Gun Control – Libertate Virtute (Virtue + Liberty)

February 15, 2024March 17, 2024

Off Our Rocker

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Are we off our rocker? Republicans sound like the 60s New Left and Democrats come across as Ronald Reagan (regarding Ukraine). Both Democrats and Republicans go off the cliff respectively into a crazy neo-Marxism and blind fealty in a cult of personality. I give you a few examples.

Right off the bat, Sen. J.D. Vance (R, Ohio) is clearly off his rocker. He took to the conservative American Spectator to burnish proof of his bonkers state of mind (see #1 below). In his mind, nearly everything goes down a conspiracy rat hole, particularly aid to Ukraine. The fact that the funding goes into next year is, in the twists and turns of his brain, proof of a Democrat plot to trap Donald Trump in impeachment if he should be elected this year. Here’s a shocker: it’s normal for funding to go beyond the fiscal year since it takes time to pass through the intestines of the federal Leviathan and make the stuff – in this case, munitions. It’s true for the aid to Israel in the bill which Vance incongruously, without a hint of embarrassing hypocrisy, supports (as do I).

The alleged trap assumes Trump will be elected and while in office turn the screws on Ukraine and by acts of omission assist Putin’s conquest of Russia’s “near abroad” – which, by the way, is strangely reminiscent of Lebensraum from another quarter of eight decades passed. Furthermore, it unwittingly presumes that Democrats will control the House and Senate to give us another impeachment parade, which might happen if Republicans continue to serve up candidate looniness and stage ugliness (Trump being Trump). For a good portion of the American public, who would want to check the Democrats’ neo-Marxism with the bestial and batty? Vance, without thinking and saying it, assumes that voters will prefer the neo-Marxists and thus they’ll be in position to oust Trump. Vance’s reasoning inadvertently slaps himself as he attempts to slap Ukraine.

What a strange way to quietly show affection for Putin and isolationism, albeit of the incoherent variety. What a strange way to make yourself unelectable as a party.

And in the Republican stable, more craziness awaits. Rep. Matt Rosendale (R, Montana), a stalwart of the House Republican suicide attempt in the toppling of Kevin McCarthy (R, Ca.) from the speakership, that didn’t make a lick of sense, announced that he’d like to bring the same looniness to the Senate chamber (see #3 below). Brandishing all the Trumpy jargon of the “establishment” drivel, he’s challenging Republican Tim Sheehy, who’s been running since summer last. So, the state Republican Party will be asked to place on the November ballot a man who lost to Montana Democrat Sen. John Tester in 2018 in a state Trump carried by 16 points in 2020. We’ll see if the state’s Republican voters are hungry to replicate 2022 when getable seats were lost by choosing the bestial and batty to carry the party flag. A sizeable chunk of Republican voters has proven to be the Democrats’ best allies.

Potentially Illegal Mailer Sent To Montana Voters Causes Upheaval In Senate Election | The Daily ... — Rep. Matt Rosendale (R, Montana)

In the end, ironically, after election 2024 passes from the scene, the Democrats might still be in a position to ruin the country, or make it look like the hellscapes of California and New York. Businesses and people are fleeing these bastions of insanity. When will we ever learn that lefty policy is a ticket to societal carnage? These states are governed by people who hate the Second Amendment and economic activity that isn’t directed by them. Lawbreaking, adolescent genital mutilation (“gender-affirming care” in the jargon of our time), eco-central planning, our schools as Marxist preparatory academies, the filth and crime, and the secessionist flouting of federal immigration law emanate from these metropolitan and bi-coastal enclaves. These places are a mess.

Their favorite whipping boys are people who bring us our energy and those who produce the means for us to protect ourselves from the miscreants coddled by them. Defund the police? The targets, especially the arms industry, are escaping a bevy of regulations, punishing taxation, and massive state-law sponsored lawsuits. Smith and Wesson fled Massachusetts for Tennessee. Now, Remington is abandoning New York for Georgia (see #4 below). Ilion, upstate NY, will shrink further.

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Our newfound passion to make everyone whole (in legal eagle lingo) in the extreme is driving whole industries into bankruptcy, literally. The fact that a wacko used a Bushmaster to kill 20 kids and 6 adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School is the excuse to squeeze $73 million from Remington and, by extension, its employees. What of the car manufacturer of the vehicle that the killer drove? What of the gas station that the killer accessed to get him to the school? What of the fuel manufacturer? What of the maker of the shoes, clothes, and food that kept him alive and well to perform the heinous deed? What of all the hammers and steak knives that have been utilized to commit mayhem throughout history? In states like New York, we have a web of law and a jury pool, indeed a population, curated on hostility to certain industries. Remington became the target, less so the killer. Well, they are getting out. Masochism shouldn’t be expected to be a requirement for economic activity.

From the article:

“My mom worked there [Remington, Ilion]. My dad worked there. My wife works there with me now. My daughter works there with me now. My second daughter works there with me now. And my son-in-law works there,” said Brown, president of the United Mine Workers of America Local 717. “So it’s a double-hit for me and my wife: two of us out of a job.”

Do ya think?!

In statements to the press and employees, Remington cited New York’s threatening “legislative environment” and the fact that Georgia “supports and welcomes the firearms industry” (see #4 below). As a result, the State of New York is giving its residents much more than they ask for.

It’s much more than a shrinking tax base. It’s a clear field of play for criminals after non-prosecution, hostility to self-protection, and suppressed bail requirements under the puffery of “equity”. Where’s the “equity”? Right now, some people have greater rights to steal and destroy your property than you do in desiring to keep it. If the numbers don’t break down “equitably” by race, then hell is turned loose on the law-abiding, and good number of those are in so-called “protected classes” supposedly in need of “equity”. It’s laughable, if it wasn’t also so tragic.

