Gun Control – Page 3 – Libertate Virtute (Virtue + Liberty)

April 18, 2019April 26, 2019

The Sledge-Hammer Method of Watch Repair

Gun bans and heavy regulation are well-intentioned, but as effective as repairing a watch with a sledge hammer. Another case in point: Kenya’s wildlife has experienced a catastrophic decline despite national gun bans and extensive regulation (see here). A minuscule ownership rate of 1.5 guns per 100 people hasn’t stopped the poisoning and poaching of some of Africa’s signature wild animals into near extinction, as mentioned in a “60 Minutes” story of 2009 and in National Geographic Magazine (Aug. 2018).

Poisoned young male lion in Kenya. (National Geographic Magazine)

Kenyan elephant killed by poison arrows.

People get guns, illicitly or otherwise. And if people can’t get their hands on one due to the expense or regulation, they turn to poison. It’s cheap and effective. The only problem is that the neurotoxins move down the food chain to scavengers like lions, leopards, elephants, birds, and people. At least a bullet is limited to the target.

A Kenyan vulture who died after eating poisoned carrion.

What’s the moral of the story? People who are motivated to kill won’t be dissuaded by a gun law. They’ll still kill, but mostly with other means that are cheaper and with broader ill-effects. So, we attempt to solve one problem by creating bigger ones.

People can be very dangerous without guns. Timothy McVeigh didn’t need an assault rifle to kill 168 and injure hundreds more in the Alfred P. Murrah Bldg. in Oklahoma City. Weaponizing fertilizer in a garage was all that was necessary. Tomorrow is the sad anniversary.

Alfred P. Murrah Bldg., Oklahoma City, after McVeigh’s bomb.

9/11 proved that box cutters and hijacked airliners can be homicidally effective.

Stripping the population of guns won’t settle your problems. It won’t even come close. One solution to assist our overburdened police officers would be to deputize the law-abiding with open-carry and accessible ccw laws. Just a thought.

If it’s the safety of your kids in school that worries you, harden them. Sadly, we live in a time when our society is getting ragged. Civil society’s little platoons of civilization are in decline. Many of those very same kids, if they survive the abortion gauntlet, are born into an increasing array of chaotic home environments. Now that doesn’t bode well, with or without more gun laws.

RogerG

April 29, 2018May 1, 2018

Our Failing Schools and the Second Amendment

The wake of the Parkland school shooting brought to mind a little-known incident from my teaching days (retired in 2015). As the Social Science Department chair in my high school, and with the responsibility for making requests for new and updated textbooks, I noticed a subtle change in one commonly available supplemental and historical document: the English Bill of Rights. An older version of the piece included the following clause: “That the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence [sic] suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law”. The newer form of the document had it removed. Why? I was suspicious then and still am.

I have always understood the opposition to the Second Amendment to be part ideological and part cultural – maybe mostly cultural. I suspected that a bias due to the ascendancy of the values and beliefs of a narrow subset of our population was at work, for the most part.

An eatery in NYC’s Greenwich Village neighborhood.

Putting the best face on the item’s exclusion, the abridging of the document caused the publishers (Holt McDougal) to weed out those things considered less important. Still, though, that’s just a roundabout way to knowingly or unknowingly display the same prejudice.

Children will go through life not understanding the full connection of the English experience and our Constitutional legacy, particularly the parts that are embarrassing to our self-anointed cultural potentates. The result is profound ignorance about our most cherished natural rights, and the susceptibility to end up like David Hogg (made famous by the Parkland shooting) and other young and eager enthusiasts for gun control.

David Hogg at the March for Our Lives this past March 2018.

Let’s set the record the straight: (1) the “militia” was all able-bodied men with the expectation that they be privately armed, and correspondingly not an organ of the government but part of civil society; (2) the English Civil War was as much a religious as political affair; (3) Charles I, in an attempt to squash religious and political dissent, called out the militia with their best private weapons and then quickly disarmed them; (4) privately-owned weapons were long held to be an inherent right of Englishmen for defense from threats to personal safety and tyranny; and (5) a great majority of the people who originally settled here carried this legacy with them to the new world. The right to bear arms is clearly an individual right – indeed, a “natural right” – as based on the words’ clear meaning to the amendment’s authors and the history leading up to its inclusion in our Constitution.

Modern reenactor of a 17th century English militiaman.

It’s a lesson increasingly lost on successive generations brought up on the progressives’ love-state fetish. The deficiency is built into the curriculum and nearly everything the teachers were taught. Ignorance begets ignorance … and poorly informed 17-year-old agitators.

RogerG

** Thanks to The Avalon Project of Yale Law School for preserving our cultural inheritance: “English Bill of Rights 1689”,
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/england.asp .

