Monthly Archives: March 2018

Education, Guns, Right?

Poisoning America’s wells

15 Comments

Students are on the march.  They have taken aim, so to speak, with a blunt political weapon, egged on by liberal, which is to say, leftist educators and a leftist press.  Interestingly, these kids’ targets are placed before them specifically for them to “shoot” (their protests) at: the National Rifle Association, conservatives, Republicans, right-leaning news outlets, writers and columnists, anyone who defends the Constitution and, of course, Donald Trump.  Left out of the group of targets are incompetent law-enforcement officers, organizations and bureaucrats who prefer to not enforce laws that already restrict guns and owners.  Left out are liberal policies of “mainstreaming” the mentally ill and the lawyers and psychiatrists who will bring Hell-fire upon anyone who presumes to restrict any psychopath who has demonstrated the will to kill or injure and who has stated a desire to do so, even when the intended target so referenced is a school.

And so they march.  Their weapons are their youth (so excessively revered in modern society), crafty signs and posters, memorable slogans and non-stop publicity through like-minded broadcasters and publishers.  What do these school-age pawns believe will be accomplished?

Well, they want “more gun control laws.”  After all, if (name the psychopath) could not have obtained his (99% ‘his’) “assault rifle,” those dead students would not be dead today.  It’s as plain as the noses on our faces.  There is a raw, unattainable truth to their simple demand.  Unfortunately, that truth cannot be realized without rewriting the Constitution (of which most people under, say, 40, know very little), and the institution of police tactics intended to confiscate virtually every gun held by legal and, one would then hope, illegal  gun-possessors in the country.  There would then need to be imposed truly draconian restrictions upon every port of entry and airport to prevent the entry of firearms into the country.  Maybe we could start with the illegal gun possessors without shredding the Constitution.

Ain’t gonna happen.

For those on the leftist spectrum, the dis-arming of the civilian population is an essential step toward creation of a more perfect nation.  For Mussolini, Hitler, Lenin and Stalin, and every current far-leftist, disarmament appears vital to their ability to maintain control of the lesser civilians who are harnessed to support their governments.  Now, being harnessed to support a domineering government is something Americans understand more than our founding fathers ever could have feared, but no dictator has ever encouraged private gun ownership.  This might be instructive, were we possessed of eyes to see, ears to hear and sufficient historical knowledge to appreciate.

Our agitated students have not been so blessed, and happily accept some hours out of school and bright publicity on weekends as they perform the blathering their leftist mentors could never do.

Let’s suppose, children, that AR-15’s and other scary-looking rifles were banned tomorrow and quickly confiscated by the New American Gestapo.  How much “safer” would you be, in your gun-free zones?  Suppose some pathological idiot wanted to solve some twisted problem he feels the victim of, by shooting some kids at his school.  He would be reduced to bringing 2 or 3 semi-automatic handguns and some extra clips – relatively easy to hide – and secreting them in strategic places where he could get to them on the fateful day.

The dark day comes, on his sick calendar, and he grabs a handgun and starts shooting.  Does the fact that he’s not employing a rifle make a damned bit of difference?  Wouldn’t you be praying for someone to shoot him?  Would you be comforted by the confiscation of millions of citizens’ lawful firearms, some of whom would have resisted, being killed or criminalized and incarcerated on your behalf?  After a few minutes of open season on students will you feel better when the police finally kill or arrest the wielder of a handgun rather than the wielder of a scary-looking “assault” rifle?

If the rifles were painted red and the handguns painted blue, would the absence of red guns make the recipients of blue guns’ bullets less dead?

To you the obvious response is to ban those kinds of guns, too. You are being raised as fools.  Your excited demonstrations make clear your incomprehension of the exceptional origins of this nation and of the freedoms you enjoy.  I hope you become more broadly educated after the public schools are done with you.

