Dick Heller Wins!

Go take a look at Dick Heller. It's OK; go ahead, we will wait.

See his smile? He's standing outside the United States Supreme Court. Today that Court agreed with him that the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution guarantees his individual right to keep and bear arms.

Dick Heller is a security guard. He carries a handgun at work, protecting government property and people within the District of Columbia. That's perfectly legal. But when Mr. Heller applied for a permit for a handgun at home, the DC government turned him down.

Why is it OK for the same man to carry a gun protecting government property and people, but not OK for him to protect himself and his family at home?

As I've written before, Dick Heller the security guard is working on behalf of a collective will--the government. But the District of Columbia sees Dick Heller the individual, separated from his protective role within the collective, as unqualified and unworthy to possess the same tools he uses at work.

In today's decision, Justice Antonin Scalia writes:

The first salient feature of the operative clause is that it codifies a “right of the people.” The unamended Constitution and the Bill of Rights use the phrase “right of the people” two other times, in the First Amendment’s Assembly-and-Petition Clause and in the Fourth Amendment’s Search-and-Seizure Clause. The Ninth Amendment uses very similar terminology (“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people”). All three of these instances unambiguously refer to individual rights, not “collective” rights, or rights that may be exercised only through participation in some
corporate body.

He goes on in the footnote:

JUSTICE STEVENS is of course correct, post, at 10, that the right to assemble cannot be exercised alone, but it is still an individual right, and not one conditioned upon membership in some defined “assembly,” as he contends the right to bear arms is conditioned upon membership in a defined militia. And JUSTICE STEVENS is dead wrong to think that the right to petition is “primarily collective in nature.”

Today's decision affirms what the Founders wrote in the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed[.]

That's right -- all men are created equal. Dick Heller is created the equal of any man, with all the natural rights of any man. His natural right to self protection, and the tools thereof, are equal to the rights available to any collective.

Winners and Losers

I'm in Washington DC on business. My hotel provides free copies of The Wall Street Journal. Yesterday's front page story was based on an interview with Barack Obama:

FLINT, Mich. -- Sen. Barack Obama shed new light on his economic plans for the country, saying he would rely on a heavy dose of government spending to spur growth, use the tax code to narrow the widening gap between winners and losers in the U.S. economy, and possibly back a reduction in corporate tax rates.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, the Illinois Democrat said that he was trying to put together tax and spending policies that dealt with two challenges. One is the competition from rapidly growing developing countries, like India and China. The other: the U.S. becoming what he called a "winner-take-all" economy, where the gains from economic growth skew heavily toward the wealthy.

Sen. Obama cited new economic forces to explain what appears like a return to an older-style big-government Democratic platform skeptical of market forces. "Globalization and technology and automation all weaken the position of workers," he said, and a strong government hand is needed to assure that wealth is distributed more equitably. He spoke aboard his campaign bus, where a big-screen TV was tuned to the final holes of the U.S. Open golf tournament.

Augh! The man is appealing to one of the deadly seven sins: Envy. He wants poor people to vote for him because he is willing to use the coercive power of the state to stop wealthy people from getting more wealthy.

I much prefer Dave Ramsey's analysis. He says, in essence:

Yes, the rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting poorer. That's because the rich keep doing what got them rich, and the poor keep doing what got them poor.

The State can only narrow the divide between rich and poor by making the rich poorer. Individual poor people can narrow the divide between rich and poor by acting more like rich people. And it's no secret how to do that.

How do you keep from getting poorer? It's simple, really, as Andrew Klavan writes in City Journal:

Beating poverty in America nowadays is largely a matter of personal behavior. Get a high school diploma, don’t have kids until you’re married, don’t get married until you’re 21, and you probably won’t be poor. It also helps if you work hard, show up on time, act courteously, and avoid anything felonious.

Or read what Bill Cosby said to the NAACP in 2004:

I heard a prize fight manager say to his fellow who was losing badly, “David, listen to me. It’s not what’s he’s doing to you. It’s what you’re not doing."

....

Now, look, I’m telling you. It’s not what they’re doing to us. It’s what we’re not doing. 50 percent drop out. Look, we’re raising our own ingrown immigrants. These people are fighting hard to be ignorant. There’s no English being spoken, and they’re walking and they’re angry. Oh God, they’re angry and they have pistols and they shoot and they do stupid things. And after they kill somebody, they don’t have a plan. Just murder somebody. Boom. Over what? A pizza?

