More Guns ≠ More Gun Deaths

If there is no correlation, there cannot be causation.  This site makes that argument quite graphically:

It's an excellent analytical piece.  RTWT.

We've Been Saying This for YEARS

They're SAFETY EQUIPMENT:

Spokane Police will add suppressors to rifles, citing concerns about hearing damage

Pullquote:

Rifles carried by Spokane police on patrol will soon be equipped with suppressors, a move the department says will protect officers and civilians from hearing damage.

“It’s nothing more than like the muffler you put on your car,” said Lt. Rob Boothe, the range master and lead firearms instructor for the department.Outfitting the department’s 181 service rifles with suppressors will protect the city from the legal costs of worker’s compensation claims filed by officers, as well as from potential lawsuits filed by bystanders whose ears are exposed to firearm blasts. The sound of a fired shot can be louder than the takeoff of jet engines, the department says.

So why do we ordinary citizens have to put in an application that requires a photograph, fingerprints, a background check and a $200 tax for a piece of SAFETY EQUIPMENT?

The .gov Can't Keep Up with Current Demand...

…so hey! Let’s expand the program with UNIVERSAL background checks!

Gun background checks are on pace to break record in 2019


200,000 checks on Black Friday alone. Enough to arm the United States Marine Corps.

However,

FBI never completes hundreds of thousands of gun checks

So it makes PERFECT sense to double or triple the number of background checks! Right?

Why is it that the .gov is the only entity that when it fails at something it doubles-down?

Quote of the Day - Glenn Reynolds Edition

Americans Have Almost Entirely Forgotten Their History. This is not by accident, but by design.

I've been saying this for years.

There are No "Solutions" - Only "Trade-offs"

Today's Electric Car Batteries Will Be Tomorrow's E-Waste Crisis, Scientists Warn

Wind turbines kill endangered bird species, electric cars require toxic batteries and run off of coal-fired power plants, The infrastructure necessary to provide charging stations for plug-in EV’s will cost billions and require even more power generation, but no one wants a nuclear power plant in their back yard.

Engineering isn’t about “solutions,” it’s about picking the best options and minimizing the costs of the trade-offs.

Politics is only about getting elected and re-elected. Politicians can promise the moon without any concern about the costs - monetary, environmental, social. And they depend on a public ignorant to the realities. Shouts of “Consensus!” are used to ensure that no one opposed gets listened to.

That’s not how science - or engineering - work. Reality is what remains even if you don’t believe in it.

Second Thoughts on the Second Amendment?

Remember, over the period from 1933 to 1945 the Nazi regime alone murdered approximately 12,000,000 people. In the United States, at our current rate of criminal homicide, it would take 695 years to kill as many people as the German government did in twelve. The Soviet Union? By one estimate between 1917 and 1987, that government killed approximately 62,000,000. Communist China? Between 1949 and 1987, 76,000,000. (Who knows how many since, with the Uyghurs and Hong Kong.)

Individuals kill retail. Governments do it wholesale. As 9th Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski wrote in one of his best dissents:

All too many of the other great tragedies of history - Stalin’s atrocities, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Holocaust, to name but a few - were perpetrated by armed troops against unarmed populations. Many could well have been avoided or mitigated, had the perpetrators known their intended victims were equipped with a rifle and twenty bullets apiece, as the Militia Act required here. If a few hundred Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto could hold off the Wehrmacht for almost a month with only a handful of weapons, six million Jews armed with rifles could not so easily have been herded into cattle cars.

My excellent colleagues have forgotten these bitter lessons of history. The prospect of tyranny may not grab the headlines the way vivid stories of gun crime routinely do. But few saw the Third Reich coming until it was too late. The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed - where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.

The residents of Hong Kong understand that now. And apparently some Americans are starting to grasp it, too.

Quote of the Day - Oren Litwin Edition

From the comments here many many moons ago when he was still a PhD candidate in Political Science, (and followed this blog) Oren Litwin wrote this:

If the non-socialist end of the political spectrum cannot create a political philosophy that is both good theory and emotionally appealing, we're doomed.

Any political philosophy that is not self-reinforcing is by definition not the best political philosophy. Libertarianism (with a small "l") features a stoic acceptance of individual risk (i.e. the lack of government intervention) for the sake of long-term freedom and prosperity--yet takes no measures to ensure that the society educates its young to maintain that acceptance of risk. The equilibrium, if it ever exists in the first place, is unstable and will collapse.

This aside from the fact that libertarianism is emotionally cold and unfulfilling to most people, who have not trained themselves to consider lack of outside restraint to be worth cherishing.

 Yup.  We're doomed.

Quote of the Day - Attorney General Bill Barr Edition

From his Federalist Society speech last week:

In any age, the so-called progressives treat politics as their religion. Their holy mission is to use the coercive power of the State to remake man and society in their own image, according to an abstract ideal of perfection. Whatever means they use are therefore justified because, by definition, they are a virtuous people pursing a deific end. They are willing to use any means necessary to gain momentary advantage in achieving their end, regardless of collateral consequences and the systemic implications. They never ask whether the actions they take could be justified as a general rule of conduct, equally applicable to all sides.

