Monday, December 31, 2012

America Doesn’t Have a Gun Problem, It Has a Gang Problem

 

Posted By Daniel Greenfield On December 31, 2012 @ 12:50 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage |

Chicago’s murder rate has hit that magic 500 number. Baltimore’s murder rate has passed 200. In Philly, it’s up to 324, the highest since 2007. In Detroit, it’s approaching 400, another record. In New Orleans, it’s almost at 200. New York City is down to 414 from 508. In Los Angeles, it’s over 500. In St. Louis it’s 113 and 130 in Oakland. It’s 121 in Memphis and 76 in Birmingham.

Washington, D.C., home of the boys and girls who can solve it all, is nearing its own big 100.

Those 12 cities alone account for nearly 3,200 dead and nearly a quarter of all murders in the United States. And we haven’t even visited sunny Atlanta or chilly Cleveland.

These cities are the heartland of America’s real gun culture. It isn’t the bitter gun-and-bible clingers in McCain and Romney territory who are racking up a more horrifying annual kill rate than Al Qaeda; it’s Obama’s own voting base.

Chicago, where Obama delivered his victory speech, matches the murder rate for Japan and is higher than the murder rates for Spain, Poland and pre-war Syria. If Chicago gets any worse, it will find itself passing the homicide rate for the entire country of Canada.

Chicago’s murder rate of 15.65 per 100,000 people looks nothing like the American 4.2 rate, the Midwestern 4.5 or the Illinois’ 5.6 rates, but it does look like the murder rates in failed countries like Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe. To achieve Chicago’s murder rate, African countries usually have to experience a bloody genocidal civil war or decades of tyranny.

But Chicago isn’t even all that unique. Or the worst case scenario. That would be New Orleans which at an incredible 72.8 murder rate is ten times higher than the national average. If New Orleans were a country, it would have the 2nd highest murder rate in the world, beating out El Salvador.

Louisiana went red for Romney 58 to 40, but Orleans Parish went blue for Obama 80 to 17.

St. Louis has a murder rate just a little lower than Belize. Baltimore has a worse murder rate than South Africa and Detroit has a worse murder rate than Colombia. Obama won both St. Louis and Baltimore by comfortable margins. He won Detroit’s Wayne County 73 to 26.

Homicide rates like these show that something is broken, but it isn’t broken among the Romney voters rushing to stock up on assault rifles every time Obama begins threatening their right to buy them; it’s broken among Obama’s base.

Any serious conversation about gun violence and gun culture has to begin at home; in Chicago, in Baltimore, in New York City, in Los Angeles and in Washington, D.C.

Voting for Obama does not make people innately homicidal. Just look at Seattle which is agonizing over its 26 murders. That’s about the same number of murders as East St. Louis which has only 27,000 people to Seattle’s 620,000.

So what is happening in Chicago to drive it to the gates of hell ahead of Zimbabwe and Rwanda?

A breakdown of the Chicago killing fields shows that 83% of those murdered in Chicago last year had criminal records. In Philly, it’s 75%. In Milwaukee it’s 77% percent. In New Orleans, it’s 64%. In Baltimore, it’s 91%. Many were felons who had served time. And as many as 80% of the homicides were gang related.

Chicago’s problem isn’t guns; it’s gangs. Gun control efforts in Chicago or any other major city are doomed because gangs represent organized crime networks which stretch down to Mexico, and trying to cut off their gun supply will be as effective as trying to cut off their drug supply.

America’s murder rate isn’t the work of the suburban and rural homeowners who shop for guns at sporting goods stores and at gun shows, and whom news shows profile after every shooting, but by the gangs embedded in the urban areas controlled by the Democratic machine. The gangs who drive up America’s murder rate look nothing like the occasional mentally ill suburban white kid who goes off his medication and decides to shoot up a school. Lanza, like most serial killers, is a media aberration, not the norm.

National murder statistics show that blacks are far more likely to be killers than whites and they are also far more likely to be killed. The single largest cause of homicides is the argument. 4th on the list is juvenile gang activity with 676 murders, which combined with various flavors of gangland killings takes us nearly to the 1,000 mark. America has more gangland murders than Sierra Leone, Eritrea and Puerto Rico have murders.

Our national murder rate is not some incomprehensible mystery that can only be attributed to the inanimate tools, the steel, brass and wood that do the work. It is largely the work of adult males from age 18 to 39 with criminal records killing other males of that same age and criminal past.

If this were going on in Rwanda, El Salvador or Sierra Leone, we would have no trouble knowing what to make of it, and silly pearl-clutching nonsense about gun control would never even come up. But this is Chicago, it’s Baltimore, it’s Philly and NOLA; and so we refuse to see that our major cities are in the same boat as some of the worst trouble spots in the world.

Lanza and Newtown are comforting aberrations. They allow us to take refuge in the fantasy that homicides in America are the work of the occasional serial killer practicing his dark art in one of those perfect small towns that always show up in murder mysteries or Stephen King novels. They fool us into thinking that there is something American about our murder rate that can be traced to hunting season, patriotism and bad mothers.

But go to Chicago or Baltimore. Go where the killings really happen and the illusion comes apart.

There is a war going on in America between gangs of young men who bear an uncanny resemblance to their counterparts in Sierra Leone or El Salvador. They live like them, they fight for control of the streets like them and they kill like them.

America’s horrific murder rate is a result of the transformation of major American cities into Sierra Leone, Somalia, Rwanda and El Salvador. Our murder rate now largely consists of criminals killing criminals.

As David Kennedy, the head of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control, put it, “The majority of homicide victims have extensive criminal histories. This is simply the way that the world of criminal homicide works. It’s a fact.”

America is, on a county by county basis, not a violent country, just as it, on a county by county basis, did not vote for Obama. It is being dragged down by broken cities full of broken families whose mayors would like to trash the Bill of Rights for the entire country in the vain hope that national gun control will save their cities, even though gun control is likely to be as much help to Chicago or New Orleans as the War on Drugs.

Obama’s pretense that there needs to be a national conversation about rural American gun owners is a dishonest and cynical ploy that distracts attention from the real problem that he and politicians like him have sat on for generations.

We do not need to have a conversation about the NRA. We need to have a conversation about Chicago.

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Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://frontpagemag.com

URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/america-doesnt-have-a-gun-problem-it-has-a-gang-problem/

The Values Economy


Sultan Knish ^ | December 31, 2012 | Daniel Greenfield

Posted on Monday, December 31, 2012 8:24:45 AM by expat1000

There are two types of things that we put money into; the things that we need and the things that we don't. The former represent our physical needs and the latter our spiritual needs. Food for the body and food for the mind. We need to eat, but we don't need to see a movie. We need a house to live in, but we don't need a house of worship. We need a car to get to work, but we don't need a painting on our wall once we get there.

Culture isn't a luxury, even the poorest of the poor have it. It doesn't mean a night at the opera, it can just as easily mean sitting under a tree while the village elder explains where fire came from. But it is optional in the sense that we choose where to put our money or pine cones and those choices are our values economy.

The values economy consists of the culture you support. It's the books you buy and the movies you see, it's the paintings on your wall and the house of worship you attend. It's the concerts and games you buy tickets to and it's the colleges you attend. It's all the intangible investments in the intangible things of aesthetics, faith and cultural knowledge.

In a healthy culture, these things mirror your values. In an unhealthy culture they do not. Not only do they not, but they don't even mirror any stable set of values that can go the distance. Instead they're a species of insanity, confused and convoluted bits of specialist jargon, perpetual revolutions against good taste, ideas without ideas and taboo hunters with no more taboos left to break.

