IN THE AFTERMATH of the Texas church shooting last week, Democratic lawmakers did what they always do: They skewered their Republican colleagues for offering only “thoughts and prayers,” and demanded swift action on gun control.
“The time is now,” said Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, “for Congress to shed its cowardly cover and do something.”
Trouble is, it’s not clear the “something” Democrats typically demand would make a real dent in the nation’s epidemic of gun violence. Congress can ban assault weapons, but they account for just a tiny sliver of the country’s 33,000 annual firearm deaths. And tighter background checks will do nothing to cut down on the 310 million guns already in circulation.
In other words, the proposals aren’t just difficult to enact in the current political climate; their practical effects would also be quite limited. On occasion, though, leading Democrats will make oblique reference to a more sweeping policy change: seizing a huge number of weapons from law-abiding citizens. The second step in the one-two dance of confiscation.
At a New Hampshire forum in the fall of 2015, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton spoke approvingly of an Australian gun buyback program that collected more than 650,000 weapons — a buyback that, she neglected to mention, was compulsory. "Buyback" is a false term. It suggests that private property paid out of private pockets somehow belong to the government in exchange for printed money. It is also false because, paid or not, it was confiscation. Inasmuch as the constitution mandates the government sufficiently compensate individuals when taking their property, it first says shall not be be infringed.
And just a few months earlier, then-President Barack Obama offered coded support for the same confiscatory approach. “When Australia had a mass killing — I think it was in Tasmania — about 25 years ago, it was just so shocking, the entire country said, ‘Well, we’re going to completely change our gun laws,’ and they did,” he said. Bully for them.
Democrats have even let the word “confiscation” slip out, on occasion. After the shooting rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. in 2012, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said in a radio interview that when it came to assault weapons “confiscation could be an option, mandatory sale to the state could be an option.” New York has mandated AR registrations, to which New Yorkers responded enthusiastically with one out of 20 actually registering their ARs. The law is being open flouted, as it should be, with 95 percent of gun owners refusing to play the left's game of registration, the first step in the one-dance dance of confiscation. The law is a spectacular failure.
It was an option Cuomo didn’t pursue. But five years after that slaughter of schoolchildren — and with fresh tales of murdered kids on the floor of a Texas church — might gun-control advocates expand their agenda? Please, be my guest, expand your agenda to include theft of property no rightly belonging to the state. It fits your criminal views of the relationship of the government to the individual.
The logic of gun control lies, at bottom, in substantially reducing the number of deadly weapons on the street — and confiscation is far and away the most effective approach. Is there any conceivable turn of events in our politics that could make confiscation happen? And what would a mass seizure look like? I suspect that popcorn futures would go through the roof. This criminal advocate should know that some of us are prepared to defend our rights through every means at hand, including active and passive resistance.
ON APRIL 28, 1996 a deranged man named Martin Bryant used a semi-automatic rifle to slaughter 12 people in 15 seconds at the Broad Arrow cafe in Port Arthur, Tasmania, a popular tourist spot on the site of a former Australian prison colony.
He killed eight more in the gift shop, and several others in the parking lot. And as he drove away, he came across Nanette Mikac and her two daughters fleeing the scene.
Bryant told Mikac to get on her knees and as she wailed, “Please don’t hurt my babies,” he blew a hole through her forehead and fired several shots into her 3-year-old, Madeline. Alannah, 6, ran into the woods and Bryant gave chase. When he found her curled up behind a tree, he put his gun to her neck and fired.
Bryant, who killed 35 people that Sunday afternoon, shocked Australia into action. A terrible act by a hostile individual, to be sure.
It took just 12 days for conservative Prime Minister John Howard to announce a full slate of gun restrictions in a nation with a long tradition of frontier firearms. There was a ban on automatic and semi-automatic weapons and shotguns, an extensive registration system, and a 28-day waiting period between getting a permit and buying a gun. Not noted is the fact that only about 20 percent of firearms were actually turned in. Despite stampeding their legislators into an act of government overreach, Australians flipped off the law and the people who conceived of it.
But the centerpiece was the mandatory buyback, with a temporary tax financing the multimillion dollar purchase of hundreds of thousands of weapons deemed illegal under the new law. A national government using its sovereign power to print money to aid in their criminal act of theft of private property.
Some feared resistance. Howard, at one point, wore a bulletproof vest during a speech to a group of gun rights supporters. But the buyback went forward peacefully, and it claimed an estimated one-fifth of Australia’s gun stock — one of the largest gun confiscations in modern history. SMFD
The seizure and the other gun control measures seem to have had a significant effect. Since passage of the law, the country hasn’t seen a single mass shooting — defined as a killing of five or more people, not including the gunman. So, despite the twisting of phrases there have been mass shootings since.
