Across the Great Divide

Signs of Decline?

If the housing market falls in the woods, does anybody hear?

Foreclosures aren't just hitting America's cities. The crisis may be even more pronounced in small towns and rural areas, where there's less competition among financial institutions, small banks aren't required to report lending activity and about 12 percent of homes are trailers or prefabs purchased on personal or installment loans. When those loans go bad, the properties are repossessed,  and the defaults aren't included in the foreclosure numbers.

*****

An errand took me to a small company that sells business forms along with secretarial services. I noticed this sign on one of the forms cabinets.

At first, I laughed. But then I began to wonder.

Might not customers wanting to return bankruptcy forms be a sign of economic recovery?

Why single out bankruptcy forms?

Had counterfeiters been discovered forging bankruptcy forms and returning them for cash?  Well, no more easy money for them.

*****

In Minnesota, according to the Federal Reserve, 56 percent of "nonprime mortgages" were current through December 2007. ARMs made up 77 percent of the loans and of those, 37 percent were due to reset in 2008. This interactive map [h/t SCSU Scholars] covers the entire country and allows you to drill down all the way to the local level.

*****
Also via King Banaian, this item from MPR about a U of M study that suggests a link between the ready availability of malt liquor and higher homicide rates in African American communities.

Malt liquor is often packaged in 40 oz. bottles that are sold cold directly from a retailer's cooler. That makes immediate consumption much easier, Jones-Webb says. Typically the lager beer contains 6 to 8-and-a-half percent alcohol by volume, compared to 4 to 5-percent for standard beer. And it's cheap. The U of M study found that the average price of a 40 oz.bottle is $1.87 in the neighborhoods it studied. That's significantly less than a gallon of milk.

Hmmm. I thought beer didn't kill people. People kill people.

Bulletin to the research team: Most beer is sold cold directly from a retailer's cooler. That's one reason America's roadways are littered with Miller Lite, Busch, Keystone and Milwaukee's Best.

It is true 40s place fewer impediments to immediate consumption than those faced by upper crust drinkers, whose choices typically require bottle openers, corkscrews, cocktail shakers and proper stemware.

Convenience is designed into the packaging, certainly, as it is easier to drink from a 40 in a paper bag on the street than to lug around a six-pack of glass bottles. And did the researchers consider the social benefits? 40s reduce waste by requiring less packaging per ounce.

As for the 6 to 8-and-a-half percent alcohol content loosing the bonds on criminal behavior, I checked the alcohol content of the brews I have ready for immediate consumption or have rhapsodized about here over the past year.

• Bell's Hopslam  10%
• Two Hearted Ale 7%
• Inversion IPA 6.8%
• Victory HopDevil 6.7%
• Palisade Dually 10% (est.)
• Cold Hop 6.5%
• Hennepin 7.7%
• Avery Kaiser Oktoberfest 9%

If yuh see me comin' better step aside...

The Stigma, Scorn and Obloquy Blues.

I confess, I've been remiss in tracking a certain prodigal preacher's progress in resisting Sen. Charles Grassley's investigation of the Big Six prosperity gospel televangelists. Once Mac Hammond got his new plane from Kenneth Copeland, I moved on to other things.

But at the start of the week, Copeland — or his Washington tax attorney — responded a second time to the Grassley committee's request for information. The letter was a bit more temperate than Copeland's defiant stance at his minister's conference or in a letter to contributor/partners:

The enemy is not going to steal what the Lord has won through this ministry, and he is not going to use this attack to bring harm to the rest of the churches and ministries in America!

The attorney put it differently, but basically reiterated what Copeland has been saying: If you want my financial information, go ask the IRS for what it has. That will protect our rights as a church and safeguard the privacy of our information. Privacy is important, because

the Church is deeply concerned that the information Senator Grassley is seeking could be used to subject the Church and its members to public stigma, scorn, and obloquy.

Most obloquy slingers have managed to get along fine without Copeland's tax returns. But Grassley, being more serious than most bloggers, would like to see whether there's actual substantiation for the claims these ministers are enriching themselves in part by skirting the tax code.

