It’s Friday, October 6th, 2017…but before we begin, we were struck by this line from a History Channel documentary on spies:
Had Richard Miller never existed, James Comey would have more than fulfilled his despicable destiny.
And speaking of the despicable, as regards the GOP/NRA offer to work with The Left to ban bump stocks…
This represents the proverbial…
Here’s the juice: with all due respect (which is utterly absent!) for those completely ignorant of the functioning of modern firearms, anyone with moderate shooting skills can/could have, for all tense and purposes, fired in a standard semi-automatic mode as fast as the Las Vegas shooter. And given the number of weapons he managed to move into his carefully pre-planned sniper stand, even were he limited to 10-round magazines, this determined mass-murderer would have likely been able to notch an equal number of victims.
Imagine next Paddock had access to a tractor-trailer rig, and simply chosen to veer off The Strip at a high rate of speed straight into the crowd. Can anyone seriously suggest he wouldn’t have been able to achieve a death toll far greater than his firearms arsenal allowed?
Then contemplate the carnage had he opted to drive a Step Van…
…loaded with a mix of ammonium nitrate, diesel fuel and ball bearings, i.e.,…
…directly into the shoulder-to-shoulder audience:
Please explain how you propose to legislate that threat out of existence?!?
Now, here’s The Gouge!
First up, courtesy of NRO, Kevin Williamson details why, contrary to the NRA‘s abject appeasement…
“As the White Rabbit said: “Don’t just do something — stand there.”
In a podcast the day after the massacre in Las Vegas, Michael Graham asked me what supporters of the Second Amendment ought to do in reaction to such horrifying events. My answer at the time was: nothing. And nothing that has transpired since then has shown me cause to modify that position. It is in the nature of reactionaries to react, but very often the right course of action is inaction.
…Passion is what drives us to “do something,” exclamation point implied. It is also what causes us to misunderstand politics as a contest between white hats and black hats: Think of how much of our political discourse is dedicated to explaining the other side as some sort of conspiracy, with the Right talking about “Alinskyites” and “Cloward-Piven,” the Left whispering darkly about the Koch brothers or, this week, NRA money lining the pockets of politicians.
The National Rifle Association is in fact barely among the top 500 political contributors (it is No. 460 at the moment) the organization and its affiliates having made barely $1 million in contributions in the 2016 cycle. Never mind the numbers (i.e., the facts!) — we have passion to express!
Passion makes youstupid. It also makes you president. (Those are not mutually exclusive.)
We could do with a good deal less passion in our public life. The alt-right knuckleheads rallied behind Donald Trump not for reasons having to do with policy — they have no serious policy agenda at all — but because he gives voice to their passion, that passion being the desire to shock and annoy the politically correct busybodies and transnational economic elites by whom they feel condescended to. Trump was sworn in as president in January; it is October, and it already is obvious that he is as tired of the job as the country is of him and his schoolboy antics. “He fights!” they said. And, indeed, he has spent a great deal of time taking swings at cable-news figures, who enjoy the attention, and at Jeff Bezos, who doesn’t notice. By “He fights!” they mean he runs his mouth and tweets angry dopey things. And he does. Does he do anything else?Can he?
Do we really want to find out?
The NRA, which to its great discredit got into bed with Trump early and enthusiastically, ought to be concerned about his passion, which is a fickle thing. Trump was a gun-control advocate to the left of Hillary Rodham Clinton until shortly before he decided to run for president as a Republican. He was a supporter of a ban on so-called assault weapons, an advocate of waiting periods, and a critic of Republicans who “walk the NRA line.” Some of his associates already are worrying that Trump will revert to his old Manhattan Democrat ways on the question, because Trump’s passion is seeking the approval of crowds, especially the small crowd that edits the New York Times. Cutting a deal with his new best friends, Chuck and Nancy, in the aftermath of Las Vegas, might be appealing to that passion, especially if he could do so in some low-cost way such as opposing the NRA-supported Hearing Protection Act, which would make it easier to buy noise suppressors for firearms.