A study by researchers at Australian National University and Wilfrid Laurier University found a 59 percent drop in the firearm homicide rate and a 65 percent decline in the firearm suicide rate in the decade after the law was introduced. And while critics have noted the firearm death rate was already declining before passage of the legislation, the data show it dropped twice as fast afterward. Statistics
Here in the United States, interest in large-scale gun buybacks — both voluntary and involuntary — has mounted with each mass shooting. Matt Miller, a journalist and onetime senior fellow with the left-leaning Center for American Progress, has proposed what he calls a “massive, debt-financed” buyback.
The idea is to supersize the small-scale, voluntary buybacks that happen in American cities — offering hundreds of dollars more per weapon in a bid to make them more effective. “Instead of $200 a gun, Uncle Sam might offer $500,” Miller wrote, in an opinion piece in the Washington Post after Sandy Hook. “After all, overpaying powerful constituencies to achieve public policy goals is a time-honored American tradition; we do it every day with Medicare drug benefits and defense contractors, to name just two.” Welfare, public broadcasting and the arts to name two more.
John Rosenthal, co-founder and chairman of Massachusetts-based Stop Handgun Violence, says it may be time to embrace a mandatory buyback — the relentless tide of mass shootings leaving weary activists with little choice.
“I am so struggling right now to find the strength to keep going,” he said earlier this week, a day after the Texas church shooting. “And guess what, I have been thinking a lot about Australia. They had that one horrific event, with 35 killed, with an assault weapon. They banned them, they bought them back — and there hasn’t been a mass shooting since.” John, you should seek counseling. It sounds like you need it badly.
It’s a model the Aussies themselves have been touting to any Americans who will listen — suggesting it could succeed in the United States with a little political courage, especially on the right. No need t worry about the right going along. They have been playing the outraged conservative role so much, you'd think they'd get an Oscar for their performance. No need to worry about the right. You'll get, at the very least, a number of golden throats and writers on the right going right along with such a scheme.
In Australia “many farmers resented being told to surrender weapons they had used safely all of their lives,” wrote Howard, the former prime minister, in The New York Times a few years ago. “Penalizing decent, law-abiding citizens because of the criminal behavior of others seemed unfair. Many of them had been lifelong supporters of my coalition and felt bewildered and betrayed by these new laws. I understood their misgivings. Yet I felt there was no alternative.” You'll notice he let his feelings get in the way of doing the right thing.
THE TROUBLE WITH all of this is that America is not Australia. First thing the writer has gotten right so far.
As Howard himself has noted, Australia is a more intensely urban society than the United States, meaning there is a larger natural constituency for gun control Down Under — and a smaller rural opposition.
The Australian gun lobby, moreover, is not as powerful or well-financed as the National Rifle Association. And the Aussies don’t have a constitutionally protected right to bear arms. Wow, second thing the writer has gotten right. He's on a roll.
While the Second Amendment isn’t absolute — no less than conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia ruled that it’s “not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose”— it would undoubtedly serve as the basis for a robust legal challenge to any involuntary buyback program. And the courts would not be the only site of resistance. Courts as a site of resistance. Please. They have been driving on the wrong side of the road on guns since my own recent memory. They'll be like the right. Theft and murder? No problem! We'll sign off on it.
Gun culture runs especially deep in a country born of violent rebellion. And over the last couple of decades, firearms have become one of the most important fault lines in American culture. It is hard to overstate the devotion — or if you prefer, the fanaticism — of the 3 percent of the population that owns half the guns in circulation. Circulation. And not all guns, either, assuming the statistics are correct, which I will not concede.
Many of those hard-core gun owners see their weapons as a guard against government overreach. And sending government agents to claim them could end very, very badly. An NRA article on the specter of Australian-style confiscation coming to the United States is subtitled “There Will Be Blood.” It's called cost and it will be borne by both sides.
Part of the problem is the sheer scale of the enterprise. An operation on par with the Australian buyback — claiming one-fifth of American guns — would mean tens of thousands of police officers collecting some 60 million guns. It is, on some level, simply unimaginable.
But perhaps gun-control advocates can propose something smaller — something more targeted. Targeted. Good one.
Before Elliot Rodger killed six and wounded 14 in a shooting spree in Santa Barbara, Calif. in 2014, his mother and a social worker raised concerns with the police. But because Rodger had broken no law, there was nothing law enforcement could do.
