Democratic senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut admitted this morning that "It took me a while to figure out" that belief in gun rights is based on a philosophy:
Host Joe Scarborough said, "Right, exactly. It doesn’t mean we shut down, would the senator suggests we shut down all screening at airports tomorrow because criminals are still going to smuggle things through there?"
"I think what has happened here is you can’t explain the opposition of background checks because the NRA is powerful," Murphy said, according to the Washington Free Beacon. "Essentially what you have here today is a bunch of gun control darwinists, right who just believe natural selection is going to take care of this problem, that if you put guns in the hands good guys and bad guys, then let’s just hope the good guys shoot the bad guys. And they sort of say this, they say 'the only way to stop a bad guy is a good guy with a gun.' You can’t explain opposition to background checks any longer by saying the NRA is powerful. I think a lot of folks who will vote against this on the Senate floor really believe the best way to solve this is throw a mess of guns out and there let the folks shoot it out. It took me a while to figure out there is a philosophy underlying this that allow people to justify being against background checks. It’s not just that the NRA are telling these guys to vote the wrong way but they believe the streets will be safer if criminals have guns and it’s ridiculous."
Federally funded, low-speed train service Amtrak has launched a website to show its support for the gay pride movement and with the hopes of attracting additional clientele.
A CENTURY AGO, the psychologist, philosopher, and agnostic William James delivered the prestigious Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh. His 20 addresses were published in 1902 as "The Varieties of Religious Experience," which soon became one of the most widely read works on religious belief by an American. Before James, no scholar had devoted such attention to the process--and the effects--of conversion. His basic argument: There is something authentic and profoundly beneficial about religious belief.
In brief: John T. Noonan on the High Court and Michael Kochin on gender in Plato.
Dec 30, 2002, Vol. 8, No. 16 • By
BOOKS IN BRIEF
Narrowing the Nation's Power: The Supreme Court Sides with the States by John T. Noonan Jr. (University of California Press, 208 pp., $24.95).
A SLIM MAJORITY of the Supreme Court has over the past decade expanded states' immunities against federal authority. These decisions are the target of John T.
John McCain's "Worth the Fighting For" and Behnegar on Leo Strauss.
Dec 23, 2002, Vol. 8, No. 15 • By
BOOKS IN BRIEF
Worth the Fighting For: A Memoir
by John McCain, with Mark Salter
Random House, 396 pp., $25.95
AS A RECOVERING McCainiac, I hesitated to pick up the new John McCain-Mark Salter volume. Their previous effort, McCain's war memoir, "Faith of My Fathers," was so good that I expected "Worth the Fighting For" to be a disappointment.
JOHN RAWLS, who died on November 24 at age eighty-one, was the towering figure of academic liberalism. A gentle, dignified, self-effacing man, he taught philosophy at Harvard for more than thirty years and exerted a commanding influence on his profession, single-handedly shifting its dominant picture of itself and the world.
Before Rawls, professors of philosophy, when they addressed questions about politics at all, restricted their analysis to the use of words and their logical relations.
Facebook
Twitter
