Showing posts with label Gun Control. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gun Control. Show all posts
Friday, April 6, 2018
Monday, January 4, 2016
America Doesn't Have a Gun Problem, It Has a Democrat Problem
By Daniel Greenfield
America's mass shooting capital isn't somewhere out west where you can get a gun at the corner store. It's in Obama's own hometown.
Chicago is America's mass shooting capital. There were over 400 shootings with more than one victim. In 95 of those shootings, 3 or more people were shot.
2,995 people were shot in Chicago last year. Shootings were up, way up, in Baltimore. With an assist from Al Sharpton and #BlackLivesMatter, Baltimore beat out Detroit. But Detroit is still in the running. Chicago, Baltimore and Detroit all have something in common, they're all run by the party of gun control which somehow can't seem to manage to control the criminals who have the guns.
The murder rate in Washington, D.C., home of the progressive boys and girls who can solve it all, is up 54%. The capital of the national bureaucracy has also been the country's murder capital.
These cities are the heartland of America’s real gun culture. It isn’t the bitter gun-and-bible clingers in McCain and Romney territory who are racking up a more horrifying annual kill rate than Al Qaeda; it’s Obama’s own voting base.
Gun violence is at its worst in the cities that Obama won in 2012. Places like New Orleans, Memphis, Birmingham, St. Louis, Kansas City and Philly. The Democrats are blaming Republicans for the crimes of their own voters.
Chicago, where Obama delivered his victory speech, has homicide numbers that match all of Japan and are higher than Spain, Poland and pre-war Syria. If Chicago gets any worse, it will find itself passing the number of murders for the entire country of Canada.
Chicago’s murder rate of 15.09 per 100,000 people looks nothing like the American 4.2 rate, but it does look like the murder rates in failed countries like Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe. To achieve Chicago’s murder rate, African countries usually have to experience a bloody genocidal civil war.
But Chicago isn’t even all that unique. Or the worst case scenario. That would be St. Louis with 50 murders for 100,000 people. If St Louis were a country, it would have the 4th highest murder rate in the world, beating out Jamaica, El Salvador and Rwanda.
Obama won St. Louis 82 to 16 percent.
New Orleans lags behind with a 39.6 murder rate. Louisiana went red for Romney 58 to 40, but Orleans Parish went blue for Obama 80 to 17. Obama won both St. Louis and Baltimore by comfortable margins. He won Detroit’s Wayne County 73 to 26.
Homicide rates like these show that something is broken, but it isn’t broken among Republican voters rushing to stock up on rifles every time Obama begins threatening their right to buy them; it’s broken among Obama’s base.
Any serious conversation about gun violence and gun culture has to begin at home; in Chicago, in Baltimore, in New York City, in Los Angeles and in Washington, D.C.
Voting for Obama does not make people innately homicidal. Just look at Seattle. So what is happening in Chicago to drive it to the gates of hell?
A breakdown of the Chicago killing fields shows that 83% of those murdered in Chicago in one year had criminal records. In Philly, it’s 75%. In Milwaukee it’s 77% percent. In New Orleans, it’s 64%. In Baltimore, it’s 91%. Many were felons who had served time. And as many as 80% of the homicides were gang related.
Chicago’s problem isn’t guns; it’s gangs. Gun control efforts in Chicago or any other major city are doomed because gangs represent organized crime networks which stretch down to Mexico. And Democrats pander to those gangs because it helps them get elected. That's why Federal gun prosecutions in Chicago dropped sharply under Obama. It's why he has set free drug dealers and gang members to deal and kill while convening town halls on gun violence.
America’s murder rate isn’t the work of the suburban and rural homeowners who shop for guns at sporting goods stores and at gun shows, and whom the media profiles after every shooting, but by the gangs embedded in urban areas controlled by Democrats. The gangs who drive up America’s murder rate look nothing like the occasional mentally ill suburban white kid who goes off his medication and decides to shoot up a school. Lanza, like most serial killers, is a media aberration, not the norm.
National murder statistics show that blacks are far more likely to be killers than whites and they are also far more likely to be killed. The single largest cause of homicides is the argument. 4th on the list is juvenile gang activity with 676 murders, which combined with various flavors of gangland killings takes us nearly to the 1,000 mark. America has more gangland murders than Sierra Leone, Eritrea and Puerto Rico have murders.
Our national murder rate is not some incomprehensible mystery that can only be attributed to the inanimate tools, the steel, brass and wood that do the work. It is largely the work of adult males from age 18 to 39 with criminal records killing other males of that same age and criminal past.
If this were going on in Rwanda, El Salvador or Sierra Leone, we would have no trouble knowing what to make of it, and silly pearl-clutching nonsense about gun control would never even come up. But this is Chicago, it’s Baltimore, it’s Philly and NOLA; and so we refuse to see that our major cities are in the same boat as some of the worst trouble spots in the world.
Lanza and Newtown are comforting aberrations. They allow us to take refuge in the fantasy that homicides in America are the work of the occasional serial killer practicing his dark art in one of those perfect small towns that always show up in murder mysteries or Stephen King novels. They fool us into thinking that there is something American about our murder rate that can be traced to hunting season, patriotism and bad mothers.
But go to Chicago or Baltimore. Go where the killings really happen and the illusion comes apart.
There is a war going on in America between gangs of young men who bear an uncanny resemblance to their counterparts in Sierra Leone or El Salvador. They live like them, they fight for control of the streets like them and they kill like them.
America’s horrific murder rate is a result of the transformation of major American cities into Sierra Leone, Somalia, Rwanda and El Salvador. Gun violence largely consists of criminals killing criminals.
As David Kennedy, the head of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control, put it, "The majority of homicide victims have extensive criminal histories. This is simply the way that the world of criminal homicide works. It's a fact.”
America is, on a county by county basis, not a violent country, just as it, on a county by county basis, did not vote for Obama. It is being dragged down by broken cities full of broken families whose mayors would like to trash the Bill of Rights for the entire country in the vain hope that national gun control will save their cities, even though gun control is likely to be as much help to Chicago or New Orleans as the War on Drugs.
Obama’s pretense that there needs to be a national conversation about rural American gun owners is a dishonest and cynical ploy that distracts attention from the real problem that he and politicians like him have sat on for generations.
America does not have a gun problem. Its problem is in the broken culture of cities administered by Democrats. We do not need to have a conversation about gun violence. We need to have a conversation about Chicago. We need to have a conversation about what the Democrats have done to our cities.
Sultan Knish
America's mass shooting capital isn't somewhere out west where you can get a gun at the corner store. It's in Obama's own hometown.
Chicago is America's mass shooting capital. There were over 400 shootings with more than one victim. In 95 of those shootings, 3 or more people were shot.
2,995 people were shot in Chicago last year. Shootings were up, way up, in Baltimore. With an assist from Al Sharpton and #BlackLivesMatter, Baltimore beat out Detroit. But Detroit is still in the running. Chicago, Baltimore and Detroit all have something in common, they're all run by the party of gun control which somehow can't seem to manage to control the criminals who have the guns.
The murder rate in Washington, D.C., home of the progressive boys and girls who can solve it all, is up 54%. The capital of the national bureaucracy has also been the country's murder capital.
These cities are the heartland of America’s real gun culture. It isn’t the bitter gun-and-bible clingers in McCain and Romney territory who are racking up a more horrifying annual kill rate than Al Qaeda; it’s Obama’s own voting base.
Gun violence is at its worst in the cities that Obama won in 2012. Places like New Orleans, Memphis, Birmingham, St. Louis, Kansas City and Philly. The Democrats are blaming Republicans for the crimes of their own voters.
Chicago, where Obama delivered his victory speech, has homicide numbers that match all of Japan and are higher than Spain, Poland and pre-war Syria. If Chicago gets any worse, it will find itself passing the number of murders for the entire country of Canada.
Chicago’s murder rate of 15.09 per 100,000 people looks nothing like the American 4.2 rate, but it does look like the murder rates in failed countries like Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe. To achieve Chicago’s murder rate, African countries usually have to experience a bloody genocidal civil war.
But Chicago isn’t even all that unique. Or the worst case scenario. That would be St. Louis with 50 murders for 100,000 people. If St Louis were a country, it would have the 4th highest murder rate in the world, beating out Jamaica, El Salvador and Rwanda.
Obama won St. Louis 82 to 16 percent.
