Category Archives: culture

Gun Registration (Control)

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The New Zealand government, enthusiastically led in this by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, intends to create a law requiring New Zealanders to register with the government the gun licenses they have and the guns they have.  This new…law…also is intended to make it harder to get, and keep, a gun license.

Other provisions of the thing include

  • establishment of new licensing for around 260 shooting clubs and ranges
  • expansion police authority to confiscate weapons if an individual shows (government defined) warning signs
  • require a separate license to purchase ammunition

Ardern, et al., claim that this thing is intended solely to “stop weapons falling into the wrong hands.”

Right.  Today, the “wrong hands” is terrorists and mass-shooters.  Sadly, “wrong hands” works out to whatever Government decides is wrong.

But, wait—this is New Zealand.  No worries.  No.  This is New Zealand today.  What about tomorrow’s government? Or the government the day after tomorrow?

These folks choose not to say what their limiting principle is.

PRC, “Armored Weapons,” and Hong Kong

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Recall the People’s Republic of China’s use of tanks to suppress the Tiananmen Square protests that resulted in some 2,000 civilian deaths.

Here’s the PRC’s new anti-protest armor: truncheons.  With the official police standing around, watching:

Media in Hong Kong have released footage of masked men in white shirts beating black-clad protesters with steel pipes and wooden poles in a subway station and on public transit. The protesters attempted to defend themselves with umbrellas.
Passengers said police did not intervene in Sunday’s attacks by the men, which left 45 people injured.

Forty-five injured by those truncheon-wielders.  Notice, too, that the thugs were masked, but the protestors were not afraid to show their faces.

Were the masks to conceal their Beijing origin?  The opposition party in Hong Kong, the Democratic Party, is taking (publicly, at least) a more generous position.  It’s investigating

the attacks amid suspicion that they involved the triad, a Chinese organized crime group.

I’m not so sanguine; although I don’t discount the idea that, rather than being sent by PRC President Xi Jinping’s supporters from the mainland, Xi caused the triad to be hired for the strong-arming.

Nationalism

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In his Wall Street Journal piece on this, Christopher DeMuth (Hudson Institute Distinguished Fellow) had this:

the nationalist claim is…government has abdicated basic responsibilities…:

failed to secure national borders and provide regular procedures for immigration and assimilation.

delegated lawmaking to foreign and international bodies, and domestic bureaucracies…

…acquiesced in, or actively promoted, the splintering of the nation into contending racial, religious and other groups and has favored some at the expense of others.

On the contrary, these aren’t abdications. The first two are by Progressive-Democrat design. The third is a deliberately wielded tool of the Progressive-Democrats to achieve the first two.

One has only to hear the bigoted spew of Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib, Pressley, Omar to understand this. One has only to see the Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidates, almost to a man, favor decriminalizing illegal entry into our nation, and then giving illegal aliens free health care at our expense. One has only to see the Progressive-Democrat Congressmen do their best to block funding for supporting our borders.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines nationalism as

The belief that nations will benefit from acting independently rather than collectively, emphasizing national rather than international goals.
The belief that a particular cultural or ethnic group constitutes a distinct people deserving of political self-determination.

There are no downsides to nationalism.

Guns and Homicides

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According to The Fresno Bee:

More people are licensed to carry concealed weapons in Fresno County than any other county in California, according to data from the Fresno County Sheriff’s Office and the Fresno Police Department [17,400 licenses for a population of 994,000].

And

Orange County is next with 12,008 licenses [population 3.2 million].

And

Los Angeles County, with a population of more than 10 million, had only 424 permits as of last summer….

And

San Diego County [population 3.3 million] had fewer than 1,150, and Alameda County [population 1.7 million] had 186. The fewest licenses were reported in San Francisco County [population 883,000], where the state bureau reported that there were only two CCW licenses….

On the other hand, here are the homicide rates (2018 figures) for those counties:

Fresno County: 5.3 per 100,000

Orange County: 1.5 per 100,000

Los Angeles County: 5.5 per 100,000

San Diego County: 2.5 per 100,000

Alameda County: 5.5 per 100,000

San Francisco County: 5.3 per 100,000

High legal gun ownership doesn’t seem correlated at all with high homicide rates.  Quite the opposite: the trend is fewer killings as gun ownership increases.

The Four

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Much is made of the racism supposedly imbued in President Donald Trump’s recent tweets (hint: there isn’t any).

But much is ignored of the racism inherent in the words of four freshman Congresswomen: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY), Rashida Tlaib (D, MI), Ilhan Omar (D, MN), and Ayanna Pressley (D, MA). Here’s Tlaib, providing a canonical example of those four’s blatant racism on last Tuesday’s CBS This Morning. In speaking of their relationship with Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA), Tlaib said

Acknowledge the fact that we are women of color, so when you do single us out, be aware of that and what you’re doing, especially because some of us are getting death threats, because some of us are being singled out because of our backgrounds, because of our experiences and so forth.

Because the first thing of importance in their minds is their skin color.  Not that they’re Congresspersons who happen to be women and who happen to have brown or black skin.  Not that they represent a constituency in their home districts.  Not even that they’re Americans.

No. What’s most important to them, all that’s important to them, is that they’ve black or brown.

It’s hard to get more racist than that.

That business about death threats, being singled out because of their backgrounds, “and so forth?” It’s been Republicans and Conservatives against whom such threats and singling-out have actually been carried out.  It’s been Conservatives who’ve been viciously attacked, for instance in Portland where the Progressive-Democrat mayor instructed his police force to stand down while the attacks went in—including during the assault on a Conservative journalist.  It’s been a Republican Congressman who was shot and seriously wounded, along with several others, for no other reason than that he, and they, are Republicans and Conservatives.

These four Congresswomen should be ashamed of their racism.  But they don’t have the grace, even for embarrassment.