Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

“A Republic, If You Can Keep It”

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Flag Gift

Melissa and I woke up this morning to find that every house in our neighborhood had a small American Flag in its yard. The flags are gifts from David Ramadan, Republican candidate for the 87th District seat in the Virginia Senate.

I don’t decide who to vote for on the basis of cute little gestures like this—so please don’t read this as an endorsement. My political endorsements will come out in September as usual, and I have not yet begun a serious review of the candidates. However, this flag is a nice little reminder from Mr. Ramadan about what makes America great: We choose our leaders, and we are the source of their power. The independence of the individual is as much what we celebrate today as our national independence from English rule.

Dr. James McHenry, one of Maryland’s delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787, recorded that a woman asked Benjamin Franklin at convention’s close whether the delegates had given the American people a monarchy or a republic. McHenry recorded Franklin’s typically pithy response: “A Republic, if you can keep it.”

We can only continue to be our own political sovereigns as long as we the people keep ourselves educated and involved. We have the choice to keep our republic, founded on individual liberty and the sovereignty of the people, or to give it up—as many already have—to a committee of nominally-elected monarchs in Washington. Today is a good day to remember that the American experiment’s continued success relies not only on our independence from outside monarchs, which we gained well-over two centuries ago, but on our active efforts as individual sovereigns to prevent the emergence of a new totalitarianism in Washington.

Our government is still clothed in the garb of a republic, but more and more our representatives behave as if they are the American sovereigns and are un-bound by any limits on their authority. Many have forgotten that we are the sovereigns, we make the republic, and it is our job to keep it.

Still Waiting for the Bloodbath

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One year ago this month, people with Concealed Handgun Permits (CHP) in Virginia were permitted to carry their firearms in restaurants that serve alcohol, provided the armed citizen did not himself imbibe. This had previously been illegal, although armed citizens had the option to ‘open-carry’ (and subject themselves to all the unnecessary ‘oh no, man with a gun!!’ hysteria that often results from law-abiding open-carry). This change in the law was long sought-after by CHP holders like myself for a few reasons.

First, it didn’t make any sense for us to have to leave our firearms locked in our cars, subject to being stolen, every time we visited an Applebees just because other people in the restaurant might be drinking. This made almost any sit-down restaurant in the state a prime target for criminals trying to get their hands on a gun. More fundamentally, it was damaging to public safety to make virtually all restaurants ‘gun-free’ zones. Violent crimes happen in restaurants too, and I have a right to defend myself and my loved ones there just as I do pretty-much anywhere else.

After all, we all know—or should know—from school shootings, violent crime in long-time gun ban cities like Chicago and Washington, church shootings, etc., that ‘gun-free’ zones are too-often not really gun-free. Criminals who intend to commit acts of violence scoff when a sign or ordinance tells them not to carry a firearm. They are already willing to shoot an innocent victim; what makes us think they will hesitate at taking a prohibited item into the area to do it? Meanwhile, law-abiding citizens are left completely disarmed in these places. A ‘gun-free’ zone is really a ‘sitting-duck’ zone.

So, when restaurant carry went into effect on July 1, 2010, the anti-freedom and anti-self-defense crowd went into a tizzy claiming that Virginia would become the wild west. We were breathlessly warned that drunken Ruby Tuesday patrons would be engaged in weekly firefights, that violent crime and murderous massacres would become commonplace, and that Virginia restaurants would no longer be safe for defenseless families and young children.

So where is the bloodbath? There has been none. As is always the case when self-defense rights are expanded for law-abiding citizens, our state has gotten safer, not more dangerous. Fewer guns are sitting in people’s glove boxes waiting to be stolen by violent criminals. Fewer people are disarmed against their will by an unnecessary law, and are thus more able to protect themselves and their families against the bad guys.

So will the bloviating anti-freedom folks at the Washington Post, Roanoke Times, Brady Campaign, and other outlets admit that they were wrong? Somehow I doubt it.

SPR Drawdown: Unnecessary; Counterproductive?

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I wrote back in March about the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) and proposals to release oil from it in an effort to ‘stabilize’ fuel prices. I stated then that the SPR serves a very specific, important national security and economic purpose and it has only been used beyond those specific purposes one time (in a debt-reduction sale under President Bill Clinton [D]).

