Scary Guns

A free people ought not only be armed and disciplined, but they should have sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain a status of independence from any who might attempt to abuse them, which would include their own government.—George Washington

Since it’s President’s Day, it seems appropriate to start this discussion with George Washington’s words on the subject of the day

The hue and cry for gun control, in the wake of last week’s school shooting in Florida, is deafening but unconvincing. Emotions of course run high after such a senseless massacre. But sometimes things that seem like the “obvious” solution when you’re high on emotion look a lot less sensible when you calm down and look at facts.

I’m not a gun expert. What I do is look at the factors that lead to freedom, prosperity, and civilization. Those are the northern hemisphere of the Spherical Model. The southern hemisphere is made up of all stripes of tyranny, poverty, and savagery.

The school shooting was savage. Any response that is southern hemisphere by nature—such as coercion—will not lead away from savagery up to civilization.

Since that is a principle I know—or, rather, is a theory I believe plays out in society—I am looking for facts to either prove or disprove the theory. Facts are less emotional, and therefore more logical. Feelings have their place, but I won’t allow them to take society southward into tyranny and all bad things if I can help it.

So I’ve been gathering some facts. There is a short piece at Ricochet.com by contributor Henry Racette, with some statistics that give perspective to start with:

At the current rate, an American high school student faces a risk of being murdered in a school shooting in a year of about 0.0014%.

That’s about one in 71,000.

Based on last year’s crime statistics, the overall probability of a person in the US being murdered in a year is about 0.005%.

That’s about one in 20,000.

Also based on last year’s crime statistics, a citizen of St. Louis, Baltimore, New Orleans, or Detroit—including children in those cities—has a risk of being murdered in a year of about 0.049%.

That’s about one in 2,000.

If the current rate continues, there will be about two dozen school shooters this year—based on a reasonable definition of what constitutes a school shooting. Their total victims will constitute about one half of one percent of all United States homicides.

Overall, in the United States, about 16,000 murders will be committed this year. Most of them—about two-thirds—will be committed by males between the ages of 17 and 35.

The 30 most violent cities in America represent about six percent of the US population but account for about a quarter of all murders.

There is nothing trivial about school shootings, but there is also nothing typical about them. If we wish to reduce their frequency, we have to find ways to reach the last 0.0003% of the male high school population. Put differently, 99.9997% of the young men in our high schools are not in danger of becoming school shooters.

Let’s look at the two dozen who are and try to understand their pathology. But let’s not mistake them for normal. Most of the other 99.5% of murders in the United States this year will be more typical, more predictable, and more preventable.

What we’re looking at in school shootings are outliers. Oddities. Atypical events.

They’re horrible. If we can find a way to prevent them, we should do so. Maybe it’s time to consider metal detectors and armed guards in every school, and possibly teachers who voluntarily qualify to carry concealed weapons. These and other measures that don’t infringe on the rights of law-abiding citizens might actually work.

As Brandon Minoff, a young man from the high school, said about football coach and security guard Aaron Feis, who was killed, “If coach Feis would have had a gun or any of the other security guards would have had a gun it definitely would have been less fatal," he said. "[The shooter] and coach Feis were face-to-face and he just shielded kids instead of having the ability to kill the shooter."

In the immediate aftermath, we were told the killer had not had a criminal record. That wasn’t exactly true. He had a long record of incidents, 39, many violent, in his home over many years. But as a juvenile. Yet the moment he turned 18, that record was hidden from people who may have needed to see it, such as the gun seller doing a background check. Police and other authorities knew of his record. The FBI had received what now appear to be credible tips about the killer’s plans to carry out a school shooting.

Do we need to get better at identifying these threats and finding ways to prevent? Absolutely. If there is a law that needs adjusting, it may be that violent youth crime shouldn’t be hidden just because a person reaches a particular birthday, since a birthday is no guarantee of change in behavior. It may need to be case-by-case. I don’t know. Those kinds of things could be debated in legislatures.

