Aug 04 2010

I’m loaning interest-free money to the county

Category: government,liberty — harmonicminer @ 1:05 pm

You may have read earlier on this blog about my adventures in getting my lot subdivided in San Bernardino County, California.  Unbelievably, that process is still not done…  more than three years after we started it.

In the meantime, property values have dropped enormously where I live, and so last year, we finally got the county to reduce the assessment on which we pay property taxes.  Since then, values appear to have dropped even more, but the county raised our assessed value, being greedy and rapacious as most governments are.  So we appealed, using the correct form, supplying supporting evidence of the further drop in property values in our area.  Here is the county’s reply:

Dear Property Owner:

Your application for changed assessment (assessment appeal) has been received. However, we have not reviewed the application for completeness or timeliness. After we review your application, you will receive another letter which will either:

* State the your application is complete and your appeal is eligible to be scheduled for hearing; or
* Inform you that your application is incomplete and further information is needed; or
* Notify you that your application has been denied.

Please note that due to the large volume of appeals, it can take 12-18 months before an appeal is scheduled for hearing. Filing an appeal does not relieve the taxpayer from the obligation to pay the taxes when due. If a reduction in your assessment is granted, you may receive a refund.

Isn’t that special?  It seems that, once again, we are making the county an interest free loan for a year or more.

California is in big trouble.  It has pushed businesses out of the state with high taxes and ridiculous regulations, and it seems determined to do everything it can do to stifle the growth of business or economic activity in the state.  In the meantime, it tries to pay its bills by further squeezing the remaining people…  a game of diminishing returns if ever there was one.

I especially like that last part: “If a reduction in your assessment is granted, you may receive a refund.”

Well gee, now I feel better.  I may receive a refund in a year or two, for the lousy decisions made by the assessor’s office this year.

Of course, unlike private citizens, government never has to pay a penalty when it makes a mistake.

Aug 03 2010

Does the universe have its own “fifth column”… er, fifth force?

Category: Uncategorized — harmonicminer @ 9:37 am

Modern physics has for decades assumed that we know of the basic four forces in the universe, and that there are only those four, gravity, electromagnetism, weak nuclear and strong nuclear forces. The problem is that some observed aspects of the universe seem not to be explainable in terms of only those four forces, notably the continued expansion of the universe, and the way galaxies stay together without (apparently) enough mass to produce the gravitic effects that are observed.  So called “dark energy” and “dark matter” is the scientific community’s way of saying, “We don’t have a fuzzy clue what’s out there or why it behaves that way.”  Dark energy and dark matter are believed to be 95% of everything in the universe, with what we see and can directly measure being 5% or less. So some scientists are asking, Is a cosmic chameleon driving galaxies apart?

The basic idea for this fifth force was hatched in 2004 by Justin Khoury and Amanda Weltman, then members of a team led by well-known string theorist Brian Greene at Columbia University in New York City. String theory is the favoured route to unifying gravity, the odd one out among the four forces, with the other three under the umbrella of quantum mechanics. It is a great playground for devising new fields and forces. The theory is formulated in 11 dimensions, seven of which are assumed to be curled up so small that we cannot see them. Disturbances in those curled-up dimensions might make themselves felt as “extra” forces in the four dimensions of space and time we do see.

For this picture to make sense, the effects in the visible dimensions must match our observations of the universe. Khoury and Weltman proposed one way of doing this: an extra force could be transmitted by particles whose mass depends on the density of the matter around them. That way, its effects could remained veiled on Earth.

How would that work? Well, in quantum mechanics, the range of influence of a force depends largely on the mass of the particles produced by the associated force field: the lighter the particle, the longer the force’s range. Electromagnetic fields, for example, produce photons that have no mass whatsoever, so the range of the electromagnetic force is infinite. The particles that transmit the weak nuclear force, on the other hand, are extremely heavy and do not travel very far, confining the force to the tiny scales of the atomic nucleus. With the strong nuclear force, things are slightly more complex: the associated particles, called gluons, are massless but also have the ability to interact with themselves, preventing the force from operating over large distances.

Khoury and Weltman started from the observation that the average density of matter in Earth’s vicinity is very high in cosmic terms, at about 0.5 grams per cubic centimetre. Under these circumstances, they proposed, the particle that transmits the chameleon force would be about a billion times lighter than the electron. The force itself would then have a range of not more than a millimetre – small enough for its effects to have remained undetected in the lab so far.