March 28, 2018March 28, 2018

“Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing ….”, Matthew 7:15 KJV

3/24/18, Washington, D.C. Demonstrators fill Pennsylvania Avenue in preparation for the March for Our Lives Rally in Washington, D.C. on March 24, 2018. (Gabriella Demczuk / TIME)

Things ain’t what they appear. A Washington Post analysis of the crowd at DC’s March for Our Lives shows that the youth were akin to albino gorillas. They were there but swallowed in a sea of adults, mostly middle-aged, college educated women.

While only slightly less skewed to lefty activism, last Saturday’s crowd would still be simpatico with the lefty, anti-Trump hordes of recent memory. Here are some of the numbers: 70% women, 72% BA degree, 10% under age 18, 49 average age of adults. The high number of BA degrees shouldn’t warm your heart since today they have little to do with wisdom.

Not surprisingly, following the political DNA of other lefty gabfests, 79% self-identified as left and 89% voted for Hillary.

Even more interesting was the dissection of the first-timers, 12% of the swarm. They were even more aroused by “peace” or anti-Trumpism. The former is a staple of lefty activism since Vietnam; the latter is the incitement du jour; both have only a glancing relation to gun control.

The uproar after Parkland might have some relation to its location. Broward County went for Hillary by 35% (Ballotpedia.org). Now we’re in California territory. Remember the Sutherland Springs, Texas, church massacre in Nov. 2017 – 47 casualties, 20 dead? That went down the memory hole.

Both episodes were evil on parade. But our legacy media chew on stories longer if they are birthed in certain places, and are pitches right into the leftist wheelhouse.

While the young-ins are a great face, many of the usual suspects of adults lurk behind the scenes.

A partial gallery of adult contributors to the collection plate for this latest lefty spectacle:

Photo by Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for March For Our Lives

After all the speechifying, would any of it do any good?

A dose of reality:

RogerG

** “Here’s who actually attended the March for Our Lives. (No, it wasn’t mostly young people.)”, Dana R. Fisher, The Washington Post, 3/28/2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/03/28/heres-who-actually-attended-the-march-for-our-lives-no-it-wasnt-mostly-young-people/?utm_term=.77bc981ec327

March 26, 2018March 27, 2018

Pass a Law And Thereby Immanentize the Eschaton, And Other Such Fantasies

Columbine High School massacre, April 20, 1999, at 11:10 am. Shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold upper left.

Here’s a thought: What effect does passing laws have on curing the ills of the human condition? A partial answer might be related to this distinction: “Passing laws” must be distinguished from “enforcing laws”. All too often we bludgeon ourselves with personal invective into passing laws and then walk away patting each other on the back on a job well done. But wait. The new edicts will have to be enforced with the non sequitur of “government efficiency”. The reality is that they won’t be effectively executed. And even if they are, they probably won’t change things one iota.

Classic example: The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 and its ban on “assault weapons”.

Pres. Bill Clinton signs the bill into law on September 13, 1994.

The ban on “assault weapons” was in effect from 1994 to 2004, when it was allowed to sunset. What effect did the law have on Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold on April 20, 1999 at Columbine High School?

Eric Harris, left, and Dylan Klebold, carrying a TEC-9 semi-automatic pistol, are pictured in the cafeteria at Columbine High School, in Littleton, Colorado, during their April 20, 1999 shooting rampage where they killed a teacher and 12 students. (Associated Press/Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department)

Answer: None that I can perceive. Klebold and Harris still entered the campus almost as well-armed as Seal Team Six. Gun controllers popped the champagne corks in 1994 and later Klebold and Harris popped untold rounds into the Columbine student body in 1999. 39 casualties later – 15 of them dead, including the shooters – and we were still as unsafe as before Clinton’s 1994 self-congratulatory signing ceremony.

These laws rely on two things for their effectiveness: (1) government employees and (2) the corresponding belief in an end to criminal creativity. As a matter of fact, criminals don’t stop thinking after a law is passed if they are bent on criminality. Set the rules at gun bans or age limits, for example, and the means will be devised to achieve the desired ends: steal the guns; inherit them; resort to other non-banned rapid-fire weapons; heck, load up a pressure cooker if need be.

Passing a law will not end human frailty and the human capacity to do evil. Chances are, they’ll do nothing to correct for our toxic modern culture, the thing that lies at the root of many of our problems.

Time to grow up and face reality.

RogerG

March 26, 2018March 26, 2018

Threshold for Maturity?

Crowds of people hold signs on Pennsylvania Avenue at the “March for Our Lives” rally in support of gun control, Saturday, March 24, 2018, in Washington.

One in the flurry of gun control proposals in the wake of the Florida school shooting is raising the age to purchase a rifle to 21, either through state or federal action. The suggestion is a clown-car of inconsistencies and undigested logic.

Right alongside with this latest bullet point of Michael Bloomberg advocacy is the 26th Amendment, the 18-year-old right to vote. If the controllers’ idea is adopted, maturity for voting lives side-by-side with immaturity for buying a gun. What? How does this work?