New Orleans lags behind with a 39.6 murder rate. Louisiana went red for Romney 58 to 40, but Orleans Parish went blue for Obama 80 to 17. Obama won both St. Louis and Baltimore by comfortable margins. He won Detroit’s Wayne County 73 to 26.
Homicide rates like these show that something is broken, but it isn’t broken among Republican voters rushing to stock up on rifles every time Obama begins threatening their right to buy them; it’s broken among Obama’s base.
Any serious conversation about gun violence and gun culture has to begin at home; in Chicago, in Baltimore, in New York City, in Los Angeles and in Washington, D.C.
Voting for Obama does not make people innately homicidal. Just look at Seattle. So what is happening in Chicago to drive it to the gates of hell?
A breakdown of the Chicago killing fields shows that 83% of those murdered in Chicago in one year had criminal records. In Philly, it’s 75%. In Milwaukee it’s 77% percent. In New Orleans, it’s 64%. In Baltimore, it’s 91%. Many were felons who had served time. And as many as 80% of the homicides were gang related.
Chicago’s problem isn’t guns; it’s gangs. Gun control efforts in Chicago or any other major city are doomed because gangs represent organized crime networks which stretch down to Mexico. And Democrats pander to those gangs because it helps them get elected. That's why Federal gun prosecutions in Chicago dropped sharply under Obama. It's why he has set free drug dealers and gang members to deal and kill while convening town halls on gun violence.
America’s murder rate isn’t the work of the suburban and rural homeowners who shop for guns at sporting goods stores and at gun shows, and whom the media profiles after every shooting, but by the gangs embedded in urban areas controlled by Democrats. The gangs who drive up America’s murder rate look nothing like the occasional mentally ill suburban white kid who goes off his medication and decides to shoot up a school. Lanza, like most serial killers, is a media aberration, not the norm.
National murder statistics show that blacks are far more likely to be killers than whites and they are also far more likely to be killed. The single largest cause of homicides is the argument. 4th on the list is juvenile gang activity with 676 murders, which combined with various flavors of gangland killings takes us nearly to the 1,000 mark. America has more gangland murders than Sierra Leone, Eritrea and Puerto Rico have murders.
Our national murder rate is not some incomprehensible mystery that can only be attributed to the inanimate tools, the steel, brass and wood that do the work. It is largely the work of adult males from age 18 to 39 with criminal records killing other males of that same age and criminal past.
If this were going on in Rwanda, El Salvador or Sierra Leone, we would have no trouble knowing what to make of it, and silly pearl-clutching nonsense about gun control would never even come up. But this is Chicago, it’s Baltimore, it’s Philly and NOLA; and so we refuse to see that our major cities are in the same boat as some of the worst trouble spots in the world.
Lanza and Newtown are comforting aberrations. They allow us to take refuge in the fantasy that homicides in America are the work of the occasional serial killer practicing his dark art in one of those perfect small towns that always show up in murder mysteries or Stephen King novels. They fool us into thinking that there is something American about our murder rate that can be traced to hunting season, patriotism and bad mothers.
But go to Chicago or Baltimore. Go where the killings really happen and the illusion comes apart.
There is a war going on in America between gangs of young men who bear an uncanny resemblance to their counterparts in Sierra Leone or El Salvador. They live like them, they fight for control of the streets like them and they kill like them.
America’s horrific murder rate is a result of the transformation of major American cities into Sierra Leone, Somalia, Rwanda and El Salvador. Gun violence largely consists of criminals killing criminals.
As David Kennedy, the head of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control, put it, "The majority of homicide victims have extensive criminal histories. This is simply the way that the world of criminal homicide works. It's a fact.”
America is, on a county by county basis, not a violent country, just as it, on a county by county basis, did not vote for Obama. It is being dragged down by broken cities full of broken families whose mayors would like to trash the Bill of Rights for the entire country in the vain hope that national gun control will save their cities, even though gun control is likely to be as much help to Chicago or New Orleans as the War on Drugs.
Obama’s pretense that there needs to be a national conversation about rural American gun owners is a dishonest and cynical ploy that distracts attention from the real problem that he and politicians like him have sat on for generations.
America does not have a gun problem. Its problem is in the broken culture of cities administered by Democrats. We do not need to have a conversation about gun violence. We need to have a conversation about Chicago. We need to have a conversation about what the Democrats have done to our cities.
Sultan Knish
Saturday, December 6, 2014
Tuesday, September 23, 2014
Saturday, November 2, 2013
Left-Wing Activists Try to Use Fast & Furious to Push Gun Control
Left-wing activists and officials within President Barack Obama’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), part of Attorney General Eric Holder’s Department of Justice (DOJ), attempted this week to reframe Operation Fast and Furious as a problem with America’s gun laws.
“Stricter U.S. gun measures are needed to stem the flow of guns to Mexico, where the weapons are fueling violence and leaving people ‘under siege’ with little hope of help from their government, activists said
Thursday,” according to Chad Garland of Cronkite News. “In addition to tougher laws, they called for tougher enforcement by federal officials, who they say have been reluctant to act since the fallout from Operation Fast and Furious, the failed ‘gun-walking’ operation by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.”
Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), a member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and a leader of the ongoing congressional investigation into Operation Fast and Furious, told Breitbart News on Friday that such an argument is ludicrous. “Restricting the constitutional rights of law abiding citizens will never serve as a deterrent for criminals intent on committing future crimes,” Gosar said in an email.
In Operation Fast and Furious, several “straw purchasers”—people who work for the Mexican drug cartels’ American-based weapons smugglers—bought guns in the U.S. which were then smuggled into Mexico. ATF agents, at the direction of supervisors within the agency, allowed this to happen and directed gun store owners to allow it to continue—a practice known as letting the guns “walk.”
As a result of Fast and Furious, Border Patrol agent Brian Terry and about 300 Mexican nationals have been murdered with the weapons the ATF allowed to “walk” into Mexico. Many of the weapons have still not been recovered years later. The congressional investigation that Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has shown that ATF willingly allowed—and helped facilitate—cartel-affiliated smugglers in their efforts to purchase firearms in the United States and then traffic them into Mexico.
Despite having enough evidence and laws already on the books to arrest and prosecute those so-called “straw purchasers,” documents and congressional testimony shows that ATF agents were ordered to allow the straw purchases to continue without making arrests. Even Holder, who has since been held in both criminal and civil contempt of Congress on a bipartisan basis for his failure to comply with Issa’s subpoenas for more documents, has admitted that the tactics employed in Fast and Furious were wrong.
“That was a fundamentally flawed program, fundamentally flawed,” Holder said in a February 2012 budget hearing when responding to a question about Fast and Furious. “And, I think that I can agree with some of my harshest critics that there are legitimate issues that need to be explored with regard in which the way Fast and Furious was carried out.”
Holder still denies having known about the tactics at the time but will not share all the requested documents with Congress.
Garland quoted an official from ATF, Phoenix-based Special Agent Thomas Mangan: “By no means are we turning our back or turning a blind eye... Trying to stem that flood of guns and that iron river of guns… and trying to keep ahead of the techniques and tactics that these criminal organizations are using in obtaining guns is ever-evolving.”
Mangan’s comments were in a response to a forum that the far-left Center for American Progress (CAP) hosted at George Washington University (GWU) on Thursday. CAP’s Associate Director of Crime and Firearms Policy, Chelsea Parsons, reportedly said that part of the reason why things like Operation Fast and Furious happened and the reason why U.S. guns are found at Mexican crime scenes is because it is “easy and legal to buy [guns] without a background check.”
“Parsons called for universal background checks and tougher sanctions on straw purchasers to ‘make it worthwhile’ for law enforcement to prosecute the ‘little fish’ in gun-trafficking operations,” Garland explained. “She also pointed to the cartels’ creativity in evading customs inspections to smuggle guns into Mexico."
In response to left-wing groups now trying to use Fast and Furious to promote gun control efforts, Gosar ripped CAP for not attempting to hold Holder accountable for his actions in Fast and Furious and the subsequent congressional investigation. "It sounds like the agenda of this forum, and the personal agenda of some of its organizers, was to talk about the need for stricter gun laws,” Gosar told Breitbart News. “Where has the Center for American Progress been in the fight to hold Attorney General Holder responsible for his role in Fast and Furious and the deaths of hundreds of Mexicans and U.S. Border Patrol Agent Terry?"
