Today in 1972, Elvis Presley recorded a live album at Madison Square Garden in New York:
Birthdays today start with Shirley Owens Alston of the Shirelles …
… born the same day as Mickey Jones, drummer for the First Edition:
Matthew Fisher, keyboardist for Procol Harum:
Max Elliott, better known in the ’80s and ’90s as Maxi Priest:
Bass player Dan Lavery of Tonic:
Two death anniversaries of note: Fellow Shirelle Addie “Micki” Harris, who died at 42:
And the great Ray Charles:
Charles is my father’s brush with greatness story, by the way: After playing in southern Wisconsin’s first rock and roll band (which once got to play backup for Bobby Darin at a concert in Madison) as its first piano player, he worked for a music store in Madison and was asked to deliver and set up a Hammond organ for Charles and his band, who were playing the first concert at the new Dane County Coliseum in Madison. After he finished, the organist invited him to watch the concert backstage. While enjoying the concert, suddenly between songs he heard Charles thanking him for his work and asking him to come onstage and play a song with them. He thinks he did, but cannot be sure because he remembers nothing of the experience. In comparison, I have seen my favorite band, Chicago, three times, and in none of the three have they asked me to come onstage and play.
One difference between my employment days and my current reality is in driving. I have driven a lot since I started work after college in a county that is 100 square miles larger than Rhode Island.
When I returned to Marketplace, I commuted from Ripon to Menasha, which was longer distance-wise, but only slightly longer time-wise, and infinitely more pleasant than my previous commute from Ripon to Fond du Lac. The latter drive on Wisconsin 23 (a road that desperately needs upgrading to four lanes; the fact it isn’t may be a commentary on the effectiveness of western Fond du Lac County’s elected representatives in Madison) features two notorious speed traps, the Town of Ripon (which is separate from the City of Ripon) and Rosendale; slow trucks, farm equipment and elderly drivers on a road with few passing opportunities; and the choice between driving through Fond du Lac or taking the longer four-lane bypass around the city (a route that appears to compel bad driving, which compelled some to incorrectly suggest adding stoplights and compelled the Department of Transportation to redesign the bypass).
After a year in Menasha, my office was moved to New London, adding 15 minutes to the commute. After a year there, my office was moved to Oshkosh, cutting my commute to about 25 minutes. All three commutes included Wisconsin 44 between Ripon and Oshkosh, which features only the Town of Ripon speed trap and a slowdown at Pickett (where no cell phone I have ever owned seems to work).
I tend to push the edge between the speed limit and the speed at which the police notice you, a quality I seem to share with most drivers on U.S. 41. I first noticed this when the Department of Transportation conducted its “Summer Heat” initiative to harass drivers and waste gasoline — I mean, ticket speeders and combat “other dangerous driving behavior” on 41 and Interstate 94.
The DOT’s “Summer Heat” propaganda claimed that speed “was a contributing factor in 37 percent of all fatal crashes” and “was a contributing factor in nearly 20,000 crashes.” For one thing, the DOT is guilty of bad writing; leaving out the word “excessive” before “speed ‘was a contributing factor’” seems to imply that any speed was a contributing factor, including 1 mph. More to the point, the DOT inflated the importance of speeding beyond actual fact; it does the same thing by asserting that “alcohol is involved” in one-third of all fatal traffic crashes. Note that the DOT doesn’t say that excessive speed or drunk driving caused that many accidents; only that it was “a contributing factor.” I’ll bet “other dangerous driving behavior” doesn’t include people driving slower than the speed limit (a growing group of people who believe they get better gas mileage at slower speeds, a notion that will be dispelled five paragraphs from now), even though people who drive 10 mph slower than the speed limit are six times as likely to get into a crash than those who drive up to 10 mph faster than the speed limit. I’ve got a better statistic for you: Drivers are a contributing factor in 100 percent of automobile crashes. (The speeding and drunk driving numbers also make me think the DOT is double-counting, although simultaneous excessive speed and drunk driving certainly cause crashes.)
