Science and God

Too many people think science and religion are somehow enemies.  But God created the very things scientists look into.  God created mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology.  Indeed, God created everything that is, and that is not.   How, therefore, could God be an enemy of science?

Today there is an article by Jerry Newcombe at Townhall.com entitled Science and God that explains this through the eyes of the founders of the scientific movement itself. The early scientists believed a rational God created a rational universe. Recent discoveries of the stochastic nature of the smallest particles of the universe, which are the building blocks of all matter, do not change any of this. For out of chaos God builds order. Its a message we should all embrace.

Got to run.  Enjoy!

Gun Registration

John Lott has written a piece at Townhall.com entitled Pennsylvania Democrats Want To Register Your Guns. Lott is not a natural gun writer, but rather one who, through extensive and tedious research, has come to the conclusion that more guns have helped to reduce crime. In this article he basically states that registering guns as a way to investigate crimes is a fool's errand.

Pennsylvania state police have keep records on all transfers of handguns (both private and through dealers) since 1931 and thus has already had a registration system for them. Records on handgun purchases through dealers go back to 1901. The new regulations would add in the private transfer of long guns as well as a $10 fee per gun per year as well as fingerprinting and citizenship verification.

 Gun control advocates have long claimed that a comprehensive registry would be an effective safety tool. Their reasoning is straightforward: If a gun has been left at a crime scene, the registry will link the crime gun back to the criminal.

Nice logic, but reality has never worked that way. Crime guns are very rarely left at the crime scene. The few that are have been unregistered — criminals are not stupid enough to leave behind a gun that’s registered to them. When a gun is left at the scene, it is usually because the criminal has been seriously injured or killed. These crimes would have been solved even without registration.

Registration hasn't worked in Pennsylvania or other places. During a 2001 lawsuit, the Pennsylvania state police could not identify a specific crime that had been solved that the registration system from 1901 to 2001, though they did claim that it had “assisted” in a total of four cases but they could provide no details.

Indeed, Lott goes on to cite other places with registration that, strangely, can not cite a single case where registration of firearms has made a difference in catching the criminal, including Canada. Canada finally came to its collective senses and ended long gun registration. U. S. based gun grabbers haven't done the same yet.

So, why is it that gun grabbers universally want a registration system?  Why do they want to know who owns what and where these objects may be found, if knowing this doesn't either prevent crime, or help solve it?  The answer lies in a desire to confiscate not the guns from criminals and the insane, but from law abiding citizens.  It is citzens who are likely to get fed up with constant, blatant, in-your-face injustice that our elites are displaying.  Naturally, the elites don't want to change, so better to make surfs of us normal people.  You won't find this answer in John Lott's analyses because those are utilitarian arguments.  But principled argument tells us that we have a God given right to defend ourselves, to be made surfs to those who, at best, display criminal tendencies themselves.

Resist.

I am right there with you

I have been saying for the last 10 or so years that our justice system has been seriously corrupted.  There is a two tiered system in this country, one for the elites, and one for the rest of us.  There is no reason to create new laws.  We have enough laws, if they were enforced evenly and fairly.  Today at Townhall.com Kurt Schlichter has another barn burner pointing out this two tiered system in a piece entitled You're A Sucker For Not Believing That The System Is Rigged. Along the way, Schlichter also points out that there are too many laws already, and our legislature, who supposedly work for us, keeps adding more.

Imagine you handled classified information and you took it home and put it on your iPad. Do you think the FBI would be super-concerned with your feels about it and give you a pass, like Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit got from Jim Comey, or would you be bunking with Michael Cohen? And speaking of that Looming Doofus, if you lied under oath in front of Congress, do you think you’d be free to wander the country, posting stupid tweets of yourself staring at trees and beaches?

...snip...

The American dream has morphed into the American grift. And we normal people are the marks.

Let’s stop pretending. Let’s stop accepting the ruling class’s lies. And let’s stop lying to ourselves.

America has changed. There used to be one standard, one set of laws, one set of rules. Now, there are two. The one set of rules for normal people is designed to jam us up, to keep us down, to ensure that the power of the powerful never gets challenged.

Rush Limbaugh insists that justice is coming for Felonia Von Pantsuit and others who committed crimes during the 2016 campaign. But then Jussie Smollett gets off with the lightest of sentences, essentially no punishment at all. The people who allowed guns to walk to Mexico during Fast and Furious have never been, and will never be charged or convicted of anything. Meanwhile the gun grabbers want to hold the people who did nothing wrong accountable for what a mass murder did. How many times must it be repeated that the weapon did not commit the murders.  But then, the gun grabbers do not care.  Their only concern is that you and I can not challenge their edicts.

The latest gun grab are the so called "Red Flag" laws, one of which is circulating in the North Carolina legislature now.  These Red Flag laws are a triple threat to the Constitution.  First, and foremost, they deny someone of his or her Constitutionally recognized right to keep and bear arms.  Second, they take a persons property without just compensation.  Third, these laws create the illusion of due process, a fig leaf to make it seem constitutional.  These laws do not present true due process but only a shadow of it so the courts can declare it Constitutional.

