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A new report to the Connecticut state legislature shows police have used the state’s unique gun seizure law to confiscate more than 1,700 firearms from citizens based on suspicion that the gun owners might harm themselves or others.

The state’s law permits police to seek a warrant for seizing a citizen’s guns based on suspicion of the gun owner’s intentions, before any act of violence or lawbreaking is actually committed.

I don’t know about you, but it is an IMMENSE comfort to me to know that the police in Connecticut can now read minds. How wonderfully crime-free this state must be! I think I will move there right away.

Under the statute, dubbed the “turn in your neighbor” law by opponents, any two police officers or a state prosecutor may seek a warrant, following a specified process of investigation, to confiscate guns from people deemed a risk to harming themselves or others. The vast majority of cases, however, begin when a person – usually a spouse or live-in, according to the OLR report – file a complaint.

Ok, how about a law now to pre-emptively arrest parents before they abuse their children?  How could you tell?  Well, of course if the child complains, they must be at risk of abuse, no?  Of course they’re not just crying about the spanking they received for coloring all over their bedroom walls, or about being grounded due to sneaking cigarettes from Mom’s purse.

And Neighbor Bill, who let his kids trample through your flowerbed and was asked to keep control over them…he’s only complaining to authorities about your guns because he thinks you might blow your thumb off, not because he wants to get back at you for so rudely pointing out his lackadaisical parenting method.  He cares about YOU, man.

“It certainly has not been abused. It may be underutilized,” Ron Pinciaro, co-executive director of Connecticut Against Gun Violence, told the Waterbury Republican American. “The bottom line from our perspective is, it may very well have saved lives.”

Thanks, Nanny-State!

*Yes, this is a link to a story on Worldnetdaily, which I ordinarily eschew, but the law exists, and it is idiotic in the extreme.

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A West Palm Beach man pulled out a gun in an argument with two supermarket managers, who then whipped out their own guns, police said Tuesday.

The man fired into the store and at one of the managers, but no one was injured, police said.

I would like to point out, for the benefit of the PSH-ers out there, that neither of the properly-licensed individuals fired a single shot.

Grant fired three shots into the store, which had several customers inside, according to authorities.

Hernandez yelled at Grant to drop the gun.

Instead, Grant got behind a car and pointed his gun. He shot again, this time at Hernandez, police said.

Hernandez did not return fire, police said.

But he would have been well within his rights to do so.  I suppose the “fear for your life” feeling kind of subsides a bit when your opponent has a demonstrated inability to strike the capacious exterior of a cow byre.

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Wal-Mart Stores Inc, the world’s largest retailer, unveiled plans on Monday to film its gun sales in the United States and create a computerized log of purchases in a bid to stop guns falling into the wrong hands.

Well, there’s a simple enough solution for that…don’t buy guns at Wal-Mart. In fact, don’t buy ammo, cat food, milk, potting soil, frozen pizzas, beach towels, frisbees, goldfish, 12 packs of diet Dr. Pepper, kids knee socks, band-aids, teethbreesh, or any other bloody thing they sell. Easy.

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Join any online discussion about gun rights and gun control, and you are bound at some point to see the above statement. It is ubiquitous and has become an almost a Godwin type statement (usually appearing alongside Nazi and Holocaust references). The statement appears on the pro-gun side, and someone will undoubtedly pop in with counter-points about how “more guns do not make us safer”, or how “we are already an armed society and we are not very polite”, and back and forth, with what seems to me to be a powerful misunderstanding on both sides about what the statement actually means. I think both sides envision this Armed and Polite Society as being one where everyone walks around with their favorite chunk of polymer and steel strapped on. Gun rights supporters see the result of such public carry as the impetus that causes the return of civility, gun control supporters fear that overheated tempers will result in deadly shootings over parking spaces.

Both could not be farther from the truth.

The original statement was made (to the best of my knowledge) by Robert A. Heinlein:

An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.

Now maybe you read that and instantly see the truth of it, but I am writing this under the assumption that you are missing the point, so I am going to break it down for you. The first thing we need to look at is this: What is an armed society?

The Armed Society

An Armed Society is not one where guns are on every hip in full display, or one where even every person is carrying concealed. An armed society is one that recognizes that society and civilization are like any great dynamic work, in that they require constant attention and maintenance, and that trouble must be dealt with in the fastest means possible so as to avoid the spread of damage. In any human society, trouble is defined as crime. It doesn’t matter what the crime is, as the definition of a crime is up to that society to choose, but crime is trouble, and if crime is not treated ASAP, the damage it will do can have a ripple effect throughout a society.

