Articles by Herschel Smith

All my buddies have to get fed too.

In the post, which has so far had 57.7k likes and generated almost 1700 comments, “Bennett the Hound” can be seen carrying his stuffed animal toys to his feeding and drinking bowls, and a caption that says: “Anybody else’s dog make sure their toys are fed and watered or is it just mine…?”

Who’s the good boy?

Hey, can I get a hand here?

Guard Donkey.  And guard donkeys were sent to protect a Northern Colorado herd from wolves.  I predict the wolves won’t be a problem as long as the donkeys are around.

Sometimes animals are violent.

Yellowstone National Park tourists witnessed a heart-breaking scene Sunday involving a subadult male grizzly bear that was savagely attacked by an adult male bear that was courting his mother.

Moments beforehand, the mother bear also attacked the subadult, perhaps in an attempt to scare him away from the boar.

During the subsequent attack by the male grizzly, estimated to weigh more than 500 pounds, the 148-pound, 3-year-old subadult sustained severe injuries and was later euthanized by park staff.

The incident has been discussed widely via social media. Park aficionados have expressed sorrow and struggled to grasp why this occurred. Some blamed tourists for crowding the roadside bears, perhaps altering their behavior.

Anger also stemmed from an incident the previous week, during which tourists illegally tossed food to the subadult bear.

But the presence of tourists does not appear to have been a factor in causing the attack. Adult male grizzly bears hoping to mate with female bears will attack and sometimes kill nearby cubs or young bears, even in the deepest wilderness.

“The subadult is confirmed to be a male, which is not going to be tolerated by another male in the territory,” Trent Sizemore, a veteran wildlife photographer from West Yellowstone, Montana, told FTW Outdoors. “No humans pushed any of these bears to cause this specific incident.”

What sort of dummy has to be told this?  What sort of dummy thinks this is somehow not representative of how wild animals behave?

This lady has Sandhill Cranes knocking at her door all day every day.  Hey, if there’s food there, they’ll come.

Raccoon visits.  WiscoDave, you out there?

This dog went for a very long swim.

This goat walks again.

This dog can perform tricks.

Lifelong cowboy gets his final wish of being with a horse again.  I miss riding myself.

I WILL NOT leave my friend.

News.

A blue-ribbon commission has recommended new names for nine Army bases named after Confederate leaders, including Fort Bragg, which will be recommended to be renamed Fort Liberty, the panel disclosed Tuesday.

The panel has recommended that another eight Army bases be renamed for a diverse group of individuals with ties to the Army.

ABC News was first to report the full list of recommended names by the Congressional Naming Commission created by Congress to suggest name changes by 2023 for U.S. military installations named after Confederate generals and leaders.

While Fort Bragg is the only base suggested as being renamed after a concept the other suggestions for the other eight Army bases include a diverse group of individuals with ties to Army history.

If approved, the nine bases will include the first to be ever named for women or African Americans, a National Guard facility in Puerto Rico already had the distinction of being the first ever named for a Latino.

The other bases to be renamed are Fort Hood in Texas, Fort Rucker in Alabama, Fort Polk in Louisiana, Fort Benning and Fort Gordon in Georgia and Fort A.P. Hill, Fort Lee and Fort Pickett in Virginia.

The panel has recommended that Fort Hood, Texas, be renamed after Richard E. Cavazos, the first Latino to reach the rank of a four-star general in the Army.

Fort Gordon, Georgia, will be renamed after Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Army general who led all allied forces in Europe during World War II and later became president.

Fort Lee, Virginia, will be named after two individuals: Arthur Gregg, a former three-star general involved in logistics — the only living individual for whom a base will be named — and Charity Adams, the first African-American woman to be an officer in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps.

Good Lord.

I ask again, if you’re still in the U.S. military, why?

Via Ken, news on what rising prices mean to logistics.

