Herschel Smith takes apart a proposition that Self Defense Is A Shaky Basis For Gun Ownership Rights as argued by “David DeGrazia who is a professor of philosophy at George Washington University.”

DeGrazia takes the idea of self defense as his theme: “There is no absolute right to self-defense; the right is qualified or limited. When the limits to this right are in view, the ground beneath gun ownership rights appears shakier.” Smith deconstructs this argument but the title of his piece also indicates that there is another right at play as well. It is the right of property ownership. On the matter of the right of self defense, Smith says “Regular readers know the true foundation of the Western principle of self defense, and it extends beyond mere self defense. The basis for this principle is found in the Decalogue.” That means the Ten Commandments and, specifically, the implications in the “shall not murder”

God’s law requires [us] to be able to defend the children and helpless. “Relying on Matthew Henry, John Calvin and the Westminster standards, we’ve observed that all Biblical law forbids the contrary of what it enjoins, and enjoins the contrary of what it forbids.” I’ve tried to put this in the most visceral terms I can find.

God has laid the expectations at the feet of heads of families that they protect, provide for and defend their families and protect and defend their countries. Little ones cannot do so, and rely solely on those who bore them. God no more loves the willing neglect of their safety than He loves child abuse. He no more appreciates the willingness to ignore the sanctity of our own lives than He approves of the abuse of our own bodies and souls.

This goes deep into philosophy which might be appropriate in response to a professor of philosophy. On another level, though, one only has to consider the matter of intellectual integrity. DeGrazia starts out with a proposition concerning an “absolute right.” That means a complex issue of self defense with many factors has been converted to a binary argument. That is a logical fallacy as the basis for the position.

The philosophy can be educational when properly founded and Smith illustrates just what properly founded means in a philosophical discussion. The matter of integrity can be a less laborious means to determine quality of argument and that is something you can use to determine who has the upper hand here.

Edwin Meese III and Kelly J. Shackelford describe How the lawyers plan to stifle speech and faith — “The American Bar Association’s new code must be rejected.”

Frighteningly, the ABA leaders’ statements verify that they understand — and intend — the ramifications of Model Rule 8.4. President Paulette Brown advocates that the ABA must prevent “bias” in ways that go far beyond current law. Committee member Drucilla Ramey insists bar authorities go “to the top of the legal profession” to “incentivize” attorneys to change their views and speech on these issues, views and speech often informed by attorneys’ religion. All this, despite committee testimony that such a rule has “little relation to concerns” arising in most lawyers’ offices, could be “used tactically against someone inappropriately,” and will “have a chilling effect on something that has always been in the best traditions of the bar: representing minority views and unpopular positions or clients.”

The purpose of our legal system is to ensure freedom. Popular speech rarely needs legal protection. The law protects dissenters’ right to disagree with governmental orthodoxy. It must not become a weapon to oppress those dissenters.
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The ABA’s un-American censorship regime is beyond draconian; it coerces conformity regarding religious and political beliefs on a level unprecedented in American history. It borders on fascism, and must be explicitly repudiated.

Silence the opposition. Squash any debate. Maintain conformity by bringing everyone down to the pablum level. Tolerate no divergence from the ideal and spew hate and contempt on those who dare question the orthodoxy of correct politics. The road to perdition begins here.

Jay Stalien on Facebook 

The more I listened, the more I realized. The more I researched, the more I realized. I would ask questions, and would only get emotional responses & inferences based on no facts at all. The more killing I saw, the more tragedy, the more savagery, the more violence, the more loss of life of a black man at the hands of another black man….the more I realized.
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All of my realizations came to this conclusion. Black Lives do not matter to most black people. Only the lives that make the national news matter to them. Only the lives that are taken at the hands of cops or white people, matter. The other thousands of lives lost, the other black souls that I along with every cop, have seen taken at the hands of other blacks, do not matter. Their deaths are unnoticed, accepted as the “norm”, and swept underneath the rug by the very people who claim and post “black lives matter”.

