Posted on 10/21/2016 7:28:47 AM PDT by SJackson
Madam President:
Criticized for his advising Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, Milton Friedman offered the only persuasive response: “I gave him good advice.” I cannot congratulate you on your election — no sane person could — but I can offer some good advice.
There is not much to like about you. You are intellectually and morally stunted, a creature of pure politics who has never had a single interesting or original idea. You are deeply corrupt yourself and a source of corruption in others. The republic truly deserves better than you. You don’t just do discredit to your party and your country, but to your species. Unhappily for us, better wasn’t on the menu, only different varieties of horror.
That being said, there is one thing about you that gives me a little hope: You are a coward. You are so risk-averse politically and personally that you have a natural tendency toward what might be described as a kind of conservatism — not conservatism of the Buckley–Goldwater–Reagan variety, but a certain conservatism of disposition, at least in comparison to such sans-culottes specimens as Bernie Sanders. I expect, and hope, that you will give into that salubrious terror and proceed with extreme caution.
Unlike Elizabeth Warren, your heart isn’t in it when it comes to organizing a political firing line for your benefactors at Goldman Sachs, and you were, oddly enough, somewhat to the right of your Republican opponent in the presidential election on foreign policy. Watching you talk about “green energy jobs” is like watching that awkwardly dancing guy who doesn’t know that he’s a little too old for the club into which he has wandered on a Saturday night. You’re more in the Wilson-FDR tradition than in the Noam Chomsky tradition — a totalitarian and a would-be tyrant, sure, but also a conventional welfare-statist of the conventional Bismarckian variety.
Hooray for us.
Still, one suspects that you are going to feel the need to throw a few mackerel to the barking seals who make up the largest and most energetic part of your daft and monstrous political party, and I fear that you will settle on gun control as your symbolic issue. It has been a while since Democrats have burned their fingers on that particular stove, and the electorate and culture have changed a bit since then.
You could, if you’re halfway clever, actually get this one right.
Let us begin with the basics: The United States of America may be a beacon of liberty and prosperity to the world, but it is also a horrifyingly violent society. Firearms are not the live variable in this: We are off the charts when it comes to stabbings, beating people to death, strangulations, homicidal drownings, any kind of murder you can think of. We also have very high rates of deaths from drugs and alcohol, motor-vehicle mishaps, accidents, and the like. The question of why, exactly, that is the case is a matter of intense scholarly interest, and there is, so far, no conclusive answer. But any discussion of homicide in the United States, whether it is of the Chicago street-corner-gangster variety or the lonely-misfit-shoots-up-the-school variety, must begin with the knowledge that we are an unusually violent and unruly people, and have been for a long time. The Swiss keep the prime criminal demographic, young men, armed to the teeth, not with what your friends like to call “military-style” weapons but with actual military weapons, and they have fewer murders in a year than Chicago has on a bad Saturday night. The issue is the character of the people, not the state of gun laws.
But that is not to say that there is not room for improvement when it comes to the intersection of guns, crime, and violence. And that’s where you could, if you were so inclined, proceed in a way that not only wouldn’t antagonize Second Amendment partisans such as myself but would in fact invite our cooperation.
The first thing you should do is have a conference call with your U.S. attorneys and insist that they either start prosecuting straw-buyer cases or start putting their personal possessions into shoeboxes and scooting their lazy asses out the door. We have, at the federal level, robust laws for the prosecution of “straw buyers,” people who have clean criminal records and act as proxies for felons and others unable to legally purchase guns. Straw purchases are not the only or even the main way by which firearms find their way into the hands of those forbidden to possess them, but they aren’t a negligible one, either. Unfortunately, many federal prosecutors (including the one responsible for Chicago) as a matter of openly stated policy refuse to prosecute these cases unless there is a sexier angle to the case, such as a shot at a major trafficking ring or an opportunity for a headline-grabbing organized-crime prosecution.
What’s worse is that a great many straw buyers are sympathetic defendants: girlfriends, grandmothers, and kid sisters of hard career criminals bullied (or worse) into making those illegal purchases. But not every defendant is sympathetic, and prosecuting a few of the sympathetic ones might be useful, too. Lying on the paperwork submitting to purchase a firearm is perjury, and suborning perjury is a crime, too, one that should be prosecuted more frequently than it is. (For example, you probably should have faced that charge once or twice in your career. But never mind that for now.) The ATF simply refuses to prosecute these crimes, a refusal blessed from the White House itself. In a meeting with NRA leaders, Vice President Joe Biden scoffed at the idea of prosecuting these crimes: “We simply don’t have the time or manpower to prosecute everybody who lies on a form,” he said.
