Un Control

I've been engaged in a fair amount of side activity for the past year or so, so my initial promise to update this weblog on something like a weekly basis has fallen by the wayside.  Nobody's fault but mine.

But recent events have brought certain issues to the fore, and it's at these times that this particular porcupine feels the most quilly.

Marchers, exploiting a national day of awareness on behalf of victims of violence to demand a reduction in our rights.  What in the actual fuck gives?

The leftist pundits are smugly proclaiming "generational change," while kids who were less than a month ago chewing Tide Pods for the cameras are now attempting to dictate national policy to the rest of us.  The NRA--an organization whose donations don't even rate on the OpenSecret's top donors page--is being blamed directly for shooting deaths, and the actual shooters aren't even mentioned at all on the signs held by the marchers.

The gun control issue is the second most contentious of all the debates I regularly engage in.  Abortion is the first.  I literally have almost no friends who are pro-choice, simply because the first time I discuss the matter with any of them, they renounce our friendship.  Gun control is only slightly more congenial.  It's gotten to the point where I'd rather have my say here, on my private (and rarely-viewed) weblog, where my social media contacts are less likely to pipe up and crush any prospects for a permanent, lifelong relationship.

So I'm going to just drop a couple minor truth bombs and call it a day.  I have a long list of grievances to air against these tools, but the most important matter is that we have, for the first time since the Progressives marched for Prohibition, a substantial portion of the population agitating to have rights taken away from them.  I would never stand in the way of someone willingly forfeiting his own rights, of course, except in the (very) special case of that forfeiture also being forced on the rest of us.

And therein lies the rub.  These marchers, and the kids serving as their nucleation point, do not regard self-defense, or individual defense against government tyranny, as a fundamental human right.

They are perfectly willing to allow government to decide what rights they have, and how they, as individuals, and how their rights will be defended.

This is entirely antithetical to Constitutionalism.  It is positively anti-American.

It's mind-boggling.

It comes across as contrived, actually...as if the "never let a crisis go to waste" arm of the Democratic Party (that is to say, the entire party) has concocted a media frenzy in order to push through one of their oldest policy wet dreams.

As if there was coaching and grooming and selection from among the student body those who were already photogenic and primed for this kind of action.

It's also kind of old news, at this point.  Boss Hogg appears to have had his fifteen minutes of fame, and then some.  (Whatever tragedy he suffered--and his story on this point has varied, according to the date on which he is recalling events--doesn't seem to have stopped him from enjoying the limelight.)

But I was reminded anew of this controversy by this morning's Fareed Zakaria GPS.  This "insightful" host has a way of neglecting to mention specific items that could clarify or even refute positions held by his guests, and this makes viewing his program an oft-irritating experience.

Today, for instance, he had an opportunity to distinguish Nazism from Fascism during Madeline Albright's segment, but let it pass.  (Or perhaps he's not quite insightful enough to know the difference himself...?)

More worrying was the segment on human rights.  The guest, Prince Zeid Ra'ad Hussein, spoke of stepping down from the chief Human Rights position at the UN because of an inability to proceed in his work without compromise, under constant pressure from powerful governments (including western democracies such as France).  The guy was mostly on point, and I agreed with and sympathized with his plight.  Then the discussion turned, inevitably, toward the US and President Trump.

It's beyond disagreement that Trump has done quite a few things wrong since taking office.  (The disagreement will lie in just which of his actions have been wrong.)  The problem with Hussein's assertion is the notion that, in limiting travel from majority-Muslim nations, or working to curb illegal immigration, or prohibiting amnesty per se for children of illegal immigrants, Trump is working against human rights.

We've been here before, haven't we?  There is no "human right" to be in the US.  Residency is a privilege.  Citizenship is a process.  It takes more than simply wanting to be here, or even getting here, to become a member of this society.  And it is the same with every society, the world over.

The same goes for things like wedding cakes.  There is no fundamental human right to any market product or service.  But to the Left, that is really the only kind of "right" that matters.

Hussein wasn't wrong to target human rights abuses in the US, though.  (Or, perhaps, prospective human rights abuses.)  After all, there is a vocal and active segment of the population, right now, attempting to curtail an essential human right:  the right to keep and bear arms.

 And the media has absolutely zero concern about this infringement surge.

The same people who decry Trump's authoritarianism, who call him a Nazi, are demanding to be disarmed by the government.

You can't make this shit up.