But the debate tends to be, instead, on “common sense gun laws,” often meaning getting rid of those “assault rifles.” The term lacks definition. There is no legally defined such thing. But the term is used to imply scary, military style weapons, with great capacity to do mass murder. Many of the people making these arguments just lack facts. So let’s start with more information about these guns.

This 5-minute Glenn Beck video clip is from 2013. The whole thing (below) is useful visually. I’ll describe a few parts of it:

Glenn picks up a scary looking metal gun, which he terms an “assault rifle,” and also a rifle with a wooden stock, which he says is a 22.

Paul Michael, owner and instructor at Strictly Defense, says. “They’re both the same caliber. They both can do the same damage. One just looks different from the other.”

The 22 holds 17 bullets. The other holds a high-capacity magazine of 20 bullets. Not much difference.

Of the collection of guns displayed on the table, Glenn suggests, if he took all the wood-stock guns off the table and left the metal ones, you might look at that collection and say the owner was a madman. But if you take away “the spooky black shotgun” and replace it with “this nice shotgun,” then people would assume the owner was a hunter.

What’s the difference between the two shotguns? Michael says, “Cosmetics. They’re both the identical shotgun. They’re both Remington 1100s.” The only differences are a synthetic (black) stock, an extended barrel, and extended magazine tube. Why the black? Glare. Some hunters believe the game can get a glint off the shiny metal parts, so they prefer a matte black finish.

There’s further discussion about a hunter-looking rifle and a slightly smaller black gun. The rifle is more accurate. The black one is less accurate, but lighter weight, easier for a woman or a less experienced gunman to use in a pressure situation. In other words, it’s good for self-defense. It has the added self-defense benefit of the pump sound, which can scare off an intruder who suddenly realizes someone has a gun ready for him.

Using handguns, they discuss the difference between a revolver and a semiautomatic. With the revolver, it’s mechanical. You need to pull back the handle to load the bullet to be ready to fire by pulling the trigger. The semiautomatic uses gas pressure from the cartridge to load the next bullet to be ready to fire, so it does one step for you. Depending on your skill, the revolver can be as fast, or nearly as fast, as the semiautomatic handgun.

Neither of those is automatic—which means, like a machine gun, firing multiple bullets with a single trigger pull. Production and sale of automatic weapons to the public have been illegal for several decades. They are not technically outlawed, in that you can buy existing ones, for very high prices (around $20,000 and up compared to around $500 for a semiautomatic but otherwise similar gun), and with lots of paperwork about how it will be stored, who can touch it, how it can be transported, and how and where and under what circumstances it can be shot.

The Tommy guns of the 1920s might be what you picture. But since this law went into effect, no mass shooting in the US to date has used an automatic weapon.

We could add that,  those “scary guns,” aren’t the weapon of choice for gun crimes; handguns are used in 80% of gun-related crimes. Nicholas Johnson gives the full story is in this PragerU video:

Earlier in January 2013, Glenn Beck had another discussion with David Barton, of Wallbuilders, on natural law and self-defense.

Natural law is where we disagree with anti-gun people. And its irreconcilable. We are not granted the right to defend our own lives, loved ones, and property by government—not even by the Second Amendment. We are granted that right by God. And God-given rights are inalienable—they cannot be infringed legally, only by tyranny.

Rescinding the Second Amendment, as has been suggested again this week, would not take away the natural law—nor the natural reaction to fight off an attacker—that you know inside you is your right. Think about it. If someone is attacking your child, do you have the right to fight them off? You do.

If that person is using a gun against you or your child, don't you have the right to use a gun or other lethal force to fight back? If you’re saying, “Yes, but not a scary black gun,” then it’s on you to explain that distinction.

We’re not saying, “Tough luck! We just have to tolerate the mayhem.” Again, we should be talking about what can and ought to be done to prevent attacks. But you might be comforted to know that the anti-gun lobby (including the media) has been lying to you when they say, “More guns mean more gun deaths.”