In the wide open spaces of the cosmos, however, where a cubic centimetre contains just 10-29 grams of matter on average, the mass of the chameleon particle plummets by something like 22 orders of magnitude, producing a muscular force that could act over millions of light years. The lost mass is picked up as energy by the chameleon field.

You’ll pardon me… but I’m excited by the idea that there is still plenty of physics left undiscovered, and the universe is still a very mysterious place. And, by that same token, I suggest that all the scientists in the room be relatively circumspect, or maybe even downright humble, in their conjectures about the possibility that all this happened more or less “by accident”, and did not require a Designer.

Aug 02 2010

Take your cellphone to the hospital with you in Britain

Category: Uncategorized — harmonicminer @ 8:35 am

You’ll need your cellphone to take and send pictures of yourself as you lay neglected, like this young woman who texted pics of herself dying to her family.  NHS is Britain’s National Health Service:

A DESPERATE woman texted photos of herself slowly DYING to her mum as she lay suffering on a hospital bed – being ignored by NHS doctors.

Tragic Jo Dowling, 25, sent over forty messages to her mother and best friend including pictures of a deadly rash spreading across her body as her life ebbed away.

The pretty youngster was diagnosed by her family GP with suspected Meningococcal Septicaemia after developing a purple skin rash and low blood pressure last November.

She was rushed to Milton Keynes Hospital where A&E doctors rejected the diagnosis believing instead her illness was a mild infection caused by her Cystic Fibrosis.

Doctors abandoned Jo on a observation ward and gave her headache tablets and fluids as they failed to spot the purple rash spread over her arms, hands and legs.

As the hours passed terrified Jo took photos of her rash on her mobile phone and sent them to her mum and best friend describing her condition as “getting worse”.

The meningitis bug left her in septic shock choking and coughing as fluid filled her lungs and she died four hours after her last text message – just 14 hours after arriving at hospital.

It seems that the hospital was understaffed AND incompetent:

The inquest heard there were only two doctors on duty to cover the entire hospital the night Jo died.

Devastated mum Sue Christie, 48, of Milton Keynes, a distribution worker, said: “Our doctor knew it was meningitis but when we got to hospital all the care seemed to stop.

“They didn’t seem to know what they were meant to do or what meningococcal septicaemia was.

“The hospital was saying it was just an infection. She had a lot of infections with Cystic Fibrosis but never a rash like this.

“I saw her picture messages and the rash was really bad. You couldn’t miss them but the nurses did. I thought she was in hospital and with the best people.

“She wasn’t given a chance and was left to die without being given any treatment.

“It is so sad as Jo had got through everything with her Cystic Fibrosis and was such a strong girl.”

I give blood regularly, and the donor center always asks me if I’ve been to Britain lately.  I suspect that if I said yes, the next question would be, “Did you have any medical care in Britain?”

Word gets around.

h/t: Powerline

Aug 01 2010

Emerging, or just merging?

Category: church — harmonicminer @ 1:46 pm

I have often thought that the “emergent church” or the “emerging conversation” reminds me an awfully lot of bull sessions in the dorm of my small Christian college in the late 1960s/early 1970s.  That is, provocative questions are asked in such a way as to imply that there are no good answers to them in the existing framework, and so something completely revolutionary is required, which should start with throwing out the bums who have been ruining everything.  In a post titled Emerging Church and Mainliners, Michael Kruse makes the point that to “mainline protestants”, whose groups are mostly shrinking in numbers, the emerging “post-orthodoxy” mixed with progressive perspectives is little different from the progressive and highly “non-judgmental” political/social orientations of the traditional mainstream left:

I’ve been saying for years that much of the emerging church in is simply Evangelicals embracing Mainline Protestant theology while experiencing reticence about Mainline institutions. While “emerging church” encompasses a broad range of expression, in the Mainline world it is almost monotone. Emerging Mainliners have little dispute with Mainline theology or the deep commitment to progressive/liberal politics. It is overwhelmingly about polity, structures, and frustration with lethargy. In this sense it is not truly post-evangelical and post-Mainline … that is … it is not truly emergent. The Mainline emerging church does not embrace the emerging church movement because it is something new but precisely because it dovetails so perfectly with their theological and political persuasions. And it really borders on comical to listen to some emerging church types describe the profound new reality that is emerging when in fact they are describing what Mainliners have been saying for decades. It is new and emerging to them only because their horizons have been so small.