You can see here what Copeland considers a stigma-proof level of financial accountability — a pie chart, showing proportional ministry expenditures but no totals, that is less detailed than one appearing on the web site prior to the inquiry. It's meaningless even to the faithful, who don't require even this level of reassurance.

If Grassley were to request the information from the IRS, about all he would see are tax returns, unless the IRS were to launch an actual investigation. Only an audit would have a chance of untangling the various enterprises of Kenneth Copeland Ministries (KCM), and Copeland and his lawyers know it.

In addition to rules prohibiting public disclosure of KCM's tax information there are rules governing the timing and extent of any IRS investigation. The IRS, with a greater workload driven by more complex schemes and fewer auditors, has to prioritize who it goes after, and a church isn't likely to be high on the list — even one running as close to the edge as this one.

The regulations that Grassley himself sponsored years ago were designed to protect legitimate churches from harassment while still being able to root out fake enterprises like a Church of Mortgage Flipping or Sucking Equity Ministries. (Though a lawyer could contend that the real estate scamming seminars were church services, I'm sure.)

Basically, if Copeland gets his way, the church appears to comply and keeps its privacy. The Grassley inquiry still doesn't get the information it really wants. At least, that's a non-lawyer's reading of the latest legal response.

Lawyers aren't the only advisors who have been busy down Ft. Worth way. KCM has revamped its web site and filled it with some kinder, gentler information, including a little bit about Copeland's short, pre-Christian stint as a teen idol.

In 1957 at 20 years of age, with a hit album [sic; it appears to have been a single only], Pledge of Love, at #14 on the national charts and #1 on the local charts Kenneth looked to be on his way to a successful singing career appearing on American Bandstand and featured next to Ricky Nelson in Dig Magazine.

Copeland had a good voice. But the record was a reverb-drenched, do-wop-choir-backed, plodding pop ballad. It met the basic one-hit-wonder requirements of the era: A simple tune that can be learned on first hearing and sung by even the most musically challenged, coupled with lyrics that express obsessive longing. Lacking any specific description of the love object, it allowed the projection of universal, deeply sublimated, teenage sexual desire.

His attempt at Rockabilly with a Jimmy Lloyd tune went nowhere, and Copeland soon turned to God and gospel music. That's where his real pop idol success eventually came — translating the faithful longing theme to a different stage, and this time, singing of fulfillment instead of waiting.

American Crosscut: Can You Take Another Round?

We continue our back and forth on gun bills, and agree on a new curriculum for America's youth...

Joel: Well, having resolved -- at least as best we can -- the issues around HF 498, the "Stand Your Ground" bill, we're on to HF 3324, the gun registration bill, authored at the behest of Heather Martens, the President of the anti-gun Joyce Foundation funded pseudo-grassroots group, hereabouts, that calls itself a whole bunch of things, among them, "Citizens for a Safer Minnesota."  (Heather was shopping this around the Capitol for a couple of months before she made the sale.) 

I'm going to try to avoid ad hominem attacks here, honest.  But, sheesh -- any gun owner who doesn't look with suspicion on a bill coming out of an antigun group is probably not smart enough to be owning a gun.  Or a fork, for that matter.

So let's start off by looking at it.  On the face of it, it doesn't say it's a gun registration bill. What it talks about are transfers of handguns and scary looking long guns. (Okay, I'm being a little unfair; it actually talks about "modifying provisions related to the transfer of pistols or semiautomatic military-style assault weapons.")

In Minnesota, there are three ways you can buy a handgun from a dealer.