Steven Crowder responds to an anti-AR-15 piece, and includes video from March 2016, in which he debunks a Vox video that tries to pass off propaganda as a dispassionate demonstration of facts—just not true ones. It’s longish, but it will help you understand why it’s easy to be manipulated if you don’t think things through. For example:

Ah, see, now this chart is comparing countries. But this chart is not about homicide; it’s not about firearm deaths. It’s only about gun ownership. All of this is designed to lead you into believing that gun ownership—legal gun ownership—results in increased violent gun crime. Important to note: If gun ownership as seen in this chart is so much higher, but the United States still ranks 28th in gun-related deaths, why is that the case? It also ironically unravels her own point. If gun ownership is so drastically higher in the United States, but we’re only 28th ranked in overall gun homicide rate, that means proportionally legal gun owners in the United States are committing fewer crimes.

Also doing some debunking is Ben Shapiro, in his show from Friday, February 16. He’s responding to a Bret Stephens piece in the New YorkTimes, which Shapiro says is the best argument around for getting rid of the Second Amendment, but it’s not a good one.

There’s this, for example:

Stephens cites a study in the American Journal of Public Health from 2013 to show the “states with high rates of gun ownership have disproportionately large numbers of death from firearm-related homicides.” But there’s only one problem with the study. This examines the statistics on a state level, which doesn’t make any sense, given that virtually all murder in the United States takes place not in the rural areas of states, but in the big cities. In those big cities there are very harsh gun laws. In the big cities, that’s where nearly all murder in the United States takes place, in big cities. So there is very little link, actually, between state law and state homicide rate, as Eugene Volokh of the Washington Post pointed out.

Shapiro uses John Lott’s website, the Crime Prevention Research Center, which goes through the annual death rate from mass public shootings, comparing the European countries to the US and Canada on a per capita basis, instead of sheer numbers. As Shapiro says,

One of the things that happens is that the United States is compared to Britain, for example. He says there are a lot more shootings here than in Britain. Right, but we’re a much larger country than Britain. When you actually look at the death rate per million people from mass public shootings from 2009 to 2015, according the Crime Prevention Research Center, the number one country was Norway, because they had that horrible Anders Breivik shooting. And then it’s Serbia, France, Macedonia, Albania, Slovakia, Switzerland, Finland, Belgium Czech Republic, and then the United States.

How about frequency? Forget about the number of dead. How about frequency of mass public shootings? So, if you look at the frequency of mass public shootings from January 2009 to December 2015, per million people, in order it’s Macedonia, Albania, Serbia, Switzerland, Norway, Slovakia, Finland, Belgium, Austria, Czech Republic, France, and then the United States.

The average incident rate per 28 EU countries is 0.0602 with 95% confidence interval of 0.0257 to .09477. The US rate is .078 higher than the EU rate. But the US and an average for EU countries are not statistically different. In other words, we’re having about the same number of mass shootings as are happening in other countries, and we have significantly more guns. So this idea that everything lines up is just not statistically correct.

“Common sense gun laws,” and “No one needs an assault weapon” are code for “We want to ban all gun ownership for self-defense or any other purpose.” But despite what media and various celebrities would portray, the American public is very much against full-scale gun confiscation and outlawing firearm ownership. That's why, when Democrats had both houses and the presidency, they didn't even bring up gun legislation; they know the people won't stand for it. 

The more the anti-freedom people lie about what they really intend, the more likely they will lose the debate in a nation that knew better from its founding than to cede natural rights to a tyrannical government.

What Is a Right?

I’ve covered the definition of a right here and there. I think it’s essential knowledge if you’re going to achieve freedom, prosperity, and civilization, which is the goal here at the Spherical Model.