The NRA might raise the irony of an 18-year-old being issued a gun in the Army but can’t be issued one on purchase once the person steps off base. “Right”, gun controllers will respond as they contend that the “kid” is under supervision on base. Well, the controllers now present the ungainly circumstance of the 18-year-old not being able to buy a gun unsupervised as they exercise the vote unsupervised. Try to square that circle.

The idea has all the earmarks of feelings clouding sensible judgment. If adopted, the proposal sets the ceiling for “immaturity” at 21 for a gun while, at the same time, still allowing the newly-defined “immature” to inflict their choices on the rest of us at the voting booth.

The 26th Amendment grants to the newly-defined “immature” the right to vote; an age-21 gun law also excuses the skeptic for scoffing as the newly-defined “immature” line up to vote. Go figure.

RogerG

March 4, 2018March 4, 2018

Colossal Ignorance Abounds

Sorry, I can’t leave the gun debate alone. The reason: the people most stridently supporting gun-control are simultaneously most ignorant about them. They say stupid things like, “These guns [AR-15’s] are killing machines” (Stephanie Ruhle of MSNBC, last week in a radio interview).

Here’s a question: Comparing the 2 gun pictures below – #2 and #3 – which one is more likely to kill you? Answer: It depends on which one is pointing at you. Dahhhh! A bullet out of a “killing machine” (Stephanie’s words) acts the same way as one heading toward a deer.

Okay, one is a semi-auto AK-47 (pic #3) and the other is a bolt-action hunting rifle (pic #2). But many sport rifles are semi-auto. Depending on the direction of the barrel, either one could be a “killing machine” (Stephanie’s words). See below, pic #4, of a Browning semi-auto and an AR-15.

Top: Browning semi-auto hunting rifle. Bottom: AR-15.

I guess that we should expect a news anchor to be infatuated with cosmetics.

RogerG

February 28, 2018February 28, 2018

CNN’s Little Red Guards

SILVER SPRING, MARYLAND – FEBRUARY 21: Students from Montgomery Blair High School march down Colesville Road in support of gun reform legislation February 21, 2018 in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Red Guards — high school and university students — wave copies of Chairman Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book during a parade in June 1966 in Beijing’s streets at the beginning of China’s Cultural Revolution.

CNN’s townhall (2/21/2018) on guns was staged in Broward County, the scene of the shooting, and also a Democrat bastion in a state trending Republican. Remember, Al Gore tried to cherry pick friendly counties like Broward County for never-ending recounts for manufacturing votes to reverse his loss of Florida in the 2000 election, only to be stopped by the Supreme Court.

Broward County canvassing board member Judge Robert Rosenberg looks over a questionable ballot, 25 November 2000, at the Broward County Courthouse in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. AFP PHOTO/RHONA WISE / AFP / RHONA WISE (Photo credit should read RHONA WISE/AFP/Getty Images)

On 2/21, CNN conducted a theatrical display of ritual humiliation reminiscent of Mao’s Red Guards during the weighty days of the Cultural Revolution. Go view CNN’s tape of their event and compare it to this 7-minute exhibit of rage, youthful exuberance, and inhumanity from Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

Today’s young firebrands, in their bullying antics towards Southern statues and the NRA/guns, has striking similarities to Red Guard attacks on bourgeois decadence and, of course, statues.

We don’t have to look far into the pages of history for evidence of adolescent cruelty. Movements built around coercive utopias have frequently found a receptive audience among the young. Italy’s Fascist Party youth, the National Socialist Hitler Youth, Stalin’s Young Pioneers, Mao’s Red Guards, Bela Kun’s Lenin’s Boys (Hungarian Soviet Republlic, 1919) show the capacity for enthusiastic intolerance among the young. The spectacle of orchestrated hate depicted on CNN is true to form.

Bela Kun’s Lenin’s Boys, the enforcers of the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919.

We must understand these things for what they are. They are not forums for calm deliberation, but devolve into kangaroo courts for compulsory humiliation. Let’s stop the pretense of calling it a “townhall”.

RogerG

February 28, 2018February 28, 2018

Can’t Question a 17-year-old?

David Hogg has thrust himself into the difficult gun control debate. There’s a reason for the age distinction of minority/majority in law. There’s a reason for the separate existence of juvenile courts. There’s a reason for the determination of minors to be not fully capable in law of “consent”. It’s the same reason they cannot be a representative, senator, or president. Mental immaturity, raging hormones, and victim status aren’t qualifications for the seat of Solomon.

Hogg has been treated with “kid” gloves (pun intended) as he has thrust himself onto the public stage. His opinions have the depth of reasoning of a kid’s Christmas wish list. His demands should be confronted and dispatched, not indulged. There’s too much at stake for millions of others to let rantings go unanswered.

David, you wanted a debate; now you should get it.

RogerG