Gun disgust?

“Productive conversations about guns can thus be difficult because the anti-gun movement gives little to no weight to the values of private gun ownership. That is because “gun disgust” engenders a bias against guns.”
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“Gun disgust is also one of the primary reasons gun-control advocates promote laws that have little to no effect on reducing gun violence. On many questions, the debate over the effects of gun-control laws on crime is surprisingly uncontroversial.”

Trevor Burus says that The gun debate is a culture debate and explains why he thinks so.

Another seasoned infantryman weighs in on Seven Myths About “Women in Combat”.

“Pity the truthful leader who attempts to hold to standards based on realistic combat factors, and tells truth to power. Most won’t, and the others won’t survive.”

The myths are that the issue is about women in combat when it is really about women in the infantry, that combat has changed in substance, that the proper measure is just physical capability standards, that infantry provides a path for promotion, that it’s a civil rights issue, and that it’s just fair. Each is summarily dismissed.

yet the myths persist as they are held with a fierce abandonment of reality by certain folks for reasons that just aren’t that clear.

“What is going on in America when the once upon famous description “Banned in Boston” has now morphed into a quasi-religious liberal campaign to ban almost everything, almost everywhere?”

Jeffrey Lord makes a list and wonders about America’s New Theocracy.

“The question is not that liberals are obsessed with banning. They are. The real question is — why? Well beyond the specific person or thing they seek to ban — what compels people in a free society to go out of their way to ban someone or something that a considerable number of their fellow citizens see as part of the warp and woof of American society?

The answer, it appears, derives from the leftist longing for control. And the perceived threat that the object of the ban is seen as posing to that control.”
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“And so it goes with the liberal desire to control not just their life but your life. A desire that is now sanctified as the Gospel of Banning.”

Busy bodies can become really dangerous when they elevate their interference in other people’s lives to governance. The trend is to push the line so far that it inhibits growth and development and that is a path to poverty, disease, and unhappiness.

Testimony before a legislative committee can be enlightening not only in the testimony presented but also in the questions asked and the behavior of the committee members. Here’s an example — Democratic Party to Rape Victim: You Were Screwed Anyway!

“She had a permit to carry a pistol but was unarmed when she was attacked. Ms. Collins was treated sensitively by Republicans on the panel, but when the questioning turned to Democratic Sen. Evie Hudak, the Democrats’ war on women was unleashed.

The Democrat ridiculed Ms. Collins, telling her that “statistics are not on your side.” She said that Ms. Collins had rudimentary training in martial arts, yet the rapist overpowered her. She suggested that the rapist would therefore have been able to wrest her gun away and use it against her, if she had been carrying. This is, of course, a non sequitur. A small woman probably can’t outwrestle a large, strong man, but that doesn’t mean that she can’t shoot him. This is why the 19th century Colt .45 was referred to as “the Equalizer.” The Democrats’ treatment of this rape victim is appalling
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The most important point here is the woman’s right to choose.”

There is a difference. It can be easily seen and observed. Those who posit that ‘both sides are the same’ are suffering delusions and an inability to make basic discriminations in behavior observations.

A kid on the bus pulled a gun and threatened to shoot. Three football players tackled him and wrestled away the gun. Joanne Jacobs has the story.

“The heroes were given an “emergency suspension” for being part of an “incident” where a weapon was present.
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This 16-year-old knows the right thing — take action to save lives — and the dumb thing — punish the kids who prevented a shooting. Why don’t Cypress Hill High School administrators know the difference between right and dumb?

The 15-year-old gunman was arrested and charged with possession of a firearm on school property and assault with a deadly weapon without intent to kill. So they’re going easy on the kid who pulled the gun and hard on the kids who stopped him.”

There are lessons taught in this school episode and it is a question as to whether they are the right ones.

“I can’t have anything unless I can prove I need it? Since when? So now is it the case that everything which isn’t provably necessary is instead forbidden?”

Steven Dan Beste notes the problem in the questions about Why does anyone need a high-capacity magazine for their pistol? Why does anybody need an AR-15? that comes up in the arguments about guns.

“I own lots of things that I don’t need. It’s called “Freedom”; I don’t have to ask permission from my betters to buy things, and I don’t have to offer justification for doing so. It’s nobody’s business but my own if I buy things I don’t need, as long as I don’t rob a bank to get the money I spend.”

It’s called “Freedom” – the question is really about just how much government should interfere with individual freedoms. You can see how that one is distorted from honest debate to useless argument with such things as ignoring unpleasant realities and the use of logical fallacies.

As for reason and logic, consider Mark Almonte’s answer to the question Why does anyone need a high-capacity magazine?

