No Room for Gun Control

The recent mass shooting in Aurora, CO have renewed calls for more gun control from the usual suspects.

New York Mayor Bloomberg, Michael Moore, various celebrities, and virtually every leftist talking head have called for new laws and restrictions on the ownership or possession of guns or ammo.

The problem is that there is no room for gun control anymore.

There are only two types of gun control laws: 'small laws' and 'big laws'.

Small laws are the incremental restrictions that try to ban the little things: bayonet lugs, flash hiders, one-gun-per-month, large capacity magazines, armor piercing ammo, and so on.

Large laws are the complete ban of firearms or types on firearms: local gun bans, banning handguns, banning assault weapons, etc. 

Here is the problem for erstwhile gun control fanatics: the small laws don't work, and the big ones have been struck down by the Supreme Court.

The small laws have been tried for decades in various configurations. The 1994 Assault Weapons Ban, for example.  All of these laws have had zero effect on crime.  Banning Saturday night specials did not reduce handgun crime at all.  Nor did banning the importation of certain guns, nor restricting teflon coated ammunition. None of it worked to reduce gun crime. 

The big laws were ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.  The Court held that the Second Amendment meant what it said: there is a right to keep and bear arms.  Therefore all the laws banning the possession of firearms are null and void.  You cannot ban entire classes of weapons, nor can you restrict the ownership of guns. 

So with the small laws proven to be ineffective and the big laws off limits, there is no room left for gun control.

The American public has figured this out, and support for gun control has dropped to post-war record lows.  The voting power of the pro-gun lobby has made gun control measures impossible to pass, and politically lethal for politicians except those ensconced in the most liberal districts.

100 Degrees of Hot Air

100 Degrees of Hot Air

It is 100 degrees out today, so it seems like the perfect time to talk about Global Warming.  Err, Climate Change.  Whatever they call it now.

It seems the Inter Academy Council (IAC) just release a new report about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports.

You know what it says?  It says all the previous IPCC reports are complete and utter lies.  They are 100 degrees of hot air.

Well, it does not use those exact works.  But it does make some startling admissions that show pretty clearly that all of the previous reports were politically motivated junk masquerading as science by a pretty important organization.

"The IPCC is the world's most prominent source of alarmist predictions and claims about man-made global warming. Its four reports (a fifth report is scheduled for release in various parts in 2013 and 2014) are cited by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the U.S. and by national academies of science around the world as "proof" that the global warming of the past five or so decades was both man-made and evidence of a mounting crisis."

"The IAC reported that IPCC lead authors fail to give "due consideration ... to properly documented alternative views" (p. 20), fail to "provide detailed written responses to the most significant review issues identified by the Review Editors" (p. 21), and are not "consider[ing] review comments carefully and document[ing] their responses" (p. 22). 

In plain English: the IPCC reports are not peer-reviewed.
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/07/ipcc_admits_its_past_reports_were_junk.html#ixzz20uqTjtu9

There are further criticisms:

The IAC notes that the summary sections are 'too political'.  Since the summary part is the only part that laymen and the new media ever read, everything we have been told about climate change has been 'too political'.  And by 'too political', they mean 'not science at all'.

False use of confidence intervals gives the report more gravitas than it deserves.  Confidence intervals have a specific meaning in statistics and science.  The IPCC would ask people for their opinions and then report that global warming predictions have an '80% confidence', conflating mere opinion for science.

The IPCC summary findings are no more than opinion polls of true believers.  This would be like going to a church and asking all the congregants if they are confident that there is a god, and then reporting that there is a 80% scientific certainty that god exists.

If you ask people who will directly benefit from solving the problem if the problem is real, of course you get 80% confidence.  The real question is, who are the 20% of  'climate scientists' that do not believe that climate change is real??

There are more problems than this, but the point is made. 

Several years ago skeptics began to question the processes and assumptions of the IPCC.  They were ignored by the press, and ridiculed by the warmist community.

Well, now the IAC has admitted the truth.  The IPCC reports are not science.  They are political manifestos trumped up to look like science.

Can we please stop talking about climate change?  It is time we all accept that the gig is up, the news is out.  Climate Change is a hoax perpetrated by Leftists to gain personal power, money, and glorious headlines. 

Worshipping the Collective

President Obama has been on the campaign trail a lot recently, and this has allowed him to be a little more revealing about who he is and what he believes.

You didn’t get there on your own...

Recently he told an audience  “There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me because they want to give something back,” the president said. “If you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own.”

He expounds on this with “If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges.

He concludes with "If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen,” he said.

These statements are very revealing, a window into the soul of the man who leads our Federal Government.

When there is success he sees the work of the collective.  He denigrates and diminishes the effort and the sacrifices of the entrepreneur.  He sees only the fruit of the government and the benefits of the government.

This flies in the face of actual experience.