Cultural industries operate on perception. Everyone must see a movie or hear a song. Everyone must go to college, even though it's mostly as useful as a donkey on a pogo stick. Everyone must accept that all religions are basically the same and can be boiled down to a love for one's fellow man. All these things are the means through which the values economy manufactures the perception of the centrality of its own values and the importance of its own products. And its only real product is convincing you of its indispensability.

All cultural products are part of the values economy. When you put money into the values economy, you are subsidizing a particular set of values and regardless of where your real tastes and beliefs lie, you will get more of what you buy. If you buy a set of lead pencils every month, the company will go on making more lead pencils. If you buy cultural products at odds with your values, then more of the same will keep on being made.

Culture is an investment. It might be the second biggest investment there is after the family. Any society can build a dam or go to the moon or harness the talents of its innately gifted artists and musicians to create great works of art... if they have the cultural framework in which that can happen. Without that framework, great engineers, musicians, poets, artists, scientists and architects will be born and their skills will be wasted, as they are wasted in most of the world and in most of history.

Culture is the difference between making things of worth and making worthless things. It is the glue that brings together bold ideas and makes them possible. It is what explains the universe and tells us how to make the impossible, possible. And it's the most fragile of all these things because it dies easily.

The values economy is how a society maintains its culture, investing its energy, money and structure into maintaining a healthy culture that projects its values and makes its achievements possible. Like any other investments, there are bad investments and good investments. A society can invest in Bach or it can invest in Andy Warhol. It can invest in engineers or Transgender Guatemalan Poets 101. And these investments have consequences, they pay out profits or lead to losses even if they appear to initially be intangible, with Andy leading to more Andy and Bach leading to more Bach.

Highbrow culture had patrons. Lowbrow culture had people who stopped by and threw pennies into a hat. Those boundaries have mostly been erased. Highbrow culture is now the pursuit of the utterly senseless, whose senselessness verifies its superiority, and the vast territory is occupied by a populist culture that is high and low at the same time, blending an empty intellectual superiority with bad taste and worse standards where everything is sincerely a joke, and ironic detachment is a pratfall away.

Aside from fans of one thing or another, most people don't think of their learning, their religion or their entertainment as an investment, a seed planted in the earth to produce more of its kind. And the failure to think that way leads them to make bad investments in a bad culture.

The culture that we are stuck with now has mostly been one bad investment after another, tracts of smelly swampland where nothing can grow pawned off by sleazy weasels wearing too much polyester and more gold chains than the pharaohs, who haven't even had to work very hard to pull off their malignant scam. Good has been traded for bad and then for worse.

The values economy is tanking and the economic indicators are just one sign of how awry things have gone. The social indicators are another.

Culture is how we teach ourselves to perpetuate our society. Instead our cultural investments have given us broken families who are willing to sell their rights to the government in exchange for being taken care of from cradle to grave. And the government is willing to make the deal so long as it can bring in more foreign laborers to balance out the gap in the birth rate and then increase the police forces and the military to deal with the fallout from that immigration leading to a police state.

As cultural investments go, it's not hard to see that this is a bad one.

Our society is less literate than it used to be, it's less sane than it used to be and less productive. And those are not due to some innate defect in the youth or a fault in the stars, but in our culture. If our society is breaking, it's because our cultural investments have been bad ones. And if our cultural investments have been bad ones, it's because we didn't approach culture as an investment, but as a thing of momentary enjoyment, or as a consensus that we accepted as coming from within the culture.

Reversing that will not be easy, but it is possible. Cultures have dramatically changed, particularly after traumatic events. The culture that we are living in bears the scars of such turnarounds. And that can be done again, which isn't to say that it will be easy. The first step is to think of culture as a values economy, not just as education, enlightenment or entertainment. An investment that we are making for the future.

This does not have to be some dreary Marxist exercise in art criticism or a dogma-ridden analysis of every show on television. It means, first and foremost, caring about what you consume, instead of consuming culture as junk food, by being enthusiastic about its merits. That experience can be solitary, but it should also be undertaken with an awareness that culture is an investment in the values economy and that what you pay into will go far beyond the books and movies you take in, or the house of worship or college you attend. Culture is a conversation and we are all part of it.

Every person has a set of values that they live by. The test of any cultural investment is whether it meets those values, fails to meet those values or has values that runs counter to it. Most culture is not entirely one thing or another. There are conservative impulses in even the most liberal works and liberal impulses in even the most conservative works. And so our cultural investments confront us with the entirely subjective question of whether a thing will do more to build our culture than to tear it down.

The values economy follows the old principle GIGO, Garbage In, Garbage Out. If you invest in bad culture, you will get bad culture. And your children will get worse culture and your grand-children will get even worse culture. There is a multiplier effect to decay, it feeds on itself and becomes worse with each cycle. The bad culture of five years ago becomes the horrible culture of today and the nightmarish alien culture of tomorrow until a breaking point is reached and there are too few worthwhile things left to keep it all going.

Cocooned in tangible luxuries, it becomes easy to let the intangibles slide, to consume without contemplating the cultural cost of our cultural investments. But there's only so much lotus that can be eaten before all memory is lost and there is no longer any voyage, only an island of shrinking land with the tide coming in.

The values economy is the calculus of our culture. It determines who we are and who our children will be. If our borders and our buildings, our roads and our technologies are our structure, then our culture is our soul. It is the spirit that lurks within the concrete and steel, it is the soul of the plastic, and if it is lost, then all that remains is structure no different from the pyramids and the countless fossilized relics of dead civilizations; empty stone with no spirit.

The economy decides if our bodies have a future. The values economy decides whether it will have a soul

Thursday, December 27, 2012

Murder by Numbers

December 27, 2012

By Randall Hoven

Listening to the latest media chatter, one could get the impression that murder in the US is historically bad and getting worse. As the Reverend Al Sharpton put it, "The time for their talk is over. Now's the time for action, and real change on gun control."

Actually, now would seem to be a very bad time for such action. The reason is simple: the murder rate is historically low and is already trending downward. In fact, the murder rate in 2011 was the lowest since 1961: 4.7 murders per 100,000 people. In only 5 years since 1910 has it been lower: 1955-59, when it was only slightly lower at 4.5 or 4.6.

Data source: The Federal Bureau of Investigation. For years 1900-1991: http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/glance/tables/hmrttab.cfm. For years 1992-2011: http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/tables/table-1

Today's murder rate is essentially at a low point of the past century. The murder rate in 2011 was lower than it was in 1911.

And the trend is downward. Whatever we've been doing over the last 20-30 years seems to be working, more or less. The murder rate has been cut by more than half since 1980: from 10.7 to 4.7.

We can only speculate on what might be behind this trend, but I will point out a few interesting facts.

• From 1980 to 2000 our prison population more than quadrupled.

• From the 1980s to 2000, the number of prisoner executions more than quadrupled.

• From 1986 to 2006, the number of states adopting "shall issue" Concealed Carry permits nearly quadrupled.

While the most recent murder rate is fairly low for the United States, we often hear that other countries like Australia, Japan and the UK have much lower murder rates. If we want to compare countries, we should not "cherry pick." Let's look at all countries. The United Nations collects such data. Out of 206 countries, the US ranks 103 - smack in the middle.

Data Source: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime: http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/homicide.html. (Rates are for most recent year, since 2000, of available data.)

