John Kerry's guns

The Democrats know that they alienate many of their potential voters when they emphasize gun control, or tout bills that sound like general gun bans. The modern campaign strategy is to skirt these topics if possible, and to use pro-hunting rhetoric when out in the boondocks. This is something that Howard Dean could have pulled off rather well. As governor, Dean presided over a state with few gun restrictions, low crime and a strong hunting reputation. John Kerry on the other hand is managing to look ridiculous trying to don the hunting mantle with two decades of anti-gun Senate work to his credit.

Take Kerry's visit to Wisconsin in July, when he was asked what kind of hunting he preferred. As quoted by Mark Steyn:

I'd have to say deer. I go out with my trusty 12-gauge double-barrel, crawl around on my stomach... That's hunting.

Except that most Wisconsin hunters agree that no, that's not hunting. Not for deer anyway. The idea of low-crawling for deer is absurd.

Kerry put on his hunting act in Racine, West Virginia as well. Showing what a sporting type he is, he accepted as a gift a Remington 11-87 semi-automatic shotgun. What tripped Kerry up was the fact that he had co-sponsored legislation (S. 1431) that would have banned the very weapon that he was admiring there for his supporters.

More recently, the sunset of 1994's assault-weapons ban brought the opportunty for Kerry to bash Bush over the head with what he figured to be a guns, crime and terrorism issue:

"Every law enforcement officer in America doesn't want us selling assault weapons in the streets of America," Kerry said. "But George Bush, he says, 'Well, I'm for that.'"

I must have missed the chain of streetside gun kiosks that dotted the landscape in the early nineties. Having made his attack on Dubya, Kerry ties together his supposed hunting bona fides and the assault-weapons issue:

"I've handled all different kinds of guns and I've gone out and I've shot - I've shot birds and deer and you name it," Kerry said last night during a rally in Allentown, Pa. "And I believe in the Second Amendment. But I'll tell you this - I have never thought about going hunting with an assault weapon, with a weapon of war."

Among other points, this quote backs up Salvius' contention that much of the posturing over these guns exploits ambiguity over what guns are actually being talked about. No, people do not go out hunting with "weapons of war," i.e. AK-47s, M-16s and so forth, but these are not what the assault-weapons bill was about. Those weapons of war are military issue, fully automatic battlefield weapons, which have been heavily taxed and regulated in this country since 1934. The assault-weapons ban of 1994 concerned semi-automatic weapons, many of which have been and are still used by hunters and other sportsmen (e.g. target shooters).

So at best Kerry is peddling caricatures and non-sequiturs. But then he goes and gives an interview for the October issue of Outdoor Life. Put on the hunting garb, Mr. Candidate!

Outdoor Life: Are you a gun owner? If so, what is your favorite gun?
Kerry: My favorite gun is the M-16 that saved my life and that of my crew in Vietnam. I don’t own one of those now, but one of my reminders of my service is a Communist Chinese assault rifle.

Got that? Even though Kerry, by his own words, would never think about going hunting with an assault weapon, and even though he voted for legislation that prevented his fellow citizens from owning such a gun, Kerry will boast about owning an assault rifle to Outdoor Life magazine.

Wait - it gets better. Because the natural next questions are, "What model assault weapon are you talking about? How did you obtain it?" The New York Times actually showed a glimmer of curiosity and asked the Kerry campaign about this:

Mr. Kerry's campaign would not say what model rifle Mr. Kerry was referring to, where he got it and when, or how many guns he owned. A spokesman for the senator, Michael Meehan, said Mr. Kerry was a registered gun owner in Massachusetts. On Thursday morning, Mr. Meehan said he had not been able to ask Mr. Kerry about the rifle because of Mr. Kerry's hoarse voice; he did not respond to further inquiries.

Say, Mr. Meehan? Could you maybe have the poor, mute Senator write the answer down on a scrap of paper then instead?

Paleoquotology

Here's a challenge for netizenry: Is there a resource on the web that will tell me what a share of MCI, purchased in 1986, would be worth today? This question interests me because my wife recently received a notice from a New York bank asking her to send in her MCI stock certificate for conversion into an updated security (and before it gets classified as abandoned property). My wife had acquired the stock (two whole shares!) as part of a public school class project eighteen years ago.