“These groups want to have it both ways; call for tougher penalties for gun crimes then turn a blind eye to the gun crimes committed under Holder's watch,” Gosar added. “Justice is blind to the partisan agenda of these gun grabbing groups. The victims' families deserve better.”
Garland also quoted a Jesuit priest from Mexico, Rev. Javier Avila, who serves as the president of the Commission of Solidarity and Defense of Human Rights in Chihuahua, Mexico. Avila said violence resulting from ATF’s gun walking and other cartel activity is brutal in Mexico. “You lose someone in a terrible way and nothing happens,” Avila said. “Young people massacred, mothers disappeared, children disappeared, husbands, wives disappeared.”
Gosar told Breitbart News that he wants “Rev. Avila and the people of Mexico to know our nation joins theirs to mourn the innocent lives lost through gun crimes. This is why it is so important we seek justice and accountability for those responsible for Fast and Furious," he explained. "Our government armed the violent criminals responsible for these deaths and no one wants to take responsibility. This is why I continue to push for Attorney General Holder’s resignation.”
Gosar has a resolution in the House of Representatives calling for Holder to resign his position over Operation Fast and Furious. Holder remains in both criminal and civil contempt of Congress, but Holder’s subordinate, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Ron Machen, refuses to prosecute Holder on the criminal contempt resolution. As a result, House Republicans, led by Issa’s committee, have fought against the Obama administration in court for the release of the documents it is continuing to withhold from Congress and the American people.
President Obama asserted executive privilege over the documents last year. Obama is asserting the lower of two executive privilege forms, deliberative process privilege rather than presidential communications privilege. If Obama asserted the higher form, it would have meant that either he or his senior White House staff was aware of the gun walking tactics employed in Operation Fast and Furious, something that both Obama and Holder have denied.
A federal judge recently allowed the House oversight committee’s lawsuit against the administration and the president’s claim of executive privilege to proceed, despite calls for dismissal from Holder's DOJ.
Traditionally, deliberative process executive privilege claims are considered invalid with even the suspicion of any government wrongdoing. In this case, the administration has admitted wrongdoing with regards to the tactics employed during Operation Fast and Furious and in how the Justice Department misled Congress with a false statement when first confronted about the scandal in early 2011.
The administration has since withdrawn that false statement and admitted it provided inaccurate information
to Congress.
Sen. Grassley told this reporter last year that if the federal judge in the case does not overturn the privilege claim, it would be "the most sweeping abuse of executive privilege in the history of executive privilege."
The Obama administration has also been reportedly holding up the publication of ATF Special Agent John Dodson’s tell-all book on Fast and Furious. Dodson was the original whistleblower who brought this scandal to the attention of Congress.
Big Government
Friday, June 7, 2013
The Schools' Sinister War on Guns
June 7, 2013
By Selwyn Duke
Call it living in Upside-down Land or the realization of the Bible's prediction of a time when bad will be called good and good, bad, but once again innocent schoolchildren have been persecuted for, well, just being children. This time the offender was Chase Lake Elementary School (CLES) in Edmonds, WA, where some kids were suspended for using Nerf guns on school grounds. And it's an all-too-common story. A child will be punished for drawing a gun, shaping his fingers as one and saying "bang!" merely talking about guns or some other innocuous action. And recently there was a case of a five-year-old boy who brought a cap gun to school to show a friend and then was interrogated for two hours until he wet his pants. It's all very bizarre and very twisted.
In the Edmonds case, the children were told that they could bring the toys to school, but I'm not interested in individual details but deeper matters. And make no mistake, something deeper is afoot here.
To introduce this, let's start with another common thread in these cases: the reaction of the persecuted children's parents. While they're always upset about the relatively draconian punishment visited upon their kids, their comments often reflect those of Edmonds mother Stacey Leidholm, who addressed her son's suspension and marred permanent record and said "I do understand that they definitely need consequences, but not that harsh of a consequence."
Let's stop right there. Why do they "need consequences"? This isn't a matter of simply having to respect the rules even if you disagree with them, since "with toy or facsimile guns, discipline is handed out at the discretion of the principal," writes KomoNews.com. Moreover, consequences imply a transgression, but what's wrong with playing with toy guns? It's not as if these brightly-colored toys could be mistaken for real guns, and playing with them is certainly less likely to cause injury than is playing baseball or most any other sport. So what danger is posed by the possession of toy guns on school grounds?
Before I get to that, a bit of history. Not that long ago it was common for boys to bring guns to school, as they might have target shooting afterwards; this was even the case in New York City in the 1940s and '50s, where kids would often ride the subways with their guns. And while this no longer occurred when I attended school in the Bronx in the '70s, no school official even batted an eye at our bringing toy guns to school. That was just what little boys did. Clearly, something has changed in society -- and it isn't the availability of guns or little boys' desire to play with them.
The obvious answer here is that the last two decades' school shootings and our civilization's general moral decline have changed the equation. But while this would explain the desire to keep students with real firearms off school grounds, there is no logical reason to apply this to toy guns. Saying otherwise is like claiming that because you wouldn't trust an 11-year-old to drive the family car to school, you won't let him bring toy cars with him, either; or that he won't be allowed to possess toy airplanes because he isn't ready to pilot a 747 for Delta. The same applies to the argument that bringing toy guns to school makes the leap to bringing real ones that much shorter; it's as nonsensical as saying that junior is more likely to steal the family sedan if you let him play with Matchbox cars.
Of course, there is the paranoia explanation: the school shootings have made people so fearful that anything smacking of firearms is reflexively rejected. And I'm sure this is a factor -- but I'm also sure there's more to it. What is it?
Conditioning.
Many have posited the theory that the goal here is to raise generations amenable to strict gun control by instilling the young with negative attitudes toward firearms. And how better to do this than with swift and sure punishment for anything that evidences even the thought of a gun? Doodle a firearm, point your fingers like one -- anything at all -- and, bang!, you suffer for your wrong thinking. Think doubleplusgood thoughts, little boy, about flowers and kittens and rainbows and what gender you want to be -- and be a good subject. And should a child be a tad recalcitrant, nothing creates negative associations with firearms like a two-hour, pants-wetting interrogation at the age of five.
(By the way, it's funny how leftists who would outlaw a 30-second spanking will then commit horrendous psychological and emotional child abuse. Hey, nothing convinces a situational-values libtard of the value of punishment like a person in need of reeducation.)
To buttress this theory, please consider this 1990s video of our beloved attorney general, Eric Withholder.
He outlines a plan for combating violence and says:
But then there are millions of other sheeple, caught in the Matrix, who simply enforce these rules because they exist. As to this, I called CLES and asked someone in community relations the following: "How does the possession of toy guns on school grounds pose a threat?" After giving me a non-answer and then my having to rephrase the question once or twice, the school official seemed genuinely flummoxed and said that she would have to consult the literature and get back to me. An unthinking drone.
But the question is, are the rest of us going to be sheeple as well? If not, there are things we can and should do to counter the schools' war on guns and tradition. First, parents should organize, pick up their children from an offending school with toy guns in hand, and play a visible shoot-'em-up game on school grounds. I'm serious. It's called desensitization. Moreover, it tells the children in the strongest way possible that there is nothing wrong with toy-gun play. And if the schools are trying to condition your kids the wrong way, why not condition them the right way?
Then there is the stick. The reason insanity keeps occurring at schools and elsewhere is that leftists are never held accountable. But here we must take a leaf out of their book. When someone transgresses against their politically correct code -- think Jimmy "the Greek" Snyder, Don Imus, or James Watson here -- an apology won't suffice.
The left wants the person destroyed.
So follow suit. Don't be like a certain popular cable-news host who is wont to say "I don't want to see the ____ (the tyrant du jour) lose his job." Make sure a school official who commits leftist abuse upon a child never works again. Go for the jugular, for the kill shot; give no quarter. Go Roman. It's only when thousands of the thought police's decaying corpses of careers are lining the Apian Way that those in darkness will see the light. The Culture War is just that -- a war. And if you want to turn it around, this must be your mindset -- every day, every way, every school, at every level.
Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on Twitter or log on to SelwynDuke.com
By Selwyn Duke
Call it living in Upside-down Land or the realization of the Bible's prediction of a time when bad will be called good and good, bad, but once again innocent schoolchildren have been persecuted for, well, just being children. This time the offender was Chase Lake Elementary School (CLES) in Edmonds, WA, where some kids were suspended for using Nerf guns on school grounds. And it's an all-too-common story. A child will be punished for drawing a gun, shaping his fingers as one and saying "bang!" merely talking about guns or some other innocuous action. And recently there was a case of a five-year-old boy who brought a cap gun to school to show a friend and then was interrogated for two hours until he wet his pants. It's all very bizarre and very twisted.
