The Tyranny of Arbitrary Laws

Is the United States still the “Land Of The Free”? Well, most of us certainly go through our day believing we are.

Part of that belief is an assumption that, as long as we don’t try to do something wrong, illicit, or illegal, we won’t run afoul of the law. We also assume that if someone DOES blatantly break the law, they’ll be punished for it. Quickly and fairly, those people will be carted off to jail.

In years past both of those may have been safe assumptions, yet increasingly they’re no longer the case.

We’re seeing reports almost daily: from the incarceration of the 19-year-old young man who cracked a joke (in extremely bad taste, I agree, but still …just a joke) on Facebook, to the arrest of the 8th-grade kid who refused to remove his NRA t-shirt, to the non-arrest of David Gregory when he openly flouted the actual gun laws of Washington DC late last year.

When kids are threatened with jail for merely wearing clothes, and TV personalities are excused for breaking the law because prosecuting them “would not promote public safety…”, we’ve established two sets of laws:

In NYC, it may soon be a Crime to …describe a Criminal?

(photo courtesy of New York Post)

When I first heard about the Community Safety Act last year, I assumed it wouldn’t amount to anything and would quickly blow over. Back then I reasoned that surely even New York City wasn’t stupid enough to tie the hands of their police to that degree.

If there are issues that exist with the City’s Police Department itself, fine: go in and suspend/fire the bad cops. Heck, fire an entire precinct, if need be. But any legislation which completely neutered the police force would result in far more harm than any potential good.

So yeah, I figured cooler heads would prevail here, and that’d be that.

*sigh*    When will I ever learn?

Disarming innocent people doesn’t PROTECT innocent people…

An excellent analysis…

YouViewed/Editorial

A Must Read From David Kopel

 

 

 

 

” Has the rate of random mass shootings in the United States increased? Over the past 30 years, the answer is definitely yes. It is also true that the total U.S. homicide rate has fallen by over half since 1980, and the gun homicide rate has fallen along with it. Today, Americans are safer from violent crime, including gun homicide, than they have been at any time since the mid-1960s.

 

Why the increase? It cannot be because gun-control laws have become more lax. Before the 1968 Gun Control Act, there were almost no federal gun-control laws. The exception was the National Firearms Act of 1934, which set up an extremely severe registration and tax system for automatic weapons and has remained in force for 78 years.

 

Since gun controls today are far stricter than at…

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Thomas Sowell: “Invincible Ignorance”

Liberalism: creating the exact OPPOSITE of its stated intent since the ’60s.

Gds44's Blog

Invincible Ignorance – Thomas Sowell – Townhall.com.

By Thomas Sowell

Must every tragic mass shooting bring out the shrill ignorance of “gun control” advocates?

The key fallacy of so-called gun control laws is that such laws do not in fact control guns. They simply disarm law-abiding citizens, while people bent on violence find firearms readily available.

If gun control zealots had any respect for facts, they would have discovered this long ago, because there have been too many factual studies over the years to leave any serious doubt about gun control laws being not merely futile but counterproductive.

Places and times with the strongest gun control laws have often been places and times with high murder rates. Washington, D.C., is a classic example, but just one among many.

When it comes to the rate of gun ownership, that is higher in rural areas than in urban…

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What’s next? A ticket for drinking coffee?

I thought that Indiana was a better-than-your-average-nanny state.  I mean, we’re in flyover country (Illinois doesn’t count, because they have Chicago and it’s on a large body of water).  We’re not like New York, Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco.  But now a statewide smoking ban is going into effect on July 1st.  And in the same editorial which mentions that, our local conservative newspaper, the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel, gave fair warning of another intrusive overstep which may be in the works.

According to the Greenfield Daily Reporter:

Police across Indiana are calling on lawmakers to beef up a new state law that bars texting-while-driving so that it covers all activities that can distract motorists behind the wheel.

All activities?  Really?  I’ve seen a lot of strange things, especially out in LA-LA land, where folks commute an hour or more each way.

For instance, I’ve seen:

RoboCop is coming to a town near you

***Full credit goes to Phoebe’s Detention Room blog for alerting me to this. Please read her full post.***

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Am I the only one who’s a might weirded out by this?

From Phoebe’s Detention Room:

The Federal Aviation Administration has allowed several police departments to use drones across the U.S. They are controlled from a remote location and use infrared sensors and high-resolution cameras.

Chief Deputy Randy McDaniel of the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office in Texas told The Daily that his department is considering using rubber bullets and tear gas on its drone.

“Those are things that law enforcement utilizes day in and day out and in certain situations it might be advantageous to have this type of system on the UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle),” McDaniel told The Daily.

I, for one, am not thrilled with this news. The army of cameras which snapped my photo and sent me a speeding ticket were bad enough. Now we’re going to have flying robots in the sky armed with rubber bullets and tear gas? OK, everyone that thinks that we have nothing to worry about here, please raise your hand.

Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

You just know that some bright boy somewhere is going to get the idea of incorporating Artificial Intelligence™ into one of these babies eventually (hey, I watch sci-fi movies, so I know these things).

And as soon as THAT happens, I’m gonna hear the words, “You are illegally parked on private property. You have 20 seconds to move your vehicle“, and I won’t even get the chance to say “I told ya’ so”.