Now, Down With Lead Fishing Sinkers! (Pun Not Intended)

From US News & World Report: " EPA Surrenders to NRA on Gun Control Issue"

The following lines really jumped off the monitor:

"The decision came just hours after the Drudge Report posted stories from Washington Whispers and the Weekly Standard about how gun groups were fighting the lead bullet ban.

The EPA had planned to solicit public responses to the petition for two months, but this afternoon issued a statement rejecting a 100-page request from the Center for Biological Diversity, the American Bird Conservancy, and three other groups for a ban on lead bullets, shot, and fishing sinkers. The agency is still considering what to do about sinkers."

Rule by bureaucratic and judicial fiat is certainly inconsistent with a free society.  It is submitted there needs to be some level of discretionary power granted administrative agencies to carry out constitutionally-legitimate laws, but such discretionary powers need to be limited to the utmost if the rule of law, and not that of autocratically-bent bureaucrats, is to remain the keystone protection of freedom.  If laws are sufficiently vague to allow unelected bureaucrats the discretion and power to set policy and ban production and sale of goods, individuals are ruled by bureaucratic fiat, not free under the rule of law.

Here is F.A. Hayek in Planning and The Rule of Law, chapter 6 of The Road To Serfdom:

"If the law says that...a[n] authority may do what it pleases, anything that the...authority does is legal---but its actions are certainly not subject to the Rule of Law.  By giving the government unlimited powers, the most arbitrary rule can be made legal; and in this way a democracy may set up the most complete despotism imaginable."

But note that the EPA rejected the petition to ban lead-based ammunition shortly after the story posted on Drudge, even canceling its plans to solicit the public for its thoughts on the ban.  I'll go out on a limb of conjecture here and guess the agency was swamped with complaints from enough hunters, sportsmen, and people who do not skip from the First Amendment to the Third that it dropped the petition.

This surprising 180 in the insulated world of bureaucratic America reminds us that even unelected bureaucrats charged with implementing the laws of the people's representatives are affected by public opinion.  And we certainly know their elected bosses in the Oval Office and Capital Hill are, too.

Keep up the pressure, America.  If we keep pushing in the right direction we just might find the government respecting the Constitution and our God-given freedom more. 

But, alas, those poor adolescent fishermen are not as numerous, vocal, or bold as Second Amendment defenders, so they might soon find themselves without lead sinkers.