The Second Amendment clearly protects the right of individuals to keep and bear firearms.
When Mr. Ashcroft said that, he also said the 20,000 or so existing laws did not infringe that right.
I agree that The Second Amendment clearly protects the right of individuals. But in my opinion, many existing laws do infringe the Second Amendment. Specifically:
New York's Sullivan Law, and
Pataki's mis-named "assault weapon ban".
These laws are unconstitutional.
The Sullivan Law- Protecting muggers since 1911.
I’ve always been incensed that New York gets away with requiring a permit for exercising a constitutional right, but The Sullivan Law, which created New York's pistol licensing scheme, had several things to going for it:
1. Sullivan represented a dock district, and many of his constituents were muggers. Sullivan himself was leader of a notorious Irish gang. The criminal work of Sullivan's constituents was impeded by the fact that citizens were arming themselves before going to his bad neighborhood, thereby making robbery a dangerous business. Sullivan wanted to protect his criminal constituents from armed victims, and his law has made New York safe for robbers ever since.
2. Tammany Hall wanted to disarm Italians and blacks. The law served the same racist purposes that gun control served in Dixie: to disarm disfavored races. That’s why the pistol-licensing agent (who Sullivan controlled) has unbridled discretion to discriminate under the Sullivan Law.
3. Tammany Hall wanted to be able to arrest political opponents. The Sullivan Law gave Tammany another excuse to arrest people.
4. Sullivan was crazy anyway, and soon was committed to an insane asylum. He died a suicide. The law is as insane as he was.
The Sullivan law is now administered to deny all but a select few the right to bear arms in many New York jurisdictions. It is unconstitutional as written and as applied.
The Ban
Pataki's ban is aimed at the very type of gun that the Second Amendment is most intended to protect: guns that are particularly useful for self-defense, and for defense of country, from:
criminals,
foreign invaders, and
domestic tyrants.
The Colonists started the American Revolution, not when the taxes were imposed without representation, but when the British Army tried to confiscate the military style muskets with bayonet lugs.
Sunday, October 01, 2006
Friday, September 08, 2006
Paper Ballots Optical Scanners
The new Federal “Help America Vote Act” requires that New York abandon its currently used lever voting machines.
We can best replace lever machines with paper ballots and optical scanners.
Lower initial cost, lower maintenance costs, quicker voting, more voters per machine, greater reliability, a failsafe paper ballot, and verifiability of election results, all make the preferred choice of Paper Ballots & Optical Scanner very clear. If there is any problem with the scanning machines, the paper ballots have been collected in locked ballot boxes and can be counted again, at any time, by any person who can count and write. A person without any technical expertise can verify the honesty of an election.
In evil contrast, the proposed touch screen machines (Direct Recording Entry or DRE’s) purport to electronically count how many times voters touch an ephemeral image on a touch screen. Such machines have been known to count 100,000 votes in a district with only 19,000 voters. They can fail through errors in programing, or through hard-to-detect deliberate fraudulent manipulation. They can only be repaired or verified by a trained technician.
The current lever voting machine can be set up to cheat, and paper ballot boxes have been stuffed or mis-counted at various times in history, but these are mere retail frauds. With Direct Recording Entry touch screens we can expect wholesale fraud, in which entire national elections can be "fixed" from a corporate headquarters in Venezuela. Ask any computer expert how little he trusts such a Direct Recording Entry system to count anonymous ballots.
The Attorney General should presume that any board of elections,
that bought a Direct Recording Entry (touch-screen) type voting system,
was acting under some improper influence, and promise to investigate accordingly.
We can best replace lever machines with paper ballots and optical scanners.
Lower initial cost, lower maintenance costs, quicker voting, more voters per machine, greater reliability, a failsafe paper ballot, and verifiability of election results, all make the preferred choice of Paper Ballots & Optical Scanner very clear. If there is any problem with the scanning machines, the paper ballots have been collected in locked ballot boxes and can be counted again, at any time, by any person who can count and write. A person without any technical expertise can verify the honesty of an election.
In evil contrast, the proposed touch screen machines (Direct Recording Entry or DRE’s) purport to electronically count how many times voters touch an ephemeral image on a touch screen. Such machines have been known to count 100,000 votes in a district with only 19,000 voters. They can fail through errors in programing, or through hard-to-detect deliberate fraudulent manipulation. They can only be repaired or verified by a trained technician.
The current lever voting machine can be set up to cheat, and paper ballot boxes have been stuffed or mis-counted at various times in history, but these are mere retail frauds. With Direct Recording Entry touch screens we can expect wholesale fraud, in which entire national elections can be "fixed" from a corporate headquarters in Venezuela. Ask any computer expert how little he trusts such a Direct Recording Entry system to count anonymous ballots.
The Attorney General should presume that any board of elections,
that bought a Direct Recording Entry (touch-screen) type voting system,
was acting under some improper influence, and promise to investigate accordingly.
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