As Democratic and Republican members rush to line up with new bills to restrict speech or guns after the Tucson massacre, Rep. Peter King once again will not be outdone in criminalizing conduct. He is reportedly planning to introduce a bill that would make it illegal to knowingly carry a gun within 1,000 feet of the President, Vice President, Members of Congress or judges of the Federal Judiciary. This, of course, raises the problem with politicians being mobile. In states allowing concealed weapons, the appearance of any federal official or judge would require a fast estimation of 1,000 feet to avoid criminal charges.
However, Rep. Louie Gohmert is about to introduce legislation to allow members to carry guns in Congress. Thus, armed members could move around in a 1000 gun-free zone except for the one that they are carrying.
For his part, Rep. Dan Burton wants the entire House chamber encased in Plexiglas to protect members from the public. No one has suggested encasing members in Plexiglas to combine both concepts.
Once again, a tragedy has led to impulse buy legislation with little concern for the impact on the Constitution or our political system.
Having federal officials move around in a 1000 foot protected zone is appealing until you consider the legal and practical problems. Under this logic, an official walking toward a person with a legally permitted gun would require the citizen to flee the moving protected zone. Analogies to schools (which are often the subject to such limitations) are not very helpful since they tend to stay put and are immediately recognizable.
The only positive aspect to this proposal would be the scene of a campaigning member walking into a gun show to see the pandemonium.
Source: Politico
Jonathan Turley
Chan,
So, no answer to my question?
RE: Chan L., January 15, 2011 at 12:21 pm
Thanks for your caring concern. I am grateful to you for it.
Alas, I find BIL to be a brilliant and caring person whose life experiences seemingly include some utterly unlike any of my life experiences. I cannot fault anyone for having had the experiences which have been the path of the person’s life.
I cannot ignore, in Einstein’s term, “arrows of hate shot at me,” because doing that can reinforce the will of some people to shoot arrows of hate at me. I cannot send back arrows of hate shot at me toward those who shot them without making my being shot at with even more arrows likely.
If I neither ignore nor return arrows of hate shot at me, what is left for me to do? Well, what I do is rather like that piece of chalk Dr. Arnold Mendel threw at me in that Carleton German class. I catch the arrows before they can strike, and perhaps penetrate, me, and I acknowledge having received the arrow. Every arrow I so catch and sequester is one less arrow that can strike someone else.
When did I begin to read law books? When I was eight, shortly after we moved from Eureka, California, to Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin. What was the first law book I read? This law book became the basis for understanding every law book I have since read; it was a law book in my dad’s professional library, the books in which I had permission to read as I chose to read them.
No, have mercy, I am not being facetious. The book, William
E. Barton, “The Law of Congregational Usage,” Advance Publishing Co., Chicago, 1915. From this book, I learned that valid law can only be made of principles which people can always follow, and which are adaptable to unforeseeable future circumstances.
As I cannot, in conscience, invent a world lawyers cannot understand and the demand of lawyers that they validate me and my life by complying with what they find impossible, in similar manner, I disallow lawyers to invent a world which I cannot understand and then demand of me that I validate them and their lives by doing that which I experience as outside the boundaries of the world in which I find myself actually living.
Were I contentions, were I “out to get someone” or otherwise retaliate for harm done to me, I would accept the need for being constrained forcibly by whatever form of brutality needed. I am not contentious, I an not “out to get anyone,” and I do not otherwise retaliate for harm as though intended to reach me.
Yet a society without laws would replicate the tyrannical permissiveness of any and every lawless society, a terrible condition indeed. In a world society which avows but two alternatives, permissiveness results in objectionable harm, and, without sufficient history to warn against replacing permissiveness (or passivity) with authoritarianism (or aggession), rules tend to accumulate until they are more tyrannically oppressive then the passivity of permissiveness ever was.
This may lead people to look to the past for the solution to the present, overlooking the historical fact that it was the past which contained the seeds of the present; such that any actual return to the past, were it possible, would merely regenerate all the conditions and circumstances which generated the difficulties of the present.
Authoritarianism is the foster parent of child abuse such that children learn the social rules which make children into people whose way of dealing with life issues is passive-aggressive, this being the result of the automatic, unwitting activity of the “mirror neuron system.”
The divisiveness of authoritarian-permissive parenting has long been known and used very well by a some parents, including mine.
Children effectively raised according to authoritative-reciprocal parenting become neither aggressive nor passive, but, in the presence of extreme difficulty, do what they find possible and withdraw from that which they find impossible, doing so without becoming either aggressive or passive.
Allowing for my difficulty in getting words to convey my intended meaning, I have modeled the authoritative-reciprocal approach here to the best of my practicable ability.
If I pretend arrows of hate are not shot toward me, more will be shot until I affirm their having been sent. If I shoot back arrows of hate for arrows of hate shot at me, those who shoot arrows of hate toward me merely have more arrows to shoot toward me. Instead of ignoring such arrows, because doing that surely would allow many of them to hit and perhaps penetrate me; and instead of returning them, I catch them before they hit me, because that way, they can never penetrate me; and I hide them where, as best I can, only I know where they are hidden.
Explaining this process in detail, in a genuinely scientific way, is beyond, in length, detail and intensity, anything I find properly posted on this blawg.
I am saving that sort of work for my own web site, when I have done enough that the work finally meets my minimum standards for sharing it with others.
Playing variants of the dozens, because of the risk (however slight) of escalation to terrible violence, simply is not a game I knowingly play.
I do not always recognize an unfamiliar dozens game variation right away.
Nonetheless, I appreciate having been able to learn what I have already learned on this blawg, and, if permitted, I will be grateful to remain a participant here.
“Permitted” means, to me, that I do not need to pretend to be someone else than who I am.