“There are several reasons for civilians to own high-capacity magazines: the right to possess the necessary means to effectively defend themselves, misconception of bullet stopping power and shooting accuracy, and the issue of multiple attackers. Additionally, on a net balance, there are benefits to the community when law-abiding citizens own guns with high-capacity magazines.”

When you are dealing with people who feel that members of a civilized society should have no need for personal defense – else it’s uncivil or perhaps because the police will do that job – then there is no basis for trying to discuss the idea of responsibility for personal defense.

The reality of a shooting situation is why the fantasies of one shot, one kill, immediate stop with any personal weapon are not helpful. It is why the AR-15 is gaining over the shotgun as a home defense weapon. Any weapon will require proper training, a good aim, and, more than likely, multiple hits to achieve the desired effect. But that is reality, not the fantasies that often drive the argument.

Related to this, see Colorado Fights Concealed Carry on Campus: Why, Exactly?

Looks like another university president made the mistake of being scholarly. Scott Johnson pulls together the story about Persecution and the college campus

“James Wagner has found himself in a familiar position and he has dealt with it in the familiar fashion. Speaking as the president of Emory University, he praised one of the constitutional compromises with slavery. …

In substance, Wagner’s point was certainly defensible. There would have been no Constitution without its compromises with slavery, but the compromises were just that. They ceded ground to the defenders of slavery, but also to the opponents of slavery. The resulting provisions allowed Congress to cut off the slave trade after twenty years. The three-fifths clause not only enhanced the representation of slave states, it also limited it.
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On most college campuses, however, Wagner’s comments cannot be defended, and Wagner has not even tried. In response to the outrage that has greeted his article, Wagner has performed the ritual self-abasement necessary to such occasions on college campuses”
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“What is really needed is advice on how to communicate one’s thoughts under the illiberal and indeed tyrannical conditions that prevail on college campuses. Suggested reading: Persecution and the Art of Writing, by Leo Strauss [Amazon affiliate link]. One must learn to speak ironically, conveying one’s true thoughts between the lines. A footnote for college presidents on campuses such as Emory’s: if you can absorb Strauss’s teaching, you must be sure never to mention his name or his writings.”

Debate in academia has been replaced by ideological argument that seems completely ignorant of the intellectual integrity that used to be the hallmark of an educated person.

“It’s bad enough that we’re on the verge of losing all of the consumer protections that keep the price of basic voice service reasonable and ensure the most vulnerable stay connected. But by putting the last nail in the coffin of the public telecommunications network, AT&T’s plan poses an even greater threat to the future of American innovation and internet freedom.

This is because the internet itself would not exist if it were not for a delicate balance of public policies that made sure the public telecommunications network was an open platform: Anyone could use it as a building block for innovation.”

Derek Turner describes How AT&T Is Planning to Rob Americans of an Open Public Telco Network and you have to think about what he says very carefully to get to reality through the bias.

The issue is an effort by telephone companies to ditch the old circuit switched networks in favor of packet switched networks like the Internet uses. This is not a matter of ‘robbing Americans’ but rather of trying to catch up with cell phones and Internet voice communications (e.g. VOIP). There is the assertion about the markets with several clues about the bias.

“an uncompetitive broadband market. Our broadband providers enjoy the kinds of high profit margins that would make a 19th-century robber baron blush. And our ability to use these networks to communicate openly and freely is under constant assault. Meanwhile, consumers in other countries not only have better access, but they pay far less for far better services.”

High profit margins? By what measure? What about build-out capital costs and the issues of dealing with massive growth and rapid technology changes? Uncompetitive? With the cell phone companies and the cable companies competing for broadband market share and the growing presence of free wifi not to mention the esoteric broadband solutions like satellite and fiber one wonders just what is meant by “uncompetitive.” Just because you don’t like the price of a service does not mean that someone is trying to “rob” you in an uncompetitive market.

The price of basic local and long distance voice service is now essentially free. That isn’t reasonable? Not to a socialist, it seems.

It is posted as Three Reasons Conservatives are Losing the Battle for America. The worry?

“In a word, we are observing the regression of a culture…one that is moving away from sophistication and proudly stepping backward from civilizing attempts. We have seen primitive behavior in our own culture and others: when people look to a label or a skin color as all that need be said about a person; when information from trusted sources of information are grossly biased so only one side is heard or even “exists”; and when physical or administrative violence against people is belittled, laughed at or ignored. It’s a cultural regression and, as the unifying, reassuring legal structures and precepts wither, as information sources become untrustworthy, and as physical and administrative violence worsens, it becomes increasingly difficult to reverse.”

