Body Parts

What's Not To Like About Guns?

The Supreme Court has in Heller held the Second Amendment provides to individuals the Federal right to possess guns for personal defense and now in McDonald that states (and local governments) cannot deny that right by banning personal possession of guns. The Court has therefore completely turned against a long-held Liberal and Left doctrine that the Second Amendment applies only to organized state civil militias and that, therefore, individuals do not have a right of personal possession of guns. Why do Liberals and the Left oppose this individual right?

I think the ultimate reason is revealed in the coincidence that the more enthusiasm the Liberal or Left wing has for authoritarian central government, the less sympathy it has for personal gun possession. Personal gun possession has two significances, symbolic and actual. Gun possession represents, as symbol, the supremacy of the free, self-reliant individual. The individual reserves to her/himself the ultimate responsibility of self-defense in civil society and civil defense in civil conflict. As a real instrument, the gun gives the individual the ability to offer armed resistance to wrongful civil authority. Confronting wrongful civil authority was, of course, the origin of the Second Amendment, in the pre-Revolutionary order that Bostonians turn over their guns to the British authorities. Symbol and fact have both featured prominently in Liberal and Left fantasies about all elements of American society. What Liberal or Left fantasy about, for instance, rural America does not situate gun possession in some cracked deviancy? Think of Obama's remark, when raising funds in the campaign in San Francisco, about alienated rural Americans clinging to their guns and religion. For Obama, typical of the Left, the gun is associated with deviancy. For conservatives, contrarily, the gun represents, as in the cowboy mythology, the moral authority of the individal. The gun is only as good as the individual conscience behind it. 

The gun is therefore symbol and fact of freedom and freedom's opposition to authoritarianism--the authoritarianism that to some degree Liberals and Left want for America. Like Obama, they look to Europe, where individual, private gun possession is not a right, as the model for us. In Europe, the central state has long kept guns out of private hands, while walking long distances into the world of authoritarianism, in which the central government organizes and imposes social order independently of the wishes of the people. It is opposition to such an arrangement that the gun represents.

Resilient Communities and National Defense: The Strategic Role Of Rural Areas

National defense theorists have been concerned, especially since 9/11, with the ability of the nation to survive for a long time without centralized services, such as electricity, water, food delivery, and so on. EMP, biological weapons, dirty-bombs, among other weapons would require cities to survive without services or require evacuation of cities for periods, perhaps a month, or several months, while centralized services are rebuilt. The local capabilities to shelter in place, or survive in evacuation centers, are poor for most cities, city neighborhoods, and city dwellers. People who think Starbucks with a resource for food aren't going to survive long on their own. How can the nation enhance the ability of local communities for such survival? How can such communities be made more resilient? These are questions lead theorists to re-consider the role of rural America in such an emergency. (This post by ShrinkWrapped is one possible entry to this discussion.) Rural people and farming communities are far more generalist and resilient. A rural farm is, for instance, set up to survive frequent interruption of electricity and isolation for a week or so in winter snow storms or seasonal river flooding. Rural areas know how to live off the land, because that's what they do. I deal with the national security issue from the point of view of local food production in an article on my farming blog.

Top Fifty Homeland Security Blogs

From e-Justice, here.

(Thanks to Emergency blog.)

Emanuel's Proposal For A Universal Civilian Service Corps

Obama's new Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel (representative, D, Illinois), has proposed a universal civilian service corps for young people. I have advocated an upgraded national civil defense program that would involve training civilian teams in neighborhoods (see here). Emanuel's proposal might build upon the existing CERT (Civilian Emergency Response Team) program in place in California and some other states. But there are two major problems with Emanuel's proposal.

First, it would be mandatory, rather than voluntary. Second, it would create a top-heavy national bureaucracy. Third, it would be focused on indoctrination of the youth, rather than preparation of the civilian population for terrorist and natural disasters.

It is possible that Emanuel has in mind, as an analogy and precedent, Israel's universal military service; but the notion of a required universal service has an ominous hint of the fascist brown shirt youth corps of the 1930s and Maoist cultural revolutionaries of the 1960s. There is too much influence from the Left in the Democratic Party today to trust the Party with oversight of a program that places all young Americans under their control.

Prudence Demands Preparedness For Disasters

Dr. Helen Smith argues that prudence demands civilians acquire a wide range of survival skills for a wide variety of possible disasters, natural, man-made accidental, and war. (Thanks to Instapundit; Dr. Helen Smith is Glenn Reynolds' wife.)

We are squandering this post-9/11 period of domestic security by not preparing civilians for a possible WMD attack. It is not paranoia to fear such an attack; it is a realistic appraisal of the recent history of attacks against the US and US properties, and against our allies, and of the numerous warnings by our enemies and by experts on the intentions and capabilities of our enemies, that our enemies desire to perpetuate a massive WMD attack on the American homeland.

Lone Criminal Anthrax Attack Gave US Time To Plan Our Biosecurity

We were lucky that the anthrax attack shortly after 9/11 was perpetuated by a lone, deranged scientist in a US Army research facility. We were lucky that the attack was limited in extent. If the attack had been carried out by a group sponsored by a criminal state, the damage could have been extensive, sufficient even to immobilize for months inter-regional personal travel and freight and mail delivery service in the US and curtail import of cargo and persons into the nation from outside.

