A little long but nevertheless sweet.

In an email Bettina states:

I mean, nothing is more clear than that: there are people who favor guns and the use thereof, and there are others, who don’t. I have lived in the US for four years, and had four years of opportunity to go to a store and get me a gun. So had a lot of my folks from Germany (where the purchase of guns is prohibited without proper formalities). How many people, did you think, took “advantage” of being able to buy one??????? One out of thirty.

Hmm so there are more than two categories. I for one favor guns, but not so that i can own them. I don’t own a gun and never plan to. This discussion is not about whether one should be able to use a gun for hunting and other non-murdering purposes, but rather the debate is about whether citizens have an undeniable right to weapons. In this regard, I must emphatically state yes.

My reasoning is simple: states choose to respect an unarmed citizenry, but states must respect an armed citizenry. Those in the state interested in taking away the citizen’s rights must seriously deal with fact that many in the citizenry will rebel using thier legally acquired firearms. Such considerations are not necessary when the citizenry is unarmed. The citizenry is at the whim of the state when unarmed.

Additionaly, prohibiting gun ownership forces one into the problem of relying on the state for protection. This slides the value of personal responsibility away from the individual and into the hands of the state. Through all of history, if there is one thing that is more true than anything else, it’s that when you take away responsibility from the person and place it the hands of the state everyone suffers. I have no reason to believe this will not be the case for firearms. Treating the right to being armed as unalienable contributes to the societal value of personal responsibility, which is to the benefit of everyone.

The fact that an armed citizenry is less likely to be oppressed and that individuals in this society will have a stronger value of personal responsibility are good reasons to strongly embrace the right to guns. What is not a good reason to support gun control is for the prevention of illegal gun use. Its a truism that those interested in breaking the law will not concern themselves with following laws. Thus, its unsurprising to discover that making it illegal to own guns will not dissuade would be criminals from using them. Thus, the only good reason for gun control laws never actually obtains when such laws are implemented.

Effectively, gun control fails to deliver on controlling illegal gun use, while still costing the citizenry the right to defend against tyranny and diminishing the societal value of personal responsibility. Thus I support the right to a gun ownership not so I can own one, but so that I may enjoy these other virtues the right confers.

This CNN headline summarizes the value of online schooling very nicely:

Yale University to post courses on Web for free

I really like the Dave Matthews video for the song Crush. Its simple and understated. This allows the music to be pulled to the front and easily enjoyed.

Post can be found here.

There are, as I’ve tried to point out, elements in Islamic society which could well be conducive to democracy. And there are encouraging signs at the present moment–what happened in Iraq, for example, with millions of Iraqis willing to stand in line to vote, knowing that they were risking their lives, is a quite extraordinary achievement. It shows great courage, great resolution. Don’t be misled by what you read in the media about Iraq. The situation is certainly not good, but there are redeeming features in it. The battle isn’t over. It’s still very difficult. There are still many major problems to overcome. There is a bitter anti-Western feeling which derives partly and increasingly from our support for what they see as tyrannies ruling over them. It’s interesting that pro-American feeling is strongest in countries with anti-American governments. I’ve been told repeatedly by Iranians that there is no country in the world where pro-American feeling is stronger, deeper and more widespread than Iran. I’ve heard this from so many different Iranians–including some still living in Iran–that I believe it. When the American planes were flying over Afghanistan, the story was that many Iranians put signs on their roofs in English reading, “This way, please.”

Russian technocrats had everything figured out when they built this federal highway. Well everything but the rain. We all win when wealth is more equally distributed.

Looks like Wal-Mart has done it again. There relentless pursuit of reducing prices at any costs will cause massive pharmaceutical firms to lose money, while putting yet more money in the hands of the consumer. Thanks to Wal-Mart people on minimum wage will be much more likely to afford the drugs they need. This reduction in health care costs will make it easier to live off of minimum wage reducing the political demand for increased minimum wage. That pisses me off since everyone knows that wealth creation is not generated through Wal-Mart’s pursuit of efficiency and innovation, but through the states demand of increasing wages.