Of course, since that time MCI grew, was acquired by Worldcom, and under Worldcom has suffered mightily along with much of the telecom world. So I'd be surprised if the updated securities could even buy us dinner. Still, I'm interested in how many times the shares may have split in their heyday, what the peak value was, and so forth. And while there are many quote servers and historical lookup resources on the internet, I don't know of one that would take the takeovers and conversions into account.

Hail, ants!

And by that I mean: Welcome to Salvius, who very recently posted a comment here. His visit speaks volumes for his ability to endure conservative ranting tinged with a technical undercurrent. Also, let me be the first here to register my strong admiration of the great state of Ohio for its large number of electoral votes. Very impressive.

Phone phollies

I picked up the telephone last night to place a couple calls, and:

We're sorry. The number you are calling from has been disconnected. For assistance, please call your customer service center.

It took a little experimenting to establish that I could still place local calls, but direct-dial long distance was gone. I was further dismayed when an 800-number didn't go through on the first try (subsequent attempts succeeded).

So what's up? I logged in to my local telephone provider's website, and they still showed "Worldcom" as my long distance connection. Note though that this is not who I pay my bills to. Worldcom merely owns the connections that my long-distance provider leases in order to provide service to people like me. My long distance is (was) provided by GTC Telecom. I logged in to their website that provides my billing information and found no special notices or alerts. I did find though that they have billed me for no calls whatsoever since August 2nd. Mysterious. I sent GTC Telecom a detailed email describing my problem and situation, for which I have yet to see any response.

Today, however, I spotted on their primary web page a notice that "We have changed our underlying carrier to Sprint." Well, good heavens, that could explain a lot.

This change should be invisible to you and your service should not have been interrupted.

That's where they are wrong. See, my local telephone provider gives us the option of blocking switches of long-distance provider unless the order is given by the customer personally (the "anti-slamming" protection). So if GTC Telecom told my local carrier to switch me (their customer) from Worldcom to Sprint, my local carrier would ignore that. The big mistake on GTC Telecom's part is not notifying me in any way. While it's possible they may have tried to email, it is equally possible that my internet provider's spam filtering ate their lousy notice. Something this important should have been snail-mailed, or at least heralded in my online invoices. They did neither.

Presently, I'm a little miffed at not being notified of this action, and even more miffed that GTC Telecom still hasn't responded to my rather elementary email given eighteen hours already. I'm used to small operations like this being short service-wise, but we're talking email instead of personal service, and I can't even get that? To their credit, GTC Telecom says they'll credit me if my local phone provider dings me for the switch to Sprint (seven dollars and eighty cents, it turns out), and they give contact info and instructions for achieving that. But this is immaterial until I get my service back. The GTC Telecom number alternates between being busy and just not answering. I can hope that now, after switching the long distance carrier lines to Sprint, everything might magically fall together on its own -- but that seems iffy.

Please, no taunting from those of you who have discarded your land-lines altogether.

Sunset

We have just seen the close of a decade-long exercise in gun-control silliness with the expiration of the "assault-weapons ban," an anti-gun bait-and-switch that squeezed through in the early Clinton administration, when the Democrats still controlled the House. The bait: The government will get rid of scary, dangerous "machine guns." The switch: The bill outlawed the manufacture, transfer and sale of hundreds of models of otherwise-unremarkable semi-automatic rifles.

Was anybody really fond of this bill? The only reason I can think of to like it is if you were for sweeping gun prohibitions, and you thought that this was a necessary stepping stone in that direction. But given that the law marked the high-tide of recent gun control rather than the first swell of a flood, I'd have to think that the law's proponents must be disappointed. By failing to build upon the ban, the bill's authors in the end are seen to have crafted ineffective legislation that went nowhere, to the benefit of no-one.