There you have it. Current events are a chronicling of absolute lunacy. Are we off our rocker?

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RogerG

Sources:

1. “The Republican Plot Against Donald Trump”, Sen. J.D. Vance, The American Spectator, 2/12/24, at https://www.theamericanconservative.com/how-congress-is-pursuing-endless-war-in-ukraine-and-trying-to-stop-a-trump-election/
2. Thanks to Noah Rothman for the reportage and commentary on Vance’s claim in “J. D. Vance Thinks You’ll Believe Anything”, 2/12/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/02/j-d-vance-thinks-youll-believe-anything/
3. “Rosendale’s entry into Montana Senate primary sparks GOP furor”, Julia Mueller, The Hill, 2/11/24, at https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4459261-matt-rosendales-montana-senate-primary-donald-trump-tim-sheehy/
4. “Remington leaves the upstate New York village where it made guns for 200 years after a PE takeover and 2 bankruptcies”, Michael Hill and AP, Fortune, 2/11/24, at https://fortune.com/2024/02/11/is-remington-in-business-who-owns-leaving-new-york/

April 3, 2023April 3, 2023

The Nashville School Shooting and a Trans Social Contagion

Nashville school shooting: Trans community fears backlash after attack ... — Nashville killer in hallway of Covenant School as she hunts for more victims (from school surveillance camera).

People pray during a community vigil held for the people killed during the Covenant School shooting on March 28, 2023, in Mount Juliet, Tenn. — People pray during a community vigil for the victims of the Nashville Covenant School shooting spree in nearby Mount Juliet, Tenn., on March 28, 2023. (photo: Andrew Nelles, AP)

This past Monday a young woman, age 28, walked into an elementary school in Nashville and murdered three children and three adults. I was nearly brought to tears watching the police body cam footage that shows courageous police officers in a frantic rush through the rooms and finally ending the madness by killing the shooter. The tears were for the shock and horror of children having to face another murderous miscreant. Quite frankly, it was hard to watch. Prayers go out to all the families who now have a huge hole in their hearts to bear, and to the parents of the killer who now must continue their lives knowing that their child is a mass murderer. Thinking about it, the sadness must be almost unendurable.

After these events, and even more horrifying, we’ve seen people too regularly jump to their agenda in grotesque exploitation. The president, Monday, went before the press to comment on the event and opened with a standup comedy routine and then shifted to his favorite hobby horse of gun control (see below). The bodies are still at the coroner, loved ones are devastated and groping for ways to cope, and a president shames himself before cameras and microphones. The White House scene was obscene.

We don’t know much at this stage about the shooter and her motive. It’s far too easy for us to join the crowd and connect the tragedy to our personal social and political hobby horses. I will try to refrain from doing that. Yet, there are certain aspects about the shooter to come to light that may or may not be relevant. Absent evidence, though, keep in mind that the known facts of her trans-identity as a man and the killing spree should be treated as unrelated at this moment.

But it doesn’t mean that killings by a trans person suddenly prevents us from continuing our public discussion on transgenderism and the strong possibility of a social contagion. Regardless of the outcome of this investigation, this debate must proceed for the stakes are too great for our children.

The argument against a trans social contagion relies on a suspension of common sense. Peer pressure and social media contagions apply everywhere else but magically they are blocked from operating on this topic. The entire advertising industry and cancel culture rely on the triggering aspect of peer pressure. People buy Coke over Pepsi (and vice versa) and censorship on campus is justified by alleged “hurts” that transmit through the social ether of the student body. Sorry, the argument lacks merit.

And other facts clearly point to a social contagion. Where is trans-identity most prevalent? It isn’t evenly distributed. Madeleine Kearns (see below) has followed the subject for quite some time. She noticed that California has young people identifying “as trans at a nearly 38 percent higher rate than the national average”. In the very progressive California city of Davis, according to numbers provided by the Davis Unified School District, the rate is three times that of California. What is there in the California social eco-system that is causing a teen rush to transgenderism? The scale of the increase suggests something more than children are now free to expose their inner trans self.

Trans-identity certainly happens everywhere but concentrations strongly imply a contagion is at work. A bump in the numbers not only occurs by geographical location but also by sex. Just a short time ago, it was boys who mostly suffered from gender-dysphoria. Now, it’s girls by two to one. What happened? Social media happened as other influences were locked down during the pandemic. Kids were isolated in long stretches with their cellphones. The isolation and the well-known sensitivity of teenage girls about their bodies brews a perfect storm.

Consider this: any husband will rue the day he ever suggested to his wife that she is getting a bit plump.

My position on the social contagion aspect of transgenderism is unrelated to the Nashville event. Her trans-identity didn’t pull the trigger. Until proven otherwise, trans people aren’t prone to murder any more than anyone else. The willingness to take life stems from something much deeper in the cranial recesses than gender dysphoria, genitalia, or chromosomes.

That said, we need to take seriously the fact that young people are intensely more impressionable than some gratuitously let on. Drag queen story hours, anal and oral sex picture books for adolescents, the instant networking of tweens/teens on their cellphones, the pervasive online content, and parental detachment from the lives of their children make for a toxic brew. Are we weaponizing normal tween/teen insecurities into rampant dissatisfaction with their bodies? Yes, we appear to be. Its modern manifestation is transgenderism.

