Justice Done in Florida

Or was it?

As it turned out, young George Zimmerman wasn’t standing his ground when he fired that fatal shot in Sanford, Florida, but being beaten into it by younger Trayvon Martin. At least, given the evidence and testimony presented at trial, the state failed to prove otherwise beyond a reasonable doubt, leaving the jury to presumably accept that self-defense had justified the defendant’s actions.

Like many, I at first thought that the defendant must be guilty of something. He had surely confronted the victim and provoked the fight that led to the fatal shooting. (In some respects, I had perhaps even wanted him to be guilty, because I am a person who avoids unnecessary confrontation and could not reasonably see myself in the defendant’s place.) Unlike most, though, I also wanted the local police and prosecutors to do their jobs without political interference, so I was dismayed when the case was pushed as a racial cause célèbre.

I was also willing to change my opinion as the actual facts emerged from the cloak of propaganda. Two currents swayed me both before and during the trial.

First, the state brought an unsustainable charge against the defendant. In Florida, second-degree murder requires that the perpetrator act with hate or a depraved mind, motives that were clearly absent even before the trial commenced. I wondered about this overreach, until the answer struck me. The state had to win on an accusation that couldn’t later be turned against its own agents. A loss would be preferable to exposing constables on patrol to potential murder charges merely for contacting suspicious individuals.

Second, at trial, the most compelling evidence and testimony supported the defendant’s version of events. While the defendant may have initiated contact, the facts strongly suggested that the victim was the aggressor in the fight that followed. That is reasonable doubt right there, even if you feel or believe that there is still guilt lurking somewhere. Confronting a suspicious individual in your neighborhood may be foolish, but it is not a crime and does not justify battery upon your person.

In the end, most of us might never have heard of the incident if the mainstream media hadn’t initially jumped to the conclusion that an old Jewish man had shot a 12-year-old black boy without provocation. Maybe the outcome would have been different then.

A Right to Carry for Illinois

In Illinois, the legislature has enacted a shall-issue concealed-carry licensing bill over Gov. Pat Quinn’s veto. This brings the state into compliance with the orders from U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in the Moore and Shepard cases. Illinois thus becomes the final state to provide some legal means for the people to exercise their right to bear arms under the Second Amendment.

Accordingly, Attorney General Lisa Madigan has moved to dismiss Moore and Shepard as moot under the new law and will not petition the U.S. Supreme Court to review these cases. That will leave one right-to-carry case, the matter of Woollard v. Gallagher from Maryland, presently ready for the high court’s attention. Cases out of California, New Jersey, and Hawaii are still waiting for decisions from their respective appeals courts.

With Illinois’ narrow no-issue example mooted, the Supreme Court will have to accept one of these challenges to may-issue licensing schemes … if it intends to rule on the right to carry at all.

Of Family and Political Philosophies

I was asked how my brother and I ended up with such differing political views. It was a pointed question that deserved a considered answer. I will pour myself another drink and answer it again here.

I would describe my brother as a highly intelligent modern “liberal.” He has intentions as noble as anyone’s and may not be as ideologically inconsistent as most, but his consistency is at least soft, and I suspect that he can be swayed fairly easily by appeals to “social justice” or political utilitarianism. He studied computer science and now works in the well-paid programming field—when he can.

Our father is a self-described bleeding-heart liberal and was born to working-class parents who came of age during the labor movement. He would even consider himself a communist at times, but in practice, I find him to be a garden-variety Keynesian—which would be perfectly reasonable in a fiscally responsible regime. He studied engineering and followed his father into the trades as a machinist. He has been a modestly successful small businessman, weathering the ups and downs of the industrial economy in southern California.

Our mother has wandered more both politically and geographically, but she has trended slightly more “conservative” throughout the years. She wanted nothing more than to be a wife and mother but found herself a single parent working at low-paying clerical jobs. She eventually left the crowded, regimented world of suburban California for the open, semi-rural environment of Cache Valley in Utah.

I can be described as a libertarian or as a classical liberal, someone who advocates equality before the law and individual freedom for all. In fact, I would make a better communist than my father, but I keep my communism in storage next to my perpetual-motion machine. I studied history, wherein I discovered that humanity has not changed at all in the last 20,000 years, despite the historical chauvinism that visits every new generation. I have also worked in academia for almost two decades now, so I’ve had plenty of opportunities to see the dark side of the ivory towers.

My parents taught me to be financially responsible and to respect others. Why those qualities should be expected of an individual but not of the governments constituted by individuals at large, I cannot say. However, it is that fundamental hypocrisy that irks me so.

It took me 30 years, but I ultimately confronted and rejected utilitarianism. Until then, I was surely as self-important and chauvinistic as anyone. I made a very conscious decision on that day in September. The ends do not justify the means. My previous worldview was destroyed utterly, and my grief is still as raw and primal as ever, but I am a better and more moral man for it—shamed and humbled though I may be.

Philosophically and morally, that decision left me with only one ideologically consistent path to follow. I would like to think that, when shown the same historical facts, any intelligent person would reach the same conclusions, but that is simply not the case. Utilitarianism is an incredibly seductive philosophy, appearing to offer the collective power to do great good—though the underlying causes of various social problems are often misunderstood—and too few will look beyond that promise to see that it can also be used to justify great evil. Indeed, regimes that I would die fighting have accomplished very great things.