You might guess that the Congo (30.8) or Uganda (36.3) would have higher murder rates than us. But would you have guessed Jamaica (40.9), Saint Lucia (25.2), Brazil (21.0), Greenland (19.2) and Costa Rica (10.0) do too?

Here is the list of European countries whose most recent murder rates exceeded the U.S.'s.

• Greenland (19.2)
• Russia (10.2)
• Moldova (7.5)
• Lithuania (6.6)
• Ukraine (5.2)
• Estonia (5.2)
• Belarus (4.9)

It is true that all countries in Southern and Western Europe had lower murder rates than the U.S. But it might be worthwhile to parse the U.S. number if we continue to make such comparisons.

In over 52% of the murders in the US in 2011 in which the race of the murderer was known, the murderer was black. Over half of the victims of murder were also black. But blacks are only 13.6% of the population. Put all that together, and the murder rate in the US for non-blacks was more like 2.6 per 100,000 in 2011.

As Peter Baldwin put it in his book, The Narcissism of Minor Differences, "Take out the black underclass from the statistics, and even American murder rates fall to European levels."

A rate of 2.6 would put us below the Southern European countries of Albania (4.0) and Montenegro (3.5), and in the neighborhood of the Western European countries of Liechtenstein (2.8) and Luxembourg (2.5).

The Government Accountability Office estimated that 25,064 criminal aliens (non-U.S. citizens) were arrested for homicide in the U.S. Compare that number to the total number of homicides in the U.S. in 2011: 14,612. The criminal aliens committed their murders over a number of years, but that is still a high percentage of all murders in the U.S. that are committed by non-citizens.

And let's not forget that we are the United States; there are 50 states. (U.S. rates are for 2011 unless otherwise stated. Foreign rates are most recent year available.)

• Idaho (2.3, was 1.4 in 2010)
• Finland (2.2)
• Oregon (2.1)
• Maine (2.0)
• Utah (1.9)
• Belgium (1.7)
• Canada (1.6)
• Iowa (1.5)
• Greece (1.5)
• Minnesota (1.4)
• New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island (1.3)
• UK and Portugal (1.2)
• Hawaii (1.2)
• France (1.1)
• New Hampshire (1.0 in 2010)

But what about guns? Does the US have a murder problem because of so many guns? Again, let's not cherry-pick; let's look at all other countries.

Data sources: UNODC and the Small Arms Survey

To the eyeball, it looks like a more heavily armed population goes hand-in-hand with less murder, as an average. The statistics bear that out: the correlation coefficient is negative, -0.23, and it is statistically significant.

You can look for various trends, but there is no evidence here that the availability of guns leads to more murders. Two of the most heavily armed countries, Finland and Switzerland, have murder rates of 2.2 and 0.7, among the lowest in the world. On the other hand, every country with a murder rate at least 5 times greater than the U.S.'s has at least 5 times fewer firearms per person than the U.S.

Yes, you can look for trends, but the Centers for Disease Control already did that for you. During 2000-02, a CDC task force "conducted a systematic review of scientific evidence regarding the effectiveness of firearms laws in preventing violence, including violent crimes, suicide, and unintentional injury." Here was their conclusion.

"The Task Force found insufficient evidence to determine the effectiveness of any of the firearms laws or combinations of laws reviewed on violent outcomes."

In short, the Al Sharpton advice is exactly wrong: this is not the time, and gun control is not the action. To put it mildly, we have better things to worry about.

In my view, this whole issue is a distraction. The homicide rate in the U.S. is one of the few things that are on a good trend. Why are we even discussing something that is historically low and declining instead of our unsustainable debt which is historically high and climbing? It is another sign of our dysfunctional politics. We seem incapable of even recognizing our real problems, much less tackling them.

Randall Hoven can be followed on Twitter or randallhoven.com.

Data source: The Federal Bureau of Investigation. For years 1900-1991: http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/glance/tables/hmrttab.cfm. For years 1992-2011: http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/tables/table-1

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2012/12/listening_to_the_latest_media.html at December 27, 2012 - 07:34:58 AM CST

Sunday, December 23, 2012

Obama Really Cares About the Kids!! (446 school age children shot in Chicago so far this year)

446 school age children shot in Chicago so far this year with strongest gun laws in country – media silent

The cesspool known as Chicago probably has the toughest gun laws in the country, yet despite all the shootings, murders, and bloodshed, you never hear a peep about this from the corrupt state run media. In Chicago, there have been 446 school age children shot in leftist utopia run by Rahm Emanuel and that produced Obama, Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan, etc. 62 school aged children have actually been killed by crazed nuts in Chicago so far this year with almost two weeks to go. So why isn’t this news worthy? Is it because it would embarrass those anti second amendment nuts who brag about Chicago’s tough gun laws? Is it because most of the kids who were shot and killed were minorities? Or is it because the corrupt media doesn’t want to show Chicago in a bad light? Amazingly, no Obama crocodile tears either.

For those of you too dense to get the point of this post, it’s to make the point about gun laws. No matter how tough the gun laws are, the crazed, nut jobs will find a way to get them and if they so chose, use them. No draconian law can stop this, no matter how well intentioned the law is, or if it’s just about leftists grabbing power from citizens and taking away their constitutional rights.

THE LIST OF MURDERED SCHOOL AGE CHILDREN 2012

18 YEARS OLD- 15

17 YEARS OLD- 16

16 YEARS OLD- 16

15 YEARS OLD- 6

14 YEARS OLD- 4

13 YEARS OLD- 2

12 YEARS OLD- 1

7 YEARS OLD- 1

6 YEARS OLD- 1

446 School Age Children Shot in Chicago so Far This Year THE LIST OF SCHOOL AGE CHILDREN SHOT IN 2012

18 year old- 110

17 year old- 99

16 year old- 89

15 year old- 62

14 year old- 39

13 year old- 21

12 year old- 10

11 year old- 2

10 year old- 3

9 year old- 1

7 year old- 3

6 year old- 2

5 year old- 1

4 year old- 1

3 year old- 1

1 year old- 2

Saturday, December 22, 2012

75 Economic Numbers From 2012 That Are Almost Too Crazy To Believe (ZeroHedge)

 

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 12/21/2012 17:44 -0500

What a year 2012 has been! The mainstream media continues to tell us what a “great job” the Obama administration and the Federal Reserve are doing of managing the economy, but meanwhile things just continue to get even worse for the poor and the middle class. It is imperative that we educate the American people about the true condition of our economy and about why all of this is happening. If nothing is done, our debt problems will continue to get worse, millions of jobs will continue to leave the country, small businesses will continue to be suffocated, the middle class will continue to collapse, and poverty in the United States will continue to explode. Just “tweaking” things slightly is not going to fix our economy. We need a fundamental change in direction. Right now we are living in a bubble of debt-fueled false prosperity that allows us to continue to consume far more wealth than we produce, but when that bubble bursts we are going to experience the most painful economic “adjustment” that America has ever gone through. We need to be able to explain to our fellow Americans what is coming, why it is coming and what needs to be done. Hopefully the crazy economic numbers that I have included in this article will be shocking enough to wake some people up.

The end of the year is a time when people tend to gather with family and friends more than they do during the rest of the year. Hopefully many of you will use the list below as a tool to help start some conversations about the coming economic collapse with your loved ones. Sadly, most Americans still tend to doubt that we are heading into economic oblivion. So if you have someone among your family and friends that believes that everything is going to be “just fine”, just show them these numbers. They are a good summary of the problems that the U.S. economy is currently facing.

The following are 75 economic numbers from 2012 that are almost too crazy to believe...