Bill of Rights in the US Constitution
image from the National Archives

In 2013 I wrote,

What is a right? Something you are entitled to just by virtue of being born a human. God has granted it to you. Others are required to respect your rights, but not to provide them out of thin air.

In the Economic Sphere section of the Spherical Model website, in the section called “How to Tell What Is a Right,” I offer this:

Let’s be clear on what a right is: it is not a privilege, something you might be granted under certain circumstances. It is something that you deserve simply for being human. You do not have to earn a right; you can’t rightfully be deprived of it (with possible forfeitures such as committing capital crimes). If it is a right, it does not come from government; it comes from God. Government may use its power to either guarantee a person’s rights, or to deprive a person of his rights. Restraint from depriving a person of his rights is not equivalent to granting rights. Rights simply do not come from government.

So, if something is a right, it is a person’s natural right whether there is a government entity guaranteeing it or not.

We’re born naked, impoverished, and inexperienced. It is by growth, hard work, and gaining in expertise that we try to overcome this condition throughout our life. We are born with the right to life, the right to live free (not enslaved), and the right to pursue our own path to overcome the naked impoverished state.

I came across an additional good source this weekend, reading Dr. Larry Arnn’s book The Founders' Key. He does a good—and fair—job of laying out both the definition of natural rights and the “progressive” definition of “positive rights,” as defined by FDR. And then explains why we should prefer the way natural rights are understood. He says,

The Founders thought that all our rights are connected. Our right to property is based on the same facts as our freedom of speech. Our right to the material things that we earn is founded in the same nature as our freedom to worship and pray as we please. Our civil and political rights depend on our ability to hold the means of our well-being in our own hands. We can have no rights of any kind that do not leave “to everyone else the like advantage.” This means that nothing properly called a right takes anything from anyone else. [p. 62]

The highlight is mine. I thought that was a main idea worth exploring.

Let’s look again at FDR’s list of “positive rights”:

In our day certain economic proofs have become accepted as self-evident: a second bill of rights, under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all, regardless of station or race or creed. Among these are:

·         the right to a useful and remunerative job, the right to earn enough to provide food and clothing and recreation;

·         the right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return that will give him and his family a decent living;

·         the right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom—freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

·         the right of every family to a decent home; the right to adequate medical care, and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

·         the right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age—sickness, medicine, and unemployment;

·         the right to a good education.

All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won, we must be prepared to move forward in the implementation of these rights to new goals of happiness and well being. For unless there is security here and home, there cannot be lasting peace in the world.

So, if you have the right to a “useful and remunerative job,” then you have the right to an employer to provide it. If there’s a free-market agreement between you and the employer, you both benefit. But if the employer is coerced to provide for you, regardless of your skill or success in bringing profit to the employer, the government must enslave the employer in order to provide you with that “right.”

If you have the right, as a farmer, to raise and grow whatever you want, regardless of market supply and demand, and receive a particular government-set rate of return—even in a season when crops fail and the farmer provides nothing of value to society—then someone is going to be coerced into giving that farmer his “rightful” share, regardless of whether the farmer provides value.

The right to trade in a free market is a good idea; a monopoly is not a free-market idea. There are sensible laws to prevent monopolies from keeping supply and demand from working. However, if a company innovates and creates something new, they aren’t required to also create a competitor. They simply put their product out there and compete when/if a competitor shows up. So that one depends on whether government does its policing role to protect free trade, or steps in to pick winners and losers, which ends up actually interfering with free trade.

If every family has a “right” to a “decent” home, who buys it for the family that can’t afford it? And who decides what “decent” means? If everyone has the “right” to adequate medical care, who is coerced to provide it or pay for it? And who decides what “adequate” means? And while it sounds nice to allow everyone the “opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health,” who decides what the opportunity consists of? If illness or disabilities are preventing that person from enjoying good health, who is required to intervene and see to it that the person doesn’t have to suffer? And how, if a solution is unknown?