In the Edmonds case, the children were told that they could bring the toys to school, but I'm not interested in individual details but deeper matters. And make no mistake, something deeper is afoot here.
To introduce this, let's start with another common thread in these cases: the reaction of the persecuted children's parents. While they're always upset about the relatively draconian punishment visited upon their kids, their comments often reflect those of Edmonds mother Stacey Leidholm, who addressed her son's suspension and marred permanent record and said "I do understand that they definitely need consequences, but not that harsh of a consequence."
Let's stop right there. Why do they "need consequences"? This isn't a matter of simply having to respect the rules even if you disagree with them, since "with toy or facsimile guns, discipline is handed out at the discretion of the principal," writes KomoNews.com. Moreover, consequences imply a transgression, but what's wrong with playing with toy guns? It's not as if these brightly-colored toys could be mistaken for real guns, and playing with them is certainly less likely to cause injury than is playing baseball or most any other sport. So what danger is posed by the possession of toy guns on school grounds?
Before I get to that, a bit of history. Not that long ago it was common for boys to bring guns to school, as they might have target shooting afterwards; this was even the case in New York City in the 1940s and '50s, where kids would often ride the subways with their guns. And while this no longer occurred when I attended school in the Bronx in the '70s, no school official even batted an eye at our bringing toy guns to school. That was just what little boys did. Clearly, something has changed in society -- and it isn't the availability of guns or little boys' desire to play with them.
The obvious answer here is that the last two decades' school shootings and our civilization's general moral decline have changed the equation. But while this would explain the desire to keep students with real firearms off school grounds, there is no logical reason to apply this to toy guns. Saying otherwise is like claiming that because you wouldn't trust an 11-year-old to drive the family car to school, you won't let him bring toy cars with him, either; or that he won't be allowed to possess toy airplanes because he isn't ready to pilot a 747 for Delta. The same applies to the argument that bringing toy guns to school makes the leap to bringing real ones that much shorter; it's as nonsensical as saying that junior is more likely to steal the family sedan if you let him play with Matchbox cars.
Of course, there is the paranoia explanation: the school shootings have made people so fearful that anything smacking of firearms is reflexively rejected. And I'm sure this is a factor -- but I'm also sure there's more to it. What is it?
Conditioning.
Many have posited the theory that the goal here is to raise generations amenable to strict gun control by instilling the young with negative attitudes toward firearms. And how better to do this than with swift and sure punishment for anything that evidences even the thought of a gun? Doodle a firearm, point your fingers like one -- anything at all -- and, bang!, you suffer for your wrong thinking. Think doubleplusgood thoughts, little boy, about flowers and kittens and rainbows and what gender you want to be -- and be a good subject. And should a child be a tad recalcitrant, nothing creates negative associations with firearms like a two-hour, pants-wetting interrogation at the age of five.
(By the way, it's funny how leftists who would outlaw a 30-second spanking will then commit horrendous psychological and emotional child abuse. Hey, nothing convinces a situational-values libtard of the value of punishment like a person in need of reeducation.)
To buttress this theory, please consider this 1990s video of our beloved attorney general, Eric Withholder.
He outlines a plan for combating violence and says:
What we need to do is change the way people think about guns -- especially young people -- and make it something that's not cool; that it's not acceptable, it's not hip to carry a gun anymore, in the way that we've changed out attitudes about cigarettes. ...Over time we changed the way people thought about smoking, so now we have people who cower outside of buildings and kind of smoke in private and don't want to admit it. And that's what I think we need to do with guns. ...I've asked that the creative community in Washington... devote [their] talent in a more constructive way, so we can get at the minds of these young people. .... People who have credibility with young people should be on the television, on the radio...and telling these youngsters that it's wrong to carry a gun.... I've also asked the school board to make a part of every day some kind of anti-violence, anti-gun message; every day, every school at every level. One thing that I think is clear with young people, and with adults as well, is that we have to be repetitive about this.... We need to do this every day of the week and just really brainwash people into thinking about guns in a vastly different way [emphasis added].Now, I don't imply this is a grand conspiracy. It doesn't have to be when you have millions of like-minded people who, being fellow travelers, all act in similar ways quite instinctively. Sure, there are puppet masters in the vanguard of these movements who create policy (like the zero-tolerance nonsense) and who purposely effect Machiavellian designs, but they are mere catalysts. Of course, there are many others -- teachers and administrators (mostly women) -- who instinctively dislike guns, or fear them, and for this reason are inclined to carry out these policies and punish a wrong-thinking child harshly. But theirs is more an emotional reaction, as opposed to the colder, more insidious, Luciferian motives of the world's Withholders.
But then there are millions of other sheeple, caught in the Matrix, who simply enforce these rules because they exist. As to this, I called CLES and asked someone in community relations the following: "How does the possession of toy guns on school grounds pose a threat?" After giving me a non-answer and then my having to rephrase the question once or twice, the school official seemed genuinely flummoxed and said that she would have to consult the literature and get back to me. An unthinking drone.
But the question is, are the rest of us going to be sheeple as well? If not, there are things we can and should do to counter the schools' war on guns and tradition. First, parents should organize, pick up their children from an offending school with toy guns in hand, and play a visible shoot-'em-up game on school grounds. I'm serious. It's called desensitization. Moreover, it tells the children in the strongest way possible that there is nothing wrong with toy-gun play. And if the schools are trying to condition your kids the wrong way, why not condition them the right way?
Then there is the stick. The reason insanity keeps occurring at schools and elsewhere is that leftists are never held accountable. But here we must take a leaf out of their book. When someone transgresses against their politically correct code -- think Jimmy "the Greek" Snyder, Don Imus, or James Watson here -- an apology won't suffice.
The left wants the person destroyed.
So follow suit. Don't be like a certain popular cable-news host who is wont to say "I don't want to see the ____ (the tyrant du jour) lose his job." Make sure a school official who commits leftist abuse upon a child never works again. Go for the jugular, for the kill shot; give no quarter. Go Roman. It's only when thousands of the thought police's decaying corpses of careers are lining the Apian Way that those in darkness will see the light. The Culture War is just that -- a war. And if you want to turn it around, this must be your mindset -- every day, every way, every school, at every level.
Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on Twitter or log on to SelwynDuke.com
American Thinker
Saturday, May 4, 2013
Saturday, April 27, 2013
The Most Effective, Logical Solution: Arming School Staff
By Mike McDaniel
Only one question matters in the school violence debate: when a shooter is attempting to enter a school, what will be done to protect the lives of students and staff?
Asking what can be done to prevent mass school shootings is a secondary matter. Honest commentators — with the background and experience to know what they’re talking about — should be aware that in a constitutional republic, school shootings cannot be altogether prevented, and that gun control can have no effect. The worst school attack in history — in Beslan, Chechnya, leaving 300 dead and 700 injured — took place in a liberty-restricted state with democratic pretensions. Deterrence is possible, but not with past or current policies; the actual defense of the school during an incident is the heart of the debate.
At enormous expense, schools can be hardened, which may help to deter some potential killers, and which may slow down, to some degree, less intelligent and prepared killers. Unfortunately, “slow down” implies seconds, not minutes. Equally unfortunate: the money necessary to harden schools to the point of truly credible deterrence that could slow or stop killers to any meaningful degree is not available during the Obama economy.
Just recently, it was revealed that the Sandy Hook Elementary School killer needed only five minutes to shoot his way into the school and murder 20 children and six adults before killing himself. This fact is fodder for those wishing to ban “assault weapons” and standard capacity magazines so that future killers with five minutes will require a few seconds longer, or might only be able to kill 20 rather than 26. They miss the point, and many intentionally ignore more sensible proposals.
Former Navy SEAL and current educator John A. Czajkowski proposes a solution that embraces the recommendation of the NRA: place armed security in every one of the 100,000-plus American schools.
However, he generally opposes the arming of school staff:
When school design, security cameras, hardened doors and glass, magnetic door locks, and every other security measure have failed — as they did at Sandy Hook — and when a killer is seconds from firing, what is that school prepared to do at that moment to prevent any loss of life? Unless they are taking affirmative steps to arm staff so multiple people will always be present and prepared to immediately engage an armed attacker, the schools tacitly admit they are willing to accept a death toll of some size. This, in exchange for “feeling safe” rather than being safe.
