A self-professed gun nut named Caleb:

Saturday leaving my office, I was the subject of an attempted mugging by a member of the Indianapolis Choir Boy School of Good Men Who are Only Down on Their Luck.  As I was leaving my office, said altar boy came around the corner of my building to the left into the side parking lot, and as I turned to face him noticed the knife in his right hand.  The Chaplain’s Assistant demanded that we engage in an abbreviated barter process, wherein I would provide my wallet and car keys in exchange for not getting shanktified, which to him probably seemed like a reasonable exchange.

I politely demurred by hurling a cup of hot Starbucks at him while fishing my Beretta Jetfire out of the stupid pocket holster it was riding in.  After taking a face full of Columbia’s most popular legal export and confronted with a counter offer of bullets to his previous barter exchange concept, the young gentlemen decided that discretion was the better part of valor and made all due haste in a westerly direction.  For my part, I locked myself in my office, called 911 and waited for the cops to arrive to take my report.

Via Glenn Reynolds, who marvels, “Coffee — is there anything it can’t do?”

Of course, to paraphrase the old saying, you’ll get more with hot coffee and a gun than with hot coffee alone.

Yes, that headline is not an exaggeration. The Chief of the Jericho Fire Department went to court and was shot by the police for disputing two tickets requiring two trips to the court house.

JERICHO, Ark. – It was just too much, having to return to court twice on the same day to contest yet another traffic ticket, and Fire Chief Don Payne didn’t hesitate to tell the judge what he thought of the police and their speed traps.

The response from cops? They shot him. Right there in court.

Now the police chief has disbanded his force “until things calm down,” a judge has voided all outstanding police-issued citations and sheriff’s deputies are asking where all the money from the tickets went. With 174 residents, the city can keep seven police officers on its rolls but missed payments on police and fire department vehicles and saw its last business close its doors a few weeks ago.

“You can’t even buy a loaf of bread, but we’ve got seven police officers,” said former resident Larry Harris, who left town because he said the police harassment became unbearable.

But lets not be hasty, these brave men in blue are putting their lives on the line after all.

“When I first moved out here, they wrote me a ticket for going 58 mph in my driveway,” 75-year-old retiree Albert Beebe said.

Well obviously Albert Beebe was going 58 miles per hour in his drive way because why would the police lie. Oh…wait, they aren’t sure where all the traffic fine money went, hmmmm….

It was anger over traffic tickets that brought Payne to city hall last week, said his lawyer, Randy Fishman. After Payne failed to get a traffic ticket dismissed on Aug. 27, police gave Payne or his son another ticket that day. Payne, 39, returned to court to vent his anger to Judge Tonya Alexander, Fishman said.

It’s unclear exactly what happened next, but Martin said an argument between Payne and the seven police officers who attended the hearing apparently escalated to a scuffle, ending when an officer shot Payne from behind.

I’m sure it was totally justified and in line with departmental policies. After all, who knows Payne might have had a pencil or paper clip on him. Those are danerous weapons you know.

Prosecutor Lindsey Fairley said Thursday that he didn’t plan to file any felony charges against the officer or Payne. Fairley, reached at his home, said Payne could face a misdemeanor charge stemming from the scuffle, but that would be up to the city’s judge. He said he didn’t remember the name of the officer who fired the shot.

What a shock the prosecutor backs up the cop who discharges his gun at an unarmed person in a crowded room and also wounds a fellow cop in the process. Police professionalism at its highest.

Alexander, the judge, has voided all the tickets written by the department both inside the city and others written outside of its jurisdiction — citations that the department apparently had no power to write. Alexander, who works as a lawyer in West Memphis, resigned as Jericho’s judge in the aftermath of the shooting, Fairley said. She did not return calls for comment.

Meanwhile, sheriff’s deputies want to know where the money from the traffic fines went. Martin said that it appeared the $150 tickets weren’t enough to protect the city’s finances. Sheriff’s deputies once had to repossess one of the town’s police cruisers for failure to pay on a lease, and the state Forestry Commission recently repossessed one of the city’s fire trucks because of nonpayment.

City hall has been shuttered since the shooting, and any records of how the money was spent are apparently locked inside. No one answered when a reporter knocked on the door on Tuesday.

So lets do a quick recap.

