- Hugh Farnham gives another look at why firearms confiscation is impossible.
- Yep. One more bit of evidence about exactly why conventional TV is doomed even as we enjoy a golden age of “television-like” entertainment.
- OTOH, it’s sad that Al Jazeera America is shutting down. It really did some of the best news coverage around. Real coverage, not newstainment.
- A kippah and Europe’s future.
- Okay, that’s it. The whole business of selling “naming rights” and trademarking “public” property has gone way too far.
- Here’s the latest thing for privacy mavens to be aware of. You’re okay if you can avoid the Internet-of-things. Which, for now, you can.
Fox says that http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/01/15/growing-number-police-chiefs-sheriffs-join-call-to-arms.html?intcmp=hpbt2&intcmp=latestnews.
My cynical self says that LEOs are encouraging use of firearms among ‘citizens’ because the numbers (as in the first article) indicate they would lose the battle otherwise. They want the populace to consider them a friend, so we won’t turn on LEOs but instead will start to trust them. (And – “The devil you know,….” is always better. They would know where the guns are before confiscation starts, if and when it does.)
If OTOH the police chiefs/sheriffs are sincere, then possibly there is a turnaround in the offing re: many local police actions. There’s been a lot of “good will” emanating from individual policemen lately – taking care of the homeless, caring for animals, of the “helping-little-old-ladies-across-the-street” sort, and it has been talked up in the media. Is it real or is it contrived, for propaganda purposes?
Trusting the “news?” Hmmmm, no thanks. 🙂
The sheriff here understands perfectly (we’ve talked often and at length) that my guns are no more any business of his than are my kitchen tools or underwear… And he also knows that I will back him up as completely as I’m able – but only if he’s doing the right thing. We don’t have any out of control thug “cops” here. In fact, I very seldom see any of them at all…
I suspect the attitude, of both the people and the cops, is the deciding factor in this place. I don’t watch or listen to much of the MSM “news,” so I don’t know what role that might play here, but I doubt it is much.
Note that when FDR ordered Americans to turn in their gold, hardly any did…Hugh Farnham assumes that 50% would obey such an unconstitutional order…I doubt it. Like Hugh, my ancestors fought in the American Revolution….
@ Pat asks, “Is it real or is it contrived, for propaganda purposes?”
Probably some of both. There are lots of truly good cops, especially in the smaller towns where the departments are small and they really are part of the community. And there are undoubtedly “good apples” even in the worst departments. Given the spate of unjustifiable police killings in the last few years they certainly need all the good PR they can get, and even the bad departments are undoubtedly seizing on any positive stores they can find (or manufacture).
As to the naming rights issue, I abhor the proliferation of commercial names on public buildings, too*, but you’ve chosen a singularly poor example as the basis for your complaint. No naming rights are being “sold” in Yosemite, although there is a dispute over who owns some very old names. Frankly, I can’t worked up over changing the name of “Badger Pass Ski Area” to “Yosemite Ski & Snowboard Area.” It’s not like they’re adopting names like “Qualcomm Resorts” or “Quicken Loans Lodge”. The names they’re changing to are uniformly innocuous.
* Although I have mixed feelings about it, but that’s a discussion for another day.
It should also be noted that Jewish journalists, rabbis and leaders have been at the forefront of leftists insisting on the importation of large numbers of moslems into what was once La Belle France. What did they expect to happen?
For my part, every time we visit there things have looked worse, and the native population more discouraged.
And to follow up on the “naming rights” issue, the fundamental problem isn’t with the selection or ownership of names on commercial structures located on government land, it’s the very fact of federal government ownership of that land in the first place. There is no constitutional authority for all those national parks, forests and preserves, all of which should be transferred to the states in which they are located. That wouldn’t resolve the “naming rights” issue, of course, but merely transfer it to a different level of government. But at least it would then be at the proper (i.e., constitutional) level of government. And it would ameliorate disputes with the noxious BLM, such as the ranch in Oregon we’ve been discussing here lately.
