Tag Archives: fentanyl

BEING A LONG SHORTLY – 4

How we deal with national problems need not, in all cases, be nationally.  A large fraction of our national weakness has resulted from the least-efficient mechanism in the country – and the most expensive – the federal Government in its thousands of permutations, assuming responsibility for local and intensely personal problems and discomforts.  These would include things like food, education, employment, housing, and sexuality… not to mention the nature of household appliances and pronouns.  We are becoming weaker as a people and weaker individually, as we wait for unrelated bureaucrats and disingenuous politicians to make us comfortable.  Only in the past 30 years, or so, have we begun to recognize that every bit of comfort has come at a loss of freedom.  Let’s move forward.

IMMIGRATION

Every nation must deal with immigration.  It’s an outgrowth of the “greener-grass” syndrome.  People in many countries live in economic and political systems that are pretty crappy.  Often there isn’t enough food or the government is mean to people.  Many of those countries are led by dictators or communists of various shades of red, leaving the residents not very happy.  Eventually some of those people do what it takes to move to some other country where the political and economic “grass” is greener… or prettier… or less crowded.  All countries, including those that people leave, have laws – or fences – to control entry, which means not crossing their border until or unless the new country actually thinks it might be good to let the foreigner across that border.  Every country does this: controls and guards its border, mainly because one never knows when a foreigner might try to steal from the new country or from its people or, worse, try to do harm to the new country or to its people.

So, every country on Earth controls its borders, umm… except for one: Ours, the U. S. of A.  Interestingly, ours is one of the freest and the most blessed with food and blessed with the idiocy of perpetual welfare.  How would a relatively modern, successful country like ours, ever select a leader who would not defend its borders?  It is a conundrum.  Our current leader, chosen according to legend by 80 Million of his fellow citizens, has actively subverted the laws – and the fences – of his country resulting in the unbridled entry of more than 5 Million strangers from 100 other countries (or more), a million of whom sidestepped the polite greetings of the so-called “Border patrol” staff so that they could enter in secret, perhaps with less than honorable intentions toward their new country.  What an odd “leader” our country is entrusted to.

Let us hope every voter with the opportunity is able to choose a far, far different leader so that our country’s border will again be protected and guarded.  It’s a simple thing.

DRUGS

Drugs can heal or injure or kill.  These 3 options are true for both licit and illicit drugs.  In concert with the problems of immigration, tons of illicit drugs cross the unguarded border we just discussed, and they definitely injure and kill the legal residents of this country.  Our erstwhile government, hired to protect us, the citizens, has failed to solve the problem of mind-altering and often deadly drugs for, well, virtually forever.  But, under current leadership and the inactions of our bureaucratic “deep state,” the swath of death such drugs have wrought has reached new depths of death and failure.  One wonders why this particular national problem has proven insoluble.  Our national government reflexively tries to force the solution to deadly, destructive drugs back upon individuals and localities, while grasping onto personal problems that earn votes and the continuation in power to make them national ones.  Someone is not being honest with the citizenry.

Over the span of 9 years or more, America sacrificed about 55,000 of its young men and women fighting Communists in Viet-Nam.  We have agonized over the waste of those young people for the 50-plus years since we pulled out.  Lots of lies and untruths were told to the American people during that botched conflict, yet we persevered until there was nothing left to fight for, and we left.

Drugs kill between 60,000 and 100,000 young people EVERY DAMNED YEAR nowadays – mostly due to fentanyl that comes through Mexico, our “friends” to the south.  The victims don’t need the Defense Department to ship them overseas to be killed; overdosing can be accomplished close to home… sometimes in the home. 