Most speed limits are not set at the traffic engineers’ standard of the 85th percentile — that is, the speed of 85 percent of unimpeded traffic. Speed limits are usually political creations incorporating revenue generation opportunities, which in Wisconsin begin at $160 for a ticket for speeding up to 10 mph over posted limits (one prediction: speed enforcement will increase if a Taxpayer Bill of Rights is ever enacted in this state), combined with constituent tachophobia — fear of speed, which is justifiable near schools and neighborhoods but nowhere else. One town of 1,400 people is so intoxicated with traffic ticket revenue from speed traps that it maintains a police department that actually loses money for the township, from what I’m told. I’m not going to say which township this is (although its name starts with the same letters as the word “ripoff”), but I’d advise watching your speed when you drive west from Rosendale, southwest from Pickett, or east from Green Lake. (If I were governor, speed traps outside of school zones would be illegal.)
Like anything else, a law is obeyed in direct proportion to the perceived reasonableness of that law — the more unreasonable the law is perceived to be, the less likely that law is to be obeyed. The federal government set a national speed limit of 55 mph in 1975, which was supposed to be a temporary response to the energy crisis of that time, enforced by the threatened loss of federal transportation funds for states that didn’t adopt 55. (That is a subject of a future blog entry.) Over the next dozen years, people voted with their right foot as to how reasonable 55 was, particularly on freeways with design speeds exceeding 70 mph. The speed limit was increased to 65 mph for Interstates in 1987 (other non-Interstate freeways later), and then the national speed limit was eliminated altogether in 1995.
Despite that, Wisconsin hasn’t touched its speed limit laws significantly since then, other than to extend 65 to non-freeway four-lanes, such as U.S. 10 west of Fremont and U.S. 41 and 141 north of Abrams. In fact, the freeway speed limit could be increased all the way to 80 mph without much effect on speed, according to a U.S. Department of Transportation study. Drivers usually will drive at speeds they consider to be reasonable, so artificially low speed limits serve to only increase the number of tickets written by local law enforcement, while simultaneously encouraging disrespect for the law in general and those charged with enforcing the law. (The speed limit on Interstate 94 between Chicago and the Illinois–Wisconsin state line is 55 mph. No one drives 55 on 94.)
Every time I see a county sheriff’s or Wisconsin State Patrol squad car sitting on the side of a road, I wonder how many actual criminals are not being caught because that police car is sitting in one spot instead of preventing actual crimes by its patrol presence. (And, by the way, speeding is not a crime — legally, it’s an ordinance violation, not a misdemeanor or felony. The difference is that, unlike crimes that require the prosecution’s proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, speeding violations are based on a strict liability standard — if the officer proves you were speeding, you’re guilty unless you can prove some kind of error in speed measurement.)
What about fuel consumption, which usually increases beyond a certain speed? (We once owned a car where that was not the case — this car spent three weeks in Georgia during the 1996 Olympics, and got 33 mpg at 75 mph. My current car gets a quite acceptable to 27 to 28 mpg at my driving speeds.) Gas prices are where they are because of the weak dollar, decisions to not drill in this country, the lack of refineries, Wisconsin’s stupid minimum markup law. Cars with gas mileage meters also demonstrate that the largest amount of fuel is used not in maintaining speed, but in accelerating to highway speed.
What about safety? Setting higher speed limits on freeways encourages people to drive on freeways, which are, after all, designed for higher speeds, with ramps to get on and off and no cross or head-on traffic. Crash rates are much higher on two-lane roads, where drivers experience head-on traffic, intersections, driveways and passing into oncoming traffic, than on freeways. Cars and highways are also safer, which is why we don’t have the death rates of even 40 years ago. Between 1975, the year before the 55 mph national speed limit was mandated, and 1996, nine years after the end of said mandated national speed limit, the death rate per million miles driven dropped from 3.5 to 1.7. Driving at the prevailing traffic speed is safer than slavishly following the speed limit.
Even more interesting is the German autobahn, which has no speed limits at all over most of the non-urban portions of its nearly 7,000 miles. According to Mark Rask, author of American Autobahn, Germany’s auto death rate has dropped 70 percent since 1970, even with their speed non-limits. In 2001, Rask notes, the death rate per 100 million vehicle miles traveled was 0.59 in Germany, vs. 0.81 in the U.S. (One reason: Driver’s licensing requirements are much more stringent in Germany than here. Another, I believe, is that car safety improvements, such as air bags and antilock brakes, have had the unintended consequence of making drivers less careful, as though their vehicles will cover their own driver error.)