I've been saying this since at least 2010. See: Al Gore, Pied Piper of the Unconstrained Vision, and Human Redemption Through Government.  This is holy war - jihad, if you will - for the Left.  This is why the Right is not wrong, not misguided, not ignorant, but evil.  And every Republican President after Eisenhower is literally Hitler.

Eric Hoffer observed in his book The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements:

Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying agents. It pulls and whirls the individual away from his own self, makes him oblivious of his weal and future, frees him of jealousies and self-seeking. He becomes an anonymous particle quivering with a craving to fuse and coalesce with his like into one flaming mass. (Heinrich) Heine suggests that what Christian love cannot do is effected by a common hatred.

Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil. Usually the strength of a mass movement is proportionate to the vividness and tangibility of its devil. When Hitler was asked whether he thought the Jew must be destroyed, he answered: "No.... We should have then to invent him. It is essential to have a tangible enemy, not merely an abstract one." F.A. Voigt tells of a Japanese mission that arrived in Berlin in 1932 to study the National Socialist movement. Voigt asked a member of the mission what he thought of the movement. He replied: "It is magnificent. I wish we could have something like it in Japan, only we can't, because we haven't got any Jews."

Got a Couple of Hours?

I'm not a fan of Glenn Beck, but as a friend put it, "sometimes he lays down information that’s tough to refute.” Give this a watch. Your tinfoil hat might blow off.

"Political Gaffe" - When a Politician Accidentally Tells the Truth

Alexandria Occasionally Coherent on the impeachment of Donald Trump, Wednesday: "This is not just about something that has occurred, this is about preventing a potentially disastrous outcome from occurring next year.

IOW, "We're impeaching him because we couldn't beat him in 2016, and we can't beat him in 2020."

What Do You Mean "AS THOUGH"?!?

Democrat Sen. Mazie Hirono: 'Believe in Climate Change as Though It's a Religion'

Maybe this wouldn't be such a divided country if skeptics weren't treated like heretics. Maybe these times would be more normal if Democrats thought before they spoke. Of course, they thrive on division. They can't exist without it. Their modus operandi is to set people against each other and then profit from the conflict. And of course, the whole time they have to blame their opponents. That's how they've always done it, and they'll keep doing so as long as it keeps working.

Word.

The Stupidest Thing I've Ever Seen the Gun-Banners Attempt

From New Zealand, where they're on their way to (maybe) 30% compliance with their gun ban:

Police meet with gang leaders to try and convince them to surrender guns during amnesty

Pullquote:

Illegal guns are remaining in the hands of organised crime as gang leaders refuse to give up their weapons.

Police have met with more than 50 gang leaders in an effort to get them to comply with firearm law changes before an amnesty ends.

But it's proving to be fruitless, as the patched members remain "very reluctant", Police Commissioner Mike Bush told the Justice Select Committee on Thursday.

Gee, ya THINK?

"We have identified over 100 influential gang leaders and spoken to about half of them about how they are managing this and what their approach and attitude toward that [amnesty] is."

Sorry about the auto-run videos.

"A Modest but Tangible Success" - aka, "Abject Failure"

New Zealand's "buyback" is going pretty much as expected - with a projected compliance of less than 30%:

New Zealand Police Minister Stuart Nash announced this week that more than 32,000 prohibited weapons have been returned to the government since collections began in mid-July. Some estimates put the number of newly-banned military-style semi-automatic rifles in the country at up to 175,000.

This would suggest a compliance rate, so far, as low as 18 percent, 16 weeks into the buyback program. With seven weeks left to go until the amnesty period ends, if the current rate of return holds, the New Zealand government is on track to collect around 50,000 prohibited weapons pursuant to the buyback. That would impute a final compliance rate of around 29 percent, at the lower end, which would represent a modest but tangible success for policymakers.

"Owning a firearm is a privilege not a right," New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said in September as the country's parliament considered new gun control laws.

Quote of the Day - Twitter Edition

Comment prompted by this Project Veritas video from yesterday:

ABC News: Multiple allegations against pedophile Jeffrey Epstein didn’t meet our standards for air.

Also ABC:

Check out these uncorroborated allegations against Kavanaugh in middle of his confirmation.

Also, here’s some Syria war footage that's actually from a KY gun range - Jason Howerton

Mexico has ONE GUN SHOP for the ENTIRE NATION

There is only one gun store in all of Mexico. So why is gun violence soaring?
Somehow that doesn’t prevent the Cartels from acquiring light and heavy machine guns, anti-tank rockets, etc.


Tell me again how gun control makes us safer.