Trump

Jerry Wescott’s thoughtful thoughts on Trump

1 Comment

[RESPONDING TO “(WORD)HOLE REDUX” from Jacksonville, Florida]

Shortly after news of his foul comments surfaced, Trump tweeted, “It is my duty to protect the lives and safety of all Americans. We must build a Great Wall, think Merit and end Lottery & Chain. USA!” Now, I have no problem with a president finding it his duty to protect us – of course it’s his duty, he’s the top cop, and the enforcement of the law is a tough job, one that requires a firm hand. I do not agree with the idea of a physical wall though. I realize that Israel has a wall, but so did East Germany and China. Those walls have been destroyed or compromised, and they cannot function to keep people from crossing. They represent old technology and in this world, they cannot be as effective as an electronic one. Trump is good at building walls, both physical and financial ones, but his walls are only as good as the technology that monitors them. Better mice defeat once-better mousetraps though, and as technology improves, the physical obstruction of a wall across our southern border becomes less and less useful until it becomes useless altogether as all the prepositions are applied to make it so. Drugs and illegal aliens will still come into the country, but by other means.

“Think Merit,” he says. If “merit” is a term only applied to foreigners, then I agree. They should be properly examined, and they should be willing to become good, productive, law-abiding citizens of our country, and they should do so in the right way, with all the documentation in order, and all the pertinent research on their personal history complete. But what if we turn the merit-seeking microscope around and examine Donald Trump. The rest of America and the world know his (every) thoughts – even the crude and thoughtless thoughts.  He puts (them) all out there on Twitter without shame. Every so often, I see the worth of what he says, but I rarely see the value in the way he says it. One of my favorite quotes from the Proverbs of Solomon is, “A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver.” If Trump acknowledged this concept, I might call him a statesman. If he honored the Creator’s determination of nations, or God’s love for each human being, I would consider him worthy of leading our meritocratic government. I see little merit in him, and his willingness to use profanity to describe global political and social situations in which the rest of mankind exists, repulses me. His careless and childish practice of name-calling not only dishonors the despised places and their leaders, and humiliates the millions of unfortunate people living in them, but the mud slung splashes back on Donald, his office, and his own people!

Okay – I believe I know what I’ve led you to think. You have me down as a bleeding heart who wants everyone to trample our borders. No, I don’t. It is not lost on me that God has created our nation as well as those which have been spat upon by the bully who has become president. He claims that we must “end Lottery & Chain.” I understand the problem. I don’t think we should simply end it, just modify it in a sensible and responsible fashion. We should have handled the repeal of Obamacare more intelligently as well. Sometimes it seems like he needs to smash things just so he can erect a new tower in the history books with his name on it. Never mind that – I know I can be too down on Trump sometimes. The point is, he needs to be more thoughtful about what he says. He needs to be way more careful about how he says it. A thug threatening you with a knife will not get the respect he craves, only fear. Respect has to be earned, and, as I see it, all he has earned is money. The fear he has generated, and the foolishness with which he presents himself, and us by proxy, has turned a global community with problems into a pending disaster. Believe it or not, I can cope with that because I expect that all of this is setting the stage for the end of the age. I’m gonna’ get un-engaged from this outrage.

Sorry – didn’t mean to rap. I don’t even like rap. I consider it to be rather … end-times stuff. It’s a destructive force that tends to tear society into subcultures and fragment any remaining sense of community that we might still have as a nation. Yes, I believe in a rapture of the saints and a seven-year tribulation period when the Antichrist arises to global power and wherein the nations of the world are judged. So the Donald is age-appropriate, after all.

Culture

Weathering the Worst

1 Comment

So it’s snowing today – might get two feet.  The wind is blowing from the northeast and everyone is upset that it’s less than a week since the last windy snowstorm.  Even worse, lots of us lost power last week, and that is the worst affront possible to our connected, screen-addled selves.  I mean, no TV?  What the heck?  No INTERNET?  What the    _ _ck??  Worse than all of that… if that’s possible, this terrible weather is all – our – fault!

We live in a remarkable political environment.  We’re in deep debt, welfare costs are too high, drugs are killing more people than ever, President Trump just fired Rex Tillerson and the White House seems to be in chaos, illegal entrants are being released after committing crimes so the “Feds” can’t deport them and a college education costs more than $50,000 a year, if you can believe that.  Besides, North Korea and Iran have nuclear weapons and missiles and China is building sand islands with military airstrips.  Let’s not even mention Venezuela and the Dakota Access Pipeline.  What are we supposed to do?