The capability to weaponize biological agents is not universal; but it is held by significant enemies of the US, including Syria, Iran, and North Korea, and probably Cuba. Any one of these states could easily pass biological agents to terror groups, their own (e.g., Hezbollah) or an independent group (e.g., Al Qaeda).

It is not reassuring, then, to read that, after six years of efforts to erect counter-measures to bioterrorism, some experts think that our approach has the wrong priorities. Most of the current effort is directed to emergency response and containment of an bioagent event. The ease with which a biological agent could be distributed throughout the US (imagine 500 anthrax letters mailed from around the country to key personnel at political, commercial, and military centers) means that even a small event could produce a tremendous disaster in multiple cities. So some experts believe we must focus more on prevention. And that, alas, is the more difficult of the two chores.

Finally, I wonder, wouldn't some civilian training to deal with a biosecurity alert and/or event be useful? Would not a civil defense program (or civilian preparedness program, if you prefer a different name) be useful here?

Obama's Proposal for a Homeland Security Corps

In a speech earlier in July and at his website, Obama is proposing an expanded national civilian service, parallel to the military services. He has not really thought much about this proposal and its name and functions appear to shift and change. Nonetheless, conservatives should not immediately dismiss the proposal. At his website, he proposes a homeland security corps to assist communities prepare for national emergencies. I think this is an excellent idea--I have been advocating such a proposal, a civil defense program, for several years. If we take seriously the threat of nuclear terrorism or biochemical WMD terrorism in American cities, and all experts say we should, we must, simply must, prepare our local communities. Civilians, not simply first responders, must be prepared for sheltering in place, for evacuation, to give first aid, to fight fires when no fire departments are available, re-route traffic as conditions require, and so on. California has programs to train civilian volunteers for such tasks (CERT: Community Emergency Response Team, or Civilian Emergency Response Team), but the programs are not heavily funded and only an extremely tiny portion of civilians have taken the training. If Obama becomes president, we should try to shape his homeland security corps proposal into something serious and useful.

What To Do In A Nuclear Bomb Attack

The first decision is whether to shelter in your home or to evacuate. Hopefully, local authorities will advise you. We should assume at the outset, however, because there has been so little local/regional/state planning for a nuclear event, that you will NOT be given clear advice about whether to stay in your home or evacuate.

The following guide is especially useful if you elect to stay in your home, that is, to use your home as a blast/fallout shelter, until some you get some all-clear signal or information.

http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2007/07/what-to-do-if-a.html

NAS Studies Preparing for Atomic Blast in US City

The San Francisco Chronicle is covering a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences on the lack of preparation of US cities for a terrorist nuclear strike. (Thanks to Hugh Hewitt for the tip.) The scenario: a 10 kiloton fission bomb (compare to the 15 kiloton bomb dropped on on Hiroshima). Advice on what to do in case of a nuclear attack is conflicting. Rand Corporation, which modelled a nuclear detonation in the long-Beach, Los Angeles harbor area, recommends evacuation to avoid fallout. No American target city is prepared to evacuate a significant portion of its population. And there are no remote reception areas set up, no preparations for family reconstitution, no plans for resettlement. Nothing.

As far as I am aware, only South Florida has an established and tried procedures for evacuation of large numbers of people, in this case, to avoid hurricanes; but South Florida is not thought to be a likely terror target. Southern California has excellent plans and technology of notification in place for evacuation of neighborhoods and similarly small areas in the paths of wildfires. Last year's San Diego evacuations in the October fires went well. The region has no plans for a regional evaucation. A year or so ago, when I inquired of Riverside County's disaster preparedness office, what plans it has for regional evacuation, the office replied that evacuation had been looked at (briefly? extensively?), but no one could figure out how to allocate the freeways. So planning got stuck on that issue. It would be irresponsible to leave the problem unsolved.

Shipping Explosives In Cargo Containers

From Scott Shane (New York Times News Service), "Inside interrogation of al-Qaeda planner", The Press-Enterprise (Riverside, California, Sunday, June 22, 2008, A1), from the interrogation of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, murderer of Daniel Pearl and planner of 9/11 attacks:

"Asked, for example, how he would smuggle explosives into the United States, Mohammed told CIA officers that he might send a shipping container from Japan loaded with personal computers, half of them packed with bomb materials, according to a foreign official briefed on the episode."

Mohammed's off-hand suggestion reminds us that shipping containers are the most likely route for moving a nuclear weapon into the United States. Yes, we know that Homeland Security knows this, that Congress has appropriated money for screening every container, that containers are checked for radioactivity, that most containers are checked, bonded, and sealed in foreign ports, at least those ports that participate in our security program. Despite the security measures, which get better all the time, a container plan must tempt terrorists. There are millions and millions of containers passing through a half-dozen US ports. Eventually, bribes, lax checks, or faulty surveillance equipment, and a container or two will slip pass security inspectors.

LA-Long Beach is the nation's major trans-shipping port for containers. As containers from LA-Long Beach pass through the inland region for seventy miles to begin their long passage through the deserts to the nation's metro-markets, the inland communities must have civil defense procedures in place. If an area-wide plume of radioactive waste is a possibility from an explosion, we must have plans for area-wide evacuation and reception areas out of Southern California already set up. We cannot assume, because we have not been hit badly since 9/11, that the threat of a terrorist strike against us has ended.