What is the SPR for? It’s for stabilizing supply of oil in an emergency, like foreign embargoes or serious supply interruptions like Hurricane Katrina. This has an impact on oil prices, which are set by the laws of supply and demand (though artificially manipulated in normal times by the OPEC cartel). The price impact, however, is just a side effect. The purpose of the SPR is to make sure oil is available for security (i.e., military) use and, secondarily, for public use. If SPR draw-downs make oil products affordable, that is just a nice bonus.

It is unsurprising that President Barack Obama (D) has decided to release oil from the SPR—in concert with other countries making similar releases—in an effort to lower gas prices. He promised as much in his 2008 campaign, but that it is a promise-kept does not mean it is a smart move.

Read more . . .

Conan Fan Correction: There Is No ‘Slash’ Key!

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On Conan O’Brien’s TBS late-night show Conan, he has a segment where he invites his fans to submit videos (through YouTube) of errors they’ve found on the show. Periodically he’ll play one of these ‘Fan Correction’ videos on the show and hilariously refute the supposed error.

Well let’s see him refute this one!

The Boy Who Cried ‘Tornado’

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I wrote in May 2010 about “The Boy Who Cried ‘Car Bomb’, pointing out that the constant barrage of terrorism false-alarms (and fire drills) has made us less capable of dealing properly with actual emergencies. It hearkens back to the age-old fable of the boy who cried ‘wolf,’ which serves as a cautionary tale about being honest, and about the natural human reaction to real or perceived dishonesty. The boy cries ‘wolf’ over and over when there is no wolf, tricking the villagers. Finally, when there is really a wolf attacking the sheep, the villagers ignore the boy’s cries, assuming that he is lying again.

Fire drills and spurious terror alerts aren’t ‘lies,’ per-se, but they have a similar effect on people. When somebody showed up at Arlington National Cemetery last week, claiming to have explosives in his backpack and saying that he had planted devices around the Pentagon, my gut instinct was to ignore it. I assumed, rightly in this case, that it was just another pointless false-alarm. But when there is really a bomb planted at a major landmark, after a decade of constant fear-mongering, people won’t evacuate quite as quickly as they would have if they hadn’t been needlessly evacuated twenty other times before. Likewise, the constant fire drills in most buildings (especially those with federal offices in them) have numbed us to the alarms and most of us just ignore them now. I doubt that will serve us well when the building is really on fire. I contend that unnecessary fire drills make us less safe, not more so.

What else has gotten so repetitious, so needlessly annoying, and so consistently incorrect that most people ignore it? Severe weather warnings. When it comes to tornado warnings, most National Weather Service (NWS) forecast offices have a false-alarm ratio in the 80-90 percent range. I would venture a guess that their false alarm ratio for other severe weather events is similarly high. I get text messages whenever a severe weather warning is issued in my area, and it’s not uncommon for a single moderate storm cell to generate a string of five or ten warnings over an hour or two . . . all to warn me about an average, run-of-the-mill summer thunderstorm that comes and goes over ten or fifteen minutes without causing any damage. I have a weather radio that can be configured to provide an audio alert when there is severe weather in the area, and I’ve turned it off because the ‘signal-to-noise’ ratio was almost all noise. Out of literally hundreds of times it sounded, it provided me with useful, important, actionable information maybe two or three times. The annoyance wasn’t worth it for the minimal benefit.

And, guess what! Like fire alarms and terror warnings, the overbearing and absurd overflow of weather warnings makes it less likely that people will have their weather radios on, or their cell phones subscribed to alert text messages, and less likely that they will know when real severe weather is bearing down on them. Thankfully, some people are beginning to notice this—like meteorologist James Spann at ABC 33/40 in Alabama. It is comforting to know that I am not completely alone on this.

So what’s the solution? Fire alarms should only sound when there is a fire. Terror alerts should only go out when authorities are reasonably certain something real is happening. Weather alerts should only go out when there is actual, dangerous weather happening (and alerts should only go out to people who might actually be affected by it). Don’t cry ‘wolf’ when there isn’t a wolf. Reserve the warnings for serious, urgent situations; if we do that, we make it much more likely that people will take them seriously.

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.