• The police shot an unarmed man from behind when in scuffle with 6 other police officers.
• No charges will be brought against the police officer from the local prosecutor.
• Nobody knows where the money from the various speeding tickets went.
• The police were writing tickets outside their jurisdiction.
• City Hall is shut down.

Anyone doubt that the cops saw this as their own private racket and were using the tickets to line their own pockets? And what is up with the police officers in Jericho? Are they all totally out of shape morons that couldn’t fight their way out of a paper bag? Six of them are scuffling with one man and they can’t subdue him and the seventh feels he has the justification to shoot the “perp”?

Michael Barone (via Glenn Reynolds) argues that elites are “out of touch” on climate change and gun control:

Many years ago, political scientists came up with a theory that elites lead public opinion. And on some issues, they clearly do. But on some issues, they don’t. Two examples of the latter phenomenon are conspicuous at a time when Barack Obama enjoys the approval of more than 60 percent of Americans and Democrats have won thumping majorities in two elections in a row. One is global warming. The other is gun control. On both issues, the elites of academe, the media and big business have been solidly on one side for years. But on both, the American public has been moving in the other direction.

One could argue that these are cases where counter-elites are exceedingly well organized and have fought back with counter-propaganda. Regardless, they’re obviously cases where the elites have failed to dominate the debate.

Over the past decade, the Gallup organization has been asking Americans whether the seriousness of global warming is generally exaggerated or generally correct. From 1998 to 2007, except for the run-up to the 2004 election, they said it was generally serious by roughly a 2-1 margin — 66 to 30 percent in 2006, for example. But in March 2009, that margin slipped to only 57 to 41 percent, with two-thirds of Republicans and nearly half of independents saying concern is exaggerated.

Actually, this is a rather bizarre cherry picking of the data. What the March poll tells us is that people are more concerned about the economy than they are about the environment during the worst economic crisis in generations.  Indeed, Frank Newport’s report is titled “Americans: Economy Takes Precedence Over Environment – First time majority has supported economy in 25 years of asking question.”

Still, as Newport’s April 2008 report makes clear, the overall concern about global warming has been essentially static for two decades.

This, not the bogus comparison in relative intensity, is a much better indication that the elites have failed to win this battle.  On the other hand, a related question shows the people who think global warming “will pose a serious threat to you or your way of life in your lifetime” has increased from 25 percent to 40 percent over that period.

The difference is even more stark on guns, as Gallup’s various trendlines show.  The most relevant question has seen a steady decline since 1991:

Furthermore, gun ownership has fluctuated considerably since 1960, starting from a high of 49 percent, going as low as 34 percent in 2000, but is back to 42 percent today.

Dick Heller, the plaintiff in the landmark Supreme Court decision that overturned Washington, D.C.’s 32-year-old ban on handguns and established that the 2nd Amendment provided an individual right to own guns, was denied a handgun permit by the District yesterday.

He was among the first in line Thursday morning to apply for a handgun permit. But when he tried to register his semi-automatic weapon, he says he was rejected. He says his gun has seven bullet clip. Heller says the City Council legislation allows weapons with fewer than eleven bullets in the clip. A spokesman for the DC Police says the gun was a bottom-loading weapon, and according to their interpretation, all bottom-loading guns are outlawed because they are grouped with machine guns.

Sheesh.  Glenn Reynolds writes, “It’s obviously a campaign of ‘massive resistance.’ Gun prohibition now, gun prohibition tomorrow, gun prohibition forever!” Don’t discount the possibility, however, that these people simply aren’t very bright.

Reynolds and Brannon P. Denning have an interesting colloquy on “Heller’s Future in the Lower Courts” in the Northwestern University Law Review.  The intro:

The Supreme Court has released its long-awaited opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller, and the buzz has been considerable.  Though much has been made of the majority’s historic ruling and of the narrowness of that majority, many commentators have missed an important point.  What Heller is most notable for is its complete and unanimous rejection of the “collective rights” interpretation that for nearly seventy years held sway with pundits, academics, and—most significantly—lower courts.

The repudiation of this extensive body of case law  suggests that the real test of Heller will occur once the lower courts, traditionally hostile to an individual rights interpretation of the Second Amendment, face the inevitable follow-up cases challenging other restrictive gun laws.  Experience with other seemingly groundbreaking Supreme Court decisions in recent years, such as United States v. Lopez, suggests that lower-court foot-dragging may limit Heller’s reach, though this time around there will likely be considerably more scrutiny and more vigorous litigation efforts.