After the rampage, California lawmakers passed a measure allowing family members to seek court orders seizing guns from disturbed people before they can hurt anybody. Similar laws are in place in Washington, Indiana, and Connecticut. And legislators in 18 other states, including Massachusetts, considered so-called “extreme risk protective order” legislation this year, according to the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.
Laura Cutilletta, legal director for the Giffords Law Center, says Devin Kelley, the Texas church killer, would have been a “perfect candidate” for an order of this kind. “People knew that there was something going on with him,” she says. “He was sending threatening messages to his mother-in-law. . . . He had [committed] domestic violence and animal abuse.” What is not mentioned is that the order can be ex parte. Who remembers the heady days after the Lautenberg Amendment, when protective orders were given out on mere accusation with little basic for fact, and when sanctions were applied to incidents that happened decades ago. It hit another common law principle. Ex post facto. Gone by merely signing a law into effect. In the new order, the individual subjected to the order will have no recourse and no day in court. A woman can just go to the courts, lie like a rug, and boom, instant revenge, all sponsored by the state. It is "perfect" because it hits all the right buttons the left wants to hit. Destruction of the family, destruction of the individual's rights, and gun confiscation. And the best part, 20 years on, the right cheerily supports the latest madness.
Cutilletta says restraining orders and other measures designed to deprive the most dangerous people of guns — like background checks and tighter restrictions on domestic abusers — are more politically viable, and legally defensible, than gun confiscation. And they can have an impact, she says: States with tougher gun laws have fewer firearm-related deaths. Not the way I heard it. But I guess the writer got the quote he wanted. Well done.
Still, even if we find a way to keep guns out of the hands of people who have engaged in disturbing or violent behavior — no small task, given all the stories of the troubled shooters who slipped through the cracks — it will only get us so far.
The United States’ astronomically high rates of firearm violence aren’t rooted in some unique American propensity for derangement and delinquency. Studies show our levels of mental illness and basic criminality are on par with other wealthy countries. Whatever happened to pure evil? You can't tell who is crazy, but you can tell who is evil. And the best way to prepare for evil, either from an individual or from a government high on printed money.
Other common explanations, like the social fissures created by our racial diversity, have been debunked by researchers, too. The only explanation left — an explanation borne out by a number of careful studies — is the sheer size of the American arsenal. There are 310 million handguns, shotguns, and semi-automatic weapons in American homes, garages, and waistbands. Rookie numbers. We can do better.
Ultimately, if gun-control advocates really want to stanch the blood, there’s no way around it: They’ll have to persuade more people of the need to confiscate millions of those firearms, as radical as that idea may now seem.
#1
“The time is now,” said Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, “for Congress to shed its cowardly cover and do something.”
Murphy faces re-election next year and is playing to his base. Sen. Murphy, I'd check and find out what's really behind some of these shootings. Oh, you don't care because its part of the talking points handed to you. Where do your talking points come from? Same question for the press, "Who hands you your talking points?"
#2
How about we offer the libs a permanent buyback arrangement at 75% of market value, with a minimum of X dollars depending on type. This would help remove the Saturday Night specials from circulation and wouldn’t affect honest gun owners.
[Ynet] Analysis: The strongest Arab country today is leading the Sunni battle against an Iranian takeover of the Middle East. Once the ’black monster’ ISIS disappears from the region, the ’yellow monster’ Hezbollah will become the largest and most dangerous Islamic terror organization in the world, receiving orders from Tehran‐and this is something the Saudis are unwilling to accept.
Soddy Arabia ...a kingdom taking up the bulk of the Arabian peninsula. Its primary economic activity involves exporting oil and soaking Islamic rubes on the annual hajj pilgrimage. The country supports a large number of princes in whatcha might call princely splendor. When the oil runs out the rest of the world is going to kick sand in the Soddy national face... is declaring war on Hezbollah, not for its love of Israel as much as for its hatred of Iran. Not a day has passed in the past few months without the Saudi press attacking the Lebanese organization and its leader, Hassan Nasrallah.
Continued on Page 49
#4
I understood ISIS to be a Sunni operation propped up by Saudi Arabia to (a) get the worst zealots out of the magic kingdom (b) fight the Shia takeover of the region.
ISIS is basically gone leaving the Saudi's a bit desperate.
#8
I could be wrong but I think Iran got a free pass first, projected into the region after the US pulled out peacekeepers, and ISIS was the Sunni response.
#9
And once Iraqi "army" run from ISIS, it was reconstituted - with USA support - from Shia militias. The ones owned by Iran. What, you think Obama gave all this money and threatened using USA forces to stop IAF attack on Iran's nuclear assets just on ValJar's say so?