If you are serious about what you insist on calling “gun violence” — which is to say, murder and other violent crime — then you should see to it that these cases are prosecuted.
Most of the responsibility for crime control lies with state and local powers. But, as it happens, most of the jurisdictions with the worst crime problems are dominated by members of your political party. (Strange, that.) While you cannot simply give them orders the way you can federal prosecutors, you can cajole and coerce them into doing the right thing, for example by making certain federal grants contingent upon actually enforcing the laws we already have regarding the illegal use of firearms.
Police departments in places such as Chicago and Philadelphia often put out press releases about sweeps in which a hundred or more illegal guns have been seized, generally accompanied by publicity photos of firearms arrayed on tables. “Look what we have done!” the mayor and the police chief will crow. That is all good and fine, but the next part — prosecutions for those illegal firearms possession cases — often simply never happens. The ratio of seizures of illegally possessed firearms to prosecutions in firearms cases is shocking. The statistics from places such as Chicago and Detroit suggest that not one out of 50 gun seizures results in a felony conviction.
You were savaged in the primary for your historical support for mandatory minimums and your loose and admittedly stupid talk about “super predators,” and so the next step — pressing for more numerous and vigorous prosecutions of violent crimes short of murder — may not appeal to you. But it must be done. In New York City, which you once pretended to represent as senator, the vast majority of murders — more than 90 percent by the New York Times’s count — are committed by people with prior criminal histories. Kathryn Steinle, the young murder victim upon whose corpse Donald Trump launched his presidential campaign, was murdered by an illegal immigrant with seven felony convictions. There is no excuse for such a man to be anywhere other than a prison cell. But what this all implies is not only the need for a more serious approach to violent crime short of murder but also wide and deep reform to our probation and parole systems. Mental-health reform also will need to be a part of the program — another topic upon which you could, if you desired, offer policy solutions that would be supported by many conservatives, from former Texas governor Rick Perry to the editors of National Review.
You know the problems you will face from my people. But the real problem you face in pursuing what we might call “common-sense” reforms come from your people. For your people, the question of the Second Amendment and access to legal firearms is pure culture war. So-called assault rifles are so seldom used in crimes that the federal government does not even bother keeping track of the figures. (All long guns — which is to say, all rifles and shotguns combined — account for the instrument of death in about 2 percent of our homicides.) It is for this reason that Democrats’ gun-control offerings have been targeted almost exclusively at law-abiding gun owners and federally regulated and licensed firearms dealers, two groups of people who, statistically speaking, commit essentially no crime at all. That they are disproportionately white, male, and conservative-leaning makes them attractive targets for the kulturkampf Left, and that they have fixed business addresses, regular hours of operation, and copious business records makes them attractive targets for law-enforcement officials, who are no more inclined toward hard work than are the functionaries of any other government agency. But leaning on them will serve only to inflame partisan passions and genuine constitutional concerns. It will do nothing at all to make our cities or schools safer.
That being the case, you should proceed with these assumptions: The Second Amendment does indeed, as the Supreme Court has decisively ruled, protect an individual right to keep and bear arms, including all of the arms that it currently is legal for civilians to keep and bear; the obsession with such armory exotica as fully automatic weapons (one legally owned by a civilian has not been used in a murder in modern history) or accessories such as sound suppressors and folding stocks does not actually contribute to public safety; the approach to reform that relies on harassing and restricting federally licensed dealers and their law-abiding customers rather than prosecuting criminals is intended mainly to humiliate hated cultural and political rivals in the service of culture war and will produce nothing but conflict and litigation; the situations in cities such as Chicago and Baltimore, and in cases such as that of Adam Lanza, represent institutional failures, both of law-enforcement agencies and mental-health authorities, the reform of which must be central to any serious effort at crime reduction.
We conservatives do not like you, Madam President, and we are not going to learn to like you. But many of us would in fact prefer to work with you on useful and productive measures than to be obliged to work against you on stupid and destructive ones. There will be plenty of time for the latter, I am sure, but if you are serious about the violence in our society, there is an opportunity for you to do something good — and a smart president would seize that opportunity.
