Scared and Stupid
I had a couple of good chuckles last night when my wife told me about a message she had seen online. It was a… well, what do you call it? Announcement? Warning? Proclamation? In a minute you’ll see what I mean.
The message indicated that the U.S. Congress had a closed-door session recently to get a security briefing on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not an unusual occurrence, mind you, but wait! This one was different! According to this message the session was held under the *guise* of a security briefing, but was REALLY a briefing on the imminent collapse of the United States! The economy, the social structure, the government, all demolished in a flurry of upheaval and armed rebellion due to the stock market troubles, terrorists, and fundamentalist/survivalist pagans.
The U.S. was going to merge with Mexico and Canada to take advantage of rich oil reserves and cheap labor, and create a new currency — the ‘Amero’ — to unite the three economies (or, what was left of them after the apocalyptic collapse of the banking system scheduled for early fall of 2008). Members of Congress and their families would be taken to secure underground locations to wait out the violence, while the army protected several high-priority targets like the Pentagon, Great Lakes Naval Station and Disney World — the *actual* storage location of the world’s only remaining stockpile of sarin gas, and its antidote!
I couldn’t stop laughing. The message went on to say that ABC News had confirmed that the members of Congress that were present at the briefing could not discuss what was said. “Well,” I thought to myself, “there’s all the proof you need! Wake up the kids, grab the shovels, start digging the bomb shelter!”
This, for those of you who have already seen this nonsense or something similar, is called a self-reinforcing delusion. It’s a story that makes wild predictions and/or conjectures with the assertion that the facts contained therein are so secret that nobody is allowed to talk about them, and will deny the details if asked — the same response a rational person would give if the story was not true. So when people hear that it’s not true, to them that means it really *must* be true, and the delusion is perpetuated.
It’s been around forever, and will continue to exist as long as there are scared and stupid people who will believe it. Don’t be one of them.
* * * * *
The other chuckle I had was courtesy of some gun-toting paranoids convinced that they’re going to have to take hostages and fight off the ATF after the next session of the U.S. Supreme Court. Apparently they are convinced that the outcome of a ruling scheduled to be delivered during the next session will outlaw possession of handguns and open up the floodgates for legislation outlawing individual possession of any kind of firearm. Once again, scared and stupid.
The Court has heard arguments on District of Columbia et. al v. Dick Anthony Heller, which has the potential to be a landmark gun ownership case, no question. The ruling should come down during the session this summer. But the result of the ruling will affect precisely nobody in the immediate term, and taken by itself, will most likely affect very few people in the long run either.
A little background first. You’ve seen the stickers on the back of pickup trucks where you live, no doubt: National Rifle Association, “From my cold dead hand”, all that. The NRA has managed to perpetrate a fraud on the American public and to some degree its legal community by advancing the idea that American citizens have a Constitutional right to own and carry guns. They claim the Second Amendment to the Constitution protects this right, but the Supreme Court (to date) has consistently disagreed. In every one of the gun rights cases it has heard — which can be counted on one hand, mind you — it has found that the right to keep and bear arms is a right held by well-regulated State Militias, not individual citizens. You Second Amendment kooks out there, the previous statememnt is accurate: I have seen material on the web advocating a contrary position, and as any legal scholar can tell you, those are lies.
However these cases have been focused on very narrow sets of circumstances. One involved criminals carrying guns, one involved something to do with tax laws of all things, and some such. The crux of the matter being, while these cases had ramifications for the those party to the case itself, there was no broad impact from the decision. With this impending ruling, that is about to change.
This case is “contrived”. I didn’t realize it, but a surprisingly large proportion of the cases that make it to the Supreme Court are cases of people intentionally getting caught doing something against the law in order to challenge that law. For instance, if a gay rights groups wants to challenge an anti-sodomy law in court, they will draft two volunteers to perform the restricted act on each other under a given set of circumstances, and call the cops. Everybody knows what’s going on, including the cops, and the process begins. The defendants plead not guilty, are convicted, appeal the decision, and so on. The intention is to challenge the law in its most basic form, free from any encumbrances or complicating factors. That is what has happened with D.C. v. Heller.
The case was conceived and “managed” by a single attorney in D.C. who is funding the thing with his own money. He intentionally gave the Court no wiggle room whatsoever: when it rules, it will either allow or prohibit states from passing laws regulating the possession of handguns by individuals. The gun lobby is positively terrified, and the reason you haven’t heard from them is that they are all out pouring new concrete patios in their back yards. They have wrapped their gun collection in plastic and set them two feet down into the cement, buried for when the Gub’mint comes a-callin’ looking for their weapons.
Scared and stupid.
What they don’t realize is, assuming the ruling goes against them (and with a Bush-appointed Chief Justice, I rather suspect it won’t), this changes nothing. A ruling in favor of D.C. means that states *can* pass legislation regulating handgun possession and ownership. That’s happening already! States are passing handgun laws all over the place, none of them with any teeth, and very few of them enforceable to any effective degree. That’s the nature of gun legislation: the NRA has so many legislators in its pocket that getting any kind of effective gun control law passed is practically impossible. The notion of an outright ban on handgun ownership is so ludicrous I would be laughing as hard as I was when I heard the nut-job doomsday message about the collapse of the economy.
Save the cement, boys. Just chill. You’ll be out emptying clips from your AK-47’s again in no time at all.
