Vin Suprynowicz

In a “move that surprised some observers,” the Chicago Tribune reported Wednesday, attorney Alan Gura, appearing before the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of the federal guard who sued the District of Columbia in 2003, claiming he feels unsafe because he’s not allowed to keep his guns at home, “appeared to concede large chunks of his argument, moving away from an absolutist position on gun rights.”

“He concurred, at one point, with Justice Stephen Breyer that a ban on machine guns or plastic guns” (whatever those are) “would be constitutional because those weren’t the kind of arms normally carried by members of state militias in the early days of the United States.”

Was it a failure of nerve under pressure, or did somebody get to this guy? More »

It’s a long-established tradition of meddlesome governments, seeking to outlaw behaviors which — unlike robbery and assault — produce no “victim” anxious to cooperate with authorities: When the first unenforceable law doesn’t work, ban another activity, previously considered innocuous, to help enforce the first.

When authorities developed radar guns to enhance “speeding ticket” revenues from those seeking to make good time on long stretches of empty highway, citizens started buying radar detectors. Instead of eliminating needless speed limits on rural straightaways (where most accidents are caused by driver fatigue, not speed) and settling for enforcement of the sensible “reckless driving” laws, some money-hungry state governments turned to … banning radar detectors.

And here I thought it was only totalitarian regimes that punished people for tuning in the “wrong” radio signals. More »

Don’t you love it when a member of the ruling class slips up and admits to the peasants what they’re really up to?

For years, I’ve called for the complete shutdown of America’s massive archipelago of mandatory government youth propaganda camps. The defenders of this Largest Jobs Program in History shriek and bellow that I must be “against education,” which is sort of like charging those who opposed slave galleys with being against ocean navigation, or branding those who called for the end of chattel slavery with “having something against growing cotton.”

Read de Tocqueville for his amazement at the high level of literacy — including an ability to discuss complex political issues of the day — found among American workingmen of the 1830s — 20 years before Dewey and Mann launched today’s government-run youth camps on the Prussian model in Massachusetts in 1852.

The average eighth grader in 1870 (when the current coercion regime was just getting started in most states) was far better versed in this nation’s history, far better prepared to articulate a defense of free markets and limited government and sound money — heck, better able to craft a simple grammatical sentence — than today’s typical high school senior, despite today’s per-pupil allocations shooting through the roof. More »

Research conducted by the National Home Education Research Institute in 2001 shows homeschooled students, on average, outperformed their public school peers by 30 to 37 percentile points across all subjects, and that performance gaps impacting minorities and genders are virtually eliminated among the homeschoolers — a fairly strong rebuttal to the racist explanation for public-school failures that “It’s the raw material.”
For those who think the home-schoolers may have faked the tests, there are other measures, which begin to reach beyond the anecdotal.

On May 22, 2003, eighth-grader James Williams of Vancouver, Washington, became the second homeschooler in a row to win the National Geography Bee, taking home a $25,000 scholarship.

Although homeschoolers make up approximately 2 percent of the U.S. school-age population, they made up 12 percent of the 251 spelling bee finalists and 5 percent of the 55 geography bee finalists. The Cato institute actually reports the number of home-schooled winners of the National Spelling Bee (which includes Canadians) runs neck-and-neck with the number of winners who attend U.S. public schools — despite the public-school kids outnumbering the home-schoolers 49-to-1. More »

CDNN Sports of Abilene, Texas is an advertiser in Shotgun News.

Frankly, if I had my way, such folks would simply open the envelope containing my check — or the e-mail with my credit card data — package up that old 1903 Winchester self-loader that I’ve had my eye on, and ship it right to my door. That’s the way it was done in this country for hundreds of years — a period of time during which “mass schoolyard shootings” were unheard of.

But the central government in its wisdom has decided otherwise. They’re still trying to come up with a law that would have prevented Lee Harvey Oswald — assuming we buy the official version — from acquiring the miserable sticky-bolt Italian Carcano with which we all devoutly believe he fired several quick shots from a sixth floor window through the autumn leaves at Dealey Plaza in Dallas 44 years ago, hitting John Connally and John F. Kennedy — once from the front — in a moving car.

(Among the thing they’ve tried? Banning firearms with full-sized magazines and descending pistol grips. You don’t even have to look to know how many of those features are present on the old bolt-action Carcano, do you?) More »

Last year, my own Nevada state senator, Republican Bob Beers, proposed a law which would have “allowed” Nevada government-school teachers to carry concealed weapons on school grounds — if they wished to do so — after passing an arduous training course.