…

I realized that some of these people, who say Black Lives Matter, are full of hate and racism. Hate for cops, because of the false narrative that more black people are targeted and killed. Racism against white people, for a tragedy that began 100’s of years ago, when most of the white people today weren’t even born yet.

I realized that some in the African American community’s idea of “Justice” is the prosecution of ANY and EVERY cop or white man that kills or is believed to have killed a black man, no matter what the circumstances are.

I realized the African American community refuses to look within to solve its major issues, and instead makes excuses and looks outside for solutions. I realized that a lot of people in the African American community lead with hate, instead of love. Division instead of Unity. Turmoil and rioting, instead of Peace.

I realized that they have become the very entity that they claim they are fighting against.

I realized that the very reasons I became a cop, are the very reasons my own people hate me, and now in this toxic hateful racially charged political climate, I am now more likely to die,… and it is still hard for me to understand…. to this day.

hard to understand indeed. go read the rest as it is a powerful plaint.

Peter Roff on Freezing Free Speech — “Democratic senators are trying to put the First Amendment on ice.”

This coordinated attack on what the Democrats are calling the “Web of denial” is a hideous affront to the right of a person or an organization to hold and to propagate an opinion running counter to the political interests of the powerful. That those participating are making use of the tactics they accuse their opponents in the climate change debate of using would make for delicious irony were the stakes not so high.

Whitehouse and company understand well they cannot yet make a difference of opinion a criminal matter. They can however make it a costly one – and they are not above using the resources available to them as officers of the United States government to do it. No matter what your beliefs about climate change you should all be sickened by the spectacle. Open debate is healthy, but that’s not what this is. It’s an effort at oppression, the kind many of our forebears fled in deciding to first come to America.

If you can’t make it illegal, you can at least make it costly to oppose you. The assault on the Bill of Rights by the Democratic Party is indeed “a hideous affront.” What is frightening is that it is a major political party supported by a good portion of the citizenry.

update: the minions are falling into line: Calling out the Koch Brothers. Note the picking of a personal target and how it is rationalized and defended in the comments. 

The American Thinker offers up two columns this morning of note. They are related because violence and crime are matters of morality and law and those ideas are fundamental to the behaviors of individuals in a civil society.

Trevor Thomas: The Law Is Dying because Morality Is Dying

To illustrate the death of morality, Dr. Zacharias recalls the comments of Robert Shapiro, the famous attorney who helped represent O.J. Simpson in Simpson’s murder trial. While being interviewed by Megyn Kelly, Shapiro was asked if justice had been served in the Simpson trial (Simpson was found not guilty of murdering his wife Nicole and Ron Goldman). Shapiro utters a “pathetic answer,” telling Kelly, “There is legal justice and moral justice. Legal justice was served.” Thus, as is common among those corrupted by liberalism, Shapiro divorces law from morality.
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Scalia continued, “The Court embraces … the fact that the governing majority in a State has traditionally viewed a particular practice as immoral is not a sufficient reason for upholding a law prohibiting the practice.” He concluded, “This effectively decrees the end of all morals legislation.”
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The biggest obstacle to writing one’s own moral code is Christianity. As The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (of the Southern Baptist Convention) recently put it, “in the twentieth century, more and more people began to see Christian morality as standing in the way of a new moral code: the morality of self-fulfillment. Throwing off burdensome traditional mores, people began to imagine life without a bothersome God standing watch.”
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Again, all law is rooted in someone’s idea of morality. We either are going to be governed by the morality of the Law Giver or the “morality of self-fulfillment.” Americans must simply decide by whose morality we wished to be governed.

That choice is distinguished by a racial divide where the desire to hide that divide crosses racial boundaries. This is ‘discussed’ under the mantras about profiling and diversity. That leads to Colin Flaherty: Media Ignore the Tsunami of Black Violence against Cops

The reason for the demonstration was simple and beyond pushback:

White cops shoot black people all over the country, all the time, for no reason whatsoever.

