By now you must realize that my “Bitches” are not straight forward. Such is the case as I briefly speak on the two topics of Gas and Guns.

On Guns

On Thursday, June 26th, our US Supreme Court struck down a District of Columbia gun ban (DC v Heller, click here for story) - a ban that, effectively, kept citizens from being able to own and keep a hand gun in their own homes. To this I say, it’s about freaking time!

Why, might you ask, would I then write about this in my “Bitch Chronicles”? For one simple reason - the Supreme Court vote. The vote was 5-4 to overturn the DC gun ban. 5-4! A slim majority. One vote the other way, and cities and states across the nation would have been empowered to enact laws stripping all citizens of their guns, no matter the reason for ownership. It greatly disturbs me that a little less than half of our US Supreme Court would want to strip away our right to protect ourselves. What disturbs me even more is that while justice might  sometimes be blind, the Justices are not. They must know that in many cities in the more liberal areas of the country, legislators are just dying to forcefully take a citizens means of self-defense out of their hands - and would do so with a smug little smile of self-righteousness.

One Justice, Steven Breyer, wrote, in his dissent, "In my view, there simply is no untouchable constitutional right guaranteed by the Second Amendment to keep loaded handguns in the house in crime-ridden urban areas."

And this statement disgusts me. Partly because of the self-evident necessity of law-abiding people to protect themselves in “crime-ridden urban areas”, where a gun ban will not stop the criminals from having one. But mostly because, well, he’s kinda right.

No, No, No - I’m not changing my tune. The decision was right - there is clearly precedence for the majority decision against the gun ban found in, for example, the Federalist papers and other writings of the constitutional authors. Not to mention plain common sense. The problem here is the shoddy and ambiguous language of the Second Amendment:

Amendment II: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed”.

Hell, it’s not even a proper sentence! One could interpret that the right to bear arms is tied to being in a Militia; one could also interpret this as two ideas, with some relation, clumsily compacted into one sentence - after all, it’s “right of the people” not “right of the Militia”.

Well, to some degree, they can be forgiven. After all, a little over two hundred years ago, there did not exist a liberal-nanny-state-socialist who would actually advocate, with help from powerful lobbyists, that law-abiding citizens be stripped of the effective home-defense measure of a gun. At that time, the only great fear of disarmament came from far-away powerful governments imposing its will on local government (i.e. the State), who then were on intimate levels with its citizenry. If one were to explain to the constitutional authors the concept of forbidding citizens from owning guns used to protect their property and person from thieves, murders and rapists, first they would look at one funny; then they might have actually put that freedom in the constitution in explicit detail.

Hell, I’m convinced that if the constitutional authors could somehow take a trip to today and spend a week, they would go back to their time and add all sorts of items to the bill of rights. Tobacco freedoms, alcohol freedoms, sexual and reproductive freedoms, and distinct prohibitions against income tax, property tax and targeted taxes come to mind.

Anyway, I digress. I’m happy about the Supreme Court decision, but greatly disturbed by the narrow vote. Future members of the Supreme Court really will decide wether we return to America the Free or drift further toward The People’s Republic of America.

On Gas

No, I’m not going to bitch about gas prices. We all hate it, and those of us with brains know there is nothing short term that can be done to stop it (short of completely nuking China and India out of existence). No, my bitch is a practice gas stations have been adopting - different price rates for form of payment.

Recently, gas stations have begun charging higher rates for credit card purchases (or, depending on how you look at it, lower prices if one uses cash).

Obviously, one reason this perturbs me is that, well, no other commodity or service is treated this way, at least officially. Yes, there is the negotiated deal where something is cheaper if you pay cash - but no store or company publicly advertises “x cheaper if paid by cash”. Certainly not any other item for sale in the Gas Station’s convenience store has the same policy. Seems kinda underhanded, doesn’t it?

But the other reason this perturbs me is because just a few short years ago, there was a successful push to do away with “pump first, pay later”.

Now, granted, where I grew up (and I’m not saying where) “pump first, pay later” was unheard of. But up until only two or three years ago, it was the norm throughout most of South Carolina to be able to pump first, then pay. Then, with a rash of assholes who would drive away without paying and some legislative action on local levels to require stations to forbid pumping first, this option disappeared.

Before that time, I almost always paid in cash. As “pump first” began to disappear, I started to pay with a credit card. This is because it is a pain in the ass to pay first with cash, then pump - you have to guesstimate how much a fill up will cost you, wait on line to pay it, pump, invariably not fill up or have paid too much, then have to go back to the freaking line to pay for more gas or get your balance back. Fuck that. I’d just assume not wait on line, thank you very much, and take care of the whole deal in front of the pump.

Fine. Then, after almost all gas stations do away with “pump first, pay later”, they start charging more for using a credit card - around here, up to 8-10 cents a gallon more. Bastards.

I should say that not all gas stations are doing this. And I would advise, if you pay by credit card, you make an effort to only buy gas at stations that don’t charge more for credit cards. These stations need encouragement to not adopt that practice and the ones that do - they don’t deserve your money and, quite frankly, deserve a spanky.