The United States president does not have the power to make poor people richer. Working through Congress he might be able to make rich people poorer. That's not the country I want. That's not something I hope for. That's definitely not the change I hope to see.

Vegetarianism

There's an interesting comment thread over at Kim's place. He ran across a story of a child whose parents failed to provide proper nutrition, leaving her with rickets, a malformed spine, and several fractured bones. The parents kept her on a strict meat- and milk-free diet.

The general tone of the comment thread is that vegetarianism is prima facie evidence of child abuse. I must respectfully dissent. Here's what I wrote as my comment on the thread:

I grew up in Alaska, raised by my Seventh-day Adventist church pastor father and my registered nurse mother. Since birth I have eaten an ovo-lacto vegetarian diet. At 40 years old I still stick to that diet, through inertia more than anything else.

Just finished eating my standard breakfast of orange juice, Grape-Nuts with 2% milk, flax seed meal, multi-grain toast with butter, almond butter, and spreadable fruit. This breakfast will hold me all day; all I have to do is drink water until supper time. Last night my supper was a cup of brown rice (cooked) with half a can of Nalley’s vegetarian chili.

When I was a kid my family did a little set-net subsistence salmon fishing. Mom cooked the fish with oatmeal in pie pans, freezing them as a weekly dietary supplement for the dog. He loved it! To pay for my schooling I worked in the fishing industry, both out on the boats and in the fish processing plants. Vegetarianism is a choice we made for our health, not out of some belief in the inherent dignity of fish.

I’m convinced that I grew up just fine on an ovo-lacto vegetarian diet. Even in rural Alaska we ate plenty of milk, cheese, soy-based vegetable protein, grains, fruits and vegetables. I’m a knowledge worker and compete very nicely with my colleagues. This morning before breakfast I walked the dog for over 3 miles in less than an hour.

As a Seventh-day Adventist I believe my body is the temple of God, and that an ovo-lacto vegetarian diet rich in vegetables, nuts and fruits is the best diet to maintain that temple. However, if I accidentally scoop the beef-based spaghetti sauce onto my plate at the buffet I’ll go ahead and eat it. It’s a question of long-term choices, not doctrinaire absolutes.

Totalitarians and ethical vegetarians are two sides of the same coin. They both fail to properly appreciate the unique value of individual human lives. Totalitarians are wiling to sacrifice individuals to the greater good (see also Communism, Nazism, Environmentalism). Ethical vegetarians believe animals should be treated with the same respect as humans, which puts animals and humans at the same level. Many environmentalists believe humanity is a curse to the planet, and the fewer of us the better--putting human life below that of animal life.

How many pro-life vegan environmentalists do you know?

I Hope This Doesn't Happen

Now comes David R. Stokes, writing on Townhall.com, drawing parallels between Bobby Kennedy's Presidential bid in 1968 and Barack Obama's candidacy 40 years later. He writes that some candidates

seem to transcend the race for a particular office and become, in fact, movements. That’s what was happening in 1968 with Robert Kennedy and it’s happening these days, for better or for worse, with Barack Obama.

Mr. Stokes recalls Richard Nixon's worried reaction to the the announcement of Kennedy's candidacy:

Richard Nixon was in Portland, Oregon on March 16th as he watched the New York Senator’s candidacy announcement. Already well on his way to the Republican nomination a few months later, he was facing the fact that he might indeed find himself running against the brother of the slain president who had beaten him eight years before. He told an aide as he watched, “very terrible forces have been unleashed. Something bad is going to come of this. God knows where this is going to lead.” Nixon understood something about politics, people, and the political milieu of the moment.

A few months ago I presented a candidate explanation of hoplophobia, the ailment suffered by those Jeff Cooper described as "people who are apparently haunted by a fixed and morbid aversion to our guns." That explanation covers why the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in 1968 led directly to the Gun Control Act of the same year. Quoting myself:

Many American Progressives believed that Robert F. Kennedy was the perfect "national leader attuned to the will of the people." Sirhan Sirhan, an individual armed with a handgun, deprived the "people" of their "leader". In response, the Progressives targeted the instrument that the individual used--because it was unthinkable that a mere individual could alone subvert the collective will.

As in 1968, might the shooting of a populist presidential candidate lead to a backlash against self-defense tools? Would a shocked nation, eager to find a scapegoat, try to blame the instrument of the assassin rather than the choices and motives of the killer? Could an event of this political magnitude reverse two decades of progress on the rights of individuals to protect themselves against predators of all species?