None of that stuff is worth a hole in the snow… well, except the snow, which is all – our – fault!  Wait until this summer, when there may be some hot days, 94 degrees, even.  Those will all be our fault, too.  This winter is the first time in the history of history that there has been more snow than municipal budgets allowed for… except for the past 40 years’ budgets or so.  Actually it’s not the first winter there has been 3 snowstorms in one month, either, but when I was a kid and everyone thought the world was cooling a little, they weren’t my… our… fault, although I had to shovel the stuff.

There isn’t a single problem, of terrorism, opiates, debt, taxes, wars, trade, education, politics, Constitutionalism or school shootings, that is as serious or as threatening as global warming.  If you had paid attention you’d have learned that all of the problems, unhappiness, dysfunction, trans-genderism, murder and genital herpes is CAUSED by global warming!  Where have you been?  Wait!  What’s that?  OMG!

Global warming is so ummmnh… so, ahhh… so 2010; I knew that.  All of those problems are caused by Climate Change… not global warming.  Meh! What’s the matter with me?  But, it’s still our fault and something we should be proud to recognize and proud to alter our lives over and pay taxes to put a STOP to.  It’s the best damned invention of the early 21st Century, for Heaven’s sake.  For the first time since the discovery of salt it’s possible to control the lives of EVERYONE on Earth, while we all sacrifice with a smile.  It’s better than religion ever was and church services are every minute of every day.

There are even sacraments.  Ten years ago a Prius was sufficient, but now it’s vegetarianism, and not just any vegetables, either.  If they’ve been touched by Monsanto or harvested by Con-Agra or Cargill or distributed by Nestle’, don’t eat them!  No siree.  You want only foods grown by real people who don’t make a lot of money or vote Republican, and who use good fresh shit to make them flourish.  If you eat meat you are taking food from the mouths of baby polar bears… or baby wolves, you ungrateful civilizer, you.  And all you people who earn a living raising animals and speaking harshly to them can just switch to carving souvenirs from windfall wood – memorials to places people once lived.

And if you can’t plug your car in and drive with no emissions, don’t come crying to us at the World Preservation at Every Cost Foundation.  We won’t have any hatred left for you: it’s all applied to the damned power plant operators who are making Climate Change worse for polar bears.  The next rally is being crowd-sourced on our freshly-charged dumb-phones, made in candle-lit factories.  You’re on your own for hatred, pal.

Man… oops, sorry, I mean two-foot.  Two-foot, I wish I believed it all – hate would be so much simpler, less distinctive.  I do believe in global climate change, though, since science shows us that it’s been going on since before history and even earlier than that.  In a way it’s somewhat reassuring that the forces that have shaped the earth are still with us.

The climate we really liked for Earth is a mix of good and bad times blended into that perfect day in, um, some state or country that has no bad storms or droughts, some time before Ronald Reagan became president.  We want to keep Earth right like that, that day… probably a 24th or 25th of April, and if it takes not driving to work or Disney World to achieve it, it’s a small price to pay.

And don’t worry about having nothing to do.  Get a pot prescription.  Text me.  We’ll do hunch.

Education, Family, Guns, Right?

Eau to be gun free

Leave a comment

“School Shootings” are among those events that tear people apart and, roughly, along the widening “liberal-conservative” divide.  Certainly adults in both frames of belief have children, send them to school, love them dearly and do what they possibly can to keep them “safe.”  How is it that they can’t agree on how to do so?  Again, both types of parents love their kids.

The same divide produces separation on “rights” of a thousand kinds, on the role of governments in individuals’ lives, on the role of education, itself – particularly so-called “public” education, and even on the role of parents, themselves!  Into these widely divergent sets of opinions let’s inject the subject of guns and of the Second Amendment.  After all, many fear that the greatest threat to children’s well-being is of being shot inside their gun-free schools.  A wide divergence, indeed.