Everybody knows that. So sad.
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Not one reporter at any point even hinted at how black violence is wildly out of proportion.

Not one reporter talked to any cop willing to tell the truth about how police are relentless victims of black hostility and violence and murder — all over the country.

And how black on cop violence and defiance are now the default response.

Not the other way around. A brief magical mystery tour of black on cop violence over the last few weeks.
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The videos show the crowds fleeing the gunfire as the officer runs towards it. When her backup arrived, they found the cop on the ground, surrounded by a large group of black people beating and kicking her and trying to steal her gun.

One black man was running around, pleading for a gun to shoot the police.
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A few days before that in Miami Gardens, a black man unhappy at a traffic stop pulled up to a cop and shot the cop at point blank range, somehow missing.

In Ireland, a young man disturbed a family gathering by announcing he had been following the shootings in Dallas and said he was happy black people were finally fighting back because cops had been picking on black people in America for a long time for no reason whatsoever.

He learned that from CNN. From a story featuring the President. Of the United States of America.

The racial disparity in crime goes deeper. One statistic often used is that of blacks being disproportionate in traffic stops and that, of course, must be because of profiling and targeting by police. The problem is that studies of even these minor crimes show that the police stops are related to traffic violations, not the race of the driver. The alleged profiling and targeting is not supported. A similar false meme exists about more significant crimes and in domestic violence in the city.  The racial disparity not only exists in crime statistics but also in such things as single parent homes or households raising children who do not have a solid role model for a father.

If you want to solve a problem, you have to first properly define it. The assault on police is not doing that but is rather an expression of denial. 

An IBD Editorial: Email Scandal: Was The Fix In For FBI’s Investigation Of Hillary?.

This not only undermines Americans’ faith in the rule of law, but undermines the very foundation of the law in a constitutional republic such as ours — that is, the idea that the law applies to everyone, regardless of social or economic status.

What were they thinking? What did they see? Why offer up such obvious contradictions between investigation and conclusion? Yes, perhaps, it was pressure from on high but it is also such things as the Democratic Party in a solid block of defense of the guilty, it is the citizens whose support has shown a disdain for criminality of certain individuals, it is the racism from the President to BLM that goes after law enforcement resulting in a war on police in Dallas, it is activists who are hired to disrupt conventions and cause mayhem, it is a media that is a propaganda machine rather than an information mechanism, it is a judiciary that is creative in interpreting the law in order to achieve political ends.

worried, yet?

A functioning legal system means that written law is applied consistently. In the U.S. recently, this concept has been taking some abuse. The FBI v. Clinton is the topic of the day but it is not the only example. Madison Gesiotto says Liberal justices espouse Second Amendment argument in Texas abortion regulation case.

Essentially, what he is saying here is that more laws will not deter lawbreakers from committing crimes.
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If they are going to use this reasoning to declare abortion regulations unconstitutional, they should stop denying its validity when raised to support the Second Amendment right of U.S. citizens to keep and bear arms.

One can only help that as gun control cases make their way to the Supreme Court that it will be difficult for these justices to distance themselves from the reasoning used in Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt.

However, as we have seen in recent years, the law doesn’t always apply to everyone, and the left has a way of unapologetically picking and choosing reasoning that is politically expedient.

On the Clinton front there Andrew P. Napolitano: The Department of Political Justice — “Once again, the rule of law exempts the Clintons.”

What has become of the rule of law — no one is beneath its protections or above its requirements — when the American public can witness a game of political musical chairs orchestrated by Bill Clinton at an airport in a bizarre ruse to remove the criminal investigation of his wife from those legally responsible for making decisions about it?
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It is obvious that a different standard is being applied to Mrs. Clinton than was applied to Gen. Petraeus and the others.
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Unless, of course, one is willing to pervert the rule of law yet again to insulate a Clinton yet again from the law enforcement machinery that everyone else who fails to secure state secrets should expect.

Why do we stand for this?

