Autumn draws near. Soon now, some 12.5 million Americans will purchase a state hunting license as the first annual step into their personal adventure to slay a beast in the wild.
No single tale can tell the story of all these hunters. Some (too few) will be youths who make a single journey to bag a gray squirrel in a suburban oak tree. A tiny number will be grand slam questers spending a fortune to stalk a dall ram on an Alaskan peak.
Between are the millions of nimrod's of all ages and wallet sizes who go afield as often as possible pursuing as many game animals as they can find: sharing in common only the belief that a bad day hunting is better than their best day at work.
A second common thread among all hunters is the basic need for a hunting place to which they can go and the presence of game when they get there.
A relationship with wild animals and wild places may be common to every hunter. But the character of that relationship varies dramatically from one person to the next. Many hunters, probably a majority, achieve only a user's relationship; they go, they hunt, they come home, they don't give the land or the animals another thought. These folks simply expect it to be there for them when they want it.
Some hunters, however, become personally entangled with the places they hunt and the lives of the animals that become their quarry. Something inside these hunters gets caught by the experience and remains in the wild place all year - never ever completely returning to the city.
For these folks the health and vitality of the places they hunt, and the animals they seek, become blurred with their perception of their own personal health and vitality.
Who knows what infinite universe of emotions is felt among these hunters who can no longer separate themselves from their epiphany of the wild: nobody, after all, really gets the straight dope from inside another person's soul. What we can see, understand and describe, however, are their behaviors. Hunter folk who gain a personal relationship with wild places and things habitually act on their values.
We have a word for the sum of their actions - we call it CONSERVATION.
In his classic fable, ALICE IN WONDERLAND, author Louis Carroll has Alice begin her wondrous adventure by falling down a rabbit hole. My observation has been that the hunter’s path to becoming a conservationist would be familiar to Alice.
A fine morning's duck hunt in an autumn gold marsh can leave a person vulnerable to joining Ducks Unlimited. (You are now standing beside the rabbit hole looking in). A couple of good days afield and, whoops, you've volunteered to run the 50-50 fundraiser booth at the next local DU banquet. (Feel the brink of the rabbit hole passing over).
By the time you are on first name basis with the Mad Hatter and the Red Queen you have probably been elected to the Board of Directors of your state chapter of Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, or the Isaac Walton League, or the Wildlife Federation. You are likely helping run the town rod & gun club and for a few of special calling - helping teach Hunter Education classes. Perhaps you have written letters to state legislators or lobbied congressmen arguing for better laws for habitat funding or access to public resources (think Mad Tea Party).
You will have one last thing in common with Alice; you will see wondrous things. The next duck hunt conveys a different essence when you can see where the dollars from your DU booth landed out among a mixed flock of mallards and pintail.
That new law protecting habitat values can be savored as much more than dry words on paper when it is smelled, touched and tasted at dawn on the opening morning of deer season.
Far down the burrow through our conservation 'wonderland' will be a place where the journey comes full circle and we find ourselves greeting that part of our soul we left in a wild place - a greeting of mutual respect for these two aspects of our personal nature - taker and giver back - because our place in the wild was honestly earned by our actions in the human world beyond.

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We remember the Saint Valentine's Day massacre and the gangsters of Prohibition, but this is history we refuse to learn from. Yesterday morning in Baltimore, 16 people were shot, two fatally, in an incident involving rival drug gangs. The body count from this single incident is extreme, but such extreme anomalies prompt the predictable calls for adding gun prohibition on top of existing drug prohibitions. Of course most major cities, like Baltimore, have already implemented a de facto prohibition on gun ownership, as has the entire country of Mexico. In both cases, the result of gun prohibition policies has been complete failure in the goal of reducing violence.