Any attempt by this corrupt government to step up enforcement of straw-purchasers will only result in my prosecution foe selling my own personal property.
"The issue is the character of the people, not the state of gun laws."
That was hard cold truth thrown right onto the face of the Wicked Witch of the West. I imagine she will be screaming if she reads it....
Nice try at putting lipstick on this pig, NR. Hillary has been a dedicated Communist since her teens, with such Leftists as Saul Alinsky and Michael Lerner as her mentors. If she gets the power of the presidency, she will use it in a more ruthless way than Obama did. Who I will stop her....Ryan, McConell???
>>We are off the charts when it comes to stabbings, beating people to death, strangulations, homicidal drownings, any kind of murder you can think of. We also have very high rates of deaths from drugs and alcohol, motor-vehicle mishaps, accidents, and the like. The question of why, exactly, that is the case is a matter of intense scholarly interest, and there is, so far, no conclusive answer.
No conclusive answer because of scholarly cowardice. The answer is right in front of your face, if you choose to acknowledge it.
My hopes have been dashed.
>>The republic truly deserves better than you...Unhappily for us, better wasn’t on the menu, only different varieties of horror.
This Progressive-Lite scumbag can write all the “please be nice to us Hillary” pleas he wants. If there is a President Hillary, it will because of him and his kind.
“Nice try at putting lipstick on this pig, NR. Hillary has been a dedicated Communist since her teens, with such Leftists as Saul Alinsky and Michael Lerner as her mentors. If she gets the power of the presidency, she will use it in a more ruthless way than Obama did. Who I will stop her....Ryan, McConell???”
To which I say, take a look at what FReeper Travis McGee stated:
“If you have 18 guns, and Hillary’s new gun laws ban 12 of them, how many guns will you have?
18 guns.
Your move, Hillary.”
http://coldfury.com/2016/10/15/i-repeat-come-and-take-them/
Also, NO WAY should Republicans agree to the mental health “compromise” that the Dems want to make. Why? Well, I’m as against lunatics having guns as the next person, but the motivation behind this push is to make anyone who ever visited a psychologist or psychiatrist, or who ever had so much as a single prescription for an anti-depressant, ineligible to own firearms - and this will include most veterans. “IT’S A TRAP!!!”
#NeverTrumper Williamson is giving up.
This fails for the same reason the Democrat schemes fail: it assumes that guns are the problem. They aren’t. No more than far deadlier automobiles are the problem. They aren’t.
The same with guns. Anything that controls the guns of honest people works *against* the public safety, yet has *no* effect on criminals.
Think about the absolute gun control regime of the (good riddance) Soviet Union. Guns were almost entirely forbidden to their honest people. But their criminals always had an abundance of guns. Even in the brutalitarian regime of Stalin, their criminals had guns.
And what did their honest citizens do? They suffered. While the Soviet Union had all sorts of uniformed and secret police, when someone was robbed, it was typically
better to not even report it.
No compare that to the increasingly ubiquitous ownership of guns by honest people in the US? It is resulting in a sharp decrease in crime. But importantly, it is resulting in a sharp decrease in *criminals*.
The FBI knows that a typical armed robber has committed more than a dozen robberies. Many can claim fifty or more robberies in just a few years. But when a robber is killed, it isn’t just that particular crime that ends.
It is every future crime that criminal would have committed. The entire rest of his criminal career wiped out. And that is going to have a *huge* impact on crime statistics for years in the future.
It also means that a vast number of future victims will no longer be victimized. People and their families *not* traumatized by armed robbery. No hospital bills for the injured, and families bereft because a member was killed in a robbery.
All of that *not* happening, because of a few bullets fired from a legal gun owner.
And society doesn’t even have to pay the half million to one million dollars it costs to keep violent criminals in prison every decade.
Kevin Williamson is most famous for the following four paragaphs written earlier this year:
Read more: Responses to Kevin Williams artice, also in National ReviewIt is immoral because it perpetuates a lie: that the white working class that finds itself attracted to Trump has been victimized by outside forces. It hasn’t. The white middle class may like the idea of Trump as a giant pulsing humanoid middle finger held up in the face of the Cathedral, they may sing hymns to Trump the destroyer and whisper darkly about “globalists” and — odious, stupid term — “the Establishment,” but nobody did this to them. They failed themselves.