If the lower courts present a challenge to the implementation of Heller, they also provide litigants with an opportunity.  Given the fact that the Heller majority declined to give a detailed accounting of the proper standard of review to be used in subsequent Second Amendment cases, litigants have a rare opportunity to write on a tabula much more rasa than is ordinarily the case in constitutional litigation, making use of recent scholarship on the crafting of constitutional decision rules that implement constitutional provisions.

Arguably, it would have been preferable if the Supremes had simply spelled out their ruling a bit more clearly.  As Reynolds and Denning note in their conclusion, however, that’s rarely the case.

Photo credit: KEL-TEC

The District of Columbia has made it legal for residents to own a handgun after being so ordered by the United States Supreme Court.  But they’re not making it easy.

The plaintiff in the Supreme Court case that overturned Washington’s strict 32-year-old handgun ban was among the first to arrive as the city started registering firearms.  Dick Heller showed up early Thursday at the police department, but he’s still upset with the city even after winning his case.  He says its strict new rules for handguns still violate the spirit of the court’s ruling defending the constitutional right to bear arms.

They allow handguns to be kept in the home if they’re used only for self-defense and carry fewer than 12 rounds of ammunition.

Gun owners can only register one weapon in the first 90 days. Police say the permitting process could take weeks or months.

Months?  How so?  Well, there are some not-so-minor bureaucratic hurdles to clear.   There are no gun shops in the District and, as previously reported, zoning regulations preclude gun shops.  But there’s a workaround:  Residents can buy their guns in another state, so long as they have the proper DC paperwork and have the guns shipped to an authorized DC location.   Or, should I say, the authorized location:

Charles Sykes is that licensed dealer, and he’s told WTOP he’s willing to handle the transfer of handguns for residents, just has he has for security companies since 1994. “On a low key basis,” Sykes says. “By appointment.”

Inconvenient, no?  You don’t know the half of it.

But Sykes has a problem. He lost his lease and has had to relocate, and the District has refused to issue him the necessary permit to open his new office. Sykes told the Washington CityPaper he thinks the city is withholding his Certificate of Occupancy for “political” reasons. He may be right.

A spokesperson for the D.C. Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs, which issues the permit, could not say what the status of his application is, or why it was being withheld in time for this report.  Vince Gray (D-At-Large), chairman of the D.C. Council, says he wants to make it as hard as possible for gun stores to open. “First of all, I don’t want them anywhere,” Gray says, “but if we’re going to have them, we’ll look at things, like keeping them away from schools and churches.”

No worries, though:  They’ve made provisions for illegal guns, just not legal ones:

At 7 a.m. Thursday, the Metropolitan Police Department will open its doors at Headquarters and begin taking applications for permits. If you already own an illegal handgun, you’re in luck. Because of the 90 day amnesty program, you can bring your gun (unloaded and wrapped up) to the police and apply for a permit. If, like most people, you don’t have a gun, you can begin the permit process, but good luck getting a gun. Without a gun store, or someone to transfer the gun, it won’t happen legally.

So, what’s an honest citizen to do?  Go back to court, of course.  But not on the above issues, oddly.

Under terms of the emergency law, passed earlier this week by the D.C. Council, residents must obtain a city-issued handgun permit and may keep handguns only in their homes for self-defense purposes. The permits require every gun owner to pass a written test and vision exam, submit the weapons for ballistic testing and offer proof of residency.

The provisions still rank as some of the toughest in the nation. But perhaps the most controversial aspect of the law, gun rights advocates say, mandates that gun owners keep their weapons unloaded, disassembled or secured with trigger locks, unless they face a “threat of immediate harm.”

The National Rifle Association has signaled it also will challenge the new D.C. regulation, describing the law as extreme and in “complete defiance of the Supreme Court’s decision.” “The current D.C. proposal requires the complete cooperation of the criminal,” NRA spokesman Andrew Akulanandum. “It would require the criminal to call and tell you when they plan to come and attack you.”

Statehood now!

Photo:  Jason Reed, Reuters via USA Today.

