Tag Archives: defense

Progressive Gun Control Agenda

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Here are some of their thoughts.  A more complete listing of their proposals is at The Dailey Caller:

Reinstate and strengthen a prospective federal ban on assault weapons: These weapons are designed to fire a large number of rounds in a short period of time.  They constitute a lethal threat to law enforcement and other first responders.

This is…foolish.  There is no such thing as an “assault” weapon, other than a carefully manufactured-by-legislation definition.  Not even the military has “assault weapons.”

Moreover, the threat to law enforcement and first responders from this sort of mythical weapon, or the semiautomatic rifles on which this mythology is purported to be modeled, is far less than is the threat of pistols, knives, clubs, fire (especially when responding to arson fires), drunk drivers, and so on.  This excuse fixes a nonexistent problem.

Reinstate a prospective federal ban on assault magazines: These magazines hold more than ten rounds and allow a shooter to inflict mass damage in a short period of time without reloading. Banning them will save lives.

This, too, is nonsense.  There is no such thing as an “assault magazine,” other than a carefully manufactured-by-legislation definition.  Here, too, even the military has no such things.

Moreover, the threat to lives from these artifices pales compared to the real causes of killings, some of which were enumerated just above.

Both of these, also are useful—critically so—in allowing private citizens to defend themselves.

There are these, too:

Require a background check for every gun sale, while respecting reasonable exceptions for cases such as gifts between family members and temporary loans for sporting purposes: It is estimated that four out of ten gun buyers do not go through a background check when purchasing a firearm because federal law only requires these checks when someone buys a gun from a federally licensed dealer.

The rest of this item is a red herring; I’ll ignore it here.  Four out of ten sales don’t go through a background check because they’re private sales from one citizen to another.  With the cost of a background check running to hundreds of dollars, this serves only to suppress those private sales.  On top of this, requiring a background check for a private sale represents an atrocious invasion of privacy for the purchaser by the seller—even if the seller has no intention of the invasion other than an arbitrary, superfluous law requires it.

Strengthen the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) database: Immediate action is needed to ensure the information in the NICS database is up to date.  Many federal and state agencies remain deficient in transferring important records to the database.

No.  This is simply Progressives demanding government compile dossiers on honest American citizens on the off chance that a small number might prove unsavory.  This is nothing more than a presumption of guilt without due process—without even probable cause.  The United States isn’t France.

Some of their thoughts are on the right track, though.

Pass legislation aimed specifically at cracking down on illegal gun trafficking and straw-purchasing: Straw-purchasing is when a prohibited buyer has someone with no criminal history walk into a gun store, pass a background check and purchase a gun with the purpose of giving it to the prohibited buyer.

Nice idea, but it’s not necessary, and we already have too many mostly redundant laws on the books.  And the areas of non-overlap are nothing more than sources of confusion and litigation.  Moreover, this is a law honored in the breach, as DoJ’s Fast and Furious illustrates.

Prosecute those prohibited buyers who attempt to purchase firearms and others who violate federal firearm laws: Federal law bars nine categories of people—including felons and those prohibited because of mental illness—from buying guns.

Absolutely, enforce the laws on the books, including applying the sanctions the laws supply.

Close the holes in our mental-health system and make sure that care is available for those who need it: Congress must improve prevention, early intervention, and treatment of mental illness while working to eliminate the stigma associated with mental illness.

This is on the right track, but government involvement must be absolutely minimal.  In the Soviet Union, the government defined disagreeing with the government as a form of mental illness.  We don’t need the USSR’s gulag reborn here.

Support responsible gun ownership: Congress should support safety training, research aimed at developing new gun safety technologies and the safe storage of firearms.

Certainly. As soon as Congress has reformed our tax code to simplify it and lower rates in parallel with greatly reduced Federal spending, so our economy can finally recover and we as a nation can afford this sort of expenditure.  At that point, Congress should begin jawboning with the States to do this sort of thing.

Given the active interference with individual freedom and responsibility represented by those first few items, though, I have to ask: what problem are the Progressives actually trying to solve—disarming the population they wish to govern, or reducing violence?

