine or counter-productive. Don't want to buy health insurance? Armed agents are on their way. Want to buy actual milk in a transaction between two consenting, informed adults? Good chance your door is getting kicked in by agents with guns drawn. Not joking, that has happened. Memes are poor excuses for discourse but now and again they serve a purpose:

Yep. Gun control is really people control. 

I know I am something of a seeming contradiction. a non-resistant Christian in the tradition of the Anabaptists who is also a frothing at the mouth supporter of the Second Amendment but if life has taught me anything it is that liberty is more valuable than "security" and that people in the government and writing for the editorial board of the NY Times are not interested in your safety, liberty or prosperity, they are mostly interested in controlling you to benefit themselves. That is an inconvenient truth but a truth nonetheless. 

On Guns

Social media is atwitter with the gun question again, thanks to another mass shooting by a deranged individual and kept alive by comments from amateur pundits and Presidential contenders alike. It is always a terribly difficult discussion to have because many people have firmly established notions one way or the other. So I thought I would add some fuel on the fire by throwing in my two (cyber) cents.

I am something of an oddity, a non-resistant Christian who abhors war and bloodshed but opposes gun control legislation. That may seem somewhat contradictory but allow me to explain.

I support the right of American citizens to keep arms not because I think we should all pack heat to defend ourselves against criminals but because as a realist I understand the very real deterrence an armed population has on a would-be tyrannical government. I don't advocate armed rebellion, even the rebellion that led to the formation of this country, but I do recognize that the state is properly understood in the size and scope of ours to be an enemy of liberty. The primary motivation of most institutions, including and especially our government, is to retain and expand its own power and thereby preserve itself and those who benefit from it. An armed populace stands as a counter to a state that seeks to reduce individual liberty and force conformist behavior on said populace. Even a casual glance at our government and the accompanying bureaucracy sees a state that is in multiple ways seeking to increase control over a largely flaccid and disinterested people who don't seem to mind losing freedom as long as they can watch The Bachelorette. As I wrote in my post Why worry about things that don't matter? I believe that even things that are not Kingdom issues still have meaning. It is better for people to be more free and to enjoy more liberty than it is for them to have less. If you don't think that many of the ideological drivers behind gun control are more concerned about law abiding citizens who are armed than they are about mass shootings, I have to assume you are naive.

Of course as I have pointed out before, making something illegal only impacts those who obey  the law, i.e. not criminals. By definition a criminal is someone who, typically, is aware of the law but has decided to break the law anyway. The gun control movement never seems to get this. Perhaps a better way of stating it is that the gun control movement doesn't trust people with guns, even when the evidence points to law abiding gun owners as being, again by definition, not criminal. Most gun control legislation, existing and proposed, treats every America citizen as a law breaker waiting to happen.

Some claim that it is inconsistent to be a pro-lifer who is anti-abortion but pro-Second Amendment. Abortions kills people. Guns kill people. Right? Wrong. The United States has some 300 million guns in the hands of private citizens if the stats are to be believed. Some insane percentage of those citizens with their hundreds of millions of guns, 99% perhaps, have never shot anyone, threatened to shoot anyone or even considered pulling a gun on someone. I own a number of firearms ranging from shotguns to rifles to hand guns. I have never and likely would never shoot anyone and the only exception would be a heat of the moment defense of my family and even that I don't consider to be proper for a Christian.

On the other hand, with a few rare exceptions where a child somehow survives the butcher's forceps and is born in spite of the best effort of a "doctor", abortions always end a human life. Not only that but they are intended to do just that no matter how much clinical and sterile language we try to hide it behind. It is the exact opposite of gun ownership. I would guess that 99.99% of abortions end as expected and desired with the death of a child. To recap, legal gun ownership almost never results in the death of someone else, much less an innocent except in the cases where a negligent parent fails to secure their gun and fails to educate their child.  Conversely abortion is intended to and almost always succeed in ending the life of another human being and by definition that child is innocent in a way that virtually no adult could be.

Get that? Owning a gun by a law abiding citizen is almost never going to lead to the death of an innocent and is generally not intended to. Having an abortion almost always leads to the death of an innocent and it is intended to do so. Comparing the two is asinine. Now one can make the argument, and I have, that being pro-life when it comes to abortion but at the same time being pro-war is inconsistent. War is intended to take life and innocents dying in those wars is an expected result.

