The ever-astute New York Times has discovered that, in theory, existing federal law should have prevented the perpetrator of the Virginia Tech shootings from purchasing a gun.

When you buy a gun, you are required to fill out and sign a form which asks if you have ever been adjudicated legally incompetent, mentally incapacitated, or been involuntarily committed to a mental institution.

Firearms Purchase Eligibility

This sort of thing is exactly like the Post Office asking you to sign a form promising that the package you are mailing does not contain prohibited items or a bomb.

Asking ordinary people to fill out these kinds of forms is a complete waste of time, and the persons the form is intended to block will always simply lie.

And there is no point in singling out Virginia. Local adaptations of the same federal form 4473 are used in every state.

Example: Minnesota version

WASHINGTON, April 20 — Under federal law, the Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho should have been prohibited from purchasing a gun after a Virginia court declared him to be a danger to himself in late 2005 and sent him for psychiatric treatment, a government official and several legal experts said Friday.

Federal law prohibits anyone who has been “adjudicated as a mental defective,” as well as those who have been involuntarily committed to a mental health facility, from purchasing a gun.

A special justice’s order in late 2005 that directed Mr. Cho to seek outpatient treatment and declared him to be mentally ill and an imminent danger to himself fits the federal criteria and should have immediately disqualified him, said Richard J. Bonnie, chairman of the Supreme Court of Virginia’s Commission on Mental Health Law Reform. A spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms also said if that if found mentally defective by a court, Mr. Cho should have been denied a gun.

The federal law defines adjudication as a mental defective to include “determination by a court, board, commission or other lawful authority” that as a result of mental illness, the person is a “danger to himself or others.”

Mr. Cho’s ability to purchase two guns despite his history of mental illness has cast new attention on Virginia’s relatively lax gun laws. And since states are supposed to enforce federal gun laws, the sales raise questions about whether Virgina — and other states — fully comply with the federal restrictions.

Rothbardite on foreign policy, but otherwise pretty good stuff.

10:38 video

Local government out of control and burdening residents with an ever-increasing array of pettyfogging rules and regulations?

The little village of Fago, located in the Spanish Pyrenees, found a solution to this overly common problem.

Thomas Sowell writes:

Although socialism has long claimed to be for the poor, it has probably done more damage, on net balance, to the poor than to the rich. After all, the rich have enough money to leave the country if they think the socialists are going to do them any serious harm.

Some of our own rich have already had their money leave the country, to be sheltered from the higher taxes that limousine liberals say we should all pay. Meanwhile, the liberal media give them kudos for their selfless advocacy of higher taxes on higher income people, forgetting that these are not taxes on wealth.

Most of the people in the upper income brackets are not rich and do not have wealth sheltered offshore. They are typically working people who have finally reached their peak earning years after many years of far more modest incomes — and now see much of what they have worked for siphoned off by politicians, to the accompaniment of lofty rhetoric.

The rich have learned to adapt socialist policies to their own benefit.

Sowell also identifies the factor behind much of the astonishing rise in real estate prices in many regions of the country in recent years: artificial shortages produced by zoning and building regulations designed to preclude development.

A very different form of socialism for the rich protects their communities from even the dangers of a free market. A whole array of laws and policies prevents outsiders from buying up property near them, even when these outsiders are ready to pay prices determined by supply and demand, rather than by eminent domain.

For example, the “open space” laws that have spread across the country to protect upscale communities represent one of the biggest collectivizations of land since the days of Josef Stalin.

Upscale residents say that they have a right to protect “our community.” But not even the rich own the whole community.

They own what they paid for — their own individual property. But they get the government to collectivize the often vastly larger surrounding property, in order to keep the unwashed masses from settling near them and spoiling their views.

Moreover, they wrap themselves in the mantle of idealism while doing this and denounce the “selfishness” of those who would stoop to building homes or apartments to house others, just to make money.

Hat tip to José Guardia.

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.

–Robert Frost, Mending Wall

Last night, the Republican-majority Senate voted 80-19 to build a 700 mile double-layer fence along the US border with Mexico. Since the House has already passed the same measure, and President Bush is on the record as supporting it, it looks like a done deal.