We’re Capable of So Much More

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In a related article, I described how even Progressive Europe recognizes the retreat of the US from the global stage and from our responsibilities as a major power.  Yet we have the economic and resource capacity to do so much better, as Spiegel International Online notices.  Fracking provides an example of both our capacity and of our willful impotence.

The United States is sitting on massive natural gas and oil reserves that have the potential to shift the geopolitical balance in its favor.  Worries are increasing in Russia and the Arab states of waning influence and falling market prices.

And

American drilling experts began using a method called “fracking,” with which oil and gas molecules can be extracted from dense shale rock formations.  The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that the United States will replace Russia as the world’s largest producer of natural gas in only two years.  The Americans could also become the world’s top petroleum producers by 2017.

And

…the boom could generate 600,000 new jobs, and some experts even believe that up to 3 million new jobs could be created in the coming years.

And

…the United States will benefit the most from the development of shale gas and oil resources.  …the political threat potential of oil producers like Iran will decline. Optimists assume that, in about 15 years, the United States will no longer have to send any aircraft carriers to the Persian Gulf to guarantee that oil tankers can pass unhindered through the Strait of Hormuz….

However.  There’s always a however.

President Barack Obama’s EPA continues to manufacture “investigations” of ground water pollution from fracking where none exists—their Wyoming fiasco, for instance.  His EPA continues its war on oil, gas, and coal by instituting output regulations that Congress already had rejected.

Obama continues to slow-walk oil and gas drilling permits on Federal lands and at offshore sites.  He has moved to cancel unused oil leases, never caring that the lessees had been reluctant to act on their leases due to uncertainty over Obama’s handling of hydrocarbons generally.

Obama even is slow-walking approval (and that approval is not a foregone conclusion, even now) of the Keystone XL Pipeline project, now that all environmental objections have been cleared with Nebraska’s approval of an alternate route.  This pipeline doesn’t directly address the resource explosion that fracking provides, but it remains symptomatic of his administration’s disdain for practical energy self-sufficiency.

It’s very unclear whether we will be allowed to realize the fruits of this technology and to bring into use these vast energy resources.

Self Defense and the Police

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The following is part of a larger beef between a sheriff and a mayor, and between a sheriff’s department and a state government, but the principle he espouses is a sound one, for all that.

In the aftermath of personnel cutbacks driven at least in part by recent changes in state law effected by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (R) and the Republican led state house, and against the backdrop of a personal animus felt toward him by the city of Milwaukee’s Mayor, Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke Jr has some advice for those he’s sworn to serve and protect.

I need you in the game.
…
With officers laid off and furloughed, simply calling 911 and waiting is no longer your best option.  You can beg for mercy from a violent criminal, hide under the bed, or you can fight back.
…
Consider taking a certified safety course in handling a firearm so you can defend yourself until we get there.
…
You have a duty to protect yourself and your family.  We’re partners now.

The only disagreement I have with him is in that last bit: “We’re partners now.”  In fact, we’ve always been partners with our sheriffs and police, and with all of our first responders.  The duty of which he speaks is older than the concept of government—it’s at the foundation of any social compact: we come together to form a government to help us satisfy our duty of protection.  But that duty to do so existed prior in order to be the motive.

This cop is taking a lot of heat, all of it unfairly because he’s simply stating a truth.

When the bad man comes, and seconds count, the police will be only minutes away.
-Neptunus Lex

Nominations

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Here are three and their positions on various matters of some import.

Chuck Hagel, Secretary of Defense:  President Barack Obama has put him up to forward Obama’s defense policy of global retrenchment and defense cutbacks.

Hagel thinks it’s appropriate to negotiate with terrorists—Hamas, for instance—and he refused to join a US Senate letter to the EU calling on them to label Hamas a terrorist organization.

In a 2006 op-ed for The Washington Post, he called for a troop withdrawal in Iraq—right before the successful surge, which he also opposed when it came up.

