The fears of these gun control advocates is sadly based primarily on fear of what they don’t understand.
Anti-gun Democrats who make up the majority of Democrat Party leadership seem to have three major hang-ups with citizens carrying concealed firearms.
- The belief that human beings are not born with a right to armed self defense.
- The belief that the state created and grants the privilege to bear arms when and if it sees fit.
- The belief that more restrictive licensing arrangements ensure that only “qualified people” will receive concealed carry permits under the current schemes in more restrictive “shall issue” states.
.. These concealed carry lectures are no more relevant to actual decision-making under stress than listening to an academic lecture on surgery makes you competent to perform an appendectomy; it’s not terribly complex, but it does require actual practice under a qualified instructor to get it right.
.. The average gun fight is over within 3-5 seconds, with the weapons typically starting from concealment. Can you reasonably argue that she is “proficient?”
.. Ultimately, so-called “constitutional carry”—the right to carry firearms without a permit—should be encouraged, in conjunction with the vigorous prosecution of gun laws when people commit violent crimes with firearms.
The anti-Trump
Mark Kelly, astronaut and anti-gun activist, aims for civility.
“One of my favorite things to do is — and it makes my staff a little nervous at times — is to go and talk to protesters,”
.. “I’ll walk across the street. I walked across the street to the gun show,” he added. “So, I mean, that’s why I like to engage with them, and sometimes it usually doesn’t go so well right in the beginning. But if I stand there and listen and then engage them in a positive way — and I understand these people, I own guns — usually, by the end, it’s a pretty positive experience for all of us.”
.. If Kelly has devoted himself to a cause, he’s equally intent on projecting an air of respect to people who don’t agree with him, on an issue
.. “I feel that if somebody is going to show up and be involved in the process, they have a right to be heard,” he told me.
.. “If you’re a felon, you shouldn’t be allowed to own a gun or possess a gun — so why do we make it easy for felons to own and possess guns?” he asked. “The same goes for domestic abusers, even people that are suspected terrorists, people who are dangerously mentally ill. … Frank Luntz is a Republican pollster, and he polled NRA members on background checks, and that came out at 74 percent. Nationwide, it’s about 90 percent.”
.. What makes Kelly unique as a messenger is the fact that he’s been a lifelong gun owner and a congenital badass.
.. “I almost died 10 times before I was 15 years old,”
.. “I’ve been shot at 39 times,” he told me with a sheepish grin, “in airplanes.”
.. “You often hear the folks on the other side, the gun guys … about how, if everybody has a gun, everybody will be safe — ‘Well, if I was there and I had a firearm,’” he said. “People don’t realize what an emotional and crazy experience it is to have somebody trying to kill you. … And that’s where I kind of get back to this concept that people think they’re Clint Eastwood. It is not the movies.”
How the System Is ‘Rigged’
In what sense is the system rigged?
Consider Big Media—the elite columnists and commentators, the dominant national press, and the national and cable networks, save FOX. Not in this writer’s lifetime has there been such blanket hatred and hostility of a presidential candidate of a major party.
.. There are more than 11 million illegal immigrants here, with millions more coming. Yet the government consistently refuses to enforce the immigration laws of the United States.
Why should those Americans whose ancestors created, fought, bled and died to preserve America not believe they and their children are being dispossessed of a country that was their patrimony—and without their consent?
.. In the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a Congressional majority voted to end discrimination against black folks.
When did we vote to institute pervasive discrimination against white folks, especially white males, with affirmative action, quotas and racial set-asides? Even in blue states like California, affirmative action is routinely rejected in statewide ballots.
.. We now know, thanks to leaked emails, that not only the superdelegates and the Obama White House but a collaborationist press and the DNC were colluding to deny Sanders any chance at the nomination.
The fix was in. Ask Sanders if he thinks the system is rigged.
.. If there is an issue upon which Americans agree, it is that they want secure borders and an end to trade policies that have shipped abroad the jobs, and arrested the wages, of working Americans.
Yet in a private speech that netted her $225,000 from Brazilian bankers, Hillary Clinton confided that she dreams of a “common market, with open trade and open borders” from Nome, Alaska, to Patagonia.
.. That would mean the end of the USA as a unique, sovereign and independent nation. But the American press, whose survival depends upon the big ad dollars of transnational corporations, is more interested in old tapes of the Donald on The Howard Stern Show.
.. And if they do, Middle America—those who cling to their bibles, bigotries and guns in Barack Obama’s depiction, those “deplorables” who are “racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic,” who are “not America” and are “irredeemable” in Hillary Clinton’s depiction—will have to accept the new regime.
The United States would survive a Trump presidency – but what about the rest of the world?
Although his personal behaviour is often clownish or boorish, and he has shown astonishing ignorance of some important international issues, Trump has a perfectly coherent world-view and strategy which are rooted in certain established American traditions, even if these are now largely defunct.