The three reasons? First is an electorate that is glued to a paradigm with unrelenting fierceness where reality, not matter how blatant, just doesn’t matter. Second is a media cohort that participates in and reinforces this paradigm. Third is the political techniques that create the paradigm for the sake of winning power.

“Political correctness is a capital political concept because: the participants silently acquiesce to its dictates; it’s a self-modulating system where groups of people self-monitor and groom each other into conformity; through unspoken or overt threats of censure, it propagates itself; and, among the willing, it inevitably leads to the control of thought. If we freely restrict our speech to only “allowed” topics, in short order we restrict our thinking as well. In the end there is no more powerful political tool than thought control, which is why mastery and management of information is a central issue in all totalitarian regimes. What has required the overt elimination or forced domination of media outlets in most autocratic regimes has been yielded up easily by our group-think media, who now march along in near lockstep while trumpeting their independence. Political correctness must be a beautiful thing to behold if you’re a politician inclined toward domination.”

There is another item to note in this essay in that it is rational and provides examples. It does not promote ideology but rather an hypothesis supported by reason and measure. That is a counterforce to what he describes and one can only hope such an approach and awareness grows.

In the movie Casablanca highly qualified people are in a surplus and anyone gets any job they can. A recent New York Times article noted how the Bachelor’s degree is taking the place of the high school diploma in the current job market. It seems many pundits miss the connection.

It isn’t that a BA is needed, it is that employers can find college degreed candidates for their positions.

Megan McArdle says Sorry, Kids, No High School Diplomas Need Apply

“More worrying is the way in which a BA is now becoming a minimum requirement for jobs that simply don’t require any of the skills you learn in college: receptionist, file clerk, secretary. ”
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“Caplan argues that to a large extent, the BA is becoming what a high school diploma became before it: a signal to employers that you are not stupid, lazy, or poor enough to drop out before you’ve finished your education. That’s valuable for the employers, but it’s increasingly expensive for the students, without necessarily preparing them to better do their work. And it’s far from clear that it’s worth removing people from the workforce for four years in order to prepare them to do sales, or manage an office. “

The issue here is in the ‘minimum wage’ class. There is a cost to employees in getting that degree and to society in productive years. Nice if you can afford it?

A bill presented to the in Washington state legislature is getting some attention. This is likely because it so well illustrates the nanny state approach to society with the idea that government employees are somehow special and better than the citizens. See the story Sheriffs can inspect homes for safe gun storage in Washington state under Democratic weapon bill.

“A new bill working through Washington state’s legislature would allow local sheriffs to enter homes of gun owners to ensure their weapons are properly stored.

The bill, pushed by Democrats, allows police to search where and how assault weapons are stored — as well as how safely they are stored, according to its text, listed in the state’s online legislative directory as SB 5737-2013-14.
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The definition of a “safely and securely” stored weapon is left largely to law enforcement to decide.”

What with the ‘law enforcement’ killing so many innocents in the recent LA manhunt, the problems of prosecutorial indiscretion, the arrests for public video recording, the problems that resulted in ‘must issue’ laws for concealed carry licenses, and so forth, one has to wonder about just what is driving this sort of idea sufficiently to craft a bill and put it up for legislative vote.

“That American breakthroughs in fracking, horizontal drilling, improved agricultural protocols and technologies, mobile communications, social networking, and online commerce have developed without fanfare and largely without government aid should remind us that the sources of our continual renaissance lie more outside than inside Washington.”

Professor Hanson describes America’s Bright Future in terms of things many do not see. Food and fuel have both shown significant productivity increases due to technology and innovation.

“Bouts of collective pessimism are common in America, and the current episode of collective depression is understandable given our mounting debt and unsustainable entitlements. But we should remember one thing. In the past, when we feared seemingly great rising powers—from the dynamic Germany of the 1930s, to the Soviet juggernaut of the 1950s that put a man into space, to the supposedly unstoppable Japan, Inc. paradigm of the 1980s, to the much admired post-national European Union collective of the 1990s— all such rivals eventually imploded or sputtered. America, meanwhile, recouped and regained its preeminence in peace and war.

Why such resilience? Largely because of our far greater reliance on free markets, transparent meritocracy, rewards for individual initiative and success, comparatively smaller government, and constitutionally-protected liberties.”

There are a lot of FUD mongerers and they are in your face all the time. The positive side of things just doesn’t seem to be news and a lot of it is incremental like compound interest. Unless you look, you may not see it. Compare now to just a few years ago and focus on what has improved. Balance that with what hasn’t.