Under the provocative headline “The Thugs Win the Case,” WaPo columnist Colbert King sniffs of the Supreme Court’s ruling yesterday in Heller,

There’s one group of District residents absolutely unfazed by today’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling shooting down the District’s strict handgun ban: the dudes who have been blowing away their fellow citizens with abandon since the law was put on the books 32 years ago.

But, surely, these dudes were not in fact doing any such thing, what with it being illegal to have guns and all? Not to mention it being illegal to blow away one’s fellow citizens, which I understand was not affected by yesterday’s ruling?

Otherwise, it’s hard to see how yesterday’s ruling affected anyone but the targets of said thugs, law-abiding fellow citizens of the District who were unable to own handguns and had to keep rifles and shotguns in a state that rendered them completely useless if their homes were invaded.

Megan McArdle has some interesting thoughts on the Supreme Court’s decision today overturning DC’s handgun ban. As she readily admits, you can get better legal analysis elsewhere. This, however, is a unique contribution to the debate:

There is a distressing lack of attention to the female market in gun companies. I want something with accuracy and stopping power, but also, an attractive exterior casing that easily integrates with my other accessories. This doesn’t seem unreasonable.

If it works for shoes and handbags, why not guns?

It’s well documented that most men need just two guns, a handgun for protection and close combat, and a rifle or shotgun for longer range defense and hunting. A woman, though, would need one of every variety, including several black handguns that, to an untrained male eye, look exactly the same.

A crazed Tokyo man has killed seven people in a stabbing spree.

A man who police said “was tired of life” drove into a crowd of pedestrians Sunday and then went on a stabbing rampage in Tokyo’s premier electronics and video game district, killing seven people and wounding 10, authorities said.

The deadly lunchtime assault happened in Akihabara district after the attacker drove a rented two-ton truck into a crowd, running over three people, public broadcaster NHK quoted an unidentified witness as saying.

News reports said the man jumped out of the truck and began stabbing the people he’d knocked down, then turned on horrified onlookers. The attacker grunted and roared as he slashed and stabbed at his victims on a street crowded with Sunday shoppers, reports said.

“He was screaming as he was stabbing people at random,” another unidentified witness told NHK.

This tragedy could have been prevented. There’s simply no reason for assault knives to be in the hands of ordinary citizens.

UPDATE: Reductio creep has already set in, apparently: England is considering a ban on knives.

Knife crime among young people has sparked a widespread debate in recent weeks in Britain, where police say they have seen “a worrying trend” toward more severe knife attacks involving younger attackers and victims.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown on Thursday announced a crackdown on teenagers carrying knives, saying that those as young as 16 will be prosecuted for knife possession on the first offense. Previously, anyone younger than 18 generally received only a warning.

“Young people need to understand that carrying knives doesn’t protect you, it does the opposite — it increases the danger for all of us, destroys young lives and ruins families,” Brown said after meeting with top police and government officials at his 10 Downing Street office. “Recent tragic events have reminded us of that.”

In a country where almost all guns are illegal, police say knives are the most popular weapons carried by youths in major cities from London to Glasgow. A police stop-and-search campaign in London last month found that about 5 percent of the 4,200 youths randomly checked were carrying knives.

It’s getting mighty hard to do satire these days.

I just had a lunch with Glenn Reynolds, who was in town to speak to the NRA Convention about Heller. We discussed such things as local politics, the high amusement value of the Democrat Presidential primary, Joss Whedon returning to Fox, and the fact that while the overall quality of movies is declining there are actually more TV shows we want to watch now than there used to be.

He also reiterated a rather important point from his talk: The gun rights crowd seems to be pretty content these days (in no small part because they anticipate a positive result in Heller), and Hillary! and Obama would both like to convince us they’re not gun grabbers, but the gun rights crowd should not just assume this election doesn’t much matter. Even if Heller is everything we hope for, we’ll still be litigating the scope of the right for quite some time – and the types of Supreme Court Justices either Democrat will appoint are not likely to be friendly to the Standard Model.

All in all a most enjoyable time. I feel for him, though, as this was his first visit to my fair town and Mother Nature didn’t do her part to make it as pleasant as it usually is in mid-May.

Syracuse University professor Arthur Brooks steps past the politics of “Bittergate” and looks at the actual facts.

