Category Archives: regulation

Children and Gun Control

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In the aftermath of the Newtown shootings, the Left cynically is using children as weapons in their charge against weapons.  Here’s an example.  And the six-year-old miscreant Had Been Warned, too.

At Silver Spring, MD’s, Roscoe Nix Elementary School, Assistant Principle Renee Garraway sent a six-year-old boy’s parents “a letter” alleging that he’d

“threatened to shoot a student” and that he had been spoken to earlier about similar behavior.

The “threat,” it turns out, came in the middle of a game a boy and a girl classmate had been playing.  He pointed his finger at her and said “Pow.”

In the letter, according to The Washington Post,

an assistant principal had warned one parent that the child’s behavior could lead to a suspension.  At school, a counselor “had an extended conversation” with the child to emphasize “the inappropriateness of using objects to make shooting gestures[.]”

Because today it’s inappropriate for children to play games that children have been playing harmlessly for thousands of years.  And

an assistant principal had talked to the boy about the “seriousness” of the issue[.]

Despite that, according to the school district’s lawyer, Judith S Bresler,

…after the meeting with the counselor and assistant principal, [the boy] chose to point his finger at a female classmate and say “Pow.”

Why, the heinous, disobedient, little six-year-old monster.  We’ll show him.  And they suspended the little hand-totinggun-toting criminal for a day.

Montgomery County schools spokesman Dana Tofig chimed in:

[S]uspending a student is a serious matter, and that is especially true of a student who is in our early grades.

So, it’s an especially serious matter for a child to play Cowboys and Indians.  Oh, wait—there’s one of the Left’s code words.  Prolly ought to suspend him for his next move, playing Unarmed Settlers and Indians, too.  Or would an extended arm, with the other hand back by one’s ear, also be an illegal weapon?  Probably not.  Too bad, too; the school would miss out on two-fer in that game.  Or a triple play, if the child playing the role of the Indigenous American also weren’t actually one.

All of this actually happened in mid-December, shortly after the Newtown shootings (it’s only coming to light now because the family has been forced to file a formal appeal with the school, the first move in bringing the matter to court, over the school’s intransigence), so a measure of hysteria might be expected, as the family’s lawyer, Robin Ficker, noted.  But these school officials are grown, rational, trained adults.  They know better.

That’s what makes it especially appalling that these folks are using children in their war on weapons.

Now that the Bill Has Been Passed

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…and we can see what is in it, the pork for President Barack Obama’s paymasters that is in it is quite impressive.  Here are some, in no particular order.  Enjoy the sausage.

  • Accelerated tax write-off for owners of NASCAR tracks: $78 million
  • Tax credit for companies operating in American Samoa: $62 million
  • Distillers rum tax rebate: $222 million
  • Film and television producers expense the first $15 million of production costs incurred in the US ($20 million incurred in economically depressed areas in the United States): $430 million
  • Wind production tax credit: $12 billion
  • Cellulosic biofuels tax credit continued and expanded to include producers of “algae-based fuel:” $59 million
  • Biodiesel and “renewable diesel” tax credit: $2.2 billion
  • Plug-in motorcycles tax credit: $7 million
  • Energy-efficient appliances tax credit: $650 million
  • Energy-efficient homes tax credit: $154 million

Most of these seem like chump change, but they, with other inclusions, sum to $40 billion of pork in the tax “deal.”

Mass Shootings

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In the aftermath of the Newtown, CT, school massacre, there’s been a push to reapply a ban on “assault” weapons—whatever those are; not even the military has any such.  The term is purely legalist, cooked up in the back halls of Congress, and subject to change with the winds of political convenience.

One of the excuses used for this foolishness is one that Peekskill Mayor Mary Foster repeats:

We have seen a proliferation of these tragedies after the ban on assault weapons expired in 2004.  We cannot allow this to continue.

Let’s look at some actual facts.  The Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel published some of those just last August.  The graph below is built from their data, which cover roughly 35 years—from 1976 through 2010.

Note:   Mass shooting defined by the FBI as the shooter killing four or more people in a single incident (not including the himself), and typically in a single location.  Data compiled from the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting program by James Alan Fox, criminology professor at Northeastern University; US Census Bureau; Journal Sentinel research

Hmm….  Pop quiz time, and no peeking below: who can identify from this graph the period of effectivity of the “assault” weapon ban?

I didn’t think so.

The ban ran from 1994-2004.  The incident rate during that period is the same as the rates both before and after.  The number of victims per incident varies wildly—but is unchanged, in average or variability, over the same three periods.