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RogerG

Just the Facts, Ma’am

See the source image — Jack Webb as Detective Joe Friday on Dragnet

Detective Joe Friday of “Dragnet” fame interviewed a nervous and anxious witness by saying to her, “All right, whoa, just the facts, ma’am—when did you start hearing the strange noise?” It’s something that should be taught in journalism school, but isn’t. Communications majors stand before cameras and twist words in ways that reflect the worldview common in the rarified atmosphere of their self-reinforcing blue silos, rarely limiting themselves to just the facts.

In that cocoon, for instance, few know much about guns and fewer own them. Their familiarity with the rest of the country outside the bubble is from 35,000 feet. And it really, really shows.

Watch CNN’s Alisyn Camerota and on-air sidekick Victor Blackwell report some of the facts on the recent Indiana mass shooting (see at (13) CNN’s Alisyn Camerota Reacts to Good Samaritan Who Killed Mall Shooter: ‘Are We All Supposed to Rely on an Armed 22-Year-Old?’ – Twitter Search / Twitter). The reportage was well and good until the end when Camerota ruined the just-the-facts about the shooting and the heroic actions of an armed citizen with a personal commentary: “I mean, but are we all supposed to rely on an armed 22-year-old in the food court?” Blackwell chimed in with, “Shouldn’t have to”. “Shouldn’t have to” suggests obvious preventions. Well, geniuses, what are they?

A just-the-facts to back up the “Shouldn’t have to” probably, in their minds, means getting onboard the gun control soul train, from Beto’s and The Squad’s mouths to your gun safe. Gun confiscation of those meanie guns used in Zero Dark Thirty – which by the way you can’t buy – the ones often dumped into the rhetorical category of “weapons of war” or “assault rifles”, has great appeal for the firearms illiterate. Of course, they can’t define the things in any meaningful way – never could – often confusing semi (legal) and automatic actions (illegal). Is it the looks, the pistol grip, the stock, the fact that most of the things are black? What? But take away the looks and what do you have? You have a plain looking gun with just as many bullets exiting the barrel. Are those exiting bullets any more lethal if emanating from a meanie-looking rifle as opposed to plain Jane? What’s the point of bans or takeaways if the weapons’ only transgression is looks?

Don’t expect Camerota, Blackwell, or Beto to be coherent in response. Their crowd hasn’t been up to now. That’s why they’ve hit upon the backstop of “high-capacity magazines”. Thus, a crazed killer will be stopped cold by a reduction from 15 to 7-cartridge magazines, or even 5. Right? You’ve got to be kidding. These lunatics practice dropping a spent clip to be replaced quickly by another. They all practice before they carry out their mayhem (news reports indicate that this murderer did). Seven rounds, seven people shot, and in a couple of seconds he’s reloaded to repeat the carnage. What’s the point, once again?

Universal background checks? Red flag laws? These sops require a competent government workforce from the ATF’s Instacheck workstations to DA’s not in a wokeness trance. Just because some of these maniacs would not qualify for a gun purchase or would be clearly eligible for temporary seizure of weapons from the home doesn’t mean they won’t get a gun. Just because the miscreants left a trail of bile all over the internet doesn’t mean people are awake and watching. A gun can travel down the grapevine like gossip with or without a civil service protected government employee standing as gatekeeper.

More laws mean more for these people to do. The new law could be award-winning poetry and be an exemplar of pure legal reasoning. Still, it has to be implemented by the descendants of Adam. All-too-often, though, the “Shouldn’t have to” is a reference to more laws, more laws to ignore or impinge on an enforcing employee’s collective bargaining rights. Camerota and company don’t think beyond getting more pages added to the criminal code. For them, it’s simply a matter of ink on paper and then off they go in pursuit of systemic racism.

For them, it’s nearly always an intense focus on the gun, the inanimate object. Not much airtime is devoted to the shooter. Who was he, for it is almost always a he? They overwhelmingly are young men in their early twenties. They, with few exceptions, show the classic signs of young male alienation. “Alienation” is a twenty-dollar word for isolated, forgotten, ignored, relegated to a place of self-absorption in front of a screen. Nobody seems to care that his anxieties are mounting and his views begin to percolate out of deranged self-delusion. Everyone from the union-protected school employee to his parents to a society obsessed with the “marginalized” is happy to have him out of their hair. It’s playing with fire.

Leveling the ship’s deck after years of severe listing to the benefit of everyone but him is extremely difficult, even if everyone agreed, which is as likely as pigs spouting wings. If that is true, what are we to do when these malcontents show up at any one of the numerous soft targets around us? More money and programs for mental health services might be a partial answer, but I’m skeptical given the failure of our current, vast, and expanding gun control regime.

A real answer may be staring at us, and the folks at CNN, in the face. The fact that an armed citizen ended the killing spree before the murderer emptied the magazine might have done more for public safety than all the bullet points (no pun intended) in the Democrats’ gun control agenda. That 22-year-old in the Indiana shopping mall with a gun and a state constitutional right to carry it probably did more to deter the homicidal from choosing a shopping mall than the ATF. Soft targets becoming hard targets might limit the miscreants’ acting out to Snapchat or TikTok.

Political Cartoons by Gary Varvel

At least by that time, somebody might notice, badger the police, who might then threaten a do-nothing DA to do something – like taking the suspect into custody and reminding the parents of their legal responsibility. Maybe the whole brouhaha might result in a groundswell to change our impotent commitment laws, giving something for our lawmakers to do other than make our lives miserable as they chase grandiose crusades like climate change or systemic . . . whatever.