.. As for the idea that a Trump presidency would be a disaster, that is completely wide of the mark. It is actually much worse than most people think. President Trump has the potential to be an unmitigated catastrophe – if not for the United States, then certainly for the rest of the world.
.. We should not assume that this is just rhetoric. First, because Trump has been saying all this, or much of it, for years in his writings and in off-the cuff statements. He is no mere opportunist.
.. Trump emerges from the confluence of two long-dormant but now resurgent American political traditions: the blunt, early-19th-century appeal of Andrew Jackson to the “common man” and the protectionist isolationism that produced the Smoot-Hawley tariffs and the Charles Lindbergh of the 1930s.
.. The US is not seriously at risk of lapsing into the kind of populist authoritarianism we see in many other parts of the world. Moreover, the nature of the American constitution is such that Trump will be very constrained in what he can do at home: by Congress, by the courts and various other checks and balances.
..There are far fewer impediments, however, to presidential power in foreign policy. As so much of Trump’s domestic programme depends on what he does abroad, the rest of the world will be much more exposed to a Trump presidency than the Americans themselves.
.. Style will soon become substance. At best, a Trump presidency will lead to the “Berlusconification” of international politics, which will become extended reality-TV events
.. he seems to have a very limited and belligerent idea of what constitutes a successful diplomatic negotiation.
.. Trump views a political “deal” as the imposition of his will on the other side.
.. he writes of one successful transaction in his bestselling book The Art of the Deal, “we won by wearing everyone else down.” It is therefore no surprise that he cleaves to an essentially mercantilist view of world trade in which, say, Japan’s gain is America’s loss. Given his severe anger management issues, the great danger is that a clever adversary will get under his skin, provoke outbursts, and either make a laughing stock of the greatest power on Earth or precipitate a confrontation.
.. He has gone on record as saying that people “are surprised by how quickly I make big decisions, but I’ve learned to trust my instincts and not to overthink things”
.. No reliance should be placed here on the restraining force of his advisers, or of the bureaucracy in the US state and defence departments. Trump has already signalled that he will not listen
.. The foreign policy “team” he has produced during the campaign is the weakest and most obscure that anybody has encountered in living memory.
.. the parallels with his opposition to gun control are evident, is the field of nuclear non-proliferation. He has repeatedly welcomed the idea of a Saudi, or South Korean, or Japanese nuclear bomb. The thinking is that this will achieve a balance of terror, which will keep the peace better than costly American intervention.
.. Even if one thinks – as this author does – that some form of reckoning with China is necessary, Trump is surely the man temperamentally least suited to lead it. His strategy may revive American manufacturing, but modern supply chains are such that China is inextricably stitched into the US industrial ecosystem in ways that could defy safe unravelling.
.. Yet one thing is clear: China, which holds a huge chunk of the US federal debt, will bitterly resist any attempt to repudiate it. Moreover, if unplugged from the US market, particularly at a time of falling European demand, China will face vast economic dislocation and consequent internal unrest. One way or the other, the reaction to any such measures by the Americans will be violent, with a countdown to conflict comparable only to the one triggered by Franklin D Roosevelt’s decision in 1941 to freeze all Japanese assets in the US and impose an oil embargo on Japan.
.. Trump will encourage the European “deplorables”
.. His xenophobia and authoritarian personality will chime with them; his protectionism may even resonate on the European left. He will therefore be much less isolated in Europe than many like to think.
.. The walls will go up across Europe and we may not see them brought down again in our lifetime.
.. But the deadliest threat to European security is Trump’s attitude to Nato.
.. One of Trump’s top military advisers, Michael T Flynn, a retired general, is a Russia enthusiast. One of his most trusted former confidants, Paul Manafort, served as a long-term political consultant to the disgraced ex-president of Ukraine and Russian stooge Viktor Yanukovych. One of his few named foreign policy advisers, Carter Page, also has close links to Russia.
.. Yet he seems oblivious to this danger, largely because he does not take Russia seriously in economic terms. It is one of the many failings of his foreign policy, and a surprising one, given his general belligerence, that he does not take other factors, such as ideology or raw military power, much into account.
.. On the other hand, he may prefer to explore a strategic partnership with Trump. That will surely begin with a joint effort to support the Assad regime in Syria, and probably develop into an alliance against China.
.. In that case, we will be in a genuinely tripolar or even quadripolar world, in which the relationship between the Russo-American alliance, the British-European confederation and the other Eastern dictatorship, China, will be one of unstable equidistance.
.. Moreover, Trump will have much of the United States behind him in making his initial foreign policy moves. Demand that the Europeans “pay up” for their own defence? Why not? Beat up on China’s protectionism? What’s not to like? As for Isis, even Homeland’s Peter Quinn thinks that the solution is to “pound Raqqa into a parking lot”. It would take superhuman moral and political courage to stop Trump early on.
.. Many Europeans, in fact, will cheer him on. At home and abroad, Trump will the harvest low-hanging fruit first, and then invest the capital gained in riskier enterprises. When he does really overstep the mark, it will be too late.