Fentanyl is fairly easy to make from its constituent chemicals, benzylfentanyl and 4-anilinopiperidine and our other “friends,” Communist China sells large quantities of those chemicals to Mexican cartels.  Toluene, an easy chemical to obtain, they don’t need to import.  “Fentanyl” is 100 times as potent as morphine in its ability to react with pleasure receptors in the brain, so a user must be very, very careful as to dosage.  Its other effect is suppression of breathing, and a user certainly wouldn’t want to end up like George Floyd, late of Minneapolis.  A deadly dose, even for a man as big as the late Mr. Floyd, is about the volume of one shake of salt on some food – very, very careful.  Unfortunately, most users of drugs, particularly drugs of questionable origin, are somewhat stupid.  Tens of thousands smarten up every year, right before they stop breathing.

A president, especially one elected due to his immense popularity with some 80 Million of his fellow citizens, would go out of his way, at least a little bit, to guarantee that they or their offspring would be safe from the ravages of illicit drugs like fentanyl.  It’s the least he could do for the millions of people who loved him so much, once.  It turns out that that President is more enamored of the one-point-something Billion friends he has in China, dwarfing the paltry crowd who “voted” him in.  So, he has done less than nothing to stop the flow of illegal drugs or illegal aliens across our once-guarded border.  Indeed, his actions have facilitated both of those illegal border-crossings, and here we are.  Parents and lovers who are mourning the loss of loved-ones to fentanyl and other “southern” drugs, are advised to never forget who their President cares about least.

Drugs could be stopped, but not one plea-bargained case at a time.                                               (See: https://www.prudenceleadbetter.com/2016/05/15/drugs-and-governance/)

It would be refreshing to hear a campaign speech that included the protection of the American people as a key promise.  It would elicit many Prudent votes, particularly if the death penalty were revived for drug distributors.

MEDICINE & FREEDOM

Recently, as in 3 years ago, a “new” coronavirus swept across the planet.  A lot of people died as a result, but not always from that virus, COVID-19.  We’ve talked about this, but the virus is not the biggest damage-causer.  The presence of COVID yielded a massive loss of rights and freedoms – un-Constitutionally – and changed the relationships among individuals, health-care providers and institutions, and changed the relationship between the federal government and individuals.  We who are plagued with short memories, owe it to ourselves and to our descendants, to keep alive the abuses Americans have been subjected to and why the new relationships must be reversed in law.  Lately we have heard the CDC and the NIAID branch of it, try to walk back the directives they issued during the “pandemic” that cost many their jobs, licenses and even lives.  Governors, school systems, public agencies, even branches of the military created executive authorities and powers to direct the actions of individuals because they were “following CDC guidance” or “following the science” as imaginatively defined by people like Dr. Anthony Fauci who claimed to “represent” science.  People like to think that “doctors,” including Phd’s, are “scientists,” but many are followers of others.  For medical doctors, with the brutal intrusion of federal governance into health care, many are employees, now, and they can be fired by the institutions that they turned to for stability and protection, if they don’t kow and tow.

Police and fire departments forced trained members to accept the experimental injections or lose their jobs; military branches forced members to accept the shots or lose their position, despite the investment in training and skills.  Teachers were forced to accept the experimental chemical injections on the same basis.  People were forced to get the injections or forego normal exercise of their rights of movement,  assembly or commerce.  Almost none of what was imposed on us, free, sovereign, Americans, was Constitutional.  Those who were questioned on these actions used various claims of ignorance by citing the “CDC” advisories as their authority to restrict freedoms.  Ostensibly, thanks to active fear-mongering by government entities, that same CDC and NIAID (Fauci) and ignorant media (to the point of marshalling hatred against those who disagreed with the fear… mixing it all up with “racism,” lack of “equity” and even “white supremacy” as reasons that people questioned “the science”) COVID was such a threat that states of emergency were justified and people could be arrested or economically destroyed for opening their businesses.

To be Prudent, most of “science” touted during the dark medical age of 2020 through 2022, was bogus.  Real science was often put forth and literally suppressed by government and media working together to protect a single narrative, and those actions killed tens, if not hundreds of thousands of Americans who would have survived COVID relatively easily had less harmful treatments been allowed early in their infections.  In some cases, those alternative treatments worked in very late stages of infection, but it took a contentious legal battle to obtain them.  Hundreds of thousands.