Maybe it would be better for concerned communities to put trained, armed guards on duty in locations where there are masses of people—like schools and shopping malls, maybe.

Maybe it would be better for folks sitting in leadership positions—like, say, Mayor Foster—to think with their brains, rather than their emotions, and to consult some actual data.

Anthropogenic Climate Change

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…and dishonesty.  More is beginning to leak out, this time from of all places the UN.  That august body’s IPCC has had leaked a draft of its latest “study” on the man-caused disaster in climate, and it isn’t a pretty example of the outcome of climate “scientist” incestuousness.

High points on the leak are from Matt Ridley, in The Wall Street Journal, and they concern a “pollutant” that our present administration is going after, and damn the economy—and damn the

poor people whose lives are being ruined by high food and energy prices caused by the diversion of corn to biofuel and the subsidizing of renewable energy driven by carboncrats[.]

The question at hand:

How much warming will a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide actually produce?

Ridley’s information comes from Nic Lewis.

A semiretired successful financier from Bath, England, with a strong mathematics and physics background, Mr Lewis has made significant contributions to the subject of climate change.

Per Lewis [emphasis added]:

[T]he latest observational estimates of the effect of aerosols (such as sulfurous particles from coal smoke) find that they have much less cooling effect than thought when the last IPCC report was written.  The rate at which the ocean is absorbing greenhouse-gas-induced warming is also now known to be fairly modest.  In other words, the two excuses used to explain away the slow, mild warming we have actually experienced—culminating in a standstill in which global temperatures are no higher than they were 16 years ago—no longer work.

Thus [again, emphasis added],

We can now estimate, based on observations, how sensitive the temperature is to carbon dioxide.  We do not need to rely heavily on unproven models.  Comparing the trend in global temperature over the past 100-150 years with the change in “radiative forcing” (heating or cooling power) from carbon dioxide, aerosols and other sources, minus ocean heat uptake, can now give a good estimate of climate sensitivity.

The conclusion—taking the best observational estimates of the change in decadal-average global temperature between 1871-80 and 2002-11, and of the corresponding changes in forcing and ocean heat uptake—is this: A doubling of CO2 will lead to a warming of 1.6°-1.7°C (2.9°-3.1°F).

This is much lower than the IPCC’s current best estimate, 3°C (5.4°F).

In the end,

A cumulative change of less than 2°C by the end of this century will do no net harm.  It will actually do net good—that much the IPCC scientists have already agreed upon in the last IPCC report.  Rainfall will increase slightly, growing seasons will lengthen, Greenland’s ice cap will melt only very slowly, and so on.

There’s more to this climate pseudo-science failure, and it flows from the CO2 interactions via alleged feedback loops [emphasis added]:

A little warming (from whatever cause [including atmospheric CO2]) heats up the sea, which makes the air more humid—and water vapor itself is a greenhouse gas.  The resulting model-simulated changes in clouds generally increase warming further, so the warming is doubled, trebled or more.

[The problem is,] water vapor may not be increasing.   A recent paper from Colorado State University concluded that “we can neither prove nor disprove a robust trend in the global water vapor data.”  [On top of that], as one Nobel Prize-winning physicist with a senior role in combating climate change admitted to me the other day: “We don’t even know the sign” of water vapor’s effect—in other words, whether it speeds up or slows down a warming of the atmosphere.

One reason for the uncertainty of the sign is that atmospheric water vapor means more clouds, and clouds reflect inbound sunlight while trapping outbound heat.  Which has the greater effect—reducing the inbound inputs or holding onto the outbound outputs?  Only a climate pseudo-scientist claims to know at this point in the data collection and analysis.  Especially given the…quality…of their data and of their models.

There’s a whole lot more at the Watts Up With That? site, both on the present topic and on anthropogenic climate change, generally.

The Irrationality of the Gun-Control NLMSM Press

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Here are some rather palpable examples, via The Daily Caller:

LaPierre [National Rifle Association Executive Vice President Wayne] as delusional as any dictator. His speech against music videos, hurricanes has the feel of a Castro rant or Mugabe tirade.
— The Huffington Post’s Jason Cherkis

In Wayne LaPierre’s defense, tone-deafness is a serious condition that afflicts hundreds of thousands of Americans.
— New York Daily News’ Josh Greenman

Wayne LaPierre should have just given this speech to an empty chair on a stage
— The Nation’s Jeremy Scahill

No two ways about: This is gross, awful, dishonest.
— Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall

What is this NRA guy talking about? Blame hurricanes. Blame media. It’s so strange.
— Politico’s Ben White

This is nuts.
— Talking Points Memo’s Ryan J. Reilly