There are two areas in which Wisconsin has proven wiser than some other states; one is in not setting lower night and truck speed limits. Doing so is a recipe for more accidents, because high speeds do not cause crashes; variations in speed between vehicles cause crashes. The state also has resisted the push for remote cameras to generate tickets for speeding or running red lights or sobriety checkpoints, perhaps because someone in state government has figured out that both are blatantly unconstitutional (the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, to be precise).
Beyond all these arguments, the fact is that there is only one truly, provably finite and nonrenewable resource: time. (This fact will be deliberately missed on the idiot in the next Congress who introduces a bill to reimpose a low national speed limit under the guise of energy conservation.) Whether you save, on a 40-mile trip, seven minutes driving 65 vs. 55, or 14 minutes by driving 80 vs. 55, that is your own time to do with as you please. This is not insignificant because of another reality — life has a 100 percent death rate.
The number one album in the country today in 1971 was Paul and Linda McCartney’s “Ram”:
Today in 1972, Bruce Springsteen signed a record deal with Columbia Records. He celebrated 19 years later by marrying his backup singer, Patti Scialfa.
Birthdays today start with the Wisconsinite to whom every rock guitarist owes a debt, Les Paul:
Jackie Wilson:
George Bunnell played guitar and wrote for Strawberry Alarm Clock:
Jon Lord played keyboards for Deep Purple and Whitesnake:
Mitch Mitchell played drums for the Jimi Hendrix Experience:
Dean Dinning played bass for Toad the Wet Sprocket:
Wisconsin ranks 25th among the 50 states, two positions better than in 2007. Wisconsin ranks 18th in personal freedom and 31st in economic freedom.
In the Midwest, Wisconsin trails Indiana (fourth), Missouri (sixth) and Iowa (13th), but ranks better than Michigan (27th), Minnesota (34th), Illinois (41st) and Ohio (42nd). New Hampshire tops the list, and New York is at the bottom.
The index ranks the states on economic and personal freedom based on the premise that freedom is grounded “on an individual-rights framework. In our view, individuals should be allowed to dispose of their lives, liberties, and properties as they see fit, as long as they do not infringe on the rights of others.”
That, of course, is contrary to the toxic brew that has been politics in this state for basically all of its history. The Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance’s Why Are Wisconsin’s Taxes High? quotes historian Daniel Elazar as putting Wisconsin into the third of three groups of political cultures among the states — “Moralistic,” which considers government “a positive instrument with a responsibility to promote the general welfare.” Elazar put an interesting mix of nine states in that category — Maine, Vermont, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, Colorado, Utah and Oregon. That is as opposite as you can get from the “Individualistic” model, found in a belt of states almost exactly south of the Moralistic Belt, that “emphasizes the centrality of private concerns” and places “a premium on limiting community intervention.” When the study was written in 2003, seven of the nine Moralistic states ranked in the top 18 states for tax burden, which shows off Wisconsin’s Socialist roots as well.
The study’s rankings are based on fiscal (government spending and taxation) and regulatory (“labor regulation, health-insurance coverage mandates, occupational licensing, eminent domain, the tort system, land-use regulation, and utilities”) policy, as well as a category called “paternalism” that includes home- and private-school regulations as well as measures of personal freedom. Not only is this the only study (according to the authors) of objective measures of economic and personal freedom among the states, it also recognizes that economic freedom (mostly favored by Republicans) and personal freedom (sometimes favored by Democrats) are inseparable.
First, the relative good news, in personal freedom:
The state has mandatory interdistrict public-school choice and a voucher program. Regulation of private schools, including general curriculum oversight, is light. Homeschools are also regulated with some annoying notification requirements. Wisconsin has very respectable asset-forfeiture laws (over one standard deviation better than average). Like North Dakota, Wisconsin has very high victimless-crime arrest rates (both as a percentage of the population and as a percentage of all arrests). On the other hand, its drug law-enforcement rate is actually below average. Alcohol laws are among the best in the country, with taxes fairly low across the board. Wisconsin does not authorize sobriety checkpoints and, before the data cutoff, was one of three states not to require auto insurance (it has since passed a law). Cigarette taxes are very high, but smoking bans allow numerous exceptions. Wisconsin enacted a domestic-partnership law after the cutoff date for our data.
