Constitutional Law, Courts, Justice, Media, Politics

Second Amendment Boogey Man

Respectfully Submitted by Lawrence Rafferty (rafflaw)-Guest Blogger

 

When it comes to the Second Amendment and guns, it seems that President Obama can’t make anyone happy.  Ever since Obama announced his candidacy for the Presidency, the NRA has screamed that Obama will be taking away the guns. This scare tactic continued when Obama defeated John McCain for the Presidency.  Just what has Barack Obama done to make the NRA and gun owners frightened for their guns?  The simple answer to this question is nothing. The head of the National Rifle Association, Mr. Wayne LaPierre actually admitted recently that Obama has done nothing to attack gun owner’s rights to bear arms, but claims Obama’s inaction against guns is actually a conspiracy to take away guns!!  ‘ “[The Obama campaign] will say gun owners — they’ll say they left them alone,” LaPierre told an audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) Friday.  “In public, he’ll remind us that he’s put off calls from his party to renew the Clinton [assault weapons] ban, he hasn’t pushed for new gun control laws… The president will offer the Second Amendment lip service and hit the campaign trail saying he’s actually been good for the Second Amendment.”  “But it’s a big fat stinking lie!” the NRA leader exclaimed. “It’s all part of a massive Obama conspiracy to deceive voters and destroy the Second Amendment in our country.” ‘  Raw Story

Now, before anyone thinks I am making this stuff up, the linked site includes a video clip wherein Mr. LaPierre verbalizes this alleged reverse conspiracy.  Mr. LaPierre makes a point of throwing in the necessary names of alleged liberal co-conspirators to rev up his base.  ‘ “Sotomayor, Kagan, Fast & Furious, the United Nations, executive orders. Those are the facts we face today… President Obama and his cohorts, yeah, they’re going to deny their conspiracy to fool gun owners.  Some in the liberal media, they are already probably blogging about it. But we don’t care because the lying, conniving Obama crowd can kiss our Constitution!” ‘

The lying, conniving Obama crowd as Mr. LaPierre labels them has not done anything to harm the Second Amendment rights that the NRA claims to be at risk.  I was interested in the last few words of LaPierre’s quotation above.  The phrase “kiss our Constitution” appears to lay claim that the NRA and its followers own the Constitution and its protections.  I could have sworn that my law school Constitutional professors taught me that the Constitution protects all citizens, but maybe I heard them wrong.  But, I digress.

As the Raw Story article suggests, President Obama has actually taken heat from his own supporters over his alleged conspiracy to not take away the guns.  NPR  Does Mr. LaPierre provide any evidence of this bizarre claim?  None that I could find.  Maybe you will have better luck than me in finding evidence of presidential actions to hide President Obama’s intentions and/or actions of stealing legal guns from their owners.

I have to admit that if you read the comments section of the NPR article that details how the Left is disappointed with Obama’s inaction on gun control, you will read almost nothing except gun owners claiming that Obama’s words of inaction are actually code words that the End is Near and the Sky is Falling for gun owners!  Just what will it take gun owners to ask Mr. LaPierre for evidence of his wild claims?  I, for one would love to hear his answer to that question. I understand that candidate and President Obama may have stayed away from the 2nd Amendment issues for political reasons, but where is the evidence of this alleged conspiracy?  I would think Fox News would be sending Bill O’Reilly’s reporters all over the country to uncover such a heinous conspiracy.

If Mr. Obama has not written any executive orders or supported additional legislative steps to control or take away guns since he has become President, just what is the basis for these wild claims?  I realize that the NRA has a financial interest in getting gun owners scared into buying more guns, but are there other, underlying reasons why the gun owners are frightened so easily, when the facts do not support the NRA’s claims?

Respectfully submitted by Lawrence Rafferty (rafflaw)- Guest Blogger

Additional sources:  Gun Owners of America; NRA-ILA; Pajamas Media;

 

 

798 thoughts on “Second Amendment Boogey Man”

  2. Gene,

    Gene H.
    1, September 28, 2011 at 11:50 am

    “It had nothing to do with the DNS server. It had to do with IP Address Allocation.”

    No shit, Sherlock. IP allocation that works with the DNS server systems to tell the server what’s connected to it where in conjunction with the regional Internet registries and the local Internet registries (a.k.a. ISPs and other entities that buy blocks of addresses). How does the FBI knows a hacker is working out of say, Lisbon? They analyze the DNS traffic to get the IP’s being used and cross-reference with the data of the RIR’s to narrow suspect addresses down to a local block of address owned by an ISP or other entity. They got Markham because his header information contained IP information for his mail servers. Mail servers that like everything else on the Internet are connected and have their traffic managed by the DNS systems.

    But you’re the expert. You should have known that.

    IP Address Allocation has nothing to do with DNS.

    The Internet would work just fine, AND DID, without DNS.

    DNS came into existence long after the Internet was created.

    IP 1974
    DNS 1987

    The Internet IS based on IP Addresses.

    An IP Address is vaguely like a phone number. If in 1960 I give you my phone number, you can call me. The machines and switches involved don’t need to know my name. The number rules all.

    A DNS system is a phonebook.

    Before DNS, yes, you would write my number and my name on your wall. And above that Mike’s name and number and above that Kevin’s name and number.

    We would each take our horses to the phone company and they would hand us a phone and give us a number.

    And at my place, I would write your name and number and then I would write Roco’s.

    And Mike would write your name and number and Mike would write Rafflaws name and number.

    And Rafflaw would just write his own name and number on his wall over and over and over.

    But to make a phone call never required the name. The machines only cared about the numbers.

