Long enough post yet? Nooooo... I did enjoy a cocktail in meanwhile.
Here is what I think the super secret undercover spies and other international men of mystery often miss while playing craps at the Casino Royal...
James Bond may know his way around the fake girls, meanwhile, it is the treatment we receive from worldly cashiers at the grocery store that is the telling symbol of our own humanity. Lead shot is the license to kill and it is designed for the express purpose of protecting our liberties. The arguments about how it all works is not what is important, the real debate is about how we take the shots: standing or rolling over. The enemy is cloaked under the wording of a new age environmental justice and I think the warning offered before in this post is well worth heeding.
Oooohh... it's a bash.
Should there be plenty to be mightily embarrassed about what we do in this country? Sure bet, though we'd probably be able to state that of any country. So, what should we be embarrassed about? I would easily admit that we must not have a very high ideal of how government operates: they are not there to help. But institutions are just that, set them aside and you have people - the individuals we all are and that's where I think those most imbued with the concept of freedom are found predominantly in the US. The opposite pull is the concept of equality which is evidently on the high altar of worship in Europe, continental western Europe in particular. The problem is that both freedom and equality cancel each other out, you can pretend all you want it is not physically possible to have both. Thomas Jefferson clearly stated he was for freedom. At about the same time, an equivalent French thinker had spurted out that freedom could go to heck - as long as there was equality. A telling difference, I think.
How does this translate into practice
Amazingly our IRS code is labeled a voluntary tax. A twist that may make us grin... Meanwhile the concept is profound and it is the same with gun laws. Neither us as individuals neither our politicians have ever thought that the system should be equally applied with the brutal force of out-and-out mandates and bans. As evidenced with arbitrary firearm rules, not much is ever really totally outlawed, there is always ways and loopholes that are admittedly very risky to put into practice and very hard to find beneath a thick layer of bureaucratic incompetence. Dig hard enough and persevere long enough and you might find just what you want - and indeed, the practical effect is that one simply has to give up... This is a forced voluntary compliance.
Why else the tens of thousands of pages of tax codes? Why else the endless business and legal regulatory environment, because the state is highly unwilling to make us do things at the point of a gun. At least in appearances. Thus, we are rarely confronted with a flat out denial of rights or anything else for that matter, instead, we are freely shown the door to the oubliettes of red tape and paper work where there is no such thing as equal outcome for equal treatment. That's the US and those are the symptoms of complicated and harsh laws that are applied with some lenience and lots of incompetence.
The strength of Americans is to resist voluntary compliance. This doesn't mean we aren't led anywhere dangerous, it's just that we weren't pushed into it. There is a huge difference.
The difference is stark compared with the rest of the world where mostly the people are comfortable with the democratic choices they efficiently are not asked to accept. The state knows best. Car control, CO2 rules, housing rules, driving rules, employment rules, store opening times, nationalized businesses, nationalized trade unions... everything is either obligatory or forbidden and strictly codified and enforced with equal stupor. Violent negative answers routinely come down the pipe from a state agency that orders you to crush your car, rip out your furnace, bulldoze your home, give up on your education and cancel your healthcare procedures after a simple routine compliance in-home inspection. That foreign state of mind is wholly accepted as evidenced by the attitude of those who walk away -half alive- from the invasive procedure happy with the feeling that the state loves them. Even those angered with the deal are not questioning the fact there should or should not be a test, they are searching for an alternate outcome, a redress of sorts, like it was their fault they were being battered. Those rules are very simple and concise but they are applied with harsh might, harsh albeit equal might.
In those places, unlike in the US, the agents of control were let in without any call for legal articulable suspicion or any form of warrant. State prerogative trumps all. The anomalies we see in the US with routine DUI checkpoints, airport security, environmental edicts and self-defense that does not follow the castle doctrine are the standard modus operandi in most of the rest of the world. The rest of the world kind of broken between those who follow the modern French Code Napoleon system of affirmative legal proceedings and those who remained in the old pre-revolutionary European system rooted in the Middle Age and similar to Anglo-Saxon justice where we remain innocent until proven guilty, or something like that.
Is the difference real? Is it just a matter of rolling over?
Foreign tourists are confronted with this mode switch when they enter the US. I often wonder how they take it all in after first sizing up the gobbledygook explanations of the sweet hostesses in the aeroplane. Then, come the complicated encounters with each of the immigration and customs and agriculture departments. What a jungle and how it all must seem perplexing to, say, a European because none of those agents really try to force-check anything, they rather operate on an honor system and will tediously hold you up to your word for not living up to what you declared to them. Evidently this does nothing to prevent en masse illegal immigration and illegal extended stays and no one cares about it much until some point in the future when facts catch up with the individuals who tricked themselves into voluntary non-compliance. It's weird, still it is all designed to prove guilt -eventually- and not be concerned at all with proving innocence on the spot. Thus the queasiness tourists report upon feeling they were treated like criminals... and asked compromising questions... like on a bad cop show. The feel of freedom is strange because it never is a mere formality.