Law enforcement and the prohibition lobby have been lobbying for sobriety checkpoints (which are blatant violations of the Fourth and Fifth amendments) and more restrictive drunk driving laws, but legislators have so far resisted them. (Wisconsin’s drunk driving problem is the number of drivers with unbelievably large numbers of drunk driving convictions, not the penalties for first-offense drunk driving or the legal definition of intoxication.) The anti-smoking zealots don’t believe the smoking bans are restrictive enough, while those who believe in economic freedom believe that bar owners should be able to decide for themselves whether or not to allow smoking.
Now, the bad news, in economic freedom:
In terms of economic freedom, the state’s spending and debt are roughly average. However, government spending on transportation and public safety are above national norms. The overall tax burden is quite a bit higher than average, as are individual income and property taxes. Eminent-domain-law reform has stalled and could go a lot further. Wisconsin has deregulated cable service but still needs further deregulation in other areas. The state has a prevailing-wage law, but minimum wage is not above the federal level. Occupational licensing is average and there is no community rating for health insurance (there are rate bands for small-group insurers).
I can certainly believe the part about government spending on public safety, given the presence of the waste of tax dollars that is the Town of Ripon Police Department and the Wisconsin State Patrol. The Mercatus Center helpfully points out Wisconsin’s totals in state and local government spending (23.3 percent), taxes (11 percent) and debt (19.8 percent) as a percentage of personal income to prove that the overall tax burden is “quite a bit higher than average.” (Fourth highest, as you know.)
One and a half of the Mercatus Center’s policy recommendations are already getting legislative attention: “Reduce the income-tax burden while cutting back spending in areas above the national average, like education,” and “Broaden the school-choice/school-voucher reforms.” The third area has gotten little attention, but needs attention: “Reform eminent-domain laws,” to prevent unfairly-compensated government land grabs in the name of development. The half is in taxes, because too many people in this state persist in the delusion that more money automatically means better schools.
I can’t tell if Wisconsin is going in the right direction or not. The Walker administration’s defanging of public employee unions is in the courts, tax cuts haven’t taken effect and aren’t large enough anyway, and we don’t have concealed-carry yet. (Concealed-carry is in fact about freedom. You have heard of the Second Amendment, right?) Going from 27th to 25th is not really progress, but had the Nov. 2 election results been different, we’d be heading toward 50th instead of the correct direction.
You might call this a transition day in rock music history. For instance, one year to the day after the Rolling Stones released “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” …
… Brian Jones left the Stones, to be replaced by Mick Taylor. Less than a month later, Jones was found dead in the bottom of his swimming pool. (At the time, Jones was living on a farm previously owned by A.A. Milne, who wrote Winnie the Pooh.)
Five years after Jones quit the Stones, Rick Wakeman said no to playing any more for Yes:
Five years later, Paul McCartney and Wings released “Back to the Egg,” their final studio album:
Birthdays start with Nancy Sinatra …
… born the same day as Sherman Garnes of Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers:
Chuck Negron sang for Three Dog Night:
Who is William Royce? You know him better as Boz Scaggs (who attended UW–Madison with Steve Miller and was in Miller’s first band):
Mick Box played guitar for Uriah Heep:
Jeff Rich played drums for the Climax Blues Band, which …
Regular readers of my previous blog know that my favorite economists are Brian Wesbury and Robert Stein from First Trust Advisors, who describe their blog as “the antidote to conventional wisdom, dedicated to helping readers understand the complexity of modern economics from a supply-side, free market perspective.”
So Wesbury and Stein begin with one version of conventional wisdom, beginning with the unwisdom of Harold Camping’s inaccurate (yet again) prediction of the end of the world May 21:
Let’s imagine that the world really did end. Let’s imagine that we’re now living in an artificial world. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is making the sun rise with monetary policy. Federal spending is generating oxygen and enormous increases in federal debt are making water. Everything seems relatively normal, but it’s all ultimately just a mirage, created by artificial means, and it can’t last forever.
Of course this is an extreme example, but that’s what it seems many believe about the economy today.