#1 In December 2008, 31.6 million Americans were on food stamps. Today, a new all-time record of 47.7 million Americans are on food stamps. That number has increased by more than 50 percent over the past four years, and yet the mainstream media still has the gall to insist that “things are getting better”.

#2 Back in the 1970s, about one out of every 50 Americans was on food stamps. Today, about one out of every 6.5 Americans is on food stamps.

#3 According to one calculation, the number of Americans on food stamps now exceeds the combined populations of “Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming.”

#4 According to one recent survey, 55 percent of all Americans have received money from a safety net program run by the federal government at some point in their lives.

#5 For the first time ever, more than a million public school students in the United States are homeless. That number has risen by 57 percent since the 2006-2007 school year.

#6 Median household income in the U.S. has fallen for four consecutive years. Overall, it has declined by over $4000 during that time span.

#7 Families that have a head of household under the age of 30 have a poverty rate of 37 percent.

#8 The percentage of working age Americans with a job has been under 59 percent for 39 months in a row.

#9 In September 2009, during the depths of the last economic crisis, 58.7 percent of all working age Americans were employed. In November 2012, 58.7 percent of all working age Americans were employed. It is more then 3 years later, and we are in the exact same place.

#10 When you total up all working age Americans that do not have a job in America today, it comes to more than 100 million.

#11 According to one recent survey, 55 percent of all small business owners in America “say they would not start a business today given what they know now and in the current environment.”

#12 The number of jobs at new small businesses continues to decline. According to economist Tim Kane, the following is how the decline in the number of startup jobs per 1000 Americans breaks down by presidential administration

Bush Sr.: 11.3

Clinton: 11.2

Bush Jr.: 10.8

Obama: 7.8

#13 The U.S. share of global GDP has fallen from 31.8 percent in 2001 to 21.6 percent in 2011.

#14 The United States has fallen in the global economic competitiveness rankings compiled by the World Economic Forum for four years in a row.

#15 There are four major U.S. banks that each have more than 40 trillion dollars of exposure to derivatives.

#16 In 2000, there were more than 17 million Americans working in manufacturing, but now there are less than 12 million.

#17 According to the Pew Research Center, 61 percent of all Americans were “middle income” back in 1971. Today, only 51 percent of all Americans are.

#18 The Pew Research Center has also found that 85 percent of all middle class Americans say that it is harder to maintain a middle class standard of living today than it was 10 years ago.

#19 62 percent of all middle class Americans say that they have had to reduce household spending over the past year.

#20 Right now, approximately 48 percent of all Americans are either considered to be “low income” or are living in poverty.

#21 Approximately 57 percent of all children in the United States are living in homes that are either considered to be either “low income” or impoverished.

#22 According to one survey, 77 percent of all Americans are now living paycheck to paycheck at least part of the time.

#23 Back in 1950, more than 80 percent of all men in the United States had jobs. Today, less than 65 percentof all men in the United States have jobs.

#24 The average amount of time that an unemployed worker stays out of work in the United States is 40 weeks.

#25 If you can believe it, approximately one out of every four American workers makes 10 dollars an hour or less.

#26 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, an all-time record 49 percent of all Americans live in a home where at least one person receives financial assistance from the federal government. Back in 1983, that number was less than 30 percent.

#27 Right now, more than 100 million Americans are enrolled in at least one welfare program run by the federal government. And that does not even count Social Security or Medicare. Overall, there are almost 80 different “means-tested welfare programs” that the federal government is currently running.

#28 When you account for all government transfer payments and all forms of government employment, more than half of all Americans are now at least partially financially dependent on the government.

#29 Barack Obama has been president for less than four years, and during that time the number of Americans “not in the labor force” has increased by nearly 8.5 million. Something seems really “off” about that number, because during the entire decade of the 1980s the number of Americans “not in the labor force” only rose by about 2.5 million.

#30 Electricity bills in the United States have risen faster than the overall rate of inflation for five years in a row.

#31 According to USA Today, many Americans have actually seen their water bills triple over the past 12 years.

#32 There are now 20.2 million Americans that spend more than half of their incomes on housing. That represents a 46 percent increase from 2001.

#33 Right now, approximately 25 million American adults are living with their parents.

#34 As the economy has slowed down, so has the number of marriages. According to a Pew Research Center analysis, only 51 percent of all Americans that are at least 18 years old are currently married. Back in 1960, 72 percent of all U.S. adults were married.

#35 At this point, only 24.6 percent of all jobs in the United States are good jobs.

#36 In 1999, 64.1 percent of all Americans were covered by employment-based health insurance. Today, only 55.1 percent are covered by employment-based health insurance.

#37 Recently it was announced that total student loan debt in the United States has passed the one trillion dollar mark.

#38 If you can believe it, one out of every seven Americans has at least 10 credit cards.

#39 One survey of business executives has ranked California as the worst state in America to do business for 8 years in a row.

#40 In the city of Detroit today, more than 50 percent of all children are living in poverty, and close to 50 percent of all adults are functionally illiterate.

#41 It is being projected that half of all American children will be on food stamps at least once before they turn 18 years of age.

#42 More than three times as many new homes were sold in the United States in 2005 as will be sold in 2012.

#43 If you can believe it, 53 percent of all Americans with a bachelor’s degree under the age of 25 were either unemployed or underemployed last year.

#44 The U.S. economy continues to trade good paying jobs for low paying jobs. 60 percent of the jobs lost during the last recession were mid-wage jobs, but 58 percent of the jobs created since then have been low wage jobs.

#45 Our trade deficit with China in 2011 was $295.5 billion. That was the largest trade deficit that one country has had with another country in the history of the planet.

#46 The United States has lost an average of approximately 50,000 manufacturing jobs a month since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.

#47 According to the Economic Policy Institute, America is losing half a million jobs to China every single year.

#48 The U.S. tax code is now more than 3.8 million words long. If you took all of William Shakespeare’s works and collected them together, the entire collection would only be about 900,000 words long.

#49 According to the IMF, the global elite are holding a total of 18 trillion dollars in offshore banking havens such as the Cayman Islands.

#50 The value of the U.S. dollar has declined by more than 96 percent since the Federal Reserve was first created.

#51 2012 was the third year in a row that the yield for corn has declined in the United States.

#52 Experts are telling us that global food reserves have reached their lowest level in almost 40 years.

#53 One recent survey discovered that 40 percent of all Americans have $500 or less in savings.

#54 If you can believe it, one recent survey found that 28 percent of all Americans do not have a single penny saved for emergencies.

#55 Medical costs related to obesity in the United States are estimated to be approximately $147 billion a year.

#56 Corporate profits as a percentage of GDP are at an all-time high. Meanwhile, wages as a percentage of GDP are near an all-time low.

#57 Today, the wealthiest 1 percent of all Americans own more wealth than the bottom 95 percent combined.

#58 The wealthiest 400 families in the United States have about as much wealth as the bottom 50 percent of all Americans combined.

#59 The six heirs of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton have a net worth that is roughly equal to the bottom 30 percentof all Americans combined.

#60 At this point, the poorest 50 percent of all Americans collectively own just 2.5% of all the wealth in the United States.

#61 Nearly 500,000 federal employees now make at least $100,000 a year.

#62 In 2006, only 12 percent of all federal workers made $100,000 or more per year. Now, approximately 22 percent of all federal workers do.

#63 If you can believe it, there are 77,000 federal workers that make more than the governors of their own states do.