If someone has the “right” to be free from financial worry in old age—whether or not they work and save, or have higher than normal health care costs because of inadequate self-care or just circumstances beyond their control—who must be coerced to provide for that person?

If a person has a “right” to a “good” education, shouldn’t teachers be providing that for free? Shouldn’t builders be building the necessary buildings for free? If so, who works for free to provide housing and food for the teachers and builders? And who gets to decide what qualifies as “good”?

While it sounds nice to “give” security to every citizen, a government isn’t God; and a government isn’t a wealth source. Government is power, and a cost. Everything government does is a cost to society. So anything it “provides” that costs money must be taken from someone who earned that money.

So let’s be clear: if government is “giving” us rights that we weren’t born with, government is coercing someone to work to provide for someone else it deems worthy. Government deprives Person A of his natural rights to life, liberty, and/or property in order to give the illusion it is providing the extra, “positive rights” for Person B. Whatever Person B feels, Person A rightly feels oppressed by that arrangement.

image found here

If we want people to have some basic shelter, food, health care, and education, there’s a way a free people can do that: charitable giving. Local charities and philanthropies are a lot better at identifying the best way to provide those things than governments can ever be. Then, a person decides when he can afford to offer from his surplus, and he can decide what conditions apply when he makes his donation.

We can do that with anything that is not a natural, God-given right, but is nice to have. We can accumulate enough to offer it freely to those who can’t manage to work their way out of their naked, impoverished, and inexperienced state. We can care about, and for, one another.

Government has no feelings. It is only coercion. That power should be limited to necessary protections of our life, liberty, and property.

Counterfeits

I propose that, for every principle that leads to Spherical Model northern hemisphere freedom, prosperity, and thriving civilization, there is a counterfeit southern hemisphere claim. Here are just a couple of examples.

Rights

Our Constitution does a good job of spelling out many of our God-given natural rights relating to life, liberty, and property: freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, freedom to defend self and others with arms, freedom to feel secure in our persons and papers, and more. The counterfeit was put forward by FDR, using the word rights that we were used to recognizing as a positive part of our free country. But he skewed it.

In our day certain economic proofs have become accepted as self-evident: a second bill of rights, under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all, regardless of station or race or creed. Among these are:

·         the right to a useful and remunerative job, the right to earn enough to provide food and clothing and recreation;

·         the right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return that will give him and his family a decent living;

·         the right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom—freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

·         the right of every family to a decent home; the right to adequate medical care, and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

·         the right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age—sickness, medicine, and unemployment;

·         the right to a good education.

All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won, we must be prepared to move forward in the implementation of these rights to new goals of happiness and well being. For unless there is security here and home, there cannot be lasting peace in the world.

 

What is a right? Something you are entitled to just by virtue of being born a human. God has granted it to you. Others are required to respect your rights, but not to provide them out of thin air. So when Roosevelt uses the term, what does he mean? Something that we’d all like to have. And if you assume these things are rights—must be given to everyone—then government takes the place of God as the provider of rights. Government gets its power—and its money—from the governed. So, what FDR is saying is, you are required to give up whatever portion of your life’s work the government confiscates so that the government can grant that as a gift to someone else, in order to claim it is a better provider than God.

You do have the right to seek a good job; but if you have a right to a good job, regardless of your efforts or abilities, that means someone is required to hire you regardless of your efforts or abilities. That doesn’t square with the business freedom “right” he lists just below. You have the right to purchase a good home or a good education, but if you must be given those purchasable things, someone must be enslaved to pay for them.

Family

Family is the basic unit of society. It is the way we get a new generation, and pass along the values and principles required for civilization to that new generation. It is based on, and bound by, love for one another.

If there’s going to be a southern hemisphere counterfeit, it is going to appeal to the sense of belonging we crave. But instead of feeling the sense of belonging to parents, ancestors, siblings, and posterity, the counterfeit version is belonging to the collective—the state in the southeast quadrant, or the gang, mob, mafia, or other cabal in the southwest quadrant. The principle is the same: the collective wants/needs override the individual wants/needs.

