First, bloggers, twitterers, the news media, etc. need to really learn to hold off on following each breaking “detail” in an event like this. I cannot recall a single time when the people reporting such an event first was also getting it right. For instance, during the Gabby Giffords shooting I recall hearing that Giffords was dead at one point, which thankfully is not true. Meanwhile Judge Roll was reported as dead, then wounded, then not wounded at all, before we found out that he was killed instantly after all. Or take the West Virginia trapped miners story from a bit back. At one moment the breaking news was all but one of the miners were alive; and then we found out that in fact all but one were dead. Can you imagine being one of the families, being told your loved one was probably alive one moment and then told he is probably dead the next? I have no doubt that this misreporting was all an accident, but the results for the families were just plain cruel.
Another case in point is that the media reported that the killer was Ryan Lanza. Then various people started bothering people who were named Ryan Lanza, on Facebook and twitter. Of course people missed the obvious reality that the killer was dead and someone was tweeting and updating the relevant accounts, suggesting that this “Ryan Lanza” was not the killer. And then we find out that the killer was not Ryan, after all: that was the name of the brother of the killer. The killer was Adam Lanza. So any unrelated Ryan Lanzas who were being harassed today—perhaps even put in danger by people who didn’t realize that the killer was actually already dead—have the additional absurdity of not even sharing a name with the killer. On twitter, I tried to encourage a sense of restraint, though I felt like I was holding back a breaking dam with a toothpick.
Second, while I am getting sick of the politicization of every tragedy, I am not going to overly object to people talking about gun control today. I don’t support gun control, but let’s have this out. If we can’t stand up for the Second Amendment today, we are just going to lose the argument.
The reality is the “lets ban all guns” theory is simply a bit of what I call “silver bullet utopianism”—that is the idea that a large and complex problem can be solved easily with a proverbial silver bullet. And it is utopianism, with dangerous consequences in real life if we don’t wake up from it.
(Must... resist... urge... to make cheap “politicians are prostitutes” joke.)
The same can be said for drugs and illegal immigration. I can name for you several spots where the illegal workers line up. Everyone can. It’s no secret. It’s open and notorious.
And it is downright bizarre to see many of the same liberals who advocate drug legalization, or open borders on the theory that “you just can’t stop the flow” simultaneously argue that banning guns will accomplish anything but disarming solely the law-abiding citizens.
And there are several other problems with banning guns. For one thing, what liberals are advocating is that the government have a monopoly on the use of deadly force—or more precisely the government and the criminals who violate the law. Good law abiding citizens shouldn’t protect themselves, the argument goes, the government should protect them.
Except of course it is also the same liberals who want to hobble our government’s ability to protect us. On the subject of terrorism, they advocate a soft approach to terrorism which positively impairs their ability to stop the terrorists from coming to kill us. On the criminal side, they have been systematically weakening our justice system for the last fifty years, reducing punishments and ensuring criminals go free for reasons other than innocence.
For instance, take what I describe as the Dirty Harry Hypothetical, because it is ripped straight from that movie. A sociopath has kidnapped a woman and buried her alive. She will suffocate soon if she is not located. So Eastwood’s character tortures the sociopath in a famous scene until the killer tells her where she is.
Rationally people can be concerned that if a cop actually tortures a man into saying “I did it!” the man might be actually innocent and simply lying to end the torment. Thus a rule excluding such coerced confessions from evidence does tend to protect the innocent from being wrongly convicted. But that’s not the situation in my hypothetical. In my hypothetical, he tells the cop where the girl is buried and she is actually there. And I can also tell you that as a matter of black letter law, the courts would also exclude from evidence the fact the killer knew where the body is buried and indeed the body itself and any evidence taken from it, barring the application of any exception to this rule. This is excluded under the theory that finding the body was “fruit of the poisonous tree.”
And there are some decent arguments for or against that. If you don’t want the cops to beat a confession out of suspects, period, this is one way of making sure the police do not get any benefit from the beating. Maybe you sympathize with that argument, maybe you don’t.