1. Get a purchase permit. These are issued by police chiefs, are free, and require a yearly trip to the local PD to fill out the paperwork.  The PD performs a background check, and, in due course, mails you out your purchase permit.  You then walk into the gun store, choose a firearm, produce your purchase permit and state issued ID, pay for it and -- not so fast, Mister; you still have to fill out the federal government purchase form, be subjected to an instant background check, after which you, assuming you are not denied, walk out with your newly purchased firearm.
2. Get a carry permit. Issued by sheriffs, not free, require training, and a background check.  Roughly the same thing, after that.  Including, of course, the federally-mandated instant background check.
3. A "report of transfer."  Instead of going through either of the two processes above, you walk into the gun store, fill in a form, pay for the gun... and then go home.  The dealers send the paperwork to the local PD or sheriff, they do the background check, and if they don't come up with a reason that you're disqualified from purchasing a firearm in five business days, you head back to the store, go through the same federally-mandated instant background check, and walk out with a gun.

In none of these three cases does your purchase go into some state or federal database to be maintained indefinitely.  It's not gun registration; it's just a background check to see if you are legally able to buy a gun.

There's another way to buy a gun... in Minnesota.  (And most other states, too, but let's keep this Minnesota-specific for the moment.)  You find a guy who is not a dealer who has a gun that he's willing to part with.  You meet with him.  You show him your carry permit or purchase permit – if he doesn't know that you have one, he's putting himself in the way of all sorts of trouble if you end up doing anything illegal with that gun – you hand over some amount of money, he hands over the gun, usually (not always, but a good idea) gives you a bill of sale, and you go your separate ways.

Notice that in all of these cases you've gone through at least one background check – and in the first three, two of them.  And, again, in none of these cases are you creating a permanent, state-maintained database of who owns what.  The law just tries to prevent law-abiding people from selling guns to criminals, leaving that part of the market to other criminals.  I'm not sure what value duplicative background checks have, and I'm pretty sure that the proponents of this bill don't, either, or they would have mentioned them.

And then we get to the bill, which turns that background check system into a permanent gun registration system.  Or would, if we hadn't killed it for the session.  (Like Jason in those horror movies, these things never stay dead; you've got to kill them again and again and again.)

Which brings me to, finally, gun registration.  Let's start with what gun registration doesn't do – after decades upon decades of gun registration in various parts of the United States, even the Centers for Disease Control's review of all of the research has shown that not any gun registration scheme has demonstrated that it will do anything to lower violent crime.  Or increase the likelihood of punishing violent crime.  That works really well on Law and Order and other dramatic fiction; the real world is not obliged to live by the scriptwriters' scripts.

Probably the best-documented case of the slippery slope of gun registration leading all the way to the bottom of confiscation is that of the United Kingdom. This whole thing is worth reading, but note the short form: step by registration/limitations step England went from an effective right to keep and bear arms to almost total confiscation in less than a hundred years.

It's not unknown in the US, either. There's been lots of talk about the DC gun ban – but note that the base on which the handgun ban rested was the law requiring registration, followed by the laws prohibiting anybody from registering a handgun. Even during oral arguments, the district's lawyers had to admit that the prohibition against registration was, in fact, the mechanism for the prohibition against possession.

It's not just DC.  Chicago has done the same thing – handguns must be registered in order to be lawfully possessed; no more handguns will be registered; the result is handgun confiscation/prohibition... for law-abiding citizens. (Chicago's large number of gang bangers don't seem to find themselves terribly inhibited, but I digress.)  New York City did the same thing with the Sullivan act, although it's not slid all the way down the slippery slope.  Now, in order to so much as possess a handgun in your home, you have to apply for a "premises permit" allowing you to have a registered handgun in your home – if, of course, after hundreds of dollars in application fees, certainly months and perhaps years in waiting for a decision, and quite possibly additional thousands or tens of thousands of dollars in lawyer's fees, your permit is granted.

The sort of thing has led to moments of unusual interest, over the years. New York State passed a "assault weapons" registration bill many years ago, with promises that, of course, it would never turn into confiscation.  Years passed, it did, and those folks who had registered their scary-looking rifles were instructed to turn them in or face prosecution. California has done much of the same thing for some firearms; more are due to follow.

(In one case, the letter went to a fellow who had moved up to a more civilized state – Colorado, I believe. Not being at all interested in what confiscation rules New York state had passed that didn't affect him, he scrawled something like, "if you want my guns, molan labe," on the letter and sent it back to the New York authorities.

