gun control

Holly Mathnerd Is Right that Effective Gun Control Is Impossible Without Govt. Gun Confiscation by Force, But Doesn’t Everyone Know That?

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Right on cue, the Brown mass shooting was instantly the inspiration for the usual gang of anti-Second Amendment zealots, utopians,”Imagine” fans, fact-phobic progressives and nascent totalitarians (funny how they hang out together…huh!) to again scream for “common sense gun control.” Joe Biden did it, or whoever was standing near him barely moving their lips or pretending to drink a glass of water.

Last week, quirky, smart, logic-obsessed substacker Holly Mathnerd issued a typically thoughtful essay called “The Reality of Nationwide Gun Control…the math behind the policy.” Holly gifted me with a subscription to her blog a while back as a gesture of professional courtesy so I pass her analysis on to you. I have written essentially this exact post on Ethics Alarms before and long ago, however, and probably more than once. My reaction to Holly’s work is, “Yes, of course. Why do we keep having to explain this?” Her delivery is a lot less abrasive than mine, so if that helps, great.

Gun control is also on my list of policy objectives that I view as unethical because they are impossible, and arguing for them is 1) a waste of time, 2) misleads the slow of wit into thinking they aren’t impossible when they are, 3) constitute virtue-signaling and 4) would be terrible mistakes even if they weren’t impossible. Read Holly’s whole argument, but the short version is…

If “nationwide gun control” is going to mean anything more than a slogan, it has to be defined in operational terms. Not aspirations. Not values. Mechanics. Logistics. Physical Reality. What specific actions actual humans would have to take with their human bodies in the material world.

In a country with roughly 450 million privately held firearms already in circulation, nationwide gun control cannot mean preventing future purchases alone. Even a total ban on new sales would leave hundreds of millions of existing weapons untouched for decades. So the policy people are implicitly calling for is not regulation at the margin, but the systematic reduction of the existing stock of guns. That requires locating them.

There is no way to meaningfully restrict, reclaim, or eliminate privately owned firearms without first knowing who has them and where they are. Which means a comprehensive national registry: mandatory disclosure of ownership, backed by penalties for noncompliance, with mechanisms for verification. Anything less is symbolic. Once a registry exists, enforcement becomes unavoidable. Some people will comply. Many will not. Some will be confused, some distrustful, some quietly resistant.

That resistance is not an edge case; it is a certainty at this scale. At that point, enforcement ceases to be abstract. It becomes door-to-door. This is the moment where “nationwide gun control” stops sounding like a policy preference and starts sounding like a domestic enforcement regime. Warrants. Searches. Seizures. Follow-ups. Informants. Penalties for concealment. Escalation when compliance is refused.

There is no clean or frictionless version of this process, and no serious proposal pretends otherwise once you spell it out.

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“Psychology Today” (Again) Shows Why “Experts” Cannot Be Trusted

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Why is a standard issue anti-gun screed with moldy “common sense gun control” talking points being featured in “Psychology Today” under the guise of a “How to prevent suicides” article? Oh, lots of reasons, such as..

  • Anti-gun fanatics will use every opportunity imaginable to repeat their cant;
  • The fact that their objective, to somehow void the Second Amendment, is impossible doesn’t dissuade them from wasting our time;
  • Like most of the print media in the sciences, “Psychology Today” has been captured by the doctrinaire Left and allowed what should be a non-partisan topic be polluted by progressive activism;
  • Too many academics, scholars and experts today have no regard for integrity, and believe that they must accomplish their ideological goals by any means necessary, and
  • To someone whose only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

“Reducing Gun Violence, Particularly Gun Suicides: What we can learn from other countries when it comes to reducing gun deaths” announces its bias and how that bias has made its “expert” author stupid right in the headline. Other countries have nothing to offer us as far as gun policies are concerned. They do not have the same culture as the United States, nor do other nations enshrine individual liberty as securely as the United States. Other nations did not rely on guns and self-determination to the extent that the U.S. population has throughout its history, and other nations are far more submissive to government interference with their rights than Americans are.