Where individualism is allowed and encouraged, people and nations prosper.  This is not opinion -- this is fact.  The Heritage Foundation data clearly demonstrates that liberty drives wealth, not government 'investment'.   One glance at history reveals that collectivism results only in poverty for the masses.

The idea that the business man owes something back to society is the root of evil, not the virtue that Obama claims it to be.

The entrepreneur makes sacrifices and takes risks.  He works incredibly hard.  He does all of this in the face of competitors and a government makes this success as hard as possible.

We owe a huge debt of gratitude to the entrepreneur and the business man.  They are the ones that make everything in our society possible.  If you are reading this on a computer, you should thank Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, not the government.

The worship of the collective is the path to hell.  It has impoverished and oppressed billions, and murdered a hundred million more.

Obama needs to step away from the mirror and look at the real world where businessmen to far more good for mankind than parasitic politicians.

Justice Roberts, Media Whore

Now we know that Justice Roberts sold our Republic out in order to 'protect the reputation of the Court'.

From Beltway Confidential:
Chief Justice John Roberts voted against Obamacare, but then — in a move that angered his conservative colleagues — switched his vote as he became convinced that a 5-4 ruling against the law would damage the reputation of the Supreme Court.

Roberts and Justice Anthony Kennedy went through weeks of debate with each other, as Kennedy tried to convince Roberts to strike down the law and Roberts wrangled with Kennedy to create a 6-3 majority in support of the bill, “two sources with specific knowledge of the deliberations,” told CBS News.

This is shocking. Truly shocking.

Rather than execute his sworn duty to uphold and defend the Constitution, he upheld Obamacare because he was worried that the liberal media would say bad things about him.

This is beyond shocking.

This is grounds for impeachment.

The venial stupidity of the ruling damages the Court far more than any rational ruling would, no matter how unpopular the decision.

Supreme Court Justices are appointed for life precisely so that they do not have to curry favor with the public or the media.  The fact that he worries about his reputation in the media so much that he places it above the welfare of the nation and the rule of law is unconscionable. .

It is unthinkable that a Justice would change his mind on a matter of such incredible importance for such a trivial and banal reason.

Justice Roberts is a media whore, unfit to serve on the Supreme Court.

Turn Out the Lights

Will the last honest person in Washington please turn out the lights?

It is pretty clear now that we are in the end phase of our experiment on liberty.  We are about to find out if this nation, or any nation, dedicated to the idea that all men are created equal can long endure.

Justice John Roberts has put the final nail in the coffin of our Liberty.

His decision that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was Constitutional is a travesty.  An abomination. A clear case of sophistry and incoherence passed off as law.  Essentially, he decided that Obamacare can stand because the mandated payments by people without insurance were at tax, not a mandate.  He decided this even though the clear langauge of the law stated that it was not a tax, and the people who passed it at the time insisted it was not a tax.  In fact, the Democrats STILL will not admit that it is a tax. 

This is enough to make Lady Liberty's head explode.

The Justice Roberts had the temerity to say that it is not the Court's job to protect the American people from the political choices that we make.  While the may be true, it is most certainly his job to protect the Constitution from the poltical choices we make.

This ruling ends our experitment with the idea of a Constitutional Republic and a government of Limited Powers. 

The Federal Government now has unlimited power to regulate and tax every aspect of American life.  There are no longer any limits.  None.  We are no longer citizens. We are subjects.

• We have also discarded the idea of checks and balances between the branches.  We have the Congress openly ignoring its duties to pass budgets and authorize spending.  There has been no Federal budget approved in over 3 years but they continue to spend money at a pace that will bankrupt the nation within the decade. Congress is standing idle as out nation spins into a death spiral.  Congress are a laughingstock, the court jesters to King Obama.
• The President has assumed imperial powers.  He is in contempt of Congress, appointing officers without approval from the Senate, creating new laws through executive orders while refusing to enforce legitimate laws like DOMA and immigration law.  He has abused his powers in barring oil exploration, expanding the regulatory state, starting wars with sovereign nations, shipping arms to drug cartels, banning oil pipelines.  Obama as Emperor.
• The Supreme Court is the last bastion of our Liberty and they have utterly abdicated the field.  They have made a number of rulings that fly in the face of plain language, common sense, and the Rule of Law.  The Obamacare debacle is but the latest and most egregious example.  Lest we forget, the first amendment no longer covers speech within 60 days of an election, and emiment domain taking for the public good now allow for your property to be summarily transfered to another citizen as long as they claim they will pay higher taxes. 

We have the perfect storm of an imperialistic Marxist as Presidient, an ineffective indolant and corrupt Congress, and a vacuous, immoral and political Supreme Court.

We might have a chance to pull out of this whirlpool that threatens to consume us if we had an honest and unbiased press that was explaining these facts to the American people.  But, alas, we do not. 

The  fifth column we call the press is too busy undermining the foundations of Western Civilization to notice that our Republic is disintegrating right before our eyes. 

Unless something radical happens in the next election cycle, we will celebrate the 4th of July for the last time this year.