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Letter from Jeff Colonnesi with reply from Neale Osborn

Re: "Voter ID, Booze, and Guns... the Compromise Solution" by Neale Osborn

Neale,

Personally, I could get on board with this compromise, so long as a couple of things were included.

• The NICS check is run on everyone. You don't pass, you don't get a Voter ID (maybe they issue a "non-voter" one). I don't see why someone who is such a danger to society that they can't own a gun should be allowed to vote.

• A criminal check happens with both voting and gun purchases— the fingerprint is checked and if you've been convicted of something heinous enough to keep you from owning a gun, you can't vote either.

• Ditto when running for office—you can't run if you can't pass the check.

• To be fair with the whole "taxation without representation", you are not required to pay any form of income tax if you can't get / don't have a valid voter ID (can't pass the background check).

• That ID lets you purchase any "gun"—pistol, rifle, machinegun, Stinger missile, LAW. The only possible exception are those weapons that are difficult to employ in self defense AND dangerous to handle or to bystanders. Things like grenades & mortars may need a person to show evidence they have been trained how to handle them.

• That ID is also the MOST you need to travel. There are no requirements for a separate ID to take a bus, train or ship within the US, or into international waters when traveling between States, or to get a passport to travel to other countries. Traveling (and passports) should not require a criminal check, just AT MOST an ID verification. As for flying, once they separate the cockpit from the passengers (should be required as part of this) then that ID is the MOST needed for that as well—with no additional screening.

• That ID is also the MOST you need to verify your ID to any government agency ever, and the MOST the government can ever require an employer to check.

Maybe if people realize they can't vote if they ever get convicted of a serious crime, they will stop supporting laws that criminalize everything.

Best regards,

Jeff Colonnesi
[email protected]

To which Neale Osborn replied:

Jeff—

you need to read my follow-up article in THIS week's TLE. While some of what you say has some merit, and you are the first person to actually see the compromise and go the next step. But read the next one, THEN tell me what you think! LOL!

Neale Osborn
[email protected]

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Letter from Richard D. Bartucci

Re: "What my article 'Voter ID, Booze, and Guns... the Solution to all Our Ills." was actually about" by Neale Osborn [in this issue]

The reason why those "precious smarmy liberals" want their intended victims and opponents to compromise our principles without yielding a micrometer on their own side of any argument is that they have no principles, no real basis upon which they predicate whatever the hell serves them in lieu of a regard for the essential uniqueness and value of any other human being.

Each of them lives in a peculiar, hideously perverted mindset from which they peer out at the universe to regard everything around him (or her) in light of how it makes her (or him) feel, how each such "Liberal" envisions the potential threat picture around him (or her)—and there's not even consideration of the possibility that her (or his) valuation of the surroundings is almost certainly contrary to fact because, remember, that perception doesn't have to be validated by objective standards of verification but simply how it makes each such "Liberal" feel at the particular moment of consideration.

Jeez, no wonder none of us understands these assholes. They really don't understand each other, any more than a particular cockroach understands the other cockroaches all around it. They swarm with the appearance of an insectile intelligence when in fact what they do is achieve a fairly high level of coordination that gives the illusion of derivation from lucid reasoning but which is, in fact, the antithesis of rational thought.

It's all emotional. Each of them is scared of all the human beings around her (or him), and because of this they hate all those essentially alien, potentially deadly specimens of H. sapiens moving and speaking and breathing all over the place.

Even though each of these "Liberal" psychopaths knows that he (she) depends for her (his) very survival on getting what he (she) wants and needs out of those pieces of animate furniture pretending to be human beings in her (his) surroundings.

Sure the "Liberal" wants all other human beings tagged for identification. Sure she/he thinks it's necessary to get them labeled and numbered and chipped for easy, secure control. After all, even if they're ostensibly fellow "Liberals," none of them is really an unique, trustworthy, valuable person—the way that particular terrified, neurotic, brainfucked "Liberal" knows himself to be.

Gotta get that threat picture under control. And some of those smelly animals—with those hands of theirs, so capable of picking up rocks and sticks and baseball bats and hitting me!—want to have guns to threaten me if I take what I need ('cause I need everything, don't I?) and even shoot me if I use them or their stuff or their children or the other things I need to survive and have the good life I truly deserve....

And who cares about them, anyway? I mean, they breed and they dirty up the planet everywhere and if I didn't need some of the things they make and do, I'd kill 'em all, wouldn't I...?

...Damn. That 1959 episode of The Twilight Zone with the hypermyopic bookworm character played by Burgess Meredith as the constantly put-upon victim of all the people around him, left as the last living person in the wake of a nuclear war. That's how each "Liberal" looks upon himself, including the terror felt by Henry Bemis as his broken spectacles left him doomed to starve and die without useful animals (shaped like humans) to serve his uniquely deserving existence. They're all like that, aren't they? Every friggin' one of 'em....

Whoof. Getting into the mind of a "Liberal" is pretty fucking disconcerting, isn't it?

Pardon me, folks. I've gotta go wash my hands.

Richard D. Bartucci
[email protected]

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Letter from A.X. Perez

Regarding Government Issued ID

Re: "What my article 'Voter ID, Booze, and Guns... the Solution to all Our Ills." was actually about" by Neale Osborn [in this issue]

Back in 1959 Robert Heinlein published Starship Troopers. He proceeded to get more flack for it than Johnny Rico ever did in any drop. One idea for which he was criticized was suggesting that a person demonstrate loyalty to his nation state and the society it existed in with at least 2 years of national service before receiving the franchise. How dare anyone suggest that voting be restricted to people who was willing to place their society's interest over their own!!!

This novel does not go against libertarian ideals, by the way. Heinlein made clear that only the right to vote and hold office were contingent om service. All other rights were guaranteed, freedom of religion and speech, RKBA, and so on.

The right to vote is a government granted privilege, the right to keep and bear arms is a natural born essential freedom. To require a person to present ID to vote is to require they prove some sort of loyalty to the state, if not the faction currently ruling it. I'm good with that. However to require people to present a license to exercise a fundamental right is wrong. It makes essential liberty a reward for supporting the state. Arguably the state was created to protect these rights for all not ration them to those whom the state's agents find worthy. Requiring people to get licensed to bear arms is therefor not right.

The state you are dealing with may in fact be powerful enough to make getting a license to carry certain weapons publicly a necessity. It may even face a situation where the unthinking view licenses to exercise essential rights as necessary to protect a society's members' life, liberty, dignity and property. I think this is rose food, but I am willing to listen to other people's logic in this matter.

Currently, those holding office want to remove all restrictions on voting, especially for people they expect to vote for them. They appear bound and determined to make keeping and bearing arms a privilege reserved for their Myrmidons.

They invert the natural order....

A.X. Perez
[email protected]

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Letter from Laird Minor

Re: "The Plan" by L. Neil Smith

In a recent article Neil noted that "The War Century was largely a Democratic century." That is isn't entirely true: Republicans held the White House for 52 years of the 20th Century; Democrats for only 48 years. But it was most certainly a century of war, and those were almost exclusively Democratic Party wars.

Democratic presidents took us into World War I (Wilson), World War II (Roosevelt), the Korean War (Truman), Viet Nam (Kennedy), and Bosnia (Clinton). Only at the very end of the century (and into the 21st) did Republican presidents begin taking us into war: Gulf War 1 (GHW Bush), and the Iraqi and Afghanistan Wars (GW Bush). Obama is merely reverting to type by dragging the US into the Syrian and Libyan revolutions.

Laird Minor
[email protected]

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