It’s a problem many have been hearing about for months now: the high price of gas. But what many who aren’t in the industry might not realize is how the skyrocketing cost of diesel fuel, in particular, is hurting truckers.

While the Energy Information Administration said gas prices are down by one penny in the last week, that’s not giving any relief to drivers, who say some companies are being forced to lay off employees.

That’s the case for Omar Edwards of North Carolina, a truck driver who owns and operates his own company. He’s had to let some employees go, and is looking for other ways to maximize profit.

“I’m heading over to Atlanta to actually pick up one of my drivers,” Edwards said. “We’re going to be team driving right now.”

Speaking to NewsNation local affiliate WJZY, Edwards said this could lead to less trucks on the road.

“A lot of these trucks you see now are not going to be here anymore. A lot of these trucks are a small company like myself that just can’t afford to pay these high prices,” Edwards said.

AAA on Tuesday recorded a record national average of $5.57 for a gallon of diesel fuel.

Preventing pipelines and refusal to issue drilling permits has consequences.  In this case fewer trucks on the road, less goods delivered to market, and empty grocery shelves.

In related news North of the border, Canadian farmers will continue to suffer under the yoke of tyranny.

CALGARY, AB: The Western Canadian Wheat Growers are shocked by the depth of the impact of the federal government’s proposed 30% reduction in fertilizer emissions. Fertilizer Canada has had an independent analysis of the effects of the proposed emissions reduction.

The analysis by Meyers Norris Penny (MNP) calculates that “If Canada adopt(s) the EU model, the potential economic impact of reduced fertilizer use would be devastating to Canadian farmers”. The calculations show that by 2030, the prairie provinces will have the following losses:

• Alberta – $2.95B loss in their Canola and Spring Wheat crops
• Saskatchewan – $4.61B loss in their Canola and Spring Wheat crops
• Manitoba – $1.58B loss in their Canola, Corn and Spring Wheat crops

Droughts are natural.  Famines are man-made.

Report from Dallas, Texas.

Lots and lots of Coyote attacks, lots of pets killed, lots of stalking.  This quote nearly floored me.

At the meeting, many of the residents wanted to know why the city didn’t already have a plan for managing coyote behavior. They have been a part of the ecosystem for decades, and are often spotted in residential areas throughout the greater Dallas-Fort Worth area.

“Where the city is on its response is in the exact same place where every other community that has a wildlife problem starts out,” Henry said. “That’s how government works, any government. We’re always behind the curve.”

“So White Rock Valley is the first community in Dallas to ever have this problem?” asked Kristy Feil, who has lived in the neighborhood for 19 years. “I mean, we’re the first?”

The truth is, yes. The city officials couldn’t say definitively that in all of Dallas’s history there hasn’t been an attack, but violent coyote interactions are so incredibly rare that it’s not surprising it took so long for them to form a plan. Urban coyotes are, the vast majority of the time, out of sight and out of mind.

“I’m starting to understand why we’re having more of an issue recently,” Feil said after the meeting. “There’s no one to blame. We’ve just got to figure out how to handle it.”

Sure there’s someone to blame.  Society is to blame.

You don’t manage Coyote behavior.  They will do what they do.  They are pests.  They are a nuisance.  There isn’t a school of rehabilitation to send them to.  What a silly and childish notion.  Manage Coyote behavior.

Ridiculous.

You shoot them.  If discharging firearms within the city limits is illegal, then they need to look at changing the law, or begin to carry crossbows, hunt them down, and kill them all.

Dean Weingarten.

According to the Taylor County Sheriff’s Office, authorities received a report of a bear attack at a home on Castle Road in the Township of Medford Friday around 11 p.m.

In a press release, authorities report a husband and wife noticed the bear eating from their bird feeder, opened the window and yelled at the bear to scare it off. The bear then turned and charged at the home, breaking through the window and began attacking the couple, while their kids were asleep in their bedrooms.