NRA chief Wayne LaPierre and Czajkowski’s approach — using trained, armed personnel focused on school security — is not unreasonable, but it is impractical and embraces several faulty assumptions.
La Pierre would even demand federal funds for the purpose. Even so, some schools — usually larger high schools and some middle schools — do have school “resource” or “liaison” officers, who are usually certified law enforcement officers provided by local agencies. Some schools share an officer from time to time, but most schools have none. This is so for practical and insurmountable reasons. Moreover, those few officers do not function as most of those supporting this concept believe.
These officers are essentially small-town police, responsible for all law enforcement functions in and around their assigned schools. They are generally present only during normal school hours, but must be absent for a wide variety of reasons: court, job-related errands, transporting arrestees, mandatory training, medical appointments, and vacation. At those times, they are virtually never replaced, and they are seldom present for extracurricular activities.
Further, it is not their job to principally focus on building security. And because there is only one of them per school — if that — the chance they will be present at the time and place an attack occurs is small. If no one else is armed, they are better than nothing, but are not the answer.
Most schools don’t have these liaison officers and never will; it’s too expensive. Their salaries, whether paid by their agency, their school, or some combination, come from the taxpayers, an increasingly scarce funding source. Affordably putting more of them in schools is wishful thinking.
As an educator, I deal with colleagues who recoil at the idea of armed police officers in school, as though the mere presence of authority, particularly armed authority, somehow poisons a mystically pristine educational atmosphere. I have heard others argue that teachers are untrained and unqualified to carry firearms, and as such would be tempted to misuse them, or would be more likely to harm themselves, or others, or to be shot by the police in a school attack. I have heard some argue that students will steal teachers’ guns.
However, the most fervent argument I’ve encountered — and only after the Newtown shooting — suggests that teachers must focus 100% of their energy and attention exclusively on teaching. Therefore, they cannot be expected to assume the same duties as school liaison officers, including engaging and stopping school shooters.
Some have gone so far as to suggest that teachers would be particularly bad at even recognizing that a shooting was happening, so oblivious to their surroundings does teaching make them.
This misconception is a related to the idea that anyone carrying a gun on school grounds must be trained to the same level — and must assume the same focus and duties — as a certified police officer, or else they are a tragedy waiting to happen.
No. Armed school staff should have precisely the same duties and responsibilities as any citizen with a concealed carry permit.
They are responsible for keeping their weapon safe, secure, and concealed, and on their person at all times.
A handgun locked in a desk or in an armory in a principal’s office suite is of no use to a teacher meeting an armed killer in a hallway or on a playground.
Above all, they will know to use their handgun only in circumstances where it is necessary to stop the imminent threat of serious bodily harm or death to themselves or others. And that is all.
Police officers undergo lengthy and rigorous training because their jobs encompass far more than this simple directive, whereas armed citizens and teachers need know only two primary things: the law relating to the possession and use of deadly force, and how to shoot straight.
Additional training along these lines is desirable, but if required, will prevent some teachers from being able to save their lives and the lives of students.
The entry qualification should be precisely the same as for any concealed carry license holder. Teachers should in fact be already almost entirely qualified, for like license holders, they have been fingerprinted, photographed, and undergone extensive background checks.
Unlike license holders, they must have at minimum a bachelor’s degree, and must undergo additional extensive testing. The only qualification most teachers lack would be any state-required training course or shooting qualification.
A cornerstone of this policy must be correct publicity. Making the public aware a given school district allows and encourages its staff to carry concealed weapons confers on every school, whether anyone is carrying or not, the benefits of deterrence.
Properly chosen by and for individuals, concealed handguns are quite invisible: this is another strength of concealed carry. Because no criminal can know who is carrying a handgun, they must assume that everyone could be. Just about anywhere in America except schools, this is also the case.
Consider the cognitive dissonance of those who argue that teachers can’t be expected to take extra time to qualify for concealed carry: recall that they already spend hours on “run and hide” drills, hiding students behind locked and easily breached doors to fearfully wait and hope that a killer will not find them. This dependence on the lack of competence and marksmanship of madmen (as well as their mercy) is not a strategy.
Consider too those who argue that teachers aren’t smart enough to understand what is happening, and will thereby shoot innocents. When a school attack occurs, and this was very much the case at Sandy Hook Elementary, the victims knew exactly what was going on. When the killer was shooting his way into the school, if one or more staff had been armed he could have been immediately stopped. No one had to die that day; no one has to die in any school.
The idea that teachers’ guns will be stolen and misused, while possible, is hardly a reasonable argument for failing to protect lives: all of life is a matter of balancing benefits and risks. Fortunately, there is an experience model. Utah has for many years allowed teachers to carry handguns: there has not been a single instance of such misuse. Texas also allows it, and South Dakota has recently passed a law allowing on-campus concealed carry. Other states are considering legislation.
What about the argument that teachers can’t shoot straight? It’s not well-known, but the police are hardly firearm experts. They are required to qualify only once a year on less-than-demanding courses of fire with equally non-demanding qualifying scores. Many citizens surpass the police in shooting skill. Wearing a uniform and badge does not confer magical shooting skills beyond the capability of the private citizen.
Consider the plight of teachers holding concealed carry licenses. Off of school property, their inalienable natural right to self-defense is operative. They may protect the lives of themselves and their children, at home and anywhere they may be. But step on school property, and due to those that claim to be most concerned with protecting children, they and their children lose the affirmative means to preserve their lives. Are the lives of teachers and children worth less on school property than off?
In any school attack, two things matter most: time and distance. Armed killers have the advantage of both.
Every second matters, and time is not on the side of victims or the police. At Newtown, a life was lost approximately every 11.5 seconds. From the time the killer shot his way into the school until he shot himself, only five minutes elapsed, but it took the first police officer 20 minutes to arrive. This is normal, and must be expected in the future: in virtually every school shooting, the police have had no active role in stopping the shooter.
Even if the Newtown police had arrived within five minutes, they still would have had no role in stopping the killer.
If there is no one present to immediately engage and stop a school shooter, the only factors determining the eventual body count will be the killer’s lack of marksmanship and dumb luck. Depending on the mercy of a madman, or luck, for the lives of innocents is quite insane. Even an armed teacher running from one hallway to the next to engage a shooter is far preferable than waiting for police that will virtually never arrive in time, and will be summoned only after some children and teachers are already wounded or dead.
One may conjure any number of objections to allowing armed teachers and school staff, but every possible objection can be addressed with proper — and inexpensive — procedures and training. The undeniably positive benefits of armed teachers, people always present and always ready and able to stop armed killers, greatly outweigh any potential objection. Which possible negative consequence outweighs the preservation of innocent lives?
Consider Virginia Tech spokesman Larry Hincker, commenting on the defeat in the legislature — only a short time before the attack — of a bill that would have allowed students and faculty to carry firearms on campus. He said:
PJ Media
Only one question matters in the school violence debate: when a shooter is attempting to enter a school, what will be done to protect the lives of students and staff?
Asking what can be done to prevent mass school shootings is a secondary matter. Honest commentators — with the background and experience to know what they’re talking about — should be aware that in a constitutional republic, school shootings cannot be altogether prevented, and that gun control can have no effect. The worst school attack in history — in Beslan, Chechnya, leaving 300 dead and 700 injured — took place in a liberty-restricted state with democratic pretensions. Deterrence is possible, but not with past or current policies; the actual defense of the school during an incident is the heart of the debate.
At enormous expense, schools can be hardened, which may help to deter some potential killers, and which may slow down, to some degree, less intelligent and prepared killers. Unfortunately, “slow down” implies seconds, not minutes. Equally unfortunate: the money necessary to harden schools to the point of truly credible deterrence that could slow or stop killers to any meaningful degree is not available during the Obama economy.
Just recently, it was revealed that the Sandy Hook Elementary School killer needed only five minutes to shoot his way into the school and murder 20 children and six adults before killing himself. This fact is fodder for those wishing to ban “assault weapons” and standard capacity magazines so that future killers with five minutes will require a few seconds longer, or might only be able to kill 20 rather than 26. They miss the point, and many intentionally ignore more sensible proposals.
Former Navy SEAL and current educator John A. Czajkowski proposes a solution that embraces the recommendation of the NRA: place armed security in every one of the 100,000-plus American schools.