At the PCUSA General Assembly this month, Landon Whitsitt, a pastor in my presbytery in the Kansas City metro (Heartland Presbytery) became vice-moderator for the denomination. On some issues I’m sure Landon and I are very different (for one thing, I don’t have a PCUSA tattoo on my forearm) but read what he said in a recent interview with columnist Bill Tammeus:

What can the Emergent Church Movement, which has come primarily out of the evangelical branch of the church, teach the Mainline churches? On a scale of 1 to 10, how important is that movement?

“I don’t know if ECM can ‘teach’ the Mainline anything, frankly. I have always kind of thought that the ECM is the vehicle that is dragging Evangelicalism into a form of faith similar to what the mainline churches experience.

“I’m sure they’d disagree, but, as an example, a lot of folks in the ECM are jazzed to the hilt about Walter Brueggemann right now. I’m so sick of Bureggemann after reading countless books during seminary. They love N.T. Wright. I’m not trying to be rude when I point out that those are Mainline folks.

“What the ECM challenges us on, however, is our creativity. We’ve gotten liturgically and politically lazy. No one wants to be a part of a bureaucratic institution anymore and no one wants to spend a hour on Sunday morning sitting through what is essentially a business meeting with some hymns. But ’emergence’ in general (a la Tickle): This is nothing short of our age’s Reformation. …

Landon is spot on. I’d also add that unlike some other segments of the ECM, within the Mainline, to be emerging is close to synonymous with being politically progressive in your cultural engagement. And in that sense, it feels to me very much like the emergence of a progressive tribalism that simply is a mirror of, say, Southern Baptist conservative tribalism. Whether all this is a good thing or bad thing is all dependent on your perspective I’m sure. But I don’t think it is emergent in the sense of coming a deep reassessment of what it means to be the church and of our engagement with the world. It is the extension of Mainline sensibilities with new modes of relating.

Here’s another way to put it. Much of the “emerging church” is essentially old-style liberal/leftism, dressed up with vaguely progressive sounding Bible verses.  Most of the emergent could listen to nearly any modern mainstream sermon or teaching, and agree, while being very comfortable with the progressive political inclinations of the mainstream churches.

Sadly, most of them don’t know this, because they’re too young to know better, and despite their pretended cosmopolitanism, many of them really don’t get out much, or read widely…  all while accusing traditional evangelical churches of “preaching to the choir.”

So, I have a simple recommendation:  instead of calling themselves the “emerging church”, they should just “merge” with the mainstream churches, their natural home.  They can do their post-modern thing without guilt, and in fact with great affirmation.  They can go to church with people who share their political/social orientations, aren’t bothered especially by legal abortion-on-demand or gay marriage, think the USA is the cause of evil in the world, and are skeptical of the evangelically understood plan for salvation (the one that mainline groups all used to believe, and strongly teach, i.e., the gospel).

The whole shebang should just become the “merging church.”  That might at least keep the dying mainliners alive for another couple of decades, as they celebrate their post-orthodoxy together.

Jul 31 2010

Lower brain functions and music: connected?

Category: music — harmonicminer @ 12:33 pm

Does Classical music move the heart in vegetative patients?

Classical music pulls at the heartstrings of people in a vegetative state as well as those of healthy listeners. If you play music to vegetative patients, their heart rate changes in the same way as that of healthy controls, suggesting that music can affect the neural systems of emotion even when conscious thought is impossible.

Francesco Riganello at the Santa Anna Institute in Crotone, Italy, and colleagues played four pieces of classical music to 16 healthy volunteers while measuring their heartbeats. The team then repeated the experiment with nine people who were in a vegetative state. In addition, they asked the healthy volunteers to describe the emotions they had felt while listening.

The pieces, each 3 minutes long and by different composers, were chosen because they have different tempos and rhythms, factors previously shown to elicit positive and negative emotions.

Riganello found that the music affected the heart rates of both groups in the same way. Pieces rated as “positive” by healthy volunteers, such as the minuet from Boccherini’s string quintet in E, slowed heart rate, while “negative” pieces like Tchaikovsky’s sixth symphony increased heart rate.

People are medically defined as vegetative when they have no recognisable behavioural responses to external stimuli, says Riganello. “Generally it is thought that vegetative patients are isolated from the external world, but maybe this is incorrect.”