Barack Obama said of people in small town American that, “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or antitrade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” Brooks observes, correctly I think, that we really don’t know what Obama meant by that but that many people undoubtedly hold the view that gun owners are poor, ignorant hicks.

That view doesn’t stand up to the reality:

According to the 2006 General Social Survey, which has tracked gun ownership since 1973, 34% of American homes have guns in them. This statistic is sure to surprise many people in cities like San Francisco – as it did me when I first encountered it. (Growing up in Seattle, I knew nobody who owned a gun.)

Who are all these gun owners? Are they the uneducated poor, left behind? It turns out they have the same level of formal education as nongun owners, on average. Furthermore, they earn 32% more per year than nonowners. Americans with guns are neither a small nor downtrodden group.

Nor are they “bitter.” In 2006, 36% of gun owners said they were “very happy,” while 9% were “not too happy.” Meanwhile, only 30% of people without guns were very happy, and 16% were not too happy.

A lot of the things we “know,” we’re constantly reminded, just ain’t true.

Tigerhawk, noting another survey showing that conservatives are happier than liberals, offers a plausible explanation for the overlap: “First, both groups are in some sense pessimistic, meaning that they do not expect life to be smooth, unruffled, peaceful, or safe. . . . Second, both groups are notoriously self-reliant, at least in their own self-image, insofar as they believe that they are the only people who will solve their troubles, whether or not somebody else is to blame in the first place.”

via Memeorandum

So I’m just now getting around to following “bittergate”–the blogospheric furor that has erupted from Barack Obama’s sociological observation that people vote on cultural issues because they don’t trust the government on economic issues. (My colleague James has covered this matter here and here.) For further reference, here is the particular portion of the speech at issue, which was given in response to a question about how Obama can win over Pennsylvania.

But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there’s not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

The furor, of course, is centered around the phrase “cling to guns or religion”, which has been interpreted as “elitist and condescending.” I have to say that I don’t get it. It’s pretty clear that if you have the capacity for simple reading comprehension and are aware of the entire context of this comment, he is clearly saying that because small town, working class voters don’t trust the government to deliver on economic issues, they vote primariliy on cultural issues. Now, this might be a matter of sociological dispute, but I fail to see how it’s condescending to try to find a way to explain why voters vote the way they do–surely politicians should consider such things, right?

Indeed, not two weeks ago, Republican nominee John McCain offered an almost identical point in an address before the U.S. Naval Academy:

But even as we stand today, at the threshold of an age in which the genius of America will, I am confident, again be proven — the genius that historian Frederick Turner called “that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism … that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom” — many Americans are indifferent to or cynical about the virtues that our country claims. In part, it is attributable to the dislocations economic change causes; to the experience of Americans who have, through no fault of their own, been left behind as others profit as they never have before. In part, it is in reaction to government’s mistakes and incompetence, and to the selfishness of some public figures who seek to shine the luster of their public reputations at the expense of the public good. But for others, cynicism about our country, government, social and religious institutions seems not a reaction to occasions when they have been let down by these institutions, but because the ease which wealth and opportunity have given their lives led them to the mistaken conclusion that America, and the liberties its system of government is intended to protect, just aren’t important to the quality of their lives. [emphasis added]

In other words, here we have John McCain claiming that cyncism and a lack of patriotism are caused not only by economic dislocations on the part of the working class, but because of the ease of life of those who are better off. Given that John McCain is basically accusing two large groups of Americans of being unpatriotic and unwilling to make sacrifices for their country as a consequence of economic issues, explain to me again how John McCain isn’t being “elitist and condescending” in the same manner that Obama is?

Let me be clear on one thing, although I am a nominal Obama supporter (I believe that he is the lesser of three evils), I don’t particularly agree with him on this point, nor am I much of a fan of his economic policies. I also do not agree with John McCain that large swaths of the U.S. population who happen to neatly demographically coincide with Democratic voters are all cynical and anti-patriotism. That said, I think that it’s troubling the media and blogosphere conflate “thinking about the state of the country and sociological trends” is tantamount to condescension. I welcome the fact that both McCain and Obama are giving these matters some thought and are actually considering how government policy does affect the culture writ large.

