Month: October 2017

An increasingly common response from pro-gun control activists following a mass shooting is the call for America to implement Australian-style gun control laws as the “solution” to gun violence. Following the horrific mass murder carried out in Las Vegas on Sunday, in which at least 59 people were killed and over 500 injured by a lone gunman perched in a hotel room on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, Australia’s radical gun reform laws of 1996 are once again being invoked as the means of preventing another such heinous act. But those condemning America for failing to follow Australia’s example are not being honest about what that would actually look like in the U.S.

Implementing Australia’s gun control policies first and foremost requires imposing Australia’s euphemistically named “gun buyback” program, the cornerstone of the country’s gun laws. As positive as a “buyback” program sounds, what gun control advocates often conveniently fail to note is that it only works if it is obligatory. The gun buyback is actually government-imposed gun confiscation. There is no opting out. You are handing over the gun that you own legally to the government, or else you will face the point of a gun. The only guns the Australian government allows their citizens to own mut be registered and permitted for specific purposes, and self-defense is not one of those government-sanctioned purposes.

Australia’s gun confiscation was only successful because of its large scale. The government took at least 650,000 guns, or about one-fifth of all guns in the country; higher estimates put the numbers at 1 million and one-third. There are over 300 millions firearms in the U.S. To implement the “buyback” program on the same scale in America would require the forced confiscation of 60 to 100 million guns from tens of millions of Americans.

So, would tens of millions of gun-owning Americans, many of whom specifically own those guns for self-defense — including, if not particularly, self-defense against a tyrannical state — voluntarily hand over those guns to a government they believed was violating their constitutionally enshrined rights? Not a chance. What would inevitably have to happen is a militarized police force knocking on doors, searching houses, and forcefully taking those guns from tens of millions of “bitter clingers.”

In short, implementing Australia’s gun laws would result in massive civil upheaval, violence, arrests, even civil war.

In a must-read piece for The Federalist, historian Varad Mehta outlined several reasons why Australia’s gun laws would not just fail in America but result in the criminalization of millions of Americans and ultimately revolt; he underscores the central difference between the United States and Australia when it comes to guns: The U.S. has a Bill of Rights; Australia does not. Australian citizens simply do not have rights as unequivocally and solidly enshrined as Americans, not to mention a right to bear arms.

Though he likely didn’t intend to make that case, the Australian prime minister who oversaw the country’s sweeping gun control laws, John Howard, underscored his fellow countrymen’s lack of constitutionally protected rights in a pro-gun control op-ed for The New York Times published shortly after Sandy Hook. Here’s the key passage from the op-ed (h/t Mehta, emphasis added):

Our challenges were different from America’s. Australia is an even more intensely urban society, with close to 60 percent of our people living in large cities. Our gun lobby isn’t as powerful or well-financed as the National Rifle Association in the United States. Australia, correctly in my view, does not have a Bill of Rights, so our legislatures have more say than America’s over many issues of individual rights, and our courts have less control. Also, we have no constitutional right to bear arms. (After all, the British granted us nationhood peacefully; the United States had to fight for it.)

Howard is celebrating his own lack of a Bill of Rights to protect him from a potentially tyrannical government. This dismissal of citizens’ rights and lauding of a government with potentially unlimited power flies in the face of a core belief of a majority of Americans, including a vast majority of gun owners. And it is this difference above all the others that makes Australia’s gun laws impossible to impose on Americans.

If you haven’t read Mehta’s excellent discussion of this issue, do so.

More from the Daily Wire on gun control:

Leftists Love Gun Buybacks. They Don’t Work.

7 Facts On Gun Crime That Show That Gun Control Doesn’t Work

Before anybody can even think it, what I am about to say in no way implies that violent video games leads people to commit violent acts, that violent video games are to blame for the mass shooting in Las Vegas, that governments must ban violent video games, or that violent video games are the worst moral issue facing us.

Hear it loud and clear, libertarians: I AM NOT CALLING FOR A BAN ON VIOLENT VIDEO GAMES. We good?

Nevertheless, I quiver in remembering my teen years when fellow friends and I would gather for a game of Grand Theft Auto — the most depraved video game on the market, where people can role play as the criminal outlaw wreaking havoc upon a simulated city in whatever creative way they choose.

Sitting around the TV, I remember us post-pubescent teens chuckling like giddy schoolgirls as we controlled our video game avatars into mowing down scores of CGI civilians and police with AK-47’s. You can play the “story mode,” but that gets boring after a while, and offers little creativity. “Rampage” was the most fun and objectives were simple: survive the longest.