It all goes back to 2008 when the economy crashed, supposedly all by itself, in what was called “the worst crisis since the Great Depression.” The pundits said capitalism had failed. Many predicted the complete collapse of the economy, a worthless dollar, and a “new normal” – it was the “end of the world” as we knew it.
And while the economy could be doing better, real GDP has expanded for seven straight quarters – we’re now in the eighth. Corporate profits are at a record; the S&P 500 is up 100% from the bottom; consumer spending is $450 billion above its pre-panic 2008 peak, and private sector payrolls have expanded for 15 straight months.
So, which is it – fake, or real? Did the economy crash and burn, only to be supported in an artificial state by government actions? Or, was all that “end of the world” talk a prediction that did not come true? Are all the same old real world things – like creative destruction, supply and demand, innovation, or trial and error – still happening like they always have? …
We do not believe that capitalism failed and that the world as we knew it is over. The crisis was caused by a failure of government policy. The bubble in housing was caused by low Fed rates and housing subsidies. The Panic of 2008 was caused by a set of misguided reactions to the bursting of that bubble (mark-to-market accounting and TARP).
In our view, quantitative easing has had little impact – the money supply (M1 or M2) is not expanding as rapidly as many think. Moreover, and this is key, the massive increase in government spending has been a drag on growth, not a boost. In other words, the end of quantitative easing, spending cuts and a new focus on government debt reduction are things to rejoice about.
We are not in the majority, nor are we ignoring our economic problems. We just believe the economy did not come to an end back in 2008 and we do not believe recent growth has been created artificially.
But a large, loud and sincere group is still convinced the economy is broken and fragile. They see the recent slowdown in economic growth – real GDP growth looks to be growing at only a 1.5% annual rate in Q2 – as another sign that it really has been the end of the economic world. Gloom and doom are back on the table.
Never mind that much of the slowdown is so obviously tied to temporary Japan-related disruptions in manufacturing and tornado-related dips in home building. That doesn’t matter if you really believe the end is near.
But, when we move through these temporary problems, when auto production overcomes the parts-related slowdown and spikes back up at about a 100% annual rate in Q3, real GDP will sharply accelerate again.
Well, of course the economy didn’t come to an end in 2008. The economy is not “broken,” but it would seem to be at least “fragile.”
I’m not an economist (and I don’t play one on TV). Maybe my current view is skewed by my current employment situation. (Remember: A recession is when a neighbor loses his job; a depression is when you lose your job.) But there is little question that if Barack Obama were a Republican, you would read nothing but doom and gloom about the current state of the economy, far more than is being reported now.
The lesson of every recession dating back to the early 1980s and probably before that is that jobs are the last thing to recover after a recession. Friday’s job news was unspinnably bad news — just 54,000 jobs created and a 9.1 percent unemployment rate in May. Even the 90.9 percent of people with jobs are suffering from the effects of soaring gasoline prices thanks in large part to the Federal Reserve’s continued weak-dollar policy and the Obama Administration’s continuing failure to be serious about the federal budget deficit and debt. And in a state where tourism is one of the three top industries, high (and rising) gas prices should be a major concern.
Does this (from Reuters) read like a recovery to you?
For smaller businesses that depend on the financial well-being of their customers in order to make a profit, the damage to household balance sheets has been difficult to shrug off.
“We’ve been in business for 37 years and survived five recessions,” said Frank Goodnight, president of Diversified Graphics, a commercial printer and publisher in Salisbury, North Carolina.
“This recession will be equal to all five put together plus about double. And we don’t think it’s really going to turn around in another year.” …
“The problem with a ‘soft patch’ in the economy is that you don’t get two of them in the first two years of a normal recovery,” said David Rosenberg, chief economist at Gluskin Sheff.
(The aforementioned “smaller businesses that depend on the financial well-being of their customers in order to make a profit” are, by the way, every business.)
Remember that this is one year after the “summer of recovery.” Remember that President Obama commanded businesses to hire employees. But businesses aren’t hiring employees to fill nonexistent and unanticipated orders; that’s the only conclusion you can make from the job numbers. And unemployed people do not buy such big-ticket items as houses, cars and large home appliances. Nor do people who are employed but feel uncertain about their economic prospects. Spending one-fourth of the gross domestic product and generating deficit and debt numbers that no one reading this blog will live to see paid off hasn’t worked for this country, has it?