Think of a society as a great ship sailing along. In the Navy, every single sailor is trained to keep an eye out for potential damage to the ship they sail on, and any suspected damage is reported to damage control, who then dispatches the appropriate people to fix the damage. Except in the case of fire. If a sailor on a ship detects a fire, a call to damage control is done after the fire danger is located and assessed, and the person who found the fire, while calling for help, will begin to fight the fire. Any who are nearby and hear his call will join his efforts. There is no waiting for damage control because every sailor knows how to fight a fire and where the fire fighting equipment can be found anywhere on a ship, and he or she is expected to get busy doing what they can to prevent the fire from spreading and to knock it down as much as possible. Every sailor is ARMED with the knowledge and tools needed to fight a fire, and everyone is expected to use that knowledge and the tools to do their duty to the ship and the sailors that live within her. Due to discipline and prevention, fires on a ship are rare. Due to every sailor knowing how to fight a fire, large fires on a ship not in battle are very rare.

In the Navy, an uncontrolled fire is so deadly to the ship as a whole that everyone MUST know how to combat a fire. In an armed society, crime is recognized as so deadly to fabric of the society that every citizen is trained and equipped to combat crime. Every ship has Damage Control Personnel, who are the people the Navy hires to deal with all ship damage, all the time, much like the police are hired to deal with crime in a society. The difference is, for the DC folks on a ship, their primary duty is not to fix damage on a ship, but rather, to make sure everyone else knows how to repair damage to a ship and to coordinate the repair efforts. In an armed society, this is what the police do. They train the populace in how to safely fight and resist crime, they coordinate citizen response efforts, and they investigate crime when needed.

The society itself is armed to fight crime. Typically this means the society is also armed with the tools and the training and knowledge to fight crime as well, i.e. weapons that can effectively resist criminals. This is why people on both sides of the debate get this wrong, they think the weapons define the society, rather than the society defining the weapons. Weapons need not be guns or swords or knives. As I told my wife once, if I could carry a hand held device that would enclose a person in a sticky web or glue and effectively restrain them 99% of the time, I would carry that. The weapon is whatever is effective to stop crime. As things stand, we do not have an armed society, despite the presence of weapons, because in general, the people have chosen to abrogate their duty to fight crime to the police. We will not have an armed society any time soon since social mores would have to shift significantly before we would.

But if we did have an armed society, how would that make it polite?

The Polite Society

This concept is a bit tougher to get right off, but hopefully I can make it clear. First, what is “polite”?

Polite
1. Marked by or showing consideration for others, tact, and observance of accepted social usage.
2. Refined; elegant: polite society.

Heinlein puts it simply that Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life. Now, if you are at all familiar with RAH and his writing, it should be obvious that the second definition is not what he is talking about at all. While RAH may himself have been elegant, and some of his characters certainly were, the truth is many of his heroes and heroines were decidedly not. No, I do believe the polite he is thinking of falls into the first definition, that of showing consideration for others.

Think about it, when we think of manners, the ones that matter, what we are really talking about is being considerate of others. Even manners we have that don’t seem to make any sense have their roots in being considerate of others (why do we keep our elbows off the table? try eating in close quarters and put your elbows up). So if being polite is in essence being considerate of others, what is the epitome of bad manners?

Rape, murder, theft, assault, etc.

Now, if a person can commit violence against another unopposed, i.e. they can demonstrate a complete lack of manners and consideration without being called out on it, how do you think such a person is going to regard the smaller niceties? So how does the armed society create good manners? The reason we get a polite society is because the people are armed against crime. All crime, not just crime committed against them, but crimes against their neighbors and fellow members of this polite society. These members of this polite society are considerate of the other members of the society. If they are considerate at the level of being willing to potentially put their lives on the line for their fellows, chances are they will be considerate at any level. Such a statement is not always true amongst individuals, two people could really not like each other and could be rude to each other specifically, but in general, people will have manners toward strangers and friends. Even two people who are socially rude to each other could understand that should a crime befall one, the other should still respond in order to maintain the social order.