If reporters want to act out the part of editor-in-chief, maybe their commentary ought to have a closer relationship to “Just the facts, ma’am”. Camerota and Blackwell, try being something more than a Democratic Party shill.

RogerG

July 7, 2022July 10, 2022

Too Much Faith in Government. Highland Park Is Proof.

Police officers walk through the crime scene the day after a mass shooting at a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, Ill., July 5, 2022. (Photo: Cheney Orr/Reuters)

Biden’s poll numbers are in the toilet. The celebrity-activist base of the Democratic Party screams at White House operatives in Zoom sessions to do something about the coming red wave in November. They complain that Biden seems mentally adrift, the administration is slow, the messaging is off – which is true to some degree. But here’s the kicker: their problems have little to do with presentation but has everything to do with the message itself.

What ties the crowd on the left together is a fanatical belief in government’s ability to accomplish anything. Thus, we have the peddling of the $5-trillion Build Back Better in an economy heating up after COVID, inflation, shortages, a full-frontal assault on affordable energy, ending wars in catastrophe, crime spiking all over, schools as lefty indoctrination centers amidst plummeting test scores, and a childish and obsessive campaign to eliminate inequalities in socio-economic numbers (statistical disparities). The problem is not the form of message presentation. It’s the message! Ideas certainly have consequences, and bad ideas have bad consequences.

The Highland Park shooting is a case study in the error of following false political gods. It didn’t take long for the bright stars of the Illinois political firmament – Gov. Pritzker and the state’s two Senators – to blame the gun. So, they trot out the banal litany of rhetoric about “gun violence”, “assault weapons”, “weapons of war”, and high-capacity magazines while they ignore their own culpability. Yes, culpability: their responsibility for not enforcing their own laws or recognizing that many of their go-to ideas are pointless.

The new so-called “bipartisan” federal gun control law parallels much in Illinois state law. Illinois has a comprehensive red flag law, a gun ownership permit system, universal background checks, bans on straw purchases, and a prohibition on conceal carry at most public gatherings. Highland Park chimes in with their bans on “assault weapons” and “high-capacity magazines”. The state and town are covered in gun laws, and none of it stopped the killer’s rampage.

And where did all of this end up? The killer still purchased his gun, in spite of documented run-ins with police, a red flag law, and a robust list of prohibitions in the state’s gun-purchase check system. The streets of Chicago would remind anyone of Baghdad at the height of the insurrection in 2003. 15 people were murdered in the city on the day of the Highland Park shooting. Other Democrat-run fiefdoms with similar Byzantine entanglements of gun laws have become war zones. 2022 has already witnessed “250 murders in Philadelphia, 175 murders in Los Angeles, and 102 murders in Washington, D.C.” (see below for source)

The reason for the progressive failure is something that never crossed the mind of the participants of the Zoom call between Biden hirelings and the party’s high-profile activists. It is the simple fact that laws must be faithfully executed (in the words of the US Constitution) before they become real. It’s the human factor. With Democrat governance comes permissive law enforcement, particularly in the form of non-prosecution, selective prosecution, or reduced prosecution. Honestly, it could be that their favorite gun laws can’t be enforced without running afoul of their other cherished ideals, like reduced incarceration rates. Regardless, we end up in the same place: urban hellscapes.

In the end, the miscreant in Highland Park still got his hand on a gun for a sniper’s nest to kill July 4th revelers. Pritzker and company should first examine their own derelictions before they harass the general public with more laws that they’ll fail to enforce or won’t make any difference.

Simply passing a law and then a retreat to their uptown soiree and exclusive gated community won’t cut it. For me, passing laws that they refuse to enforce is grounds for impeachment. Are you listening people of Illinois?

RogerG

*Source:

An excellent column on the gun issue and HIghland Park: When Gun Laws Don’t Prevent Gun Crime | National Review

June 19, 2022June 25, 2022

Why I am Opposed to Red Flag Laws

No, it’s not due to a view of the Second Amendment that claims the right of every American to own rapid-fire artillery. My opposition to red flag laws stems from government’s inbred incompetence. The more responsibilities are piled onto government, the more the ineptitude overwhelms. It’s the perfect storm for exploitation by sinister political actors. In the confusion, due process and equal application of the laws gets buried under prejudices and arbitrary and capricious actions. Oh, then add civil service protections and unionization for the hirelings in the people’s government and the people’s government quickly becomes a worker soviet. Get the picture?

As proof, and previously mentioned, Democrats demand expanded background checks for gun purchases when recent violations of the existing background checks seldom go to investigation, let alone charges. Also, state gun-enhancements in the commission of crimes get tossed out the window by progressive – read “soft on crime” – DA’s enthralled with “equity”, meaning racial proportionality, meaning the race-norming of the numbers on the docket so they don’t exceed the race’s 13% of the population. More succinctly, a form of criminal justice affirmative action is implemented to give “protected classes” a head start by discarding the weapons charges entirely. Either way, more embellished background checks, expanded rules and bans on difficult-to-define guns and their appurtenances, and new layers of regulations in red flag laws will not translate into safer communities. An already difficult task was made gargantuan for an already difficult-to-manage government workforce.

Stenographers and typists taking a civil service exam on July 9, 1936.

Don’t think for a moment that hiring more government workers will do the trick. More government workers won’t necessarily mean more work gets done. It’ll just create a larger worker soviet, as California has proven with the CSEA and CTA. It’s a state government of the public employee unions, by the public employee unions, and for the public employee unions. The word “capture” keeps coming to mind. There’s a reason for the California DMV, or CalTrans (the state transportation agency) for that matter, being a nationwide insult to efficiency.