As a nation, America seems incapable of having a rational discussion about root cause and effect when it comes to drugs and violence. The rationale against drugs is simple: using drugs destroys the lives of users, their children and others around them. True enough. But the ravages of prohibition are worse and have a multiplying effect: prohibition leads to huge drug profits, which leads to gangs, which leads to murders and terrorized neighborhoods, which leads to urban blight and rural despair. Drug use harms users, but jail time makes them permanently unemployable and traps them in its pervasive criminal culture. Prisons might as well give out diplomas for all the lessons learned in them; and many gangs wouldn't even exist if it weren't for their ability to exploit the prison system to recruit members.

But we already know this. We just refuse to act on our knowledge or to insist our politicians do so.

Our policies now exist for their own sake; we have lost track of what started the call for prohibition in the first place: a desire to improve and save lives.

Like obsessed gamblers, our response to failed policies so far has been to "double-down" by spending more on enforcement and incarceration, and gradually accepting more and more restrictions and intrusions on our private lives and personal liberties. Like the children’s rhyme of the old lady who swallowed the spider to catch the fly and on and on until she finally ate the horse and died (of course), our war on drugs has created one casualty of civil society after another. Our policies now exist for their own sake; we have lost track of what started the call for prohibition in the first place: a desire to improve and save lives.

Second Amendment advocates have special cause for concern. Ultimately, the impulse to regulate guns and the impulse to regulate what consenting adults ingest, inject or smoke comes from the same Utopian desire for an avuncular government exercising control over our daily decisions, including personal safety. Events like that in Baltimore inevitably bring out calls for increased gun prohibition and other restrictions on firearms ownership and carrying. The general public reads about killings and is easily swayed to agree there is a “gun problem” instead of a diverse range of more complex public policy problems, including prohibition. If we are serious about protecting our gun rights from those looking for a quick fix, we must to be proactive in informing the public about the real causes of violence. We also need to take the lead in promoting real solutions.

Let the farmers in Peru and Afghanistan (or Kentucky) grow whatever they want to--once drugs were legalized the price would collapse and the warlords of the Taliban and FARC would have to get real jobs.

Speaking of solutions, consider this alternative: take the money currently spent on drug interdiction, policing, and incarceration and spend it on education and drug treatment. Imagine America finally using its resources to ensure every child has a chance at a real education. Imagine the results from fighting drug addiction as what it is: a public health problem. Go a step further and apply the same principles internationally: let the farmers in Peru and Afghanistan (or Kentucky) grow whatever they want to--once drugs were legalized the price would collapse and the warlords of the Taliban and FARC would have to get real jobs. Domestically, once the link between drugs and violence is severed, the profit motive for murder would be gone and violence involving guns would also decline along with misguided calls for gun prohibition. The anti-gun forces would have lost one of their biggest bait-and-switch ploys to use against us.

Is this just a pipe dream or a real possibility? Are you willing to challenge the conventional thinking on prohibition in order to protect your Second Amendment rights?

Different hat, different blog; same message:

Attacks on Sonia Sotomayor by right-wing gun rights groups don't hold up.

Feel free to post here, there or anywhere, as Dr. Seuss might have said.

Much has been made of Sonia Sotomayor’s decision in Maloney v. Rice, which affirmed the right of New York to deny the right to bear nunchukas to its citizens. In the decision she supported, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld the New York ban on nunchukas, noting that the landmark Heller vs. DC decision (which affirmed the individual right to keep and bear arms) applied solely and explicitly to federal law, not state law, based on that ruling itself and because of the contradictory rulings in other standing Supreme Court rulings.

While opponents of the president have seized on the opportunity to paint Sotomayor as a clear and notorious gun grabber, those same voices have ignored the fact of what Heller actually says. Here is an excerpt from the actual case, as authored by Supreme Court Justice and notorious liberal activist (joking!), Antonin Scalia:

“Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited… We also recognize another important limitation on the right to keep and carry arms. Miller said, as we have explained, that the sorts of weapons protected were those “in common use at the time.” 307 U. S., at 179. We think that limitation is fairly supported by the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of ‘dangerous and unusual weapons.' ”

(Like maybe nunchuckas?)

