Monthly Archives: December 2018

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Trump’s Holiday Gift to America: Hope for a Little More Peace on Earth?

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Donald Trump swearing in ceremony

In March, US president Donald Trump promised the American public that US troops would be leaving Syria “very soon.”

Nine months later, he threw Washington’s political establishment into turmoil by finally ordering the withdrawal he’d promised. Politicians like US Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who’d never once in four years bestirred themselves to authorize the previous president’s decision to go to war there in the first place, railed against Trump’s decision to bring the bloody matter to a close.

Instead of backing down in the face of opposition, Trump doubled down. Or, rather, decided to draw down the 17-year-long US military presence in Afghanistan.

Then he jetted off for a surprise Christmas visit to Iraq … eliciting, with his usual theatrics, calls from Iraqi lawmakers for US withdrawal from THAT country. I suspect he may concede to that demand as well.

Nothing’s written in stone, and both US foreign policy and Donald Trump are prone to sudden and unexpected turns. But the holiday season is a time of hope. Maybe, just maybe, nearly three decades of US war in the Middle East are coming to the beginning of their end.

Adding to that hope, let’s turn an eye further east.

After significant saber-rattling and then a sudden turn toward personal diplomacy, Trump stood back and let events on the Korean peninsula take their course even as he continued the bellicose rhetoric and sanctions noises demanded of him by Graham and company.

As a result, North and South seem on the brink of ending a 68-year war. They’ve begun removing land mines and guard posts along the Demilitarized Zone. They’ve broken ground on a railway connecting the two countries.

Is it possible that Trump, as some of his supporters like to say, has been playing 4D chess while the rest of us distracted ourselves with checkers?

I’d really like to think so, and I do hope so.

As an advocate for ending US military adventurism, I’ve doubted Trump every step of the way. During his presidential campaign, he alternated between talking peace and pronouncing himself the most militaristic of the GOP’s presidential aspirants.

I’ve generally found it safer to believe the worst, rather than the best, things politicians say about themselves. But at moments like these,  his bizarre zigs and zags on the global 4D chess board suddenly seem in retrospect to have taken American foreign policy in the right direction.

If he brings home substantial numbers of the American fighting men and women now in harm’s way around the globe, he will have secured his legacy and deserve the thanks of a grateful nation. I wish him every success in that endeavor.

Peace on Earth, goodwill toward men, and Happy New Year.

 

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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Go Go GoFund.gov!

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Hundreds (RGBStock)

Brian Kolfage supported US president Donald Trump’s proposal for a wall on the the US-Mexico border.  He was frustrated that  Congress still refused to fund the wall (as I write this, we’re in the early hours of  “government shutdown” theatrics over that very argument).

Unlike most Americans, Kolfage did something above and beyond voting and complaining to assuage his dissatisfaction: He started a campaign to raise $1 billion in voluntary funding for the wall, using “crowdfunding” site GoFundMe. As of December 23, the campaign had raised more than $16 million.

Personally, I consider the border wall one of the dumbest and most evil ideas since disco, but I applaud Kolfage’s initiative. I think he’s on the right track when it comes to funding government generally.

I see two big problems with this particular campaign.

One problem is technical: Apart from a few discrete areas like gifts to pay down the national debt, the executive branch can only spend money appropriated by Congress for specific purposes. A group of us can’t just decide we want a war with Pitcairn Island, write the president a check, and expect him send forth a carrier strike group or launch some Tomahawks. Or at least it’s not supposed to work that way (it does for Raytheon and Lockheed Martin).

A second problem is moral: Much of the land on which the border wall would be built is owned by people (that is, it’s not “government property”). That land would have to be bought, and some owners don’t want to sell. Which means it would have to be stolen through the process of “eminent domain.” On that end, this effort is like crowdfunding a bank robbery spree.

But I still like the general principle. It reminds me of an old antiwar saying along the lines of how beautiful it would be if the Air Force had to hold a bake sale every time it wanted to buy a new bomber.

If instead of collecting taxes, Congress simply approved project goals and appropriated “as much money as is voluntarily donated toward” those goals, it would constitute a giant step toward a free society.

Instead of an Internal Revenue Service, the federal government could contract with GoFundMe to set up and operate GoFund.gov.

It will never happen because too many people are too intent on taking other people’s money for their pet projects. But it’s a beautiful dream, isn’t it?

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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Trump v. Bump: A Potentially Deadly Holiday Decision

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Slide Fire Solutions Slidefire Stock on a GP WASR-10 AK-47 (no watermark)
Slide Fire Solutions Slidefire Stock on a GP WASR-10 AK-47 (no watermark) WASR [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], from Wikimedia Commons

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.

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