The thing is, these sorts of things are not only in the upper levels of government, they are in local clubs like the WBCCI, an Airstream RV club. Stand up? It seems that that takes too much work and creates too much unpleasantness. Club Directors ignore malfeasance? Why worry about the club corporate charter? That’s like in Venezuela where they went for socialism and a dictator and didn’t think the current food riots were any risk to consider. What might (historically has) happened is far off so don’t worry, be happy. It’s not going to happen to you and who cares about the other guy.

The scandals brew. Bill Clinton and AG Lynch have a half hour discussion in an airport – this raises questions because it is the prosecutor hobnobbing with the husband of an individual under criminal investigation. Then there is the AG that dropped the efforts against Exxon even though a coalition of 17 other Democrat AG’s promise to plow on. These are only two ingredients in the noxious brew.

Paul Bedard describes: Fox targeted by FEC Dems in first-ever vote to punish debate sponsorship

Finally making good on long-harbored anger at conservative media, Democrats on the Federal Election Commission voted in secret to punish Fox News’ sponsorship of a Republican presidential debate, using an obscure law to charge the network with helping those on stage.

It is the first time in history that members of the FEC voted to punish a media outlet’s debate sponsorship, and it follows several years of Democratic threats against conservative media and websites like the Drudge Report.

The punishment, however, was blocked by all three Republicans on the commission, resulting in a 3-3 tie vote and no action.

Then the IBD opines about the IRS Scandal: No End To Lois Lerner’s Lawlessness.

It’s now apparent, if it wasn’t before, that the Internal Revenue Service — which was created solely to collect revenues due the government, not to persecute the administration’s political enemies — has become a kind of rogue agency.

Its chief, John Koskinen, is being threatened with impeachment for not telling the truth in testimony before Congress. But Lerner, more than even Koskinen, has become a symbol of IRS arrogance and illegality.
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So it looks like Lerner broke the law — again. But will she be punished? Not likely.

President Obama’s Justice Department already passed on prosecuting Lerner in 2015, despite strong evidence of criminal wrongdoing. IRS chief Koskinen, who is less guilty and less implicated than Lerner in all of this IRS skulduggery, is more likely to be impeached than Lerner is to be brought before a judge.

Loretta Lynch’s Justice Department, it seems, is just as politicized these days as the IRS.

One wonders just how long this sort of behavior will remain acceptable and how long the Democrats will continue to mount a solid patisan effort in trying to block investigations, persecute investigators, and otherwise defend and deny. The Benghazi investigation provides another clear example of this effort to whitewash a dirty fence.

William J. Olson and Herbert W. Titus take a look at a SCOTUS ruling that medical precautions in abortion are unduly restrictive in Whole Woman’s Health: Justice Thomas Exposes the Court’s Corrupt Abortion Jurisprudence. A dissent describes a broader view of just where the problem in the SCOTUS decision lies.

Justice Thomas concluded: “Our law is now so riddled with special exceptions for special rights that our decisions deliver neither predictability nor the promise of a judiciary bound by the rule of law.” Concluding with a frontal assault on balancing tests, Justice Thomas warned: “As the Court applies whatever standard it likes to any given case, nothing but empty words separates our constitutional decisions from judicial fiat[.] … If our recent cases illustrate anything, it is how easily the Court tinkers with levels of scrutiny to achieve its desired result.”
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“The Court has simultaneously transformed judicially created rights like the right to abortion into preferred constitutional rights, while disfavoring many of the rights actually enumerated in the Constitution. But our Constitution renounces the notion that some constitutional rights are more equal than others. A plaintiff either possesses the constitutional right he is asserting, or not – and if not, the judiciary has no business creating ad hoc exceptions so that others can assert rights that seem especially important to vindicate[.]”

In other words, the courts have become so politically active that the only way to tell what decision they make is to examine the political ideologies of the judges. The actual law has very little to do with anything anymore. 

Think of the movie Red October where a captain orders that the safeties on a torpedo be turned off is the first two attempts did not get the desired results. That is what is happening with the courts: the safeties for governance are being turned off. In the movie, we found out why the safeties were there. Let us hope we avoid analogous results from court actions to remove the safeties on government.