Interestingly, heartbeat patterns detected in people listening to Boccherini’s music in previous studies indicated that the listeners were becoming relaxed. Riganello suggests that listening to music may have caused “some relaxation” in the vegetative patients.

He believes this reaction originates from the lower regions of the brain, such as the limbic and paralimbic system. These are known to control emotion and autonomic responses and “may remain active after extensive brain damage”.

“It’s a nice paper,” says Ashley Craig, a rehabilitation neuroscientist at the University of Sydney, Australia, who was not involved in the study. He points out, however, that it doesn’t show the vegetative people feel emotions as healthy people do. Although their basic, automatic brain functions are working, “that’s very different” from the higher cognitive processes required to be conscious and feel emotions, he says.

Alan Harvey at the University of Western Australia in Crawley agrees, but finds it very interesting that “music has this way of affecting neural systems that process emotion even in the absence of conscious thought”.

Hmmm…. I’ve written elsewhere about my opinion re: the connection between emotion, communication and music, to the extent that there is one.  The research reported here seems to relate the very lowest level of autonomic nervous system functioning to music. 

I’m afraid I have to agree with Ashley Craig.  This doesn’t prove much of anything about the way people with normal, undamaged brains actually process music, or about the way that music affects them.

It is interesting, though…  and makes me wonder if music affects animals (who share these lower brain function with humans) the same way, so that they might respond the same way as the brain damaged human research subjects did in this study.

If so, I know a particularly hyper dog I might try it on.

Jul 30 2010

Hate speech in action

Category: church,family,gay marriage,Group-think,left,ministry,missions,Scripture — harmonicminer @ 8:54 am

You tell me who is practicing hate speech here.

Imagine if the roles were reversed…

If the speaker was a gay minister, speaking gently of our responsibility to pray for our unfortunately confused brethren who don’t understand that Jesus was for gay marriage, saying that tactics of intimidation aimed at straight people are wrong, and the speaker was being shouted down by conservative bible-thumpers carrying signs saying things like “Gays hate God” or some such, you’d have seen this all over the evening news.

But the intolerant Left almost always gets a pass.

Jul 29 2010

Colonel Cody wasn’t the only one

Category: multi-cultural — harmonicminer @ 8:22 am

Buffalo Bill is sometimes charged with the near extinction of the American buffalo, due to his hunting exploits.

But he wasn’t the only one.  A “buffalo jump” was not an athletic event involving leaping over buffalo, some sort of native American rodeo.  It was simply organized mass slaughter of buffalo by native Americans.

Does this sound like they were terribly reluctant about killing animals en masse?

Native Americans also contributed to the collapse of the bison.[28] By the 1830s the Comanche and their allies on the southern plains were killing about 280,000 bison a year, which was near the limit of sustainability for that region. Firearms and horses, along with a growing export market for buffalo robes and bison meat had resulted in larger and larger numbers of bison killed each year.

The common myth of the Native American living in “harmony” with his environment continues to be passed along… but to the extent that it is true, it is because of their lack of the technology to do anything else, not due to some spiritual connection to Gaia.  They were basically stone-age people in most ways until the Europeans arrived.

I suppose the myth of the wise primitive will continue to be promulgated in movies and other media.  But if I had to be captured by someone, I think I would prefer the US Army circa 2010 to the Apaches or Commanches circa 1700.  After all, I also saw A Man Called Horse.

For the most part, primitive people were not/are not wise.  Instead, they were/are typically racist, xenophobic and sexist, not to mention chauvinistic, jingoistic, and ageist.  If you don’t know that, you need to get out more.  Maybe read a book.

This is the ludicrous aspect of multiculturalism.  The people that the multiculturalists would like to lionize are themselves the exact opposite of multiculturalists, by and large. 

I do prefer buffalo to horse meat.  Good ‘ole cornfed black angus beef is even better.

Jul 28 2010

Justice is blinded by politics

Category: government,illegal alien,justice,legislation — harmonicminer @ 4:08 pm

Here is the introduction to Andy McCarthy’s comments on today’s Arizona Immigration Decision

On a quick read, the federal court’s issuance of a temporary injunction against enforcement of the major provisions of the Arizona immigration law appears specious.