(He got a letter from his brother in a few months later.  "Did you hear about that SWAT raid on the house you used to own...?")

Yes, gun registration leads – not always, so far, but often – to confiscation.  And it's understandable. For the gun grabbers, registration is a necessary (albeit not sufficient) start. 

The people who push gun registration are not all gun grabber types, trying to incrementally reduce the right to keep and bear all arms, nibble by nibble.  Some of them are those who believe – as an article of faith, and who am I to mock somebody's religion? – that gun control laws actually can reduce violent crime – despite the lack of evidence – and, once the latest gun control law has not actually reduced violent crime, think that if only they pass another one, or two, or a hundred, that will do the job. (Sort of like ancient physicians figuring that if a small course of leeches didn't cure the disease, what was needed was more leeches.)

Charlie: Or more tax cuts, if I may interject from the left field bleachers.

Joel: So, here we have a situation where there are already background checks – in most cases, multiple, duplicative ones – no evidence that requiring additional background checks for private sales would do anything useful here, anymore than it has elsewhere, and the creation of a permanent database of every transaction involving any transfer other than a very short term loan of a handgun . . .

. . . all mislabeled as "closing the gun show loophole." 

If the folks behind this bill are looking to bridge any sort of divide at all, much less a great one (and I know you're not one of them) perhaps they might do well to start treating those of us watching them with entirely justifiable suspicion as though we didn't just fall off the turnip truck.   

Charlie: I'll confess, I didn't start out predisposed to this bill, based simply on my belief it would not prevent crimes and likely not solve them, either. But I was willing to consider it on the basis of consistency — that is, we do this for other gun transactions; why treat these any differently?

You make the case that such harmless, incremental steps can lead to greater perils later on. Most of the time when I've heard that, it sounds to me like Black Helicopter paranoia, and I'm not sure how much of that interpretation was due to my prejudices or the advocate's rhetoric. But we're trying to get beyond that here.

The slippery slope argument is really spelled out in the long "essay" you linked to, which details the changes in UK gun ownership controls over the past century. The intertwined history of increased restrictions and fears of immigrants, anarchists and labor agitators does seem to have a few lessons for us today. Personally, I find that example more persuasive than the usual Nazis-disarming-the-Jews images I showed here last month.
I also see how a broad rationale for justifying restrictions — in the present case, guns as a public health menace — can lead to further restrictions without new laws being enacted. As I've said before, even gun-hating liberals should be able to get that point, having witnessed enough of that behavior coming from the White House.

But seriously, 26,000 words and 293 footnotes? That won't get far in the court of "gun grabber" public opinion, now, will it?

Turnip truck full of facts and historical precedents aside, here's what I think you and your friends face in trying to persuade people like me.

• Many people living in cities — and close proximity with lots of people they don't know — are not crazy about the idea of more folks walking the streets with firearms, legally or otherwise. That may make you feel safer, but they don't see it that way. They can look to other countries with more restrictive gun laws and lower murder rates and think, yeah, like that.
• Some of your homies do not... um... take rejection well. I think I can speak for others when I say the combination of belligerent rhetoric and gun ownership does not set minds at ease with the idea of loosening restrictions. I know there are lots of reasonable gun advocates out there, but we seem mainly to see the foam-flecked.
• Glorifying or celebrating guns — as with sex, drugs or rock & roll — will turn off some people concerned with the state of our culture who have no personal experience with guns. Unfair? In some cases, sure. But mocking or belittling their fears with the gun equivalent of Gay Pride Parades won't convert any more of them to your side.
• This issue is too wrapped up in party politics. Frankly, a lot of "my" people will have a hard time looking past the candidates and causes associated with gun rights to see the merits of your arguments. I think the gun rights argument could be more compelling if it focused more on the rights and less on the minutia. And as part of that, better segment the people on the other side you are trying to persuade. Focusing on firing up your base just fires up the other side. How do you find more people predisposed to civil rights who are opposed or on the fence? What would it take to bring them along?