So there it is in a nutshell. Feel free to tell me I am wrong but be prepared to use facts and reason rather  than simple emotionalism.

Brace Yourself

Kentucky Senator Rand Paul is announcing what everyone has known for a long time, namely that he is running for President in 2016. If I am going to vote at all in the next cycle, Senator Paul is about the only one I would vote for. His libertarian message is a welcome breath of fresh(er) air amid the twin statist parties of Big Government Via Income Redistribution and Big Government Via Endless War And Military Spending. No one else in either party is talking about the issues of liberty he does and being one of the few to question American interventionist foreign policy is enough to set him apart.

Of course running for President often changes a man's political positions so we will see and I still place zero trust in politicians to actually do what  they say but you never know. I do know this, many in the pro-war Republican establishment hate and fear Senator Paul and will do everything in their power to keep him from the nomination, even if that means handing the White House to Hillary Clinton. Never underestimate the lust for power.

This being 2016 I of course had to make a meme to celebrate this moment.

Around The Web On #RFRA

I don't normally get especially incensed over political stuff anymore but the ludicrous response to my home state of Indiana passing a law that is substantially the same as an existing Federal law and some 30 odd state laws, including one supported by then State Senator Barack Obama who has predictably changed his tune after testing the political winds, has me feeling compelled to keep putting out decent responses to the inane responses from people who largely don't live in Indiana and wouldn't be caught dead here.

The first point to make is that when you get a coalition of academic pseudo-intellectuals, "social justice Christians", guilty leftist business leaders, the Obama administration and a mishmash of Hollywood liberals who feel qualified to speak on an issue because of a talent for pretending to be someone else, all opposing what you have done, it is a sure sign that it was the right thing to do. I am not super-interested in fighting the culture wars mostly because they have been largely counter-productive, a huge waste of resources and lead increasingly to be unequally yoked with unbelievers. I am even less interested in being scolded by people who a) haven't read the bill and/or b) couldn't find Indiana on a map with both hands. The professional class of people in this country that are offended and aggrieved over something new every day, creating ridiculous notions like "micro-aggressions" to turn any and every casual human interaction into a cause to be rallied to and a wrong to be scolded about, are a cancer in our culture. I don't use that word lightly but I do use it unapologetically and intentionally.

The uproar over Indiana's Religious Freedom Restoration Act can be linked to the social media prompting of George Takei and that is the reason, the only reason, that this law which is essentially the same as the laws on the books of 60% of the states as well as the Federal government is getting so much attention. There is nothing quite like social media to inflame the passions of the willfully ignorant. This backlash, while predictable in retrospect, has taken the Right in this country off-guard, at least initially. Very few voices stood against the ironically labelled forces of "tolerance". Thankfully in spite of the slow start that has changed. I wanted to highlight a few for your reading pleasure.

The Daily Signal has a brief article, The True Facts About Religious Freedom Laws, that is noteworthy for a helpful graphic. It isn't an in-depth look at the issue but in this day and age a clear graphic is a useful tool in responding to the forces of religious bigotry that depend on sound-bytes and memes to make their point.

The National Review has several good articles, Is Indiana Protecting Discrimination? as well as Liberals against Religious Liberty in Indiana and The White House Doesn’t Like Indiana’s Religious-Liberty Law, but Won’t Say Why It’s Different from the One Obama Supported. It is typical that the media is completely giving a pass to Obama for yet another flip-flop. It is almost like they have an agenda or something....

Matt Walsh has a decidedly snarky essay but one worth reading, Sorry Gays, You Don’t Have The Right To Be Free From Discrimination. All businesses discriminate by virtue of price, product line-up, location, etc. Victoria's Secret discriminates in favor of women. Heck it used to be considered a virtue to be discriminating. Now the real virtue is to have no opinion or preference about anything other than what the government says or the marketers tell you.

Rod Dreher, writing for the American Conservative has a very comprehensive piece, Indiana: A Religious Liberty Bellwether.

It seems to me that the media/elite freakout over the Indiana law is a moral panic analogous to the freakout over the UVA rape case. People rushed like lemmings to endorse as true something that turned out to be a hoax because it confirmed their prejudices about Bad Classes of People. This is why so many in the media are making no pretense to be fair in their reporting and commentary on the Indiana law. As Mollie Hemingway avers, the most interesting — and most worrying — aspect of all this is that religious liberty is not considered to be important at all to very many people in this country, especially the most powerful people.