The passionate man is an unreliable man. Trump has been on both sides of gun control, abortion (he famously took five different positions on the question in three days), the Afghanistan war, Syria, the Electoral College, NATO, Beijing’s purported currency manipulation, tax reform, single-payer health care, the Export-Import Bank, and whether the president should play golf, among other things. (He finally got it right on golf.) Emotions are running high at the moment, and Trump is a captive of what Marcus Aurelius called “the animal soul,” writing in his Meditations:
To have sensible impressions exciting imaginations, is common to us with the cattle. To be moved, like puppets, by appetites and passions, is common to us with the wild beasts, with the most effeminate wretches, Phalaris, and Nero, with atheists, and with traitors to their country.(See: Obama, Barack Hussein)If these things, then, are common to the lowest and most odious characters, this must remain as peculiar to the good man; to have the intellectual part governing and directing him in all the occurring offices of life.
He was a pretty good emperor.Would have been a lousy talk-radio host.
Passion is the enemy of good government — and the enemy of the civil peace, too. Good government is boring government: regular, orderly, predictable. To govern dispassionately requires a measure of mental serenity, which is hard to come by while Americans are still bleeding in Las Vegas. The easiest and surest way to equanimity is to let time pass. And, in the meantime, just do — nothing.“
Though Chuck Todd and the rest of The Left would disagree…
…preferring instead to take advantage of unreasoned, uninformed emotion lest a serious crisis go to waste.
Since we’re on the subject of unreasoned, uninformed emotion passing as intelligent commentary, also courtesy of NRO, Ben Shapiro opines on…
“On Monday evening, the day after the Las Vegas massacre, ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel took to the microphone to deliver a harangue about gun control. His monologue on the issue had been eagerly awaited by the media, who were still dripping with excitement from his emotional speeches about nationalized health care. And they weren’t disappointed…
…The Left’s attempts to use their advantage on the cultural heights in order to promote their politics is nothing new — we all remember Bob Costas’s 2012 tirade regarding gun control during halftime of Sunday Night Football. But this is the big problem with the gun-control debate: It never gets to an honest debate. Instead, the debate becomes an exercise in overwrought virtue-signaling, in which emotional reaction to events is identified with commitment to leftist policies.
Here are the facts: Kimmel’s monologue was wrong in significant and important ways. He misled his audience. And his specific policy prescriptions weren’t just wrong, they were misinformed. (or deliberately misrepresented!)
Kimmel began by mocking the notion that the Second Amendment protected AK-47s; of course, that’s like stating that the First Amendment doesn’t protect Kimmel’s television show, since televisions didn’t exist in 1789. The function of a rifle in today’s society is the same as the function of a musket in the founding era. But Kimmel obviously knows nothing about firearms…
…Kimmel went on to blast the National Rifle Association, suggesting that the NRA’s political spending is basically bribery (he said that the NRA had Republicans’ “balls in a money clip”) — but the NRA is politically powerful not because of its giving but because a huge number of Americans agree with its agenda…Kimmel trotted out the hackneyed talking point about the non-existent “gun-show loophole”…He suggested that making purchase of suppressors easier somehow raised rates of gun violence.
The errors went on and on, but the message was clear: Republicans are sinners, and they must repent. “They should be praying,” Kimmel thundered. “They should be praying for God to forgive them for letting the gun lobby run this country, because it’s so crazy.”
This is the typical debate: not between people who marshal evidence to their positions to determine the most effective policies, but between those who demand such evidence and those who scream to “do something” and suggest that those who refuse their policy suggestions “don’t care,” as Kimmel put it.
This isn’t just nonsense, it’s nasty nonsense. We all mourned over the evil attack in Las Vegas. And just because we differ on our prescribed policies — or more important, just because we demand that all public policies affecting hundreds of millions of Americans be undergirded by evidence — doesn’t mean that we are morally deficient.In fact, leveling those sorts of charges is morally deficient. I believe Jimmy Kimmel cares about the victims in Las Vegas, just as I believe he cares about children who need health care. For him to assume anything different about people like me isn’t just small-minded, it’s repellent.“
“Repellent” is putting it politely. As for Kimmel’s theology, while we all need to pray for God’s forgiveness, we’d suggest those who’ve enabled the slaughter of over 59,000,000 innocent unborn children since 1973, Kimmel included, should purchase particularly thick sets of knee pads.