#64 Nearly 15,000 retired federal workers are collecting federal pensions for life worth at least $100,000 annually. The list includes such names as Newt Gingrich, Bob Dole, Trent Lott, Dick Gephardt and Dick Cheney.

#65 U.S. taxpayers spend more than 20 times as much on the Obamas as British taxpayers spend on the royal family.

#66 Family homelessness in the Washington D.C. region (one of the wealthiest regions in the entire country) has risen 23 percent since the last recession began.

#67 If Bill Gates gave every single penny of his fortune to the U.S. government, it would only cover the U.S. budget deficit for about 15 days.

#68 During fiscal year 2012, 62 percent of the federal budget was spent on entitlements.

#69 Back in 1965, only one out of every 50 Americans was on Medicaid. Today, approximately one out of every 6 Americans is on Medicaid.

#70 It is being projected that Obamacare will add 16 million more Americans to the Medicaid rolls.

#71 Medicare is also growing by leaps and bounds. As I wrote about recently, it is being projected that the number of Americans on Medicare will grow from 50.7 million in 2012 to 73.2 million in 2025.

#72 Thanks to our foolish politicians (including Obama), Medicare is facing unfunded liabilities of more than 38 trillion dollars over the next 75 years. That comes to approximately $328,404 for each and every household in the United States.

#73 Amazingly, the U.S. national debt is now up to 16.3 trillion dollars. When Barack Obama first took office the national debt was just 10.6 trillion dollars.

#74 During the first four years of the Obama administration, the U.S. government accumulated about as much debt as it did from the time that George Washington took office to the time that George W. Bush took office.

#75 Today, the U.S. national debt is more than 5000 times larger than it was when the Federal Reserve was originally created back in 1913.

Average:

Friday, December 21, 2012

Amazing explanation of US Fiscal problems

Here’s the Chart That Supporters of a Federal Assault Weapons Ban Won’t Want to See

This is why we killed the Long Gun Registry in Canada

  • While anti-gun advocates argue that banning semi-automatic rifles, like the popular AR-15, will help decrease shooting deaths in the U.S., FBI data suggests that the average American is more likely to be killed by “hands, fists” or “feet” than a rifle. The anti-gun crowd has intensified its calls for a federal assault weapons ban following the tragedy in Newtown, Conn. last week.

“Yes, massacres tend to be done with weapons like this. But not most gun murders in the U.S.: a vast majority of gun murders in the U.S. are committed with a handgun,” The Washington Examiner’s Timothy Carney writes.

FBI Data Shows Only Small Number of Murders in U.S. Committed With Rifles

(Source: Washington Examiner/FBI)

As you can see in the chart pictured above, the vast majority of murders in the U.S. are indeed committed with handguns, not rifles. More people were killed with shotguns (373), knifes/blades (1,704) and “other weapon[s]” (1,772) more often than they were with rifles in 2010, which were reportedly used in 358 murders that year.

Whether it’s a knife, gun or a fist, will a “ban” of any kind sway a deranged individual’s decision to take human lives?

(H/T: Weasel Zippers)

Thursday, December 20, 2012

Obama's Hypocrisy Problem On Guns (Karl Denninger http://market-ticker.org/ )

I just got done throwing up (again) listening to Obama opine on gun control in the wake of the Newtown shooting.

Let's step back for a moment and look at this issue with a wide-angle lens, starting with President Obama and Mayor Bloomberg, two of the loudest anti-gun proponents.

Let me first disclose where I'm coming from -- I'm a parent of a teen-age daughter and have raised her single-handed since she was in diapers. She came into this world through an intentional act that I undertook with not only full acceptance of the potential consequence but actual planning for that consequence. I would lay down my life for her, as would most parents. And in a few years she will go off on her own, yet I believe our relationship will remain solid through the years. I hope to some day see the "circle of life" repeat with one or more grandchildren and, I hope, a worthy partner with whom she chooses to live her life with.

I still remember walking her out to the bus stop that first day of school, and her marching up into the bus to go to kindergarten. Just like every other parent has done in one way or another.

I never gave much thought to the idea that she might be at risk while in school. Oh sure, it's always a possibility -- anything is a possibility; there might be a tornado tomorrow, or lightning could hit you on the way to get the mail in the afternoon. But there are some things that you start by believing, or you'd never let your kid walk up those steps onto the bus. Among them are that the teachers and staff are not creeps; they are there to help your child learn, not exploit them in some hideous way. You cede to those people what is known as in loco parentis for a number of hours in the day, and then you take that responsibility back when your kid comes home in the afternoon.

If there's a bump in the night and it's a thug intent on attacking my family, it's my responsibility to deal with it first. That's who I am as the head of the household. I am the first responder, because my other alternative is to be the first victim, either along side or right in front of my daughter. And again, while you don't expect such an event to happen, and you arrange your life as best you're able to prevent it, there is no such thing as a guarantee.

Now please understand one thing very clearly before we continue.

Mayor Bloomberg and President Obama don't have this issue.

They literally do not care about such things, and they design their life and their public office so as to be able to not care. It is an intentional act they could cast aside should they so choose, but they have not and will not.

Mayor Bloomberg has a small cadre of hired hands who are near and with him literally 24 hours a day. They are armed, all the time, and they are paid to worry about these things so he doesn't have to.

Likewise, President Obama has a literal army of trained, armed soldiers in the form of parts of the military and an entire division of officers (The Secret Service) who's job it is, once again, to make this not his problem for both him and his entire family. Michelle and his children do not have to concern themselves about these issues because there are literally over a thousand others who are paid to take that responsibility -- up to and including eating a bullet in their place.

Neither of these people is proposing to rely on what they claim you should rely on -- a "law." A piece of paper, which today doesn't even get printed on real paper; it's a ghost in a machine that glows at you in the dark.

Let me remind you that our founders said, over 200 years ago:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

They did not say that government gave them rights. They stated that you had them, just as they had them, simply by virtue of being human and alive. That all persons have them, and that they are unalienable -- unable to be removed by any man.

If you believe that you have a right to life because your creator endowed you with that right, and that this right is unalienable and thus cannot be taken from you (although it can certainly be disrespected!) then it follows that you have not only the right but the responsibility to defend your life. That is, you have the right and the responsibility to deter to the best of your ability any other person who would take your life from you.

You may choose to delegate this responsibility to others, as Mayor Bloomberg and President Obama have, but your right to life is not inferior to theirs. It is equal. President Obama has no more right to live than you do. You are his equal from the standpoint of what your creator, and his creator, endowed both of you with.

So we have established that you have the right to live, as does the President. And if the President has the right to defend his life with deadly force, and indeed the responsibility to do so, then, should it be necessary, so do you.

This debate should end right there. Up until all of these people in political office disband their police forces, their Secret Service details, throw down their own arms, armored cars, body armor and other defensive means of interdicting assault they have nothing -- not even a moral argument -- behind them in their demand that you disarm and become an intentional victim -- no matter who you are.

But of course the debate doesn't end there, because the false equivalences don't begin and end with rank hypocrisy and politicians crapping all over the documents they swear to uphold.

Worse, we the people keep electing jackasses just like them. Indeed, in the last election we had two choices for President that were both hostile to your fundamental right to life.

Thus, we are compelled to continue our debate and look at the world around us.

Unfortunately when we continue our examination that we find that there is evil in the world. There are those who disrespect other people's rights. Some of them may want to kill you. Everyone who undertakes to murder believes their reason for doing so is justified. That they may be objectively insane doesn't change their view of the world. Their desire to see you die is in direct conflict with your right to live.

In that situation one of you will be victorious, and the other will not.