Notre Dame’s Pat Deneen wrote this weekend on Facebook that law school friends tell him of plans underway now by progressive law profs to “Bob Jones” churches and religious institutions that have policies they consider discriminatory against LGBT people. That is, they want to campaign to take away tax exempt status from all religious entities that have traditional views and practices related to homosexuality. This is the next frontier. Many churches and religious entities operate so close to the margins, budget-wise, that they will not be able to survive this.

Set aside the reality of church operating at the budget margins, a worthy topic for another day, and concentrate on the words above. The media is paying so much attention to this issue because it allows them to bash the Bad People and like so many other issues like the noted UVA "rape" farce, the "hands up, don't shoot" farce, the "bombing" of the NAACP offices in Colorado farce, etc., what is important here is the agenda driving narrative, not the truth. Let's be honest, the "media" in this country is mostly designed to push an agenda. This is a charge regularly lobbed at the evil Fox News by the left but it is at least as true for the NBC/ABC/CBS cabal along with CNN, MSNBC and NPR/PBS. What changed with the advent of Fox News and talk radio, etc., is that the monopolistic stranglehold of the leftist media was broken and they cannot forgive that. Also of note is this tweet from the Dreher article:

Any cause with the active support of Apple, NCAA, Wal-Mart and the Kochs is not a beleaguered minority, but the ruling elite.
— Patrick Deneen (@PatrickDeneen) March 29, 2015

That is exactly on the mark. This is very much the government at the state level attempting to put into place protections for religious small businesses to exercise their religious beliefs as a defense against the elites of our society in academia, entertainment, government and business. The groups he lists have a lot in common, namely that they want nothing to rock the boat and interfere with the money flow that is the lifeblood of the government, the academy, the entertainment world and the massive corporations. Ironically the American Left has placed itself firmly on the side of the most privileged and white organizations in the world.

The attempt to muzzle religious expression, and make no mistake that while evangelical Christianity is the primary target here this same law will extend to Roman Catholicism, Muslims, Jews, really anyone with any religious convictions. As many of the articles point out , these laws do not provide blanket amnesty to discriminate, they simply provide a legal framework for litigation if it arises. Of course lost in this entire discussion is that many of the existing cases across the country are pretty clearly activists intentionally trying to force a business to cater to them to make a political point.

Anyway, it is just really important that the reality of this issue gets circulated because it is turning into a witch hunt with the wealthy elites trying to one-up each other over who is more outraged.

The Erosion Of Liberty Marches On Even In A "Red State" Like Indiana

I read the local news this morning to check out the aftermath of our minor snow storm last night and saw this news headline: DeKalb woman accused of unlicensed midwifery. I pretty much knew right away who that was and sure enough when I read the story it was confirmed.

DeKalb County prosecutors have accused a 55-year-old St. Joe woman of helping deliver babies without a midwife’s license.

Barbara S. Parker told an investigator that she assisted in 48 deliveries in 2012 and that she has averaged 60 to 70 deliveries a year over the past five years, according to court papers.

Parker faces three felony counts of practicing midwifery without a license. The charges stem from three deliveries she performed in early August. 

We know the Parkers quite well. In fact I stopped over at their house on Friday to see about renting their boar to breed our lady pig but no one was home. Turns out the reason no one was home was that Barb had been arrested. As sometimes happens there are difficult deliveries and in two especially difficult cases last year babies died in childbirth. Of course that is not unique or even particularly more common with home births. The U.S. has a less than stellar rate of infant mortality, ranking 34th in the world between Lithuania and Belarus and well below Cuba, with an infant mortality rate of 6.81 out of every 1000 live births. Something on the order of 99% of those births happen in hospitals oddly enough. The Amish in our area use midwives for their normal births and speak highly of Barb. Childbirth is about as natural as breathing, eating and sleeping but it does and always has carried risks. What is different in this case is that when a professional with the blessing of the state attends a birth where a child dies, it is just a statistic. When a non-professional without the blessing of the state attends a birth and a child dies it is time for the state to spring to action!