Frankly, all that I think this “bittergate” nonsense is shown is the elitism and condescension of the pundit class. Face it–what this incident has revealed is that we live in a media environment that considers the American populace so stupid and ignorant that a candidate with thoughtfulness, nuance, and intellectual rigor is considered unelectable, while a candidate with incoherent, inconsistent policies who gives speeches full of flag-waving and poll-tested cliches is the “regular guy you want to have a beer with” who will inevitably be elected.

Barack Obama’s foray into pop psychology, trying to explain why rural Pennsylvanians aren’t warming to him and are asking him to talk more about patriotism, is causing quite the stir in the blogosphere.

“You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them,” Obama said. “And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

The complete transcript of these remarks is available at The Page. Reading them in context does not change their meaning.

Not surprisingly, both Hillary Clinton and John McCain quickly pounced.

“Barack Obama apparently believes that for Americans less privileged than him, religion is an economic-based and not faith-based condition,” Mark Salter, a senior campaign adviser for Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., tells ABC News. “It is hardly news that Senator Obama’s ‘new’ approach to politics is based on the presumption that voters are easily fooled,” Salter continues, “but the arrogance and elitism he shows here is truly astonishing, and very revealing about how he would govern this country.”

[...]

In Philly, Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, implies that Obama “looks down on” these small town Pennsylvanians. “I saw in the media it’s being reported that my opponent said that the people of Pennsylvania who faced hard times are bitter,” Clinton said this afternoon. “Well, that’s not my experience. As I travel around Pennsylvania, I meet people who are resilient, who are optimistic, who are positive, who are rolling up their sleeves. They are working hard everyday for a better future, for themselves and their children.

“Pennsylvanians don’t need a president who looks down on them, they need a president who stands up for them, who fights for them, who works hard for your futures, your jobs, your families.”

John Hinderaker asks, “Is Obama’s campaign over? ” He answers himself: “It may be. I don’t see how anyone known to have uttered these words can be elected President.”

Andrew Sullivan won’t go that far but concedes these were “not the most felicitously phrased” remarks.

You can see the point he is trying to make – it’s the Thomas Frank argument – and you can argue about its merits, back and forth. I don’t think it’s meant pejoratively about the blue collar workers Obama is trying to engage. But the context of these remarks is political gold for McCain and Clinton. Especially Clinton. You will hear these words on Fox News for a very, very long time.

Tom Maguire believes “This ices the Wright cake – I don’t think Hillary can stop him, but Obama is not electable.”

Isaac Chotiner is more low key, simply noting, “this is not the story [Obama] needs ten days before Pennsylvania.”

Mickey Kaus points out an amusing irony: “Isn’t Obama the one who has been clinging to religion lately? Does he cling to his religion for authentic reasons while those poor Pennsylvania slobs cling to it as a way to ‘explain their frustrations’?”

Obama stands by his remarks and doubles down. Here’s video of his response:

The key ‘graphs:

“And for 25, 30 years Democrats and Republicans have come before them and said we’re going to make your community better. We’re going to make it right and nothing ever happens. And of course they’re bitter. Of course they’re frustrated. You would be too. In fact many of you are. Because the same thing has happened here in Indiana. The same thing happened across the border in Decatur. The same thing has happened all across the country. Nobody is looking out for you. Nobody is thinking about you. And so people end up- they don’t vote on economic issues because they don’t expect anybody’s going to help them. So people end up, you know, voting on issues like guns, and are they going to have the right to bear arms. They vote on issues like gay marriage. And they take refuge in their faith and their community and their families and things they can count on. But they don’t believe they can count on Washington. So I made this statement– so, here’s what rich. Senator Clinton says ‘No, I don’t think that people are bitter in Pennsylvania. You know, I think Barack’s being condescending.’ John McCain says, ‘Oh, how could he say that? How could he say people are bitter? You know, he’s obviously out of touch with people.’

“Out of touch? Out of touch? I mean, John McCain—it took him three tries to finally figure out that the home foreclosure crisis was a problem and to come up with a plan for it, and he’s saying I’m out of touch? Senator Clinton voted for a credit card-sponsored bankruptcy bill that made it harder for people to get out of debt after taking money from the financial services companies, and she says I’m out of touch? No, I’m in touch. I know exactly what’s going on. I know what’s going on in Pennsylvania. I know what’s going on in Indiana. I know what’s going on in Illinois. People are fed-up. They’re angry and they’re frustrated and they’re bitter. And they want to see a change in Washington and that’s why I’m running for President of the United States of America.”