The Parkland Survivors are pushing a false narrative.  The NRA is in no way responsible for gun violence.  The organization simply provides a convenient scapegoat, which, as we've seen in Nazi and Fascist enterprises of the past (and which was mentioned by Ms. Albright this morning), is an essential component of encouraging a populace to curtail its own rights.  You first identify a class of the population that you can cast as the outsider; then you blame various economic and social problems on that class.  You have now drawn the boundaries of your new preferred social order, and your political party, in inviting everybody else, becomes the enforcement wing of that order.

On the OpenSecrets' All-Time Top Donor list, the NRA barely rates, appearing 94th out of 100 (on a list dominated by left-leaning donors, predominantly labor unions...42 pro-Dem donors versus 29 pro-Republican).  Even NRA-donations poster boy Marco Rubio has received only a tiny slice of his total war chest from the NRA, accounting for 3.3%.

Not the facts have ever mattered to true believers.

Some other relevant facts that don't matter:  homicide rates, and violent crime in general, have been trending downward since the 1990s, largely irrespective of changes (pro- and con-) to gun laws, except in particularly violent jurisdictions which have tended to exhibit wild, albeit usually temporary, upswings in violent crime in response to stricter gun control measures.

Mass shootings are, for all the spectacular media coverage, quite rare events, accounting for only about 2% of all gun crimes, and fewer than 1% of all homicide victims.  Rifles (of all kinds) are used in fewer than 2% of all crimes (of all kinds).  Mass shootings are not on the rise, and schools are in fact safer than they used to be in this regard.

The vast majority of intentional gun homicides are suicides.  This has always been the case.  And that is the only plank in the gun-control platform that has ever had any merit.  But the fact remains:  suicide, although horrific and tragic, is not victimization.  It is a choice.  Guns don't make suicide any easier; they just make it more final.

There are other factors aside from the "easy availability of guns" that make mass shootings happen.  The availability of guns hasn't really increased much since the 1960s and 1970s, when students routinely carried weapons to school (usually kept in plain view in gun racks in their vehicles) and trained in safe firearms use right there in their gyms.  In fact, gun rights are more restricted than back then.  We should be looking into the impact of other problems, such as widespread antidepressant use and the growing influence of fatherlessness on today's teens (one of the most significant predictors of violent tendencies).

Perhaps the weirdest aspect of the "movement's" list of demands is their insistence that they're going to be of voting age soon, whereas they refuse the right to bear arms until they're three years past that age.  They're trying to send a message to the rest of us that they are to be feared, yet are quite mixed in their signals as to why they should be.

Politics, as always, is driven by perception, not reality.  Perception is what makes scapegoating possible.  Perception is how the media controls the narrative.  As long as fear-based policy continues to be driven by the perception, say, that mass shootings are on the rise and don't have a particular bias in favor of soft targets like gun-free zones, our rights will be under attack.

Always question the narrative.

Yet there is always hope for the future.  Having been on the scene of a school shooting during my sophomore year in high school, I can attest that witnessing violence does not inevitably lead to opposing specific human rights.  (An informal poll conducted on my Facebook page back in February seems to confirm this; none of the respondents, fellow students who were also on the scene that day, favored increased gun control.)  Not all of the Parkland students are in favor of gun control measures, as Brian Williams found during an interview of two brothers.  And in the days since the original class walk-out, there have been others in support of the Second Amendment.  These students, too, are about to come of voting age.

And of course there's Kyle Kashuv, Twitter personality and 2A defender, who is also a Parkland survivor, and faces sharp criticism from his own classmates for disagreeing with them.  Among the accusations they've leveled at him for not supporting their protests:  he must be the "next school shooter."

Keep at it, Kyle.  You may have a future role in public service, or as a pundit, or even in law or in law enforcement.  Or you may opt to live out your life quietly somewhere else in the private sector (Wall Street evidently being your preferred destination).  But right now, your efforts and words are needed, as a counterbalance to your classmates (whom, as the recent Laura Ingraham imbroglio has demonstrated, are off-limits to criticism from adults).

Speaking of narratives, In a follow-up post, I'll be diving more deeply into firearms themselves.  Let's crack this "assault weapons" nut wide open.


Meanwhile, as the saying goes, if you smell something, say something.

Here's something that smells.

Broward County deputy who questioned gun control agenda dead at 42.

Obituary:  Jason K. Fitzsimmons