I suppose the indulgence of Congress and the Administration in this symbolic gesture is an inevitable sop to the growing Republican constituency opposed to illegal immigration, but I’m afraid I personally just detest this sort of nonsense.

Building a wall is an ugly symbolic gesture. Our adversary in the Cold War built walls to keep people in, and now we’re going to build a similar wall to keep people out. This is bad art. It contradicts our values and our image of ourselves. 700 miles of brute negativity can never be compatible with what America is all about.

Any federal project on such a scale will always cost far, far more than initially projected. As the Washington Post observes, this wall is going to have to cross a lot of extremely difficult terrain, and cost overruns are going to skyrocket.

The fence, of course, will not work. Anywhere a guard with a gun is not standing next to it, people will find ways to dig under it or climb over it. Since we will have already invested a staggering amount of money in the project, efforts to make it work will inevitably proceed to more drastic and extreme measures, at further costs, both monetary and otherwise. Bad policy of this kind never stops at a single step. Folly will be piled upon folly as the desired goal continually recedes unrealized.

We are a fundamentally decent, liberal and humane society. A wall is only going to work if it features mines, electrified wire, watch-towers, guard dogs, and machine guns. We’re only just starting this policy with the initial wall. And exactly how far down that road do we really want to go? Are we going to shoot pregnant women trying to sneak over the border to clean our houses?

There are also other, perhaps minor, but unattractive considerations.

The fence will intrude on the Tohono O’odham reservation in Arizona, interfering futher than previously with that people’s free movement within its own traditional trans-border Sonoran desert homeland.

It will be bad news for Southwestern wildlife, which also has a habit of ignoring borders. The jaguar has been verifiably sited again in Southern Arizona recently for the first time in many years. A large predator of this kind, particularly in so difficult an environment, can only exist if it has access to an enormous range of territory. It needs to travel from far-separated canyon “islands” in the desert containing water over great distances. Is this fence worth removing the jaguar from the list of American species?

The proposed fence is really just a confession that we have a habit in this country of passing laws (immigration laws and drug laws) which we really don’t want enforced. Politicians vote for them, seeing strong opinion poll majorities in favor of restricted immigration and drug prohibition. But the same American public smokes the pot, snorts the coke, and gets its lawn mowed, its car washed, and a lot of its hard labor done by illegal aliens.

We could have been enforcing existing immigration laws all along, if we really and truly wanted them enforced. Federal agencies have tried and given up, because enforcement efforts have always provoked strong protests to congressional representatives, who time and again have intervened to put a stop to them.

The only positive thing I can say about all this is that it is just a sop. The fence represents only an expensive and symbolically ugly federal pretense at “securing our borders,” intended to appease those incensed about illegal immigration. Expensive, futile, and ugly as it is, it will obviously be less injurious to American life than the far worse alternative: a regime of identity cards (Paperien, bitte! – “Your papers, please!”), workplace inspections, and massive deportations of people who are (in overwhelming majority of cases) just here to do work we don’t want to do ourselves at prices we are willing to pay.

The federal government killed the Anthracite Coal industry of Northeastern Pennsylvania in the aftermath of WWII by environmental regulations, which prevented pumping water from the mines into the already thoroughy polluted regional watercourses. Minewater would continue to flow from abandoned collieries, the Shenandoah and Mahanoy Creeks and the Big Catawissa would still flow orange, but the collieries on which the region’s economy depended could no longer work below the water table, and thus could no longer profitably mine coal. Maple Hill, my hometown’s last colliery, closed down in 1954.

A few irredentists including one uncle of mine, having no other options, continued to mine coal in bootleg operations.

Bootleg mining started during the depression. Anthracite coal was so ubiquitous, and so near the surface in some places, that in those days a man could go just up on the mountain with a pick and shovel and dig coal. The land and mineral rights belonged to the Girard Estate or the Reading Coal Company, which had little ability to do anything about it, and these informal and illegal operations were called “coalholes” or “bootleg mines.”

In the modern era, bootleg miners commonly paid a small fee to the Company or Estate, and had permission to dig coal. Typically, they were “robbing the pillars,” i.e. taking coal left to support the roof of mines long ago mined out and abandoned. If they were careless, too greedy, or merely unlucky, as in the case of three bootleg coal miners near Shepton in the early 1970s, they could wind up buried by a cave-in.