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Larry Bushart, Justin Carter, Josh Pillault: Martyrs To Anti-Gun Fearmongering and School Shooting Hysteria

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Today Greg Lukianoff, the president and chief executive of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, has a guest column in the New York Times about the unethical persecution of Bushart, a 61-year-old retired police officer living in Lexington, Tennessee, who ended up in jail for 37 days for posting a meme on social media post that some hysteric took to be a threat to shoot up a school. His was a particularly head-scratching case of the wild over-reaction to stupid and vicious comments about Charlie Kirk after his assassination. Lukianoff uses his column to condemn all negative consequences of all of those comments, usually by the Trump Deranged and Axis media-indoctrinated.

From the column:

Mr. Bushart’s case would be alarming even if it were the sole instance of institutional overreaction to a response to Mr. Kirk’s killing. But it is not unique. A recent review by Reuters of court records, local media reports and public statements found that more than 600 Americans have been fired, suspended, investigated or disciplined by employers for comments about the Kirk assassination. Mr. Bushart, too, lost his job — because he was in jail.

At my organization, we have tallied 80 attempts to punish academics over their remarks about Mr. Kirk since his killing, resulting so far in about 40 investigations or disciplinary actions and 18 terminations.

The Bushart case is a poor one to send Lukianoff to his soapbox: he wasn’t arrested over what he said about Kirk. I don’t think he was fired, either, since the column begins by telling us he is retired. Moreover, FIRE’s absolutism is misplaced: there are very good reasons to fire teachers who celebrated a man’s death by violence for his political views. To begin with, they are terrible, hateful leftists who shouldn’t be corrupting young minds.

But the column did remind me that I had never learned (or written about…I’m sorry) the resolution of the far worse case of Justin Carter, a Texas teenager (above) who was arrested in 2013 for commenting on Facebook with a fellow gamer, “Oh yeah, I’m real messed up in the head, I’m going to go shoot up a school full of kids and eat their still, beating hearts. lol. jk.” A Canadian jerk who read the exchange decided to report Justin to the Austin police, who then arrested him–he was 18 at the time—searched his family’s house, and charged him with making a “terroristic threat.”

I wrote a great deal about the case in 2013, beginning with this post, “The Persecution Of Justin Carter And The Consequences Of Fear-Mongering: If This Doesn’t Make You Angry, Something’s The Matter With You.” I just re-read it: I blamed the teen’s abuse on the Obama Administration’s exploitation of the Newtown school shooting to create sufficient anxiety among parents to move the metaphorical needle on gun control, and I was right. Where I was wrong was in not keeping Ethics Alarms readers updated on Carter’s fate, though I referred to his case as recently as 2018.

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Ethics Alarms Encore: “The Inconvenient Truth About The Second Amendment and Freedom: The Deaths Are Worth It”

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Back in 2017, when I first re-posted  this essay from 2012,I noted that it was written in response to the reaction at the time from the Second Amendment-hating Left to the shocking murder-suicide of of the Kansas City Chiefs’ Jovan Belcher. Nobody remembers the incident now, but the reflex reaction of the Axis of Unethical Conduct to  virtually every mass shooting or nationally-publicized gun violence incident has remained constant.  Now much of the “justification” for the assassination of Charlie Kirk has focused on his statement that mass shootings are the price we pay for the Second Amendment, and that the price is worth it. Maybe that position got him killed. His statement was 100% correct, of course, and when I was reminded that I had made almost the exact same assertion in the post below, I realized that I was ethically bound to repost it now. to Some of it is obviously dated (the reference to juvenile Carl in “The Walking Dead,” for example), but I have re-read it, and would not change a word of its substance.

Do I fear that this position puts me in the cross-hairs? No, because EA has relatively small circulation, and I don’t matter. But even if it did put me in personal peril, I could not and would not allow that possibility to stifle my opinion or my willingness to state it. That is what the bad guys want, and have been working to accomplish for many years. That is one of the reasons Charlie Kirk was killed.

Here, once again, is that 2012 post: Continue reading →

Kamala Harris, the “Integrity? What’s Integrity?” Candidate

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

As an ethicist, I don’t have to agree with a Presidential candaidtes policies to find him or her ethical, unless a policy are per se unethical (like validating terrorism by forcing a ceasefire on Israel before it has destroyed Hamas), involves not enforcing laws (like at the Southern border) or violates the Constitution (as with Gov. Walz’s declarion that “hate speech” should be illegal). However, as an ethicist, it is explicitly my business when a Presidential candidate demonstrates a cynical contempt for integrity as an ethical value, for integrity is one of the most important of ethical values. An individual without integrity cannot be trusted.

