St. Nicholas, bishop of Myra, d. 6 December 345 or 352
St. Nicholas was reportedly born in the city of Patara in Lycia in Asia Minor, heir to a wealthy family. He succeeded an uncle as bishop of Myra.
Nicholas left behind a legend of secret acts of benevolence and miracles (in Greek, he is spoken of as “Nikolaos o Thaumaturgos” — Nicholas the Wonder-Worker).
One of the saint’s prominent legends asserts that, in a time of famine, he foiled the crime of Fourth Century Sweeney Todd, an evil butcher who kidnapped and murdered three children, intending to market their remains as ham. St. Nicholas not only exposed the murder, but healed and resurrected the children intact.
Nicholas is also renowned for providing dowries for each of three daughters of an impoverished nobleman,who would otherwise have been unable to marry and who were about to be forced to prostitute themselves to live. In order to spare the sensibilities of the family, Nicholas is said to have secretly thrown a purse of gold coins into their window on each of three consecutive nights.
St. Nicholas’ covert acts of charity led to a custom of the giving of secret gifts concealed in shoes deliberately left out for their receipt on his feast day, and ultimately to the contemporary legend of Santa Claus leaving gifts in stockings on Christmas Eve.
St. Nicholas evolved into one of the most popular saints in the Church’s calendar, serving as patron of sailors, merchants, archers, thieves, prostitutes, pawnbrokers, children, and students, Greeks, Belgians, Frenchmen, Romanians, Bulgarians, Georgians, Albanians, Russians, Macedonians, Slovakians, Serbians, and Montenegrins, and all residents of Aberdeen, Amsterdam, Barranquilla, Campen, Corfu, Freiburg, Liverpool, Lorraine, Moscow, and New Amsterdam (New York).
His relics were stolen and removed to Bari to prevent capture by the Turks, and are alleged to exude a sweet-smelling oil down to the present day.
The New York Times today for the first time in 95 years ran an editorial on the front page.
It is a moral outrage and a national disgrace that civilians can legally purchase weapons designed specifically to kill people with brutal speed and efficiency. These are weapons of war, barely modified and deliberately marketed as tools of macho vigilantism and even insurrection. America’s elected leaders offer prayers for gun victims and then, callously and without fear of consequence, reject the most basic restrictions on weapons of mass killing, as they did on Thursday. They distract us with arguments about the word terrorism. Let’s be clear: These spree killings are all, in their own ways, acts of terrorism.
Opponents of gun control are saying, as they do after every killing, that no law can unfailingly forestall a specific criminal. That is true. They are talking, many with sincerity, about the constitutional challenges to effective gun regulation. Those challenges exist. They point out that determined killers obtained weapons illegally in places like France, England and Norway that have strict gun laws. Yes, they did.
But at least those countries are trying. The United States is not. Worse, politicians abet would-be killers by creating gun markets for them, and voters allow those politicians to keep their jobs. It is past time to stop talking about halting the spread of firearms, and instead to reduce their number drastically — eliminating some large categories of weapons and ammunition.
It is not necessary to debate the peculiar wording of the Second Amendment. No right is unlimited and immune from reasonable regulation.
Certain kinds of weapons, like the slightly modified combat rifles used in California, and certain kinds of ammunition, must be outlawed for civilian ownership. It is possible to define those guns in a clear and effective way and, yes, it would require Americans who own those kinds of weapons to give them up for the good of their fellow citizens.
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Jonah Goldberg was moved to note some of the major news events which failed to provoke an equivalent emotional response.
The Peace of Versailles, Buck v. Bell, the Great Depression, Pearl Harbor, the Hitler-Stalin Pact, the Ukrainian famine, the internment of Japanese-Americans, the Tuskegee experiments, the Holocaust, McCarthyism, the Marshall Plan, Jim Crow, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Kennedy Assassination, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Kent State, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, Watergate, withdrawal from Vietnam, the Killing Fields, the Iran hostage crisis, the Contras, AIDS, gay marriage, the Iran nuclear deal: These are just a few of the things the New York Times chose not to run front page editorials on. But, the “Gun Epidemic†in America? That deserves a front-page editorial.
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I myself find it interesting to reflect that not one single member of that New York Times editorial board could properly define an assault weapon, nor if challenged justify placing ugly-looking semi-automatic rifles chambered in a slightly modified version of a cartridge introduced in 1950 for the purpose of shooting groundhogs in a special category supposedly more “designed specifically to kill people with brutal speed and efficiency” than any repeating firearm which appeared on the market later than the Henry Rifle of 1862 or even the Colt Patterson Revolver of 1836.