This correspondent was able to talk with Larry Woebbeking, Sheriff of Taylor County.  While Sheriff Woebbeking was not at the scene of the attack, he had talked to an investigating officer who was. Larry had interesting information to add. He was sure of his facts.

The bottom of the window was about three to four feet above the ground. The bear had to jump up to get through the window. The window appears to be a typical northern Wisconsin type which slides vertically up and down, with an insect screen on the outside. The screen is gone on the picture from the sheriffs office, so the bear probably clawed the screen out as it came inside.

After the wife yelled at the bear, the bear forced its way through the window and attacked the wife. The husband came to the aid of his wife, interjecting his body between them. The bear attacked him. He suffered severe bites to the neck and may have had an arm broken.

The wife, freed from the bear attack, accessed a knife and attacked the bear mauling her husband. The bear turned its attention back to the wife, which allowed the husband to escape momentarily. He was able to access a 9mm Sig handgun. He quickly returned and killed the bear.

Dean goes on to make interesting points about female black bears not displaying strong maternal instincts, and that 9 out of 10 times a female black bear will abandon cubs rather than face danger.

This bear had something else in mind.  Perhaps food.

I would never have allowed my wife to open the window and scream without having a firearm nearby.  And this is yet another instance of the need to carry inside the home.

From a reader, this report on new weaponry for SOCOM.

It has a 5.5″ barrel.  The propaganda at the link says, “One was to roughly match the ballistic performance of the Soviet-developed 7.62x39mm round, retaining accuracy and power when fired from a weapon with an extremely short barrel. The other includes a heavier bullet that is subsonic and ideal for suppression and close-quarters combat.”  It will “blast out of tight spots with a wallop similar to a full-size assault rifle.”

No it won’t.  It shoots the 5.56X45 and the 300 BO rounds.  The 5.5″ barrel will cause a tremendous loss of bullet velocity.

SOCOM released a statement: “After years of continuous market research, USSOCOM HQ has concluded that Sig Sauer is the only vendor that can fulfill USSOCOM’s need for the commercial PDW requirement.”

The only vendor.  Sig is the only vendor who could fabricate a PDW that shoots a bullet.  Any kind of bullet.  Pistol caliber or rifle caliber that behaves like a pistol round because of reduced muzzle velocity.

The only vendor.

My question is this.  Who at Sig has what on SOCOM?  What is this love affair with Sig and why does it exist?

I wouldn’t want to go into a gun fight with that thing.  Guys, make your rifles rifles, and your pistols pistols.  Stop trying to marry the two.

New Featured Article.  Duke University’s Arguments Against A Statutory Second Amendment.

And leave comments there.

Views from Florida.

I have yet to see any compelling evidence that tourism has suffered in the 25 states that have enacted constitutional carry. And, as I recall, the policies of deregulation, low taxes and letting free people make their own decisions have actually significantly boosted tourism and permanent migration to places like Texas and our beautiful Florida.

Lastly, just to highlight the popularity of constitutional carry, not one of the 25 states with the policy on its books has even held a hearing, let alone a vote, to repeal its law.

That’s what they argued in South Carolina too.  Tourism around Charleston will be affected.  It wasn’t true.  It was always a lie.

I can assure you, as a resident of an open carry state, no one cares, or if they do, they get used to it.

The Regulatory Review links a paper by Joseph Blocher of Duke University arguing against state preemption laws that prohibit more restrictive gun control statutes by cities and counties than instituted by the state itself.  The paper is entitled “Cities, Preemption, and the Statutory Second Amendment.”

He argues:

As a practical matter, though, nothing has done more to shape contemporary gun regulation than state preemption laws, which fully or partially eliminate cities’ ability to regulate guns at the local level. Although the claim is admittedly hard to prove, it is likely that these preemption laws—nearly all of which were adopted in the past forty years—have kept more gun regulations off the books in the past two decades than has the Second Amendment in more than two centuries (including in the nearly 1,500 cases filed since Heller). In effect, preemption laws restrict gun laws in precisely the places—cities—where they are most viable16 and provide broader protection for the right to keep and bear arms than the Constitution has ever done.