It is your decision, and only justly your decision, how you resolve this conflict. You have the right to surrender your life if you so wish, but in doing so you are making a decision that only you, and nobody else, has the authority to make.

President Obama and Mayor Bloomberg demand that you cede this decision to an insane criminal.

They are attempting to demand that you not defend your right to life, although they will not themselves do what they demand of you and cede their decision to any person who is insane and would kill them.

They in fact spend millions of your taxpayer dollars to prevent the very victimization they demand you submit to from happening to them.

There is only one sane response to that demand, and it is for you to insist that these people perform an anatomically-impossible act.

Now let's put this in the context of your children.

When a child is born it is defenseless, hungry and cold. The newborn baby is dependent upon its parents for everything, other than oxygen from the air, that it needs to survive. It is incapable of feeding itself, it is incapable of adjusting its environment and bodily covering to deal with environmental changes such as heat or cold, and it is incapable of disposing of the waste products from bodily processes in a manner that will not make itself and others ill. That child, during the next 18 years, undergoes growth in both mind and body, to the point where (hopefully) he or she is capable of discharging those responsibilities alone.

But until that time comes, you are that child's protector. You are the one ensconced with the responsibility to protect that child's life.

That child's right to life is unalienable but as that child's parent you are the one charged with defending that right.

How dare you refuse to discharge that responsibility!

Mayor Bloomberg and President Obama, along with many others have, thus far successfully, demanded that you intentionally refuse to defend your child's right to life as soon as that child enters a school -- and they then attempt to compel you, by law, to have that child attend some form of school!

How dare you consent in place of that young person who is too young to do so!

They have the gall to tell you that your children must be unarmed targets while armed guards stand at the ready next to them on a literal 24 hour a day basis to prevent the same thing from happening to them, while forcing you to pay for their protection.

How dare you accept this premise while they smugly stand with their Secret Service and Police, armed to the teeth, not even willing to step inside a hotel without security first checking to make sure there has been no evil laid in!

Now I would like it very much if we could find a way to rid the world of evil. Simply making all guns disappear, which is incidentally a factual impossibility, is unfortunately insufficient. One of the worst mass-murders committed in the 20th century was undertaken by a man with less than a gallon of gasoline and two matches; he killed 80 people here in the United States and is currently in prison for life. No gun law in the world could have changed that outcome, for he did not use a gun. Another nutjob blew up a federal building in Oklahoma; he used fertilizer, diesel fuel and a truck. Likewise people have murdered with cars, SUVs, swimming pools, common household goods used as poisons along with sporting goods, including baseball bats, golf clubs and even their bare hands. A not-insignificant number of murders in China in recent years have been committed (in schools no less!) by knife-wielding assailants. Your kitchen contains more than enough implements of destruction to murder virtually anyone, especially if taken by surprise. Harris and Klebold at Columbine not only used guns, they also attempted to blow up the school with tanks of ordinary propane; fortunately the detonators failed to work.

I don't see anyone talking about banning outdoor BBQ grills.

Fortunately man is clever and invented a device many years ago that makes the weak the equal of the strong. It makes the 90lb woman the equal of the 250lb man who desires to******her. It makes the 92 year old wheelchair-ridden widow able to stop two teenage thugs who break into her home with felony on their mind.

And it makes an elementary school principal, janitor or teacher able to stop a rampaging young man.

It's called a gun.

We recently read in the news about a deranged man who stole a gun and shot up a shopping mall in Oregon. After shooting a couple of people his gun jammed. He un-jammed it and then decided to shoot himself, despite the fact that the police had not yet arrived. This puzzled me, as the pattern in these rampages is that the maniac continues to kill until he either runs out of ammunition or the police arrive and it is evident that he will be captured. Then, as his final act of defiance, he kills himself. This insane individual checked out before the cops got there, which is uncommon, despite having plenty of ammunition remaining -- and no cops yet at the door.

The media, Obama, Mayor Bloomberg, Joe Lieberman and others didn't talk about why he shot himself instead of continuing his rampage once he unjammed his gun. They tried to keep that quiet on purpose, concealed from you because it destroys their justification for demanding that you cede the most-holy of all rights that you have -- your right to life -- to them.

You see, a man carrying a concealed weapon, an ordinary law-abiding 22-year old citizen, pulled that weapon and used it to defend himself, his friend and her baby.

He didn't have a clear shot without the risk of hitting an innocent person and thus didn't fire. He didn't have to. The shooter saw him along with his gun and that was enough for him -- he decided to dispatch himself.

That's how it happens 98% of the time, according to the FBI. 98 times in 100 when a citizen uses a firearm in self-defense he or she doesn't have to shoot anyone. It's simply enough that the weapon is there in the hands of a person willing to defend their right to life -- the criminal decides to terminate his assault.

The gun, the much-maligned gun, in the hands of a person willing to discharge their personal responsibility to defend their own life and those who they love, stops a felony in process more than one million times a year in the United States -- and 98% of the time that weapon is not discharged.

President Obama, Mayor Bloomberg, Lieberman, Pelosi, Boxer and more are all dancing in the blood of those dead children in Newtown and worse, they are lying to you about the true record that guns have in relationship to crime in this country and they know it as the counter to their argument that guns in the hands of citizens would not stop such assaults happened just days before!

Now let's look at another argument -- that citizens will shoot "wildly" and hit innocent people. The facts say differently -- citizens in fact shoot the wrong person only 1/5th as often as police officers!

This really isn't surprising, when you think about it, and it also isn't an indictment of the police. A police officer almost never is at the scene of a crime when it begins; he is called or otherwise discovers the crime in process. As he was not the original intended victim it's not surprising that he's sometimes not real sure who the bad guy is.

A woman being raped, on the other hand, is quite sure who the rapist is at the moment he attempts his crime, since his body is attached to the instrument with which he intends to commit the assault. Her odds of engaging the wrong person by accident are vanishingly small.

And this leads to the next problem -- the cops are never there. They can't be. When seconds count the police will be along in 5 minutes. Within those 5 minutes a homicidal maniac can murder dozens of people. The police will then "catch" (or kill) him, but you will still be dead.

It therefore is utterly ridiculous for you to rely on the police and insane for any government official to suggest (or worse, insist) that you do so; their purpose is to show up with a broom and clean up the mess, documenting it all for prosecutors, juries and judges -- if the assailant is still alive.

I've already made the case conclusively that our government at both State and Federal levels are full of hypocrites who insist that you cede to them your right to life, while they assiduously protect themselves at your expense, being unwilling to live with the restrictions they would impose on you.

But in truth it gets worse than that.

You see, our government has been running guns. Illegally running guns. Jaime Avila, in just one of many examples, purchased two rifles that were found at the scene of a federal agent shot near the Arizona-Mexico border. Our government knew Mr. Avila was illegally trafficking weapons to the Sinaloa drug cartel. Nonetheless, when his purchases were called into the BATFE for clearance the government intentionally approved the transactions despite knowing they were illegal.

Two of those hundreds of weapons came back over the border and were used to murder Brian Terry. Hundreds of Mexican citizens have been murdered with these guns in total -- guns that our government illegally, intentionally and maliciously allowed to be delivered to this murderous cartel.

Mr. Avila's sentence? 57 months in prison, or just under 6 years.

When?

Two days before the Newtown Connecticut shootings.

Media outrage? Zero.

Your outrage? Did you even know about the sentence?

Guess who didn't tell you and run that story every 5 minutes on national TV -- the same media that is trying to ban your firearms!

