Here's an interesting article on CNN about a journalist facing wiretapping charges. Apparently there is a viral video out there of a police officer slamming the head of a handcuffed kid into a cafeteria table. The journalist may potentially get 21 years in prison if found guilty, and this case is a good test for jury nullification in New Hampshire. While the story itself is interesting, what I want to point out is the reaction and comments to the case made by readers of the story. Here are two of those responses.
What I would like to point out is that there is such a thing as bad laws. The law is not perfect, and if we do see bad laws, we need to challenge them and not accept them as 'just the way it is.' If we were to reduce our thinking to accepting the laws as is, then nothing would ever change, and we would be drowning in bad laws. A question that I would ask to those two people above - What would you have said fifty years ago in the age of Jim Crow laws of the South? Would you tell those African Americans, oh too bad you just have to follow the law?
Harry Reid does not have time to fit the bill (H.R. 459) to audit the Fed into the Senate schedule for a vote, but has time to talk to/about Mitt Romney's tax returns. This is the situation even though Reid has supposedly been fighting to audit the Federal Reserve for the past two and a half decades. What gives?
It wasn't long after the Aurora shooting that politicians jumped at the chance to speak out in favor of more gun control laws. Bloomberg was praised by some in the media as having the fortitude to speak out in favor of more gun control. However, just because Bloomberg was speaking out in favor of such measures doesn't make the man right. I've put out the idea that even if guns were not available to the shooter, that he could have easily killed many people, and probably more people if he had chosen a different weapon (say the many explosives that were found at his apartment). Getting back to Mayor Bloomberg and his view on gun control though, according to this article, he was brazen enough today to say these remarks:
"I would take it one step further. I don't understand why police officers across this country don't stand up collectively and say, 'We're going to go on strike. We're not going to protect you unless you, the public, through your legislature, do what's required to keep us safe.'"
While I agree that we should do all we can for our law enforcement officers, abridging the Second Amendment of our Bill of Rights should not even be in consideration. The right to bear arms is there so individual people can defend themselves not only from criminals, but from tyrannical government. After tragedies, such as 9/11, we are urged to give up our civil liberties in order to attain more security, and the politicians succeed. We have already had compromises of the First and Fourth Amendment, and now they are going to go after the Second Amendment once again. We now live in a society where any citizen can be spied on if they are 'suspected' to be a terrorist, where they can be on the President's kill list, where we are searched in order to get on an airplane, where we can even be indefinitely detained without charges brought against us.
Getting back to the Second Amendment though, the right to bear arms is meant for personal self defense and prevention of tyranny. What Bloomberg suggests is that we need to give up this right in order for our police to be safe. Now think about this; who will protect us against the police in those situations where the police are in the wrong? I am not saying that this happens often, but it does happen.
Take this account recently in Florida. Police shot a man in the early hours of the morning after knocking on his door. Police were searching for a suspect at the wrong home. They proceeded to knock on his door without announcing themselves, and the resident answered with a firearm drawn. The police then shot the resident, who had nothing to do with the suspect they were looking for.
Here is another account from Bloomberg's home state of New York. I watched the entire youtube video, and I would encourage everyone to do the same. The story had me in tears, but is a good example of police misconduct which ended in a tragic fatality.
Police are not perfect, and we shouldn't expect them to be. If I need to defend myself, I would much rather have a firearm than a police officer 5 minutes away. However, Bloomberg is the same politician who wants to ban large sugary drinks from his city, so I understand his political philosophy. You can depend on the government to protect your health from sugary drinks, just like you can depend on the government for your personal safety.
Think about this though; when the government fails in its duties (in some cases it does pretty often), who is left to protect the individual?
I came to the realization that what seems to be the driving force behind the gun control debate seems to be the media. The media needs to talk about "something." They need to attract attention. They need this attention to make money, so naturally they will mention gun control, which is a topic that will surely draw that attention. What is more troubling is that even though they bring up the topic, they fail to be interested in reporting on the facts, and in some cases completely disregard the facts.
I've run across a number of articles following the Aurora shooting where it is painfully obvious that the journalist publishing the piece failed to even cross check their article. In one article, they label the weapon used as an 'AK-47 style' rifle, which to anyone who knows anything about the AK-47 or the AR-15 will tell you, are not similar at all. Another article pointed out that the guns were obtained online without background checks, which again is totally false. Yet another article claims these assault weapons are the very ones that the military uses, completely and utterly false. You cannot start a debate on a topic with false facts, and expect an honest debate to take place, so why do we let our media get away with this? Whatever happened to doing your research before publishing something?
We need to stop media from dictating what issues we talk about today. I am not saying that we shouldn't have an open or honest debate on gun control, but it should be just that - open and honest. We should not let the media tell us that this is about guns. The story here should be, why didn't anyone around this guy raise any flags about his behavior in those four months when he was planning this? Why is the media not focusing on that fact?
The guy, Holmes, also had explosives, and had booby trapped his own apartment. Why is that not a cause for concern? He could have easily blown up his entire building and everyone in it. Why is there no talk about this?
And think about this; when the Trayvon Martin incident took place, infused in the national dialogue was the idea that race was a factor. Turns out it wasn't, but it sure did grab a lot of attention that way. Even Obama capitalized by saying that if he had a son, he'd look like Trayvon Martin. We don't need media spinning stories in a way that grab our attention. We need them to report facts, not fabricate them for us so that we pay attention. We need to hold our media accountable. We need to demand that these so called journalists lose their jobs.
The true tragedy here is that not one of these so called journalists will lose their jobs and that the public will accept their misinformation as fact to form their own opinions of the situation. If we base our debates on lies and misconceptions we will solve nothing.
I picked up this book the other week, so I have been reading it off and on as of late. I think the subject of the book is as relevant today as it was back then. Hayek discusses how central planning, particularly government with the economy, often leads to authoritarianism. Just food for thought, how can we entrust our elected officials to centrally direct our economy when they can't even balance their budget?
This also leads me to something else I saw recently. I recently youtube'd an interview that Elizabeth Warren did with Jon Stewart on the Daily Show. In one instance she stated that without government, 'no one is going to invest in the basic research that flings off thousands of things that private industry can do with it.' I really hope that she does not believe that, but rhetoric like this is dangerous and disingenuous at the same time.
History shows that private industry can and will invest in research and technology that can fuel the future. Some people seem to forget that modern central economic planning is a relatively new idea, and like Hayek I can agree that some central planning is necessary for society, but the debate should be where we draw the line (for instance cutting some subsidies). I think maintaining our roads, police, fire departments, and schools are a good form of planning. Those are all things a society needs for commerce to take place. What we don't need is government promoting green energy with companies like Solyndra. As Hayek pointed out, we should not be planning at directing resources where they ought not to go, but instead be planning for the freedom of the marketplace.
I found this video on youtube of a speech made by Ron Paul predicting what would happen in the near future. It's pretty spot on in terms of predicting what would happen within a 5-10 year period from when he gave the speech on the house floor.
I sometimes read in comment sections that even 'broken clocks are right twice a day', but looking at the entirety of the speech, it seems like this broken clock was right most of the day. If Paul's ideas are crazy, then I guess its a crazy world that we live in right?