Like so much evil in this country, it can be traced back to a Roosevelt. (In this case, Teddy and his virulent and brainless environmentalism.) There must be something in those genes.
Laird, I realize the naming rights in Yosemite were not sold in the same way they are on stadiums and arenas. But that some mere contractor could now be claiming rights to historic names is certainly related to that phenomenon. I don’t know how that concessionaire came to believe they owned the names, but you can bet somebody at least thought they were selling and buying.
I’d be perfectly happy to have commercial names on a whole lot more facilities — as long as the commercial interest in question paid the entire cost of building and maintaining the thing in question. But I’m on record that, given the present situation, every sports stadium, park, and etcetera in the whole country should be named “Taxpayer Field,” “Poor Sucker Park,” “Your Tax Dollars Benefitting Billionaires Arena,” “Bleed-You-Dry Stadium” or something along those lines.
Ah, Yosemite’s going to be renamed Trump Park West in another year anyway. There’ll be a Mount Trump in Alaska, and some hill in South Dakota will have Trump’s head just to the right of Lincoln’s. I understand the plan is to rename that Chick-fil-A Presents Mount Trump, but I might have heard wrong…
It occurred to me the other day that for the Feds to disarm me would be a piece of cake. Let’s say I go to the city for some groceries. My license plate number is on “the list.” I get pulled over and detained, while the rest of the crew goes to my house, enters, finds a stash I don’t know about, takes my guns, and I’m out on bond awaiting a trial which may or may not come. But I’m disarmed, and that’s the object.
They only need 2 to detain and maybe 3-4 to do the home invasion. That makes Farnham’s 120,000 houses a day potentially 400,000 houses a day, and it’s off the radar for a while.
In my fantasy they confiscate a lot more guns than they do in Farnham’s before resistance occurs.
On a different topic, I would suggest that maybe there are no more rogue cops killing people nor are there more good cops helping little old ladies across the street than there were before. The difference we see is in the exposure. Most people you meet are carrying a video camera and have the ability to self publish. And every news outlet has their own axe to grind. Who knows what the truth really is?
Well, Farnham presumed a “turn-in-or-else order first, and after that nothing would be “off the radar.” What might be easy to do to one individual might not be easy to do to 30,000,000.
That said, being nit-picky, I think Farnham might have some rounding errors.
Using his figures:
8-hour day / 3-hour raid = 2 raids per day. (Can’t conduct 2/3rds of a raid. Besides, given planning and staging, and rearming and contraband disposal, four hours is still very short.)
900,000 JBTs / 20 JBTs per team = 45,000 teams.
45,000 teams * 2 raids per day = 90,000 raids per day.
30,000,000 homes / 90,000 raids per day = 334 days = 11 months.
Note that during the confiscation, for almost a year, nobody in the U.S. gets any police response whatsoever regardless of the crimes being perpetrated, and no politicians have protective details.
Unfortunately for the European Jews, I don’t remember any instance in history where a non-Jewish government protected Jews from its own people. Taking off their hats is at best a short-term reaction to an eternal problem.
Unfortunately for the other civilized people in Europe, the Jews will be the focus of violence only as long as there are Jews available. After that it will be open season on non-Jews.
Europeans (and Americans) need to learn, again, that pretending it’s the government’s duty to protect them is meaningless, given that the government doesn’t have the capability to protect them.
Bob, maybe you missed where Farnham stated: if nobody resists…
Your scenario isn’t much different, and would only work for “them” if nobody (or darn few) resisted. I carry a gun all the time. I intend to resist, no matter who attacks me or where… I think I have a lot of company. How long before “they” can’t find enough raiders? Long before “they” get around to all however many millions of us.
They are seriously outnumbered, and they know it. Their only hope is to frighten as many people as possible into compliance. Not happening.
No. I will not comply. Period.