“If fluoride is potentially dangerous in large amounts, isn’t it best to avoid it altogether? Not necessarily. Yale clinical neurologist Steven Novella, one of the authors of the well-respected blog Science-Based Medicine, put it to me this way: “Everything is toxic at a high enough dose; everything is safe at a low enough dose.” Yes, even water and vitamin C can be deadly when you consume too much. And the idea that something bad at high doses is also necessarily bad at low doses is based in part on the assumption that dose-response effects follow a linear pattern, but many scientists now think that biological responses are more complex than that. Some substances may only be dangerous beyond a certain threshold, while others may follow U- or inverted-U-shaped dose-response curves, such that substances have unexpected effects at high or low doses. (The anti-cancer drug tamoxifen, for instance, can stimulate tumor growth in small amounts.)”

Melinda Moyer got curious after hearing some rumors about the effect of flouride in water on children. See decided to check it out and reports on the question “Does Fluoride Make Your Kids Dumb? (Don’t trust the influential doctor who says yes)” at Slate.

Some people are gullible, some are skeptical, but one has to wonder about those who make it a life’s work to promote and promulgate fear and uncertainty with a complete lack of intellectual integrity. As Moyer illustrates, it often doesn’t take much effort to qualify the rumors and FUD mongering that floats all over the place.

“Among the most troubling questions from this episode is why the Internet’s ability to spread information at gigabit speed didn’t result in the story being killed.”

It’s FREE! It has the taint of mysterious (i.e. magic) technology! The media says it’s true! The government is going to do it – for everybody, for FREE! Feels good. Must be.

but it isn’t.

Wi-Fi “as free as air”—the totally false story that refuses to die – Journalism goes wrong and just keeps getting worse. Jon Brodkin tells the tale.

“The story is still out there. Three days after anyone who knew what they were talking about debunked the free Wi-Fi myth, three days after the Post was notified of their mistake, the false story is still published on the Post website and many other sites as if it were true all along.”

This is one of those things that doesn’t pass the smell test but there aren’t many in the surface media who have any sense of smell any more, it seems and their audience is also quite gullible for pipe dreams. That is called a positive feedback loop and the result is not pretty. What Jon notes is the problem of stimulating just a little bit of critical reading. It seems to be an impossible task.

On the one hand is Walter Williams on Women in Combat. There is a difference by gender in important military related variables.

On the other hand is David Horowitz on the difference between political parties.

“Behind the failures of Republican campaigns lies an attitude that is administrative rather than combative. It focuses on policies rather than politics. It is more comfortable with budgets and pie charts than with the flesh and blood victims of their opponents’ policies.”
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“There is a reason for this, and it affects everything that goes on in political campaigns. Republicans and Democrats are not similar people who make opposite judgments about common problems and their solutions—spending is good, tax hikes are bad. Republicans and Democrats approach politics with fundamentally different visions of what politics is about. These visions color not only the way each side thinks about questions of policy, but how they enter the arena to face their opponents.”
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“Unlike Republicans, Democrats are not in politics just to fix government and solve problems. They are secular missionaries who want to “change society.” Their goal is a new order of society— “social justice.””
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“Republicans see Democrats as mistaken. Democrats see Republicans — whatever their individual intentions and behaviors—as enemies of the just and the good. Republicans have no parallel belief that drives them and their agendas, and no similar cause to despise and hate their opponents.”
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“It is the very grandeur of the progressive ambition that makes its believers so zealous in pursuing it.” … “The vision of the glorious future puts urgency into their crusades and encourages them to hate their opponents.”

There is a difference and a politician isn’t just a politician. What drives people influences their values and that influences their tactics. It is why any argument that takes the basis that ‘both sides do it’ is flawed in its first premise. It isn’t just a matter of difference of opinion. As the old saying goes, the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. That applies here as well. One side hits in the gut while the other side is trying to tell you that such hits will hurt. One is concrete and the other abstract. One is emotional the other rational. One wants to feel good and the other to be good. That difference makes a difference.

“This bipartisan activist policy is coming to a close with the new “lead from behind” policy of the Obama administration. Perhaps America now believes that the United Nations has a better record of preventing or stopping wars — or that the history of the United States suggests we have more often caused rather than solved problems, or that with pressing social needs at home we can no longer afford an activist profile abroad at a time of near financial insolvency.

Yet the reasons for our new isolationism, analogous to early 1914 or 1939, do not matter; all that matters is the reality that lots of bad actors now believe that the United States cannot or will not impede their agendas — and that no one else will in our absence. Americans are rightly tired of the Afghan and Iraq wars. Yet we left no monitoring force in Iraq and are winding down precipitately in Afghanistan, and thus have no guarantees that our decade-long struggle for postwar consensual government will survive in either place.”