Furthermore, by making healthcare much more cost efficient thorough reducing drug costs, its sort of implies that the solution to ever increasing cost of health care is free markets and not state sponsored health care. Everyone knows that any industry, including healthcare, is run much more effectively when a few government appointed technocrats use their immense intellect to determine every detail of that industry’s economy. But with this recent reduction in price, people may become more inclined to think that the competition in the free market might be the best solution to managing an industry. Again it will cause political weakness this time towards universal healthcare.

Yet, once more we see how Wal-Mart decreases the standard of living for the poor.

Attempts are being made to characterize the probably unintentional but complicit attitude of the MSM in assisting terrorists in disbursing their propaganda. I suspect that if this rhetoric succeeds, which is quite likely given the strong outrage in some sects of the population towards the MSM coverage of Islamic fundamentalism, its likely to be translated into law intended to regulate how MSM should cover these topics.

Personally I’m against such regulation, but the MSM’s blatant disregard towards accusations of it being manipulated can potentially generate a large constituency eager to vote in politicians that will impose such regulations. I suppose this is the real danger. By allowing terrorists organization free outlets for their propaganda the MSM gives citizen’s good reasons to distrust their work and demand more oversight. In this regard, I hope that the senior editors in the MSM change the way they cover news before enough political will is formed to get the government’s hand involved.

Over at Cato-at-Liberty blogger Radley Balko finds the best solution to all of society’s eating disorders.

Given that skinny women are hopelessly manipulated by the fashion industry, and that obese women are hopelessly manipulated by the food industry, I propose the following magic-bullet legislation:

The government should buy every obese person subscriptions to the top fashion magazines; meanwhile every skinny person should be forced to sit through a dozen McDonalds, sugary cereal, and Hostess cupcake commercials.

All joking aside, Radley needs to take the message we send people more seriously. Its scientific fact that if you see somehting on TV you HAVE TO DO IT. What he really fails to realize though is that if comercials don’t FORCE people to eat poorly, then people have some kind of choice in what they eat. This is the real danger because you can easily see some libertarian asshole saying that it’s a person’s right to choose what they eat if they have some sort of personal control over their eating habits. Next thing you know he will oppose legislation mandating a one size fits all diet to insure the health of ALL AMERICANS. Then we will never solve this OBESITY CRISIS.

So you see this blogger is a fool because he doesnt realize that their is no justifiable reason to force adults fully capable of making their own decision to live a ‘healthy’ lifestyle. Without this justification we are no longer allowed to legally proscribe the way all Americans should live. It’s a scary thought, but we would leave their lives up to them to live. What kind of America would that be? Certainly not one envisioned by our forefathers.

From my perspective its a no brainer. The right to firerams should be just as basic as the right to free speech and religion. You keep a government honest by keeping the citizenry armed. Unfortunately the UN seems to disagree.

In fact, the human rights community has addressed the issue — but from the wrong side. They seem generally supportive of U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s effort to put in place a global gun control regime “including a prohibition of unrestricted trade and private ownership of small arms.”

In other words, in the face of evidence that an armed populace prevents genocide, the human rights community has largely gotten behind a campaign to ensure that there will be no armed populaces anywhere in the world.

It seems to me that the human rights community has things exactly backward. Given that the efforts of the international community to prevent and punish genocide over the past several decades have been, to put it politely, a dismal failure, perhaps it is time to try a new approach. International human rights law is supposed to be a “living” body of law that changes with the needs of the times in order to secure important goals — chief among which is the prevention of genocide. Given that the traditional approaches of conventions and tribunals have failed miserably, the human rights community should be prepared to endorse a new international human right: the right of law-abiding citizens to be armed.

Whats most alarming is the idea that by restricting guns, you will eliminate violence by guns. Seriously, this is not rocket science. People interested breaking the law to do harm with guns will not be detered by having to illegal acquire a firearm. Thus, it will not reduce violence in any meaningful way since criminals will still break the law with their illlegally acquired weapons. Gun control laws only restrict the people unlikely to use them illegally ultimately leading to the disarment of the citizenry. This will prevent citizens from banding together and defending their fundamental rights in cases where the goverment becomes corrupt. Its simple, if you are serious about individual having a set of rights then you would include being armed as one of those rights.