A unanimous SCOTUS ruled on The McDonnell Case: Another Study in Criminal Law as Democratic Partisan Warfare. Clarice Feldman explains.

It’s common for those unhappy with a decision to criticize the partisanship of the judges involved, but the weakness of the case, which was evident when it was argued in the Supreme Court (and during the trial itself), and the fact that it was reversed unanimously warrants a raised eyebrow. It comes on the heels of the reversed prosecutions of then-Senator Ted Stevens, Governor Rick Perry, House Majority leader Tom DeLay, the IRS war on Obama’s opponents in the tea party and other conservative groups, and the outrageous trampling the rights of those who worked for and supported Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. This case and those matters lead to an inescapable conclusion: With the endorsement of partisan juries and/or judges, the Democratic Party seeks to and will use the power of the prosecution to destroy Republican political leaders and anyone who supports them.
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The law was thus rather well settled on this point, and neither the prosecution nor the trial and appellate courts gave it the required deference nor exercised any reasonable (or fair) judgment on the salient issue.
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In the meantime, McDonnell’s political career, finances and family have suffered greatly by this strained reading of the law to cover conduct which the Supreme Court and ordinary common sense supports was not criminal , but rather ordinary and perfectly proper official conduct.
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What I would bet on is that Democrats will continue to stretch the criminal law for partisan advantage, and that, if elected; Hillary will appoint prosecutors and judges willing to continue to mount such legal warfare.

“Warrants a raised eyebrow?” That seems to be a bit of understatement, especially in light of the previous post about a cohort of partisan AG’s going after the First Amendment for the cause. The Left, and the Democrats, loose many and suffer many casualties but they keep going, keep at it, knowing that there will be an occasional victory and another small push forward in the cause.

Democrats Attack 3 Of The 10 Amendments In The Bill Of Rights — An IBD editorial explains.

Democrats have long expressed frustration, if not outright contempt, for the Constitution whenever it hinders their ability to enact some new government program. President Obama has repeatedly complained about the “messy” process the Constitution’s co-equal branches created, and has several times acted as though the Constitution’s limits on the president’s authority simply don’t apply to him.

But the fact that a major U.S. political party — which still considers itself mainstream — is now willing to specifically target amendments designed to protect Americans from tyrannical government control is alarming, to say the least.

Then there is the SCOTUS ruling that allows reverse discrimination, despite laws for equal treatment. What next?

Jazz Shaw thinks The Fourth Amendment wasn’t created to protect the guilty but one SCOTUS case got some riled.

The Libertarians are up in arms over yet another Supreme Court decision this week which involves the question of when police are allowed to use evidence of a crime in the prosecution of a suspect. In a five to three ruling which crossed the normal ideological battle lines of the SCOTUS justices, the court found in the case of Utah v. Strieff that evidence of a crime discovered during a traffic stop could be used if the suspect has an outstanding warrant for an unrelated offense. (New York Times)
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The responses from Justice Sotomayor in her dissent and from the Libertarians who are bemoaning the death of the Constitution are equally maddening, though for different reasons.
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An officer with a gun. (Every lethal force encounter between police and minority suspects)

No one can breathe. (“I can’t breathe” Eric Garner)

Until their voices matter. (Black Lives Matter)

This wasn’t a Supreme Court dissent. It was a series of excerpts from a Black Lives Matter diatribe in a case which wasn’t even addressing questions of profiling or any other related issue.

In this case, Shaw is illustrating racism by example. Paul Mirengoff describes how those illustrating racism and calling for decorum and such might be expressing projection in A penny for your thoughts — “Here’s the measured response of a British leftist, Laurie Penny, to the Brexit:”

“So, here’s the thing. This was never a referendum on the EU. It was a referendum on the modern world, and yesterday the frightened, parochial lizard-brain of Britain voted out, out, out, and today we’ve all woken up still strapped onto this ghost-train as it hurtles off the tracks.”
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There is, of course, more to the Brexit than the desire to curb immigration by low-skilled Europeans. Many Brits wanted to wrest control of Britain’s destiny from EU bureaucrats. In other words, they wanted much more say than the EU will allow them in determining what the “modern world” will hold in store.