Science is not a place or even a consensus, it is a process.  Stopping investigation, data analysis and experimentation by claiming “settled science” or similar baloney, is as anti-science as can be.  That’s what the “great” Anthony Fauci represented throughout.  The entire National Institutes of Health – NIH – should be disassembled and reconstituted in a way that will improve health and longevity, not the bottom lines of pharmaceutical companies.

The only legitimate role of government in our democratic Republic is to be a partner in the health, safety, advancement and prosperity of its citizens.  Consider what it is, in fact today, and recognize why Prudence indicates that these should be revolutionary times.

DOLLARS

The world is awash in dollars including the trillions we create through productive enterprise in our own economy, those we create through productive enterprise in other countries, the “air-dollars” the FED creates for us at re-election times, and the dollars created by foreign banks and enterprises.  Lots and lots of dollars.  The “air-dollars” have been tolerated by Saudi Arabia and other OPEC nations (OPEC being largely a creation of Henry Kissinger and the American oil industry) and nearly every other nation in the world since Nixon closed the “Gold Window” of the Treasury in 1973.  Simultaneously we guaranteed to protect Saudi Arabia and its oil markets and they agreed to market oil only in dollar denominations.  People who wanted oil, and many other traded products, were happy to accept dollars in payment and just as often would sell their goods in terms of dollar values rather than their own currencies.  The need to maintain “exchange rates” with all other currencies and the dollar, gave rise to incredibly lucrative currency speculations that have been not only a financial lever but a political one, as George Soros and others can testify.  So many dollars.  Every one is a bill – a bill against American productivity, and each must eventually be paid with something valued by the holder.

Many in power today seem to view the ocean of dollars as something that will be tolerated forever, and, further, that our incomprehensible debt – over 32 Trillion, now – can be “mentalized” as opposed to monetized.  That is, we will eventually be able to talk our debtors out of worrying about it or even wanting it paid back.  Without grasping what their attitude means, many people just roll their eyes when asked about how we will ever deal with our national debt?  Since it can’t be dealt with now, the best thing is to not let it worry us too awfully much, and let someone worry about it in the future.  Apparently, since we have made ours the largest single element of worldwide debt, all other nations should realize that if our debts are called the world will be worse off without an independent United States… so there: deal with it.  That’s some convenient mentalizing, but it’s not likely to work.

Until 10 or 15 years ago, the majority of nations accepted the dominance of the dollar as a trade-off for stability and extensive military aid from the U.S. to the more than 150 nations in which Americans were posted to protect or stabilize smaller countries facing politically crappy enemies.  Militarily, the U.S. had established a global empire that benefitted itself in both trade and influence, yet also cost it more than its own productivity could afford, hence the enormous debt being tolerated.  But tolerance isn’t love.  There was and is nothing about our past relationships that will inhibit smaller countries from accepting “help” from Communist China, our sworn enemy.  Part of China’s all-dimensional war against the U.S. is the unseating of the dollar as the global currency of trade.  If we lose the “petro-dollar” advantage other nations will quickly decide to not accept payments of international trade obligations in dollars.  One hopes that some one of the geniuses who brought us to this point of astronomical debt, is working on how the U.S. of A. is going to survive as an independent entity without the petro-dollar economy to sustain it.  Voters should ask politicians this question.

Fellow Prudentialists will appreciate the growing, unique responsibilities of U.S. citizenship, ignored or un-taught only at our peril.  Let’s move further.

BEING A LONG SHORTLY – 2

America is mired in at least 39 or 390 serious problems, but we’ve dealt with only 4 of those we’ve Prudently identified.  Time is short.  We must continue.

NUCLEAR POWER

Those who have submitted, mentally and emotionally, to the “green” cult, are uniformly opposed to so-called fossil fuels on the premise that carbon-dioxide is going to ruin Earth’s climate and cause the demise of civilization and of life, itself.  That CO2 is the prime “green” component of the solar-driven oxygen cycle upon which all life depends, seems not to affect their thinking.  Those same are virulently opposed to nuclear energy, the cleanest, least damaging source of electrical energy currently available.  Something doesn’t make sense.