I saw the latest Star Trek movie this past weekend, always fun. They re-enacted in a different way a scene from an earlier movie (that is set in a later time), where Spock had sacrificed himself by entering the hot nuclear reactor. He had said, “It is logical. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one.” But what has happened here? An individual sacrifices himself, because his love for the many he can save is greater than his love for his own life. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends,” John 15:13 (King James Bible). That is the northern hemisphere version. Our soldiers do this for us. Our police take this risk. Last week we tragically lost four Houston firefighters who were acting on this honorable premise.

 

The southern hemisphere counterfeit takes the choice of sacrifice away from the individual, and replaces it with, “Because the collective is more important than the few or the one, the rights/wants/needs of the few or the one can be overridden at the will of those in control for the benefit of the collective.” This shows up in health care. If the collective is paying for health care, a costly and limited resource, then it is to the benefit of the collective to refuse care to whomever it deems less likely to benefit the collective: the elderly, the handicapped, the mentally impaired, the seriously ill. Everywhere in the world there has been state-run health care, there has been rationing, poorer service, loss of service to the elderly and seriously ill, and enforced euthanasia. There is no sacrifice involved; there is imposed punishment for being ill or elderly.

I’m in the middle of yet another youth novel, with the enemy being some entity trying to take over the world, ostensibly to “help” mankind (while incidentally giving unlimited power to the controlling bad guys). This one is Michael Vey, by Richard Paul Evans. The bad guy says things like, “Want is a thing of the past…. It’s a brave new world… with endless opportunities.” There’s a collection of young people with special electrical powers. They’ve been kidnapped and manipulated, and are essentially imprisoned. But the collection of them is called the family. If they don’t use their powers as required, to harm people and even murder, then the young person is punished and imprisoned. Most of them have succumbed, and the ones found at earlier ages were more easily manipulated. They’re made to feel “special,” told that they are eagles, among the chickens, and shouldn’t choose to act like chickens, or even worry about the chickens—because eagles eat chickens, after all.

When confronted with the discomfort of being asked to do something harmful, one who had been there from a young age said, “You get over it. At first you might hate it but before you know it, you’ll volunteer to do it…. Why do you care? We’re better than them.”

Ah, the old “we’re the important people and the others are subhuman” ploy, found in all savage tyrannies, wherever there is mass murder, genocide, or halocaust.

Belonging to a real family is something we’re designed by our Creator to respect and enjoy—where we can develop loving relationships that will help us in everything we do. The counterfeit is belonging to some replacement collective, with controllers that either tell us why we can disregard the rights of those supposedly beneath us, or why we are too insignificant to have our rights respected. There may be an inculcation of adoration for the collective. But real love—giving and receiving love—is missing.

Find something good in a society of freedom, free enterprise, and civilization, and there will be a correlative counterfeit in a society of controlled behavior, controlled economy, and savage disregard of the value of human life.

The Parental Right to Educate

We’ve been covering education topics for a few posts now, mostly in preparation for current related news. Last Friday’s post presented the concept of the parental right and responsibility to educate their children. Monday’s post covered definitions of curriculum and textbooks, to take away some of the mystique of the experts. Wednesday’s post covered more skepticism of centralized control, revealing the lack of connection between accreditation and educational outcomes.



The Romeike family in 2010
photo from NY Times story

Today I want to cover a particular case. I mentioned this case back in October 2011. A German family, the Romeikes, an Evangelical Christian family with six children, found that the German public schools did not meet their family’s educational needs. They found that local private schools (which, in Germany, are required to teach the government dictated curriculum used in public schools) were an even worse environment. They came slowly to look into homeschooling, which is illegal in Germany, and has been since long before WWII. A few people do it undercover. (I actually know an American homeschooling family who worked in Germany for a year, that managed to stay under the radar during their stay.) The Romeikes finally saw it as their best option, believing that, if caught, the outcome would be fines they were willing to pay.