He’s certainly right that a lot of people are bitter and angry. And, frankly, he’s right that the same people are the ones who are most bitter about illegal immigration and most likely to own rifles and shotguns and go to church.

Marc Ambinder is exactly right here:

We’re dealing tonight with a classic Kinsleyian “gaffe,” where a candidate says what he means and then is forced to account for it. Let’s separate, for the moment, the politics of Obama’s words from the argument he is making.

[...]

The substance of what Obama said has the makings of a very good Firing Line broadcast. (Alas…)

The elite media and most Democrats will say… “yeah.. .So? Obama is simply describing world as we know it.” His opponents and people who are inclined to view Obama as an elitist will say, “he is dismissing the culture and religion of working class whites.”

Indeed, the responses to Obama’s words have proven (to Obama allies) a part of his argument. Conservatives are already portraying Obama as liberal, elite, out of touch with the values of ordinary Americans — exactly the type of legerdemain that Obama was pointing to.

So there’s a debate to be had about substance.

But the politics are unquestionably dangerous for a candidate whose appeal depends on him transcending traditional political adjectives like “liberal” or “elite.”

Despite his working class upbringing, Obama’s hyperconfidence sometimes translates as holier-than-thou, elitist, aristocratic, Dukakis-esque. Republicans know that these attributes aren’t popular in middle America, so they will use every opportunity to remind independents and moderates about them.

John Podhoretz reminds us that this was absolutely predictable: “Well, it has finally happened. Barack Obama has done what Democratic candidates for president invariably do — he has revealed the profound sense of unearned superiority that is the sad and persistent hallmark of contemporary liberalism.”

Despite the mythology that the Republicans are “the party of the rich,” they have, since at least Dwight Eisenhower, nominated presidential candidates who understand and have appeal to rural America. While the Democrats’ base includes some of the poorest Americans, they have been nominating mostly big city wonks since, oh, Woodrow Wilson. (The two notable exceptions, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, did quite well with Middle America.) And that reflects in their attitudes on the campaign trail.

Class bias works both ways. Urban elites tend to view rural America, especially Southerners, as a bunch of yahoos. Rural Americans, meanwhile, think big city types are elitist snobs who don’t love America. There are similar resentments between rich and poor, educated and not, and even Ivy League -State College. In private gatherings, where people think they are among the like-minded, one hears shocking bigotry along those lines.

There’s a huge cultural divide that’s been with us since well before (and, indeed, was a major factor in causing) the Civil War. Great national crises, like World War II and the 9/11 attacks, bridge those divides but only temporarily. And the permanent campaign that has characterized our politics in recent years continues to poke a stick at these wounds.

Obama will survive these remarks, although they’ll likely cost him any chance at rallying to win Pennsylvania. He’s still the odds-on favorite for the Democratic nomination. But it’s the hope that something like this or the Wright brouhaha will take away his aura that explains why Hillary Clinton continues to hang around.

Ed Morrissey says that, “Only a rookie would make a colossal blunder like calling Midwestern, small-town voters a bunch of bigoted, overly religious gun nuts. Rookies should not run for President.” While I wouldn’t go that far, Ed’s at least aiming in the right direction.

The more we learn about Obama, the less saintly he appears. That was inevitable, of course; he’s just a man. But he’s had a huge advantage coming into this race as simultaneously a superstar and a virtual unknown. He’s been able to inspire people with his rhetoric while being sufficiently vague that those who “hope” for “change” could paint their own picture and have him be just the change they were hoping for. As the long campaign forces him to reveal more of himself, though, it’ll be far easier to campaign against him.

It’s too bad that John Mellencamp has forbidden the McCain campaign to use his songs. “Small Town,” which Maguire evokes in his post title, both reinforces and rebuts Obama’s comments.

Here’s video of him performing it, ironically enough, at the 2004 Democratic Convention:

Key lyrics:

All my friends are so small town
My parents live in the same small town
My job is so small town
Provides little opportunity

Educated in a small town
Taught the fear of Jesus in a small town
Used to daydream in that small town
Another boring romantic that’s me

[...]

