On December 18, just in time for Christmas, the US Department of Justice announced a new 157-page rule banning “bump stocks.” The regulatory move comes 14 months after Stephen Paddock’s murder of 58 concert attendees in Las Vegas, Nevada made the devices notorious.

The new rule is a dumb and dangerous piece of political grandstanding, and there’s no doubt who’s behind it. “We are faithfully following President Trump’s leadership” said acting US Attorney General Matt Whitaker, “by making clear that bump stocks, which turn semiautomatics into machine guns, are illegal …”

A couple of nitpicks:

First, both Whitaker’s claim and the definition in the rule itself (“a semiautomatic firearm to which a bump-stock-type device is attached is able to produce automatic fire with a single pull of the trigger”) are as inaccurate on the factual end as “bump firing” is where hitting targets is concerned. Bump firing requires one pull of a semi-automatic’s trigger per shot, merely allowing a shooter to pull the trigger faster, with a severe penalty to accuracy (if Paddock was a skilled marksman, his use of bump stocks probably saved lives).

Secondly, the rule is completely useless vis a vis its supposed goal. Bump firing is a technique that can be implemented using devices as simple as rubber bands, belt loops on pants, or even just one’s body. Commercial bump stocks are novelty items, not necessary tools for using the technique. The rule is the equivalent of banning pet rocks to reduce the incidence of rock-throwing.

That said, this rule has the potential to cost far more lives than Stephen Paddock took in Vegas.

The rule requires those possessing the banned devices to destroy them or turn them in to law enforcement within 90 days of its publication in the Federal Register (by right around Easter).

According to Matt Vasilogambros of the Pew Trust,  the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives  believes there are more than 500,000 commercial bump stocks in the hands of American gun owners.

When New Jersey’s politicians passed a similar law, the number of bump stocks turned in was … wait for it … zero. If the incidence of bump stock ownership in New Jersey tracks national population averages, that’s zero out of more than 13,000.

If ATF wants those bump stocks, it’s going to have to start knocking on doors and forcibly taking them from hundreds of thousands of gun owners who have declined to voluntarily surrender them.

What could possibly go wrong?

The best possible outcome of this stunt is that it will simply be ignored both by its supposed enforcers and its prospective victims.

Otherwise, Trump’s Christmas present to the anti-gun lobby may well turn into an Easter basket for America’s trauma units and funeral homes.

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

Bahia Amawi works as children’s speech pathologist for the Pflugerville Independent School District in Texas. Or, rather, she used to work as a children’s speech pathologist for the district. After nine years, Glenn Greenwald reports at The Intercept, the district’s administration declined to renew her contract because she refused to sign a loyalty oath.

Not a loyalty oath to the United States. Not a loyalty oath to the state of Texas. Not a loyalty oath to Pflugerville Independent School District, nor to its students.

A loyalty oath to Israel.

Texas is one of 26 states (with similar legislation pending in 13 others) which requires state contractors to certify that they “do not currently boycott Israel” and “will not boycott Israel” for the duration of the contract.

The definition of “boycott” includes “refusing to deal with” or “terminating business activities with” Israel or any “person or entity doing business in Israel or in an Israeli-controlled territory.”

The purpose of these requirements is to hinder the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. BDS participants call on Israel to meet its “obligations under international law” by withdrawing from occupied Arab territory and so forth, and back that call by refusing to purchase Israeli goods or do business with Israeli companies.

Agree with BDS or not, it’s entirely proper for people who oppose a government’s actions to adhere to their convictions peacefully, by refusing to trade with that government or with businesses operating in that government’s jurisdiction. One prominent example in living memory was the global boycott of South Africa over apartheid, a system many BDS proponents liken to  Israel’s rule in the West Bank and Gaza.

The Texas law  theoretically excludes actions “made for ordinary business purposes,” but it’s easy to see how the loyalty oath could be abused:

Two companies or contractors, one from Israel and one not, bid on a job. When the Israeli company doesn’t get the job, it complains that prejudice against Israel, rather than “ordinary business purposes,” motivated the decision. Contractors who do business with governments requiring such loyalty oaths are likely to bend over backward to avoid such complaints.

But such abuse, while worth noting, isn’t the essential evil of such loyalty oath requirements. It’s merely one negative side effect of a kind of law that’s bad in and of itself.

The state of Israel benefits to the tune of billions of dollars per year in US foreign aid. Instead of just gratefully accepting the annual welfare check, its lobbyists have also successfully demanded what amounts to veto power over US foreign policy.

Now those same welfare queen lobbyists want the power to order American businesses and workers — the people from whom that tribute is extracted — to buy from, sell to, and hire Israelis whether we like it or not.

You and I — and Bahia Amawi — should be free to do business, or not, with anyone we darn well please, for any reasons we consider relevant. And American politicians should stop trying to impose loyalty oaths of any kind.

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

Roger Simmermaker takes the The Wall Street Journal‘s editors to task for warning that Donald Trump will “lose” a “war with the laws of economics” if he wages a trade war with China (“Washington and Lincoln Were Also Tariff Men,” December 13). Simmermaker admits that Trump’s tariffs will reduce the availability of imported goods to domestic consumers, but simply considers buying American instead an inherently good thing.

Simmermaker notes that Trump is by no means the first American president to enact tariffs. He quotes a lineage of eager support for restricting trade running all the way back to George Washington. In an earlier column, Garrison Center director Thomas L. Knapp explained why: “Tariffs help a few people visibly and in a big way, while harming a lot of people far less visibly and far less noticeably. Politicians typically love policies like that because such policies allow them to rack up votes and campaign contributions from some constituencies without enraging others.” Teddy Roosevelt’s proud embrace of the tariff created far more trusts than he busted; its opponents at the time aptly named it “the mother of trusts.”

Simmermaker makes it clear that he doesn’t value the economic well-being of the Chinese as much as that of his fellow Americans, but he would have to be particularly spiteful to harm the latter by cutting off mutually beneficial trade with the former. As the genuine populist Henry George noted in 1886, “Trade has ever been the extinguisher of war, the eradicator of prejudice, the diffuser of knowledge.” Simmerman should take heed of George’s warning that “What protection teaches us, is to do to ourselves in time of peace what enemies seek to do to us in time of war.”

Simmermaker asks why, if tariffs are so economically damaging, has the United States, whose Constitution “never mentions free trade or free markets,” prospered with such a long history of them? Indeed, the new nation’s laws promptly set about the same “cutting off our trade with all parts of the world” that the Declaration of Independence denounced the British monarchy over. Yet it retained enough that Bertrand Russell noted “the leadership [in international trade] has passed to the United States” — the country that had the best chance of replicating the golden ages of previous merchant havens like Italy and Holland. Ironically, American newspapers can still afford to run letters like Simmermaker’s in large part because Trump failed to enact tariffs on inexpensive newsprint from Canada.

The United States has also had the advantage of a huge internal expanse for its economy to reap the benefits of borderless trade. In a time when the Civil Aeronautics Board imposed the economic equivalent of tariffs on airplane flights between states, the airline Southwest was able to supply low-cost air travel within the vast state of Texas. After such barriers were repealed, their advertising told consumers that “You are now free to move about the country.” Similar gains from trade need only not be blocked to soar around the globe.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a contributing editor at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org).

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

• “Protectionist Presidents are the Parents of Our Country’s Trusts,” by Joel Schlosberg, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 12/18/18