Death of the Second Amendment

I wish I thought that this was premature, but I fear it is not.

The Supreme Court refused to hear a case from Maryland, where the right has been severely abridged for many years.

In case you don't live in Maryland, right now it is necessary to get a license to think about buying a handgun.  After you get the license, you still have  the paperwork and delays for which Maryland has become notorious - but you have to spend more money, get training (not a bad idea, but redundant for many of us, and costly for all of us) the survive a background check - then see if you can find a gun dealer that has what you want - or learn that the gun dealers are flummoxed by the way the rules are written.

An example of the last - I wanted to buy a Smith & Wesson Governor - a popular revolver that chambers .45 Long Colt and .410 shotgun shells.  It is a great home defense weapon, less likely to kill someone outside the house than most, and noisy as hell.  I know of folks in Texas thats hoot skeet with them, even. Right now, no dealer will even order one for me - because the law disallows drum magazines on shotguns but is written in a way that does not specifically call out long guns, and in a way that uses 'revolving cylinder' as a term describing the mechanism that is prohibited which, of course, could include any revolver-type handgun as well. Taurus is also impacted - ordering a Judge might be problematic, as they also are chambered for .45 Long and .410 shot.

Weapons are being banned not because of some function (like select fire) but because they look like they may be easy to use. There is not a particle of (functional) difference between a long-range hunting rifle and a sniper rifle - except perhaps for appearance.  Even one of my .22 rifles qualifies as an assault weapon by some readings.

Were it not for the fact that my family and friends are here, I'd be looking really hard at Texas right about now, or some other place that has legislators smart enough to understand that the primary identifying characteristic of a criminal (or a crazy) is a pronounced lack of interest in laws and in obeying laws.  Our legislators appear to think that if they make enough laws, at some point the criminals and crazies will count them up and say to themselves "Oh shit - this new law makes 147 (or pick your own number) laws - maybe I should start paying attention to them."  It just won't happen.

Many ideal defense weapons are being made unavailable for the most ridiculous of reasons.

An example occurred several years back - in the small .32 caliber (semi)automatic pistol market. There are several fine .32 ACP pistols made, among them Beretta, Seecamp and too many others to mention. KelTec began making one - a very nice little pocketable pistol, reasonably accurate, well made and decently priced. This pistol never made it onto the Maryland List of Things You May Own because, they said, it was too small.  Seecamp, which is smaller, made it onto the list. Seecamp sent representatives to appear before the committee that determines what you may own to plead the case and KelTec did not - they are a small firm noted for good design and manufacture and reasonable price and apparently thought that the money to do so would be better spent improving the products.  The P-32 is, so far as I know, forbidden for Marylanders to own.

It really is not about guns at all - it is about legislators who think that, having been elected, they get to think for us and determine for us what is good and proper for us to own.  They have bodyguards and don't have to dirty their hands protecting their homes and families. Mere citizens like the rest of us do not have  that luxury, but it does not make the obligation to protect our homes and families and less, it just makes it our personal responsibility unless we can afford to hire the guards - which the legislators get from the state (which is us, and our taxes.)

Some folk will say 'It is only property' - but I don't consider wife and children to be property, and I  doubt there are many who do.  It has already been established in court many times that the job of police is to show up after Something Bad has happened, collect spent brass, draw chalk marks around the bodies and gather up anything that might help them catch whoever it was that did the terrible deed. Their responsibility does not include protecting folks unless they happen to be around when something nefarious is being perpetrated, and they are not charged with preventing any crime except one that they see happening. Indeed, they arenot permitted to act on imputed intent - they have to wait.

The Powers that Be in Maryland will not rest until citizens are disarmed. If I were young and single, I'd begone already.

Is there anyone out there that believes that more laws are the answer to anything?

Boycott

If some business does something that does not please you, it is your perfect right not to spend your money there.  If you feel strongly about how wrong that business is, tell your friends and ask them to go elsewhere with their money.

Don't think that, because you a mayor or something that that gives you imperial power to decide that that business cannot do business where you are.  Simple disagreement over something does not grant permission to deny folks around you access to a business.  If the majority does not like the business, it will go away when there are no profits to be made.

It is also not your right physically to impede the flow of customers.  Picket if you must, shout slogans, behave in a manner guaranteed to disgust most folks but stay out of their way.  You can complain and demonstrate, but you can't impede.  If you are right, others will join you.  If the business has a better day for your presence it is a good bet that you're on the wrong track.

The week's nonsense about Chick-fil-A started all this - and it seems it gave the place lots of business, indicating that a goodly number of folks either like what they make or disagree with the atheists that did not want to hear what the founder had to say - or maybe both.