Along with other divisions between the two generic groups there seems to be one along military lines.  There are a thousand nuances, but in general conservatives are more in favor of military training, discipline, duty, honor and bravery, than are liberals.  Liberals are more in favor of government in its own right, more inclined to favor extremely personal “rights” to be codified, protected and even enforced by government, and to that degree, liberals also favor police in their roles of enforcing “civil rights,” a somewhat malleable term.

Conservatives also honor police but rather more for their quasi-military structure, honor and daily bravery.  At the same time conservatives see police as potentially threatening to constitutional rights, even twistable by “government” to control populations rather than to protect them.  Many questions arose as part of the Valentine’s Day school shooting in Parkland, Florida: questions of policing, of guns, of safety, of parenting, of news… and of government.

Quite distinctly, liberals believe that one or another form of “gun control” will make school shootings and other crimes where guns are employed, impossible.  This is not unlike liberal beliefs about governmental programs like public housing projects, in which residents of such projects will become more responsible toward themselves and others by virtue of having a decent place to live.  The same could be said of liberal attitudes toward most welfare programs.  In a generic sense, liberals believe that government in its great wisdom and goodness will make better citizens – better humans – than develop naturally or, incredibly in their view, by the hand of God.

Conservatives tend, generally, to see guns as protective devices in at least as great a degree as they might be offensive.  Almost automatically conservatives respect and honor the Second Amendment and the civil right of gun bearing.  Where liberals think that guns are the problem, conservatives think that criminals are the problem; where liberals fear guns, increasingly as they appear “scary;” conservatives respect their power and uses.  Where liberals are frightened of and purposefully ignorant of guns, conservatives see mechanisms that may be learned, understood and mastered with a set of skills.  The demands for “solutions” to school shootings following the Parkland “snafu,” exist in two separate universes.

Liberals want government to modify humans by legislating limits on their rights and actions: ban certain guns (scary ones), raise age limits for gun ownership and more.  Conservatives want a form of the “Guardian” program1 where sovereign individuals accept the training, risk and responsibility to protect themselves and others by arming themselves – including in school environments – and being willing to confront bad people using guns, and other weapons, offensively.

Liberals, including most teachers these days, fear guns, themselves.  They see the gun as inseparable from the person wielding it.  That is, the gun: metal, machining, grip, trigger, sights, barrel, caliber and bullets it holds – is as evil as the criminal prepared to use it against innocents.  No way can a liberal accept having that evil object anywhere near a school.  “Guns in classrooms?  That only puts us and our students in greater danger!”

Conservatives tend to be quieter about guns.  They don’t fear them but they do feel that it’s necessary to learn about them, get trained to use them1, get trained to deal with active threats, and, in general, they feel that concealed carry by a trained individual is a wise, sensible response to armed threats.  In other words, they believe in deterrence rather than response.

Response is a problem in every shooting incident.  Effectively, the only good response to an armed, crazed potential murderer is an armed challenger who is prepared to fire in the moment.  Schools could be turned into vaults with armored doors, metal detectors, and even Kevlar backpacks, but waiting for the potential murderer to arrive to a gun-free zone like a school and responding by hiding, simply means that it might be a tad more difficult for the killer to kill, but not at all impossible.  A couple of minutes are all it takes, whether firing an AR-15 or a 9 MM pistol, to kill a dozen or two defenseless kids and nearly helpless teachers.  In 3 to 5 minutes armed police could be on site, but those minutes are all that are needed to complete a tragedy as we too recently witnessed.

If first responders then fail to act in the most defensive, responsive way possible, then the number of dead will be greater.  There is no alternative… in the moment.

In order for gun bans to make a difference in actual school safety, there will have to be an enforced confiscation.  With millions of guns in private hands this presents the likelihood of resistance to such an action.  Will police then shoot at citizens who have never committed a crime with a gun except to own it?  Can such an ex-post-facto offense legally be imposed?  Can the right to bear arms be subsumed by popular emotion and civic policing?  It would seem that both eventualities are impossible.  But the demand for them fits the essential liberal opinion of guns, gun-owners and the Second Amendment.  All three are equal, and evil.