They shall have it. No wonder leftists like Penny are incensed.

The Brexit vote also prompted outrage at xenophobia and other such contemptuous moral failings. As with the similar flailing against Trump, the level of the outrage says more than the allegations and accusations.

Jacki Pick: Why Exxon is not the problem — “The greatest threat to the environment is unrestrained government.”

What the prosecutors are doing to Exxon and scientists is moving from the Rule of Law to the Rule of Man.

When the Constitution no longer has meaning, its protections are lost to the mercy of whoever is elected or appointed. What a capricious game. So, if the prosecutors’ favored climate scientists are refuted by a future President Trump’s climate experts, does Mr. Trump get to jail them under RICO for propping up the fortunes of green tech groups who contributed to their campaigns? How do you like the climate inquest precedent now?

Counter to the president’s claims, the greatest threat to Americans is not climate change, nor is it Exxon’s climate change research; the greatest threat is unfettered government, and the threat looms larger as the election year wears on.

The case of Peabody Energy is mentioned. That was a ‘do whatever they say’ effort to appease the prosecutors. Funny, that is what some members are saying about how their local  chapters should deal with the WBCCI. The current Exxon exercise shows just how futile it is to try to appease the beast.

And the news this morning is that the British decided to abandon rule from Brussels and Hawaii is implementing a database of gun owners and the bureaucrats have more guns than the marines. 

Worried, yet?

Scott Adams thinks he knows Why Gun Control Can’t Be Solved in the USA. One problem is the idea of “solved” as applied to gun control as the debate has little to do with guns and a lot to do with control. The Democrats temper tantrum in the House yesterday showed that. The temper tantrum was about due process, not gun control, as due process was the only sticking point on a Senate bill the Democrats otherwise supported. Adams also illustrates the misdirection problem.

So it seems to me that gun control can’t be solved because Democrats are using guns to kill each other – and want it to stop – whereas Republicans are using guns to defend against Democrats. Psychologically, those are different risk profiles. And you can’t reconcile those interests, except on the margins. For example, both sides might agree that rocket launchers are a step too far. But Democrats are unlikely to talk Republicans out of gun ownership because it comes off as “Put down your gun so I can shoot you.”

Let’s all take a deep breath and shake off the mental discomfort I just induced in half of my readers. You can quibble with my unsupported assumptions about gun use, but keep in mind that my point is about psychology and about big group averages. If Republicans think they need guns to protect against Democrats, that’s their reality. And if Democrats believe guns make the world more dangerous for themselves, that is their reality. And they can both be right. Your risk profile is different from mine.
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Fear always beats reason. So as long as Democrats are mostly using guns to shoot innocent people (intentionally or accidentally) and Republicans are mostly using guns for sport or self-defense, no compromise can be had.

When fear drives people to solving the wrong problem, there is a solution to be had. In the Adams scenario, this would be for Democrats to address the reason why they are killing each other – e.g. inner city crime. The problem here is that they oppose the effective and proven methods. Stop and frisk has been set aside in New York. Black Lives Matter works on a false premise to emasculate proper policing. Releasing criminals from prison on a false pretext of racial disparities in the prison population is another. None of these have anything to do with gun control but they do have something to do with murder and mayhem.

What is missing in the efforts to solve a political problem is first the lack of intellectual integrity. There is no common basis in reality upon which to build any solution. The House tantrum shows just how deep a denial exists. That tends to lend credence to the idea that “Republicans are using guns to defend against Democrats” as that is one of the fundamental reasons for the second amendment in the first place: citizen defense against irrational tyranny that eschews such concepts as due process much like the Democrats are advocating.

Thomas Sowell on The Gun Control Farce.