I do not want my house to burn down, but I still carry homeowners insurance. I don't want to be involved in a car crash, but I still put on my seatbelt. I do not want Barack Obama to be injured or killed, but I'm worried about the consequences of that possibility. Far better that he be defeated at the polls in November--or even be elected President--than for his candidacy to be cut short by his untimely demise.

Al Qaeda's Vulnerability

While on business travel a few weeks ago I bought this book:



Michael Yon has spent more time "embedded" with the United States Military in Iraq than any other journalist. As of 2008, he believes the United States is winning the war in Iraq:

We can win this war. And if we do, it will be a victory of the same magnitude as the fall of the Soviet Union. It will not be a victory for the Republican Party. It will not be a victory for America and Great Britain and others "against" Iraq. It will be a victory for freedom and justice. It will be a victory for Iraqis and the wold, and only then will it be a victory for us.

A stable, reasonably democratic, and friendly Arab country will have been established in the heart of the Middle East. Al Qaeda will have been defeated not only militarily but morally, rejected by the very Muslims they claim to represent.

--Moment of Truth In Iraq, p. 226

al Qaeda claims to be on a divine mission to set up a caliphate; a pan-Muslim government that will restore the glory of the fourteenth century. But when given the opportunity, they proved completely unwilling and unfit to govern:

For al Qaeda, Iraq as just one front in their battle to humiliate and exhaust America--their strategy in Iraq was to provoke a civil war between Sunni and Shia. It was a tempting strategy, but al Qaeda militants are not smart insurgents. They know how to kill people and break things, but that's where their skill sets end. Once they have gained control of and responsibility for a territory, they can only offer terror. They do not know or care how to run a village, much less a city or nation. The locals came to view al Qaeda as degenerates and less than swine--using drugs, laying up sloppy drunk, using prostitutes, raping women and boys, and cutting off heads--while at the same time they are imposing strict morality laws on the locals. In 2007 in Baghdad, an army intelligence officer told me that one of his best sources in their area as a gay al Qaeda member; when his al Qaeda lovers mistreated him, he would pass along intelligence to get them killed or captured.

--Moment of Truth in Iraq, pp. 89-90

How will we win in Iraq? Our military capacity is certainly necessary, but not sufficient:

Before the war, our people had no street credibility in Iraq. Iraqis thought American soldiers were soft and that body armor was a type of personal air conditioner. If the Iraqis had known back then...about American willingness to suffer and fight, it's doubtful that Saddam would have taunted us.

Of course we swept them off the mail battlefields quickly, but that could be and often was chalked up to our money and our machines. It was only after, when they saw that our people were better street fighters too, and that American combat soldiers would match our outlast them in the heat, that they began to understand.

--Moment of Truth in Iraq, pp. 161-162

Not only can the Americans fight, but they know how to build a society:

[The] job of kick-starting the government fell on the shoulders of the American commanders because most of the experienced local leaders [in Baqubah] were either living abroad or had been victims of al Qaeda. The new leaders had little experience, or lacked the natural instinct to solve the many problems their city faced. So our soldiers mentored Iraqi civil leaders. In meeting after meeting, American military leaders revealed an important yet hidden collective skill set: they know how to run a city.

How is it that a group of commanders seem to understand how to run a city? Because they do it all the time, even at home.

The American military governs city-states--bases--all over the world. A commander who runs an American military base in Iraq is referred to as the "Mayor", and he or she must understand the vital functions of a city and how it operates. This includes water, electricity, sewage, food distribution, police, courts, prisons, hospitals, fire, schools, airports, ports, trash control, vector control, communications, fuel, and fiscal budgeting, for example. Base commanders in the U.S. must deal with local political leaders; base commanders abroad must be international diplomats.

--Moment of Truth in Iraq, pp. 142-143

In this asymmetrical conflict, al Qaeda is attacking the weak link the United States ability to project force--our media-driven, opinion-based public decision making process. Al Qaeda knows they can never win a stand-up fight, but they hope to win like the North Vietnamese won in the 1970s--by simply convincing us to quit.

But unlike Vietnam, the United States Military has discovered how to asymmetrically attack al Qaeda. We know how to run a free, successful society--and are demonstrating to the Iraqis that we can teach the Iraqis to succeed too. More and more Iraqis are figuring out that the al Qaeda promises are false, and that the Americans really do want them to succeed.

That's how we will win.