Speaking of California, look at what they’ve done to their election laws. It’s more proof that more laws and an explosion in their attendant regulations means more . . . of a mess. While guns and voting are different arenas, if you fumble one, don’t expect a person in their right mind to give you unfettered access to the other. Chaotic elections give to us a clue about the fate of the Second Amendment.

Led by the mantra to “count every vote” and the rhetoric to fight “voter suppression” by the poohbahs of the one-party state, laws were passed that can only make your eyes roll. An election system is efficient if results are produced in a timely manner and come with the reasonable expectation that vote totals actually reflect legal, honest-to-God votes. Today, nothing can be further from the truth. In an earlier time, election results were frequently known hours after the polls closed. Only three-quarters of the votes were counted in LA’s June mayoral contest after 5 days.

Many things are awry in California’s election zoo. It’s a criminal act in the state for a poll worker to ask a person for ID. Yes, a criminal act! They’ve done this as they’ve made it exceedingly difficult to identify ballot misbehavior. To boot, ballots are shotgunned through the mail, a method famous for election shenanigans. My son, a recent California refugee, got two ballots for this June’s primary election: one from Sanders County, Mt., where he now lives, and one from California. The state mailed the absentee ballot to him at his Montana residence (?). He has a Montana driver’s license to prove it. You’d think that someone in the California county clerk’s office would notice. So much for that thought.

A worker bends over to move ballots from a drop box into gray bags as another worker loads bags into the back of a van — Workers from the Los Angeles County registrar’s office collect ballots from a drop box in Norwalk on Nov. 4. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

He has no inclination for vote fraud, but can we be certain about others, especially if the system is constructed to make it difficult to detect the chicanery? Remember, this is the party of bail funds for rioters, inciters of public incivility against their opponents, mobs to intimidate the administration of justice, and plotters with friends in the administrative state to hound a duly elected president from pre-election to the four years of post-election. Is this a party that would shrink from pushing the envelope on voting if they have a reasonable expectation of never being caught? If you’re naïve enough to think so, I have some Clark Stanley’s Snake Oil Liniment to sell you.

I can’t prove fraud, few can, because the system is designed to hide it. Ballots, after being scattered through the mail, are picked up by who-knows-who, taken behind closed doors to be marked by God-knows-who, and then collected in bulk by who-knows-who. California in 2016 made it a matter of law to sanction the “harvesting” of the vote. Uhhhh, what can go wrong?

In a brief moment of sanity, in a holiday from its usual display of Trump derangement syndrome, the LA Times in 2018 condemned the “overly-permissive ballot collection law”. The Times said the law opens “the door to coercion and fraud and should be fixed or repealed.” Precisely!

Voter registration with verified identity, eligibility, and address is made into a Keystone Cops’ comedy skit. Moter-voter – automatic voter registration at the DMV (driver’s license, vehicle registration) – makes a conduit for prohibited persons such as felons, the underaged, non-residents, and illegal immigrants (the “undocumented”). Unknowingly, or knowingly, they can get swept onto the voter rolls. Remember, the whole system is manned (or womanned, or whatever) by proud SEIU-protected state workers.

Federal law requires a regular clean-up of the rolls (removal of the ineligible, dead, inactive, or moved), something that California is notoriously delinquent. California hasn’t been removing “inactive” voters from the lists for 20 years, in spite of a Supreme Court reaffirmation of the requirement in 2019 (Husted v. Randolph Institute). The problem aggravated to such an extent that Judicial Watch forced a consent decree onto the state to fulfill federal law. It is being done in fits and starts or not at all.

Then, compound the problem: the provisional ballot morass allows a person to vote anywhere in the state, away from the precinct registration rolls, which puts more pressure on an election workforce not prone to efficiency to begin with. Don’t expect SEIU-protected underlings to be aficionados of signature analysis in obscure comparisons. When you add to the muddle the ballots allowed to arrive days after the election, it is no wonder election day in California turns into election month(s). And the results . . . ?

Can anyone have faith in California elections? Would you entrust the “the right to bear arms” to the California mentality of government, amply displayed in their crazy-quilt elections laws and regulations? If you are, I suppose that there is a larger clientele for Clark Stanley’s Snake Oil Liniment than I thought.

May be a cartoon

RogerG

Bibliography:

*Read John Fund’s piece on California’s election system here: https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/06/californias-crazy-vote-count-is-a-warning-to-other-states/

*The LA Times editorial against ballot harvesting can be found here: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-mail-ballots-harvesting-20171115-story.html

*For a full accounting of the public employee unions representing California state government workers, refer to here: https://lao.ca.gov/StateWorkforce/BargainingUnits

February 4, 2022February 4, 2022

A Flummoxed President

Flummoxed: adj.; bewildered or perplexed.

I am flummoxed and so is our president. I am perplexed by young people, formally educated and from comfortable backgrounds, storming police stations, burning down central business districts, and imposing on us their warped views by defacing our monuments and memorials. I am further bewildered by a refusal to recognize the most elemental of things: if you don’t enforce the law, there is more law breaking. Our president is equally flummoxed and displays it regularly. He strode into New York City yesterday (2/3/22) and announced that he was going to lead an effort to arrest, wait for it . . . guns! Arrest guns, not the people who use them to commit heinous acts.

Yes, that’s right, President Biden declared a crackdown on inanimate objects. The favorite phrase in vogue among his people is “gun violence”. And they don’t mean violence committed by human beings WITH guns. They mean violence BY guns. It’s as if these metallic things have a mind, a will of their own. They jump from the coffee table to a person’s hand, take over the psyche, and drive the individual to commit horrifying acts with them.