Harris’s whole campaign is an effort to pretend integrity is a myth. Bernie Sanders issued a damning verdict on Harris (and himself) when he told NBC’s “Meet the Press “ that despite her efforts to moderate her positions since taking over from Joe Biden on the top of the ticket, such as purporting to support fracking and opposing “Medicare for All,” Harris was just being “pragmatic” and “doing what she thinks is right in order to win the election.”

In other words, lying.

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Ethics Quote of the Month: Ironically, It’s Justice Alito!

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

“An event that highlights the need to amend a law does not itself change the law’s meaning.”

—-Justice Joseph Alito, concurring in the case of Garland v. Cargill and re-affirming the ethical, legal, democratic and conservative principle that laws shouldn’t be ignored or changed by courts just because they no longer work the way they were designed to.

I guess this will be just one more reason for the Angry Left to try to “get” Alito. Maybe he likes to eat candy bars that a lot of the Capitol rioters ate, or something. May be they’ll hire a lip-reader to try to catch him saying something like “it was a riot!” while smiling. Conflict of interest! Recuse!

Re-affirming why the 6-3 conservative SCOTUS majority is good for democracy, the U.S. Supreme Court yesterday ruled that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (aka the ATF) exceeded its statutory authority when it tried to ban bump stocks by classifying them as machineguns. Machineguns are defined in an old statute, the National Firearms Act of 1934. It banned “machine guns,” encompassing today’s automatic weapons. The law “defines a machinegun as any weapon capable of firing “automatically more than one shot…by a single function of the trigger,” as Justice Clarence Thomas explained in the majority opinion. Although the definition also covers parts of a gun that are “designed and intended…for use in converting a weapon” into a machinegun, it does not cover “bump stocks.”

Bump stocks assist “bump firing,” which involves pushing a rifle forward to activate the trigger by bumping it against a steady finger, then allowing recoil energy to push the gun backwards, resetting the trigger. If the shooter maintains forward pressure and keeps the trigger finger in place, a semi-automatic rifle will fire like an automatic weapon (anti-gun fanatics don’t know the difference, and don’t care). The ATF’s “interpretive rule” published in December of 2018 banned stock replacements that facilitated this operation.

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Ethics Quiz: The President’s Mexican Ventriloquist

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Over at Newsbusters, Jorge Bonilla argues that “the act of dubbing President Joe Biden in Spanish is tantamount to an act of election interference.”

He cites as evidence Biden’s interview this week about guns as aired on Univision and Unimás this week. Here is what the President said (so far, I haven’t found a YouTube video):

“The idea we don’t have background checks for anybody purchasing a weapon, the idea that we’re going to be in a position where he says that he famously told the NRA that don’t worry, no one’s going to touch your guns if I… From the very beginning, I used to teach the Second Amendment in law school, from the very beginning, there were limitations. You couldn’t own a cannon. You couldn’t… You could own a rifle or a gun.”

This is off the topic a bit, but did you know Donald Trump lies all the time? We require background checks for most gun purchases; the idea that “we don’t have background checks for anybody purchasing a weapon” is a false idea, and communicating it as if it isn’t is called “a lie.” Biden means that people making private purchases of firearms don’t currently have to get background checks. Then he again, as he has repeatedly for years, makes the absolutely untrue statement that “You couldn’t own a cannon.” No, Joe you could, and even lackey fact-checkers like the Post’s Glenn Kessler have called out this favorite piece of anti-Second Amendment fiction. Biden just keeps on repeating it, as interviewers nod their heads like those plastic German Shepherds in the back rear window of cars in the 80’s.

Back to Bonilla’s point: He says that listening to Biden’s weak and hesitant delivery should set off “Oh-oh…this guy is President?” alarms, but the President is protected from that legitimate realization when Spanish-language outlets dub his voice:

Those who watched the TelevisaUnivision interview of Joe Biden on Unimás (as I did, primarily) got English with subtitles. We heard the president in his own voice, speech pattern and mannerisms. We got to hear him trail off several times, and made assessments of his lucidity and cognition. Based on this feed we were able to speculate as to the efficacy of the (alleged) White House medical cocktail team…Those who watched the Spanish-dubbed interview on Univision were deprived of that perspective because of the stellar job done by the interpreter. When dubbed into Spanish, Biden sounds 40 years younger and without cognitive decline. The interpreter’s rich baritone, when transposed onto Biden, leaves viewers with the impression of a president far more vigorous than he actually is.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Is dubbing Biden voice in Spanish for Spanish-speaking voters unethical “election interference”?