[Breitbart] On Monday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s "Fox News @ Night," Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill (R) said that the Alabama Republican Party can formally pull its support for its Senate nominee Judge Roy Moore, and if this happens and Moore still gets the most votes, the election would be null and void. This coming from an admitted philanderer. Tiny Heflin Alabama could not hold this man, he obviously has Washington aspirations.
Merrill said Moore could withdraw from the race, or the state Republican Party could formally pull its support. He further stated that if that happens and Moore receives the most votes, "our election would be declared null and void, and Governor Ivey would have to call another special election, and we’d start the process all over again."
Merrill commented on the prospect of Governor Ivey delaying the certification of the election results, and said he would be "very surprised," if this happened, seeing as it would be "unprecedented in the history of the state for that to occur after the results of the people were made known. It would be very unusual."
He added that Ivey has already changed the election date already, but that was done before the process had begun.
Merrill concluded that if the current seatholder, Senator Luther Strange (R-AL), resigned before the election, "[T]he governor would certainly have to appoint someone to fill that term that Senator Strange is currently completing. Of course, the way that our code reads is that the individual who is in that role would continue to serve until at such a time that the senator was duly elected and duly sworn in to fulfill the commitment as the junior senator from the state of Alabama. So, in the instance that you just described, Senator Strange would no longer be in the picture. However, that individual who was in that role would continue until this election was completed and certified."
#1
Who are these people, these so-called voters, and what do their wishes matter ? [sarc off]
The 45 year old accusations ...'week old accusations' (corrected per Rob at #4) right or wrong, I am now WELL BEYOND these questions. The rights of the voter and our democracy has eclipsed this tawdry issue, along with it's bringers.
#4
They're not 45-year-old accusations; they're week-old accusations of events 45 years ago. There's no historical support for them.
A very salient point. Correction made. Thanks Rob.
Posted by: Rob Crawford ||
11/14/2017 8:17 Comments ||
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#5
the Alabama Republican Party can formally pull its support for its Senate nominee Judge Roy Moore, and if this happens and Moore still gets the most votes, the election would be null and void.
Wait a minute "Who decides elections? It's the voters--right?"
I don't know much about Moore but it seems like momentum is building from both the uniparty for him being toast.
#9
both Trump and McConnell supported Luther Strange in the primary
I personally like Luther Strange just because of his name - its part DC, part Marvel
Posted by: lord garth ||
11/14/2017 9:52 Comments ||
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#10
I don't think there's any question this is a hit job. Nor do I think there's any question Moore will be ousted one way or another.
I simply hope Moore sues his accuser's. There's a high standard of malicious intent needed for public figures, but this? When the stories fall apart, this will meet those requirements.
Posted by: Charles ||
11/14/2017 13:10 Comments ||
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#11
That signature looks suspect. It's written with two pen inks.
#14
I am sorry, but if the State GOP pulls support for Moore, then he would be running as an Independent, no?
Also, what Alabama law permits nullification of an election if 'the wrong person won it?' What would constitute 'wrong'? What would keep the Democrats from nullifying the election of 'the wrong people'? Please cite statute and section, Mr. Merrill, or be silent.
h/t Instapundit
[AmGreatness] America is in another of its Salem moments. Frenzy is almost a living, breathing monster. It moves from host to host, fueled by rumor, gossip, and self-righteous furor.
The Greeks knew well of the transitory nature of these mass panics. They claimed such fits were inspired by the Maniae, the three daughters of Night who were the goddesses of insanity, madness, and crazed frenzy. We’ve seen all three of them in action throughout the past year.
...For about six months, cable news shows, the internet, and the major newspapers ginned up the charge of "Russian collusion"‐as a means of explaining the otherwise inexplicable and unacceptable defeat of Hillary Clinton by someone without either political or military experience.
...The hysteria then moved on to the once dormant NFL "take a knee" protests, which were reignited by Trump’s public castigation of the players.
Soon the players’ incoherent messaging was passed off by the media as some sort of grassroots Rosa Parks civil rights movement. But as viewers turned their channels and stadia emptied, the hysterical outbursts began to cool.
...About the same time came the statue hysteria. America woke up one day and decided that century-old statues of Confederate generals or archetypical southern soldiers were proof of pernicious racism. So they had to be removed‐by the dead of night and by the mob if necessary. Once these iconic impediments were gone, then social justice would be achieved, as if mute stones, not beating human hearts, explain deteriorating racial relations. IMCO, the competition for principal victim group status is quite fierce - and, lately, "African-Americans" been losing to bearded men with vagina envy
...The next collective furor arose over Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein. Sometime in October 2017, the progressive film titan was abruptly condemned as sick, evil, and unhinged‐after 30 years of common knowledge that he routinely sought to use his power of hiring and firing to leverage or force sexual gratification.