It turned out the fines were onerous, and the government threatened to take the children away from the parents, and possibly imprison the parents as well.

They did the legal thing; they went through the legal system in Germany first. Failing there, and with the threat of family dissolution looming, they came to the United States in 2008 and requested asylum. That was granted in 2010, by a judge in Tennessee, who spoke strongly in favor of their parental rights.

There was reason to rejoice, but it didn’t last long. The Department of Homeland Security (the Immigration and Naturalization Service, under DHS) stepped up to insist the judge had ruled incorrectly, and that the family should not be granted asylum.

There are some specific guidelines for qualifying for asylum. Being persecuted for religious reasons is one; so is being part of a specific targeted social group, which it is argued homeschoolers are. The judge in his ruling spelled out why the family qualified, so he was following the law, even though circumstances were unusual.

The case comes up for appeal before the Sixth Circuit Court on April 23^rd. It’s unclear to me how the case is set up. The Romeikes won the original case, so no need for appeal. So the government must have stepped in to insist on appeal, forcing the family to re-defend their position.

If this were simply a question of asylum, there might be some conceivable reason for pressing the question. If we allowed just anyone feeling unhappy in their home country to come here, we would be hard-pressed to accommodate the rush. But this family has been here since 2008. During the two years it took to get the ruling in their favor, they were productive and contributing members of society. During the additional three years, they have continued their noble behavior—and there has not been a sudden increase in similar requests for asylum based on homeschooling prejudices (or even religious prejudices) from Germany or elsewhere.

So the administration has stepped in, pretty much out of the blue, targeting a clearly harmless family for deportation—when the known outcome will be termination of custody of their own children, plus hefty fines and prison terms. Not only will they lose the right to educate their children as they see fit, they will lose the right to have a relationship with their children, and will have their lives essentially ruined and livelihood ended. That may not be a death threat, as with many asylum cases, but it’s pretty severe.

This is an administration that just set free a large number of illegal aliens who had been incarcerated. They have sued the state of Arizona for even asking people taken into custody for other infractions whether they have legal status. “Everyone is welcome, and we hope you’ll be voting for us soon,” is practically the announced immigration policy.

So why go to so much trouble to expel this particular family that came here legally?

I’ve wondered if there was pressure from Germany, which is an ally, and would appear somewhat embarrassed by the accusation of oppression that the request for asylum implies. There may be something behind the scenes, but there’s no mention of a request for extradition or any such thing in the stories I’ve read. And it seems unlikely there would be such a request. Germany’s stated purpose for the anti-homeschooling law is that they want to discourage factions and separateness within the country; having the family leave means problem solved.

Whether there’s some backroom discussion with Germany or not, this prosecution by the federal government clearly exposes this administration’s belief: there is no parental to right to see to the care, control, and upbringing of children, nor is this administration willing to protect any so-called parental rights.

Not all natural rights are spelled out in the first Ten Amendments to the Constitution. The reason even those are amendments is that natural rights were understood and accepted, so much so they didn’t need to be mentioned. It was fear that people might someday become corrupt enough not to understand and accept the natural God-given rights that led to the addition of the Bill of Rights. But it was so far from their thinking that anyone would come to believe someone other than parents owned the responsibility for raising the next generation that they didn’t even think to spell it out. Parents choosing how to best raise their children is simply part of a person’s life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Only in severe cases of abuse and neglect would society (or government) have a role to step in to protect the child.

But this administration is more corrupt than the founders imagined. The insistence on challenging the Romeike decision is a way to codify the administration’s belief that parents do not have rights concerning raising their children—the government wants to make it clear that they believe they have the right to control, to indoctrinate.