Nary a word about blue-bubble public leaders vilifying the police, robbing their budgets, and refusing to prosecute lawbreakers. Check this out: mobs using phone calculators during smash-and-grabs to guarantee that their thefts don’t exceed $950, thanks to the voters and political establishment of California (Prop 47). And blue-bubble potentates don’t need a Prop 47 to set a baseline for allowable criminality. They’ve got Soros-funded henchmen as DA’s refusing to fulfill their oaths of office to faithfully enforce the laws, and thusly are deserving of impeachment. Sorry, “prosecutorial discretion” doesn’t cut it. This is not discretion; it’s essentially ripping pages out of the duly-passed code of laws.

Our exalted president says not a word about the vastly more significant contributions of his party to the mayhem. Get prepared for a campaign to hamper your ability to own a gun to protect yourself from the lawlessness that they inspired. Mr. President, you should be condemned for not lowering the boom on your party’s abettors of criminality while leaving the rest of us without any means to protect ourselves.

Watch yesterday’s disgusting spectacle on the video below.

RogerG

P.S.:

See the source image

December 20, 2021December 20, 2021

Sunlight Is a Disinfectant

Parents protest at Loudon County school board meeting, June 2021

Most people are unaware of what’s happening in the deep and dark recesses of their most significant public institutions. If they’re informed, a good portion would hit the barricades, and for good reason. Well, here’s a couple of stories on the role of sunlight (public exposure) in the disinfectant process for public policy.

A scheme to strangle the civilian firearms industry of capital was forged in 2018 by – who else? – Cal STRS’s Christopher J. Ailman, chief investment officer, with collaboration from a few other public and private investment officers (a full list below). Basically, in typically obtuse and vague language, the declaration is an attempt to abridge a legal and Constitutionally protected activity because it affronts the sensibilities of California’s coastal elites who then try to foist their sentiments on the rest of the country.

Read the thing (here). Most of it was written by someone completely unfamiliar with the process of purchasing a firearm in America. Anyone buying a gun in a store goes through a federal background check. The unregulated transfers and sales – gifts, inheritances, underground sales – will always exist, with or without our many laws, in the same manner as the regulated drug market will always face a shadowy illicit version. Pass a law and an underground clone will pop up.

Further, the statement is littered with “best practices”, the “best practices” of Nancy Pelosi’s home district. It’s as scam to work-around the agencies of popular sovereignty, a people’s elected representatives, by organizing the socially and culturally insular crowd in gated and walled estates to do what an elected government refuses to do, because they were never elected to do it.

Light was beamed onto the scheme first by National Review (“Woke Capitalism: A History”, KDW, July 1, 2021) and then to the NRA (“Florida’s Pension Fund Joined a Gun-Control Compact, Until…”, LW, America’s 1st Freedom, Sept., 21, 2021). The NRA noticed the name of Michael McCauley, Senior Officer at the Florida State Board of Administration, as a signatory to the screed. Remember, Florida doesn’t suffer from the ritual identity-mongering and victimhood of the power brokers in the not-so-Golden State. Jimmy Patronis, Chief Financial Officer for the state, was informed by the NRA and Florida quickly withdrew its name from the extortion racket. Florida is growing precisely because it is not California, and now McCauley knows it too.

Jimmy Patronis, Florida Chief Financial Officer

Parents have joined the fray in shedding light on another radical ploy of longstanding. All the pandemic Zooming may have exposed the people who run your child’s classroom to be on a par with the ethos in Nancy Pelosi’s home district. I should know of what I write as a 30-year veteran of a public high school classroom. A while back, I retorted to our superintendent that we are nothing but a finishing school for “good little Democrats”. It’s only gotten worse since my retirement in 2015. What began with the multiculturalist nonsense of “diversity is our strength” quickly metastasized into the rancid racism-to-fight-racism.

Whatever you want to call it – critical theory, critical race theory, deconstructionism, anti-racism, white privilege, systemic racism, etc. – it’s still nothing but Marxism for a new revolution to overthrow our Constitutional order and civilization. The ideological seed germinated in teacher training (going back to my 1970’s), in all textbooks that I’ve used, and reviewed as a department chair, for the past three decades, in supplemental materials, as the orthodoxy in the colleges and universities, and as the pervasive and presumptive outlook in faculty lounges. It is so in the ether that one should not be surprised that we have undergrads in spittle-laced tirades at deans who’ve called for a little tolerance.

Watch this report on student treatment of Matt Walsh.

Not too many parents want their kids to join the statue-toppling brigades. And parents are beginning to show up at school board meetings. Good for them. Keep it up. And, by the way, a great deal of “throw the bums out” is more than deserved. Start local, then continue on up through the bureaucracies and the federal ladder. Clean house. Extremist partisans fiddling with our pensions funds and children should feel the heat. It begins with the white hot rays of the sun.

RogerG

* “The Principles for a Responsible Civilian Firearms Industry” authors: Christopher J. Ailman, Chief Investment Officer CalSTRS; Christianna Wood, Fellow at Harvard’s Advanced Leadership Initiative; Michael McCauley, Senior Officer at the Florida State Board of Administration; Peter Reali, Senior Director at Nuveen; John O’Hara, Managing Director and Senior Advisor at Rockefeller Asset Management; and Rakhi Kumar, Senior Managing Director, Head of ESG Investments and Asset Stewardship at State Street Global Advisors.

