Gun Control

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Versus gun rights. And police.

Squatters keep occupying another’s property in Lynnwood, WA, and using it as a stolen vehicle trafficking facility and as a residence. A police SWAT team raided the property and made some arrests. The owner changed the locks on the building. Then the squatters returned and resumed operations and residence.

In response to the reoccupation, Lieutenant David Hayes of the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office (Lynnwood’s county) told Fox News Digital that ensuring the squatters don’t return is “largely on the property owner.”

This is what the Left and their Progressive-Democratic Party mouthpieces are trying, functionally if not (necessarily) deliberately to prevent: a property owner defending her own property. A disarmed population via those gun “controls,” though, will be helpless against criminals and unable to satisfy their right and their obligation to defend their own property. Instead, they’ll be rendered entirely dependent on Government to for them rather than government’s (sic) local, county, and State police forces acting in assistance of the property owner.

In parallel with this, seemingly contradictorily, exponentially potentiating the police’s inability to support private citizens’ efforts, is the Left’s and Party’s ongoing—still!—efforts to defund and to shrink those same local, county, and State police forces.

It’s no wonder that whenever anyone in Party mounts an effort to disarm us, however seemingly mildly, there’s an increase in gun and ammunition sales.

“Common Sense”

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The Progressive-Democratic Party is attempting to use its Newspeak Dictionary to redefine “Nonsense” as “Common sense.” The latest example of this is President Joe Biden’s (D) latest call for “common sense” gun reforms. He made his latest demand in response to a series of murders with guns in Mississippi. In that series, the murderer used a shotgun and two handguns to murder six people across three locations in his single rampage. Biden’s demand:

That includes requiring background checks on all gun sales, banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, fully closing the boyfriend loophole to keep guns out of the hands of domestic abusers, requiring safe storage of guns, and eliminating immunity for gun manufacturers who knowingly put weapons of war on our streets.

Because any of that, like banning mythical devices—assault weapons and weapons of war on our streets—would have kept shotguns or handguns away from this murderer, or any other. And surely “high capacity magazines,” of whatever definition that becomes convenient from time to time to an overreaching government, would have kept shotguns and handguns away from criminals.

Holding gun manufacturers liable for the abuses of their products by criminals will only limit the availability of firearms to us honest ­average Americans. Oh, wait: that’s the goal of Party. Party members know full well that laws are ignored by criminals; that’s at the core of what makes them criminals.

Nonsense is common sense to Party. And Party expects us meekly to accept that. Or else.

Debt Limits and Spending

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The Congressional Budget Office is out with its projection for our nation’s economic future.

As for the much-discussed federal debt, the nearby chart shows how fast it has grown in the last several years. Debt held by the public—the kind we have to pay back to creditors like the Chinese and Japanese based on contracts—is now 97% of the economy, and will soon rise to 100% and keep going to 118.2% in 2033. How high can it go before creditors stop lending? No one knows, but it will be ugly if they do.

Here is that nearby chart:

This illustrates the tight relationship between spending and debt limits, and why future spending cuts must be part of negotiations related to raising today’s debt ceiling limit. It’s barely possible to see any effect from the 2011 debt limit increase that was agreed in exchange for some “freezing” of Federal spending levels, a pseudo-freeze that in the end ended rather quickly.

There need to be real reductions in Federal spending, not just a reduction in spending growth or even a pretend freeze. There’s plenty of room in welfare spending, for instance, for cutting. Furthermore, all Federal spending is discretionary, the bad habit of calling some spending mandatory notwithstanding. Finally, to put a legitimate floor under spending (which doesn’t contradict the forgoing because it’s a floor not a mandatedly ever-increasing level), there’s a Constitutional requirement to spend adequately on national defense and debt repayment.

In the end, too, tax rate cuts, leaving more money in the hands of private economy actors—us average Americans and our businesses—leads to increases in Federal revenues. This has been empirically demonstrated by every tax rate cut since President John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s reduction of the top rate from the neighborhood of 90% to the region of 70%.

Federal spending cuts coupled with Federal tax rate cuts—they’re win-win for our economy and our nation, if only the Progressive-Democratic Party politicians in Congress and the White House would get out of the way.

New Possibilities

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The People’s Republic of China has already said it intended to expand its presence in Antarctica to

add new ground stations in Antarctica to support its satellite activity and data collection as concerns mount over Beijing’s surveillance programs and the rising security threats directed at the US.

Rick Fisher, Senior Fellow at the International Assessment and Strategy Center and Global Taiwan Institute Advisory Board member has an additional concern.

In 2021, state media revealed that China had put a LIDAR—a laser radar—into the Zhongshan station to conduct “atmospheric research.’ Any kind of laser raises the possibility that the LIDAR could be upgraded to be a far more powerful laser.

That’s true enough, and it’s a fairly simple upgrade and one about which to be concerned. However, for many of our satellites and those of our friends and allies, it would be a low angle attack through much of our atmosphere to get at very many of our satellites.

I have a larger concern, one also touched on by Fisher.

If you’re going to be attacking the United States in that manner—traversing Antarctica—it is extremely useful to have the ability to update a FOBS [Fractional Orbit Bombardment System] bus[.]

The PRC has already tested an around-the-world hypersonic nuclear missile attack profile; that test missile missed its target after its circumnavigation by some 25 miles. The route wouldn’t need to be all that close to over-the-south-pole to pick up a precise course update from the PRC’s Antarctica ground station. And at this point in our deteriorating defense capability, such a system gone operational would give the PRC a first-strike capability.

Christine Wilson’s Weak Apologia

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Soon to be ex-Federal Trade Commissioner Christine Wilson issued her “explanation” for quitting her post as FTC Commissioner. Her lengthy rationalization of her decision to walk away from her responsibilities as FTC Commissioner aggregated to as a minority member of a Left-dominated Commission, she was unable to get the FTC Chairwoman to change her ways.

This is how the Left wins. Putative Conservatives turn tail and run when things get tough, cutting and running especially during a time when the erstwhile Conservative chair will be sat in by a Progressive replacement.

I have failed repeatedly to persuade Ms Khan and her enablers to do the right thing, and I refuse to give their endeavor any further hint of legitimacy by remaining. Accordingly, I will soon resign as an FTC commissioner.

Any excuse to run away. Staying on would give legitimacy only if she meekly acceded to Khan’s misbehaviors. If she kept the fight going, even if losing the fight, she would be lending no legitimacy to Khan; on the contrary, she would be highlighting Khan’s misbehaviors. But it’s just personally easier to…quit.