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Archive for category Opinion
Holding Our Leaders Accountable
From SOFREP:
Many are quick to light their torches and encircle presidential candidate Hillary Clinton without due process. It’s worth taking a step back to acknowledge that Clinton’s role as secretary of state was largely to serve as a public figurehead; the day-to-day, on-the-ground operations were run by Patrick Kennedy.
The big questions that should be asked by the House Select Committee on Benghazi are, “Why didn’t Mrs. Clinton hold Kennedy and Lamb accountable in the aftermath?†and “What do these two have on her that keeps Hillary blocking and tackling in the media for two diplomats whose decisions got good Americans killed that day?â€
The Atlantic: Gun Rights Are Racist
Public-carry advocates like to cite historical court opinions to support their constitutional vision, but those opinions are, to put it mildly, highly problematic. The supportive precedent they rely on comes from the antebellum South and represented less a national consensus than a regional exception rooted in the unique culture of slavery and honor. By focusing only on sympathetic precedent, and ignoring the national picture, gun-rights advocates find themselves venerating a moment at which slavery, honor, violence, and the public carrying of weapons were intertwined.
The authors of this piece are correct in their sense that our current gun debate has its roots in the 19th-century American South—but they managed to get the true alignment of things completely backwards. It is the modern gun control movement that is absolutely a product of racist legislators trying to deprive black Americans of the ability to defend themselves. When the Civil War ended and the Reconstruction Amendments freed the slaves and assigned them equal rights under the law, the white landowners at the top of the socio-economic ladder found themselves in a predicament. Not only were they deprived of their resource pool of unfree labor, but they now lived side by side with a black population that outnumbered them—and was about to enjoy equal access to both ballot boxes and firearms. These landowners acted swiftly to defend their dominant position. Encouraging poor whites to cling to a sense of racial identity and despise their black neighbors was part of their strategy. The other part was an explosion of new legislation that spat in the face of the Constitution’s clear intention to guarantee the rights of the former slaves.
Bill Whittle: America Was Designed To Be Free
Posted by Brian in Opinion, Threat Watch on 13/Oct/2015 07:00
Guns: U.S. vs Australia
Posted by Brian in Law, Opinion, Threat Watch on 12/Oct/2015 07:00
From National Review:
“Australia†is Obama’s preferred euphemism for that most cherished of gun-control ideals: mass confiscation of the citizenry’s weapons.
You will notice that the president doesn’t exactly spell out what following Australia’s model would entail. He speaks instead of “commonsense gun-control legislation,†“closing the gun-show loophole,†and “universal background checks.â€
But the Australian 1996 National Agreement on Firearms was not a benign set of commonsense gun-control rules: It was a gun-confiscation program rushed through the Australian parliament just twelve days after a 28-year-old man killed 35 people with a semi-automatic rifle in the Tasmanian city of Port Arthur. The Council of Foreign relations summarizes the Aussie measure nicely:
Condi Rice and Bob Gates on U.S., Russia Relations
Posted by Brian in Opinion, Threat Watch on 11/Oct/2015 07:00
From The Washington Post:
One can hear the disbelief in capitals from Washington to London to Berlin to Ankara and beyond. How can Vladimir Putin, with a sinking economy and a second-rate military, continually dictate the course of geopolitical events? Whether it’s in Ukraine or Syria, the Russian president seems always to have the upper hand.
The fact is that Putin is playing a weak hand extraordinarily well because he knows exactly what he wants to do. He is not stabilizing the situation according to our definition of stability. He is defending Russia’s interests by keeping Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in power. This is not about the Islamic State. Any insurgent group that opposes Russian interests is a terrorist organization to Moscow. We saw this behavior in Ukraine, and now we’re seeing it even more aggressively — with bombing runs and cruise missile strikes — in Syria.
