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“Somehow This Has Become Routine”

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Gun photo from RGBStock

That’s what president Barack Obama said after a gunman killed ten before police shot him to death at Umpqua Community College in Rosebud, Oregon on October 1.

Obama said a mouthful there; more than he knew.

“Mass shootings” — gun homicides with four or more victims — are indeed “routine.” That is, they are stable. There’s been no discernible upward trend in the number of incidents or victims over the last 40 years, contra scaremongers who pretend this is a new or growing phenomenon.

It’s also routine for victim disarmament (“gun control”) advocates to begin dancing on the graves of those killed in “mass shootings” before the bodies have had time to cool, demanding more, and more draconian, laws of a type which are not only patently evil and irrefutably  unconstitutional, but which have never produced the results their supporters claim to want. The main centers of American “gun violence” are, and always have been, areas where corrupt legislators or naive voters adopt the victim disarmers’ schemes.

Obama happens to be Grave-Dancing Ghoul in Chief at the moment, but would-be Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton wasted no time hitting the dance floor either, hoping to gain back some ground on opponent Bernie Sanders by grandstanding on the fact that Sanders hasn’t historically been quite as stark-raving nutzoid on the topic of guns and self-defense as the Democrat mainstream.

Clinton focused on the victim disarmament lobby’s bete noire, the National Rifle Association. “What’s wrong with us that we can’t stand up to the NRA and the gun lobby?” she asked.

A better question might be “with friends like the NRA, what do gun owners need enemies for?” The NRA has either overtly backed, or at best “grudgingly” compromised on, every major piece of American victim disarmament legislation since the 1930s.  At their very best, they’re weak-kneed moderates who can’t be trusted to show any backbone in defense of human rights. At their  worst … well, Benedict Arnold doesn’t lack for modern imitators.

For those politicians and activists silly enough to think “gun control” is a winning issue in 2016, one thing to keep in mind:

There are somewhere between 270 million and 350 million guns in the hands of between 70 million and 100 million Americans.

You can’t have them.

You don’t have to like it. That’s how it is whether you like it or not.

Get used to THAT routine.

Thomas L. Knapp 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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Private Prisons: Bernie Sanders is Right

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RGBStock.com Prison Photo

US Senator Bernie Sanders (allegedly a Vermont Independent, but running for president as a Democrat) and US Representatives Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), Keith Ellison (D-MN) and Bobby Rush (D-IL) introduced bills in Congress last week aiming to “ban private prisons, reinstate the federal parole system and eliminate quotas for the number of immigrants held in detention.” The bills won’t pass, and who knows what devils lurk in their details, but the general direction is right.

Americans should be embarrassed by the propensity of government at all levels to cage other Americans. We’ve often heard over the last few years that the US government imprisons a higher proportion of its own subject population than any other government on Earth. I doubt that’s true — the remaining Communist regimes and other dictatorships likely don’t honestly account for how many people they incarcerate — but the US certainly leads the “western democracies” in the matter. Nearly one in every 30 Americans is “under correctional supervision,” i.e. in jail, in prison, or on parole or probation.

As a libertarian, I’m all for “privatization.” I’d love to see as many services as possible taken out of government’s hands and left to the private sector.

But “private prisons” aren’t “private” in any meaningful sense of the word. They’re still operated under government supervision and according to government rules; they are still paid for with taxpayer dollars. Fake “privatization” of prisons creates two bad situations:

First, it creates a special interest lobby centered around how much money can be made by sticking people in cages. “Private prison” companies lobby for things like mandatory minimum sentences and a litany of new or revised “tough on crime” laws that put more and more non-violent criminals in their facilities to generate more and more profits. That lobby finances the campaigns of politicians who pass such laws. It’s good for business.

Second, it results in situations where no one is held accountable or responsible for abuses. When, for example a prisoner dies for lack of proper medical care, the politicians blame the “private prison” operators and the operators blame the politicians, round and round in a circle until someone’s wrist gets slapped and everyone forgets about it (until the next such incident).

I won’t vote for him, but Sanders is right on this. We should be looking for ways to minimize, or even abolish, imprisonment, not ways to pretend we’ve “privatized” it.

Thomas L. Knapp 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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Welcome to Shutdown Theater, 2015 Edition

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The western front of the United States Capitol...
The western front of the United States Capitol. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

Well, here we go again. Sample annual headline: “Republicans Threaten Government Shutdown.” This year’s excuse: A feud over whether or not to continue writing an annual $500 million corporate welfare check to Planned Parenthood.

With bated breath, the mainstream media informs us that the usual suspects on Capitol Hill are “working feverishly” to avoid the “shutdown.” If they don’t work out a deal, the media will squeeze a few more days’ or weeks’ worth of purple prose out of this fake calamity.

Yes, fake.

There’s not going to be any “government shutdown.” There’s never been one, nor is one likely in the future. Or at least not until the US government as we know it “shuts down” for good (yes, that will happen someday — nothing lasts forever).

Nor are these fake “shutdowns” anything close to calamities. At worst they’re mild inconveniences, and then only because Americans have acquiesced in government doing far too many things for far too long.

When we hear that the government has, or is about to, “shut down,” there’s always a curious follow-on clause: “Except for essential services.”

You’d be surprised at the variety of seemingly non-essential services the US government considers “essential.” The list is too long for this column, so I’ll just throw out one example: TSA agents will continue to feel up air travelers, even though letting not-quite-qualified wannabe cops routinely sexually assault people has, on the evidence, never prevented so much as a single terror attack.

But here are two more important questions than what’s “essential” or “nor essential”:

First, if something is not “essential” — a synonym for “necessary” or “indispensable” — why is the possibility that the government will stop doing it for a little while always portrayed in the mainstream media, as an impending disaster of epic proportions?

Secondly, if something is not “essential,”  why is the government doing it in the first place? Especially when that government is $18.5 trillion dollars in debt, runs annual spending deficits in the neighborhood of half a trillion dollars each year, and faces future unfunded liabilities which may be in excess of $200 trillion?

It seems to me that the impending fake “shutdown” should be greeted not with angst but with anticipation. Or, at worst, with apathy.

It’s not the end of the world. It’s not even the end of an era. It’s the finale of a bad sitcom’s bad season.

Thomas L. Knapp 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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