At the time Heller came out, I noted it was only a minor victory, filled with qualifications and caveats. For instance, the Heller decision includes a virtual invitation from Scalia to the states and local jurisdictions to create so-called gun free zones. Writing for the majority, Scalia notes that the Heller ruling should not “cast doubt on . . . laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings.” The Heller judgment also confirmed the government’s ability to restrict the types of guns (and nunchuckas) that may be owned, as noted above.

The narrow victory represented by Heller said only that the federal government may not prohibit individuals from keeping and carrying loaded firearms (including handguns) in their homes, but that government can still require a permit before even that narrow right is allowed.

This unfortunately narrow ruling is not the opinion of a circuit judge or a liberal activist—it represents the signed opinion of justices Alito, Kennedy, Roberts, Thomas and Scalia. And yet Sotomayor—a circuit judge with no authority to overturn Supreme Court  rulings—has been labeled as an anti-gun crusader on the basis of upholding the Heller decision in the single 2nd Amendment case ever before her. I propose this “case” of hysterics against Sotomayor is not about Sotomayor or even President Obama, but about stirring up the passions of the faithful rightwing and especially rightwing donors for pious PACs and other fundraising organizations. Sorry guys, but no sale. In fact, if anything, supporters of Heller should be celebrating the findings of the Congressional Research Service report on Sotomayor which found:

“Perhaps the most consistent characteristic of Judge Sotomayor’s approach as an appellate judge has been an adherence to the doctrine of stare decisis, i.e., the upholding of past judicial precedents.”

Sorry, but that’s just not the biography of a radical.

Happily, there are now three cases with the potential to expand the Heller ruling to states which are likely to be heard by the Supreme Court: Maloney v. Rice (Second Circuit), National Rifle Assn of America v. City of Chicago and Village of Oak Park (Seventh Circuit) and Nordyke v. King (Ninth Circuit). The ruling of the Ninth Circuit claimed that the 2nd Amendment—and therefore the Heller ruling—does apply to states by virtue of the “Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment,” a legal theory known as “incorporation.” Both the Seventh Circuit and the Second Circuit (of which Sotomayor is currently a member) ruled that, based on what Heller actually says, the Supreme Court had not ruled that states are bound by the 2nd Amendment.

But what the Second Court ruling (signed by Sotomayor) went on to say was:

“[where], as here, a Supreme Court precedent ‘has direct application in a case, yet appears to rest on reasons rejected in some other line of decisions, the Court of Appeals should follow the case which directly controls, leaving to the Supreme Court the prerogative of overruling its own decisions.”

In other words, the Maloney v Rice decision is an invitation to the Supreme Court to re-examine that case, and to apply Heller to the states if they so choose. Given that Sotomayor helped write this decision knowing there was a 5-to-4 majority in favor of Heller gives a decidedly different view of her objectives than those portrayed by the right-wing fundraising groups assailed against her. AHSA sincerely hopes—and predicts—that the Supreme Court will use the opportunity of these new legal challenges to firearms restrictions to expand the Heller decision explicitly to state law. Further, we hope the narrow interpretations of Heller are expanded. Given Sotomayor’s strong history of supporting victim’s rights, we are optimistic that she will side with the majority.

Much has been made of Sotomayor’s statement that “ [she] would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life.” In contrasting Sotomayor’s life story to that of retiring Justice Souter (who voted against the Heller decision) the following quote by gun policy researcher Gary Kleck is instructive. Says Kleck:

“. . . though blacks were generally less likely than whites to own guns, they were more likely than whites to own solely for protection. In particular, 9.8% of all Illinois black female respondents [to the Illinois survey cited in the book] owned a gun solely for protection, compared to only 2.4% for the white males . . . The common stereotype held among gun control proponents of a Daniel Boone lingering on from yesterday should perhaps give way to that of a black nurse hoping to make it to tomorrow.”

We think a wise Latina from the Bronx will be the better one to understand that.