Green leftists always reference “Chernobyl” as the end of the argument against nuclear; if that fails, “Three-Mile Island” is expected to shut-up any pro-nuclear stragglers.  Both of those supposed examples of what’s wrong with nuclear power plants, are non-sequiturs.  Chernobyl, in particular, is an example, but it’s an example of how NOT to build a nuclear pile and of how NOT to run and maintain it.  Rather than condemn the natural process of nuclear fission, opponents should correct their opposition to the technological stupidity the Soviet Union rewarded.  Chernobyl would have been a big nothing had it been designed and built like, well, Three-Mile Island, actually.

Chernobyl was, technically, not in a containment structure as nearly all nuclear plants outside of the USSR were.  That is to say, the weaknesses of the design and overall misunderstanding of the processes at various states of operation of their graphite pile reactors, make the Chernobyl-design power plants risky for mistakes and accidents under the best of circumstances.  A long list of nuclear accidents at those plants was finally made public after the investigation into “Chernobyl” was completed.  Some engineering traditions should not be permitted to operate or build nuclear plants.

Still, nuclear power plants have so many inherent advantages that it is foolishness to avoid making use of the continuously-improving technology that goes into their design and construction.  The largest deterrent to nuclear power is fear, often fed by reference to bad technology, like that employed in Chernobyl-design plants and methods.  New series III and IV plants are smaller, modular and 5 to 10 times safer than Three-Mile Island era plants, including passive safety systems.  They’re also much less expensive to build and license.  And, they are clean in both product and operating lifetimes up to 60 years and in eventual decommissioning costs and impacts.  There is no “all-electric” future without massive, weatherproof generating capacity like what nuclear can provide.

TRANSPORTATION

Ours is a highly specialized and competitive global economy.  Both commodities and finished products must move from points of origin to points of consumption; this is not going to change no matter how many “community gardens” are created, and it won’t change despite all efforts to go “carbon neutral,” either.  Some tasks must be performed.  Daily there are millions of them.  Reducing the efficiency of completing those millions of tasks places huge burdens on society, the economy and on freedom.  Forcing wholesale changes on how transport is performed… without a more efficient way to do it, is risky at best and foolish by definition.

We are in the midst of a green revolution, and we have been for over 100 years.  From time to time wisdom has been applied through government regulation that has sped up the process of becoming more efficient and therefore cleaner in our consumption of energy to get materials and people moved from place to place.  Increased mileage standards is one example, and automobiles are far cleaner and more efficient than ever, today.  On the other hand, there are far more cars on the road than ever – in virtually every country – causing ever more gasoline, diesel and lubricating oil to be consumed while propelling substantially more “transport” per gallon or quart, and overall.  For green evangelists there has been no progress at all – things are oh, so terribly worse because people insist on private, self-directed transport, and reject, for the most part, “public” transportation: too many cars, too many people driving cars.

Bad government, bending to the political pressure of “green” acolytes, responds by forcing people to pay for and to switch to public conveyance, and then fails to render it clean, comfortable or safe.  Worse, public transit doesn’t go to every place where people need to go, and it never will.  Government then considers how to force people to go to where public transit does go, imagining “model” communities that may never exist.  There are clean, electric alternatives, but so much money and political force has been committed to “public transit” that alternatives are now less likely to be considered than if government went back to being wise, again.  [See: https://www.prudenceleadbetter.com/2017/07/20/a-home-on-the-beach/; or https://www.prudenceleadbetter.com/2016/07/10/automotive-economics-and-freedom/.]