The American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Barone makes an interesting observation:
Obamacare and the Dodd-Frank financial-regulation bill are scheduled to be followed by thousands of regulations that will impose impossible-to-estimate costs on the economy.
That seems to have led to a hiring freeze. The Obama Democrats can reasonably claim not to be responsible for the huge number of layoffs that occurred in the months following the financial crisis of fall 2008. And Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke did manage to help stabilize financial markets.
But while the number of layoffs is now vastly less than in the first half of 2009, the number of new hires has not increased appreciably. Many more people have been unemployed for longer periods than in previous recessions, and many more have stopped looking for work altogether.
It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the threat of tax increases and increased regulatory burdens have produced something in the nature of a hiring strike. …
Obama had already ignored his own deficit-reduction commission in preparing his annual budget, which was later rejected 97–0 in the Senate. Now he was signaling that the time for governing was over and that he was entering campaign mode 19 months before the November 2012 election.
People took notice, especially those people who decide whether to hire or not. Goldman Sachs’s Current Activity Indicator stood at 4.2 percent in March. In April — in the middle of which came Obama’s GW speech — it was 1.6 percent. For May, it is 1.0 percent.
“That is a major drop in no time at all,” wrote Business Insider’s Joe Weisenthal.
After April 13, Obama Democrats went into campaign mode. They staged a poll-driven Senate vote to increase taxes on oil companies.
They launched a Medi-scare campaign against Ryan’s budget resolution that all but four House Republicans had voted for. That seemed to pay off with a special election victory in the New York 26th congressional district.
The message to job creators was clear. Hire at your own risk. Higher taxes, more burdensome regulation and crony capitalism may be here for some time to come.
Hoping for bad economic news because you don’t like who’s in charge in Washington is against your own interests. But if things are getting better, that has escaped notice of working people and business people. And if business isn’t doing well, its employees aren’t doing well.
Several Milwaukee conservatives, including WTMJ’s Sykes and Jeff Wagner and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Patrick McIlheran, are opposed to concealed-carry legislation that is so-called “constitutional carry” — that is, essentially unrestricted concealed-carry, with no training or registering required.
First: With all due respect to Flynn, he disrespected the officers he was supposed to be commending and, more importantly, the people who pay his salary by deviating to condemn the concealed-carry bill he considers too extreme.
Those who oppose concealed-carry — in fact, those who oppose the Second Amendment and firearm rights entirely — are crowing that this means constitutional carry is, well …
Sykes and Wagner call the proposed laws “way too extreme” and say support for these bills comes from the “kook fringe.”
Like all of us, Sykes and Wagner sound just disgusted that our legislature is considering legislation that requires no background checks and no safety training whatsoever. Heck, you can almost see Wagner throwing his hands in the air, when he says sarcastically, “Let’s let everybody carry guns.”
When right wing radio hosts – who generally support concealed, loaded weapons in public – call pro gun legislation “screwed up,” you know it’s extreme.
“Extreme” is a better description of the anti-gun movement. Their solution to crime is for you to cower in your homes in fear and, if someone breaks into your house or assaults you, try to understand the root causes of their misbehavior while hoping the police show up.
You’ve read about the boycott of some Wisconsin businesses by public-sector unions. Well, two sides can play that game:
Milwaukee “conservative” radio talk show hosts Charlie Sykes and Jeff Wagner think people who support Constitutional Carry are “The kook fringe”
How nice of supposedly “conservative” radio show hosts to give the anti’s talking points. …
Email the advertising sales manager Tom Sheridan: tsheridan@620wtmj.com and let him know that Wisconsin Carry and the USCCA chose this past week to run our 2-week series of ads on WISN radio instead of WTMJ in part because of comments like Charlie and Jeff’s.
Since when did wanting smaller government and fewer taxes become “Kook fringe?”
Since when did not wanting meaningless permits and registration (its a felony for felons to carry and police, using their radio, can determine in SECONDS during a stop if a person who is carry is legal to do so) become “kook fringe”
Since when did embracing personal accountability VOLUNTARY training and knowing that people either already have or will seek training out of self-preservation (not shooting themselves handling their gun AND staying out of jail because using your gun unlawfully will get you a quick trip to jail) and government training mandates are not effective, become kook fringe?