In an inconveniently related item (at least for Liberals!), Townhall.com‘s Matt Vespa relates how…
“I’m sure FiveThirtyEight isn’t held in the highest regard among conservative circles. They said Obama would be re-elected in 2012…Yet, on gun violence, the site and its writers have been nuanced. They haven’t taken the ban all guns, more background checks, and prohibit so-called assault weapons route that other celebrities, pundits, politicians, and nutjobs have taken recently after the tragic Las Vegas shooting.
Fifty-nine people were killed, with another 527 wounded when Stephen Paddock decided to open fire on the 22,000 attendees, who were enjoying the last night of Route 91 Harvest country music festival. It’s the worst mass shooting in American history. Yet, the site noted that mass shootings are rare, they don’t constitute the majority of gun crimes or deaths, and viewing policies to reduce gun crimes solely through mass shootings is a way to conjure upsome really bad policyon the subject.Specifically, more background checks as a policy initiative probably won’t stop future mass shootings.Over at The Washington Post, a former FiveThirtyEight writer, Leah Libresco, said she supported pretty much what the anti-gun Left wants on gun policy.But when she analyzed the data(i.e., the facts!), support for those positions “crumbled”:
…[M]y colleagues and I at FiveThirtyEight spent three months analyzing all 33,000 lives ended by guns each year in the United States, and I wound up frustrated in a whole new way. We looked at what interventions might have saved those people, and the case for the policies I’d lobbied for crumbled when I examined the evidence. The best ideas left standing were narrowly tailored interventions to protect subtypes of potential victims, not broad attempts to limit the lethality of guns.
I researched the strictly tightened gun laws in Britain and Australia and concluded that they didn’t prove much about what America’s policy should be. Neither nation experienced drops in mass shootings or other gun related-crime that could be attributed to their buybacks and bans.Mass shootings were too rare in Australia for their absence after the buyback program to be clear evidence of progress. And in both Australia and Britain, the gun restrictions had an ambiguous effect on other gun-related crimes or deaths.
When I looked at the other oft-praised policies, I found out that no gun owner walks into the store to buy an “assault weapon.”It’s an invented classification that includes any semi-automatic that hastwo or more features, such as a bayonet mount, a rocket-propelled grenade-launcher mount, a folding stock or a pistol grip. But guns are modular, and any hobbyist can easily add these features at home, just as if they were snapping together Legos.
As for silencers — they deserve that name only in movies, where they reduce gunfire to a softpuick puick.In real life, silencers limit hearing damage for shooters but don’t make gunfire dangerously quiet.An AR-15 with a silencer isabout as loud as a jackhammer. Magazine limits were a little more promising, but a practiced shooter could still change magazines so fast as tomake the limit meaningless.
…I found the most hope in more narrowly tailored interventions.Potential suicide victims, women menaced by their abusive partners and kids swept up in street vendettas are all in danger from guns, but they each require different protections.
Older men, whomake up the largest share of gun suicides, need better access to people who could care for them and get them help. Women endangered by specific men need to be prioritized by police, who can enforce restraining orders prohibiting these men from buying and owning guns. Younger men at risk of violence need to be identified before they take a life or lose theirs and to be connected to mentors who can help them de-escalate conflicts.
When you get the data, you see the liberal gun agenda for what it is: a massive soup of bad social policy that only chips away at our rights.I would have more respect for them if they just came out in unison and said that they want to ban guns, but they won’t…“
As our youngest son Travis so accurately observed:
“So, according to The Left, we have a tyrant in office we can’t trust because he’s Hitler reincarnated. But we should surrender our guns because this new Fuhrer can better protect us. Which would result in the primary source of racist oppression in America, COPS, representing the only armed protection force in the country…outside of the 1%’s private security.“
Our response: no one said Liberals have to make, or ever have made, sense.
Which brings us to our next item, brought to us today by the editors at NRO:
An Advance on Abortion
The House of Representatives has to its credit passed a bill that would limit abortions performed after the 20th week of pregnancy. We urge Mitch McConnell to undertake every exertion to get it through the Senate and put it on President Donald Trump’s desk for signing as quickly as possible.
The bill, the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, is offered on the theory that at 20 weeks, unborn children have developed the sensory apparatus necessary to experience the pain associated with the gruesome process of aborting them. Indeed, ultrasound imagery shows children in the womb flinching from pain during fetal medical procedures.The more obvious the facts about abortion are, the less tolerable our current anything-goes abortion regime appears.