Once Weinstein’s progressive armor was pierced and he was exposed as a groper, assaulter, and likely rapist, then dozens, perhaps hundreds of similar stories of powerful media and film men surfaced. Some were not only pronounced guilty of past consensual though asymmetrical sexual relationships but of abusive sexual acts and cruelty. Apparently, the mostly progressive male entertainment and media hierarchy had long equated the 1960s-era liberal legacy of "sexual freedom" with a blank check for their own sexual coercion and phallic exhibitionism. We all had assumed a continuity of Hollywood culture of updated Harry Cohns, but Hollywood’s preemptive moral finger-pointing at others apparently allowed their hypocrisies to stay in-house.
As the collective furor grew, the net widened. More stories, but from 10, 20, 30, and 40 years past, surfaced‐calibrated to the current celebrity or perceived visibility of the perpetrator. The charges initially also ranged from horrific (and quite believable) allegations of rape and gross groping and assault to what used to be called male-power rudeness and bullying‐and eventually including even the occasional crudity and stupidity that can accompany seduction.
...The Russians always liked to interfere and gum up American elections. It is, after all, the credo of Vladimir Putin to be mostly against what America is mostly for. But as the Obama Administration warned in a dig at Donald Trump (shortly before the election, when it was sure that Hillary Clinton was to be its picked successor), such Russian attempts at election sabotage usually were irrelevant and largely impotent. Instead, what fed the furor was not collusion facts per se, but the idea of yet another post-election weapon to take Trump out before he could dismantle the Obama bureaucratic and executive-order legacy.
Certainly, it is bothersome that the racist and founder of the Ku Klux Klan, the brilliant but diabolical slave-trading Nathan Bedford Forrest, is still worshiped in bronze and stone. But the stone smashers lacked the education and ethics to differentiate individual Confederates like a Forrest from a Longstreet, and so smashed boldly on.
The distance from Lincoln to Lee narrows to almost nothing. Every mute statue becomes a sinner and fair game for the more authentic revolutionary to outdo the latest violent act.
Dozens, perhaps hundreds of women have had their entertainment careers ruined by choosing to fight off the crude assaults of the Weinsteins and their ilk, who sometimes gravitate to the top of entertainment and media, masking their depravity by claiming progressive exemptions and penances. But at this point in the frenzy, most Americans cannot keep up with whether a puffed up and arrogant Dustin Hoffman three decades ago was an uncouth potty mouth in his celebrity trailer as he sought to seduce vulnerable women. Most of the public had long assumed such creepy Hollywood behavior anyway.
What then causes often legitimate writs abruptly to explode into collective fits that end up either ensnaring the innocent or taking legitimate concerns beyond human reason?
...History is full of such frenzies‐the stasis on Corcyra, the Spanish Inquisition, the Committee of Public Safety, or the strange career of Joe McCarthy. They all can start over some legitimate grievance and all can quickly turn manic. And as we play each fit out, expect the madness to come full circle as it always does, when the spell wears off and 51 percent of people finally revolt at the very thought of tearing down Washington’s statue, or lumping together a criminal rapist with a loudmouthed sexist of 20 years past, or envisioning a multimillionaire spoiled, has-been quarterback as the next Jackie Robinson‐or treating a fake-news smear document as if it were the New Testament.
-People who want to kill statues in the middle of the night really want to kill actual people in the middle of the night.
-Women and minorities have gone full primitive pagan and have convinced themselves that if they throw enough white males into the volcano then they will all have wonderful lives with all the material things they've told themselves they deserve
Posted by: no mo uro ||
11/14/2017 6:08 Comments ||
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#2
-Women and minorities have gone full primitive pagan and have convinced themselves that if they throw enough white males into the volcano then they will all have wonderful lives with all the material things they've told themselves they deserve
Communist inspired social anarchy has been brewing for decades. The attack on statuary was symbolic. They've now moved on to the 'live fire exercise.'
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Just knowing who wants the American citizen disarmed is clear evidence of the desired end-state. 
[Breitbart] On Monday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s "Fox News @ Night," Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill (R) said that the Alabama Republican Party can formally pull its support for its Senate nominee Judge Roy Moore, and if this happens and Moore still gets the most votes, the election would be null and void.