I would point out too that while an accuser can do so for the price of half a day down at the court house, the accused must hire a lawyer, at great expense to himself,  The accuser doesn't have to appear in court, and in fact his or her name is held secret, so that the accused can not face his accuser.  And while the accused loses a right, the accuser faces only a misdemeanor charge if found to have made a false accusation.  Shouldn't the accuser have to pay the lawyers fees for the accused defense if he can not make it stick?

If you still wonder how we got Trump, just look around you. He’s a cry for help, a scream against the injustice we’re surrounded by. This injustice is poison to our country. This injustice is what makes republics fall apart, when the worthless ruling class pushes its contempt in the people’s collective face so hard and for so long that the population finally screams “The hell with this!”

I am right there with you, Kurt.

The Effort to Ban the AR-15 Is Incremental Step Toward Total Gun Ban

In the article at The Federalist entitled The Gun Control Campaign Against The AR-15 Is Full Of Lies David Harsanyi subtitles his article "Efforts to outlaw the AR-15 are part of an incremental movement to ban all semi-automatic guns". While I have great respect for Harsanyi, author of the recent book First Freedom on the history and meaning of guns in American culture, he left out one important detail. The effort to ban the AR-15 is a marker on the road to banning not just all semiautomatic guns, but all guns period. If they can find a excuse that sticks, they can use that excuse or another like it to ban every other gun.  Of course the police and military will be exempt while on duty at least.  The gun grabbers mean to disarm us. But otherwise, Harsanyi's article is correct. All weapons are designed to be able to kill, though in use as a self defense tool the intent is not to kill but to stop the other guy from killing you.

Harsanyi concludes his article thusly:

Gun restrictionists focus on the AR-15 because it looks like a military weapon. Once stripped of emotion, however, the argument against ARs, which feature the same mechanics as many others firearms, is that they work better. There will always be a gun that works better than other guns. Which is why we know banning them is part of an incremental push towards broader prohibitions. After all, many gun controllers openly argue that we should roll back technology to musket—also a weapon of war—because the founders never imagined firearms would become more powerful. This is historically inaccurate, as well. But when politicians go back to writing pamphlets rather than making their cases on TV and the internet, we can start to have that conversation.

And so Harsanyi makes the subtle case that technology drives methods, but that the fundamentals remain the same.  Just as better technology has made communication faster and more efficient, so too has it made weapons more deadly.  In both cases there are good and bad effects of newer technology, but in the end both kinds serve basic human needs.

I have read his book entitled First Freedom: A Ride Through America's Enduring History with the Gun, From the Revolution to Today. Okay, so I am a slow reader these days. In any case, the level of scholarship and the attention to detail in the writing of this book is astounding considering its readability for the average reader.

Harsanyi for example focuses in on the effect the Kentucky Long Rifle had during the Revolutionary war. Of course the leadership of General George Washington, the decision of the French to enter the war on the colonist side, the effect of Baron Von Steuben training our Continental Army in the ways of European warfare no doubt all contributed greatly to winning the war. But Harsanyi is right to single out the Long Rifle as perhaps tipping the balance in America's favor.

I plan to do a book report on First Freedom though I don't know when I will get around to it. It is a book well worth reading for yourself, though, so get a copy and read it for yourself.

We Can Not Let Them Win

At the moment, there are a bevy of gun grabbing bills in a number of legislatures.  The gun grabbers, dancing in the blood of the victims in New Zealand figure this time....This Time...they have the momentum.  And they are going for the jugular.  Kurt Schlichter captures the spirit of the moment in an article entitled An Armed Citizenry Is A Free Citizenry, Which Is Why Liberals Want You Disarmed. Why, I would venture to say that Schlichter is saying that without guns, the citizen becomes just a subject, a peasant.   Of course you should go read the whole thing.

But liberals oppose this natural right. Why? Well, there are only two kinds of people who object to Normal Americans being able to protect their lives and freedom, felons and aspiring tyrants, and it just so happens both of them are key constituencies of the Democrat Party.

Felons, of course, are a problem for you and me, because they tend to prey on the average American. They are not such a problem for the elites because they have armed protection.  As Schlichter makes clear in the article, gun grabbers are not against guns, just us having guns.  They are all in favor of guns in the hands ot people they control.  

Democrats recently slid a “common sense” gun grab bill through the House that would not have actually prevented any of the massacres we have seen over the years, but would have made you a felon for lending your neighbor a .22. They were also annoyed at an amendment requiring ICE be informed whenever an illegal alien tried to buy a gun, which is a great demonstration of their real objective. It’s not to stop violence, because we Normals are not violent without legitimate cause. It’s to stop us Normals from having a veto over leftist excesses.

While some may believe that their gun grabbing ways are all about lowing the crime rate, or making it impossible to kill each other, that notion has no basis in reality.  People have been killing each other with whatever comes to hand since Cain killed Able with a rock.  Are we proposing to register rocks? No? Then let's admit what this is really all about.  Gun control is about control.  Its about taking away the veto the normal American has over what the Left wants to shove down our throats.  We can not let them win.