The really important distinguishing category to which the editorial board of the New York Times belongs is the class of limitlessly self-important, limitless self-entitled holier-than-thous, the category of persons The Godfather referred to as “pezzonovantes” (90 caliber individuals) who get to hand down regulations and edicts, even if they do not actually produce the desired result, because “at least [they] are trying.”
The New York Times Editorial Board is composed entirely of fanatic liberal devotees of the cult of the Leviathan State, and their personal religion demands a symbolic regulatory response, a sacrifice of somebody’s rights, liberties, and property, as a means of addressing any perceived PROBLEM. When something bad happens, you must immediately invoke Nobodaddy, the administrative state, and make that sacrificial gesture. Then, and only then, is “la patrie” no longer “en danger.” It doesn’t matter if the ceremony of Statism has any practical effect. It doesn’t matter if what the priests of Leviathan do is actually counter-productive. The point of all this has nothing to do with reality or practical results. The point is the emotional satisfaction of the assembled congregation of the worshippers of the State through the performance of the proper ceremony.
If we don’t respond to every shooting which makes a major headline by banning something, by passing some brave new law, the urban-based cult of Leviathan will shriek at us in pain until we do.
Interestingly, those Monitor Lizards, which can grow to be up to 7 feet (over 2 m.) long have recently been found to be somewhat venomous. The aborigines apparently think they are delicious.
Business Insider reports that the crybullies at Yale have successfully driven away the Silliman College Associate Master who provoked mass demonstrations and hysterical confrontations between screaming snowflakes of color and Yale administrators by having the temerity to question an edict demanding Halloween costume self-censorship issued by the Yale cultural centers’ collective politburo.
Erika Christakis, the faculty member at the center of a racially charged debate at Yale, has decided not to teach at the Ivy League school going forward.
“I will not be teaching at Yale in the future,” she told Business Insider in an email Thursday.
Christakis’ decision came after weeks of backlash against the lecturer and administrator over an email she sent to students suggesting that Yale shouldn’t tell them not to wear offensive Halloween costumes.
That backlash included an open letter criticizing her signed by hundreds of members of the Yale community.
Recently, 49 faculty members wrote their own open letter defending Christakis against allegations of racism.
Douglas Stone, a colleague who wrote the open letter, told Business Insider that “aggressive tactics” used against Christakis spurred her to decide to stop teaching.
“Last year over 300 students expressed interest in her courses, she is an acclaimed teacher, and she was planning extra sections this year to accommodate more students,” Stone wrote Business Insider in an email message. “The unfair and ad hominem attacks she has endured have measurably reduced student academic choice at Yale. There is a cost to allowing this behavior to go unchallenged.”
Media reports about the guns were misleading as ever, describing them as “legally purchased” typically as part of a ideologically-loaded effort to demonstrate the lack of Gun Control regulations which might have kept such weapons out of the hands of mass killers like Farook & frau.
But MRC TV’s Dan Joseph yesterday noted that, in fact, those two AR rifles were almost certainly not legally acquired.
San Bernardino, Calif., officials have confirmed that the two rifles used by gunman Syed Rizwan Farook in Wednesday’s massacre were purchased not by Farook himself, but rather by a friend. This means that at some point the rifles were either sold, stolen or given to Farook by his friend, sometime within the last three or four years.
According to California’s firearms laws, it is “illegal for any person who is not a California licensed firearms dealer (private party) to sell or transfer a firearm to another non-licensed person (private party).” The prohibition on transfers – except those between family members- that do not involve a licensed gun deal Went into effect on January 1, 2011.
This means that unless, Farook’s friend was an authorized weapons dealer in the state of California or the transfer occurred in another state, then the rifles were acquired illegally.
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Today, Jacob Sullum, at Reason, confirms that either a straw purchase or an illegal transfer must have occurred.
Federal officials say Syed Rizwan Farook, one of the massacre’s perpetrators, bought the two 9mm pistols used in the attack, a Springfield and a Llama, from gun shops in San Diego and Corona. That means he passed background checks, which indicates he did not have a disqualifying criminal or psychiatric record. An acquaintance of Farook’s bought the two AR-15-style rifles used in the attack, a DPMS A-15 and a Smith & Wesson M&P15, also at gun shops in San Diego and Corona.
Sullum goes on to note the ineffectiveness of legislation targeted at “bad” military-style weapons in preventing human ingenuity from developing work-arounds which render the regulations meaningless.