EVEN the NRA is pushing AGAINST training mandates. Are their 100,000+ members in Wisconsin the “kook fringe”?
In 2010 the Wisconsin GOP changed their party platform at the state convention to support right to carry concealed WITHOUT a permit. Are they all “kook fringe”
The massive Wisconsin Tea-Party coalition and all of its 100+ independent member groups support constitutional carry. Are they and the 10’s of thousands of law-abiding everyday folks they consist of all “kook fringe”?
It appears there is an out-of-touch “kook fringe” in this story, but its the radio talk show hosts who sit on their perch behind microphones, pretend to be conservatives and talk down to the rest of us.
I would point out as someone with a marketing background that advertising on a radio station that did not carry the aforementioned objectionable opinions may be less than effective, but it is their money.
Flynn’s and Chisholm’s position prove the point I made last week on Facebook that law enforcement is not necessarily a friend of your constitutional rights, particularly law enforcement leadership. Police chief organizations have more often than not come out against concealed-carry, although police officer organizations seem less opposed.
And, to be perfectly blunt, I do not care what Flynn’s or Chisholm’s opinion — or, more bluntly, the opinion of anyone in law enforcement — is about concealed-carry. The Second Amendment and the state Constitution guarantee our rights to own and possess firearms. Period. Police chiefs, sheriffs, district attorneys and judges should have only the same opinion pull that any ordinary citizen has. Their job is to enforce the law, not pontificate on it.
The objections to unrestricted concealed-carry are based, to be equally blunt, on fear. And that is misdirected fear. No gun I have ever seen has loaded itself, pointed itself at a target, and fired. The people that concealed-carry legislation will affect are those who respect the law enough to follow its provisions, and those who respect firearms enough to become familiar with their weapons to the point of practicing enough with them
There has never — never — been a firearms law that has deterred a criminal. The experience of Great Britain, which has banned most firearms for decades (their gun ban is so complete that waivers had to be created for shooting events to take place at the 2012 Olympics), shows that the bad guys simply replace some other lethal weapon they can get for the lethal weapon they can’t get. Pass any law you want; criminals do not care because they are criminals.
For gun-crazy legislators trying to make it as easy to carry a concealed weapon in Wisconsin as a wallet, the fortuitous capture of a man admitting his murderous intentions should be a major, major teachable moment.
What is the lesson? That maybe someone at the clinic should consider carrying a gun in case a nut decides to commit an act of violence?
Because if the person was intent on committing homicide, violating the current law against concealed carry of a weapon wasn’t much of a deterrent. Making concealed carry legal would not have affected this case at all, anymore than the current prohibition on concealed carry affected Lang’s decision making.
Interesting, isn’t it, that there is only one constitutional right we have that requires, in some people’s minds, restrictions. The old saw that the First Amendment is not absolute in that you can’t yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater (a reference becoming sadly obsolete in the Internet age) is not correct: You can yell “Fire,” and then you can live with the consequences of your actions by getting firsthand experience in the criminal courts system. There were no requirements that women be trained in how to vote when the 19th Amendment was passed, or for 18- to 20-year-olds when the 26th Amendment was passed.
Rowen and others of his left-wing ilk clearly believe the Second Amendment needs to be removed from the Constitution, as with the similar gun-rights provision in the state Constitution — passed with three-fourths of the voters voting for it, mind you. And if they feel that way, they should try to abolish the Second Amendment, just as the 21st Amendment eliminated the 18th Amendment — passing both houses of Congress and getting 38 state legislatures to pass the amendment. They will not succeed, of course, because they are wrong about gun rights, and most people believe they are wrong about gun rights.
Wisconsin and Illinois are the only states without concealed-carry. The experience of 48 other states shows that legalizing concealed-carry does not create a Wild West environment where people routinely settle arguments with their 9mm pistols, whether or not citizens have to get a concealed-carry permit or whether they have to train before being authorized to carry a concealed weapon. The police have a saying that applies to private citizens too: Better to be judged by 12 than carried by six.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 