Perhaps that sounds harsh, but consider the following. It seems to me inarguable that from the gun-prohibition standpoint, ground has actually been lost in the last ten years when you consider the progress of concealed-carry in the states. So then you're left to argue effectiveness or benefit, i.e. that you saved lives or reduced crime, neither of which has been clearly shown. That the efficacy would be difficult to measure or detect should surprise no-one, since semiautomatic rifles aren't often used by criminals owing to their large size, substantially higher cost, and tendency to attract unwanted attention. A Justice Department-sponsored report noted that crimes with guns classified as assault weapons amounted to only two percent of gun crimes even at the beginning of the ban in 1994.

Meanwhile, the violent crime rate has fallen 54 percent since 1993. Simple math dictates that even had the ban eliminated all assault-weapon-related crime (and it did not), and even supposing that all violent crimes are gun crimes (they are not), that would at most have accounted for two of the 54 percent drop. And even that assumes that the assault-weapon crimes didn't just become pistol crimes, bat crimes, knife crimes, or whatever. So little wonder the Justice Department couldn't detect any benefit in crime rates from the ban. The best that could be hoped for was almost undetectable, and the effects (if any) were overwhelmed by larger trends from increased incarceration rates, dramatically higher rates of federal gun crime prosecution since 2000, and so forth.

I would be remiss in not directly acknowledging the arguments of the Brady Campaign (formerly Handgun Control Inc.) with regard to assault weapons, which you may peruse here. My big counterpunch to their advocacy is that they are entirely avoiding the important points: Was overall crime reduced as a direct result of the legislation? Were lives saved? Instead they point out (repeatedly) that assault weapons were involved in fewer crimes (and arrests). Of this I have little doubt, but why should anyone care? To illustrate, suppose that twenty thousand highway fatalities in the 1980s involved Ford cars and trucks. We could ban the sale and transfer of all Fords in 1990, beginning the "Ford Ban." We would probably notice a sharp downturn in Ford fatalities in the 1990s as a result of the Ford Ban, but that says exactly nothing concerning overall highway fatalities! It is a non sequitur.

The Brady Campaign makes several further arguments of debatable relevance, concerning for instance the meaning of the terms "cosmetic" or "rare." Two percent of crimes are made to seem less rare, I suppose, when you note that these still amount to a few thousand crimes, but in the end we're still talking about a small percentage -- and the Brady Campaign still cannot show that those crimes disappeared along with the guns. I frankly find the Brady Campaign's arguments concerning semiautomatic rifles to be at points misleading, ignorant, or downright silly. If someone should have questions regarding a specific point, I'd be happy to address them.

Plus Three

"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free."

President Ronald Reagan

"What do I tell the pilot to do?"

Barbara Olsen
American Airlines Flight 77
Washington, D.C.
11 September 2001

"A group of us are going to do something."

Thomas E. Burnett Jr.
United Airlines Flight 93
Pennsylvania
11 September 2001

"We're going to rush the hijackers."

Jeremy Glick
United Airlines Flight 93
Pennsylvania
11 September 2001

"Everyone's running up to first class. I've got to go. Bye."

United Airlines Flight 93
Pennsylvania
11 September 2001

"Today is a proud day to be an American."

Cyril Richard "Rick" Rescorla
Vice President, Security, Morgan Stanley - Dean Witter
World Trade Center 2
11 September 2001

"America has stood down enemies before, and we will do so this time. None of us will ever forget this day. Yet, we go forward to defend freedom and all that is good and just in our world."

President George W. Bush
11 September 2001

"We're going to find out who did this and we're going after the bastards."

Senator Orrin Hatch
11 September 2001

"I fear that all I have done is awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve."

Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto
8 December 1941

Short bus engine fire

What an amazingly bad week in the Old Media! Most remarkably, Dan Rather reported on 60 Minutes II Wednesday night on newly unearthed Texas National Guard memos purporting to demonstrate that Lt. George W. Bush was trying to weasel out of reporting to drill and the commanding officer was getting pressure from a Major General to "sugarcoat" Dubya's record. Rather also trotted out a former Lieutenant Governor from Texas claiming that he got Dubya into the Guard as a favor to the Bush family, for political and career reasons.