Further, he remarks:

… some states have enacted strict prohibitions. These laws, which Blocher deems “unmistakably partisan,” attach penalties to local attempts to regulate. Republican-controlled legislatures have enacted statutes that threaten local officials with fines, loss of funds, and removal from office. In Florida, for example, local leaders who impermissibly regulate firearms can face a $5,000 fine and personal liability for up to $100,000 in damages.

As long as the law encourages increased liberty, we like state preemption laws.  They are a good thing, and they will continue to expand to other states where they don’t currently exist.  This blog is well known as devoted second amendment absolutists, and so when someone proposes a scholarly fisking of our doctrines, we take notice.  He cites Heller’s “approval of longstanding forms of gun regulation” (page 17) and flatly states that local ordinances are “entitled to some respect, either for its own sake or as a proxy for collective wisdom.”  Collective wisdom has nothing whatsoever to do with God-given rights, nor the rights recognized in the constitution.

To begin with, we have long held that Heller was a weak decision.

Heller offers a Second Amendment cleaned up so that it can safely be brought into the homes of affluent Washington suburbanites who would never dream of resistance-they have too much sunk into the system–but who might own a gun to protect themselves from the private dangers that, they believe, stalk around their doors at night. Scalia commonly touts his own judicial courage, his willingness to read the Constitution as it stands and let the chips fall where they may. But Heller is noteworthy for its cowardice.

The common formula for absolving Scalia of problems and weakness in Heller is to claim that it was the best he could get out of the court, or otherwise, it was the beginning of a development in legal doctrine, the balance of which had to be developed and applied in lower courts before it could be carried any further.  But it is still noteworthy that neither Heller nor McDonald recognized the right to self defense with weapons outside the home.

Also, note that the term “recognized” is used above.  Rights are God-given, and the constitution on this paradigm is a covenant between government and the people, not a source of rights.  Since Scalia supplies a tip-of-the-hat to some gun control laws (he doesn’t mention which, how many, what locations, or anything else) this has in turn supplied 2A detractors with a never ending fountain of replenishment to attack the 2A any time and everywhere they can.  Even the author made hay of this on page 21 when he stated that “Heller itself indicates that concealed carrying of firearms is not even covered by the Second Amendment.”

But regardless of the fact that we see weakness in Heller, Mr. Blocher’s claims fall short.  The legal community is reading too much Stanley Fish and Jacques Derrida today and not enough history.  They have forgotten how to argue and craft rhetoric.  The best and most defensible way to read the 2A is to remember the lives of the men who wrote it.

“1. John Adams John Adams, as a 9-or-10-year-old schoolboy, carried a gun daily so that he could go hunting after class. 3 DIARY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JOHN ADAMS 257-59 (1961). 2. Patrick Henry Patrick Henry would “walk to court, his musket slung over his shoulder to pick off small game.” Harlow Giles Unger, LION OF LIBERTY: PATRICK HENRY AND THE CALL TO A NEW NATION 30 (2010). 3. Daniel Boone “When Daniel was almost thirteen he was given his first firearm, a ‘short rifle gun, with which he roamed the nearby Flying Hills, the Oley Hills, and the Neversink Mountains.’ ” Robert Morgan, BOONE 14 (2007). 4. Meriwether Lewis Meriwether Lewis’s neighbor Thomas Jefferson observed that young Lewis “when only eight years of age . . . habitually went out, in the dead of night, alone with his dogs, into the forest to hunt the raccoon & opossum.” 8 WRITINGS OF THOMAS JEFFERSON, at 482.  5. Thomas Jefferson Thomas Jefferson himself carried as a lad. “When he was ten he was given a gun by his father and sent into the forest alone in order to develop self-reliance.” 1 Dumas Malone, JEFFERSON AND HIS TIME: JEFFERSON THE VIRGINIAN 46 (1948). As an adult, Jefferson wrote about a holster he made for one of his Turkish pistols, “having used it daily while I had a horse who would stand fire,” and he noted another holster he made “to hang them [the Turkish pistols] at the side of my carriage for road use.” 10 THE PAPERS OF THOMAS JEFFERSON, RETIREMENT SERIES 320-21 (2004). Jefferson advised his fifteen-yearold nephew to “[l]et your gun therefore be the constant companion of your walks.” 8 THE PAPERS OF THOMAS JEFFERSON 407 (2004). 6. James Monroe Every day, “[w]ell before dawn, James left for school, carrying his books under one arm with his powder horn under the other and his musket slung across his back.” Tim McGrath, JAMES MONROE: A LIFE 9 (2020). 7. Ira and Ethan Allen Ira and Ethan Allen regularly carried multiple arms at once. For example, in 1772 Ira, Ethan, and a cousin went to purchase land near New York’s border “armed with holsters and pistols, a good case [pair] of pistols each in our pockets, with each a good hanger [sword].”