But the one argument that cannot be made is this application of the exclusion rule to the “fruit of the poisonous tree” is about ensuring justice in the individual case. In my hypothetical, the fact the man knew where the woman’s body is buried is powerful evidence that he was involved in the murder; indeed probably conclusive evidence in most people’s eyes. Excluding the fact he knew where her body was and any evidence taken from the body itself is not about protecting the innocent from conviction, but protecting all people—guilty or innocent—from being beaten into confessions. So as a direct result of this rule otherwise plainly guilty people can go free.
The same can be said about virtually every fourth amendment case. If a cop illegally enters your home and finds evidence you committed a crime, the fact he was there illegally doesn’t make you suddenly innocent. We don’t exclude that evidence because it protects the innocent; we exclude it because we don’t want cops to illegally enter your home.
There are dozens of rules like this, rules that serve a purpose other than protecting the innocent from being wrongly convicted and liberals have been pushing for them all of my life, while simultaneously telling me I should outsource the defense of myself and my wife to the state. So liberals, if you really want people to give up their guns and trust the government to protect them from criminals, you need to stop undermining our justice system.
And really, our system is never going to be perfect enough to eliminate the need for self-defense. As the cliché goes, when seconds count the police are minutes away. We do not have a situation where the police are able to respond immediately and I don’t think we want the police that much up in our lives.
And that ignores the possibilities of gross failures on law enforcement’s fault. As I pointed out several times on Twitter today, given that I am being stalked and harassed by a convicted terrorist (Brett Kimberlin), who right now could be thrown in prison for up to fifty years if Montgomery County State’s Attorney John McCarthy got off his ass and did something about him, it’s going to be awfully hard to convince me to disarm myself. The law right now is failing to protect my wife and I from this violent bomber, but my wife and I are able to defend ourselves if he should more directly endanger our lives.
Indeed Brett Kimberlin is a walking argument for the second amendment. He could have been sentenced to over two hundred years for his crimes. Instead he was sentenced to fifty and served around seventeen. Further his history demonstrates the futility of gun bans. For instance, many of his convictions related to his bombings is for unlawful possession of a firearm. That is because before his bombings he was convicted of various felonies related to his being a drug dealer, and as such he was prohibited from owning firearms. And of course a bomb counts as a firearm, and yet somehow he was able to obtain multiple bombs and terrorize his town with them despite the federal ban. In addition to that, he was in possession of many ordinary firearms as my friend Hoge recently noted:
To counter Kimberlin’s claim that he was temperamentally incapable of violence (“not prone to assaultive behavior”), for instance, the government cited the array of weapons that had been seized during the drug bust in Texas. Among them a .22-caliber semiautomatic pistol equipped with a silencer. The testimony of Bixler placed this gun in Kimberlin’s hands, along with the half-dozen AR-15s he said he had bought for the defendant.
Do read the whole thing, but let’s also note what an AR-15 is:
So the liberals would tell me that I should disarm myself and hope and pray that this convicted violent bomber who has a history of violating the law prohibiting felons from owning guns, won’t get a gun this time.
Yeah, I think I am better off having a gun.
And indeed the teachers in that school might have been, too. Imagine how many lives might have been saved today if each teacher carried a gun.
And for that matter, imagine how much better school discipline would be if those teachers practiced open carry.
But there is a more fundamental argument for the right to bear arms than simply self-defense, although that is certainly a powerful one: Guns are fundamental to protecting democracy. I could write eloquently on the subject, but truthfully no one has made this point better than Judge Kozinsky of the Ninth Circuit, in a classic dissentthat today can be correctly cited as controlling law:
It is wrong to use some constitutional provisions as springboards for major social change while treating others like senile relatives to be cooped up in a nursing home until they quit annoying us. As guardians of the Constitution, we must be consistent in interpreting its provisions. If we adopt a jurisprudence sympathetic to individual rights, we must give broad compass to all constitutional provisions that protect individuals from tyranny. If we take a more statist approach, we must give all such provisions narrow scope. Expanding some to gargantuan proportions while discarding others like a crumpled gum wrapper is not faithfully applying the Constitution; it's using our power as federal judges to constitutionalize our personal preferences.