June 5, 2021June 12, 2021

A Lesson For All Seasons, The Movie Clip

Here’s the relevant scene from “A Man For All Seasons” mentioned in my previous post. Substitute young Roper for the cancel-culture mobs patrolling our campuses, infecting our children’s curriculums, manning the halls of power, and swarming the newsrooms. Mob rule has the upper hand over the rule of law and decency. These, indeed, are tumultuous times. We must keep our heads on straight in this period of malevolent madness.

RogerG

May 28, 2021May 28, 2021

What’s an Assault Rifle?

David Chipman (left) and Pres. Biden. Chipman is Biden’s nominee to run the ATF. Both want to ban “assault rifles”, “period”. But what is an “assault rifle”?

Good question. David Chipman, Biden’s nominee to run the ATF, couldn’t come up with a definition but he wants to ban them anyway. Sen. Kennedy of Louisiana pressed him for a definition. Chipman said, “There’s no way I could define an assault weapon.” Senator Cotton of Arkansas did as well. Chipman tried to redirect the question to Congress and dredged up an old memo on suspect weapons crossing the southern border. He described the memo defining an assault rifle as semi-automatic, detachable magazine, in caliber 22 on up. He just made illegal most of the rifles and pistols in the possession of good American citizens.

That’s the problem with the mythical gun: it can’t be defined in any sensible way. It’s a rhetorical mirage. Take a look at the rifles below. Which one is an “assault rifle”? Is it “A” or “B”?

Remington 742 Woodsmaster, 30-06 caliber.

You say “B”. Why not “A”? “B” looks military – it’s the notorious AR-15 – and “A” is for hunting Bambi, you might say. So it must be about the looks of “B”, right?

Looks is the only difference because both are semi-automatic, besides the fact that the hunter uses the more powerful 30-06 round as opposed to the smaller 5.56 in the other.

Will “B” assault you more effectively than “A”? If so, how so? Will the bullet out of the barrel of “B” assault you more effectively than the projectile leaving the barrel of “A”? Let me help you. The answer is “no”. Both will tear into anything that happens to be in the way. Thus, all guns with a bullet exiting the barrel “assault” whatever is in their path.

Of course, the thing just sits there as an inert piece of metal, wood, and plastic, till a human mind behind a human finger at its trigger turns it into a projectile-ejecting tool. No human, no assault. Simple.

Is the semi-automatic feature scary to you? You see “automatic” in semi-automatic. They aren’t the same. For all intents and purposes, full auto weapons aren’t available to you and I. The only thing that we can get is a gun that will fire only one round with each pull of the trigger. “A” does it just as well as “B”.

A Polish soldier behind a WLKM 50 caliber multi-barrel machine gun (automatic). You can’t buy this thing, or anything that operates as an automatic, at your local Cabela’s, or practically anywhere else this side of the Mexican cartels.

Chipman enters Alice’s Wonderland when he said that the AR-15 was issued to him as a federal agent and called it a “particularly lethal weapon”. Particularly lethal? How? All guns are lethal if you happen to be in the flight path of the bullet. Just point ’em in a dangerous direction. And another round will issue out of the hunter as quickly as the AR.

The “assault rifles” discussion is demented. If you can play word games with a legal and widely available gun in order to ban it, then any gun can be banned if you can find the right word chemistry to use against it. And there goes the 2nd Amendment.

RogerG

*Also on my Facebook page.

May 5, 2020May 13, 2020

Waco and What We’ve Become

“Waco”, the miniseries currently airing on Netflix.

I was surprised and disappointed that Clint Eastwood’s “Jewell” didn’t do better at the box office. The poor showing wasn’t due to a lack of cinematic craftsmanship. It was well-made and acted with a riveting script. I have only speculation, but it sure seems like today’s public is squeamish about such offerings. Could it be a byproduct of a broad revulsion of our incendiary politics? Escapism might be more appealing because the quality of our public discourse is so appalling. That’s my guess. I hope that Netflix’s “Waco” doesn’t experience the same fate. It cries out to be seen.

Eastwood’s story is riveting, as is “Waco”. Richard Jewell was tarnished by nothing more than a FBI profile (of the “lone bomber” and the “hero syndrome” psyche hypotheses) – profiling being an investigative technique to narrow the range of suspects, not to ignore evidence and hound a person. An institutional psychosis grips and propels agents toward a particular suspect or set of actions to the exclusion of any other possibilities. All of it is based on nothing more than an abstraction that straitjackets the minds of government agents.

The potential for tunnel vision, fueled by this institutional psychosis, intensifies as the responsible agency is administratively removed from local circumstances. The FBI in 1996 was obsessed with Richard Jewell in Atlanta, and the ATF/FBI in 1993 was consumed with Vernon Howell, aka David Koresh, outside Waco, Texas, as the US Marshals Service and FBI were with Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992. Caricatures were formed and plans made from afar, and then imposed on a locality. The fallout included Jewell’s unjustifiably tarred reputation, 79 dead in the inferno at Waco, and the killing of Weaver’s wife, Vicky, and son, Sammy (age 14), at Ruby Ridge. We might as well include the yang of the Oklahoma City bombing, killing 168, to the yin of Waco. Innocents all; lives cut short. It’s not a matter of saints and sinners. It’s a matter of a grotesque abuse of power that is broadly ignored as such. Easy to do when decision making is centralized and distant.

Randy Weaver and family. Federal authorities would kill his wife, Vicky (next to Randy) and son, Sammy (seated at his mother’s feet).

Randy Weaver’s home at Ruby Ridge, southwest of Bonner’s Ferry, Idaho.

By the way, what was with the 1990’s? Now that’s a question awaiting serious consideration.

