Quote of the Day

Can be found Gun Rights 4 Us:

Ineptocracy

(in-ep-toc'-ra-cy) - a system of government where the least capable to lead are elected by the least capable of producing, and where the members of society least likely to sustain themselves or succeed, are rewarded with goods and services paid for by the confiscated wealth of a diminishing number of producers.

Liberty Slowly Creeps Northward

Alan Gura and the Second Amendment Foundation have struck again, this time in Maryland. Fox News has the story. From Fox News:

U.S. District Judge Benson Everett Legg wrote that states are allowed some leeway in deciding the way residents exercise their Second Amendment right to bear arms, but Maryland's objective was to limit the number of firearms that individuals could carry, effectively creating a rationing system that rewarded those who provided the right answer for wanting to own a gun.

"A citizen may not be required to offer a 'good and substantial reason' why he should be permitted to exercise his rights," Legg wrote. "The right's existence is all the reason he needs."

Marylanders have been fighting this for a long time. It seems that at every level of State government, the attitude has been to fight tooth and nail to maintain its supposed monopoly on the use of force, but refuse to provide security for citizens who may be danger. The hypocrisy of the State's position has been breathtaking in its chutzpah.  While the Governor of Maryland goes about with armed body guards like an emperor, and State and local police are armed to the teeth, the average citizen can not usually get a permit,even if a woman has had documented death threats against her.  A "good and substantial" reason typically has not been good and substantial enough.

Typical of Marylanders' frustration with the law in Maryland pertaining to carry permits are the commenters to Red Maryland. I especially liked this comment from warpmine:

The CCW permit for criminals is one that is a Don't ask don't tell honorary law of the jungle. Criminals generally use their weapons for aggression rather than self protection and when they hunt, it's usually human beings that are the bounty.

Maryland liberal logic mandates that only criminals should have the opportunity to carry a fire arm forcing the law abiding citizens to fear for their lives.

Having lost, the State Attorney General plans to appeal.  I don't have any insight into what the AG's strategy or thinking may be, but I suspect it is a delaying tactic.  But remember that a right delayed is a right denied.  How many more victims will the State have on its conscience as it tries to maintain the fiction that they, and they alone, have a monopoly on force in the State.

Update:  Dave Kopel has more analysis over at the Volokh Conspiracy.

The Slippery Slope was Real After All

Fay Voshell has an article up at American Thinker on March 1, 2012 entitled Infanticide on Demand that expresses the many fears pro-life people have had about the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.

Click to read more at Free Liberty Writers.

Recently, advocates for the parental right to kill unwanted newborns have appeared in the forms of Drs. Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva, whose paper for the Australian Journal of Medical Ethics advocates "after birth abortion."

This of course, is laying the foundation for the re-emergence of Eugenics, a so-called science that takes the prejudices and fears of the Left, and gives them quasi scientific sanction to kill anyone who is "undesirable" for whatever reason.  But, of course, who decides who is undesirable? Who decides that someone's life is not worth living? Who has the effrontery to claim to play God?  If you are living in a Fascist State, the State does. 

An enthusiastic proponent of the "science" of Eugenics, Margaret Sanger was the founder of Planned Parenthood and a godmother to the modern feminist movement that sees abortion as a sacred rite. Some biographical details of Sanger's life can be found at Creation Ministries. A few quotes may get your blood boiling:

Sanger believed she was ‘working in accord with the universal law of evolution’. She maintained that the brains of Australian Aborigines were only one step more evolved than chimpanzees and just under blacks, Jews and Italians. When arguing for eugenics, Sanger quoted Darwin as an authority when discussing ‘natural checks’ of the population, such as war, which helped to reduce the population. Her magazine even argued for ‘state-sponsored sterilization programs’, forcibly sterilizing the ‘less capable’. She won many academics and scientists to her cause, including Harvard University sociologists E. M. East, University of Michigan President Clarence C. Little and Johns Hopkins psychiatrist Alfred Meyer.

Sanger also made her eugenic views clear in her many publications, such as The Pivot of Civilization and Woman Rebel, stressing that birth control was not only ‘important with respect to controlling the numbers of unfit in the population’, but was the ‘only viable means to improve the human race’. For example, she wrote: ‘Birth control itself … is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or of those who will become defectives.’ She boldly proclaimed that birth control was the only viable way to improve the human race. And while in her later years Sanger redefined what she meant by the unfit, ‘she increasingly saw feeblemindedness, the bogey of all hereditarians, as antecedent to poverty and social organization in the genesis of social problems.’

Sanger believed the ‘Negro district’ was the ‘headquarters for the criminal element’ and concluded that, as the title of a book by a member of her board proclaimed, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy, was a rise that had to be stemmed. To deal with the problem of resistance among the black population, Sanger recruited black doctors, nurses, ministers and social workers ‘in order to gain black patients’ trust’ in order ‘to limit or even erase the black presence in America’.

Sanger was perhaps too successful, as she exported her ideas to a number of European States including Nazi Germany. But the horrors of the Nazi eugenics program were so repugnant to the average person, that eugenics went underground. But it didn't disappear. I remember a self proclaimed atheist saying once of someone that "He is too stupid to live." But this person had lot of people who, for one reason or another, didn't deserve to live.

Ms. Voshell goes on:

Both doctors go on to write that the newborn and the fetus are morally equivalent. Both are human beings and "potential persons," but since neither is in the position of attributing any value to his or her existence or able to articulate any aims in life, neither is a person. It follows that "[m]erely being human is not in itself a reason for ascribing someone a right to life."

Huh? This is playing semantic games. The dictionary defines a "person" as a "human being." To be a human being is to be a person. All the mumbo jumbo about having aims and appreciating life is little more than window dressing. This is not a serious paper on ethics, though I take it very seriously, but is laying the ground work for infanticide, euthanasia, and eventually, a resurgence of eugenics.

Larry Grathwhol, an FBI informant in the Weather Underground recounting a meeting of the upper eschelons of the organization says they would have to kill 25 million people after their revolution. Of course, they already had a solid blue print to go by. The Communist regimes killed an estimated 120 million of their own people during the 20th century. Before that, there was the Reign of Terror of the French revolution. The Left hates everyone, and everything. They hate creation. They are the ultimate death cult. They do not see people as individuals, pursuing their own hopes and aspirations, but as cogs in a machine, doing their bidding.  And if you don't want to?  Well, there are the "re-education camps."

From the moment that a fetus begins growing in the mother's womb, it will, if unimpeded, become a person.  It is already a human being; it can be nothing else. Although it can not at this point articulate the an aim in life or an appreciation of life, it none the less has a right to life by virtue of the fact that it will eventually become a person, and by virtue of the fact that it is a human being.  The person who chooses to stop that process, by aborting the fetus, or by killing the born child, commits homicide. There may be extenuating circumstances that might justify the decision, but those circumstances should be explained, preferrably in a court of law.