Virtually all empirical studies in the United States show that tightening gun control laws has not reduced crime rates in general or murder rates in particular. Is this because only people opposed to gun control do empirical studies? Or is it because the facts uncovered in empirical studies make the arguments of gun control zealots untenable?

In both England and the United States, those people most zealous for tighter gun control laws tend also to be most lenient toward criminals and most restrictive on police. The net result is that law-abiding citizens become more vulnerable when they are disarmed and criminals disobey gun control laws, as they disobey other laws.

The facts are too plain to be ignored. Moreover, the consequences are too dangerous to law-abiding citizens, whose lives are put in jeopardy on the basis of fact-free assumptions and unexamined dogmas. Such arguments are a farce, but not the least bit funny.

Why does so much of what the left advocate result in death, misery, and suffering? Another big push for gun controls trying to leveraging grief for political gain at the same time there is a push for leniency of convicted felons in both voting rights and even outright sentence reduction. Whether it is big city crime or Venezuela food riots, the result is not pretty.

Try to discuss or explore this reality and the door slams shut, defensive barricades are erected and denial goes full force. 

Worried yet?

Mary Grabar wanted to set up a small tax exempt association “resisting the re-education of America.” She tells her story: Here’s How the IRS Treated Me Because I’m a Conservative.

We waited, long past the three-month mark. And past our opportunity to hold a 2013 year-end fundraiser. I continued to post and speak, and I published three educational guidebooks.

But over a year passed. I called my senator’s office. After several correspondences, we were told we had been assigned an agent.

On May 16, 2014, our – ahem — Cincinnati-based agent sent an “Information Request” consisting of seven multi-part objections — with a two-and-a-half week deadline to respond. I was floored. She ended up granting us several extra days.

The IRS had three types of objections to our application: minor paperwork, a financial inquest, and ideological accusations.
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Remember, it was pretty much me in the basement. I described my one-woman efforts in a recent post.

We finally received approval on September 2014. They forced me to waste money and time when we should have been building on the momentum of our launch and fundraising. Other groups also lost opportunities, namely in 2012.

That’s how this IRS, this administration, works.

On the other side of such tactics, it appears that some Republican District Attorneys are telling their Democrat colleagues that going after climate skeptics also puts climate alarmists as valid targets. You can only expect the opposition to lie down and take it for so long. Grabar is now a part of a lawsuit challenging Democrats misuse of the IRS. The efforts to shut down debate about using climatology as a path to power and control are also being challenged. The efforts to use a tragedy to gain control to deny a right to self defense is being challenged with significant increases in gun sales.

In smaller associations, lawsuits and such things are usually not worth the effort. With the WBCCI, for instance, membership suffers when bullies take over. While it is a lot easier to leave a social RV club (and form your own alternative) than it is to leave a country, the parallels in behavior are worth study. Well meaning people seem ignorant of just how destructive their behavior really is and turn to denial and defense rather than introspection, examination of consequences, and intellectual integrity.

The latest mass murder has the gun control fanatics out in full cry and much of that cry is rather far afield from reality. Andrew P. Napolitano speaks In defense of self-defense — “Americans have a natural right to preserve their lives with guns.”

Don’t expect to hear that argument from the gun control crowd in the government. It is the same crowd that has given us the killing zones. It is the same crowd that does not trust you to protect yourself. It is the same crowd that ignores the reality that in the post-World War II era, there is not one recorded example in the United States of a person in a restaurant or bar getting drunk and shooting his lawfully carried handgun.
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We have a government here that is heedless of its obligation to protect our freedoms. We have a government that, in its lust to have us reliant upon it, has created areas in the United States where innocent folks living their lives in freedom are made defenseless prey to monsters — as vulnerable as fish in a barrel. And we have mass killings of defenseless innocents — over and over and over again.
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All these mass killings have the same ending: The killer stops only when he is killed. But that requires someone else with a gun to be there. Shouldn’t that be sooner rather than later?

The question is why a political party wants to burden law abiding citizens with suspicion and to take away a fundamental right of self defense.

