All posts by Thomas L. Knapp

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Joe Biden’s Latest “Gun Violence” Fairy Tale

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Gun photo from RGBStock
Free photo from RGBStock

A White House “fact sheet” tells us that “the President is committed to taking action to reduce all forms of gun violence.”

The “fact sheet” departs from the facts starting with its title, which characterizes gun violence as a “public health epidemic.” Gun violence is a set of volitional human behaviors, not an infectious disease spread by gun cooties and amenable to “public health” remedies.

The “fact sheet” announces six “initial actions,” none of which any sane person would expect to substantially impact gun violence.

Ineffectual initial action #1: “The Justice Department … will issue a proposed rule to help stop the proliferation of ‘ghost guns.'”

“Ghost guns” are homemade firearms. They’re not made in government-licensed facilities, nor do their makers generally report them to the government. While some are built from commercially sold kits, firearms are simple technology. You could probably build one from items lying around your house, even if you don’t have machine tools or a 3D printer. No matter how many rules DOJ proposes,  the vast majority of ghost guns will remain beyond its reach.

Ineffectual action #2: “The Justice Department … will issue a proposed rule to make clear when a device marketed as a stabilizing brace effectively turns a pistol into a short-barreled rifle subject to the requirements of the National Firearms Act.”

That’s even dumber than the “ghost gun” rule. Stabilizing braces are even easier to build at home than guns. And if anyone paid attention to a rule against them, that rule would only magnify the carnage of mass shootings as violent criminals sprayed more bullets, less accurately, into their targeted areas.

Now we move from merely ineffectual to idiotically counter-productive with action #3: ‘The Justice Department … will publish model ‘red flag’ legislation for states.”

“Red flag” laws allow police to seize guns from people who haven’t been accused, let alone convicted, of crimes on the claim that they “present a danger to themselves or others.” When a bunch of gun-waving cops show up unexpectedly to confiscate someone’s firearms, that someone sometimes DOES start presenting a danger to themselves or others, when he or she hadn’t before. And if he or she doesn’t respond that way, it’s evidence that the order was unnecessary in the first place.

In addition to likely being 99% ineffectual and counterproductive, the first three “initial actions” are also 100% unconstitutional.

Initial actions number 4 and 5 are just bureaucratic showboating to justify throwing taxpayer money in a hole and setting it on fire: “The Administration is investing in evidence-based community violence interventions” and “[t]he Justice Department will issue an annual report on firearms trafficking.”

Action #6 — the appointment of former Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives thug (and Waco massacre revisionist) David Chipman to head that agency — is probably a subject for a whole column of its own. It might actually be consequential.

The first five “initial actions” are a mix of pro-gun-violence idiocy and public relations fluff that the White House should be embarrassed for even trying to put over on the public as non-fiction.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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“Vaccine Passports” and the Holocaust: An Invalid Comparison?

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Jewish Synagogue in German-occupied Bydgoszcz (Poland). Inscription in German language means: "This city is free of Jews." September 1939. Public domain.
Jewish Synagogue in German-occupied Bydgoszcz (Poland). Inscription in German language means: “This city is free of Jews.” September 1939. Public domain.

On March 29, the Libertarian Party of Kentucky issued a tweet that aroused considerable controversy (not least among partisan Libertarians themselves):

“Are the vaccine passports going to be yellow, shaped like a star, and sewn on our clothes?”

Kentucky governor Andy Beshear called the tweet “shameful” and implied it was “anti-Semitic.”

Rabbi Shlomo Litvin called the comparison “morally wrong,” but treated it, kindly, as part of a widespread habit of “using Holocaust comparisons to make literally any political point you want to make.”

Was the tweet over the top? Well, maybe.

Was the tweet anti-Semitic? Ask the Jewish protesters in Israel who equate that country’s vaccine passport scheme not only with the yellow Star of David badges forced on Jews by the Nazis, but with  death camp prisoner tattoos.

Was the comparison valid? To at least some degree, yes.

Early on, the Nazis used a “public health” excuse for their targeting of Jews and the imposition of the patches. Jews, they said, spread typhus, and needed to be identified so that others could avoid them and stay healthy.

Yes, that supposed “public health” concern was completely false.