Travels to Europe for us show what appears to be wide open and friendly porticoes through the airport lobby. All is smooth. The treatment is equal for everyone from every country and it involves no yelling, screaming and obvious trip-up questioning. It all seems nice until you consider that the reason it is so is because you were asked to prove your innocence. A mere simple formality that puts the smile on the custom agent. Showing clean hands carries the heavy acceptance that there was nothing voluntary about the act and that it came with the full recognition that the purpose of this type of border control was to give you a pass. Guilty, you are as a matter of default. It all goes smoothly and quietly and the fear of the control guards is very palpable and, unlike in the US, border control occurs both on entry and exit.
It is the difference between having your innocence validated every day and at every state checkpoint and feeling good about it as opposed to living your life in true innocence that is free of the permanent guilt stigma. With that in mind, crossing into the US borders is actually a comfortable passage in spite of its hassles. Freedom is old and comfortable while equality comes with a permanent concern for class envy and group identification where individuals are commanded by something very different than voluntary compliance. Which of the two makes for the pursuit of happiness? -Just look where people smile.
There are many other visible signs of this big changeover.
Driving down the highway, continental Europe is filled with mechanisms to deliver fines that cannot be contested. There are also multiple automated identity checkpoints. It is all designed to filter out the innocent down to a mere trickle - while the fines-by-mail treatment for everyone else is harsh. Ok, so what? It's not like we are immune from state trooper action here, but, overall we are not particularly apprehensive of driving past a police cruiser because we count on them being honestly fair thanks to constitutional limitations on the government. And we do believe in being innocent until proven guilty. The difference in numbers: many typical US drivers have never gotten any traffic ticket... and elsewhere in the world... ho ho ho... Merry Christmas...
Shopping carts come on wheels too
Go shopping at a grocery store, one in a big city: we totally take for granted how much freedom we have and how much respect the store manager and all the clerks and cashiers give us. We are the innocent customers. We can enter and exit freely. In case of a price check our word is good enough. We can also pick up one of the bulky items stored outside on the simple word of the cashier. Freedom is amazingly liberating. Now, for shopping in Europe... stores are fitted with one-way entrance and exit gates, cashiers question everyone's honesty, and often, perform systematic handbag inspections, and there is no way of any form of trust possible on a price check, and everything is under lock down, and even the caddies are securely chained to the wall. Europeans shrug and find this natural. Why not, if you consider it established that the customer is a guilty pilferer. The standing accusation is represented by the one-way entrance cattle stop and the no-jury verdicts are delivered by the sitting cashier while the customer stands at the bar. So there, instead of pouncing only on the eventual shoplifter everyone is as good as accused of being guilty - equally guilty. That's what it means to roll over and with all those gates, European shoplifting is through the roof. What would their innocence be good for?
Gloriously, Americans do not accept being told or being accused of anything by anyone, we want nothing to stand in our way. Though it is easy to conceive that this attitude may not necessarily always be the safest, it is nonetheless the healthiest. The best antidote to just rolling over in the face of any on coming decisions from above is... individual freedom... the freedom spoken of in a bunch of constitutional amendments and given teeth in the second... and remember, the base ingredient of the second amendment is lead.
How we treat the leaded question is highly dependant on how much we prefer freedom over equality and the answer has nothing to do with the technicalities of birdly ingestions and what form of lead oxide is actually noxious. The only consideration for equality loving environmentalists and other sanctimonious goody two-shoes is that birds are people too, bugs are people too, rocks are people too and what matters most to them is to believe in the pretense of brotherly care for alternative creatures - the softer the fur and the more helpless the eyes, the more heartfelt the empathy. - Give me a tearing baby seal ! So now, us, we wonder why guns are not people too? and why automobiles are not people too? and why horses and cows and dogs and chickens and pigs and bacteria and power plants and factories are not people too? Well, that is simply because those items and creatures are the engines of freedom. Thus, they are in the same crosshair of those who seek tyrannical force to senselessly spread around the misery of equality. And ooops, capitalism being the tool of free markets we have to wonder whether capitalists are people too... Ohhh...
Lead is the metal of freedom.
The call for a lead ban is a call for a ban on freedom and for its replacement with a theory that puts the birds and the swamps on an equal footing with us humans. I resent that. If you think it is far fetched, realize too that the traditionally reactionary Swiss have been snuck a constitutional re-melt that includes both the environment as the feared-for supreme being and the erasure of the portions that had to do with protecting gun rights... good God. -Who? Gaia? They ask.
Tell me what your supermarket looks like and I'll tell you in what aisle you'll find the ammunition. Around my place, most of them carry stuff, for shotguns, rifles and handguns, and doughnuts to enjoy the sweet taste of freedom.
Evidently, I don't mind loading tons of time on double-length posts, and I do load them like a 500 NE - ahem - thanks for reading along. I think it is an important fight.