ML, no, I didn’t miss that. Maybe you missed MY point. You call it a scenario – I wouldn’t dignify it with that term. I referred to it as “my fantasy” and compared mine to Farnham’s. That was my point. Maybe my writing is not as clear to the reader as it is to the writer.
Claire, according to the article you linked, “DNC counters that it had been forced to pay $61.5 million when it first took over the contract from the previous concessionaire, largely for trademarks.” So the basis for its claim is that it purchased those trademarks from the previous concessionaire, and if the government wants to take them now it should pay for the privilege. Seems entirely reasonable to me.
As to the naming of stadiums (stadii?), I largely agree with you. But one quibble: I don’t think it should be necessary for the commercial entity to pay the entire cost of building the structure; a substantial portion should be sufficient. Of course, they rarely disclose the terms of those naming deals, so how much of the cost is covered by the naming rights fee is unknown. But nonetheless I strenuously oppose public funding of sports arenas. Honest economic analysis proves that they never pay for themselves, or even provide the economic benefits promised.
But how did the previous concessionaire acquire those rights? I agree that trademarks are different than names (though so closely linked they usually can’t be separated). At some point, the fedgov allowed the names of the taxpayers’ facilities to go effectively into private possession. By design? By stupidity? I don’t know. But there it is.
Did they sit down and say, “Hey, Corporation X, you can buy the name of the Ahwanee for $XYZ?” Probably not. But does it make a darned bit of real-world difference?
“As to the naming of stadiums (stadii?), I largely agree with you. But one quibble: I don’t think it should be necessary for the commercial entity to pay the entire cost of building the structure; a substantial portion should be sufficient.”
You’re right. Really, naming rights should go to whoever the private investors agree should get them. Agreed: no public funds should go into these expensive boondoggles. Even if they benefited (and compensated) the average guy, which as you note they never do, neither bread nor circuses are legit roles for gov.
And Hugh leaves out the fact that many of those millions of guns predate ATF forms, or are on forms so old the data never made it to the database. And any sensible gun owner has already buried at least one of them, with ammo, probably a cleaning kit and maybe even spare parts. And that is one hell of a lot of yards to dig up, not to mention farms and suburban parcels. And I suspect my yard is littered with buried pot-metal cap guns and other scrap metal just to frustrate the search teams. A post-hole digger will get stuff so deep that it’ll take 2 men over an hour to dig the hole, then they’ll find another target under all that dirt…
And oh, just btw, those smart gun owners may have even buried their guns on public land. Who wants to go dig up the entire national forest – any one of them? Or all the right-of-way property of the railroad system? Ha! And how many highway cloverleafs are there with nothing in the 4 little circles? State parks? The leased land of a cell tower? Power lines right-of-ways? The possibilities are endless.
And when you think it only takes one gun to acquire more from the jackboots themselves, this confiscation stuff will never end. One gun gets one, then there are two, so now two more are captured, and then 4 get 4 and become 8, etc. etc. etc. NONE of which will be registered to their new owners, and all of which will be the equal of what the gestapo has.
Firstly, a thanks to Claire for posting a link to the article on firearms confiscation.
To respond to Larry – I, too, saw that an average of 3 hours per home raid doesn’t fit into an eight hour day. My thought while writing this was that remainder would be irrelevant due to the massive number of operations this would take.
Some raids would take two hours, some four. Some days would be 7 hours, others 9. Variety is the spice of a jack booted thug’s life.
I couched this scenario in the most LEO-friendly terms possible – half turned in their guns, and no one resisted. Data from Australia, Canada, and New York suggest compliance would be far less than 50%.
Hugh, I’m glad you called the article to my attention.
There will be flaws in any such scenario, whether presented by the antis or the pros. Doesn’t really matter, IMHO. What matters is the thinking and discussion such scenarios, including yours, will spark. Thanks for writing it.
Weapons found in El Chapo’s hideout were sold to him via Obama’s “Fast and Furious” scheme.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/01/20/rifle-capable-taking-down-helicopter-found-at-el-chapo-hideout-purchased-through-fast-and-furious-program.html