Murphy’s Bye-Laws

If anyone has been within 100 feet of a newspaper, television, or radio wherein professional football is discussed they probably know the story of Plaxico Burress, the New York Giants and former Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver who shot himself in the leg with his unregistered handgun last week.  Much of the talk revolves around whether he will receive “special” justice due to his public stature, if he will ever play football again (when he presumably gets out of prison), and what a bone-headed move this was on his part. There are also questions about why he was carrying a gun to begin with instead of leaving his protection to trained professionals, asked in a tone to indicate the disease-like aura that must surround all weapons.  As usual, these are all the wrong questions.  The public is apparently not over the tendency to be easily mislead and distracted away from salient points, like the gullible fool who continues to look where the person is pointing with one hand while the other hand steals his french fries over and over and over and over again.  Sigh.  I guess I can be the one to clear some of this up for the confused and frenzied audience.  I do this for you, gentle reader, because I care. Read the rest of this entry »

The Supreme Court has issued the decision for the Heller case against the Washington D.C. gun ban this morning.  The assenting opinion, which came out in favor of Heller, can be found here.  But just like the nefarious “free speech zones,” we may now end up with “2nd Amendment zones” that will confine our rights to our home.  Pretty soon, it really won’t be safe to leave the house!

The sheep’s clothing in this case is rejecting the outright banning of possesion of handguns, such as the D.C. law.  On the surface it appears as if a blow was struck against gun control; certainly the militia-only argument, which is based on a collective right idea, was rejected by the majority.  But as soon as the complete ban on handguns – especially in the home – is decided to be unconstitutional, the Justices promptly put up fences all around the 2nd Amendment Right to confine it and limit it.  So while an outright ban is no good, the decision may actually set back the 2nd Amendment against gun regulation worse than before.

So while the opposite decision would have been immediately disastrous, the actual decision was still damaging.  One cannot rely on police or a court or any unit of the government to define, protect, or enforce an individual’s rights.  The institution of government is dialectically opposed to such concepts and can only work to erode them in favor of its own power.  The dictates spewing forth from the halls of power can only command the zombies who listen.  Sometimes the zombies move with the flow of free people, but there may well be a time when a free person is required to move in a crowd of zombies hostile to their freedom.  After this decision, the streets are looking to be less safe for the non-zombified.

The long-running campaign to disarm the peons populous may come to a head tomorrow when the Obscene Supreme Court issues its ruling in the case of DC v. Heller.  Disarmament is a hot issue that was enlivened by reports of gun confiscation in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and if it is decided, against any historical evidence and in complete incongruity with the rest of the Bill of Rights – that this is the one collective right in the BoR – then disarmament will be a hot issue once again.  No matter how illogical the gun control crowd’s arguments, they may have the illogical weight of the nation’s highest court to justify any actions following a collective rights ruling in this case.

For some reason and against observational evidence of the mainstream to the contrary, rugged individualism is still seen as a defining characteristic of “Americans.”  Perhaps this was true of the people who threw off colonization and picked a fight with a proverbial giant, but is it still true of people who whimper for a bailout at the first negative consequence of their own actions?  Our society has been moving away from individualism for many, many decades now – to its own detriment, in my opinion.  The very term “American” and a million other vast generalizations of the people living under the thumb of this government are necessary for such wide-reaching rule because the bureaucracy of bureaucracies that are the different levels of government cannot rule the millions of individuals; they can only rule generalizations.  The institutions of government have always known and believed this to be true.  When the individuals started buying into the idea of collectivization, that’s when the trouble started.

The creation of the concept of collective rights – indeed the creation of involuntary collectives themselves – may well be sanctioned by the Court’s decision tomorrow.  Of course, rugged individualist don’t put much merit into the decisions of high courts and other dictates of “authority.”  An unfavorable decision may just make the rugged have to get more rugged as the terrain dictates.