Battery magic seems to many, especially to “green” proselytes, to be cleaner than those awful carbon-based fuels; we should all shuck our internal combustion engines and switch to battery-powered vehicles.  Bad government is listening to them and is virtually forcing car manufacturers to make more magic cars and fewer reliable ones.  The ads are impressive.  Batteries, themselves, are dirty products to make, both physically and politically.  A person changing from gasoline or diesel to battery power has to drive upwards of 60,000 miles before the ecological cleanliness of an “electric” car starts to improve upon that of an internal combustion model.  The only advantage of lithium-ion battery-powered cars is that the filth of mining and tailings, processing and effluents, unsafe mining (including child labor) and ecological disruption and pollution… well, it all happens in other places, out of sight of “green” Americans and others.  Right in our neighborhoods things are pollution free!  Forcing indigenous people off of their ancestral lands in South America is meaningless to us: they’re not OUR indigenous people about whom we care very deeply… very, very deeply.  Improvements to Communist China’s manufacturing base and our long-term dependence on it for parts and replacement batteries, should keep China from ever damaging relations with the United States… so that’s good, too.

No matter how much cleaner internal combustion engines become, it is – and will never be – clean enough; only perfection is barely adequate in the business of planet-saving.  So, in partnership with an entirely anti-American regime, the “green” (actually Red) movement has twisted our economy to the point of throwing away phenomenal manufacturing and servicing skills and technology, as well as discarding remarkably and increasingly efficient electric generation in favor of windmills and Chinese solar panels.  Soon, there will be millions of used cars rusting away as planet-saviors force the end of internal-combustion cars and trucks and the adoption of battery-powered replacements, while limiting the number of “licenses” to sell gasoline… or refine it… or transport it, making continued use of gas or diesel power a little more awkward and unreliable than even severely limited-range electrics are and will continue to be.

Ultimately, (see “only perfection” in the preceding paragraph) owning and driving personal vehicles will become so troublesome that only grossly expensive “public” transportation will be able to provide a modicum of mobility.  Personal freedom and sovereignty that Americans have invented the technological means to enjoy, will be lost forever.  After that there will be millions of battery vehicles that no one wants or can sell, and will find difficult to recycle.  Everything will be approaching perfection.

IMMIGRATION

For many nearly forgotten reasons the United States of America has for over 230 years been the most attractive nation and place for people from every nation to emigrate to.  Americans, themselves, no longer understand (or are taught) why this could possibly be.  Today education appears to include – is compelled to include – every tawdry mistake anyone in our history ever made.  Worse, to complete a communistic circle, the effect of those mistakes is to absorb and render null and void, every great idea and action of those same people.  The net effect of this twisted lens of American history is to grow up blaming your country for every problem in the world, rendering the existence and founding of it indefensible.  As a result, fewer and fewer people do defend it… at least from inside the country… even as more and more people flee their home countries and sneak into, well, HERE.

Actual sovereign nations, however, have laws to govern and, basically, restrict entry to their jurisdictions.  Nations are defined by their borders.  The United States is defined by both borders and ideas of freedom and individuality – not by groups or identities, but by individuals, individual responsibility and equality under the law for – every – individual.  For the past 65 years or so, we have turned our backs on our unique and majestic ideas, and dispersed the gold of citizenship as millions of people who don’t want to become Americans flooded to the insides of our borders.  

Barack Obama was the first president who actively modified immigration practices if not policies, to try to change the demographics of the United States.  Democrats had been dreaming of pushing white America into the minority category since Teddy Kennedy, an avowed socialist (and idiot).  They couldn’t get it rolling any faster during the Clinton administration, but things started moving under Obama.  He was probably the first president who seriously does not like the United States or its Constitution.  Trump, obviously, was an unexpected speed bump in the race to change races.  Biden, on the other hand, knows only two speeds in that race: “flat-out” and “stupid.”  Some FIVE MILLION illegal aliens from over 100 countries have walked in to the U.S. since the 2020 votes were “certified.”  About a million of those never even checked in with the Border Patrol, preferring to sneak in with various subterfuges planned, including serious drug-dealing and, for some hundreds or thousands, terrorist crimes.