You could blast people from anywhere: a rooftop for sniper fire, a hilltop for machine guns, a street corner for pistols. Kill enough people, the “wanted” level increases, and then you’re knee-deep in destruction as the city becomes a warzone. Nobody survives forever; eventually, your health runs low, and you’re “Wasted,” or the cops arrest you, and you’re “Busted.” But this simulated fantasy world has no consequences, and either the hospital will miraculously resuscitate you back to health or police will forgive you of your mass-murdering ways and release you from prison. No matter what, you live to kill another day.

Simulating depravity and the most unspeakable of moral acts was our idea of “fun,” and though I eventually grew up from this packaged insanity, many have not. Grand Theft Auto remains one of the most popular video games created, having sold over 235 million copies since it became popular in 2001. The “Mature” rating states that only kids 17 years or older can purchase it, but that matters little, since GTA is most popular with “middle-class, middle-aged parents.” That means adults with allegedly fully-formed consciences think that simulated mass-murder is the best way to blow off some steam after a hard day’s work.

Why am I mentioning any of this if studies show that violent video games do not lead to actual violence on behalf of those who partake in playing them? The same reason that C.S. Lewis demonstrated on why watching a striptease (nowadays pornography) was not only an act of moral lassitude, but also stupefying for the intellect. In his book Mere Christianity, Lewis demonstrated the lunacy of watching naked women from a distance for pleasure:

Suppose you came to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food? And would not anyone who had grown up in a different world think there was something equally queer about the state of the sex instinct among us?

Translation: what a sad state you must be in to pay for watching a naked woman, who neither knows you nor wishes to know you, when a little sacrifice and hard work will garner you true intimacy in marriage. The same logic applies to simulating violence, and in the case of the GTA series, depraved violence. What great social purpose does it serve to simulate a mass shooting? Why simulate the most wicked and anti-social of behaviors if you would never do such a thing in reality? For what reason, why?

Nearly a decade has passed since I last played Grand Theft Auto, or any game like it. How distant I feel from my former self. Watching videos of these rampages on Youtube, the laughs I once enjoyed when watching my friends blast police as CGI civilians fled in horror, has yielded to distressed introspection over what the hell we were thinking … if at all.

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The ratings for NFL Sunday are in, and they aren’t pretty. Apparently taking a knee during the playing of our national anthem in “solidarity” with other anthem kneelers and as a way to “resist” President Donald Trump has rubbed some red-blooded Americans the wrong way.

Although the number of anthem kneelers significantly decreased this Sunday and executives’ decision to swing to commercial during the anthem in an attempt to protect their pocketbooks, the NFL still took a hard hit from viewers.

Deadline reports:

With a 11.0/19 in metered-market results, last night’s SNF was down 5% from last week when the Washington Redskins beat the Oakland Raiders 27-10. As the league took another week-by-week ratings hit just a month into the 2017-18 season, Sunday’s game also was down a bit year-to-year. Compared with the then-season-low of the Pittsburgh Steelers’ 43-14 smackdown of the Kansas City Chiefs in primetime on October 2, 2016, last night’s SNF dipped 2% in the early numbers.

Ouch.

​On Monday morning, ESPN changed their tune in light of the Las Vegas massacre, choosing to air the anthem in a sign of unity.

“Although ‘MNF’ has shown the anthem in previous seasons, the production team decided to make a change this year, even as the idea of protests were looming, to use the time to highlight matchups and story lines, a network source said,” reported The Washington Post.

Despite the massive death and injury toll from the Las Vegas shooting, two players chose to sit while the anthem played before their Monday night football game kicked off.

Classy stuff.

Following Sunday’s mass murder in Las Vegas, NV, Democrats and their left-wing news media allies are hyping a “fake news epidemic” from the “far-right,” laying the groundwork for censorship of dissident voices via legislation and technology company (primarily Facebook, Google, and Twitter) policy changes.

The New York Times, The Guardian, Los Angeles Times, BBC, Bloomberg, Business Insider, and Newsweek are among many left-wing and Democrat-aligned news media outlets framing “fake news” from “far-right” personalities and outlets as broadly duping Americans.

An analysis from BuzzFeed of disinformation on Twitter hyped irrelevant tweets as illustrative of a broad threat to the ecosystem of digital information. Among the evidence for its central claims, BuzzFeed shared the following tweet; twice retweeted and liked:

Americans, suggest the aforementioned news media outlets, are incapable of dealing with “fake news” from the “far-right.” Enter Democrats and Silicon Valley technology company overlords to rescue them with censorship solutions.

