NRA Fosters Conspiracy Stupidity

The NRA is accusing the United Nations of conspiring to take away their precious guns.

Americans mistakenly worried the United Nations is plotting to take away their guns on July 4 -- U.S. Independence Day -- are flooding the world body with angry letters and postcards, the chairman of a U.N. conference on the illegal small arms trade said on Wednesday.

"I myself have received over 100,000 letters from the U.S. public, criticizing me personally, saying, 'You are having this conference on the 4th of July, you are not going to get our guns on that day,"' said Prasad Kariyawasam, Sri Lanka's U.N. ambassador.

There's even a webpage devoted to getting Americans to let their voices be heard on the matter - Stop U.N. Gun Ban.

...These dictatorships, terrorist states and so-called “free” nations of the world plan to meet on our home soil to finalize a U.N. treaty that would strip all citizens of all nations of their right to self-protection, and strip you of your rights under the Second Amendment.

Before one word falls from their lying lips about our country and our freedoms, I want them to hear from America’s 80 million gun owners and YOU.

I expect such bullshit from the NRA, I also have to admit that I expect such stupidity from millions of Americans. The UN can't get America to abide by resolutions about things such as invading Iraq, do these people honestly think that UN forces donning light blue helmets are going to landing on our shores to pry a rifle from Charleton Heston's cold, dead hands?

Will the gun owners who now see a UN conspiracy please get your heads out of your asses? Come July 5th, you'll still be able to get drunk, grab your rifles, and go shine for deer. Even if there was a resolution, it would be impossible for the UN to take away your civil rights. That's the responsibility of your man, George Bush and the American government generally. Where were these NRA members when our own government trashed our civil rights with the Patriot Acts? Or when Bush said that he is above the law and can ignore civil rights as he pleases? Stop wrapping yourself in the flag and talking about how patriotic you folks are when your organization endorsed Bush in 2004. The UN isn't throwing people into Gitmo; the UN isn't ignoring the FISA laws; the UN didn't decide that the 4th Amendment means that the police can just barge into your house - that's your, no, our government. The threat to civil liberties comes from within, not without. How can some NRA members get all fired up about this boogie man (that their own organization helped create) and passively endorse the erosion of civil liberties by their own government?

Since I alluded to the recent Hudson ruling by the Supreme Court, I'd like to point out Ed Brayton's great post on Scalia's "scholarly screwup" in his explanation for having voted to help weaken our 4th Amendment rights. Brayton points to a a post a post by Balko over at The Agitator as it was Balko that did the legwork. Scalia argued:

Another development over the past half-century that deters civil-rights violations is the increasing professionalism of police forces, including a new emphasis on internal police discipline. Even as long ago as 1980 we felt it proper to "assume" that unlawful police behavior would "be dealt with appropriately" by the authorities, United States v. Payner, 447 U. S. 727, 733-734, n. 5 (1980), but we now have increasing evidence that police forces across the United States take the constitutional rights of citizens seriously. There have been "wide-ranging reforms in the education, training, and supervision of police officers." S. Walker, Taming the System: The Control of Discretion in Criminal Justice 1950-1990, p. 51 (1993).

Balko went and talked to Prof. Walker, whose work Scalia cites. And what does he think?

Walker tells me he learned that Scalia had cited his work, "to my horror."

Walker adds, "Scalia turned my research completely on its head. My point was that these reforms came about because the courts, specifically the Warren Court, forced the police to institute better procedures with judicial oversight. Scalia now wants to take that oversight away."

Walker says poltical leadership, internal procedures, media oversight and public pressure are all necessary to ensure civil liberties, but that judicial oversight is extremely important too, and that Scalia misused his scholarship to imply that Walker supports a diminishing role for the courts.

Walker also says his research focused on conventional policing, not drug policing. The latter, he says, "is a special kind of policing," and says he would agree that the direction of drug policing of late (which of course was what the Hudson case is all about) does raise significant civil liberties concerns. One might also note that Walker's research for that particular book ended in 1990, sixteen years ago.

Brayton comments:

The irony of this is that Scalia, by his own declaration a textualist and an originalist, would be the first one to criticize reliance on social science research to justify a court ruling. Yet not only does he use such research to justify his ruling here, he does so sloppily and inaccurately.

Go read the whole post.