Judicial Activism

A friend asks:

You have hit on one of my big questions lately: what is so freaking wrong with looking at judicial opinions from other countries? or any other social ideas? if something is a good idea, does it matter where it comes from? i'm not saying adopt other laws/judicial ideas wholesale, but to outlaw ANY inspiration from any outside source? that seems unnecessarily harsh, and even a little short-sighted.

To which I reply:

Nothing- if the legislature does it. The reason for this is obvious: the legislature is elected by the people and serve subject to the public pleasure, therefore they reflect the will of the people (and any 'evolving standards of public decency'). The Supreme Court (and some other judges) are appointed, and in the case of the Supreme Court sit on the bench until they choose to leave (subject to impeachment, a difficult process to remove someone.)

Our law proceeds from our constitution, unique in the world for being the first and most lasting of its kind, which has specific requirements built into it that provide a web of protection for individual states' rights as well as individuals (not just a specific and unique instance of trying to make a point in an individual case, but an integrated context). This ensures that our country accepts a variety of community standards, each of which is an experiment in social order running in parallel with all the others, but all congruent with the greater principles of democracy and liberty because they are subject to one basic law of the land. If we start making exceptions to the basic principles of our constitution, it becomes meaningless and all those protections and inter-dependencies collapse.

Also, many other countries have high-sounding sentiments in their laws, but that doesn't mean they actually live by them. If they don't live by them, how do we know that they actually work as social practices?

Anyway, the court's place is not to enact law, merely to interpret and apply it. This principle is clear, with only the most basic understanding of the 'checks and balances' system. And yet it is more and more accepted to legislate from the bench, and to twist the intent of the Constitution and the law by the most tortured of grammatical constructions and twisted logic, as well as feel-good 'consensus opinions'.

If public standards evolve, the way to account for and acknowledge that is through the legislature. If the Constitution is outdated or wrong, there is a process to amend it and any other way of 'getting around it' is illegal, unethical, and just plain stupidly short-sighted.

The genie is out of the bottle

http://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2015/10/04/the-genie-is-out-of-the-bottle/

Guns can be made with tools and materials that already exist in half the garages in America. We have consumer level 3D printing.

You're not getting rid of them. Ever.

Guns to Africa

I wrote this a bit over ten years ago, and I still don't see a reason to change my mind:

I've been thinking about what we can do to help Africa, and I think the best thing we could do is probably to export more small arms to them. Weapons are probably the most useful thing we could give them. With weapons they could stand off the raiders while having the chance to keep what they earn through their own hard work. "Big Men" in uniforms wouldn't find it as easy to take aid shipments away from the intended recipients quite as easily if the weapons weren't overwhelmingly one-sided.

Some people will of course, argue that we would just be prolonging conflict by increasing the number of weapons available to said conflicts.

However, I imagine everyone in the Sudan who is not a Muslim Arab (Janjaweed militia) would probably greatly appreciate prolonging the conflict, maybe even escalating it, since the only other option is to be dead. Well, to be positive about it, I suppose being a starving, displaced refugee is slightly better than being dead,

Risk Management

I originally wrote this on another blog about 4 years ago:

I continually train myself. I find opportunities to learn new stuff as I am able, even when it's not directly applicable to my current job.

In aid of this, I've been reading this website:

http://emergency.cdc.gov/

I'm going to quote a bit and paraphrase a bit:

Hazard is the seriousness of a risk from a technical perspective. Outrage is the seriousness of a risk in non-technical terms (in terms of how people respond to the risk).

Experts view risk in terms of hazard. Unprepared people view it in terms of outrage. This latter doesn't produce a single positive result, and until you can get beyond that stage, you will be subject to greater (objective) harm when something unexpected or undesirable happens.

Get over your outrage at the unfairness of the universe. It doesn't pay to anthropomorphize and rail against injustice (including conspiracy theories). But fortune does favour the prepared mind. Taking responsibility for your own reaction to external events, especially before they happen, makes you stronger.

What he said...

Larry Correia fisks "27 Ways to Be a Modern Man"

http://monsterhunternation.com/2015/10/02/fisking-the-new-york-times-modern-man/

(Alternate Title: Does the Touch of a Woman Confuse and Frighten You? 27 Ways to Avoid Girl Cooties.)

Gun Spree Zones

The usual suspects are already out calling for more control over this shooting in Southern Oregon even though at least one person qualified and capable of resisting the bad guy was made greatly less effective by lack of having his own gun. 

