Categories
Second Amendment rights

The Island of Dispossessed Guns

Rhode Island, 2nd Amendment, guns

As a gun owner in Rhode Island, you may think that no matter what wacko state laws legislators impose to make it harder to buy weapons, at least you’ll remain secure in your right to the arms you’ve already legally purchased.  

Not so. Bearing Arms alerts us to the fact that two bills pending in the state legislature jeopardize your right to keep your already owned — lawfully obtained— firearms. One bill does so immediately. The other paves the way for follow-up legislation that does so immediately.

H8073 “updates” a bill passed last year that banned the sale of “assault weapons” — a kind of weapon that is clearly the opposite of those used to soothe and caress. Current “assault weapon” owners were grandfathered in. Having bought their “assault weapons” when it was legal to do so, owners wouldn’t have to give them up. 

But that was last year. Now, if H8073 becomes law, Rhode Islanders will have to turn in those weapons or face penalties like up to ten years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000.

Looking at the bill, you see a reference to restrictions on “manufacture, sale, and purchase of prohibited firearms” crossed out and replaced by reference to restrictions on “manufacture, sale, possession, and purchase” of same. Just a quick fix.

Another bill, H7755, would impose onerous training-certificate and waiting-period requirements for new handgun purchases. You would not need to comply to keep handguns you already have . . . unless the wording is ever changed.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

Bertrand Russell

And all this madness, all this rage, all this flaming death of our civilization and our hopes, has been brought about because a set of official gentlemen, living luxurious lives, mostly stupid, and all without imagination or heart, have chosen that it should occur rather than that any one of them should suffer some infinitesimal rebuff to his country’s pride.

Bertrand Russell, in “The First War,” eighth chapter of The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (1967), p. 265.
Categories
Today

WWW

On March 12, 1989, Tim Berners-Lee submitted his proposal to CERN for an information management system, which subsequently developed into the World Wide Web.

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free trade & free markets regulation

Alas, Poor Yorick

Australia, regulations, labor, internet

Working from home is a very old idea, becoming new again during this Age of the Internet. 

COVID made telework something of a mania. But there’s been some withdrawal of support for the arrangement from major corporations, and one of the main results of Elon Musk’s DOGE effort in government was to bring government workers back into the office.

Well, sort of. A few months later, some of the measures implemented by DOGE were halted or scaled back.

How goes the trend elsewhere? As soon as something becomes possible, someone in politics wants to make it mandatory. A Reason article by Reem Ibrahim takes a look Down Under: “Do You Have a Right To Work From Home? This Australian Politician Thinks So.”

This politician being Victoria’s Premier Jacinta Allan, who aims to lead Australia into a new era of labor paradise, giving “all employees, regardless of the size of the business, the right to work from home. The legislation — which will be introduced in July as a provision of the Equal Opportunity Act and go into effect in September — does not include exemptions for small businesses.

“Working from home,” Ibrahim writes, “is often a win-win for businesses and employees,” but he fails to say it often isn’t. How do you dig ditches or construct skyscrapers or fish in the deep sea from home? To handle the necessary exemptions and complexity, of course, plenty of red tape would be required, which Mr. Ibrahim does mention.

So, does Jacinta Allan advance this innovation because she is a leader of extraordinary foresight?

Doubtful. A few months ago she had to deal with a mini-scandal: Yorick Piper, her husband, was convicted of drunk driving and had his driver’s license taken away.

Gotta get hubby back to work!

Well, it was a temporary license revocation. But alas, poor Yorick: see what you’ve spawned?!?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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Thought

Giorgio de Santillana

The working of great administrations is mainly the result of a vast mass of routine, petty malice, self-interest, carelessness and sheer mistake. Only a residual fraction is thought.

Giorgio Diaz de Santillana (1902 – 1974), The Crime of Galileo (1958).
Categories
Today

Shaken, Sworn In

March 11, 2010 — minutes before being sworn in as President of Chile, economist and businessman Sebastián Piñera is shaken as an earthquake hits central Chile and aftershocks disturb the ceremony.

Categories
government transparency partisanship representation

#ThemToo Movement

Congress, transparency, sex scandal

No matter how partisan politics has become, there are a few issues that our politicians seem intent on supporting — or opposing — regardless of party.

Example? Consider how soundly the House scuttled the recent effort to bring transparency to taxpayer payoffs for representatives’ and senators’ sexual harassment, rapes, and other improprieties. 

Last Wednesday, 357 members of the House of Representatives voted to refer to a committee a resolution that would have forced the release of records related to sexual harassment claims against lawmakers. While that sounds innocuous, in this case it effectively killed the measure. That’s how Representative Thomas Massie (R-Tenn.) explained it, and that’s how it was reported in the news: everyone who voted to refer the resolution to committee knew they were sending it to die.

“Both parties colluded to protect predators,” lamented Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), who had introduced the resolution. “They voted to keep sexual harassment records buried, and they did it together.”

How together? Well the 357 members who protected their comrades from the ire of their constituents included 175 Republicans and 182 Democrats. Remember that there are currently 218 Republicans serving in Congress and 213 Democrats (with three vacancies and no independent representation). Nine members did not vote, while one answered as merely “present.” 

The uncooperative Republicans (willing to stab members of their own party in the back!) numbered thirty-eight, while recalcitrant Democrats (cruelly eager to shine sunlight on their fellow vampires!) numbered twenty-seven. 

While the House overwhelmingly voted to protect its members from transparency and their own voters, back on November 18, 2025, representatives voted 427-1 to demand the immediate release of all federal documents related to Jeffrey Epstein. 

Even more bipartisan. But that time it was for transparency.

Just not theirs.

This is key.

And this is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

George Santayana

On fact, the whole machinery of our intelligence, our general ideas and laws, fixed and external objects, principles, persons, and gods, are so many symbolic, algebraic expressions. They stand for experience; experience which we are incapable of retaining and surveying in its multitudinous immediacy. We should flounder hopelessly, like the animals, did we not keep ourselves afloat and direct our course by these intellectual devices. Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of fact.

George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty (1896).
Categories
Today

The Mahatma

On March 10, 1922, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948), activist and theorist of non-violent revolution, was arrested in India, tried for sedition, and sentenced to six years in prison, only to be released nearly two years later for an appendicitis operation.

Categories
First Amendment rights privacy regulation

The War Against Anonymity

Mexico, privacy, cell phone

The Mexican government wants to stop people from using cellphones anonymously.

Every mobile phone number in Mexico — some 127 million — must now be biometrically tied to the owner’s identity. Cellphone owners must register their numbers by June 30 or lose signal.

The ID card to which numbers must be linked will in turn be linked, via QR code, to a national registry of biometrically verified records.

Who needs anonymity? Just criminals?

Criminals do use throwaway “burner” phones when committing crimes. They won’t necessarily be stymied now. Would they hesitate to steal other people’s cell phones, treat them as burners, then throw them away?

Maybe victims would act fast enough to get lost and stolen phones deactivated before thieves could use them, maybe not. Criminals may have several ways to circumvent the new law. 

We must remember, after all, that criminals are willing to commit crimes.

The safety of journalists, dissidents hiding from other governments, targets of abusers and stalkers, and anyone with good reason to keep his identity separate from his phone will be endangered by Mexico’s new mandate.

Some may say that Mexico’s ID database is inaccessible by all but authorized, benign, unbribable government personnel. One problem with this fairy tale is that not long ago, a cyberhacker used AI to steal 195 million taxpayer and other records from the Mexican government.

Not the first time hackers have grabbed “secure” data. And what has happened again and again and again and again, can happen again.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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