Biden is hard to pigeon-hole.  A patriotic observer is hard-pressed to declare him merely sloppy or foolish, when the very next day he might be presented with greater evidence of Biden’s treason toward his own nation.  Breaking, or failing purposefully to enforce U. S. laws, which enables the entry of enemies to our nation, is exactly what President Biden has been doing since taking office… and it’s treasonous.  That treason has come in many flavors, primarily these two: entry of those seeking to execute criminal activities including terrorist acts, and entry of those transporting deadly narcotics with intent to distribute.  That fentanyl kills 10’s of thousands of Americans – mostly young men, but certainly not exclusively – one would think might wake up Americans to the crime of making its importation easier!

The importation of people is also a crime.  Mexican cartels, who control drugs across Mexico and across the U. S., have found a new billion-dollar industry in the trafficking of people into the U. S., especially, by a factor of 10, since the Biden administration took office.  For all of the cooperative police work – DEA work – between Mexico and the past 5 administrations, the flow of drugs, now including abundant fentanyl, has not slowed.  Where there once were 5 or 6 cartels there may be 15 operating in every Mexican state and every U. S. state, as well.  They’ve become more violent in Mexico, causing record levels of homicides, destroyed families and widespread official corruption.  At the same time, with the cooperation of Chinese chemical suppliers, they are partners in at least 100,000 deaths in the U. S. from fentanyl overdoses.

President Biden commits treason against his own country in other ways, often by providing “aid and comfort” to our enemies.  It’s subtle, but definite… well, subtle except for scuttling Afghanistan.  According to sworn congressional testimony, Biden demanded immediate withdrawal despite the advice of military advisors, including the abandonment of Baghram Airbase and more than $7 BILLION in weapons, ammunition, aircraft, including some high-tech personal and tactical hardware.  The Taliban, of course, has never been an ally of ours or friendly toward America or Americans in any way.  They’re enemies, Joe, you dope.  And we armed them to the teeth, abandoned real allies to danger and death at the hands of the Taliban.  We could have retained Baghram and much of our equipment, and we logically should have regardless of costs.  So, militarily, why did we do things the way we did?  What on Earth was the headlong, damned stupid rush?

It seems Prudent to realize that we abandoned all of our work because China wanted us to.  China didn’t want us to maintain a base so close to their border.  China is happy to see us shoot ourselves in the foot – it saves them the trouble.  They have invested many millions into the Biden family; our retreat was a return on investment by a factor of a thousand percent.  When we look at all the players and pressures involved in 20 years of U.S. actions in Afghanistan, only the U.S. acted like an idiot, against its own interests.  Treason, thy name is Biden.

When China is invited to “help” the United States eliminate drug abuse, and elections are “temporarily” suspended to get a handle on “crime,” it will be too late to rid ourselves of the gaggle of assholes from the Obama and Biden regimes.

So many words and only 3 more issues discussed.  Prudence says stop here, wait for the next.

