One trusts that the University of Tennessee College of Medicine in Chattanooga is not taking too seriously an animal rights group that wants the school to stop using pigs in medical training.
The Physicians Committee for Overbearing Nonsense — I mean, “for Responsible Medicine” — sent a letter to the dean of the school calling for the moratorium.
From a strictly culinary point of view, the organization has a point: Pigs used in medical training may reduce the supply of glazed ham. During this holiday season in particular, that merits investigation.
But no such sensible argument motivates “PCRM.” It’s just one more assemblage of busybodies determined to impose by force what it cannot achieve by other means. The organization has called for a government-imposed moratorium on new fast-food restaurants in Chicago, for instance.
We may thus safely mark the Physicians Committee for Overbearing Nonsense (there I go again) off the list of groups that have the remotest understanding of the proper role of government.
Remington Crow
Imagine the outcry if New York City imposed a $340 poll tax on eligible voters when they tried to cast their ballots. Think of the backlash if New York forced citizens to have their registration forms notarized before they could be added to the voter rolls. Ponder the fury that would be unleashed if voting were permitted at only one location in the city.
Happily, the Big Red Delicious does not impose poll taxes or other unseemly burdens on voters.
It does, however, demand that $340 fee — every three years — of people who want to keep a gun at their home or business, assuming it deigns to let them have a gun at all. (The fee is far in excess of what it costs to process the paperwork.) The city also requires that gun permit applications be notarized, and that applicants make the trek to one site in the metropolis to get the forms they need. Online forms would be way too convenient.
In short, New York sets up a series of hurdles whose purpose is to deny, rather than ensure, gun rights. That casual infringement of the Second Amendment would be condemned as a throwback to Jim Crow if the liberty in question were the right to vote.
And what does the City That Never Sleeps Because It’s So Noisy Thanks to All the Gunfire get for its nannying? Not much in the way of curtailing gun violence, that’s for sure: More than 5,400 weapons charges have been filed in 2010, and there have been almost 1,600 shootings — about 60 more than there were by this point in 2009.
Desperate for any solution to the violence that doesn’t involve letting New Yorkers protect themselves, the city has been reduced to offering thousand-dollar rewards for information leading to the arrest of people who have illegal weapons.
It seems that folks who are willing to gun down their fellow citizens are not inclined to obey laws forbidding them to have guns. Heck, if so many smart gun-control people didn’t regularly correct us, we might think the cliché was true: When guns are outlawed, only outlaws have guns.
Pretty much
“The definition of a racist today is anyone who is winning an argument with a liberal.” — Radio host Chris Plante
That reminds me of one of the smartest banners spotted at a tea party rally: “No matter what I put on this sign, you’re going to call it racist.”
Misery galore
It’s almost December. The best film of the year thus far is “Cats and Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore.”
Let that sink in.
Now try to come up with a more succinct condemnation of the state of modern cinema.
And a hug around the neck
A fun way to irritate an apple-loving co-worker who asks what half a bushel comes to: Respond, truthfully, “Two pecks.”