Professor Hanson says War Is Like Rust: “War seems to come out of nowhere, like rust that suddenly pops up on iron after a storm.”

There are some who deny human nature or have a strong belief that history is no predictor. The denial is often flavored with rationalizations such as the idea that the source of all evil is Western Culture — that gets into an interesting exploration about personal feelings of guilt and how they are expressed.

VDH says “there is no evidence in either human nature or our recorded past to believe such a rosy prognosis.”. The biggest problem seems to be that evidence makes no difference to all too many.

“In disputes over the future of gun laws, people espousing different positions often literally don’t understand each other.

“The sides are speaking different languages,” says Harry Wilson, author of “Guns, Gun Control, and Elections: The Politics and Policy of Firearms.”

Many of the most frequently used words and phrases in this debate mean different things to different people — or, in some cases, don’t have clear meanings to anyone.”

Josh Leva says Loaded language poisons gun debate

As with the use of children as props in a debate, words without clear meaning chosen to frame the debate debase the debate. They move it from a matter of rationale discussion of values and ideologies to matters of emotion and comfort where actual consequences and implications are set aside or even denied.

“The Marine Corps passed to congress and higher that it would not be a good idea ton implement women into the infantry. What does the Marine Corps know? They only have been fighting our nations wars, that’s all. Well, to already cluster strike an idea that apparently everyone in the room already knows the results except those in DC, a female Marine gives her two cents. But hey, it’s only another Marine telling everyone, it’s a bad idea. Let’s do it anyway!!! Brilliant. “

Maj Pain at BlackFive says Get Over It! We Are Not All Created Equal quoting Capt Katie Petronio, “a company grade 1302 combat engineer officer with 5 years of active service and two combat deployments, one to Iraq and the other to Afghanistan.”

“Who is driving this agenda? I am not personally hearing female Marines, enlisted or officer, pounding on the doors of Congress claiming that their inability to serve in the infantry violates their right to equality. Shockingly, this isn’t even a congressional agenda. … it’s very surprising to see that none of the committee members are on active duty or have any recent combat or relevant operational experience relating to the issue they are attempting to change. I say this because, at the end of the day, it’s the active duty servicemember who will ultimately deal with the results of their initiatives, not those on the outside looking in.”

The captain has ‘been there, done that’ and has first hand experience with the result. Her story is worth careful consideration.

Trying to make women and men equal in all ways is one of those high sounding nifty ideas that recently came to the fore in the idea of allowing women to serve in combat roles in the military. It is also a ‘nifty idea’ that has problems with reality. Scott Johnson quotes and Iraqi marine to label that idea An act of wanton destruction.

“It seems to me an act of wanton destruction — David French calls it “Demilitarizing the military” — of a piece with Obama’s touch elsewhere. I commend to your attention Ryan Smith’s Wall Street Journal column “The reality that awaits women in combat.” Smith himself is a combat veteran with poignant memories of his service in Iraq. Available via Google News, the column may be inaccessible behind the Journal’s paywall. Smith writes:”

You can read a memoir such as Love Company: L Company, 399th Infantry Regiment, of the 100th Infantry Division during World War II and Beyond and you’ll find that the grunt on the front line in the European theater in World War II has a lot of experience that can be shared with one in Iraq in the 2000′s. That experience is considerably different from that envisioned by the ‘equality of sexes’ dreamers.

“to a leftist there can never be an honest disagreement with a leftist policy: it must always come because someone is paid to oppose the Left. Again, we have no mention of the infiltration of campuses by active Soviet sympathizers and devout Communists, which continues to the present.”

Another propaganda film, one that is supposedly a documentary, has its deceit exposed.

“Vietnam did leave a lasting scar, one that was not fully healed until American forces effortlessly kicked Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. The nation was divided, but this was in no small measure due to the fact that many passionately understood that America’s cause against Communism was righteous and necessary. Nixon’s narrow election in 1968, for instance, was only “narrow” because George Wallace, even more committed to defeating the North Vietnamese, siphoned off millions of votes from Nixon. Stone’s series is only “untold” because few have had the temerity to portray Soviet propaganda on cable TV as historical fact. If we are lucky, it will continue to be “untold.””

Larry Schweikart provides A History Lesson for Oliver Stone on Vietnam – real history, not the made-up stuff that is mostly just leftist anti-U.S. fantasy. It is one of a series at FrontPageMag.com on the efforts to re-write history so as to make it fit in what some want it to be rather than what it really is.