...
The majority falls prey to the delusion — popular in some circles — that ordinary people are too careless and stupid to own guns, and we would be far better off leaving all weapons in the hands of professionals on the government payroll. But the simple truth — born of experience — is that tyranny thrives best where government need not fear the wrath of an armed people. Our own sorry history bears this out: Disarmament was the tool of choice for subjugating both slaves and free blacks in the South. In Florida, patrols searched blacks' homes for weapons, confiscated those found and punished their owners without judicial process. See Robert J. Cottrol & Raymond T. Diamond, The Second Amendment: Toward an Afro-Americanist Reconsideration, 80 Geo. L.J. 309, 338 (1991). In the North, by contrast, blacks exercised their right to bear arms to defend against racial mob violence. Id. at 341-42. As Chief Justice Taney well appreciated, the institution of slavery required a class of people who lacked the means to resist. See Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393, 417, 15 L.Ed. 691 (1857) (finding black citizenship unthinkable because it would give blacks the right to "keep and carry arms wherever they went"). A revolt by Nat Turner and a few dozen other armed blacks could be put down without much difficulty; one by four million armed blacks would have meant big trouble.
All too many of the other great tragedies of history — Stalin's atrocities, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Holocaust, to name but a few — were perpetrated by armed troops against unarmed populations. Many could well have been avoided or mitigated, had the perpetrators known their intended victims were equipped with a rifle and twenty bullets apiece, as the Militia Act required here. See Kleinfeld Dissent at 578-579. If a few hundred Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto could hold off the Wehrmacht for almost a month with only a handful of weapons, six million Jews armed with rifles could not so easily have been herded into cattle cars.
My excellent colleagues have forgotten these bitter lessons of history. The prospect of tyranny may not grab the headlines the way vivid stories of gun crime routinely do. But few saw the Third Reich coming until it was too late. The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed — where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.
Seriously, what more needs to be said?
So while we correctly mourn those who died today, let’s not fall for the pipe dream that if we just banned guns we would magically be safe. We wouldn’t be, and our freedom wouldn’t be safe, either.
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My wife and I have lost our jobs due to the harassment of convicted terrorist Brett Kimberlin, including an attempt to get us killed and to frame me for a crime carrying a sentence of up to ten years. I know that claim sounds fantastic, but if you read starting here, you will see absolute proof of these claims using documentary and video evidence. If you would like to help in the fight to hold Mr. Kimberlin accountable, please hit the Blogger’s Defense Team button on the right. And thank you.
Follow me at Twitter @aaronworthing, mostly for snark and site updates. And you can purchase my book (or borrow it for free if you have Amazon Prime), Archangel: A Novel of Alternate, Recent History here. And you can read a little more about my novel, here.
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Disclaimer:
I have accused some people, particularly Brett Kimberlin, of reprehensible conduct. In some cases, the conduct is even criminal. In all cases, the only justice I want is through the appropriate legal process—such as the criminal justice system. I do not want to see vigilante violence against any person or any threat of such violence. This kind of conduct is not only morally wrong, but it is counter-productive.
In the particular case of Brett Kimberlin, I do not want you to even contact him. Do not call him. Do not write him a letter. Do not write him an email. Do not text-message him. Do not engage in any kind of directed communication. I say this in part because under Maryland law, that can quickly become harassment and I don’t want that to happen to him.
And for that matter, don’t go on his property. Don’t sneak around and try to photograph him. Frankly try not to even be within his field of vision. Your behavior could quickly cross the line into harassment in that way too (not to mention trespass and other concerns).
And do not contact his organizations, either. And most of all, leave his family alone.
The only exception to all that is that if you are reporting on this, there is of course nothing wrong with contacting him for things like his official response to any stories you might report. And even then if he tells you to stop contacting him, obey that request. That this is a key element in making out a harassment claim under Maryland law—that a person asks you to stop and you refuse.
And let me say something else. In my heart of hearts, I don’t believe that any person supporting me has done any of the above. But if any of you have, stop it, and if you haven’t don’t start.
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