Laws on Alcohol vs Guns
From Volokh Conspiracy:
Every day, about 30 people are killed in the U.S. in gun homicides or gun accidents (not counting gun suicides or self-inflicted accidental shootings). And every day, likely about 30 people are killed in homicides where the killer was under the influence of alcohol, plus alcohol-related drunk driving accidents and alcohol-related accidents where the driver wasn’t drunk but the alcohol was likely a factor (again not including those who died in accidents caused by their own alcohol consumption). If you added in gun suicides on one side and those people whose alcohol consumption killed themselves on the other, the deaths would tilt much more on the side of alcohol use, but I generally like to segregate deaths of the user from deaths of others.
So what are we going to do about it? When are we going to ban alcohol? When are we going to institute more common-sense alcohol-control measures?
Mass Killings That Were Prevented
From Volokh Conspiracy:
Backers of laws that let pretty much all law-abiding people carry concealed guns in public places often argue that these laws will sometimes enable people to stop mass shootings. Opponents occasionally ask: If that’s so, what examples can one give of civilians armed with guns stopping such shootings? Sometimes, I hear people asking if even one such example can be found, or saying that they haven’t heard of even one such example.
1. In Chicago earlier this year, an Uber driver with a concealed-carry permit “shot and wounded a gunman [Everardo Custodio] who opened fire on a crowd of people.â€
2. In a Philadelphia barber shop earlier this year, Warren Edwards “opened fire on customers and barbers†after an argument. Another man with a concealed-carry permit then shot the shooter; of course it’s impossible to tell whether the shooter would have kept killing if he hadn’t been stopped, but a police captain was quoted as saying that, “I guess he [the man who shot the shooter] saved a lot of people in there.â€
What Would Repealing The Second Amendment Look Like?
From National Review:
We should be absolutely clear about what Delaney is arguing here: He is a) agreeing with Jefferson that “laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind,†b) contending that “progress†suggests that the individual right to keep and bear arms is now counterproductive, and c) concluding that it is time therefore to make a “change in law and constitution†— in other words, to repeal the Second Amendment. This, it is true, is not a mainstream position on the American Left — at least, it is not one that is argued openly. But it is a reasonably popular one on social media, it has strong support within the more leftward-leaning parts of the political commentariat, it is often implied by the casual manner in which progressives such as President Obama refer to “Australia†and other heavily regulated nations, and it enjoys indirect approval from around one quarter of the American public. When the likes of Rob Delaney and Bill Maher and Keith Ellison say that we need to get rid of the Second Amendment, they are not speaking in a vacuum but reflecting the views of a small but vocal portion of the American population. And they mean it. That being so, here’s the million-dollar question: What the hell are they waiting for? Go on, chaps. Bloody well do it.
Is Glock 26 or 43 Better For Women?
From Nutnfancy:
Syria: A Chronology of How the Civil War May End
Posted by Brian in Opinion, Threat Watch on 5/Aug/2015 07:00
“Syria: A Chronology of How the Civil War May End is republished with permission of Stratfor.”
Analysis
Editor’s Note: The conflict in Syria is entering a critical phase. Turkey has at long last entered the fight, conducting airstrikes against Islamic State targets in Syria — and capitalizing on the opportunity to attack Kurdistan Workers’ Party militants in northern Iraq. Turkey’s newfound vigor is fueled by a convergence of U.S. and Turkish interests in the region, evidenced by the July 23 agreement between Ankara and Washington to allow U.S. forces to use Incirlik Air Base. There is a shared interest in combating the Islamic State, and both countries want to see a diplomatic resolution to the Syrian conflict that would end the fighting and remove Syrian President Bashar al Assad from power. Al Assad’s frank July 26 comments about the level of fatigue in the Syrian army, combined with the continued success of Syrian rebel groups and the prospect of Turkey’s increased participation, could indicate that the al Assad regime itself is considering its options.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry will to travel to Doha on Aug. 3, where he will discuss the future of Syria with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Stratfor has been tracking the evolution and perspectives of the key parties involved in the Syrian conflict from the opening of hostilities. We are publishing this chronology to highlight our previous analyses and forecasts. Read the rest of this entry »