In essence, Judge Susan Bolton bought the Justice Department’s preemption argument, i.e., the claim that the federal government has broad and exclusive authority to regulate immigration, and therefore that any state measure that is inconsistent with federal law is invalid. The Arizona law is completely consistent with federal law. The judge, however, twisted <the>  concept of federal law into federal enforcement practices (or, as it happens, lack thereof). In effect, the court is saying that if the feds refuse to enforce the law the states can’t do it either because doing so would transgress the federal policy of non-enforcement … which is nuts.

There is much more at the link above, including references to other federal court precedents that the judge seems to have decided to ignore… presumably because they would not have led to the decision she appears to want. (She is a Clinton appointee, and presumably leans left, as essentially all of his appointees did.)

There are other federal laws, laws the enforcement of which requires local law enforcement to be directly involved, and even take initiative, on matters ranging from kidnapping to terrorism to the Mann Act to drugs, literally thousands of laws.

There is no precedent for the federal government to sue to stop a state from enforcing federal law in a constitutional way.  Imagine if local peace officers were not allowed to notice if someone was selling illegal drugs (mostly federal laws), or to stop a kidnapping, or arrest someone carrying a grenade launcher (not illegal according to some state laws, but banned federally for most civilians).  Imagine if local peace officers were not allowed to notice someone carrying a sign advocating the assassination of Obama, or the bombing of a federal facility?

That is the ridiculous position we’d find ourselves in, if the notion that local peace officers can’t enforce federal law ever became consistently applied, and that’s why the judge’s decision is ridiculous.

This was a PURELY political lawsuit, brought by a president who wants to buy off the Hispanic vote in 2012, even at the cost of the congress in the 2010 midterms, a president who cynically believes that Hispanic voters are in favor of illegal aliens in large numbers.

I hope he is wrong in ascribing such motives to legal Hispanic voters.  If he is right, it will be interesting to see exactly how much other American citizens care about this.  How many who usually don’t vote can be energized to get to the polls to avoid amnesty (official or unofficial) for illegals?

Not enough, I fear.

Jul 28 2010

Experience Trumps Brilliance

Category: capitalism,economy,left — amuzikman @ 8:55 am

In case you have not yet read this or if you have been living in a bunker and do not know the name Dr. Thomas Sowell … here is his latest, and quite brilliant commentary.  It should be required reading.

Many of the wonderful-sounding ideas that have been tried as government policies have failed disastrously. Because so few people bother to study history, often the same ideas and policies have been tried again, either in another country or in the same country at a later time, and with the same disastrous results.

One of the ideas that has proved to be almost impervious to evidence is the idea that wise and farsighted people need to take control and plan economic and social policies so that there will be a rational and just order, rather than chaos resulting from things being allowed to take their own course. It sounds so logical and plausible that demanding hard evidence would seem almost like nitpicking.

In one form or another, this idea goes back at least as far as the French Revolution in the 18th century. As J.A. Schumpeter later wrote of that era, “general well-being ought to have been the consequence,” but “instead we find misery, shame and, at the end of it all, a stream of blood.”

The same could be said of the Bolshevik Revolution and other revolutions of the 20th century.

The idea that the wise and knowledgeable few need to take control of the less wise and less knowledgeable many has taken milder forms, and repeatedly with bad results as well.

One of the most easily documented examples has been economic central planning, which was tried in countries around the world at various times during the 20th century, among people of differing races and cultures, and under government ranging from democracies to dictatorships.

The people who ran central planning agencies usually had more advanced education than the population at large, and probably higher IQs as well.

The central planners also had far more statistics and other facts at their disposal than the average person had. Moreover, there were usually specialized experts such as economists and statisticians on the staffs of the central planners, and outside consultants were available when needed. Finally, the central planners had the power of government behind them, to enforce the plans they created.

It is hardly surprising that conservatives, such as Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Britain and President Ronald Reagan in the United States, opposed this approach. What is remarkable is that, after a few decades of experience with central planning in some countries, or a few generations in others, even communists and socialists began to repudiate this approach.

As they replaced central planning with more reliance on markets, their countries’ economic growth rate almost invariably increased, often dramatically. In the largest and most recent examples, China and India, people by the millions have risen above these countries’ official poverty rates, after they freed their economies from many of their suffocating government controls.

China, where famines have repeatedly ravaged the country, now has a problem of obesity, not a good thing in itself, but a big improvement over famines.