One might argue that John Adams’ school and the local “court” were as sensitive as schools of today, and not only were firearms openly carried, there was no concept of “sensitive places.”  Moreover, “In the colonies, availability of hunting and need for defense led to armament statues comparable to those of the early Saxon times. In 1623, Virginia forbade its colonists to travel unless they were “well armed”; in 1631 it required colonists to engage in target practice on Sunday and to “bring their peeces to church.”

Firearms were ubiquitous in Colonial times, and there was no need for an amendment which stated so or justified the right of men to own their “peeces.”  The second amendment was written to address a single issue – that of federal interference with the militia.  It would be quite an absurd proposition to claim that the very men who used their own “peeces” to go to war against their sovereign to ameliorate tyranny would see what they had written any other way than the right of men to live in liberty, and the right of combat to make that happen if necessary.

Hunting, self defense, and defense of home and hearth are certainly rights in God’s economy, but those are assumed as the presupposition, the axiomatic irreducible, for the second amendment to make any sense at all.  Before one even gets to the incorporation doctrine under the 14th amendment, there is no recognition of these facts by the author.

What does the author do then?  He focuses on various and sundry local problems like violence in Chicago.

Still, it is true that some of the regulations which have been held to violate the post-Heller Second Amendment are local and that stringent preemption laws might have kept them off the books in the first place. Chicago’s handgun ban is, of course, an obvious example. The fact that such laws have been struck down in court, however, suggests that preemption laws—if justified as a necessary protection for Heller’s right—are a solution in search of a problem.

Note his twisted logic.  We need local gun control because of violence in the inner city.  Local gun control is good.  State preemption laws prevent this sort of gun control.  Such local gun control has been struck down in court before, so state preemption laws are unnecessary (a “solution in search of a problem”).

That silly train of logic is offered up for a city where firearms carry is still illegal, hasn’t been struck down in court, and that infringement isn’t being prevented by state preemption.  Mr. Blocher needs to find a good course in formal and modal logic at Duke and sit for some training.

Never mind that his focus is on gun control, when he never even asks the question, “How could John Adams carry his “peece” to school with him and there was no violence, and we can’t get a handle on gangland?”  He never asks root cause questions such as, “Have we created this problem ourselves by government programs eviscerating the family unit?  Will we ever end the violence with gun control if access to firearms isn’t the cause of the problems?”

But the biggest leap in legal logic is found on page 17.

One obvious reason for the traditional variation is that the costs and benefits of guns vary by location. In crowded urban areas, the externalities of gun use (and misuse) are higher. In rural areas, there are more opportunities for traditionally lawful purposes like recreation and hunting, and police response times tend to be longer, thus arguably increasing the utility of a gun for self-defense.

And on page 23, he states the following.