Yes, Virgina, There is a Deep State

From Arthur Chrenkoff:

The media and the left (but I repeat myself) have spent the past three years ridiculing the concept of the “Deep State” and those who subscribe to its existence. We have been told it’s a crazy right-wing conspiracy theory to believe that some public servants, mostly in the fields of intelligence, law enforcement and diplomacy, might cooperate in informal cabals to pursue their preferred policies regardless of who is in power and to protect their fiefdoms from oversight, interference and the executive, legislative and judicial control. To wonder whether some influential people in the federal bureaucracy, connected through a revolving door with the progressive establishment, might have contemplated preventing the election of their bete noire and his removal from office once their initial efforts proved unsuccessful invited accusation of delusion and paranoia.

This narrative is now officially old and busted. The new and hot one: the Deep State exists and it’s good.

RTWT on this one, too.

I'm reminded of a previous QotD from Stephen Green:

Once you’ve convinced yourself that your job is to protect the proles from themselves, any foul action you take becomes excusable, or even noble. That’s progressivism in a nutshell.

Quote of the Day - Angelo Codevilla, Part 3

From Interview with Angelo Codevilla, a two-fer - one from the interviewer, David Samuels:

...there is no such thing as America anymore. In place of the America that is described in history books, where Henry Clay forged his compromises, and Walt Whitman wrote poetry, and Herman Melville contemplated the whale, and Ida Tarbell did her muckraking, and Thomas Alva Edison invented movies and the light bulb, and so forth, has arisen something new and vast and yet distinctly un-American that for lack of a better term is often called the American Empire, which in turn calls to mind the division of Roman history (and the Roman character) into two parts: the Republican, and the Imperial.

While containing the ghosts of the American past, the American Empire is clearly a very different kind of entity than the American Republic was—starting with the fact that the vast majority of its inhabitants aren’t Americans. Ancient American ideas about individual rights and liberties, the pursuit of happiness, and so forth, may still be inspiring to mainland American citizens or not, but they are foreign to the peoples that Americans conquered. To those people, America is an empire, or the shadow of an empire, under which seemingly endless wars are fought, a symbol of their own continuing powerlessness and cultural failure. Meanwhile, at home, the American ruling elites prattle on endlessly about their deeply held ideals of whatever that must be applied to Hondurans today, and Kurds tomorrow, in fits of frantic-seeming generosity in between courses of farm-to-table fare. Once the class bond has been firmly established, everyone can relax and exchange notes about their kids, who are off being credentialed at the same “meritocratic” but now hugely more expensive private schools that their parents attended, whose social purpose is no longer to teach basic math or a common history but to indoctrinate teenagers in the cultish mumbo-jumbo that serves as a kind of in-group glue that binds ruling class initiates (she/he/they/ze) together and usefully distinguishes them from townies during summer vacations by the seashore.

The understanding of America as an empire is as foreign to most Americans as is the idea that the specific country that they live in is run by a class of people who may number themselves among the elect but weren’t in fact elected by anyone. Under whatever professional job titles, the people who populate the institutions that exercise direct power over nearly all aspects of American life from birth to death are bureaucrats—university bureaucrats, corporate bureaucrats, local, state and federal bureaucrats, law enforcement bureaucrats, health bureaucrats, knowledge bureaucrats, spy agency bureaucrats. At each layer of specific institutional authority, bureaucrats coordinate their understandings and practices with bureaucrats in parallel institutions through lawyers, in language that is designed to be impenetrable, or nearly so, by outsiders. Their authority is pervasive, undemocratic, and increasingly not susceptible in practice to legal checks and balances. All those people together comprise a class.

And one from Prof. Codevilla:

(T)he Democrats (are) the senior partners in the ruling class. The Republicans are the junior partners.

The reason being that the American ruling class was built by or under the Democratic Party. First, under Woodrow Wilson and then later under Franklin Roosevelt. It was a ruling class that prized above all its intellectual superiority over the ruled. And that saw itself as the natural carriers of scientific knowledge, as the class that was naturally best able to run society and was therefore entitled to run society.

The Republican members of the ruling class aspire to that sort of intellectual status or reputation. And they have shared a taste of this ruling class. But they are not part of the same party, and as such, are constantly trying to get closer to the senior partners. As the junior members of the ruling class, they are not nearly as tied to government as the Democrats are. And therefore, their elite prerogatives are not safe.

RTWT. It's pretty interesting. Depressing, but interesting.

Quote of the Day - Angelo Codevilla Edition, Pt. 2

From the same essay as yesterday, Our Revolution's Logic:

Unattainable, and gone forever, is the whole American Republic that had existed for some 200 years after 1776. The people and the habits of heart and mind that had made it possible are no longer a majority. Progressives made America a different nation by rejecting those habits and those traditions.

 Depressing, but accurate.

Quote of the Day - Angelo Codevilla Edition

From his 2018 essay Our Revolution's Logic - RTWT:

The logic is rooted in disdain, but not so much of any of the supposed inferiors’ features or habits. If it were, the deplored could change their status by improving. But the Progressives deplore the “deplorables” not to improve them, but to feel good about themselves. Hating people for what they are and because it feels good to hate them, is hate in its unalloyed form.

 And this is why they have to disarm us.

Make the Pain Stop...

A memorial video for my great-grandson done by my daughter.