    And from 1974 on, computers also had walls to write names and numbers on. Those walls were called HOSTS files.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hosts_(file)

    History

    The ARPANET, the predecessor of the Internet, had no distributed host name database. Each network node maintained its own map of the network nodes as needed and assigned them names that were memorable to the users of the system. There was no method for ensuring that all references to a given node in a network were using the same name, nor was there a way to read the hosts file of another computer to automatically obtain a copy.
    The small size of the ARPANET kept the administrative overhead small to maintain an accurate hosts file. Network nodes typically had one address and could have many names. As local area TCP/IP computer networks gained popularity, however, the maintenance of hosts files became a larger burden on system administrators as networks and network nodes were being added to the system with increasing frequency.
    Standardization efforts, such as the format specification of the file HOSTS.TXT in RFC 952, and distribution protocols, e.g., the hostname server described in RFC 953, helped with these problems, but the centralized and monolithic nature of host files eventually necessitated the creation of the distributed Domain Name System.

    Around 1987, Paul Mockapetris (Mock87a, remember?) wrote an RFC describing how Internet phone books could be created and used.

    DNS is a centralized phone book. It’s a way of having a different set of machines having nothing to do with making the calls or routing or switching the phone calls maintain all those lists mapping names to numbers.

    And here’s the thing.

    UNLESS you have at home some sort of web server or other internet based server, FTP, HTTP, NTP, that you have set up and publicize on the web with a NAME: geneh.com that lives at your home, then your computers are not in the DNS system.

    The DNS system is only for computers that we want to address by name because of some service they offer.

    wordpress.com
    jonathanturley.org
    redtube.com
    google.com
    cnn.com

    How does the FBI knows a hacker is working out of say, Lisbon? They analyze the DNS traffic to get the IP’s being used

    No. They don’t.

    They analyze the IP traffic,

    They go to the computer the hackers are attacking and they examine the packets and they extract NOT NAMES but numbers, IP Addresses of the computers originating the packets are coming from which are included so that services can RETURN any requested information to those computers.

    DNS traffic may be analyzed, but equally or more likely is HTTP traffic and TELNET traffic and SSH traffic and the traffic of various protocols with known vulnerabilities in them that can be exploited.

    They got Markham because his header information contained IP information for his mail servers.

    Almost certainly not true.

    Markoff’s email server was probably gmail, hotmail, yahoo, or aol. You would send email to him as markoff86 at yahoo.com. Yahoo.com’s email servers need DNS service to provide that.

    Markoff would send that email from his home computers. Like all networked computers they needed an IP address.

    Yahoo’s, gmail’s, aol’s web based email programs would accept email from Markoff’s computers and place in the headers, a Received: header that looks something like this:

    Received: from [23.435.654.321] by web52302.mail.ac4.yahoo.com via HTTP; Wed, 28 Sep 2011 09:57:51 PDT

    That’s an IP address of a home computer that has nothing whatsoever to do with DNS.

    Gene,

    You are just simply wrong on this. I do not know your motives for continuing to spew the wrong information.

    Gene, it should be pretty clear to most people with the links I’ve included and the statements I’ve made that way way up there, when you claimed I had no idea what was going on, but that you did, that in fact, it was just the reverse.

    You’ve even said your information is 20 years old. And you even have that information wrong.

    At this point, you are either too stupid to know how wrong you are or just lying to misdirect others.

    Mike S. Just google hosts.txt and domain name system and check out the wiki and then figure out who has more credibility.

  4. Elaine M.,

    Put me in the camp that wants to know….

    Slarti,

    I don’t think Gene could handle Cork town….

  5. Elaine,

    I’m just happy the Lions have cleared the curse of Bobby Lane. When he was traded he said the Lions would lose for 50 years – and they did – but that’s over now and the ROAR is RESTORED!

    Gene,

    There’s plenty of room for you on the Tiger bandwagon (and for Verlander’s impending Cy Young award, too…) – no one should EVER feel compelled to root for the Yankees!

  7. Elaine M.
    1, September 28, 2011 at 1:51 pm
    Gene,

    You know what Red Sox fans always say about the Yankees, don’t you?

    —————————————————–

    I’m sure Gene knows but I don’t … what?

  8. Slartibartfast
    1, September 28, 2011 at 1:46 pm
    Elaine,

    Red Sox, pshaw – how about them LIONS and TIGERS? (Sorry, professor, no Bears – oh my… 😉 )

    ————————————————————————–

    Oh great, now raff is going to get all pissed off … I suppose it could be worse … you could have thrown some stats (math) into your comment.

  11. Elaine,

    Hope still blooms in Boston as they hold on to a chance at the Wild Card slot. I’d much rather see them hold on to than lose it to Tampa Bay. Hopefully we’ll know after a Thursday play off. I’m no fan of the Rays, but I can’t wish for no playoff because that would put me in the position of having to root for the Yankees. A man’s got to know his limitations.

  13. Elaine,

    Red Sox, pshaw – how about them LIONS and TIGERS? (Sorry, professor, no Bears – oh my… ;-))

  14. Elaine M.
    1, September 28, 2011 at 1:38 pm
    So…how about them Red Sox?

    ————————————————————————–

    Love it, you sly fox, you. 🙂

  19. Uncontrollable mood swings and lashing out.

    Either very interesting or simply the banality of mental illness in action.

    I vote the later in this instance.

  20. Slarti,

    Fret not, darlin’ … my only real attraction to Johnny Depp is his love of the Gypsy life style and with the way you’ve been traveling, perhaps I will switch my obsession to you! 🙂

Comments are closed.