Liberals hate guns and, given their automatic equivocation of guns and owners, they often sound as though they hate their owners, too.  This fits with liberals’ disrespect of any who fear government more than guns.  Most of the “statistics” that gun haters cite are untrue, as are most crime statistics, themselves. Gun advocates are just as ready with inflated statistics of their own.  We have reached a point in the national debate over guns and rights and of wrongs and rights, when gun haters owe it to themselves and to the nation… and to schools and children, to grasp some realities about private gun ownership and their positive impacts on crime and social order.

The vast, vast majority of gun owners are not criminals.  There are more than 70 Million gun owners and more than 210 Million guns.  Among the 210 Million about 6 Million people own half of them.  Many gun owners have one, two or three, a rifle and a couple of sidearms.  A large subset of gun owners are active hunters and they may own 5 to 10 weapons: a shotgun or two, three to five rifles and two or three handguns.  Millions of guns are old, collectible, rarely even handled, much less used for anything.  A significant number are antiques.

But Americans own a lot of guns… gun ownership is part of America, part of our founding and heritage, written into our constitution and a legal, civilian right, like other civil rights, in fact.  Part of the chasm between beliefs is an urge and effort to, in effect, “un-do” America.  Our Judeo-Christian fundament and all the laws and traditions that flow from it, are, today, offensive to this group.  The definition of words and terms that describe the ideas and nature of “America,” are being changed daily.  There is a large and apparently growing segment of the United States that desires to “fundamentally change” America.  Those are they for whom “sovereign citizenry” is an affront, believing that a benevolent, socialist government is the only locus of trust in our society, never a sovereign individual.

Guns and self-defense are part of U. S. citizenship.  The more stupidly we deal, socially, with this fact the more times defenseless people will be victimized.  If we follow the concept of banning certain guns, now, upwards of 200 “types” of firearms, the net improvement to the safety of defenseless groups, most specifically and almost most defenseless, schoolchildren, will be approximately zero.  In a weird way the next school shooting is almost looked-forward-to by some rabid segments of leftists, for it will help ratchet up the demand for greater restrictions on the ability to own as well as buy or, likely, even manufacture certain types of guns.  The intended eventuality is a gun-free America.

That is to say, a non-American America, their ultimate goal.

Extreme defenders of the Second Amendment exclaim numerous statistics that are just as extremely “debunked” by anti-gunners.  Reviewing numerous studies over the past two decades one can learn that there are many, many thousands of instances of crime prevention thanks to civilian, legal gun possession.  There are probably not a million a year or two million – that is unknowable since most events are not newsworthy or even part of police reports.  But, there are thousands.  Even the Clinton administration, in studies2 opposing guns, found upwards of “1.5 million” yearly armed self-defense incidents.  Even “simple” female self-defenses against sexual assaults number over 100,000 events per year.

Let’s consider that there are, say, 400 thousand such events of various kinds.  That’s in the order of 1,100 events per day –a significant quantity.  A certain fraction of those would have resulted in physical assaults and murders… perhaps what, 1 in 20?  5% of crimes?  Are those lives not also of value?  Is it the position of anti-gun advocates that people have an obligation to remain defenseless, accepting rapes, beatings or worse while police are either on their way or, more likely, totally unaware of the event?

Is not self-defense of oneself and family the most fundamental of civil rights?  Can that be truly equated with the utter failure of law-enforcement in the matter of the Parkland massacre?  Or of the Fort Hood shooting?  Or even of Columbine where the weirdness of perpetrators was well-known in advance?

Anti-gun advocates need to recognize that there could barely be a civil society in the U. S. WITHOUT private gun ownership, guaranteed by the Second Amendment.

1http://www.prudenceleadbetter.com/2016/05/30/the-guardian-program/  1http://www.prudenceleadbetter.com/2016/03/26/shooting-back/

2 Gun Control Fact-Sheet 2004 / From Gun Owners Foundation, 8001 Forbes Place, Suite 102 Springfield, VA 22151