I could say more, namely about the moral courage required to allow others to fail, but I think that I’ve answered the question. Different political philosophies are valid and have been proven so by their historical success, but that doesn’t make them necessarily moral. I chose objective morality for its own sake—or perhaps because the alternatives too horrified me. Everything else is mere detail.

Mr. Kashalsky Doesn’t Go to Washington

The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to review the matter of Kashalsky v. Cacace, which unsuccessfully challenged the constitutionality of New York’s discretionary handgun-licensing regime. There are several more right-to-carry cases in the queue, so the rank speculation is that the high court would prefer to hear one of those examples instead, since the justices have already telegraphed their intent to review further Second Amendment litigation in the near future. However, the danger inherent to avoiding Kachalsky lies in the timing. The longer these important issues go undecided, the more likely that longstanding frustration will turn into anger … and anger into defiance or even violence.

In other words, we’ve moved frighteningly closer to constitutional crisis.

A Loss for Woollard

Regressing to the mean, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit has reversed the district-court decision in what is now Woollard v. Gallagher. Ruling for the state, the court held that while Maryland’s requirement of “good and substantial reason” for a permit to carry a handgun in public does burden the right to bear arms under the Second Amendment, it is still “constitutionally permissible.” However, as Eugene Volokh notes, “a constitutional right that can be trumped in nearly all its applications, under whatever level of scrutiny, is not really a right.”

Meanwhile, we wait to see whether the U.S. Supreme Court will take up Kachalsky v. Cacace and if Illinois will petition the same for review of its loss in Moore v. Madigan.

Relative Frequencies and Magnitudes of Bolide Explosions and Impact Events

In light of the destructive bolide explosion over Chelyabinsk in Russia earlier this month, I have reviewed the recent history of meteoric events. From A.D. 1908 to 2013, there have been 11 confirmed events with potential explosive equivalencies greater than or equal to 10 kilotons of TNT. These are summarized below and suggest an observed frequency of such incidents that is somewhat higher than previous conservative predictions.

Eight of the observed explosions or impact events occurred over the greater Eurasian expanse. This continental zone includes just over 10.3 percent of the planet’s surface area. Extrapolating from these data yields an estimate of about seven such intermediate incidents per decade, which is not much lower than the number allegedly observed by military satellites. During the 105-year period bracketed by the Tunguska and Chelyabinsk explosions, there were also at least four bolides that exceeded 100kt equivalencies.

1908	Tunguska Event	15 Mt
1930	Curuçá River bolide explosion	5 Mt
1932	Arroyomolinos de León bolide	190 kt
1947	Sikhote-Alin impact	10 kt
1972	Great Daylight Fireball	80 kt
1993	Lugo bolide explosion	10 kt
1994	Marshall Islands Fireball	11 kt
2002	Eastern Mediterranean Event	20 kt
2004	Antarctic bolide explosion	12 kt
2009	Sulawesi bolide explosion	50 kt
2013	Chelyabinsk bolide explosion	500 kt
2016	South Atlantic fireball	13 kt

The Great Daylight Fireball of 1972 was caused by a near-Earth asteroid that passed harmlessly through the atmosphere over North America at least 35 miles above the surface. Estimates of its potential damage vary wildly, but I have selected a number in the upper range. Given the speed and luminosity of the bolide, had it grazed the planet at a more acute angle, I expect that the results would have been spectacular and potentially devastating.

As the Chelyabinsk explosion has proven, these intermediate objects present a very real danger. They are smaller, harder to detect, and much more common than the potential doomsday asteroids we can spot now. And we still lack the infrastructure to stop either of these threats.

Updated to include the South Atlantic fireball of 2016, which exploded several hundred miles southeast of Brazil (http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/fireballs/).

Right-to-Carry Litigation in Summary

While the police finished murdering each other in southern California, and the President prepared “massive” proposals for the Congress, the case of Piszczatoski v. Maenza [now Drake v. Jerejian, 1/09/14] was argued before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. With an en banc review of the decision in Moore v. Madigan looking unlikely, a victory in Piszczatoski would deepen the circuit split created by the loss in Kachalsky v. Cacace and thus make the conflicting jurisprudence even more difficult for the U.S. Supreme Court to avoid reviewing. Here is a summary of the major right-to-carry cases for those keeping score.

Kachalsky v. Cacace	New York	Lost on appeal at USCA2.
Moore v. Madigan	Illinois	Won on appeal at USCA7.
Palmer v. D.C.	D.C.	Won at U.S. District Court.
Drake v. Jerejian	New Jersey	Lost on appeal at USCA3.
Peruta v. San Diego	California	Petitioned to U.S. Supreme Court.
Richards v. Prieto	California	Lost on rehearing at USCA9.
Woollard v. Gallagher	Maryland	Lost on appeal at USCA4.

There is a host of other right-to-arms cases that are working their way through the federal court system, but this is the vanguard litigation. A historical turning point is at hand, though some people can’t or won’t see the important civil-rights implications at work here. Few people need to carry guns, they argue, but then very few people needed to abort pregnancies … or to marry the spouses of their choice … or to ride at the front of the bus.