You haven't asked my advice, but here it is. Get the NRA, the National Safety Council and Planned Parenthood to champion a new national school curriculum that requires X hours of age-appropriate sex education and gun safety over several years. Make it part of phy ed or health and include actual time at a gun range and training in non-violent conflict resolution. Freak out liberals and conservatives together, while giving each something they want.

I think the country and our culture would be better off with that deal. 

Joel: You're preaching to the (secular) choir, Reverend, on that latter; as the saying goes, "you had me at 'hello.'" I'll address the other stuff next round – you went long; I'll need to – but if there's anybody more in favor of teaching non-violent conflict resolution, gun safety and sex ed (and, for that matter, drownproofing) in the public schools than I am, I can't imagine who it might be. 

Can I kick the next round off?  You've gone from the underlying subject matter we've been talking about to the issue of how to persuade people, and I think that's a very useful direction, but it's a new one, and I'd like to start out.

Wakeup Call.

The new and cumulative ability to manipulate the world around us may dazzle our senses. And what we do with our lives in the presence of such opportunities may be neglected.
— William Stafford, Every War Has Two Losers

Layer Cake.

Man with bike and camera. Corvettes and VW squarebacks. Dirt, sand, water and rocks. Time.

[Pause and use arrows to read at your own speed.]

Veils of "Independence."

An adulatory ad from the American Future Fund (AFF) supports Sen. Norm Coleman as an "independent voice for Minnesota." The only way you could tell the senator's party affiliation from the ad is the inflection in one line: "Coleman has worked with Republicans and Democrats..."

The Minnesota DFL responds with its own video, noting Coleman, who claims to be a uniter not a divider, has united with President Bush on 86 percent of his senate votes.

Of course, neither of these videos is paid for by candidates or coordinated with their campaigns.

But as MNObserver  reports, the Iowa-registered, Virginia-located AFF seems to be well-connected to national Republican political consultants — well-enough connected to know they should register with the Federal Election Commission. Like Coleman, the chair of the cash-strapped and scandal-plagued National Republican Congressional Committee disavows any knowledge of the organization but says he's "very excited" to see it play a role in the election.

Soft money groups like AFF will play their little distancing dance.  Blogs for Norm! will continue to be an "online community" consisting of one person. MNPublius will provide fig leaves for DFL messages. But at least there are names attached to these efforts so we can judge their independence for ourselves.

Then there are the anonymous emails that are impossible to tie to candidates. Some particularly odious ones have been circulating about Obama and Clinton that seem aimed mostly at Republicans and gullible independents, but FactCheck has just reported on a deceptive email aimed at Clinton that seems likely to have come from the Obama camp. Not the campaign, of course — just from some over-zealous supporter the campaign has no way of knowing who makes misleading comparisons of the two senators' records.

As a forwarded anonymous email, it doesn't rise to the level of something a candidate would bother to address. And unlike paid advertising, it can't be yanked, traced or sanctioned.

Obama may not come out and condemn this crap, but I will.

Bachmann Strikes Another Blow for Freedom.

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) is not stopping her crusade for consumer choice. Buoyed by the enthusiastic reception for her "Light Bulb Freedom of Choice Act," Rep. Bachmann has sponsored a new bill, the "Leaded Gasoline Emancipation Act."

"There was a tragic rush to judgment after the EPA proposed banning leaded gasoline in 1972," said Bachmann. "It claimed to study health effects of banning lead, but no studies were ever completed on the future impact of unleaded gasoline on classic car collectors, for example.

"Now, our domestic lead industry is in shambles at a time we desperately need the higher octane and fuel efficiency of leaded gasoline. My bill will help free us from dependence on corn and Islamic Oil, while offsetting the energy demands made by Americans exercising their free choice of incandescent light bulbs."

When questioned whether the health and environmental costs could be justified economically, Bachmann responded, "I think the American people understand freedom is more important than brain damage."

American Crosscut: Boy Scouts and Bogus Boyz.

Joel Rosenberg and I resume our discussion of the Minnesota bill HF498 [Download pdf] on the use of deadly force in self-defense.