Far more troubling for us today is the public’s apparent assent to this state of affairs. Are we becoming the type of people who are increasingly willing to turn over our right to govern ourselves to a narrow class of specialized “experts” employed in government service? Are we becoming sheep? One has to wonder.

Interestingly, the character of Janet Reno had a brief appearance in Netflix’s “Waco”. She approved the final assault on the Branch Dividian compound when informed of unproven accusations of child abuse at the Mt. Carmel estate. Janet Reno cut her teeth on successfully prosecuting child abuse cases in the 1980’s as chief prosecutor of Dade County, Florida, and rode her success to fame and the office of Attorney General of the United States under Bill Clinton.

Janet Reno takes the oath as attorney general during a ceremony at the White House on March 12, 1993, while President Bill Clinton watches. (photo: *Barry Thumma/AP)*

Oh, one important fact about Janet Reno: she devised a prosecutorial recipe – the infamous “Miami method” – for carrying out a mammoth miscarriage of justice by railroading many innocent people into long prison terms and setting off a daycare child-abuse hysteria that gripped the country in the 1980’s and early 1990’s. Almost all of the convictions have been overturned and ample payouts awarded for false prosecution by states and localities who followed the Pied Piper of Dade County. The story is vividly portrayed in PBS’s “The Child Terror” and in the work of journalist Dorothy Rabinowitz in publications like the Wall Street Journal. From her perch in Washington, DC, Reno was inflicted on the Branch Davidians.

A page from the PBS website for “The Child Terror”.

Part of the problem in our thinking is the nomenclature for the government headquartered in DC. You know, the one surrounding The Mall. We try to avoid calling it what it is: a “central” government. “Central” is unsettling to a nation who sees itself as geographically and culturally diverse with the accompanying and long-established regional loyalties, and a governmental structure to reflect it. If you doubt the belief’s persistence, attend a pro or college football game. Regionalism is rampant.

The word “federal” in reference to the one headquartered in DC is the odd duck in the field. “Federal” pertains to a system of state and national sovereignties, not just the central one. The word is an awkward fit when applied to those manning our national bureaucracies. More accurately, they are “national” or “central” government authorities.

The fuzzy wording hides the reality that the DC government has been centralizing since Woodrow Wilson took the oath of office in 1913 (or maybe it was TR in 1901). The zenith of concentration is a very high plateau of power for our DC authorities running from the New Deal of the 1930’s through the Great Society of the 1960’s to our current Great American Shutdown. The decentralizing efforts of the Nixon/Reagan/Gingrich triumvirate were just hiccups along the way.

Let’s count the ways of DC’s consolidation of power. How do we, the general public, view our national chief executive? George Will’s use of “caesaropapism” for the popular conception of the presidency is apt. DC has been a hot real estate market since FDR’s alphabet soup of “federal” agencies. The commerce clause of the Constitution has been exploited to impose a national floor on wages, the amount of allowable particulate matter in a locality, our car’s fuel economy, whether to cut down a tree, bans on guns that look mean, and nearly everything between … including light bulbs. Huge swaths of our population are dependent on a national bureaucracy’s paycheck or handout. The Supreme Court through its edicts has turned the states into handmaidens of DC. With its ATF, Marshals Service, and FBI, DC has extensive and expansive police forces with a very long reach. Many of them in personnel and behavior mirror the other armed branch of the central government, the military.

The DC government is primed and ready to be at war with its citizens. I have warmed to the complaint about the militarization of law enforcement. Long a talking point of the left, it nonetheless has resonance in light of the increasing recruitment of ex-military into law enforcement, the formation of law enforcement special forces in the form of SWAT teams, and tactics and equipment more appropriate for storming Baghdad. David Koresh looked out the window of his Mt. Carmel compound and saw something familiar to Wehrmacht and Russian officers as they viewed the soon-to-be battlefield of Kursk in 1943.

Tanks in the final assault on the Branch Davidian compound.

Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge might have thought that he was beset by Viet Cong and North Vietnamese regulars like Lt. Colonel Hal Moore’s battalion in the Ia Drang Valley in 1965 (captured in Randall Wallace’s and Mel Gibson’s film, “We Were Soldiers”). “Enemy” patrols and snipers surrounded his family cabin, but he didn’t have Moore’s advantage of airpower and artillery. More aptly, he was Custer at the Little Big Horn.

The thread of concentration runs right through the past and onward to the Great American Shutdown of 2020. The potentates in DC without reservation, in essence, commanded us to stop living. It was a nationwide cease-and-desist order to end the actions that define living. Many governors – mostly blue state ones – see themselves as mini-Woodrow Wilsons, or caesaropapists, and began arresting dads playing with their children in parks or surfers 30 yards offshore. When a local government stood in his way, California’s Governor Gavin Newsom steamrolled Newport Beach. Many of them announced the extended euthanization of their states well into June, maybe beyond. Do you doubt any of them, if they won the presidency, would hesitate in making the act of going to work a crime or using their immense law enforcement powers to assault any group not culturally and politically correct? The real viral threat is this massive abuse of power, not a bug from China.

SAN RAFAEL, CA – MARCH 22: McNears Beach County Park in San Rafael, Calif. was among the parks to close in Marin County on Sunday, March 22, 2020. (Sherry LaVars/Marin Independent Journal)

The stage is set for an edict to kill society at the start of every flu season. Is that even possible? Yes, it’s possible, but not sustainable. It’s no more sustainable than to allow more law enforcement power to accrue in the DC headquarters of the FBI, ATF, and other branches of centralized police forces.

We need to be constantly reminded of the dangers. See Netflix’s “Waco” for a refresher course.

RogerG