Monday, August 31, 2015

Four from Herschel Smith.

MBV NOTE: Please keep Herschel's son Joshua in your prayers. He has just gone through some major back surgery.
Adam Gopnik On Guns As Symbols
The Second Amendment And Illegal Aliens
Here Is Your War On Drugs
The Fargo Police Are Imbeciles

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

"Here Is Your War On Drugs". I'm a law abiding citizen. There is no contraband in my home. I rarely leave home. I'm a stay at home dad. Decades ago, I had acquaintances that were part of the drug culture. I said decades ago...more than one decade. Most are now dead or lost in time. My home cannot be easily violated without a lot of effort and noise. I have burglar bars, surveillance cameras and dogs...otherwise known as 'hillbilly doorbells'.

If a SWAT team came to my door, kicked it in after erroneously targeting the wrong house for a drug raid, there would be a need for many body bags because I, with several loaded 'crowd repelling' models of firearms, including those that can easily penetrate level III armor, could definitely take out more than a few of those SWAT guys before they got me. I hope they have their affairs in order before they violate my rights.

Chiu ChunLing said...

As far as the right to bear arms is concerned, I'm pretty much an orthogonalist. Everyone, as a human being, has the right to be armed to the best of their ability, and the presumption that everyone is so armed makes everyone safer. I could argue this from more basic axioms, but in this forum I will take the theorem as granted.

This being the case, the mere fact of being armed, rather than anything one might do with one's arms or while bearing them, is irrelevant to anything else. If I'm in church talking with people I trust, I don't make any fuss over whether they're armed. It doesn't make a difference how I treat them. If I'm in a dark alley confronting some illegal aliens rummaging through a trash can, I have to presume they're armed anyway, because I can't know they aren't no matter what laws exist forbidding it (since they're already breaking the laws forbidding them to be there in the first place). So why not just allow everyone to be armed? What advantage is there to disarmed anyone?

If I want a higher penalty for someone committing a crime because they committed it armed, then I should want that same penalty even if I can't prove they were armed because when I caught them I had to deal with them as if they were. The costs of the crime itself, and of responding to it, are not affected by whether or not they were actually armed because I can't know that they aren't until after the criminals have been successfully arrested. So there is no real point is lessening the liability for having committed the crime if the criminals turn out to have been unarmed at the time. I'm rewarding them for committing a crime in a manner that does nothing to reduce the costs to myself.

So what exactly is the point of prohibiting even criminals from carrying weapons while they commit a crime? None whatsoever that I can discern, because you must assume that, if they are committing a crime at all, they wouldn't hesitate to commit an additional crime that improves their odds of getting away with the crime, and being armed increases their chances of getting away with the crime.

If you can't make a case for why criminals who are armed while actually committing a crime should be treated differently from criminals who commit the exact same crime while unarmed, then how can you justify ever treating someone differently because they're armed? Rationally, you can't, a direct contradiction will always arise unless you grant the presumption that simply carrying a weapon, in and of itself, is a criminal act.

And I won't ever grant that presumption. Because it isn't. Tools, absolutely all of which can be used to inflict harm on other humans, are the entire basis of human existence. A human deprived of tools is functionally no longer a human at all, and a tool that cannot possibly be used to hurt anyone else (like maybe an Asimovian 3L robot) is no longer a tool.

Of course, this can be taken as a comment on pretty much anything posted on the Captain's Journal, but I suppose it's most relevant to the questions of increasing charges (or administering extra-judicial punishments like summary execution or threats thereof at the scene) for people who happen to be armed (or just appear so). Which, I suppose, covers all four of these particular posts.

Anonymous said...

As one who has endured a spinal surgery that didn't quite pan out as planned, I will surely pray for a right and proper outcome. Science and doctoring can work some magic these days but there still ain't no such thing as perfection. That fella needs all the prayers he can get!
So prayers up Sipsey readers!!!

Anonymous said...

If the Georgia cop killed the homeowner's dog, he deserved to get shot.