Since we last posted, we've had some other exchanges that were useful to us, but a bit off track for posting here. You'll notice Joel is posting comments here, too. That's a good byproduct... no, the point of these discussions we're having. Opening up to the other side on one thing leads to another.
 
Charlie: Joel, I don't think we're too far apart on the right to self-defense or when there are questionable claims, they ought to be determined in the courts. Certainly, people will make mistakes in those split-second decisions, and those are a very different sort than the "mistake" of a driver who gets into a car after downing a quart of booze. I'm not personally big on punishing mistakes. I think we ought to try to prevent them as much as reasonably possible, and try to mitigate the seriousness of the consequences that do occur. It seems like this part of the discussion may belong with the other bill, so I'll table it for now.

The question for me regarding HF498 at the end of our previous post was the purpose of the presumption language. Let me remind readers where we left off last time. I wanted to understand how the presumption of innocence — which we all enjoy — relates to the bill's statement about immunity from prosecution:

(a) An individual who uses deadly force according to this section is justified in using such force and is immune from any criminal prosecution for that act.

   If we agree the place to sort these claims out is in the courts, how can that be done if the individual claiming self-defense is immune from prosecution? This language may only be intended to let someone shoot into ground in self-defense and not get hauled off to jail by the cops, but it sure sounds like he can kill someone under the defined circumstances and not even be brought to trial, where the claim could be tested if there were questions about its legitimacy.

If this language is still confusing to me after numerous readings, no wonder people who haven't even looked at it are concerned. Can you address this and straighten me out?

Joel: Utterly fair questions.  Let me give you two answers.

I'll take the easy one first.  We don't have to guess how this language will be implemented, because we know how this language is implemented.  There are quite a few other states that already have just this law -- tweaked slightly, from state to state, to make the language consistent with pre-existing state law.  While there are some Minnesota specific bits in HF498, all of the reform in the following states was based on the same model bill, lobbied for by a fairly prominent — in the view of some folks, including me, often too accommodationist — civil rights organization, the NRA.

Here's the list.

Alabama
Alaska
Arizona
Colorado
Florida
Georgia
Idaho
Indiana
Kansas
Kentucky
Michigan
Mississippi
Missouri
Oklahoma
Pennsylvania
South Carolina
South Dakota

I'm not including states like Utah — while Utah has very similar language (I have to know this; I'm certified by Utah as a Concealed Weapons Instructor, and teach this stuff), it wasn't part of this endeavor by the NRA; its self-defense language was already in place long before the NRA move for reform in all the other states.

Charlie, do you think that if such laws had the effects that you're worrying about, you wouldn't have heard about the murders in, say, Colorado that had gone unpunished because of them?  If it hasn't been a disaster in Colorado, why would it be one in Minnesota?

That's the easy part.  The more difficult one involves a close look at the text and at legal construction.

Here's what it doesn't say:  (emphasis mine, in both of the following quotes)

(a) An individual who claims to have used deadly force according to this section is justified in using such force and is immune from any criminal prosecution for that act.

Nope.  It starts off with "an individual who uses deadly force..." 

Whether or not the individual has, in fact, used deadly force as provided for in that section is, as lawyers say, a matter of fact.  In a court of law, matters of fact are determined by a trier of fact — either a jury, or a judge sitting as a trier of fact.  While, of course, the trier of fact should give the benefit of the doubt to the defendant, juries (and judges, in a bench trial) aren't required to throw common sense out the window, much less run down the stairs to get it with a shovel and make sure it's dead.  They're allowed to — invited to — look at the evidence presented to them, by both the prosecution and the defense, and make some judgments about what the facts are.

When I do my carry classes, I talk about this stuff.  One of my standard raps goes something like "if you're surrounded by a dozen Bogus Boys (they're a local gang, consisting of gang bangers who have not been able to maintain the minimal interpersonal skills required by the Bloods, Crips, or Vice Lords) trying to knock you down and stomp you to death, a jury might conclude that you were in imminent danger of immediate death or great bodily harm, even if they displayed no weapons.  If you're surrounded by a pack of Cub Scouts, threatening to punch you in the thigh with their little fists, you're really very unlikely to be able to persuade a jury that you were."