However, he generally opposes the arming of school staff:
Although I grew up very comfortable with the responsible use of firearms as a boy and then later professionally, I still can’t support arming teachers first when there are still so many other more proactive opportunities for improving our security. Arming teachers is far down my list of recommendations for improving security, per balancing return on investment and risk assessment. Although I am entirely comfortable with the idea at a personal level, the difficulty of applying Kant’s universal imperative makes me hesitate to adopt an armed teacher paradigm.Only one policy can credibly deter school shooters, will cost little or nothing, and will provide the maximum chance to limit — or even to eliminate — the loss of life when an attack on a school occurs: arming school staff.
When school design, security cameras, hardened doors and glass, magnetic door locks, and every other security measure have failed — as they did at Sandy Hook — and when a killer is seconds from firing, what is that school prepared to do at that moment to prevent any loss of life? Unless they are taking affirmative steps to arm staff so multiple people will always be present and prepared to immediately engage an armed attacker, the schools tacitly admit they are willing to accept a death toll of some size. This, in exchange for “feeling safe” rather than being safe.
NRA chief Wayne LaPierre and Czajkowski’s approach — using trained, armed personnel focused on school security — is not unreasonable, but it is impractical and embraces several faulty assumptions.
La Pierre would even demand federal funds for the purpose. Even so, some schools — usually larger high schools and some middle schools — do have school “resource” or “liaison” officers, who are usually certified law enforcement officers provided by local agencies. Some schools share an officer from time to time, but most schools have none. This is so for practical and insurmountable reasons. Moreover, those few officers do not function as most of those supporting this concept believe.
These officers are essentially small-town police, responsible for all law enforcement functions in and around their assigned schools. They are generally present only during normal school hours, but must be absent for a wide variety of reasons: court, job-related errands, transporting arrestees, mandatory training, medical appointments, and vacation. At those times, they are virtually never replaced, and they are seldom present for extracurricular activities.
Further, it is not their job to principally focus on building security. And because there is only one of them per school — if that — the chance they will be present at the time and place an attack occurs is small. If no one else is armed, they are better than nothing, but are not the answer.
Most schools don’t have these liaison officers and never will; it’s too expensive. Their salaries, whether paid by their agency, their school, or some combination, come from the taxpayers, an increasingly scarce funding source. Affordably putting more of them in schools is wishful thinking.
As an educator, I deal with colleagues who recoil at the idea of armed police officers in school, as though the mere presence of authority, particularly armed authority, somehow poisons a mystically pristine educational atmosphere. I have heard others argue that teachers are untrained and unqualified to carry firearms, and as such would be tempted to misuse them, or would be more likely to harm themselves, or others, or to be shot by the police in a school attack. I have heard some argue that students will steal teachers’ guns.
However, the most fervent argument I’ve encountered — and only after the Newtown shooting — suggests that teachers must focus 100% of their energy and attention exclusively on teaching. Therefore, they cannot be expected to assume the same duties as school liaison officers, including engaging and stopping school shooters.
Some have gone so far as to suggest that teachers would be particularly bad at even recognizing that a shooting was happening, so oblivious to their surroundings does teaching make them.
This misconception is a related to the idea that anyone carrying a gun on school grounds must be trained to the same level — and must assume the same focus and duties — as a certified police officer, or else they are a tragedy waiting to happen.
No. Armed school staff should have precisely the same duties and responsibilities as any citizen with a concealed carry permit.
They are responsible for keeping their weapon safe, secure, and concealed, and on their person at all times.
A handgun locked in a desk or in an armory in a principal’s office suite is of no use to a teacher meeting an armed killer in a hallway or on a playground.
Above all, they will know to use their handgun only in circumstances where it is necessary to stop the imminent threat of serious bodily harm or death to themselves or others. And that is all.
Police officers undergo lengthy and rigorous training because their jobs encompass far more than this simple directive, whereas armed citizens and teachers need know only two primary things: the law relating to the possession and use of deadly force, and how to shoot straight.
Additional training along these lines is desirable, but if required, will prevent some teachers from being able to save their lives and the lives of students.
The entry qualification should be precisely the same as for any concealed carry license holder. Teachers should in fact be already almost entirely qualified, for like license holders, they have been fingerprinted, photographed, and undergone extensive background checks.
Unlike license holders, they must have at minimum a bachelor’s degree, and must undergo additional extensive testing. The only qualification most teachers lack would be any state-required training course or shooting qualification.
A cornerstone of this policy must be correct publicity. Making the public aware a given school district allows and encourages its staff to carry concealed weapons confers on every school, whether anyone is carrying or not, the benefits of deterrence.
Properly chosen by and for individuals, concealed handguns are quite invisible: this is another strength of concealed carry. Because no criminal can know who is carrying a handgun, they must assume that everyone could be. Just about anywhere in America except schools, this is also the case.
Consider the cognitive dissonance of those who argue that teachers can’t be expected to take extra time to qualify for concealed carry: recall that they already spend hours on “run and hide” drills, hiding students behind locked and easily breached doors to fearfully wait and hope that a killer will not find them. This dependence on the lack of competence and marksmanship of madmen (as well as their mercy) is not a strategy.
Consider too those who argue that teachers aren’t smart enough to understand what is happening, and will thereby shoot innocents. When a school attack occurs, and this was very much the case at Sandy Hook Elementary, the victims knew exactly what was going on. When the killer was shooting his way into the school, if one or more staff had been armed he could have been immediately stopped. No one had to die that day; no one has to die in any school.
The idea that teachers’ guns will be stolen and misused, while possible, is hardly a reasonable argument for failing to protect lives: all of life is a matter of balancing benefits and risks. Fortunately, there is an experience model. Utah has for many years allowed teachers to carry handguns: there has not been a single instance of such misuse. Texas also allows it, and South Dakota has recently passed a law allowing on-campus concealed carry. Other states are considering legislation.
What about the argument that teachers can’t shoot straight? It’s not well-known, but the police are hardly firearm experts. They are required to qualify only once a year on less-than-demanding courses of fire with equally non-demanding qualifying scores. Many citizens surpass the police in shooting skill. Wearing a uniform and badge does not confer magical shooting skills beyond the capability of the private citizen.
Consider the plight of teachers holding concealed carry licenses. Off of school property, their inalienable natural right to self-defense is operative. They may protect the lives of themselves and their children, at home and anywhere they may be. But step on school property, and due to those that claim to be most concerned with protecting children, they and their children lose the affirmative means to preserve their lives. Are the lives of teachers and children worth less on school property than off?
In any school attack, two things matter most: time and distance. Armed killers have the advantage of both.
Every second matters, and time is not on the side of victims or the police. At Newtown, a life was lost approximately every 11.5 seconds. From the time the killer shot his way into the school until he shot himself, only five minutes elapsed, but it took the first police officer 20 minutes to arrive. This is normal, and must be expected in the future: in virtually every school shooting, the police have had no active role in stopping the shooter.
Even if the Newtown police had arrived within five minutes, they still would have had no role in stopping the killer.
If there is no one present to immediately engage and stop a school shooter, the only factors determining the eventual body count will be the killer’s lack of marksmanship and dumb luck. Depending on the mercy of a madman, or luck, for the lives of innocents is quite insane. Even an armed teacher running from one hallway to the next to engage a shooter is far preferable than waiting for police that will virtually never arrive in time, and will be summoned only after some children and teachers are already wounded or dead.
One may conjure any number of objections to allowing armed teachers and school staff, but every possible objection can be addressed with proper — and inexpensive — procedures and training. The undeniably positive benefits of armed teachers, people always present and always ready and able to stop armed killers, greatly outweigh any potential objection. Which possible negative consequence outweighs the preservation of innocent lives?
Consider Virginia Tech spokesman Larry Hincker, commenting on the defeat in the legislature — only a short time before the attack — of a bill that would have allowed students and faculty to carry firearms on campus. He said:
I’m sure the university community is appreciative of the General Assembly’s actions because this will help parents, students, faculty and visitors feel safe on our campus.Signs, doors, locks, and good intentions do help some to feel safe, but teachers and staff ready and able to stop killers is actual safety.
PJ Media
Thursday, April 18, 2013
How the Media Blew the Gun Control Debate
18 Apr 2013
With the total and complete defeat of gun control legislation late Wednesday afternoon, the media learned something they had obviously forgotten since pushing Obama over the reelection finish line: They do not run the country. And from what we are seeing across the media landscape since the handing down of this defeat (which was followed by a full-blown presidential hissy fit), this realization has been quite a slap to the face.