In response to current SecDef Leon Panetta’s statement that the present sequester would gut Defense, and while the Joint Chiefs of Staff were telling Congress that the sequester would lead, variously, to “a severe and irreversible impact on the Navy’s future,” “a Marine Corps that’s below the end strength to support even one major contingency,” and “an unacceptable level of strategic and operational risk” for the Army[,]” Hagel insisted that the “Defense Department, I think in many ways, has been bloated….  So I think the Pentagon needs to be pared down.”

I won’t go over his anti-gay verbal assault on a Luxembourg ambassador nominee, except to note that his attitude will impact Defense’s (repealed) Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy.

John Brennan, Director, CIA: Obama selected Brennan to put forward Obama’s policy of no intel collection, just kill them with drones:

Brennan is closely identified with the Obama administration’s expanded policy of using drones…to strike at suspected militants in countries such as Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan.  The Washington Post refers to Brennan as “the principal architect of a policy that has transformed counterterrorism from a conventional fight centered in Afghanistan to a high-tech global effort to track down and eliminate perceived enemies one by one.” The Post adds that Brennan is at the “core” of the White House centered effort to use drones and that “when operations are proposed in Yemen, Somalia or elsewhere, it is Brennan alone who takes the recommendations to Obama for a final sign-off.”

In truth, there’s much to be applauded about this policy; however, like all things, it can be overdone—and it is here, through the blind, unconsidered application of drone strikes.  The biggest symptom of the policy’s failure?  The utter lack of intel coming out of these strikes.  Dead men, after all, tell no tales.

Brennan compounded this failure, though, with this lie:

There hasn’t been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities we’ve been able to develop.

On top of this, Brennan has no understanding of the fundamentals of terrorism: he’s called jihad a “legitimate tenet of Islam,” insisting instead that these poor, misguided violent extremists are victims of “political, economic, and social forces.”

Jacob “Jack” Lew, Secretary of the Treasury: Obama selected him to continue Obama’s policy of extended (and extensive) borrowing and spending.  But he, too, cannot be trusted.

When Lew was Obama’s Director of OMB, he testified before Congressional committees on Obama’s budget proposals:

Our budget will get us, over the next several years, to the point where we can look the American people in the eye and say we’re not adding to the debt anymore; we’re spending money that we have each year, and then we can work on bringing down our national debt.

President Obama’s budget proposals then added at least $600 billion to the deficit every year.

As Senator Jeff Sessions (R, AL) puts it

[Lew’s] testimony before the Senate Budget Committee less than two years ago was so outrageous and false that it alone disqualifies him.

There’s more.  Lew claimed that the reason the Democratic Senate hadn’t adopted a budget is that it was being filibustered by Republicans.  This demonstrates breathtaking ignorance of the Congress, or further dishonesty, or both.  Budgets cannot be filibustered—they get up or down votes and the majority carries the outcome.  He also misrepresented the fact that the House (led by Republicans) has passed a budget every year since 2010, and the Senate (led by Democrats) have refused even to debate them.

And there’s this exchange between Bernie Sanders (I, VT) and Lew [emphasis added]:

When asked by…Sanders…at a Senate confirmation hearing in 2010, when Lew was nominated to be head of the Office of Management and Budget, whether the deregulation pushed by Rubin and former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan had “contributed significantly” to the banking crisis, Lew responded:

“Senator, I don’t consider myself an expert in some of these aspects of the financial industry.  My experience in the financial industry has been as a manager, not an investment adviser.  My sense, as someone who has generally been familiar with these trends, is thatthe problems in the financial industry preceded deregulation.  There was an increasing emphasis on highly abstract leveraged derivative products that got us to the point, that, in the period of time leading up to the financial crisis, risks were taken, they weren’t fully embraced, they weren’t well understood.

I don’t personally know the extent to which deregulation drove it, but I don’t think deregulation was the proximate cause.”

That is a statement of such profound (faux) ignorance that it’s awe-inspiring that Lew would say such a thing out loud.  Moreover, he was one of the senior economic advisors working for President Bill Clinton when Clinton signed the legislation making all of those “derivative products” exempt from the reach of any existing government regulation or regulatory agency.