We all realized that the SCOTUS decision in Citizens United was bound to open the floodgates in corporate attempts at manipulating regulatory policy.
It didn’t take long, either.
With the exit of Evan Bayh, Indiana’s centrist Democratic Senator, the playing field was open for a likely Republican win. The Republican candidate is former U.S. Senator and lawyer Dan Coats. Coats is a partner with King & Spalding, a law firm specializing in what they call “Government Advocacy.”
The Citizens United opinion was published January 21, 2010. The next day King & Spalding issued the following paper:
From this paper we learn that “Going forward, a corporation may spend unlimited amounts of its treasury funds to directly engage in efforts to elect or defeat federal candidates through, for example, electronic and print advertisements and direct mail and other means of communicating its position on a candidate to the general public,” and that “every corporation should view the Citizens United decision as providing new tools to assist it in advancing policies and legislation that are in its and its shareholders’ interests.”
While I feared Citizens United would have dire consequences, I didn’t expect to see the effects of the decision quite so quickly, or quite so bluntly, either. Time will tell, but I can see nothing good coming from all of this.
One of the major reasons there is such a large element of folks wishing to disarm the rest of us is the behavior of some of us.
We read or hear stories of some criminal miscreant committing some violence or another with a firearm, and always there is the hue and cry for gun control. I have little difficulty defending the right of the people to keep and bear arms in such cases, as the acts were that of a criminal… not a legitimate, law abiding gun owner. There are criminals and there are crazy people, neither of whom should be allowed access to deadly weapons. Guns in our hands are one way of protection from these bad guys.
But unfortunately there are overtly law abiding folks who go about life in an upstanding fashion for many years, all the while owning and carrying firearms in an overtly legitimate manner, then one day they make an error in judgment that is difficult to justify. It is far more difficult to defend my 2A rights in those cases.
The only problem is that they weren’t wolves. They were pet huskies escaped from the yard of another neighbor, and all the while the shooter was doing such a bad job of trying to kill the "wolves", the dog’s owner was right there trying to stop him; shouting… begging… pleading for the shooter to stop. But he kept shooting, and all the while failing to follow even basic gun safety rules.
All of this was caught on video by one of the estimated 60 witnesses, a tourist from Ireland. In the video you can here her saying, “That’s the problem with America; guns.”
Without much information, and with the shooter claiming justification, it was initially easy for me to excuse the situation and assume the shooter was doing what so many farmers and ranchers have had to do so many times in the past.
Protecting livestock from loose dogs has become a real problem as city dwellers frequently dump unwanted pets in the countryside, perhaps thinking the kindly country folk will adopt them. Unfortunately that seldom happens. We already have our own dogs and don’t need these strays. So the strays frequently pack up and attack the livestock, which is the livelihood of some farm or ranch family. The result has been a pretty automatic response of shooting any stray unfortunate enough to wander onto the farm.
It wasn’t that way in the Florida incident. The shooter did not own either the property or the cattle, and had no relationship with the owner of the calves in the video. Neither did the calves represent the livelihood of the owner. They were on a hobby farm, kept for the purpose of protecting an agricultural tax exemption. The shooter was acting of his on accord and without invitation. He trespassed onto the property to shoot the “wolves” for a reason only he might be able to explain.
Still, when confronted, he claimed he was doing a good deed. He wasn’t initially charged with anything because he claimed the dogs tried to attack him.
A game changer
Once the video hit You Tube the story went viral and the anti-gun crowd went crazy. A Google search finds scores of blogs ranting about the incident, most by anti-gunners and/or animal rights bloggers.
Some blogs are for-profit operations, but many are like mine; a hobby blog. We hobby bloggers aren’t trying to make money; we just use the venue as a means of expression. So I found it rather unsettling when I learned that the shooter had filed a lawsuit against a hobby blogger for that blogger’s admittedly anti-gun, anti-redneck (or hillbilly, as it is called in the blog title) ravings. Although I might agree that he was over the top with his criticism, suing a hobby blogger is a mistake of monumental proportions.
The fellow who shot the dogs was wrong in the actions of that day, and he is damn sure wrong for suing anyone expressing an opinion of those actions. The guy is an asshat on many levels, but with this desperately misguided suit, he is doing all manner of further stupidity that serves only to cement his asshat status in perpetuity.
He will lose the suit, and in all likelihood will lose when he gets sued for filing it in the first place. In the mean time he has placed a heavier burden on honest gun owners everywhere.
To quote that famous philosopher, Bugs Bunny, “What a maroon…”
The world of woo is an astoundingly baffling place. Without any sort of actual evidence, folks walk open-eyed into hoax after hoax, and even after the hoaxers are busted, another crop of snake oil selling charlatans pop up and successfully play to a whole new audience of wide eyed believers.
Every now and then one of them gets busted, but even then the pitchers of woo defend and explain. The ignorance is painful.
It was last summer that I wrote about pastor Steven L. Anderson of the Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Arizona. In his Sunday sermon, Pastor Anderson called on his god to kill President Obama, and the following day, when one of his parishioners showed up carrying guns at an Obama appearance in Phoenix, pastor Anderson went out of his way to praise the dude.
Later on we have Pat Robertson sticking his foot in his mouth (again), saying the earthquake in Haiti was his god’s punishment on a nation that had made a pact with the devil.
Now we have Wiley Drake, a pastor from Orange County, California (and another Baptist, by the way), stating that his god had answered prayers with the death of former Pennsylvania Democratic Congressman John Murtha.
“Maybe God took him out,” wrote Drake. “Maybe God answered our imprecatory prayer that we prayed every 30 days.”
Isn’t it wonderful that we are such a faithful, loving, Christian nation…
Liz, blog matron at I Speak of Dreams, has posted a really interesting compillation of news reports and blog posts regarding the current state of debate about Andrew Wakefield. The list includes both supporters and detractors, so you can easily seperate the wheat from the chaff.
It is clear to me that Wakefield is a quack responsible for an untold amount of suffering among children.
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