As an op-ed writer, I’m a slave to the news cycle. That means that whenever one or more mass shootings heat up the topic of “gun control,” I tend to weigh in. And my usual take these days, as opposed to arguing about the Second Amendment, etc., is to simply note that a significant percentage of the more than 100 million Americans who own more than 400 million guns would just say “no” to giving up those guns, and make their “no” vote stick.

The usual retort to that position is pretty simple, and best summed up by a reply op-ed from Rob Kall, publisher of OpEdNews.com.

Disclaimer: Rob often disagrees with me. Rob also publishes most of my columns whether he agrees with them or not. I love Rob and I love OpEdNews, and urge you to check it out. This column is NOT intended as a slam on  Rob or on the site. But since it gives me material to work with:

“If, as Knapp appears to predict, people decide to break the law, and use their weapons to fight police, then they are terrorists and they should be arrested or killed. … If they resist, arrest them. If they shoot, give them a chance to surrender, then blow up their homes. Have the military do it with a missile fired by a fighter jet or helicopter. It won’t take many houses being blown up to persuade people to give up their AR-15s and related weapons.”

A related observation from Twitter user AbiSpeaks:

“[T]he Federal government can obliterate your entire block. Even if you buy the killingest killing machine you can find anywhere, you’re bringing a water gun to a tanks-and-laser-sighted-bombs fight.”

My reply to that tweet:

“The federal government was able to obliterate entire blocks in Afghanistan, but that didn’t stop them from getting their asses kicked by farmers with 60-year-old AKs and 100-year-old Mosin-Nagants.”

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think a government war on America’s gun owners would be anything like Afghanistan.

I think it would be far worse,  for both the government and for Americans, gun owners and non-gun-owners alike.

Only 2,448 members of the US armed forces died in Afghanistan.  The approach Rob suggests would likely produce at least Vietnam-level casualties (58,281 dead) … and an outcome similar to both those wars.

“Enemy” and civilian casualties were much higher than US military casualties in both wars. And that would likely be true of this one as well.

I have difficulty believing that Rob, and people who think like Rob, would be happy with tens of thousands of American cops and soldiers, and hundreds of thousands of American civilians, dead — and at the end of the carnage, more guns on the streets than before.

I prefer to believe that Rob, and people who think like Rob, just haven’t thought this through very carefully.

Because, make no mistake about this, what Rob is calling for is civil war.

I hope we can all agree that that would be a bad thing.

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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On June 6, US president Joe Biden invoked the Defense Production Act “to accelerate domestic manufacturing of clean energy.” That goal sounds laudable and, for those of us who don’t own stock in oil or coal companies, probably uncontroversial. But once we start focusing on the details, Biden’s order turns out to be just another crony capitalist boondoggle that’s more likely to increase prices and slow adoption than the other way around.

Let’s start with the situation as it is, according to the Department of Energy’s press release:

“Demand for clean energy technologies such as solar panels, heat pumps, and electrolyzers for hydrogen has increased significantly as the costs of these technologies have plummeted over the last decade.”

In other words, “things are GREAT! Everyone’s adopting these new technologies and it’s getting cheaper and cheaper to do so!”

With the situation well in hand, what’s the purpose of Biden’s order?

Here’s the first clue: “Unless the U.S. expands new manufacturing, processing, and installation capacity, we will be forced to continue to rely on clean energy imports …”

And here’s the second:

“DPA authority, with the necessary funding appropriated by Congress, will allow the federal government to invest in companies that can build clean energy facilities, expand clean energy manufacturing, process clean energy components, and install clean energy technologies for consumers.”

The goal of the order isn’t to “drive down energy costs for American consumers.”

It’s to artificially advantage American companies over those conniving foreigners who can profitably sell solar panels, heat pumps, etc. to American consumers at lower prices than American manufacturers can.

It’s central planning’s age-old black box: Your tax dollars are fed into one end; higher prices for the things you want and need come out the other.

If this idea doesn’t sound like a win for you, that’s because it isn’t.

All the DoE blather about “supply chain vulnerabilities,” “job opportunities,” “climate change,” and “national security” is just cover for a standard issue corporate welfare program.

You’ll pay more to convert your home to rooftop solar or replace your old gas furnace with a heat pump, and whichever American companies hire the most effective lobbyists will pocket the difference.

If Biden was serious about spurring adoption of clean energy, he’d take a meat ax to tariffs and restrictions on importing the relevant goods. Instead, he’s just writing welfare checks to Big Business and handing you a “Green” Raw Deal.

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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Over the last few years, the world’s transition from powering our cars with gas-burning internal combustion engines to zipping along on battery power has accelerated faster than the Tesla Model S Plaid, which can supposedly got from zero to sixty miles per hour in less than two seconds.

Setting aside my visceral love for the old muscle cars I grew up around, I wholeheartedly support that transition. My own “car” happens to be an electric bicycle (it used to be a regular bicycle, but knee problems made motorization attractive), and I hope that the next family vehicle, or the one after that, will be electric too.

That said, the urge to get society completely electrified and off of fossil fuels suffers from both propaganda oversell and from practical problems.

The big selling point for electrification has always been “emissions reduction.” Whether you accept mainstream climate theory or not, pouring less smog out of tailpipes and into the atmosphere seems like a good idea.

But electrifying cars does not, as such, solve that problem. It matters where the electricity comes from. Running a coal-fired power plant to charge your electric car doesn’t reduce overall pollution. It just moves that pollution off of city streets (which is nice) and into the air around the power plant (which doesn’t change the overall equation).

Lately, spiking gas prices due to US/EU sanctions over Russia’s war on Ukraine have come into vogue as reason to electrify. But again: Unless that electricity is produced using wind, solar, or nuclear, it still entails use of fossil fuels and the attendant pollution.

If electric makes sense for your situation, go electric. But don’t lie to yourself about how much good you’re doing the environment by transitioning. It’s a holistic problem and electric cars are, at best, only part of the solution.

In addition, technology and infrastructure lag still make electrification a problem for those who need to travel long distances in a timely manner.

Rachel Wolfe recently chronicled an all-electric round trip between New Orleans and Chicago for the Wall Street Journal. The headline sums it up nicely: “I Rented an Electric Car for a Four-Day Road Trip. I Spent More Time Charging It Than I Did Sleeping.”

Even assuming sufficient charging stations along your route (an infrastructure problem), charging your car still burns a lot of time (a technology problem). Even “fast charge” facilities take much longer than a gas fill-up.

Will these problems be solved? Almost certainly. The market for electric cars continues to grow, so the market for more and faster charging options will too.  We’ll get there. But we’re not there yet.

Unfortunately, the urge to “nudge” us in that direction with government subsidies and spending programs will almost certainly take us down various paths that produce worse rather than better outcomes.

Instead of subsidizing electric cars, governments should stop subsidizing fossil fuels. Free markets will always solve these kinds of problems faster, better, and with fewer unintended consequences than government propaganda and force.

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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