But the notion that COVID-19 represents a permanent, existential threat to humanity, that we can never return to “normal” again, and that those who choose not to get vaccinated represent a significant danger to those who choose to get vaccinated is completely false, too.

Novel viruses hit humankind hard occasionally, then recede as we learn to treat them and vaccinate for them, and as they weaken through mutation. No sane society completely remakes itself around them.

Supporters of vaccine passports tout them as a way to “allow” us to do things such as attend concerts and sporting events.

We’ve never needed health-based government permission to do those things before, and there’s no compelling argument that we should be required to seek such permission in the future.

Vaccine passports aren’t needed to “allow” things. They’re not designed to include, they’re designed to exclude. They’re designed to do something with a long history that includes, yes, the Holocaust: They’re designed to ghettoize (“put in or restrict to an isolated or segregated place, group, or situation”).

Absent government involvement, if a business doesn’t want to accept un-vaccinated customers (or any other kind of customers), that’s, well, their business. But they should shoulder the costs themselves instead of asking governments to create and impose uniform identification schemes for them.

A federal vaccine passport would create yet another government surveillance tool. It would also inevitably be used by local governments to legally exclude the un-vaccinated from particular types of businesses (such as nightclubs), particular expressions of public life (such as youth sports), and quite possibly entire zones of public commerce (such as large shopping centers), all in the name of “public health.”

And the scheme wouldn’t end with COVID-19. It would be continually repurposed and probably made permanent.

I’d like to see everyone choose to get vaccinated, but we should all be opposed to forcibly ghettoizing those who don’t.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Time to Get Government Off Our Lawns

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Photo by Magda Ehlers via Pexels
Photo by Magda Ehlers via Pexels

It’s spring, and for many Americans that means it’s time to drag out the mower and trimmer, invest in various seeds, feeds, pesticides, etc., and quite possibly put the water bill on steroids with daily sprinkler operation. According to the American Time Use Survey, the average American spends 70 hours — nearly two full work weeks — on lawn maintenance every year.

The lawn is such a familiar part of everyday American life that it might seem like the natural state of things.  In reality, it’s evolved over the last two centuries from an aristocratic plaything to what Washington Post columnist Christopher Ingraham rightly calls a “soul-crushing timesuck” that most of us would be better off without.

More to the point, the lawn is effectively a regressive tax scheme that benefits the sellers of expensive equipment and  those who use that equipment in our stead if we can afford to hire them.

Lawns originated with the European nobility of the late Middle Ages — people who owned plenty of land and could afford staff (assisted by large herds of sheep) to keep the grass cut short. By the 18th century, lawns were places for snobbish parties and social games such as croquet and tennis.

The first lawnmowers appeared in the 1830s, and over the next century, culminating with the introduction of “affordable” gas-powered push mowers, lawns became increasingly popular with “lower-class” imitators of the rich.

But until after World War 2, most of us regular people, even if we had houses, still didn’t have “lawns.” We had “yards.” Yards were generally smaller, and were more likely to be bare dirt or vegetable garden than carefully manicured grass of a single species.

Yards became lawns as they got bigger and as they became situated in the post-war cookie-cutter housing developments where developers or homeowner associations promoted property-value-preserving uniformity. You had to have a “lawn” of St. Augustine grass kept to no more than three inches in height for the same reason you couldn’t paint your house pink or put your old Chevy up on blocks in the driveway.

Local governments, seeing an irresistible opportunity to pass new ordinances, took their cue from the developers and HOAs and joyfully added lawn care to their already endless excuses for levying fines on the neglectful and recalcitrant.

The ill effects go beyond lost time, wasted money, and forced dealings with nosy bureaucrats. In addition to reduced biodiversity (exacerbated by ordinances dictating a few types of acceptable lawn vegetation) and the use of millions of pounds of unnecessary pesticides every year, Ted Steinberg tells us in American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn, our palsied hands spill 17 million gallons of gas — half again as much as the Exxon Valdez vomited onto Alaska’s coastline in 1989 — every year while refueling lawn maintenance equipment.

Xeriscaping, ornamental and vegetable gardening, etc. are increasingly popular alternative approaches to yard use. But for those of us who really want to be done with lawns, an important first step is getting governments off of them.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY