John Loughlin speaks with Dr. Tim Shafman about cancer and Glenn Valentine of the RI Firearm Owners League about the prospect (and legality) of proposed gun regulation.
Featured image by Bo Harvey on Unsplash.
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The day of the school shooting in Ulvade, Joe Biden took to his national platform to blame people who disagree him about the Second Amendment and the practical steps to stop mass shootings: “When in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?”
That talking point has filtered down throughout the organized movement to take further steps to infringe on the right to bear arms. In a WPRI article by Adriana Rozas Rivera and Amanda Pitts (which is notable for its lack of the bias that has been near universal, lately), a gun-control spokesperson read from Biden’s notes, so to speak.
As they do just about every year, Rhode Islanders who value their Second Amendment rights put on their yellow shirts and rallied at the State House. In a contrary statement, the Rhode Island Coalition Against Gun Violence expressed disappointment that “the gun lobby” is so intransigent.
We shouldn’t allow that turn of phrase to slip by without remark. When our flesh-and-blood neighbors are jammed into a faceless abstraction like “the gun lobby,” which implies cynical manipulation of our political system, they are easy to dismiss because dehumanized. Note the difference from other generic terms like “supporters,” “opponents,” “advocates,” or “activists.” None of these words implies invalid or ulterior motives, and all of them describe people, whereas “lobby” means a cold machine.
“Lobby” implies advocacy for personal profit, often without true belief in the cause. It implies that lobbyists’ views shouldn’t be given the full weight due to active citizens but should be discounted — perhaps disregarded. When applied to people who are not professional lobbyists and deployed alongside terms like “racist” or “fascist,” the word serves to give members of an opposing movement permission to invalidate the rights of their neighbors, including rights to property and safety.
Such rhetoric is in direct line with the demand from Rhode Island’s obnoxious Democrat Congressman David Cicilline that his fellow Congressmen “spare [him] the bullshit about constitutional rights.” The words clearly articulate a disregard for rights, and the swear disregards decorum, which governing bodies maintain in order to allow cooperation and a sense of fair play.
There will be no fair play. One can easily imagine support from Cicilline for the confiscation of property and incarceration of his political opponents. Whether he’ll stop short of calling for gulags for such loathsome creatures as the “gun lobby” is a question we should pray never to see answered one way or the other, and the right acknowledged in the Second Amendment is absolutely crucial toward holding that possibility at bay.
Featured image by Vincent van Gough on WikiArt.
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For the elimination of doubt, I don’t mean to evoke Americans’ historic appreciation of the concept of revolution. I mean to warn of the actual possibility of something like this:
Some 1.5 million people were killed during the Cultural Revolution, and millions of others suffered imprisonment, seizure of property, torture or general humiliation.
The dark vision came to me when the tweet used as the featured image of this post from Bill Bartholomew scrolled up my computer screen.
The generation of Americans currently slogging through its teen years is the safest, most comfortable and privileged group of people in the history of the planet. They carry supercomputers in their pockets as a birthright. Diseases that once were death sentences are all but cured. For the most part, they have no experience of war or famine. A surplus of calories is a far bigger problem than a deficit. To amplify the point, consider their experience in its extremity. A global pandemic did not decimate their ranks. Even their internet access was hardly threatened. (I offer the qualifier, here, that contrary examples will always be found on this side of Heaven’s gates, but Bartholomew is speaking generationally, not about isolated, rare examples.)
They are what’s known as “summer children.”
The only reason today’s youth feel as if they’re living in an oppressive dystopia is that people like Bartholomew are propagandizing them to believe they are under constant threat of “gun violence, vastly underserved communities, lack of mental health, climate change, environmental racism, widening inequality.” If “environmental racism” is on your list of grievances, things must be going pretty well for you, whether or not you’ll admit it (or even know it).
Don’t get me wrong. The hardships will come; to the extent policies Bartholomew supports take hold, they will arrive sooner than later. I’m not claiming achievement of utopia. The tragedy for summer children is that autumn inevitably follows. For the moment, though, the sun is shining.
Why would adults take a generation that should be capitalizing on its comfort and opportunity to reach new heights and prepare for future challenges and, instead, deliberately drag it down with fear and anxiety?
Bartholomew provides a clue elsewhere when he asks one of the teenage organizers of a Pawtucket school walkout what his response is to “fascist parents” on social media. In this context, the term, “fascist,” has no meaning. The parents he’s referencing aren’t part of a fascist group. They don’t promote differential treatment based on ethnicity. They don’t subscribe to the brand of socialism known as “fascism.”
Rather, Bartholomew calls them “fascist parents” because you’re allowed to hate, even to physically assault, “fascists” according to the current rules. That’s how this works. Progressives like Bartholomew label people they you don’t like as “fascist,” “racist,” or something similar, and thereby give themselves license to deny those people’s rights and investigate and oppress them.
In other words, adults like Bartholomew want to put a boot on somebody else’s chin, and they see teens as their means of placing it.
The day may come that Bartholomew attends a rally just like the horrific scenes from Maoist China and celebrates the abuse of the “fascist” grownups whom the kids are beating. The open question is whether the media organizations that employ him, WPRO and RI PBS, will pay him for the coverage.
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The issues of gun regulation and marijuana legalization have an interesting overlap, even as they head in opposite directions.
To increase regulation of the former, advocates insist that we focus on the implements used for harm (the guns) and eschew — sometimes with great vehemence and insult to those who disagree — the notion that the true problem lies in socio-cultural deterioration, broken homes most of all. Similarly, while decreasing regulation of the latter, advocates studiously ignore the social and cultural concerns that contributed to the criminalization of drugs in the first place.
Democrat Governor Dan McKee’s signing legislation to legalize marijuana last week has led me to think more deeply about my more-or-less ambivalent attitude toward the issue. Social media rhetoric about the reform being “historic” has rung oddly in my ear. The Ocean State isn’t on a wave of increasing respect for individual liberty. To the contrary, the mounting pressure for legalized marijuana in Rhode Island and elsewhere seems to have been much more like legalization of gambling, meaning that the government is moving into formerly criminal enterprises in search of revenue.
The state isn’t setting us free. It’s making us customers — which, when it comes to addictive activities and mind-altering substances, begins to have a little of the bitter taste of enslavement.
Two paths exist to the same endpoint of increased availability of dangerous or potentially harmful things, and which we take will make all the difference. With one, arrival at the destination enriches and elevates us. With the other, we reach the end too hobbled to do anything but crawl.
The first, which I support from the heart of my philosophy, echoes St. Augustine’s suggestion to “love God, and do as you please.” Along this path, we foster a responsible culture that allows increasing freedom founded in the principle of individual responsibility and protected by an environment of strong family connections and voluntary community support.
The second path — the one we’re actually on — is toward a controlled, socialist society that doesn’t mind a dysfunctional population that is easy to manipulate, so reliant on government services that we cannot truly exercise our right to vote for fear of losing that on which we’ve become dependent, and too drugged up and otherwise distracted to defend ourselves against tyranny.
We see the early indications of this outcome in the very fact that advocates for regulating guns and legalizing drugs don’t apparently believe the culture to be relevant at all. In their view, we must rely on the government to protect us, even as we make ourselves more vulnerable and in need of support.
Featured image by Ahmed Zayan on Unsplash.
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Policy arguments driven by emotion will often have incoherent gaps in their logic, and the Ulvade shooting exposes a big one.
Emotional people tend to focus on the most-dramatic element in a scene, which in this case is the shooter, and the solution appears to them to be removal of the gun. The problem is that it simply isn’t possible to remove all dangerous implements from the hands of those who are driven to evil, and the more we try, the more we’ll affect others. Even the most “common sense” of restrictions affects our lives in deep ways. For one thing, they require that we cannot insist our Constitution and Bill of Rights must be read literally by means of the words on the page. No small thing, that. If the words aren’t literal, then who gets to interpret them? The documents cease to be an agreed basis for our coexistence, but rather a tool for gaining social leverage.
This observation does not necessarily imply a position on gun regulation; the point is only that we should strive to make decisions based on facts and a thorough understanding of our assumptions.
One assumption that Ulvade swept entirely away is that we don’t need guns for self-protection because our modern society has a police force to protect us. What we witnessed, instead, was the police mainly protecting people from their own impulse to do something to protect children from the slaughter. The story was the same not long ago in Parkland, Florida.
What happened in between those horrific events reduced our ability to trust in police protection even more. With head-spinning speed, the activists’ call went from putting a police officer in every school to getting police out of the schools — indeed, getting them off the streets altogether and defunding them.
In other words, not only can we not trust that individual police officers will actually live up to the expectations on which we rely in order to take the burden of self-reliance off our own shoulders, but we can’t trust our fellow citizens not to get swept up in a moral mania and trample our policy compromises into the ground. The parents outside the school were easy to restrain with guns, while the shooter was dangerous and intimidating to authorities. The lesson is worth contemplating as we ponder disarmament of the citizenry.
Everywhere around a school shooting are complicated, thorny problems. At a minimum, we must resist the lure of the crowd and its madness.
Featured image by Jacob Morch on Unsplash.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- The horror of school shootings and the cynicism of the aftermath
- The Matt Brown gift to Governor McKee
- Foulkes’s hard decision
- A little bit about Anchor Rising
Featured image from Matt Brown on Twitter.
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When government officials allow a business to shift its risks onto taxpayers, the people can never be certain about how the costs will be “unexpectedly” driven up, but news like this is a near certainty:
The cost of building a professional soccer stadium in Pawtucket has risen to $124 million, the city said Friday, $40 million more than initially expected.
Supply chain problems and inflation have driven the estimated price tag for stadium construction from $84 million to $124 million, according to a news release from Pawtucket Mayor Donald Grebien’s office late Friday afternoon.
If anything, we should expect “supply chain problems and inflation” to come on top of the cost overruns we should also have considered inevitable. That is, one suspects that Tidewater Landing is not done with the taxpayers, yet. Filtering business projects through the government is just a terrible, terrible idea. The incentives are all wrong.
People operating in the business realm are looking to make money. While they may have other motives, when the costs start climbing, even as the promised outcome shrinks, they have to seriously consider cutting their losses. People operating in government are looking for political advantage, and letting go of prior investments, even if the prudent financial move, represents a political liability. The exception is if a project becomes unpopular for some completely political reason (a sex or race scandal, for example, or environmental concern), in which case the incentive for government officials is to drop it no matter the cost to taxpayers.
Apart from the shift of currency from cash to political favor, the fact is that “taxpayers” are mostly somebody else. In such circumstances, the question is why we should ever expect a net gain from such projects — certainly not a net gain compared with other projects the resources could have gone toward, including the individual activities and projects of the people from whom the money has been (or will be) taken.
Featured image from the Tidewater Landing website.
[Open full post]Harry Potter plays Weird Al Yankovic in what appears to be a quasi-fiction movie from a streaming service.
I’m honestly not sure how I feel about this.
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Guest: Robert Lancia, Candidate for Congress, District 2, www.lanciaforcongress.com
Host: Richard August Time: 30 minutes
Description: Lancia talks about his experience as a state representative and a multitude state and national of issues and concerns, which motivate his candidacy. Topics include federal debt; universal pre-k education; school choice; teaching of Critical Race Theory in schools; environmental concerns; border security; inflation; cancellation of student debt; voting laws; taxing the wealthy more; Ukraine war; statehood for Porter Rico; increasing number of Supreme Court judges; gun control; and more. Lancia believes that his work as a state representative has adequately prepared him for the national House of Representatives.
I’m as keen to lament the deterioration of our broader community as anybody else, but reactions to a recent cell phone video taken in the New York City subway seem to me to overstate the inaction of the bystanders.
In summary, a guy who is obviously disturbed walks through the subway car shouting. He sits down next to a woman, and when she stands to move away, he puts his hand on her shoulder and makes her sit. She looks around pleading for help. Then, the man shouts for her to stand up, which she does, and he walks her a few steps while grabbing her hair, ultimately pushing her away and walking in the other direction.
The whole thing happens in a matter of seconds, so the question for those faulting the bystanders is how quickly they think one should react. Intervening too quickly and confrontationally could escalate things. When a situation is in the open and somewhat controlled, sometimes it’s better to wait.
Observe the man in the blue shirt, for example. He was behind the passenger with the camera, and when we first see him, it’s clear he was keeping an eye on the situation. Quite likely, when the crazy guy made the woman stand up, the man in blue began to move in their direction. When we get another glimpse of him; he’s standing near the woman. Now, it’s possible he was just moving away from the crazy guy as just about everybody else did, but perhaps he had positioned himself to intervene if the crazy guy’s attention turned back toward the woman.
That seems to me to be the correct approach, in this case.
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