The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit recent struck down D.C. gun laws that pretty much prohibit private ownership of firearms; this piece in The Weekly Standard by Erin Sheley gives a good look at the story.
Letter to the editor, Baltimore Sun:
The logic of gun control ("Ban assault rifles, save Maryland lives", February 27) is seductive: take away the bad guys' guns and they can't hurt us.
But the hard fact is that gun control laws keep guns away from bad guys
about as well as drug control laws keep heroin away from junkies.
It's easy to turn away from that unpleasant truth into the sort of factual
and logical errors that Mr. Helmke falls into.
First, we must be accurate in our terms. It is unfortunate that advocates
of stronger gun control have consistently obscured the meaning of "assault
rifle". Assault rifles - carbines capable of selective automatic or
semi-automatic fire, such as the M-16 carried by American soldiers - are
already so heavily regulated as to be effectively banned for civilians. The
National Firearms Act of 1934 strictly regulates all automatic weapons, the
only sort capable of anything resembling the "spray" of bullets that Mr.
Helmke mentions.
In South Korea, at least, thieves not only make more money but have greater job satifaction than police, 79.3 versus 65 percent. Keep in mind, that's the gangsters in jail giving that result.
More details to come.
When I was a kid, my folks got a multi-band radio that picked up not just AM and FM, but shortwave and audio channels from TV. (If memory serves, they got the radio with a big stack of game tickets from an arcade in Atlantic City.)
While we mostly used it to listen to Johnny Walker or Brian and O'Brien in the mornings, or listen in on TV shows while in the tub in the evening, every once in a while I'd fool with the shortwave. Sometimes I'd pick up a weird channel with someone reading numbers, ghostly voices reciting nonsense.
From Tim Kreider's artist's statement for last week's The Pain -- When Will It End?:
I just could not let Saddam die. I know the man was a brutal dictator and a butcher and I ought not to celebrate him as a figure of fun. Partly it’s just that perverse impulse in me that refuses to take seriously what everyone else regards as unassailably sacrosanct or taboo. I am inexplicably cheered by the idea of his surviving, Elvis-like, in our imaginations. Perhaps he lives on as a symbol of the ineradicable authoritarianism and brutality in the world, a reminder that as long as human beings are cringing hierarchical animals that defer to authority, the sociopaths among us will inevitably rise to the top. Wherever there is a country held together by fear, wherever people are raped and tortured in secret prisons and buried in mass graves, Saddam is there. Wherever we bankroll dictators and look the other way from atrocities, whenever we smile and shake hands with devils for the sake of political expediency, Saddam is there. Wherever there is misguided and hubristic American bungling, wherever we turn brutal dictatorships into chaotic bloodbaths, Saddam is there. [Saddam] is with us always.
One continual talking-point of apologists for our contemporary Crusade in the Middle East is how barbaric "those people" are because they execute people by beheading. Remember that these apologists are, by and large, people who are in favor of Americans executing our own criminals by electric shock or by injecting an agonizing potassium chloride solution directly into their veins as they lie paralyzed; describing the irony is left as an exercise for the reader.
Anyway, their argument is that our invasion of Iraq is justified because we're bringing civilized democratic government to the region.
According to a report from Reuters, in another botched execution, Saddam Hussein's half-brother Barzan al-Tikrit was beheaded by the noose during his hanging.
Besides being ghastly, disturbing, and inhumane in and of itself, this can only inflame hatred of the Iraqi government and its American sponsors, i.e., us.
Watada announced last June that he would not follow orders to participate in an illegal war. He has avoided charges of desertion by staying on base (Fort Lewis, Washington), but faces counts of "missing troop movement" and "conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman." He faces up to six years in prison.
Here's all you need to know to understand the contemporary United States: according to an Associated Press-AOL News poll, 25 percent of Americans anticipate that the second coming of Jesus Christ will occur in 2007.