The Guardian Program

1-minuteman-grangerIt is time that we institute a national program I call “Guardian.” The Guardian program will be populated by men and women who are trained to take emergency defensive steps in all sorts of venues, and who are willing to carry and employ firearms as part of those steps. Each would be carefully investigated by the U. S. Marshall service, and trained, at partly their own expense, at certified gun safety ranges and, later, at police academies in each state. The idea is that these thousands of individuals would have a form of interdiction powers, such that one might stop an incipient crime or shooting by presenting his or her weapon and a trained stance, in situations where an idiot wielding a firearm would have expected no resistance whatsoever.
Copious history supports the likelihood that a fool with a gun will usually abandon his plans and submit or attempt to flee when faced with a defender with a gun. At the worst, like the examples of Adam Lanza at Newtown, or James Holmes at Aurora, Colorado, or even the two dopes at Columbine High School, a single armed and trained individual would have stopped the carnage before or immediately upon its beginning in all three of those circumstances.
Guardians would also be equipped with “911” buttons, so to speak, that would be required equipment anytime they are carrying a firearm. One push of the button would open a 911 channel unique to that purpose, such that the wearer could explain what was happening as it unfolded. Police could respond at their fastest, knowing it was a potential shooting incident, probably active.
Guardians would be insured under a federal policy, and held harmless from prosecution unless true negligence were established. It will be at some risk that a gun owner might submit to the rigors of Guardianship, but, aside from announcing the existence of the program and the numbers of Guardians in the country, neither their identity nor their locations – even generally – would be published.
Obviously they would be witnesses, but perhaps better-quality witnesses – part of their training. Masking their identities at trial is not an insurmountable problem.
Many of the objections raised to the free exercise of 2nd Amendment rights eventually come around to “that’s not the kind of country we are,” or, “we aren’t that kind of people.” Such statements are correct, in the worst way. America is increasingly occupied by who must be seen as “non-Americans.”
That is, there are, ANNUALLY, many thousands of illegal and legal entrants added to our population, who have no desire or intent to “become” Americans. In other words, they are not interested in our culture, morals or heritage of individual responsibility. Many of these entrants and immigrants, come to the U. S. for no more than personal gain. They may work, but this means “under the table” for a large number. They may be granted refugee status and this provides various forms of welfare support without waiting, and it is as likely as not that what is claimed to earn “refugee” status is a lie. They may have a distant relative already here, making it easy to “win” welfare status.
They may simply be criminals, drug merchants or otherwise, ready to take full advantage of liberalism’s open arms. Despite their receipt of welfare and education, these criminal types remain members of criminal gangs who ply death amongst us.
The rise of indigenous gangs is another source of extreme criminality that soft hearts and softer heads attempt to explain, rationalize and justify as a fault not of the criminals involved, but of society -American society – itself.
None of these sources of sociopathy can be traced to the mere availability of guns, nor to the legal ownership of guns, regardless of number. What these sources have done, similarly to the influx of Italian gangs in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, is to introduce a new element of danger and criminality to American society, with two significant differences.
One is the scale and reach of modern criminality – largely connected to drugs – which reaches down to virtually every street, unlike “organized crime” that may have profited from many streets, but which limited its murderous effects to rivals in its own universe. The other is that, today, murder is a way of doing business, even crappy, penny-ante neighborhood-dominance business. Kids are being shot before they can overdose.
The conditions for widespread death-dealing are a direct result of federal policiy failures. Yet many are afraid to recognize – or are blind to – that fact. As suburban kids, from “good” towns and families run a race to eternity with heroin, fentanyl and pain-killers, not always beating the cops with the Narcan, at least not the first time, more and more parents, police, teachers and counselors are asking why things have sunk to this.
Having porous borders for not just the past 8 years, but for the past 30, has promoted the hard drug trade like nothing else. Instead of delivering drugs to retailers, loose immigration has enabled larger-scale wholesalers to establish themselves in every metropolitan area and in many mid-size cities. Drugs, now, are delivered in tons rather than pounds. Shipments of cash in return are measured the same way.
A federal administration that prevents arrest and deportation of illegals only compounds failures of policy marking the last 30 or more years. Compounding that, the policy of releasing convicted criminals, mostly drug dealers – re-defined as “non-violent” offenders – has made a mockery of federal law in general, and a mockery of the oath by every member of our armed forces, to “…support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic…”
Finally, we have entered a period of social confusion that seems more concerned with the misfortune of criminals than with that of their victims. A new faith in “rehabilitation” has infected our judicial network and we are less safe. Some can be rehabilitated, and God bless them. The other 80% of violent offenders – and I include drug dealers – will not be. Yet we feel compelled to parole them, somehow, to test arcane psychological theories. No one involved is held accountable when a parolee murders an innocent, and we are less safe.
Combined with the influx of new criminals from outside our borders, we have created our own, unfolding tragedy. Gun ownership is a perfectly logical reaction; self-defense an inherent right, the Guardian program a wise extension of those rights. I strongly encourage its adoption.