I have been getting a lot of hits on this page in the last couple of months, mostly referring from other places where I post thoughts, argue points, etc.
I have been doing that (writing on other forums), primarily, rather than writing blog posts.
This is for a couple of reasons:
First, I don’t want to copy/paste someone else’s comments from a message board or topic forum and then have a discussion with myself on the blog. I won’t learn anything and the original writer hasn’t given me permission to do so.
Secondly, the things I’m inclined to write about are varied as can be. They range from ethics to guns, to civil rights and the wonderful personality of our dogs. I’m neither a well-known person, widely published by other organizations, nor am I a specialist that can write volumes on a niche topic. Those are great things, but it’s not me.
As much as I like to write about guns, there’s only so much I can write that’s not a rip-off of someone else or hasn’t been said elsewhere better than I’m likely to present it.
I’m tempted to let the entire blog just die when it comes to renewal time. But I would like your feedback.
In case you don’t know what microstamping is, here’s a good description along with California’s iteration of the process:
Firearms microstamping is the process by which firearms manufacturers would have to micro laser-engrave a gun’s make, model and serial number on two distinct parts of each gun, including the firing pin, so that in theory the information would be imprinted on the cartridge casing when the pistol is fired. Legislation mandating microstamping in California was signed into law in 2007 by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-Calif.) and was slated to take effect this New Year’s Day (2010); however, since the technology remains encumbered by patents it cannot be certified by the California Department of Justice and therefore has not been implemented.
Other people have written about this incredibly bizarre idea California is trying to mandate, but I thought I’d add my 2¢, with the excuse of the letter the California Police Chiefs Association (Which has rarely met a people gun control idea it didn’t like) sent to the California AG saying essentially, “woops.“
{From the letter: } Publicly available, peer-reviewed studies conducted by independent research organizations conclude that the technology does not function reliably and that criminals can remove the markings easily in mere seconds. We believe that these findings require examination prior to implementation.”
In other words, the technical flaws of the idea without any other argument needing to be made makes this a stupid idea. But the letter itself is a perfect example of the ignorance and hypocrisy inherent in the idea of requiring the microstamp in the first place, much less registering individual gun owners. In it’s own words the CPCA references the fact that criminals can easily find a way to evade detection via a firearm registration scheme as one of it’s reasons for opposition to the bill.
“Criminals can remove the markings easily in mere seconds.”
The antis can’t manage to come up with even a remotely plausible scenario in which this stuff would solve many crimes, even if they got everything they wanted. But they want it anyway.
To many who don’t know or care much about guns, gun registration doesn’t sound like a big deal. And if you don’t know anything about microstamping, and much more importantly the assumptions that its supposed efectiveness rests upon, it might not sound like a bad thing. I mean, it’s supposed to help the cops solve crimes right?
The only problem is that this simply isn’t the case.
Microstamping guns and registering individual gun owners depends on a large number of things for them to make more than the very slightest difference in catching bad guys. And trust me, I was a crime reporter for years in an area with high gang violence and lots of shootings. I know whereof I speak.
First, and most easily shown to be false, is the required assumption that guns used by criminals are legally owned and obtained by said criminals. Otherwise having the murder weapon (or shell casing in the case of microstamping is useless.- There’s no connection to the shooter. Microstamping, or even posession of the weapon used will only provide a connection to the gun shop that originally sold the gun or if there is registration of guns as well, a connection in some cases to a previous owner of the firearm.
That won’t help.
We have actual numbers on this stuff. They are released by the FBI and most states every single year, and wide-ranging reports, even those submitted by Clinton Administration appointees and staff in the justice department have concluded that the vast majority of crimes are committed by people with previously existing criminal records, which bars any legal purchase of a firearm, people under age to posesss a firearm legally, and in a staggeringly large percentage of cases, where the gun is stolen or obtained from an illegal black market, so far removed from the original source that tracing is virtually impossible.
Essentially, their excuse for logic is that the thing they want to use for crime solving is the one thing they are absolutely certain to not have, even with the most stringent of registration/microstamping provisions.
First, there are a grand total of about 500-600 unsolved homicides in California each year. About 2/3 of those (following national statistics) are committed with a firearm. Many of these are caught the following year, so the real number of cases where absent more information on the gun could possibly help solve otherwise unsolved cases is already very small. Knowing who used to have the gun legally is of very little help in most cases.