Just because you have a different viewpoint does not give you permission to try to destroy the persons or business with whom you disagree.  You might try being nice - they might listen to you.  Get in their faces, and all you'll get is a bunch of angry people facing you.

The simple fact is that many are offended by the mere though of someone's being a devout Christian. That is unfortunate, but it is a fact, however it does not confer upon the hater blanket permission to revile, persecute, attempt to damage or otherwise hinder the Christian - although if you do so he might pray for you.  \

You are free to say that he contributes to organizations for which you have no use.  He is likewise free to say the same about you, although he probably will not.  There are lots of Christians around,'t likely to convert many to your way of thinking, and you are likely to get really irritated and generally pissy about your failure, so why not find some other rope to push?

You can be a Christian, a Jew, a Mormon, a Unitarian, a Buddhist, a Seventh Day Adventist, a Jehova's Witness, an agnostic (I do not believe in atheists - they make too much noise about what they believe, and anyhow almost everyone knows at least which church from which they are staying away) a Daoist, or just about anything else and we can talk about things in general, or our differences without becoming shrewish and strident.

I've never eaten at Chick-fil-A - but after the past few days I just might have to - to support folks who don't weasel-word things, but tell the truth when asked questions in spite of the fact there may be backlash.  Honesty is underrated these days, and it is a damn shame.

New York

I haven't written here for some time, and probably should sleep on this one before I get yelled at, but somehow this time I just can't keep my big mouth (fat fingers?) shut (in my pockets?)

New York now makes gay marriage legal.

I have a problem with the word "gay" as used here - the word used to have a meaning, something like happy or joyous - now it no longer means just that, and I have to be careful where and how I say it lest I be misunderstood.  Words mean things, or anyhow they did when I was young, naive and stupid.

So let's make it clear for old idjits like me - New York has now changed its law to make marriage between two persons of the same sex legal.  Or anyhow, they are calling the social uniting of two people of the same sex a marriage.

"Marriage" just joined "Gay" in the list of words that no longer has meaning.  For thousands of years I knew what it meant - now I am no longer sure.

I asked a dear friend why another word could not have been chosen to indicate a state like matrimony, but different in that it did not join two people of opposite sexes, could not have a reasonable expectation of procreation, and was an evolutionary dead end within one generation.

What I got was resoundingly denounced as old, meanspirited, sexist, prejudiced, and even probably wishing to keep people of color enslaved.  All this for asking a question....

And I don't see any parallel at all with the old issue of miscegenation - after all, the union involved a man and a woman - the so-called race issue was one trumped up to keep a minority convinced it was a minority in terms of value (about which I'll have more to say later....)

Two men cannot reproduce without the intervention of a third party who is not a man.  Does this mean that two homosexual men should become the object of a woman's polyandrous affections?  I thought the idea was to keep the women out of the males' lives - but they can't reproduce without a woman, so they are going against themselves - where's the fun in that? And how can someone who would scorn the 97% of the population as "Breeders" lower himself/herself (itself?) to couple with a person so obviously inferior or disgusting?

Then I thought about two women having the same problem - in order to reproduce, there has to be a man somewhere - leading to the spectre of a polygynous relationship for the man - when the two women involved want nothing at all to do with men; they have to involve a man or the "race" dies out within one generation.

There was an article in Town Hall this morning, Marriage Cannot Be Redefined that caused me to start to think about this again, and stirred in me the realization that it's a game, and the only end to the game has no words having anything like a meaning we all know.  Kinda like the Red Queen (in "Alice") - "A word means what I choose it to mean, no more and no less!" - except in the case of gay marriage, there are as many red queens as there are marriages, so the word is reduced to a state of meaninglessness.

I don't know the answer, but I do know that, for me anyhow, there is an intrinsic wrongness in allowing 3% of the population to cause a word that had meaning to the other 97% suddenly to become meaningless to that other 97% of the population.  We invent new words all the time - why not here?

The distortion is such that it makes noise in my head - almost as if I had a pet cat, which died, so I got a pet skunk, but insisted on calling it a cat even though a deep breath would convince anyone that it was not a cat - except for myself who is sure that it is a cat - it has four legs, claws and a tail - must be a cat, right?

Call the simile ridiculous if it pleases you, but think about it - is it any less strange than calling a marriage "the same" as what used to be a marriage when it now is supposed not to care about the sex of either partner?

I'll probably have more to mutter about this; right now what I see before us is madness - a tower of Babel, if you will, brought to us by the so-called Progressive People, who will not rest until every word we have ever relied upon to have meaning and to help us make decisions is rendered devoid of meaning.

I have spoken (written?)!