Now look back at RAH statement. If a person knows he lives in a society where the great majority of persons around him can and will, without pause, meet any violence he chooses to enact with violence in return, he is going to be very careful with regard to his location and environment when committing his crime if he has any hope of getting away with it. He isn’t going to walk into a bar and shoot someone, because the other patrons will detain him at the least, or shoot him in return. He will not get away with his crime unless he plans carefully and takes pains to keep his crime out of the public eye. This means an armed society is not free of crime, it is, however, better able to respond and deter crime, and it means that persons will likely not be committing crime in full view of the public. There will still be murders, and rapes, and theft, and assaults, but you won’t have a whole lot of events like a kid shooting up a classroom, or a gang beating a person on the street, or a husband dragging his wife out her place of business to die, because others will respond, with force, and not when the sirens arrive, but right now, as it happens. If the act of being impolite can lead to my death in very short order, I will take pains to be polite and I will carefully weigh any decision to committ a crime.

When you care enough about your neighbor, and by extension, your community, to step up and defend it against crime in the public eye, you are being considerate of others, and therefore, polite. People who are armed with a weapon are also less likely to commit violence because they don’t want a minor thing to become a fatal thing. In an armed society, drawing a weapon without need must be a crime, much the way that the Samurai of old would not draw their sword unless there was a need. When you grow up knowing you have the power to take a life, and you have been raised to be considerate and respectful of others, you understand the responsibility and rationale not to take a life unless there is no other choice.

Conclusion

A polite society need not be armed, and an armed society need not be polite, but neither will survive well or long unless both conditions are met. To be fair, arming everyone will not create a polite society, however, allowing those who wish to be armed to carry a weapon they have demonstrated proficiency with, and who have demonstrated the ability to obey the law and exhibit restraint, is a good start. The fact is, through, that until we give up this idea that the police are all we need to protect us, and we begin to reinstall a sense of civic obligation that goes beyond working at the soup kitchen or putting some money in a kettle during Christmas, we will continue to have an impolite society. The number of people who wish to be armed and trained is still too small to act as much of a deterrent, except in certain areas where the local population has a greater incidence of persons carrying, but as more people decide to take responsibility for their own safety, things should improve. Things won’t change overall until we as a society decide to change it, and parents and schools begin to instill a sense of civic duty in their kids, that they need to protect society if they want society to protect them.

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What I don’t know about Mr. Heston would fill a large reel of film. What I do know about him is plenty though. He marched with Dr. King. For Civil Rights. At a segregated theatre in Okla-frickin’-homa. Against his own movie. That tells me he had a pretty firm idea about what he thought about Liberty as it applied to all people. So how is that a Left quality?

I ask because story after story mentioned prominently that Mr. Heston made a Right-hand turn politically in his later life.

So. Can anyone in the audience tell me how marching for civil rights in support of the First, Ninth, Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments is any LESS Right than supporting the Second Amendment? Can anyone tell me why some of our Enumerated Rights seem to be more palatable to the press than others? Can anyone tell me why the Fourth Estate, a direct beneficiary of the Constitution of the United States of America, choses to spend more time on the man’s politics than his art; politics they apparently disagree with even though his stance is the very one that they themselves should be crying to the mountain?

Yeah, that was kinda the answer I expected.

Rest in Peace, Chuck. Veteran of WWII, actor, and conservative; all in the finest senses of the words.

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But.

Since the 2nd Amendment seems to be the one that’s under active siege lately, you’re going to see more gun-related posts here. Feel free to skip.

Yesterday saw me barely coherent over DC’s latest attempt at gun-grabbing. This morning, Robb emailed a link to a similar measure in Boston, only it isn’t going so well for them:

Boston police officials, surprised by intense opposition from residents, have significantly scaled back and delayed the start of a program that would allow officers to go into people’s homes and search for guns without a warrant.

The program, dubbed Safe Homes, was supposed to start in December, but has been delayed at least three times because of misgivings in the community. March 1 was the latest missed start date.

One community group has been circulating a petition against the plan. Police officials trying to assuage residents’ fears have been drowned out by criticism at some meetings with residents and elected officials.

I suppose they *would* be surprised, wouldn’t they. We’ve tolerated constitutional violations before, why shouldn’t we keep tolerating them?

Only this one is a bit more blatant than the others:

Officers may begin knocking on doors this week, officials said yesterday, but instead of heading into four troubled neighborhoods, as they had planned, officers will target only one, Egleston Square in Jamaica Plain, where police said they have received the most support.

Police would ask parents or legal guardians for permission to search homes where juveniles ages 17 and under are believed to be holding illegal guns. Police would only enter homes into which they have been invited and, once inside, would only search the rooms of the juveniles.