Microstamping, even if it were trivial to do and worked every time rests upon the idea that there are lots of cases where:
A registered gun is used in a crime by a legal gun owner or someone to whom he knowingly gave the gun
Which isn’t a revolver
The perpetrator doesn’t pick up his brass
The perpetrator keeps the gun after committing a crime with it instead of reporting it lost/stolen
The perpetrator is not otherwise tied to the crime
The perpetrator hasn’t altered the gun to defeat registration/microstamping requirements
Is this true for more than a handful of cases? For this they want to spend millions, make ammunition AND firearms prohibitively expensive for all but the well-to-do and cost the state yet more jobs as anyone who is in the firearms business or cares about their human right of self defense, rapidly flees the Golden State. Like the famous “assault weapon” ban, where the Justice department noted that fewer than .75% of gun crimes were committed by “assault weapons” and that hi-capacity magazines seemed to make no difference in terms of numbers of people injured or in rounds fired, this is another solution to a problem that doesn’t exist outside Sarah Brady’s fantasies.
I gave up on Democrat politicians showing any common sense on gun control a long time ago, but this is enough to make my jaded opinions sit back in awe. This is beyond stupid. As a matter of fact:
ROME – An attacker hurled a statuette at Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi, striking the leader in the face at the end of a rally on Sunday and leaving the stunned 73-year-old media mogul with a bloodied mouth, police said.
I saw the story today and had to laugh at the contrast with Iraq, where they throw shoes at national leaders.
So let’s see…In Iraq they throw shoes, in Italy they throw statues… I predict Germany’s Angela Merkel will need to dodge a Tiger tank or Piano in the not too distant future.
Lt. Timothy Crowley said an accident reconstruction team was continuing its investigation at the corner of Merrimack and Central streets, where Philip Laverriere was driving his Cadillac DeVille when Angel Pena, 18, of Lowell, walked out in front of his car.
Pena, who was listed in critical but stable condition at Lahey Clinic in Burlington with a serious head injury Tuesday morning, was wearing a hooded sweatshirt and listening to an iPod when he walked in front of Laverriere, who had the green light, according to Crowley.
For those of you who don’t have the misfortune to travel or live in the commonwealth, this is par for the course. The drivers are downright terrifying. 3 feet off your bumper at 70 MPH in the rain, blasting thru an intersection turning left in front of traffic with the right-of-way, you name it. If it’s dangerous and stupid, it’s normal driving here.
But the pedestrians are, in a word, suicidal. As bad as the drivers are here anyone who’s not paranoid about crossing the street or walking their dog off a sidewalk has to be nuts. I regularly have people driving down my residential street at 40-50 MPH because people use it as a cutoff for a nasty intersection nearby. I can’t count the number of times I’ve nearly been rear-ended pulling into my driveway.
Prosecuting dangerous driving is fine by me but walking while stupid gets little sympathy for the “victim.” Maybe the genius with the walkman will watch where he’s going next time.
I realize a good advocate has to be aggressive on behalf of his client so I’m certainly not surprised. And normally I’d have a lot more willingness to buy that defense. I mean who the Heck but a crazy person after having spent all those years in the army suddenly goes postal like this? Some things you just have to be crazy to do. But given the history of his ravings on Islam and his anger at Muslim soldiers deploying to the sand-box, I’m not buying it and I’m reasonably sure a court-martial won’t either.
Sorry counselor, your client is gonna fry. -This is my sad face :
I keep reading snark as well as serious arguments claiming that Global Warming is a myth. It seems that invariably in these screeds someone mentions that in the 70s there was some hoopla about the “coming Ice Age.”
In the early to mid 70’s climatology was still a science still in it’s infancy, and more importantly a science without things like the space shuttle, or U-2 and SR-71 aircraft to use in their observations. Heck, weather satellites were still a fairly recent thing.
The report shows that due to some cooling observed from the mid-1940’s some scientists did indeed make the claim. -About 12% of them. The other 88% reported either no change (16%) or increased warming (72%).
Virtually all of the reports citing the possibility of global cooling came out in the years 1967 and 1971. By 1976 virtually no one was making the claim.
Find another straw-man argument folks, global warming is happening. We may or may not be able to address its man-made aspects in time to make a difference. But pretending it isn’t happening at all when there’s a broad concensus among climatologists and other scientists that it is and it is at least partially man-made just makes you look like a putz. This isn’t Chemistry. It’s a theoretical science. We can’t prove the existence of black holes or human evolution either. We extrapolate from the data, come up with theories which best explain our observations. Global warming has been beaten to death by climatologists from day one. At this point, virtually none of the experts are questioning it any more. That’s called scientific consensus. Yes, it’s still theory, but no, no one has come up with an alternative that tests out as plausible.
When broad scientific consensus is reached and points to something with catastrophic consequences for the entire human race, only a jackass makes it a matter of political point-scoring. We can argue all day about what the best possible course of action to deal with global warming may be. To argue that it isn’t happening or that we shouldn’t even try to address it is stupid at best a racially suicidal at worst.