No I cannot forget where it is that I come from
I cannot forget the people who love me
Yeah, I can be myself here in this small town
And people let me be just what I want to be

Got nothing against a big town
Still hayseed enough to say
Look who’s in the big town
But my bed is in a small town
Oh, and that’s good enough for me

That pretty much covers it, doesn’t it?

A man who mistakenly brought a load gun to Ronald Reagan National Airport was arrested by the TSA. At first glance you might think, “Well duh. Sounds like government is doing its job for once.”

Not so fast.

WASHINGTON (CNN) — A passenger who went through an airport security checkpoint — before remembering that he had a loaded gun — is facing charges after going back to report his error, authorities said.

Gregory Scott Hinkle, 53, of Davis, West Virginia, went through a Transportation Security Administration checkpoint at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport about 7:30 a.m. Sunday, an airport spokeswoman said.

After the traveler evidently recalled having the gun, he returned to the checkpoint and disclosed the weapon, authorities said.

The TSA contacted airport police, who charged the man with possessing or transporting a firearm into an air carrier terminal where prohibited, a misdemeanor, and released him. He is scheduled to appear April 2 in Arlington County, Virginia, General District Court.

So we have a guy who mistakenly brings a gun to the airport, makes it through the security checkpoint, realizes his mistake, tries to rectify and gets arrested. In short, don’t attempt to comply with the law after the fact. Continue on to your flight, get on board, and fly with the gun, and head on through to the baggage claim once your plane lands and not get arrested. Wouldn’t it make more sense to not come down so hard on what appears to be a decent law abiding citizen and instead spend more time focusing on how the security checkpoint failed? Just an idea.

And here is another one: How about instead of worrying if I have Head-n-Shoulders or Pantene in my small 2 oz. bottle, inside a zip lock baggie, inside another bag with my other liquids…maybe these TSOs should concentrate on…oh I don’t know…guns, knives, explosives, and so forth. I imagine under the right circumstances a shampoo bottle could explode, but all that does is make a mess inside my carry on bag.

Michigan sees fewer gun deaths — with more permits (Detroit Free Press):

Six years after new rules made it much easier to get a license to carry concealed weapons, the number of Michiganders legally packing heat has increased more than six-fold.

But dire predictions about increased violence and bloodshed have largely gone unfulfilled, according to law enforcement officials and, to the extent they can be measured, crime statistics.

The incidence of violent crime in Michigan in the six years since the law went into effect has been, on average, below the rate of the previous six years. The overall incidence of death from firearms, including suicide and accidents, also has declined.

Michigan mirrors the experience of pretty much every state that’s liberalized its concealed carry laws: Hyberbolic predictions of the streets running red with blood before, reductions in violent crime after. With each new state that goes through this process, the former become more difficult to sustain and the latter harder to ignore (though some, of course, still do).

SupCt agrees to hear DC gun ban case:

In a decision that could affect gun control laws across the nation, the Supreme Court has agreed to consider whether the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to carry a gun….

The Supreme Court agreed to step in because the issue has caused a deep split in the lower courts. While a majority of courts have said that the right to bear arms refers in connection to service in a state militia, two federal courts have said the amendment protects an individual’s right to keep a gun.

One of those courts, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, went as far as striking down a decades-long ban on the private ownership of handguns in the District of Columbia. It is this case the court has agreed to consider.

The district will argue that the Second Amendment does not prevent the city from enacting reasonable regulations to limit gun possessions in order to protect residents.

The petition raises one question: “whether the Second Amendment forbids the District of Columbia from banning private possession of handguns while allowing possession of rifles and shotguns.”

As noted in the article, the Supremes have not looked at the meaning and scope of the Second Amendment in almost 70 years. And, owing in part to the peculiar circumstances of that case, what they gave us in Miller was essentially a Rorschach Test on gun rights: Whichever position one prefers, one can find in Miller what one wants to find, provided one looks for nothing else.

Clearly, it’s long since past time for a definitive ruling on the issue.

UPDATE: The Court’s order states that the question before it is as follows:

Whether the following provisions — D.C. Code secs. 7-2502.02(a)(4), 22-4504(a), and 7-2507.02 — violate the Second Amendment rights of individuals who are not affiliated with any state-regulated militia, but who wish to keep handguns and other firearms for private use in their homes?”

So we will be getting a Second Amendment ruling, absent a decision based solely on procedural issues or a (very unlikley) retraction of cert.