Juicy stuff, no? Except this time instead of taking Dan Rather's word, glance at the documents he's waving around. Do you think that the National Guard had typewriters in 1973 that used proportional spacing? And what typewriters in 1973 used Times New-Roman typeface? What typewriter of that era had curly apostrophes? Mr. Rather, what typewriter has the superscripted 'th' key on the keyboard? What typewriter ever did kerning? Isn't it a remarkable coincidence, Mr. Rather, that typing this same material into Microsoft Word thirty years later yields an exact replica of your assuredly-authentic document? Hey Dan, how is it that a colonel would be worried about "pressure" from a superior officer who had retired the previous year? Hey Dan, why won't you tell us who your "document experts" are? And by the way, why didn't you bother asking the purported author's son or his widow what they thought about the documents' authenticity?

As for Texas Lt. Gov Ben Barnes:

I was a young, ambitious politician doing what I thought was acceptable. It was important to make friends. And I recommended a lot of people for the National Guard during the Vietnam era.

The thing is that apparently Barnes has told his tale about George W. before, and differently. John Podhoretz in the New York Post notes that Barnes has stated on video that he got Bush into the guard when he was Lieutenant Governor, except Bush entered the Guard the year before Barnes became Lieutenant Governor. And in this AP story from 1999, Barnes told a different tale when he had to make a deposition in a corruption case. So that's at least six years of different versions of the story from Ben Barnes, making this latest eruption hardly a sudden breaking of silence. And then there are more pedestrian reasons to doubt Barnes' motives other than an inability to keep his story straight, like the fact that he's one of only eight persons to have raised more than $500,000 for John Kerry, and that he's listed as a Vice Chair of the Kerry campaign on the Kerry-Edwards website.

Now bear in mind that we're talking about the very same fair, unbiased media giants who wouldn't touch the Swift Boat Veterans story with a ten-foot clown pole because, you know, 250-plus veterans are just not enough credibility for such an august news source.

And did we mention that Kitty Kelley will be getting three mornings on NBC's Today show? Let's see, we could put Kitty Kelley and her book on TV, bearing in mind that Kelley is known for airing baseless allegations from unnamed sources (e.g. Frank Sinatra and Nancy Reagan were having an affair in the White House). Or we could go with John O'Neill and his book, Unfit for Command, backed by hundreds of military veterans who have all put their names on the record. Could the decision to go with Kelley have anything to do with the fact that Kelley is attacking the Bush family? Ya' think?

"Health of the Mother"

If one reads the first few pages of the Carhart decision from the U.S. District Court (Nebraska), you see the justice's reply to my question as to why we cannot ban partial birth abortion (and apparently other full-term abortion procedures):

I declare the "Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003" unconstitutional because it does not allow, and instead prohibits, the use of the procedure when necessary to preserve the health of a woman.

This is usually the final battleground on which abortion questions are fought, after all the initial claims and misrepresentations (the procedure doesn't exist, it is almost never done, it is only done on nonviable fetuses, etc.) are proven false. And this argument has been a particularly challenging one for abortion-rights advocates to honestly make. The challenge here is coming up with a scenario in which chemical dilation of the cervix followed by partial delivery of the baby, killing the baby and only then delivering the (dead) baby the rest of the way is safer than C-section, which from first incision to delivery typically takes five to ten minutes. To that end, Carhart cites a handful of scenarios (e.g. the mother has placental cancer, the mother has extreme risk factors for bleeding) for which "intact D&X" is safer for the mother.

In response, I merely point out that this argument is only contemplatable when the baby is considered at the outset to be a non-person. If we are taking the health of two people into consideration instead of just one, it becomes obvious that even the exceptional circumstances described above call for different procedures to manage the risks in attempting to secure two survivors. To take a more mundane example, mothers (particularly single mothers) put their health at risk routinely because they have children. Just getting behind the wheel of a car to go to work in the morning after a sleepless night with an infant is an elevated health risk. Yet no one suggests that such risk be reduced by killing the child. So why the stampede to "intact dilation and extraction" to manage risk in late-term pregnancy, unless of course the goal all along is to only have one survivor?

Good question!

Joseph raises an interesting question regarding my abortion-related post, asking about the actual frequency of the procedure in question:

[In other words] is this largely a symbolic issue or does its legality truly impact the "infanticide" rate?