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This Is The Mentality That Allows You To Thrive As A Democratic Party Political Consultant In 2023…

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

The speaker is Ally Sammarco, a D.C.-based Democratic political consultant who pretends to be a firm, ARS Media LLC. You get an early clue about Sammarco’s ethical orientation by the fact that the ARS media website keeps referring to the company as “we” but when you click on “Who we are” you get just one name, hers. Lawyers are subject to discipline if they do this, but political consultants, obviously, don’t have to be ethical, since their job is recommending lies.

Her presumably self-written description of what she does is working “with clients on messaging to Democrats and swing voters, using creative social and digital media strategies.” You know, like posting misleading, Big Brotheresque videos on TikTok and Twitter, then responding to legitimate criticism with snark like, “Literally the replies on this show how many Republican men actually think that they could actually take out a shooter with an AR-15 with zero training.” Literally! Is this just dishonest deflection when she knows she’s mouthing pro-totalitarian propaganda, or is Ally really that stupid? It doesn’t make any difference really: this woman makes her living getting paid to advise Democrats. Ponder that for a nonce. What does this tell us?

As I noted to Ally, “It will keep you safe” is the standard aspiring totalitarian rationalization for the government infringing on any individual rights, from the First Amendment, to Due Process, to the right to a fair trial. In one of his more prescient quotes, Benjamin Franklin wrote: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” Today’s Left is charging full-speed against that core American principle, betting that the average voter is too ignorant, too stupid, and too terrified to realize what progressives and Democrats want to do to them until it is too late.

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Welcome To Masterpieces Of Bad Analogy Theater…Today’s Featured Performer: Matthew Dowd! [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

Matthew Dowd is one of an elite group of pundit grifters who pretend to be conservatives or Republicans so progressive propaganda news networks can put them on panels for “balance,” deceiving viewers into believing that their consistent agreement with the Left’s talking points arises from fair and objective analysis. It’s a small but growing group encompassing the cynical members of the Lincoln Project as well as the shamelessly Trump-deranged Jennifer Rubin, the pathetically intellect-challenged ex-RNC chair Michael Steele, and Ana Navarro, who demonstrates her uselessness by not walking off the set of “The View” muttering, “Life’s too short to waste hanging around idiots like Joy Behar and Sunny Hostin.” Dowd is smarter and more credentialed than any of them (faint praise, I know), which makes his act even more unethical than theirs are.

On one of many—with many more to come I’m sure—MSNBC “do something!’ panels on gun control in the aftermath of the most recent Texas shooting, Dowd offered this brilliant analysis:

“Three children died from lawn darts. They banned lawn darts after three children died from lawn darts. Texans will record 4,000 gun deaths or more this year as we move forward in this. And so, yes, it’s frustrating, it’s incredibly disappointing, but we have get to a place where it gets to anger and then anger motivates us to action.”

Anyone who compares laws darts with guns is either a fool or a liar. I’ve listened to Dowd for many years; he’s no fool. He knows damn well that this is a stupid and misleading analogy, but he is trying to convince people whom he knows are gullible and easy to mislead. Lawn darts were toys, a game. They were marketed to parents for their children, and were absurdly dangerous. Toys are never supposed to kill anyone, and three deaths from a lawn game was two too many. Ever hear of someone being killed playing croquet? Badminton?

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Gun Control Advocates Would Be More Persuasive If They Didn’t Rely On Big Lies And Fake Statistics: The Latest From Kamala Harris

/ Jack Marshall / 71 Comments

The only example of a similarly polluted public policy debate I can think of right now is the hoary “women are payed 76 cents for every dollar a man is paid for the same job” myth. Wait: there are the inflated and misleading Wuhan virus fatality stats. And come to think of it…never mind, we’re talking about the Bill of Rights here. The fake statistic in Harris’s tweet—and to be fair, her claim didn’t originate with her—representing a toxic hybrid between the “Do something!” gun hysteria and the “Think of the children!” rationalization—is popping up everywhere lately. Frankly, I believed it when I first saw it last week. After all, as Harry Reid would say, it works. But it’s a Big Lie.

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