An adjunct to the oft-heard argument that we shouldn't allow guns in places like schools, churches and similar is that civilians can't be trusted to only shoot when they should, and not when it's unclear if they could injure or kill an innocent person.

But the record says otherwise, and not only in the incident that occurred just days before Newtown at the Oregon mall. Witness this incident from March of this year, one of over a million a year, when a deranged man claiming he wanted to see his children (who do not attend there) showed up at a church and kicked in the door while wielding a shotgun.

He didn't expect to find a parishoner with a pistol pointed at him, who then held the would-be shooter until the police arrived. As in 98% of these cases the armed citizen in this event did not need to shoot -- by the mere presence of his firearm he likely prevented the nut with the shotgun from causing mayhem in the church.

Arguments over magazine size or type of weapon are distractions. A man intent on murder who doesn't have a 30 round magazine will stuff three 10 rounders in his pocket instead. You can change magazines in less than a second with a bit of practice; such a restriction burdens no criminal. Not only did the alleged assailant in Newtown have a rifle with him that some people would like to ban he also stole two pistols, either of which alone was more than sufficient to commit the mass-murder that occurred. In the instant case banning "assault weapons" would have changed exactly nothing, never mind that Connecticut already has an assault weapons ban and it did not prevent the crime!

What's worse is that banning weapons based on how they look (which is what so-called "assault weapons" bans do) has nothing to do with the ability of a firearm to inflict injury. Semi-automatic firearms, which is what all of these are, were invented in the 1800s. They were sold through the mail with no background check or anything else until 1968. Many of the most popular firearms, including shotguns such as the Remington 1100, .22LR rifles such as the Ruger 10-22 and many hunting rifles are semi-automatic.

Indeed, the common AR-15 variants are most-often used for varmints, target practice and competition. None of these weapons are "machine guns" or weapons of war, the sale and possession of machine guns (any weapon which can fire more than one round for each pull of the trigger) have been heavily regulated (but legal) since the National Firearms Act of 1934.

AR-15 variants are the most-popular sporting weapon sold in the United States; surveys show more than 3 million Americans own one. They're popular because they're reasonably-priced, reasonably-accurate out of the box, have a light recoil and thus can be used by women and others of smaller stature without having your shoulder pounded to a bloody pulp and the ammunition is reasonably-priced since the cartridge is relatively small (in fact the bullet is about the same size and mass as a 22LR!)

These rifles are considered severely-underpowered for many hunting applications and in fact it is illegal to hunt deer with one in many states as they are not lethal enough to have a reasonable certainty of humanely taking the animal in question. Common hunting rifles are far more deadly than an AR-15.

There is in fact nothing particularly special about the AR-15, or for that matter any other gun.

Now, onto legal constraints as they exist today, and the fallacy that they could have prevented what occurred last week.

Background checks are already necessary to buy guns but again do nothing to deter a determined criminal. In the case of Newtown the system worked; the shooter attempted to buy his weapon at a store and was turned down.

He then turned to murder -- of his mother -- to acquire the weapons he used.

There is no background check system that would have prevented this tragedy. The guns didn't come from a licensed dealer, there was no circumvention of the system via the so-called "gun show loophole" (or any other sort of loophole); the alleged perpetrator in fact murdered the lawful owner of the weapons in order to acquire them.

Further, mass-shooting events are almost-never random. Columbine and the Aurora theater shooting both are known to have been extensively planned. In the case of Newtown it is reported that the shooter destroyed his computer, including the hard disk, before beginning his assault, in addition to attempting to buy a gun in a store. This evidences material amounts of planning and premeditation, which means he didn't randomly decide to shoot up a school, he planned to do so and selected that as the location most-likely to bring him "success" as he defined it in whatever twisted worldview he held. Had he not been able to find someone with guns he could steal through committing murder (and consider that a cop could have been his intended target in that regard since they all have guns!) he could have used any one of a number of other easily-acquired means of committing murder and mayhem. This shooter was clearly nuts, but insane does not mean unable to plan -- that he very-clearly was able to do, and did.

There are, however, three things we could have done, and any of them might have stopped the tragedy from occurring, or at least limited or prevented the loss of life.

The first is to get rid of the so-called "gun free zones"; they are nothing more than a public advertisement that the persons within them are unarmed and thus targets for anyone who wants to commit murder.

There is already a strong vetting process for school personnel. We check them for criminal records for entirely valid reasons -- nobody wants a pedophile working for the school in contact with their kids! There is no reason not to allow school districts, if they so choose, to allow those members of their staff and faculty who desire to acquire the training to carry concealed to do so while on school property. In short removing the target of opportunity sign from the front door might have deterred this shooter. If it didn't the principal and teachers who elected to be trained would have had a fighting chance. And that's all we can ask for, really, when all the other defenses we try to put up in front of such an assault fail.

Second, if you're going to actually "up-armor" the schools, then do it and mean it. Classroom doors must be able to be locked from the inside and require a key to open from the outside. Sidelights and glass in the doors must be of shatter-proof material (e.g. wired glass or polycarbonate) so as to prevent someone from breaking a window and either walking in or reaching through or unlocking the door. Doors must be able to withstand a reasonable degree of assault, meaning they should be steel-framed and steel-cored, bolted to the building. The point is to deter assault, not make it impossible. At the same time there needs to be a means for two-way communication to and from the office along with some sort of duress alarm so in the event of a serious problem the teachers can all be informed to lock the doors. Many people want "single-point" entry with a passthrough from a front office or similar -- this is a nice idea for new schools, but is entirely unreasonable for existing construction. In addition we need to be sensitive to the fact that you still have to deal with exposures during before and after-school periods (e.g. when buses are loading and unloading); there's only so much you can reasonably do without turning schools into prisons. Our children are not prisoners of the State and we must not allow them to be treated as if they are.

Third, we must improve psychiatric surveillance and impose liability on those professionals who have a duty to report and fail to do so. The shooter at the Colorado movie theater could have been interdicted on this basis but wasn't. We don't yet know if that is the case in this incident, but the public deserves to know. There is a serious civil liberty concern here that has to be balanced against public safety, and for this reason the exact criteria and how we perform that balance must take place through public debate. There's nothing wrong with being crazy; we all have the right to be nuts so long as we're not a risk to anyone else. But when someone expresses a credible desire to commit mass-murder that sort of shield must evaporate.

In short the answer is not found in gun bans -- no matter what sort of excuse is offered. In the instant case there is no gun ban that would have changed the outcome.

But beyond the proved inability to be effective gun bans are nothing more than an outrageous demand by our political leadership that we submit not only ourselves but our children to slaughter by criminals, promoted by politicians dancing in dead childrens' blood and upon their still-warm corpses, while they hide behind their armed guards, bullet-proof windows and armored vehicles.

No citizen should stand for this crap -- not on an ethical basis, not on a moral basis, and not on a Constitutional basis.

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Tyranny: The Murderous Legacy of Gun Control!

Paul Harvey ^ | 12/19/12 | Paul Harvey

Posted on Wednesday, December 19, 2012 4:08:47 PM by xuberalles

GUN CONTROL FACTS:

1. 1911: Turkey established gun control. From 1915 to 1917, 1.5 million Armenians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.

2. 1929: The Soviet Union established gun control. From 1929 to 1953, about 20 million kulaks, peasants, and dissidents who were unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.

3. 1935: Maoist China (Anita Dunn’s favorite guy) established gun control. From 1948 to 1952, 20 million people (est), unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.