Getting back to my first answer, we ran into these same sorts of objections to carry reform.  We heard all the theoretical worries about how the Personal Protection Act would turn bar arguments into gunbattles, fender benders into gunbattles, disagreements about parking spaces into gunbattles... and when we pointed out, then, that something like three dozen states already had similar laws in place — in some cases for many decades — it hadn't happened there, we were right... but the folks opposing carry reform just refused to listen and to look for themselves at the other states, but kept repeating the same theoretical fears, over and over again.

So, in answer to your question: in other states, with laws similar to HF498, people who have claimed self-defense have, in fact, been brought to trial.  I don't see any reason to believe that it will be different here — and, in fact, every reason to believe that prosecutors will bring people claiming self-defense to trial, if and when they have sufficient grounds to believe that the claim is bogus, and that they'll be able to persuade the juries of that, when they have sufficient evidence that the claim is bogus.

That any help?

As a heads up, when we get to the gun registration bill, I'm going to be pointing out how gun registration has been — not everywhere, nor all the time — a necessary precondition to gun confiscation, and how almost invariably useless it's been for the purported purpose of preventing violent crime and aiding in the apprehension and punishment of criminals.

Over to you.

Charlie: Well, I've always made a living by my imagination, so maybe it's too highly developed. I've also had a youthful experience of entering a dwelling by stealth — at least in the view of my girl friend's father, who had a shotgun and no sense of humor. It's easy for me to imagine not being around to have this discussion, had Colorado passed its law about 20 years earlier.

But I take your point. Here I am.

I also noted that the Halloween story recounted in an article I linked to last time was from 1992. So yes, there are cases used to evoke fears, but they're not exactly ripped from the headlines.

Here's a case from Colorado that's more current. It involves a homeowner wounding a late-night intruder in his home, who was drunk and disoriented from a motorcycle accident. He thought he was entering his father's house down the street. After considering charges against both parties, no one was prosecuted, and no apparent outcry followed.

Another involves a man assaulted in his house shooting one of the assailants in the back while the guy is sitting in his own car. The jury, interpreting the evidence and the law, found him not guilty of murder. That one was more controversial, but despite the ambiguity (Colorado also has a detailed self-defense statute), the Colorado legislature hasn't gone back to clarify the 1985 Homeowners Protection Act.

You've allayed most of my concern about the intent of HF498 and how it's likely to be interpreted. I'm still not convinced it's needed, but I don't believe it will unleash gunplay in the streets, either. I hope I don't come across too wishy washy here, but I'm not anti-gun or anti-self-defense. I do not represent gun control forces; I represent me trying to come to terms with this issue and trying to provide a model for how others might, as well.

Now, speaking of active imaginations, tell me about how gun confiscation and registering private gun sales come together in your mind. The usefulness of regulating sales requires a whole 'nother post, at least.

Curse the Person Who Sent Me This!

If you are a golfer in recovery do not click this link. If you are still addicted, you will protest, but you'll do it anyway. If you don't play, move along, nothing to see here.

Of Pigs and Parts.

Today I biked into town against high winds, but believe me, Minnesota, I'm not complaining. I was on a mission to find a glass piggy bank as video prop, and sure enough, I found this cutie in the first antique shop I visited.

Cost me eight bucks plus tax. No idea how long it had been on the shelf, but the price certainly had not gone up recently due to inflation, commodity prices, transportation costs, devaluation of the dollar or supply and demand. I'm reasonably confident Colorado antiques retailers aren't walking through their shops, marking up prices of other inventory on the shelves, either.

If anything, there's downward pressure on their prices, just as there is on homes right now. I mean, who needs a butter churn — or a bigger house payment with a longer commute?

But bicycle parts?

Bike dealer Jim Thill reports that he watched  the wholesale price of a certain item increase 25% over the weekend, and a 50% over the past few months. Unfortunately, it's probably an indicator of the dollar's weakness, and not a sign that bikes are becoming the new hybrids.