These days, hard coal is back in fashion, being widely used for electrical generaton, and the small number of surviving bootleg miners are making a few bucks, but the government is closing them down, enforcing more new regulations with an iron hand.

Marc Brodzic, a native of New Jersey (probably having roots in the Region), has made a documentary titled: Hard Coal: Last of the Bootleg Miners about the near-pending extinction of the last dozen surviving bootleg mining operations.

The film was exhibited at the Philadelphia Film Festival and at the Waterfront Film Festival in Saugatuck, Michigan.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports some eye-opening statistics from a study by the National Association of Homebuilders of the distribution of federal tax benefits for homeownership.

Homeowners in a single congressional district in California, the 14th District in Silicon Valley, took more in mortgage interest write-offs than all the residents of six states combined. Homeowners in the 14th — which covers most of San Mateo and Santa Cruz counties, plus part of Santa Clara County — claimed $3.2 billion in mortgage interest deductions during the year covered by the study, compared with $2.9 billion by all the residents of Vermont, Wyoming, West Virginia, Alabama and North and South Dakota. The average deduction in the 14th District was $35,000, compared with an average of $9,500 for homeowners nationwide.

— Residents of a single congressional district on Long Island wrote off more in real estate property tax deductions than all the homeowners from seven states combined. Owners in New York’s Third District took $1.25 billion in deductions — more than the $1.2 billion total claimed during the same period in Hawaii, Wyoming, Arkansas, Delaware, the District of Columbia and North and South Dakota.

— The average New Jersey homeowner claimed $6,005 in real estate tax write-offs — more than five times the average deduction by residents of Hawaii ($1,126). New Yorkers claimed an average $5,181 in property tax deductions, followed by the residents of New Hampshire ($4,830), Illinois ($4,129) and Vermont ($3,845).

— The average California homeowner wrote off $14,217 in mortgage interest deductions, while the average homeowner in Oklahoma wrote off $5,710. Washington, D.C., homeowners took an average $11,759 in mortgage interest deductions, while the average homeowner in North Carolina got $6,808.

Higher federal deductions mirror the impact of liberal governments. Home prices (and mortgage deductions) are far higher where new development is intensely regulated and curtailed, and liberal states and municipalities impose (naturally) the highest real estate taxes resulting in the largest local tax deductions.

Thus, the cost of bad government in San Francisco, Manhattan, and the District of Columbia is shared with residents of low regulation, low tax red states.

Harvard Law Professor William J. Stuntz in New Republic has a provocative essay on the history of privacy (both that private citizens and that of government), attitudes of the left and right toward both, and considers the contemporary impact and proper limits of the right to privacy of the individual and exposure to public scrutiny of government operations.

Urban dwellers like their experiences of Nature pre-packaged and predictable, and anything out of the ordinary will invariably throw them into a tizzy. The Press will emotionalize the situation and self-importantly opine. The government will step forward, inform everyone that it’s in charge, and proceed to do something designed to make itself appear necessary.

The latest collision of Nature with urbanized humanity is occurring in London, where –as the BBC reports — a 16-18 foot Northern bottlenose whale (Hyperoodon ampullatus) for reasons of its own has swum up the Thames directly through the heart of London.

The Press is describing the event as unprecedented, but one suspects that the same species probably visited the Thames fairly regularly before Industrialization rendered the river inhospitable to cetean visits. Contemporary environmental measures (and the outsourcing of industrial activity to more remote regions) have obviously made the Thames cleaner today than it has been for a couple of centuries.

Concerned authorities and solicitous private well-wishers are hovering around the whale (accompanied by media helicopters), trying to prevent its stranding itself, overlooking the fact that bottlenose whales make a regular practice of doing precisely that in all the Northern European waters they frequent. See this Faroese account.

MSN video

When my wife and I go to the cineplex in a nearby California municipality, it is not easy to park legally. All legal street parking (and the great majority of spaces in the nearby municipal parking garage) features two hour limits. Any ordinary movie, with promotional and coming attraction trailers, more often than not will run longer than two hours. Arrive anytime past early morning, and the extra time slots (located on remote upper garage floors) will typically all be occupied.