Needless to say, there was a public outcry, and not the outcry one would have expected if one were under the impression Nevada and America are still freedom-loving nations with governments whose powers are limited by the written Constitution.

Since we must apparently spell everything out, slowly, what I mean is that the outcry SHOULD have been: “What? Teachers need some kind of special ‘permission’ to carry firearms, in a nation with a Second Amendment guaranteeing the right to keep and bear arms ‘shall not be infringed,’ and an added 14th amendment prohibiting local authorities from infringing those federal rights — a 14th amendment enacted SPECIFICALLY to prevent the states from enacting ‘black codes’ designed to strip black former slaves of the ‘cheap, easily concealable’ weaponry best suited to defend their womenfolk from white hooded rapists and lynch mobs?” More »

NOTE: This is a column about naughty words.

A local Las Vegas eatery called Paymon’s Cafe, specializing in Middle Eastern cuisine, serves its own version of the popular peach-flavored concoction generally known as the Fuzzy Navel, but dubbing it the “Genie’s Navel” — a reference that may soar over the heads of younger diners.

From 1965 to 1970, Barbara Eden played the mischievous Arab imp freed from captivity by astronaut Larry Hagman in NBC’s situation comedy “I Dream of Jeannie.” But those were the days when the bathrooms in TV cleanser ads miraculously lacked toilets, when Jane Russell had to demonstrate the support features of the Cross-Your-Heart bra by pointing to the garment displayed on a mannequin instead of on her own “fuller figure” — when married sitcom couples couldn’t even occupy the same double bed. More »

Back on Feb. 17 I offered another column on an American of great character and achievement — in this case, George Washington — who wound up better educated with only a few years formal schooling than our high school “scholars” of today. (In fact, John Taylor Gatto goes beyond that — asserting that locking kids up in today’s enervating youth propaganda camps virtually guarantees we will produce no new Washingtons.)

This drew a Feb. 19 letter from a reader who insists we now “live in a different time. … We no longer live in either an agrarian or manufacturing-based economy.

“By and large, children no longer work on family farms in hopes of taking over upon their parents’ death,” this wise reader instructed me, “and the concept that someone can expect to work on an assembly line for 30 years and retire with a comfortable pension has become a relic of a bygone era.

“Our economy has evolved into a technology-based marketplace where competition requires an educated work force. Increasingly, employees must comprehend and use mathematics and science as well as have the ability to communicate effectively.”

Hey! Now I get it. Men like Washington, Franklin and Jefferson went to school for only a few years, yet somehow without benefit of instruction by any credentialed graduates of our fine modern teachers colleges managed to outmaneuver and defeat the greatest army and power in the world, build and run a new nation, lay out entire new cities, and treat with foreign nations with little more than their rudimentary mastery of geometry, trigonometry, French, Latin, philosophy, world history, and so forth. More »

If you ever saw George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead” or any of its many sequels, you know that it’s not enough merely to nail some boards across the front door. The zombies will break in through the windows! Through the cellar! Anywhere! Like Democrats trying to bring in nationalized health insurance through the back door!

In this case, by “expanding eligibility” for a program that they swore up and down would be “only for poor kids, honest.”

In Washington, three Democratic governors told Congress on Feb. 26 that the Bush administration has made it virtually impossible for them to expand coverage under the State Children’s Health Insurance Program to more moderate-income children, as they want to.

The governors said their states seek to enroll tens of thousands of children in the government-subsidized health program because families earning $44,000 to $52,800 “cannot afford” private health insurance, but those efforts are threatened by an August directive from the Bush administration. More »

The question posed by one local letter-writer — “If the Democratic Party can’t successfully stage a convention in a city that hosts hundreds of conventions a year, how will they fare at something really complicated, like running our country?” — is not entirely fair.

Local Clark County (Las Vegas) political conventions, for either major party, have tended in the past to be sparsely attended events, the usual gang of insiders hammering out some platform planks no one will ever read again in an echoing room with balloons on the floor and extra chairs stacked along the walls, and then deciding who can afford the time and expense of traveling on to do essentially the same thing at the state convention a few months hence, before taking the really important vote on where to have lunch.

Clark County Democratic Chairman John Hunt and other local party leaders claimed they were expecting more than 7,000 people at their county convention at Bally’s Hotel and Casino Saturday. They’d certainly seen an unprecedented 117,000 party members flock to local high schools for their presidential precinct caucuses last month.

But after booking a room that held only 5,000 people, turning away thousands of delegates, and offering no streamlined procedure for recognizing and seating even those delegates who had registered in advance, More »