Inalienable rights cannot be given up. But just as people can lose their freedom to slavery, any inalienable right can succumb to usurpers if people do not stand strong against the tyrannists. Usually the loss happens little by little. “Free” public schools have been used for the incremental usurpation of parental rights. This administration is testing how far they have already come toward the tyrannist plan to dictate what and how children are taught.

When this federal government puts forth a curriculum (as it has with Common Core), claiming it is best for all our children, it doesn’t matter what is in the curriculum and whether it could be effective as a teaching tool. Such curriculum must be rejected, because the issue is parental rights—and we know that any curriculum they provide comes from the worldview that parents do not have rights.

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* You can learn more on the Romeike case at these links: this story from 2010, this story from The Blaze March 15th, and this video with HSLDA, who are helping to defend the Romeikes. 

Studying the Constitution

Back in the 1770s-80s, the founders were an unusually well-educated group of men, considering they were farmers and shopkeepers in the world’s frontier. They had a list of readings in common, which led to their concepts of natural rights granted to men and women by God. And it is this understanding that led to the writing of our brilliant founding documents: The Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution.

I’ve often felt driven to educate myself somewhat along the lines of the founders. A couple of years ago I went to an all-day seminar provided by the National Center for Constitutional Studies (nccs.net). I’ve also used their curriculum to teach homeschool students from elementary through high school. Another good source is Hillsdale College. Last fall, in honor of Constitution Day in September, they provided a free six-week course of lectures by Dr. Larry Arnn, President of Hillsdale, introducing the Constitution. It’s a good review, still available, and free of cost.

Right now Hillsdale College is offering even more. They have developed their core course on the Constitution for online study—also for free. Constitution 101 will be ten weeks of lectures, readings, discussion, quizzes, and all you’d expect from a college class. It is part of Hillsdale’s mission to educate, and they take seriously educating as far and wide as possible, particularly these constitutional essentials of our culture. (Their magazine Imprimus is another example of their spreading knowledge mission, also free.)  The course started Monday, but you can sign up and catch up at any time. The only thing you miss by starting late would be the active Q&A.

Here is the lineup of lecture titles, and the various lecturers:

1. The American Mind
   Larry P. Arnn
   Monday, February 20
2. The Declaration of Independence
   Thomas G. West
   Monday, February 27
3. The Problem of Majority Tyranny
   David Bobb
   Monday, March 5
4. Separation of Powers: Preventing Tyranny
   Kevin Portteus
   Monday, March 12
5. Separation of Powers: Ensuring Good Government
   Will Morrisey
   Monday, March 19
6. Religion, Morality, and Property
   David Bobb
   Monday, March 26
7. Crisis of Constitutional Government
   Will Morrisey
   Monday, April 2
8. Abraham Lincoln and the Constitution
   Kevin Portteus
   Monday, April 9
9. The Progressive Rejection of the Founding
   Ronald J. Pestritto
   Monday, April 16
10. The Recovery of the Constitution
    Larry P. Arnn
    Monday, April 23

I’ve already enjoyed the first lecture and started on the readings, the most pertinent segments of some essential founding readings. Here’s this week’s list:

1. “Letter to Henry Lee”—Thomas Jefferson
2. “On the Commonwealth”—Marcus Tullius Cicero
3. “Nicomachean Ethics”—Aristotle
4. “The Politics”—Aristotle
5. “Discourses Concerning Government”—Algernon Sidney
6. “Second Treatise of Government”—John Locke
7. “Fragment on the Constitution and the Union”—Abraham Lincoln
8. “The Inspiration of the Declaration”—Calvin Coolidge

All of the readings are made available online, but they are all taken from the book Hillsdale’s text The US Constitution: A Reader, which you can order: http://www.hillsdaleusconstitution.com/

Just to be clear, I have no connection to Hillsdale, other than someone who subscribes to things they offer. I just appreciate a good deal on some essential learning, so I want to share. I hope you’ll join me in this study of our beloved Constitution.