When Rush Limbaugh shows me his PhD in a related hard science I’ll be interested in his nattering. Until then I’ll rely on what the actual experts tell me, thanks
A study published in the journal Child Development says spanking is bad for kids, according to a CNN article. Pardon me if I’m somewhat skeptical over how exactly one really measures for this stuff, and am even more skeptical when I hear the same old pacifist arguments from ivory tower social “scientists.”
“”We’re talking about infants and toddlers, and I think that just, cognitively, they just don’t understand enough about right or wrong or punishment to benefit from being spanked,” said Lisa Berlin, the study’s lead author and research scientist at the Center for Child and Family Policy at Duke University.
Well Dr. Berlin, you’re quite right. Infants and toddlers don’t grasp ethics or time-outs and yelling is terrifying to a child that age. That’s why you give them a swat when they reach for the electrical outlet or the stove. They don’t grasp it’s not allowed, they DO grasp that when they reach for it they get an ouch, immediately and consistently. It usually doesn’t take more than a few times to teach the lesson.
Berlin and colleagues found that children who were spanked as 1-year-olds tended to behave more aggressively at age 2…
Measuring aggression in terms of X percent over/below baseline is nearly impossible. How exactly do you arrive at a baseline? What exactly is your method for measuring aggression and how do you average it? And finally, how do you assess this so-called “aggressive” behavior other than in a fundamentally subjective and therefore unreliable manner? If the kids who were in one group were all randomly beating the snot out the kids in the other group, that would get my attention too. But that’s not the case here, and as with every study I have ever read that attempts to measure aggression, I’m reasonably sure that this one used “anything other than totally docile” as a definition of aggression. Seriously, someone define for me in a scientifically measurable way what is the difference between aggression and assertiveness in 2 year-olds and how to tell the two apart? -Remember, these are child psychologists, the same people who think little boys who don’t act like little girls need Ritalin.
To continue:
…[They] did not perform as well as other children on a test measuring thinking skills at age 3.
It’s extremely difficult to measure the thinking skills of 3-year-olds. Kids develop at wildly different rates at that age for reasons that have nothing to do with spanking. So claiming that spanking is correlated with different measurements of thinking skills is questionable to put it kindly.
The new study focused on children from low-income families because prior research suggested that spanking is more common among them, Berlin said. This may be because of the added stresses of parenting in a low-income situation, or because of a “cultural contagion” of behaviors among people. For example, in some families this study examined, a grandmother would spank a child, or neighbors would encourage physical discipline, she said.
Her study found that about one-third of the 1-year-olds, and about half of the 2- and 3-year-olds, had been spanked in the previous week, according to mothers’ self-reporting to the researchers. At all three ages, African-American children were spanked significantly more frequently than those from white and Mexican-American families, and verbally punished more than the other children at ages 2 and 3, the study said.
You’ve got to be kidding me. They used as a sample people from low-income groups which they admit are under “added stresses” and then used self reporting as a model for the study? In other words they looked for the most likely group to have high stress, low income, stress over money, little or poor childcare, most likely to be much younger parents than average..They picked out the group likely to be the worst parents in the country and then decided this would be the ideal group to use to study the effects of spanking?R U f***ing serious?
Now, as to self reporting:
Out here in the real world we know low-income people are much more likely to get their kids taken away for giving them a spanking than middle class people who have lawyers and will raise Hell with a legislator. This is a known factor. Do the study’s authors really think they can be relied on as accurate self-reporters of what many child welfare agencies define as a crime? Are you people completely daft about the way the real world works? -wait, never mind, we’ve asnwered that.
This kind of thing is just silly. There are so many unmeasurables, so many complicating factors that there is no way on earth to control for,the study was meaningless before it started. Secondly, by measuring kids only in the first three years, years in which completely normal healthy and intelligent kids exhibit wide latitudes of behavior and cognitive skills and trying to correlate it with something you can’t even pretend to know is occurring with any certainty is ridiculous. Finally, when one third of your control group reports spanking their one-year-olds every week, you know before you get any further that this is far from “normal” behavior from the parents, which might lead you to draw conclusions about beating, abuse or other things, but can’t possibly tell you about the efficacy of “spanking.”
Stop with the B.S. studies that can’t and don’t prove anything. If you can’t measure it without using some half-assed subjective metric and you can’t control for variables, it’s not science. It’s someone’s subjective opinion. And choosing this group for the study instead of a populati0n cross-section indicates the “researchers” started out with an axe to grind and carefully crafted a “study” to confirm their opinions.
Well, here we are, 9 days before the 8th annniversery of Sept. 11, 2001, the day that gave us the “war on terror” or whatever they’re calling it this week.