A cynic will readily guess that this particular municipality, like many others, deliberately makes legal parking impossible in order to use parking tickets as a form of supplementary taxation. Anarchists like myself often just tear up tickets issued by dollar-snatching localities that we do not live in. But, as the Wall Street Journal warns, the days when this kind of payment compliance was semi-voluntary may be nearing an end:

A growing number of routine municipal fines and fees — including unpaid parking tickets, library fines, and trash-collection charges — are starting to damage consumer-credit scores.

In the face of budget crunches, major cities, including New York, Chicago and Miami, are hiring private collection agencies to chase down small debts that are frequently shrugged off by consumers. Since an outstanding account handled by a private collection company can wind up in a credit file, more consumers are discovering that niggling government fees — like unpaid speeding tickets or dog-catcher fines — are marring their credit. It’s up to each city to decide whether such information will end up in a consumer’s credit file.

Claude DaCorsi, a management consultant in Portland, Ore., used to pride himself on his near-perfect credit rating. But during a recent routine credit check, he discovered his credit scores had plunged to “below average.”

The reason: Two late library books, including a picture book taken out for his two-year-old son. The library had turned over the $40 late fee to a private collection agency.

Mr. DaCorsi, who says the black mark affected his interest rate on a home loan, has since barred his children from visiting the library. “We go to Barnes & Noble now,” he says. “We can get books there without fear of retribution.”

A handful of cities, including San Diego and Chicago, have worked with collection agencies since the late 1990s. But the trend is spreading rapidly around the country as strapped local governments look for creative ways to boost revenue without raising taxes and fees. Over the past few years, local governments in places including Seattle; Anchorage, Alaska; Austin, Texas; and Florida’s Miami-Dade County have contracted with private agencies to collect late parking tickets and court fees. In New York City, Baltimore and Dallas, libraries use private collection firms to recover fines. New York state recently hired a collection company to pursue overdue E-ZPass toll bills…

Local governments are also using collection agencies to track down some more-unusual fees. In Florida, some municipalities have used a private agency to track down swimmers who fail to pay “beach rescue” fees after they are rescued by lifeguards. San Diego courts have used collection agencies to collect fines issued to people caught riding the trolley system without tickets, according to AllianceOne, a Pennsylvania-based collection firm that works with court systems around the country…

Some cities are using collection agencies to chase down debts that are over a decade old, which can lead to surprises for consumers. Last July, Phillip Remstein of King of Prussia, Pa., received a notice in the mail from a collections company requesting $53 for a Philadelphia parking ticket issued in 1993. “It was ridiculous,” says Mr. Remstein. “I didn’t hear from them for 12 years and suddenly they want to collect?”…

Even when the dollar amounts involved in the fines are small, any collections activity in a credit file can do serious damage to a credit score. “It’s a very serious negative item on your report, on par with a tax lien or a bankruptcy,” says Maxine Sweet, vice president of public education at Experian. “You will definitely pay more for your credit, in higher interest rates and higher down payments.”

A library fine reported to a credit bureau, for example, can knock as much as 100 points off a credit score, making it difficult for someone with previously good credit to get the best rate on a loan, consumers and industry experts say. (Credit scores calculated by Fair Isaac Corp., the leading provider of such scores, typically range from 300 to 850; any score above 700 will generally get you the best rate on a loan.) Collections activity can stay on a report for seven years.

For more than a decade, students from Loyola College have participated in the school’s Care-a-Van program, providing the homeless two nights a week with meals, such as turkey-and-cheese sandwiches and hot chocolate, as well as toiletries.

But on Nov. 14, a Health Department representative notified the students that they needed a city license to distribute food, and that distribution via a van could not be licensed, since licensing would require on-site hot and cold running water for volunteers serving the food to wash their hands. The college suspended the program, but students rebelled, and resumed distributing food to the local homeless anyway in a nearby park.

Facing a problem with the kind of publicity that might be associated with arresting people for feeding the poor during the Christmas season, city officials offered to compromise.

Under the agreement, the students will continue to be allowed to provide food for two more months, while city officials try to find a more permanent place for the charity work that complies with city regulations, according to Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, Baltimore’s health commissioner.