We have had all eight of our children in hospitals with the last two births attended by a midwife. If we were having more children we would probably still choose to go to a hospital to deliver so I obviously think that if someone wants to go to a hospital that is certainly fine. It is also fine if a mother and father choose to have their child at home after making an informed decision. Many home birth advocates take the accurate position that delivering a baby is a natural event, not a disease. I liked this quote from the NY Times article linked below:

"Midwifery is an autonomous profession," Ms. Ayres said. "It's an art and a science that predates the medical model of care. Midwifery sees birth as normal and basically safe.

"It's made safer by reliance on the woman's power," she continued. "The medical model assumes the woman is passive and her body needs to be acted upon. Every birth is presented as a potential disaster from which every woman needs to be protected and potentially rescued."

Our culture treats pregnancy as a medical condition and classify maternity leave as disability. The idea of a woman of all people doing anything more than staying in a hospital bed, pumped full drugs and waiting to be told to push is preposterous! It reminded me of a Monty Python skit about the delivery room...

Woman in Labor: What do I do?

Doctor: Yes?

Woman in Labor: What do I do?

Doctor: Nothing dear, you're not qualified!

It is funny but not. Of all the people in the delivery room, only the father and the baby have less input than the mother who is delivering. Don't get me wrong, most labor & delivery nurses are great but they operate in a pretty controlled system that is governed by hospital policy, insurance companies and lawyers. Like so many other parts of our lives we have subcontracted our most basic functions to professionals.

Midwives in our area deliver a lot of Amish babies at home. The Amish will deliver at home whether they have permission or not and whether they have a competent midwife or not. Barb's arrest is not unique. Just a quick google search yields the names Jennifer Louisa Williams, Irena Keeslar and Mary Helen Ayres. with stories like:

Prosecution of Midwife Casts Light on Home Births

Arrested Midwife Says She Won’t Deliver Babies in Indiana Anymore

Bloomington midwife arrested for practicing without a license

That is just in Indiana and just a quick search. I am not sure if Indiana is unique in this crusade against "unlicensed midwifery" but certainly there are those who seem bent on stamping out this dangerous criminal element in our midst (from the above story Arrested Midwife says...)

Mike Rinebold, director of government relations for the Indiana State Medical Association, is hoping that will change. 

“We are thankful there is a prosecutor in LaGrange County who is willing to enforce the laws,” Rinebold said.

For the uninitiated, "director of government relations" is a fancy title for what we commonly call "lobbyist". When you start to take back autonomy over things that the government and industry groups have decided you can't be trusted with, you better watch out! According to Mary Ann Griffin of the Indiana Midwives Association, midwives have drawn the ire of the Indiana medical lobby who are blocking a law pending for 17 years to legalize certified professional midwives (same story):

“We are being stopped by the Indiana State Medical Association, which has a powerful lobby. I’ve met with them many times. They have told us that we have been their number one priority. This little tiny group of midwives. There are about only about 15 CPMs in Indiana. It’s a tiny group. We serve 1,000 families a year who want to have a homebirth.”


Glad to see the lobbyists at the Indiana State Medical Association are on the job keeping Amish women safe from midwives!

This is all part of a disturbing pattern and it is all related. Drinking unadulterated milk from a cow. Eating food that hasn't been approved by our government (the same government that says Twinkies are safe). Giving birth to a child outside of a hospital. Teaching your children yourself in your home rather than shipping them off to an institutional school. These are all basic liberties that are under constant assault by overzealous regulators egged on by the lobbyists for international food conglomerates. The general attitude is that people are too dumb to be left to their own devices. Like so many actions by big institutions it has an unintended (or perhaps intended) consequence. The more the state and its enablers coddle the population, the less independent and capable we become. Oddly enough when you don't expect anything from people, you don't get anything from them. Women can't deliver outside of a hospital, how will they know what to do! Moms aren't qualified to raise and educate their own children, mothers need to get jobs in a cubicle shuffling papers while the professionals in daycare and public schools raise their children. People can't make choices in what to eat even if they want to without facing the ire of the militarized food police. Even in the church we don't trust people so we encourage the Body of Christ to "invite people to church" so they can be ministered to by professionals and send money to missions organizations where the professionals can reach the lost.

As long as people are cowed and imprisoned by the state for carrying out the most basic functions in life, our cherished slogan "Land of the Free and Home of the Brave" will continue to be at best an empty saying and at worst an outright lie.

A blast from the past

I love this famous line from Barry Goldwater at the 1964 GOP Covention in San Francisco...



I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.

And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.