Here's my best info. Ron Fitzsimmons testified in 1997 while executive director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers that partial birth abortions number around "several thousand" annually. Up until that time, NARAL and Planned Parenthood had insisted that the procedure was at least a factor of ten rarer, a couple hundred annually. If Fitzsimmons' testimony alone was not enough to explode that myth, the very concrete statistic of 182 such abortions in Kansas alone in 1999 pretty much took care of it.

Around that same time period meanwhile, murders of children in the 0-5 age group numbered around 800 annually, a statistic which has varied little in the last two decades. So it is immediately evident that not only is the number of late-term abortions (absent the PBA ban) significant, it dwarfs the age 0-5 murders by a factor of three at minimum. So I wouldn't write off these legislative efforts as striking a pose, like flag-burning, the pledge or school prayer.

Certainly the abortion-rights groups see this as more than a symbolic issue. I'm certain that they fear any limitation on the killing of the unborn to be the snowball that unleashes the avalanche that undoes Roe v. Wade. I'm equally certain that National Right to Life wishes this were so. As for me, lurking somewhere in-between, I'm still asking why the judiciary insists that the citizenry isn't justified in prohibiting the killing of thousands of perfectly viable babies.

I feel unclean

I have just had the acute displeasure of witnessing Garrison Keillor vent his spleen in a personal, partisan rant. There's little to be said for his piece, other than it offers the genteel red-state Prairie Home Companion listener an opportunity to find out what Keillor really thinks about her. And about the Republican party in general, which he caricatures in a paragraph that starts:

The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists[...]

and on and on. I invite you to read that one paragraph of Keillor's piece at least, as a bridge to my paragraph holding up the funhouse mirror to Keillor's party:

The party of Roosevelt and Kennedy was transmogrified into the party of conspiracists and freeloaders, anti-American international socialist activists, health mullahs with PAC money, busybody atheists, race-baiting shakedown artists, Hollywood pseudo-intellectuals, overearnest un-funny commentators, multimillionaire senators, anti-smoking Nazis, rioting protectionists, trial lawyers, flacks, New-Age poseurs, ecoterrorists, and people who believe the Bush administration was complicit in and profited from the 9/11 attacks. In place of leaders they now offer a do-nothing senator whose main claims to fame are having opposed the vital defense bills of the last two decades, and having his lifestyle paid for by a succession of wealthy heiresses; a man suspicious of the free flow of capital and of religious institutions, whose philosophy is a pastiche of bumper sticker slogans masquerading as a platform. Democrats: The No. 1 reason the rest of the world thinks we're coddled, corrupt and cowardly.

Do I feel some sense of achievement at meeting, or even one-upping Keillor in the field of partisan rancor? Pfffft. Heck no. Keillor's piece is vile crap. My paragraph above is just more crap with hyperlinks. At best it's a simple demonstration of how easy it is to paint with a broad brush and pretend that a party's most extreme hangers-on are representative of the mainstream. You'd think that Keillor would be worldly enough to recognize that his party is at least equally vulnerable to this kind of blunderbuss attack. Instead, he seems blinded by the idealistic notion that his side is untainted. How very silly.

Governing from the bench

Are the People (via their elected representatives) still in charge of the United States, or is the judiciary? I ask (testily) because of another Court decision upholding the sanctity of partial-birth abortion, this one 3-0 in Nebraska. I just consider it breathtaking arrogance for a court to say that the citizens and the legislature do not have the power to make infanticide illegal.

Before you throw down and argue with me, I'll do you a favor and clue you in on where I stand. Do I think an embryo is a person, deserving of legal protection? No. Do I think a full-term baby is a "person" right before birth? You bet I do. Where do I draw the line? There's the difficult part, but I won't dodge it. If I must go black & white, all & nothing, I grant legal protection when the cerebral cortex has matured and differentiated from the rest of the brain. From my perspective, from that point on you have a human there with its own distict identity.

Of course, nearly all the fighting arises over disagreements about where this line is, or should be. Settle that, and not only is abortion settled, but so is fetal homicide, stem cell research, and about a half-dozen other sticky issues.