4. 1938: Nazi Gerrmany established gun control and from 1939 to 1945, a total of 13 million Jews and others, weaponless, were rounded up and exterminated.

5. 1956: Cambodia established gun control. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, from 1975 to 1977, round up and murder OVER one million educated people, who could not be “reeducated”, were rounded up and exterminated. (This also can be linked to the DEMOCRATS in Congress betraying SVN and allowing them to fall to the commies and releasing the commies in Cambodia to go nuts.)

6. 1964: Guatemala established gun control in 1964. From 1964 to 1981, 100,000 Mayan Indians, without firearms, were rounded up and exterminated.

7. 1970: Uganda established gun control in 1970. In EIGHT YEARS, 300,000 Christians, oddly enough without firearms to defend themselves with, were rounded up and exterminated.

8. 1973: Friend of Obama and ghostwriter for Obama’s TWO autobiographies, William Ayers, domestic terrorist, murderer, and unrepentant terrorist, writes “Prairie Fire” wherein he states that upwards of 25 MILLION Americans will need to be “liquidated” because they won’t be able to be “reeducated.”

9. 1993. Life under an Imperial Federal Government run by Democrats, without firearms at our side, was previewed at Waco and with Elian Gonzalez in 2000.

FACTS ON AUSTRALIA’S GUN CONTROL LAWS:

1. Australia-wide, homicides are up 3.2 percent. 2. Australia-wide, assaults are up 8.6 percent. 3. Australia-wide, armed robberies are up 44 percent. 4. Home invasions are up 300%. 5. In the state of Victoria, homicides with firearms are up 300 percent.


Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Love America, Love Guns.


Rob Cunningham USA ^ | Dec. 18, 2012 | Rob Cunningham

Posted on Tuesday, December 18, 2012 11:34:12 AM by RobaWho

In 1929, the Soviet Union established gun control. From 1929 to 1953, about 20 million dissidents, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
——————————
In 1911, Turkey established gun control. From 1915 to 1917, 1.5 million Armenians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
——————————
Germany established gun control in 1938 and from 1939 to 1945, a total of 13 million Jews and others who were unable to defend themselves were rounded up and exterminated.
——————————
China established gun control in 1935. From 1948 to 1952, 20 million political dissidents, unable to defend themselves were rounded up and exterminated.
——————————
Guatemala established gun control in 1964. From 1964 to 1981, 100,000 Mayan Indians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
——————————
Uganda established gun control in 1970. From 1971 to 1979, 300,000 Christians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
——————————
Cambodia established gun control in 1956. From 1975 to 1977, 1 million educated people, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
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Defenseless people rounded up and exterminated in the 20th Century because of gun control: 56 million.
——————————

You won’t see this data on the US evening news, or hear politicians disseminating this easily verifiable information.

Guns in the hands of honest citizens save lives and property and, yes, gun-control laws adversely affect only the law-abiding citizens.

I’m a firm believer in the 2nd Amendment. Do you truly appreciate the value of well armed, law abiding, God fearing citizens in a civil society?

Evil exists. Throughout history and forever into the future, evil will exist. Evil exists in the hearts of children, men and women, be they civilians or politicians, police or clergy.

If ever we disarm ourselves we will become dangerously vulnerable to a Godless, secular, power crazed government with unchecked powers, just as the 56 million who were murdered at the hands of “government officials” described above. We will cease to exist as the greatest nation in the history of man.

Never forget, there are many politicians, our current President included, that proudly proclaim their intent to weaken America’s stature and global influence. Fundamentally transforming the United States of America mandates the weakening of our inalienable 2nd Amendment rights. This is perhaps the most fundamental step for politicians seeking to achieve this goal.

I would no more trust Rahm Emanual, Michael Bloomberg, Barack Obama, Diane Feinstein, Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney, George Bush or Eric Holder (God help us) to honestly safeguard my inalienable rights than I would have trusted similar narcissists that previously used lethal force against their fellow citizens.

Perhaps one of the most insightful, thought provoking, brilliant books ever written regarding the nature of man and the historical record of governments killing their citizens was written by Andy Andrews in his 2012 book, “How Do You Kill 11 Million People?”

With guns, we are ‘citizens‘. Without them, we are ‘subjects‘.

If you value our freedoms, please spread this message to all of your well intentioned, less informed friends.

Merry Christmas, America. Share the Love.

Monday, December 17, 2012

Invincible Ignorance (Thomas Sowell – Creators Syndicate)

 

Must every tragic mass shooting bring out the shrill ignorance of "gun control" advocates?

The key fallacy of so-called gun control laws is that such laws do not in fact control guns. They simply disarm law-abiding citizens, while people bent on violence find firearms readily available.

If gun control zealots had any respect for facts, they would have discovered this long ago, because there have been too many factual studies over the years to leave any serious doubt about gun control laws being not merely futile but counterproductive.

Places and times with the strongest gun control laws have often been places and times with high murder rates. Washington, D.C., is a classic example, but just one among many.

When it comes to the rate of gun ownership, that is higher in rural areas than in urban areas, but the murder rate is higher in urban areas. The rate of gun ownership is higher among whites than among blacks, but the murder rate is higher among blacks. For the country as a whole, hand gun ownership doubled in the late 20th century, while the murder rate went down.

The few counter-examples offered by gun control zealots do not stand up under scrutiny. Perhaps their strongest talking point is that Britain has stronger gun control laws than the United States and lower murder rates.

But, if you look back through history, you will find that Britain has had a lower murder rate than the United States for more than two centuries— and, for most of that time, the British had no more stringent gun control laws than the United States. Indeed, neither country had stringent gun control for most of that time.

In the middle of the 20th century, you could buy a shotgun in London with no questions asked. New York, which at that time had had the stringent Sullivan Law restricting gun ownership since 1911, still had several times the gun murder rate of London, as well as several times the London murder rate with other weapons.

Neither guns nor gun control was not the reason for the difference in murder rates. People were the difference. Yet many of the most zealous advocates of gun control laws, on both sides of the Atlantic, have also been advocates of leniency toward criminals.

In Britain, such people have been so successful that legal gun ownership has been reduced almost to the vanishing point, while even most convicted felons in Britain are not put behind bars. The crime rate, including the rate of crimes committed with guns, is far higher in Britain now than it was back in the days when there were few restrictions on Britons buying firearms.

In 1954, there were only a dozen armed robberies in London but, by the 1990s— after decades of ever tightening gun ownership restrictions— there were more than a hundred times as many armed robberies.

Gun control zealots' choice of Britain for comparison with the United States has been wholly tendentious, not only because it ignored the history of the two countries, but also because it ignored other countries with stronger gun control laws than the United States, such as Russia, Brazil and Mexico. All of these countries have higher murder rates than the United States.

You could compare other sets of countries and get similar results. Gun ownership has been three times as high in Switzerland as in Germany, but the Swiss have had lower murder rates. Other countries with high rates of gun ownership and low murder rates include Israel, New Zealand, and Finland.

Guns are not the problem. People are the problem— including people who are determined to push gun control laws, either in ignorance of the facts or in defiance of the facts.

There is innocent ignorance and there is invincible, dogmatic and self-righteous ignorance. Every tragic mass shooting seems to bring out examples of both among gun control advocates.

Some years back, there was a professor whose advocacy of gun control led him to produce a "study" that became so discredited that he resigned from his university. This column predicted at the time that this discredited study would continue to be cited by gun control advocates. But I had no idea that this would happen the very next week in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His Web site is www.tsowell.com. To find out more about Thomas Sowell and read features by other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

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