The DPMS A-15 and Smith & Wesson M&P15 both come in “California legal” versions, which means they have “bullet buttons” that require the insertion of a loose round (or some other tool) to detach the magazine. With that feature, the magazine is not considered “detachable,” which is part of the state’s “assault weapon” definition.
Gun controllers tend to view bullet buttons as a sneaky end run around California’s “assault weapon” ban. Huffington Post reporter Daniel Marans calls the bullet-button option a “technical loophole.” Josh Sugarmann, executive director of the Violence Policy Center (VPC), complains that gun manufacturers are “cynically exploiting an inadvertent limitation” of the law. But bullet buttons are explicitly allowed by California Department of Justice regulations, which say “‘detachable magazine’ means any ammunition feeding device that can be removed readily from the firearm with neither disassembly of the firearm action nor use of a tool being required.” The DOJ adds that “a bullet or ammunition cartridge is considered a tool.”
Since rifles with bullet buttons do not have what California considers detachable magazines, they can include military-style features that would otherwise be forbidden, such as folding stocks, pistol grips, or flash suppressors. “Assault weapon” is an arbitrary, legally defined category, so the fact that California does not consider these rifles to be “assault weapons” means they aren’t “assault weapons.” It makes no sense to complain that California’s “assault weapon” ban misses some “assault weapons,” which are whatever legislators say they are. Nor does it make sense to complain about design changes, such as bullet buttons, aimed at complying with the law. Gun manufacturers that produce “California legal” guns are doing precisely what the state has told them to do.
But, wait, more than human ingenuity and work-arounds using technical loopholes occurred here. According to The Wall Street Journal, the ATF discovered that two highly-illegal modifications of those rifles were made.
The rifles used in the San Bernardino mass shooting were illegal under California law because they were modified and violated the state’s ban on assault weapons, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives determined on Thursday. …
The two semiautomatic rifles were versions of the popular AR-15 model, according to San Bernardino officials. One was made by DPMS Inc., and the other by Smith & Wesson.
While they were originally sold legally, with magazine locking devices commonly known as bullet buttons, the rifles were subsequently altered in different ways to make them more powerful, according to Meredith Davis, a special agent with the ATF.
The Smith & Wesson rifle was changed in an attempt to enable it fire in fully automatic mode, while the DPMS weapon was modified to use a large-capacity magazine, she said.
Modifying the DPMS A-15’s to accept larger capacity magazines would be a felony in California. On the other hand, converting Smith & Wesson M&P15 to full-auto capability did not only violate California gun laws, it was also a serious federal crime, violating the National Firearms Act of 1934, the Gun Control Act of 1968 (which would make the couple, as felons, persons prohibited from owning full-auto weapons), and the Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986 (banning civilian ownership of new machine guns).
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The notion that more Gun Control laws would prevent such shootings was satirized yesterday on Facebook with this image:
Editorialist Rich Schapiro and the New York Daily News this morning are insulting religious faith and calling Republicans who spoke of praying for victims of the terrorist shootings in San Bernardino, California “cowards.”
“God Isn’t Fixing This!” thunders the Daily News headline, obviously preferring to believe that the cult of the Leviathan state to which Mr. Schapiro bows down can do better via Gun Control. All we need to do is follow the example of democrats like Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Martin O’Malley and support Gun Control, sacrificing the Second Amendment and American’s individual rights on the altar of Statism and we will receive safety and security in return.
People like Rich Schapiro cling passionately to their own twisted version of religion in which the State and the Rule of Experts and the Calculative Power of Human Reason are deemed totally omnipotent and beneficent, somehow managing to overlook the record their philosophy compiled in the last century of transforming civilization and the state into an abattoir resulting in the deaths of hundreds of millions, and also managing to overlook the fact that, only a few weeks ago, a much larger armed massacre took place in Paris, the capital of a country which has in place every element and detail of the gun control laws desired by the most hoplophobic of democrats. These kinds of people don’t even notice that the San Bernardino shootings occurred in California, one of the most gun-controlled states in the country.
There is more than a little irony in a bunch of metrosexual simps who disapprove of self-defense, who are afraid of the very sight of guns, who systematically delude themselves with fantasies of universal harmony and safety brought about by the unilateral disarmament of the peaceful and the law-abiding going around calling other people “cowards.”
Personally, if I had a laboratory need for a pure and authentic specimen of the coward, I feel certain that Rich Schapiro himself would function perfectly in the experiment.