On that day, 19 hijackers took over four airliners and proceeded to drive three of them into buildings filled with innocent men, women and children (even the pentagon has more civilian workers than military personnel.) The fourth airplane, United Airlines Flight 93, had a different outcome. Passengers, alerted to the first impacts on the World Trade Center heroicly stormed the cockpit, forcing the hijackers to drive the plane into the ground.
In all, nearly 3,000 Americans were murdered on that day and rightfully, with indignation and anger we turned our attention on the perpetrators of that crime and their sponsors and unleashed Hell.
There were some real heroes on that day; the people on flight 93 who stormed that cockpit were heroes. The firefighters, EMS people and cops who went into the WTC knowing full-well it was likely to come down with them inside were heroes. but for the most part, the dead on that day were just victims.
I’m truly sorry for anyone who lost loved ones on that day. But I’m just as sorry for any other person who’s lost someone to a murderer. Just because one murder, or yes, even 3000 is more spectacular than another doesn’t make the mother of a 9-year-old killed in a drive-by less worthy of compassion. This Sept. 11, let’s try to put it in perspective and call out the heroes who genuinely did heroic things. We can remember the victims, but honestly folks, calling helpless victims heroes cheapens the word and lessens the things done by REAL heroes on that awful day.
SayUncle has a tidbit that I enjoyed reading, especially the comments on the post because they pose some interesting questions that go to the heart of our criminal Justice system.
The Juice:
The North Carolina Supreme Court says a 2004 law that bars convicted felons from having a gun, even within their own home or business, is unconstitutional.
Good. Civil rights should be restored once your debt to society is paid.
I often disagree with posts on this blog but here I think he nails it.
Historically the concept of “criminal records” are a fairly new thing. Once upon a time if you committed a crime, went to prison and got out, you could move to a new town or state and start all over again. Now, once you commit any crime anywhere, that record stays with you forever.
The problem with this is that when we release someone who has served their sentence, they enter into a lifetime of second-class citizenship. They can’t vote, they can’t own a firearm for self defense and they are barred from many many jobs where “being a felon” instantly puts them out of the running, even if their crime had nothing to do with the job. With the advent of $20 internet-based criminal record searches that absolutely anyone can run you can’t even lie about your past and have any hope of it not coming up.
A felony record, or for that matter even a misdemeanor conviction can keep you from obtaining anything more than menial employment at minimum wage forever. Is that the price we want to impose for owning an eagle feather? Yes, that’s a felony. As are countless other victimless crimes.
Think about that for a minute. An 18-year-old fool does something incredibly stupid, like taking a joy-ride in a stolen car, gets caught, does a couple of years in prison (which is hardly a trivial price to pay for an hour’s stupidity that didn’t hurt anyone) and forever more is consigned to wear a scarlet letter of FELON, no matter where he goes or how he lives his life no matter how virtuous.
And people wonder why we have high recidivism rates?
What’s the purpose of a criminal justice system anyway? Would not most people agree that it’s primarily to keep people safe from people who would prey on them, serve as an example to other would-be criminals and give the public some sense that justice is being done? Beyond that I suppose you could add rehabilitation, but experience shows prison is a lousy place for that. To deter people from re-offending you ghave to offer some hope for a future. Our current system does not. Quite the opposite.
I’m not talking about being soft on perpetrators. If you commit a serious crime the penalties should be stiff. If you attempt murder I’m quite content with locking your ass up for a very, very long time, possibly forever. If you break into a house you should do years, not months. I could go on down the list, but hey, committing a serious crime and getting caught should hurt. A lot.
But keeping people who have served every day of their sentences as second class citizens forever is just plain counter-productive. If you’re still dangerous, you shouldn’t be getting out of prison. If you’re not, then it’s time to wipe the slate clean, at least as far as the general public will ever know, and letting you start out fresh with the ability to make a new life. After all, it’s not like starting out fresh at age 30 after a ten-year prison sentence is a walk in the park under any circumstances, record or no record.
I’m fine with the courts keeping records. And I’m fine with the concept of throwing away the key on repeat serious offenders. But what we’re doing with the current system is throwing away the key on people who have made one serious mistake. And think about it for a moment: If you’re to be consigned to a life of minimum wage jobs and sucking up to the boss in fear he’ll fire you and you won’t get another just as crappy job, why the Hell would you not go back into crime? We’re asking people to make entirely irrational choices and then we’re surprised when they give us the finger.
Let them do their time. Eliminate parole. But once they’re out, restore their rights. All of them. Anything else is just tyranny to no purpose an makes even rehabilitated folks want to go back to breaking the law. What the Hell, at least that has some dignity to it, risk or no risk.