This has implications far beyond economics. Think about it: How was it even possible that transferring decisions from elites with more education, intellect, data and power to ordinary people could lead consistently to demonstrably better results?

One implication is that no one is smart enough to carry out social engineering, whether in the economy or in other areas where the results may not always be so easily quantifiable. We learn not from our initial brilliance, but from trial-and-error adjustments to events as they unfold.

Science tells us that the human brain reaches its maximum potential in early adulthood. Why, then, are young adults so seldom capable of doing what people with more years of experience can do?

Because experience trumps brilliance.

Elites may have more brilliance, but those who make decisions for society as a whole cannot possibly have as much experience as the millions of people whose decisions they pre-empt. The education and intellects of the elites may lead them to have more sweeping presumptions, but that just makes them more dangerous to the freedom, as well as the well-being, of the people as a whole.

Jul 27 2010

The plain meaning of the 2nd Amendment to the US Constitution

Category: government,guns,liberty — harmonicminer @ 8:48 am

Parsing the Second Amendment

It’s been about a month since the U.S. Supreme Court rendered its decision in McDonald vs. Chicago, a successful challenge to the city’s handgun ban. It was decided on the basis that the 14th Amendment extends the prohibitions of the Bill of Rights to state governments, and thus the Second Amendment applies.

So let’s look at the Second Amendment: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

One gun-hater argument is that this does not guarantee an individual right “to keep and bear Arms,” but is some sort of group right that applies only to members of state militias.

But “people” clearly means individuals in the Fourth Amendment, which stars with “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated . . . .”

Further, it’s pretty clear that the Founders supported private ownership of weapons, not just of muskets, but of entire ships laden with cannons.

That’s because the Constitution gives Congress exclusive power to “grant Letters of Marque”, that is, authorization for a private party to engage in piracy on the high seas against the nation’s enemies.

(Beginning in 1856, many civilized nations signed a treaty renouncing letters of marque, but the United States has not, although it’s been a long time since Congress issued one.)

Next, what did they mean by “militia”? From what I can gather, the general belief at the time was that the state militias would be America’s primary military force, mobilizing against invasions, uprisings or Indian attacks. Thomas Jefferson, for one, was opposed to a standing army. His fear was that if you had all these soldiers drawing pay, you’d be tempted to use them, and his agrarian republic would turn into a rapacious empire.

Even so, Jefferson did not abolish the standing army when he became president; indeed, he founded West Point in 1802 to train officers for the standing army.

We do know what the Founding Fathers meant by “militia,” for there is the federal Militia Act of 1792, which defines the militia as “each and every free able-bodied white male citizen of the respective States, resident therein, who is or shall be of age of eighteen years, and under the age of forty-five years . . . .”

It was not some small group of volunteers, but just about every capable citizen of the day. Gun ownership was a federal mandate, not an option.

“Every citizen . . . shall . . . provide himself with a good musket or firelock . . . or with a good rifle,” along with powder, shot, knapsack and the like. Further, the guns and related gear could not be seized to satisfy unpaid debt or taxes.

But what did “well-regulated” mean? That the militia was supposed to have a lot of rules, as we might understand it today? That inspired me to delve into the English major’s bible, the Oxford English Dictionary, which attempts to track every word in every sense from its first written appearance to the present.

(I’ve long hoped to be rich enough to buy the full 20-volume second edition issued in 1989, but I’ve had to settle for the tiny-print version of the first edition of 1933, issued as a Book-of-the-Month Club premium.)

It provides a relevant definition for “regulated”, “Of troops: properly disciplined” with a 1690 citation and a note that is a rare usage, long obsolete by 1933. But that appears to be what it meant when the Second Amendment was proposed in 1789, that militiamen were supposed to be proficient with firearms, since that was a big part of their discipline.

So you can argue that the Second Amendment is an archaic relic that ought to be repealed, or that it means we should restore regular drills on the village green so that we’ll have a “well-regulated militia.” But there’s no reasonable argument that the Founders wanted the government to have the power to outlaw private gun ownership, especially not when one of the nation’s first laws made it a requirement.

I would add one other point, a fairly important one.

It is the SECOND Amendment, just following free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom to assemble, and the like.

It seems to have been fairly important to the founders, to get such pride of place.

And the Supreme Court has long ago decided that the Bill of Rights applies to state and local governments as well, though it seems to need to reaffirm that principle from time to time.

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