Reports vary between 10 and 13 dead, around 20 wounded. Witnesses say the perp had time to "huddle people together and hold dialogues on their religion" and the rest of us with any common sense or experience are flabbergasted that no one shot him while he was monologuing. Tellingly, the people most directly involved aren't calling for more victim disarmament.

 As a trainer for DHS on Law Enforcement Active Shooter Emergency Response, the thing that was hammered in over and over is that the longer we take to neutralize the bad guy, the longer he has to hurt and kill people. We KNOW that the encounter will end in one of three ways.

1. The perp will kill himself.
2. He will surrender, or
3. Someone (either LE or bystander) will use enough force to disable or kill him.

About half the time, the perp kills himself at the first sign of effective resistance by anyone before LE even gets on scene. This is not the fault of LE. Simply displaying a handgun worked in the Clackamas town Center shooting.

Time to end victim disarmament. No more "gun free zones" becoming "gun spree zones".

8-and-a-half out of 10 ain't bad

10 Things You Learn by Carrying a Gun Every Day by Tom McHale - Monday, August 24, 2015

I've got no problems with most of the "lessons" he mentions. He's spot on with most of it. However, I do have to take exception to the phrasing on this one:

5. Bending over can get you in trouble—in more ways than one.

A number of carry methods can cause printing dysfunction if you’re not careful. Most belt holsters, inside or outside the waistband, can cause the gun grip to press against the back of your shorts or cover garment if you lean forward too much. If you carry a gun daily, you quickly learn how to reach low things by bending your knees and keeping your back straight.

Here's the thing. You are NOT going to "get in trouble" for "printing" or exposing your firearm.

Open Carry is perfectly legal in almost all states, although a handful do require that you have a (concealed)  permit to open carry. An incidental exposure of your firearm cannot be illegal, if blatantly, obviously open carrying your pistol is not illegal. It is absolutely AMAZING how many people get this wrong: well-intentioned, not-stupid people get this wrong ALL THE TIME. I just had one in my concealed class for Oregon and Utah a couple weeks ago insisting to me that it is illegal to open carry or accidentally expose your firearm while concealed carrying in Washington State. Fortunately, he was also open-minded enough to take in new information- we've had some who weren't.

On the other side, people automatically assume that Texas has had people open-carrying their 6-shooters everywhere. Couldn't be further from the truth. Texas will START to allow open carry in January of 2016. 

Bottom line: don't think you know, if you haven't checked a real source. Sometimes the problem is not what we know, it's what 'we know that ain't so'. To be fair, a LOT of trainers are still passing on this bad information (that once you get a concealed permit you are required to conceal), either because they don't know better or they believe their own preferences for how you carry are more important than factual correctness and open honesty. There's no good excuse for a trainer to include information that they have not verified in their courses, or to not know. Sometimes things change and we can be behind the times, but we have a duty to seek out updated information if we're representing ourselves as experts.

Now, opinions vary on whether it's a good idea to open carry. But I submit that police officers open carry for a reason, and it doesn't sacrifice a tactical advantage (concealing would be more of a strategy than a tactic). I think it varies with circumstances. A young lady wearing skimpy clothing absolutely has the right to be in a dark alley on the wrong side of the tracks at 2 am. Doesn't make it a good idea, or safe. 


6. How many other people carry concealed.


Once you start carrying, you tend to look for other people who are also carrying. Trying to spot other concealed carriers is a great way to pass time. Better yet, make this activity a self-improvement drill. If you can spot others carrying, consider what tipped you off to their armed status, and don’t make the same mistake yourself. For example, my daughter spotted a motorcyclist on the highway the other day using an inside the waistband holster covered by a long shirt. Cruising along with the wind in his face caused his shirt to ride up to his chest, leaving his gun exposed for all to see.

Half-right on this one. Yes, you certainly start to notice "tells" like a gambler looking for a bluff over a big pot. And this is a good thing- anything that helps you to be present and aware of your environment is a good exercise. But what problem precisely, do we have with the man on the motorcycle who is doing nothing illegal? Acting all shocked and titillated by it like someone who spotted some celebrity side-boob doesn't seem like a worthwhile expenditure of energy.

Brandishing a firearm is another thing. That's going to get you in trouble, sure. States have specific definitions for that, though. It typically has some element of objectively warranting alarm, not just someone getting a case of the vapours because they have a hoplophobic fear of firearms in general. Actions are not illegal just because the observer doesn't approve. There generally needs to be an actual harm to someone, and certainly real justice would require that element.