With the total and complete defeat of gun control legislation late Wednesday afternoon, the media learned something they had obviously forgotten since pushing Obama over the reelection finish line: They do not run the country. And from what we are seeing across the media landscape since the handing down of this defeat (which was followed by a full-blown presidential hissy fit), this realization has been quite a slap to the face.
The first mistake the media-complex made was the decision to immediately make the National Rifle Association the "Newtown Bogeyman." This happened even before the bodies had been removed and was an immediate "tell" into the media's motives. This wasn't going to be about protecting children; this was going to be yet-another culture war launched to marginalize the dreaded NRA and hand Obama a win.
This was also a media so full of its
own power, they simply assumed they could exploit another tragedy into
yet-another another Us vs. Them cultural victory. Out of the box,
though, the plan was tactically stupid.
But the media's first fatal error wouldn't come for another week.
Wisely, the NRA refused to make any
kind of statement until a week had passed after the murders. During that
time, as they always do during their partisan crusades, the media
ordered up and reported on polls showing that they and Obama happened to
be right about everything related to gun control, and the NRA was "out
of touch."
The media trap had been set and the
knives sharpened. Either the NRA would compromise its beliefs or the
Second Amendment civil rights group would face a savage media campaign
that would push it into the margins. The media were sure they had a
win-win on their hands. But what the media forgot is that Wayne
LaPierre, Executive Vice President and long-time public face of the NRA,
is nobody's fool.
In a masterful speech carried live
across the cable networks, LaPierre completely caught the media off
guard by refusing to budge an inch on America's Second Amendment civil
rights. Immediately, the objective, unbiased, not-at-all-liberal media
collectively bared their corrupt backsides on Twitter, spewing the kind
of partisan hate you might expect from a Daily Kos blogger.
Then LaPierre delivered his
masterstroke: a federal plan that would ensure that someone armed and
trained to stop a spree-shooter, like the one at Newtown, would be on
guard in every school across the nation.
Checkmate.
Caught completely off guard, and having
no idea how to respond, the media moved into the default position they
always assume against all-things conservative --which is that we can
never do anything right. And what followed was the media making an
unbelievable spectacle of themselves, from which they would never
recover.
Blinded by frustration, rage, and an insufferable sense of entitlement, and before finally getting a grip on themselves, the media as a whole would spend the next thirty-six hours mocking, marginalizing, and publicly pushing back against ... guarding schoolchildren against madmen with guns.
Just a week after learning 20
elementary schoolers had been gunned down, the American people watched
as the media savaged a common sense proposal to ensure a Newtown
couldn't happen again -- simply because the NRA proposed it.
It was during these 36 hours, and before tens of millions, that the enraged media got way out over their partisan skis.
Anyone who hadn't already figured out the media were using these dead
children in the most mercenary of ways certainly did now. Poll after poll
would quickly show that Americans favored the NRA plan. Suddenly it was
the NRA on the right side of Newtown, and the media out of touch.
And with that, the slow-motion train wreck got fully underway.
Now that they had fully exposed themselves, and polls were starting to show that the American people were slowly coming
to their senses on gun control, an increasingly desperate media changed
tactics. The new offensive was a two-track attack -- one fraught with
risk -- but one the media obviously thought was worth taking.
Track One -- Emotional Blackmail:
As personified by NBC's Joe Scarborough and CNN's Piers Morgan,
shameless demagoguery was employed. You either agreed with them on gun
control or you wanted children to die and the terrorists to get guns.
Track Two -- Fabricate Reality: As personified by NBC's Chuck Todd and the two days CNN spent lobbying for stricter gun control,
the idea was to narrow-cast the news onto a single subject and direct
it at fewer than 600 people -- the lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Like the
media did with ObamaCare, a propaganda bubble was manufactured to
convince lawmakers that gun control was The Most Important Issue In The
History of the World.
The risk I mentioned above was eternal damage to reputation, which all involved ultimately suffered, especially CNN.
Meanwhile, Democrats only made the
media's job harder. As polls turned against gun control, the actual
legislation became increasingly watered down until it was practically
nonexistent.
Off the table (other than symbolically)
was the assault weapons ban and all the rest. What remained was the
tiniest tweaking of background checks.
But again, faced with this, the media made another tactical error -- and this one would be fatal mistake number two.
Rather than report on the reality of
what was happening -- that Obama and Democrats had lost the country on
their sweeping gun control proposals -- the media (specifically NBC)
moved the political goalposts and immediately went into divisive
partisan mode again, this time with the absurd and totally false claim
that Obama's push for gun control was always about strengthening background checks, and not the rest…
Therefore -- and this is key-- passage
of these stricter background checks would still represent a huge
political win for Obama (and by extension the media) and a historical
defeat for the NRA.
Other than the obvious politicization,
what the media failed to understand here was that the American people
were witnessing Obama and his media place all their chips on a law that
would do absolutely nothing to stop another Newtown. Suddenly gone, as
though it didn’t matter, was anything having to do with mental health or media violence.
In other words, all we had left was a
nothingburger bill designed only to deliver a symbolic political defeat
to the NRA, the GOP, and America's law-abiding gun culture. The Us
vs.Them media campaign was unrelenting, but it was also spiraling out of
control and into outright farce.
Though Senators Manchin and Toomey
provided a day or two of hope with bipartisan legislation on background
checks, by now the writing was pretty much on the wall. And it was at
this point that the media's desperation became even more desperate.
The news-cycle went 24/7 into Track One
and Track Two propagandizing. But as we all now know, rather than being
effective, the bias, demagoguery, and outright lobbying drifted into
self-parody.
As the Chuck Todds and Joe Scarboroughs
and Piers Morgans sanctimoniously raged about their silly and flawed
90% polls, out here in the real world, the media's stupid decision to
make this a culture war only managed to ensure that 96% of Americans had tuned out and moved on.
As I have written before, and as
Charles Krauthammer said Wednesday night on "Special Report," as a
Senator I personally would have voted for the Toomey-Manchin bill. But
the media blew it.
Had the media chosen to unite rather
than divide, educate rather than propagandize, debate rather than shout
down opposition, and cared more about 20 innocent children than one
Barack Obama -- things might look entirely different today.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC
Big Journalism
NRA President Slams Obama's 'Public Rant'
"He's attacking the NRA, he's attacking our members, he's attacking citizens and senators of the United States, threatening them and all the rest. I think that's really not a seemly way for the President of the United States to respond to a legislative defeat."
So said NRA President David Keene Thursday morning on "Mornings on the Mall" on WMAL-FM in Washington DC. Keene was responding to President Obama accusing the gun lobby of "willfully lying" about the Toomey/Manchin/Schumer background check in a statement at the White House Wednesday.
"(Obama complained) that we used the victims of these tragedies as props, and he did it while he was standing with all of these victims behind him, using them as props," Keene said.
Listen to the entire segment here:
Big Journalism
Tuesday, April 16, 2013
Politico: NRA's Total Defeat of Obama, Media Likely
In the immediate aftermath of the tragic Newtown murders, Obama and His Media joined forces to exploit the deaths of innocent children for all it was worth -- with a series of laws that would have done absolutely nothing to stop the very crime they were exploiting. This naked political move to leverage the murder of innocents as an excuse to attack the National Rifle Association and gun owners, who live predominantly in red states, is about as cynical and craven as it gets.
According to Politico, though, all this soul selling is likely to come to nothing. Politico reports on Tuesday that the gun control bill Obama, liberal Democrats, Piers Morgan, Chuck Todd, and all of CNN want so desperately to pass "has little if any, chance of passing this Congress – it’s struggling in the Senate and facing outright rejection in the House."
Obama and His Media kept moving the
goal posts for victory until they reached a point where assault weapons
and the size of magazine clips were completely off the table. All that
remains today is a small tightening of background checks. That doesn't
mean, though, that victory wouldn't still be declared and Obama
celebrated as Caesar back from the wars. But even that piece of
practically-nothing looks unlikely to pass -- in part, because of three
Senate Democrats who, as of now, are unwilling to support it.
But even if the Toomey-Manchin
compromise passes in the Senate (which is unlikely), Politico writes,
"the House is certain to rewrite the bill – or discard it altogether."