One of the ripple effects of broad preemption laws might be to dampen the use of local law to establish a duty of care.

There is no “duty of care” and the author knows this.  This isn’t merely an error – it’s an intended oversight because the consequences of admitting the truth are lethal to his arguments.  Nor is there a duty of police protection, and likewise, the author knows this as well.  See the following.

Castle Rock v. Gonzalez

Warren v. District of Columbia

DeShaney v. Winnebago County

No trained attorney is ignorant of these things.  The courts have repeatedly ruled that the police cannot be there all of the time, are under no legal obligation to respond in any certain time frame, and are under no duty to protect citizens (notwithstanding contractual obligations such as witness protection).

Throughout the paper the author speaks from the perspective of public safety without addressing the overarching concern of individual safety, security and right of self defense.  He also doesn’t address the fundamental basis of the second amendment as the surety against tyranny.

It may be a nit, but it’s worth mentioning.  There are silly remarks cited by the author that significantly detract from the intended seriousness of this paper (page 18).

… as Professor Richard Briffault has noted: if “the fifty states are laboratories for public policy formation, then surely the 3,000 counties and 15,000 municipalities provide logarithmically more opportunities for innovation, experimentation, and reform.”

There is nothing about this that is logarithmic.  Even without granting any validity to the assumption that experimentation with rights is a good thing, we observe that each county or city is an uncorrelated variable.  This isn’t like a deck of cards that can be arranged in many different sequences (52!), or 52 factorial.  This is linear, not logarithmic.

We started saying that we always look up when someone comes along claiming a scholarly analysis of the 2A.  This author apparently thinks he succeeded.  He did not.  He belongs in the department of sociology rather than law.

Finally, the author has turned the ideas of the founders on its head.  Liberty means the right of local tyrants to enact stricter and stricter laws on its people because the smallest locale is the laboratory of democracy.  Experimentation is a good thing, according to him.  It was against such local tyranny that the founders went to war, and it was against such local tyranny that Heller and McDonald were written, however weak we see them.

NPR.

When an 18-year-old man stepped into a Buffalo grocery store last Saturday with an AR-15-style rifle, the store’s security guard tried to stop the shooting by firing his own weapon back at the shooter.

But the security guard’s fire was stopped by the shooter’s body armor, authorities say. Then, the shooter shot and killed the guard, Aaron Salter.

“The security guard that was killed was a retired Buffalo police lieutenant. [He] engaged the shooter, who was wearing tactical gear and body armor. [He] did shoot and hit the suspect, but it did not penetrate the body armor,” said Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown in an interview with NPR.

The Buffalo shooter’s decision to wear body armor makes him the latest mass shooter in recent years to do so, following high-profile cases in Colorado, Texas and California.

In the U.S., body armor is subject to far fewer restrictions nationwide than guns. Its use in mass shootings has ticked up in recent years, experts say, raising questions about the equipment’s accessibility and fears about the deadliness of such shootings, if police are unable to use deadly force to stop them.

The only purchase limitation in most of the U.S. is a federal ban on possession of body armor by people convicted of violent felonies. Connecticut restricts body armor sales further by requiring sales to be face-to-face transactions.

In a sharp contrast with firearms, no states require background checks, permits or registration.

Some retailers decline to sell to civilians. But others sell products to anyone who will purchase it.

Cheap vests run from about $200 to $300. At the highest end, body armor and ceramic plates can be very expensive, as much as thousands of dollars for a complete set.

You expected it to happen, yes?  Tell me you knew this was coming.  Breathless panic and outrage.  There is all goes again – calls among the offended to regulate body armor.

Body armor could be nothing more than a steel plate worn with a rope around your neck, and you have as much right to own it as anyone else.

Even if the only use it ever actually gets is family drills when the father sends his wife and children into a closet with a shotgun while he confronts an intruder, that’s good enough and the potential for a home invasion justifies its ownership and use.