If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy — which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog — you will come to an awful realization. It wasn’t Beijing. It wasn’t even Washington, as bad as Washington can be. It wasn’t immigrants from Mexico, excessive and problematic as our current immigration levels are. It wasn’t any of that.
Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence — and the incomprehensible malice — of poor white America. So the gypsum business in Garbutt ain’t what it used to be. There is more to life in the 21st century than wallboard and cheap sentimentality about how the Man closed the factories down.
The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul
"To the right" of Trump on foreign policy?
Arming and supporting Islamist uprisings in the form of the Benghazi jihadis against Gaddafi, in the form of the Muslim Brotherhood against US ally Mubarak, in the form of the Syrian Islamist rebels against Assad, leaving a vacuum in Iraq for ISIS to fill, and then refusing to support the anti-Islamist rebels against the Iranian ayatollahs?
This is supposed to be "more conservative" than Trump's foreign policy of rebuilding our military and putting the US national interest first in foreign policy?
This guy Williamson has been working as hard as possible to put Hillary Clinton in the White House.
Oh, and he is the same guy who said white working class communities deserve to die if they cannot out-compete the massive third-world wave of immigrants and when their factories have been moved to Mexico and elsewhere.
Williamson is complete scum.
I live right across the river from whelped eastern Kentucky. We’re the same breed over here in S. Ohio. We think that if someone someplace has to have a steel factory, then have it here. If someone needs a gymsum factory, then have it here. WHY send it to Vietnam or China or Mexico and pretend to us that we have just as many jobs without it as with it.
Just because a computer chip means they need fewer workers doesn’t mean that we don’t want those workers HERE. Then we have the factory jobs, the transport jobs, the supplier jobs, the retail jobs, the marketing jobs, the supply chain jobs, etc. etc.
Do I assume correctly that your meaning suggests that if you deduct certain demographic realities from the equation, then U.S. crime satitistics mirror those of European nations with less ethnically diverse populations?
Unless you're selling to gun runners, no. I suspect you're referring to a total ban on private sales and transfers and yes, Hillary would love to put you in jail for that.
You're right, other than a very few academics it won't be addresses. As the author notes correctly.
The issue is the character of the people, not the state of gun laws
An interesting issue probably not worth getting into deeply here. I've no problem keeping firearms out of the hands of those of a danger to themselves and others, that's about it. And at some point there should a process to restore their right. Ironically many of the states which withhold records, in most cases public records, of commitment from the NICS system are liberal states. If you're not going to report the commitment, what's the point.
A highly erudite argument directed at someone whose thinking has absolutely no connection with the logic the author purports to present.
Hillary, like other globalists, wants to disarm citizens for two reasons:
1) She mistrusts the means of effectuating an armed rebellion against her tyranny
2) They believe, correctly, that since most of the word is inhabited by either violent maniacs or pusillanimous sheep, it is far better not to allow the maniacs they want to bring in to have access to weapons, and the pusillanimous sheep they to provide open access to are frightened of real men and women with weapons since only maniacs have them in their own countries.
It has NOTHING to do with public safety. These anti-gun people are not stupid and know exactly why they are doing this.
I think using logic like this article presents misses the mark and the entire article from the suggestion Hillary will win, to the argument itself, best exemplifies the depths to which the National Review has descended since Buckley departed.
I was thinking that myself, but you’re not allowed to say it out loud in modern America. Take a look at one of those interactive homicide maps that the news outlets occasionally publish, allowing you to remove certain demographics from the murder map. It’s surprising (NOT).
Hillary and all Democrats love to propose background checks at gun shows. Well, at every gun show I have ever attended the sellers (99.9% ivory soap pure) were licensed gun dealers. They cannot sell a gun in their inventory without preforming a background check lest they risk losing their gun dealer’s license. Very, Very few guns are sold at gun shows by one private citizen to another private citizen. Most private citizens that bring a gun to a gun show to sell ultimately sell it to one of the licensed gun dealers. At the time the gun is resold by the dealer, a background check will be done.
So the Dems are merely whining about nothing to confuse the low information liberals. This is not the gun control reform that she has in mind. She wants to make the entire country like Chicago. Seems Chicago hasn’t worked to good for its citizens. Approximately 4000 people have died in Chicago due to gun violence since Obama took office. Hillary wants to bring this mayhem to your neighborhood.
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