Jazz Shaw says We’re having the wrong discussion regarding “soft targets”.

So called soft targets are optimal for those seeking to perpetrate evil because of the minimal risk to themselves when launching an attack combined with the probability of the highest body count and greatest impact.
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The real question left unaddressed is what to do about it. You can’t eliminate soft targets without forbidding significant numbers of free people from gathering together in public spaces. … since you’re never going to find every person with evil in their hearts before they strike, the only rational choice remaining is to make those soft targets less soft.
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what we can do is make it easier for the crowds of innocent civilians to include a reasonable proportion of them who are not only armed but thoroughly trained in how to respond to a crisis situation and take down a bad guy before a tragedy turns into a mass tragedy.
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Stripping more law abiding citizens of their ability to defend not only themselves but their fellow citizens is pretty much the opposite of a solution.

Trying to use the reference to a militia in the 2nd amendment to mean it is a collective and not an individual right is a tactic often used to promote gun control. SCOTUS dismissed that idea in the Heller case but the 9th circuit has recently tried to reinstate the idea that one can only be armed by permission of the state. The fact is that recent terrorist attacks do require a citizen militia in order to harden targets and make the risk much higher for those that want to murder civilians.

But then, “having the wrong discussion” in matters like this is another common tactic of those driven by fantasy and self delusion rather than reality and integrity. It is why it is often impossible to have any discussion at all as there is no common basis for discussion when reality is dismissed.

Here’s another one. Baltimore Six Trial – Stunning Last Minute Motion To Dismiss Due to Severe Brady Violation…. This is about trying to ignore evidence that doesn’t fit the prosecution’s efforts and that is evidence that justice is the last thing on the prosecution’s mind.

Just a few minutes ago (Wednesday Night) Judge Williams released to the public a Motion to Dismiss filed by the attorney’s of Cesar Goodson which is based on this Brady violation, and the prosecution’s failure to be honest with the court. This is the third time Mosby’s office has been caught hiding exculpatory evidence in the cases against the accused.

It seems to be a disease that is showing up a lot lately. Whether it is the EPA on watersheds, the DOJ on email security, state AG’s after climate skeptics, the IRS on several scandals, or the partisan blocking of inquiry, the effort to stymie justice seems widespread and almost pervasive and very much an accepted tool by many on the left.

Michael S. Greve takes a look at Odd Legal Ethics and summarizes by concluding that both sides do it, except one hasn’t had the chance yet.

And suppose we name and shame and sanction the lawyers (and I for one do want to know their names): what then? Why, the spin machine—the same machine that “explains” the President’s Iran Policy or the Secretary of State’s email server—will inform us that a vindictive right-wing judge is seeking the ruin of reputable lawyers with impeccable Harvard Law School credentials and did you know some of them are gay and also the judge hates Dreamers, or whatever. And will those martyrs still find gainful employment? Oh, yes. It’s no impediment to skirt legal and ethical boundaries, to follow orders to that effect, and to take the fall if need be: it’s the price of admission to Hillary Clinton’s entourage.

While Mrs. Clinton is unique in having practiced this sort of “law” and politics for three-plus decades, it has also flourished under President Obama, and it would blossom under President Trump.

In his Trump conclusion he shows himself to be a part of the problem and not a part of the solution. With Clinton (and Obama) there is a track record which has resulted in Judicial censure. With Trump, it is a matter of prognostication that puts bias above reality and attempts to hide it behind a curtain of moral preening (that seems to be the concept of the week – moral preening). Greve falls into Trumpysteria and the same sort of lack of honesty and integrity that was the subject of Luboš Motl’s takedown noted in the previous post.

There is a serious problem with the DOJ and it is now on its second AG. Efforts towards accountability in Congress are being blocked by Democratic Party Solidarity. The media, the state propaganda machine (SPM), is doing its best to obfuscate and deny the scandal. That leaves the Judiciary and the Public – and a good part of that Public is in on the deal, too.

Worried, yet?