It may indeed be that unborn children at even earlier stages of development experience excruciating pain as their young lives are snuffed out, which is one reason that even in such socially liberal countries as France, abortion often is heavily regulated (nearly prohibited) after the twelfth week, not the twentieth. The bill would not bring the United States into line with Sweden (18 weeks) or Germany (12 weeks and mandatory abortion counseling) but it would represent a welcome step in the right direction.
The bill would make the usual exceptions for cases of rape and incest, and cases in which the life of the mother would be put into danger by the continuation of the pregnancy.
Abortion is an ugly business, and it gets uglier the later in the pregnancy it occurs.We will not rehearse the horrors of late-term abortion here beyond noting that there was a compelling reason the Born-Alive Infant Protection Act was signed into law. A 20-week limit would represent the most meaningful federal restriction on abortion since Roe v. Wade — indeed, the inevitable legal challenge to the law might very well provide the Supreme Court with the opportunity to revisit that grievously ill-considered and constitutionally groundless decision.
Every advance against this barbaric and needless practice is to be welcomed. We urge Republicans not to let up until this bill is law.
Again, we humbly suggest Jimmy Kimmel reconsider his thoughts on the efficacy and effectiveness of certain prayers.
And in today’s Follow-Up segment, in a forward from The Daily Caller via our old friend Joe Flood, the latest on a national disgrace:
The Army officer who outed himself as a radical Marxist had been reported back in 2015 for publishing inappropriate and outright anti-American views online, according to a scathing report obtained by The Daily Caller.Thereportgave exhaustive and damning details on 2nd Lt. Spenser Rapone’s disqualifying insubordination at the U.S. Military Academy, extremist political views and out-of-regulations online activity. Still, the Academy’s administration saw fit to allow Rapone to graduate in 2016.
Rapone made the news last week for his pro-communism tweets during the #VetsForKaepernick social media craze. West Point’s Public Affairs office quickly released a statement last week condemning Rapone’s actions, saying that they “in no way reflect the values of the U.S. Military Academy or the U.S. Army…Second Lieutenant Rapone’s chain of command is aware of his actions and is looking into the matter.”
The statement leaves readers with the idea that Rapone’s chain of command (and indeed the academy at large) was unaware of his radicalism and frequent Uniform Code of Military Justice violations. It turns out a senior officer reported Rapone to his chain of command nearly two years ago.
…In essence, everything that was reported over the previous week should have been old news to anyone in Rapone’s chain of command, had they been paying attention. (Or considered his actions and views problematic!)
So why was Rapone allowed to graduate, and who made the call? And why was this radicalism being ignored and kept under wraps until now? The Daily Caller reached out to West Point’s public affairs office for comment, but received none by press time.
…In his Monday Townhall article, “Our Broken Military Can’t Even Manage to Toss Out Traitors,” [author and retired Army Colonel] Schlichter declared Rapone’s apparently tolerated communist activism “the pinnacle of the military’s moral bankruptcy.” Schlichter argues that Rapone needs to be ousted. But he also professes that the real problem here is far larger than the Marxist officer:
“The real story isn’t this one loser. It’s not even the other losers who knew what he was and said and did nothing,”Schlichter wrote in Townhall. “It’s the chain of command. We need to know exactly what the faculty and staff at West Point knew about Comrade Cadet Rapone’s treachery. If they did know –– and I bet we will find out that he was counseled in writing about it — every officer from his first line supervisor to the USMA Superintendent must be relieved and reprimanded.”
And THEN forced to kiss the gunner’s daughter, keelhauled, drawn and quartered and hoisted from the highest yardarm in the fleet!
Which brings us to The Lighter Side:
Finally, we’ll call it a week with yet another titillating tale torn from the pages of The Crime Blotter:
“A Missouri man is accused of stabbing his 12-year-old grandson on Tuesday after he “snapped” during an argument over a doughnut, court documents revealed.
Jose Ortega, 67, told police he was in his Raytown house with his grandson, who was getting ready for school, just before 7 a.m. when they got into an argument over the sweet treats, according to court documents obtained by FOX4KC. Ortega “snapped” when the boy refused to give him a doughnut. He then grabbed the boy’s neck, threw him to the ground and stabbed him with a kitchen knife “once or twice.”…”
We’re guessing, come Thanksgiving, Grandpa won’t be carving the turkey.
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