How craven were the media's politics
during all of this? So craven that when the NRA's Wayne LaPierre
suggested we guard school children from gun-carrying maniacs, the media
publicly ridiculed him. My god, the media was despicable. And driven
only by a seething hatred and bigotry towards a culture they have never
bothered to try to understand.
Personally, I am in favor of tightening
background checks and would probably vote for the Toomey-Manchin
compromise were I a United States Senator. But that does not make me
blind to the media's appalling behavior in this crusade -- the
coordinated Narratives, the release of polls to back the coordinated
Narratives, the open propagandizing, the marginalizing and ignoring of
reasonable opposition voices…
And while I would personally prefer to
see a reasonable law tightening these background checks pass, if it does
die, I intend to enjoy every moment of bitter disappointment I see on
the faces of Chuck Todd, Piers Morgan, and their corrupt colleagues.
And maybe, just maybe, had Obama and
the media not used the Newtown massacre as an excuse to launch
yet-another culture war against the right, something good might have
come from this.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC
Friday, April 12, 2013
Boehner: I Don't Need GOP to Pass Gun Law...
11 Apr 2013
On Thursday, in the midst of ongoing national debate over prospective gun control and comprehensive immigration legislation, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) said that he didn’t need the approval of a majority of his own party to move forward with legislation. Referring to the so-called Hastert Rule, named after former House Speaker Denny Hastert (R-IL), which dictated that House leadership not bring up any bill for a vote without the support of a majority of the majority party, Boehner said, “Listen: It was never a rule to begin with.”
On Thursday, in the midst of ongoing national debate over prospective gun control and comprehensive immigration legislation, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) said that he didn’t need the approval of a majority of his own party to move forward with legislation. Referring to the so-called Hastert Rule, named after former House Speaker Denny Hastert (R-IL), which dictated that House leadership not bring up any bill for a vote without the support of a majority of the majority party, Boehner said, “Listen: It was never a rule to begin with.”
Then, realizing the gravity of admitting that he could move without a majority of his own party, Boehner added, “And certainly my prerogative – my intention is to always pass bills with strong Republican support.”
That may be his intention, but it has not been his history. On the fiscal cliff deal at the end of 2012, for example, he ignored a majority of his own party. That prompted a mini-rebellion in the House resulting in a supposedly humbled Boehner retaining his speakership. Should he buck the House Republicans again, he may face a stiffer challenge this time.
Ben Shapiro is Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the New York Times bestseller “Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America” (Threshold Editions, January 8, 2013).
45 Reps Urge Boehner To Reject Expanded Background Checks
12 Apr 2013
Reps. Steve Stockman (R-TX), Paul Broun (R-GA), and 43 others have sent a letter to House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) urging him to oppose the gun control currently being discussed in the Senate on grounds that a "'universal background check' system would be a violation of Constitutionally-protected rights on an unprecedented scale." The letter states:
Reps. Steve Stockman (R-TX), Paul Broun (R-GA), and 43 others have sent a letter to House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) urging him to oppose the gun control currently being discussed in the Senate on grounds that a "'universal background check' system would be a violation of Constitutionally-protected rights on an unprecedented scale." The letter states:
The principle that no person can purchase or sell a firearm without first receiving government permission transforms the Second Amendment from a "right" that should be protected by the government into a privilege granted by the government.
In addition to constitutional concerns, even if every private transfer of firearms were regulated by the federal government, it would not be an effective crime fighting tool. Typically, criminal shooters steal firearms (Adam Lanza), pass a background check (James Holmes and Jared Loughner) or receive their firearms through straw purchasers (which is already illegal).
The letter includes a list of gun rights groups who join the representatives in opposing gun legislation currently being discussed in the Senate: the Gun Owners of America, the NRA, the National Association for Gun Rights, and the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, among others.
The letter close with the forty-five representatives asking "that no gun control legislation be brought to the floor of the House unless it has the support of a majority of [their] caucus."
Big Government
Wednesday, April 10, 2013
Obama Budget Skyrockets Gun Control Funding
10 Apr 2013
President Obama’s budget contains a significantly elevated level of spending dedicated to enforcement of federal gun control. According to the budget, the Department of Justice will be granted some $395 million “to combat gun violence, and ensure that those who are not eligible to purchase or possess guns are prevented from doing so.” More importantly, the budget includes funding designed to “increase inspections of the firearms industry.”
President Obama’s budget contains a significantly elevated level of spending dedicated to enforcement of federal gun control. According to the budget, the Department of Justice will be granted some $395 million “to combat gun violence, and ensure that those who are not eligible to purchase or possess guns are prevented from doing so.” More importantly, the budget includes funding designed to “increase inspections of the firearms industry.”
The budget includes “an increase of $173 million” for more federal gun control enforcement. It is unclear how much the federal government spent in 2012 on gun control enforcement. The budget also reportedly includes $10 million for research on gun violence and $222 million on school safety measures including “increasing firearms safety.”
Ben Shapiro is Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the New York Times bestseller “Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America” (Threshold Editions, January 8, 2013).
Big Government
National Association For Gun Rights: Don't Expand Gun Control, Repeal It
On April 9, Breitbart News spoke to National Association for Gun Rights (NAGR) Executive Vice President Dudley Brown about the tact his group takes toward preserving the 2nd Amendment and opposing the incremental expansion of government into the private gun purchases of law-abiding citizens. Brown quickly made it clear that NAGR isn't like other gun rights groups, inasmuch as NAGR is not looking for compromise but for victory. And they don't accomplish this by kissing up to moderates.
Brown explained this by using hockey verbiage to say he, "is willing to drop the gloves with any politician who would take away our 2nd Amendment rights."
NAGR has over 1.1 million likes on Facebook, over three million recipients on its email list, and had a $7 million budget last year.
Brown says all these contacts and funds are being utilized every day, in every way, to take the pro-gun fight to DC instead of waiting for the fight to come to them.
NAGR does a conference call with staffers and personnel in DC and around the country every day. These calls include Congressional and Senate contacts as well, and they are aimed at putting pressure on legislators to kill the gun control package Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) is cramming down America's throat.
In fact, when Breitbart News asked Brown what he believed was the biggest threat gun owners in America face, his answer contained two words: "Harry Reid."
He said other prominent gun rights groups take a milder approach to Reid, and described him as a pro-gun Senator who won't do anything too extreme. But Brown said, "Reid's agenda is no different than that of Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Chuck Schumer (D-NY)."
Big Government
Sunday, April 7, 2013
McCain: 'I Don't Understand' Filibustering Gun Control
Sen. John McCain (R-Sunday Shows) expressed bewilderment on CBS' "Face the Nation" that GOP Sens. Cruz, Lee and Paul would filibuster gun control legislation. “I don’t understand it,” McCain said. “The purpose of the United States Senate is to debate and to vote and to let the people know where we stand.”
With all due respect to Sen. McCain, that is almost completely backward. The purpose of the US Senate is not to be some federal debating society. It is not tasked with taking the great issues of the day and giving its "august" members a platform for their musings on policy. The public does not look to the Senate for guidance in its deliberations on the issues.
The Senate's first, and only, task is to uphold the Constitution. Originally, the Senate was designed to act as the states' check on an encroaching federal government. Senators were appointed by state legislatures to be their voice in Washington. The House was designed to be the voice of the people. Sadly, those days are long gone.
Today, Senators are just House members juiced-up on steroids. Worse, they have a habit of putting decorum and the traditions and processes of the institution above foundational principles.
“I don’t understand why United States senators want to block debate when the leaders said we could have amendments,” McCain noted.
If one believes a legislative proposal is, on its face, unconstitutional, the ability to offer amendments is of little solace. Sens. Cruz, Lee and Paul, among other Senators, believe legislation to limit gun rights is, by its nature, unconstitutional. Amending the legislation to make it slightly less unconstitutional is a fool's game, and a large reason our federal government has grown so large.
A filibuster against gun control legislation is upholding the greatest tradition of the Senate, i.e. acting as a bulwark against the federal government's natural inclination to expand its power. Knowing how specific Senators voted on shredding the Constitution won't put it back together again. Any proposal that tramples on constitutional rights should never grace the floor of the Senate.
Sen. McCain, once the GOP candidate for President, is becoming marginalized within the GOP Senate caucus. New, more conservative, Senators are stepping up to defend Constitutional principles and becoming a vocal, loyal opposition to the Administration and its curtailing of our liberties. They should be applauded.
Follow Mike Flynn on twitter: @Flynn1776
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