I don’t care if they’re going into South Compton, and I don’t care if they say pretty please with sugar-coated crack on top, this is unconstitutional and isn’t to be tolerated.

People of Boston, people of DC…those of you still interested in personal liberty, and the rule of LAW instead of the rule of MAN…find out who exactly is proposing and supporting these measures, and let’s get them un-elected and un-appointed.

TLIH Rule #1: The more someone is grasping for power, the less of it they should be allowed to have.

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A crackdown on guns is under way in the District. Police are asking residents to submit to voluntary searches in exchange for amnesty under the District’s gun ban.

The program is starting in the Washington Highlands neighborhood of southeast Washington on Monday and will later expand to other neighborhoods.

Officers will go door to door asking residents for permission to search their homes.

Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier said the “safe homes initiative” is aimed at residents who want to cooperate with police. She gave the example of parents or grandparents who know or suspect their children have guns in the home.

If weapons are recovered, they will be tested and destroyed if they are not found to be linked to any other crimes.

Just who in the bloody hell does this fascist bitch think she is? Someone in danger of losing a bit of her much-coveted power, eh. This sort of thing is unacceptable in a FREE country, is it not?

Let’s get this cow into a new job, shall we…junior fry cook at McDonald’s sounds about her speed.

(Clarification:  This braindead plan was announced March 12, and was put into action today.)

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He was on a, brace yourself, political talk radio show speaking about guns.

I had heard of Mr. Nugent my whole life and all I really knew about him was that he was a musician who was a big gun rights supporter. I never really even listened to his music. But he summed up for me in plain and simple words the very essence of what the anti-gun crowd doesn’t understand. I wish I could have recorded it. I will try to reproduce what he said. Keep in mind this isn’t a quote, but I am putting it blockquote format for emphasis:

I don’t need a piece of paper or a court to tell me, a free citizen of a free country, that I can’t defend myself or my family while at the same time forcing me to pay for an armed security force to come along and clean up after something goes wrong. The most basic thing that makes me free and safe is my ability to protect myself from those who would try to take away my liberty or my life.

I do not do Mr. Nugent’s words justice. He was on the air for sixteen minutes. And I mean he was ON. He said things that I have believed and fought for my whole life. He spoke the Truth, capital “T” in words that I could only hope to emulate. He wasn’t bombastic or crude or angry, just passionate and logical. He knows facts and stats off the top of his head, sure. But he also related them to the real world.

I’m not saying that I am going to run out and join the NRA, or even buy one of his albums; but the man left an impression on me.

I am now going to link to his website. Here.

Carry on.

Update from Hazel: Yes, I am the Queen of the Gotdamn Internets. Click here for the Nugent interview.

And just for fun, Stranglehold:

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In an argument that ran 23 minutes beyond the allotted time, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy emerged as a fervent defender of the right of domestic self-defense. At one key point, he suggested that the one Supreme Court precedent that at least hints that gun rights are tied to military not private needs — the 1939 decision in U.S. v. Miller — “may be deficient” in that respect. “Why does any of that have any real relevance to the situation that faces the homeowner today?” Kennedy asked rhetorically.

With Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., and Justices Samuel A. Alito, Jr., and Antonin Scalia leaving little doubt that they favor an individual rights interpretation of the Amendment (and with Justice Clarence Thomas, though silent on Tuesday, having intimated earlier that he may well be sympathetic to that view), Kennedy’s inclinations might make him — once more — the holder of the deciding vote.

Good news, yes. It’s this I don’t understand:

There also remained a chance, it appeared, that Justice Stephen G. Breyer, one of the Court’s moderates, would be willing to support an individual right to have a gun — provided that a ruling left considerable room for government regulation of weapons, particularly in urban areas with high crime rates.

Kindly explain to me the logic of this. The issue in these high crime areas is not legitimate gun owners GIVING their weapons to the bad guys, nor is it really having them stolen by same. The bad guys get their hands on guns no matter what laws/regulations are in place, we know this. So how does crippling the ability of the law-abiding populace to defend their homes and lives against said bad guys make any sense at all? If some thug is booting down my front door, I want my choice of responses, be it a mare’s leg or a bloody AR-15.

I am TENSE about this, people.

UPDATE – In the comments, Craig wants some advice on a weapon of choice for a small-framed guy.  Have at thee.

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