The hype dovetails with the Democrats’ and broader Left’s narrative of “Russian election hacking,” in which Americans who voted for Donald Trump are broadly cast as having been duped by supposedly pro-Trump and/or anti-Clinton propaganda surreptitiously pushed online by the Russian state at the direction of Vladimir Putin (an allegation supported by various former and current intelligence agency heads without any publicly shared evidence).

Recent weeks have seen Democrats and their news media allies hype allegations of a Russian state political influence campaign procured via ad buys on Facebook for propaganda distribution. Assorted news media figures dutifully hyped the storyline, framing American Facebook users as incapable of being able to defend their minds from foreign propaganda.

The insinuation? Fragile American minds must be protected from foreign propaganda. The benevolent defenders? Democrats and their Silicon Company masterminds.

Reuters, CNN, The Atlantic, CNBC, Variety, Engadget, and The New York Times joined the narrative of Russia’s alleged Facebook facilitates political influence over Americans.

Adam Schiff is the Democrats’ most-deployed figure for hyping the threat of Russian “election interference.” Without any sense of irony, the Democrat congressman accuses Russian propaganda of “[stoking and amplifying] social and political tensions”:

Political and news media observers will note that Democrats and their news media allies primarily traffic in the politics of “social and political tensions” along the lines of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, and sexual orientation.

Mark Zuckerberg has done his part in advancing the aforementioned and interconnected narratives. Fretting about “election integrity,” he promised to protect vulnerable Facebook users from propaganda:

Facebook claimed the discovery of $100,000 “influence operation likely based in Russia” on its own platform, hyped by NBC News. Meanwhile, the political influence campaigns purchased via billions of dollars of operational costs spent by the “mainstream media” is unexamined by America’s self-appointed Guardians of Democracy.

America’s self-styled elite view their perceived American subjects as too free.

Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter.

An Ithaca College professor says patriotic songs like the national anthem and “God Bless America” are “expressions of hyper-patriotism” and have no place at sporting events.

Stephen Mosher, who teaches “sports as political resistance” and “sport and popular culture” – both clearly very necessary exercises in higher education, penned an op-ed for The Ithacan bemoaning an American public who clamors to hear the national anthem at all of their sporting events.

The songs, Mosher says, have ““changed our ‘philosophy” about “what it means to be an American,” plunging us into a mode of “hyper-patriotism” that encourages “warmongering.”

“Sporting events don’t need a national anthem,” he claims. “Irving Berlin’s warmongering song “God Bless America” became our second, unofficial national anthem at the ballpark” only after the September 11th attacks, he continued, adding that NFL team owners are mostly to blame for the rise in national pride at sporting events.

“These men are the oligarchs — many are Trump contributors — who are simply protecting their investments,” Mosher says, before accusing these corporate overlords, and President Trump himself, of being “jingoists spreading lies.”

It may come as no surprise that Mosher is a Baby Boomer, conditioned in the 1960s to a sort of knee-jerk leftism. He speaks fondly of his time spent protesting the Vietnam war, though by his own admission, he made great strides against the mid-century fascists from a comfortable dorm room at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Desperate to relive his glory days, apparently, Mosher is inculcating an entirely new generation with his deep thoughts on America’s pastimes.

To solve the “problem” of patriotic displays, Mosher suggests that the American flag be banned from tee shirts, athletic uniforms and sports stadiums where its often treated in violation of the U.S. Flag Code (a set of prohibitions leftists rarely refer to when it comes to burning, not wearing, the Stars and Stripes, of course), and proscribing the national anthem from pre-game ceremonies.

Mosher is right in the sense that mandating players be on the field for the national anthem is a recent development. But banning the flag is a Catch-22: without kneeling to the flag, what, pray tell, would have inspired such academic prose as, “Trump’s attacks on ESPN’s Jemele Hill for expressing her own views, that he is and supports white supremacy, via her personal Twitter, reveals a leader whose skin is paper thin.”

It boggles the mind.

Some leftists have stepped away from blaming America’s 2nd Amendment for the mass-shooting in Las Vegas in order to blame another one of their favorite targets: the white supremacist patriarchy.

Ranting on his Twitter feed, Drexel professor George Ciccariello lashed out at the patriarchy for somehow enabling the Vegas killing spree.

The professor even criticized efforts to enact gun control, the typical knee-jerk reaction from leftists after these horrific events. He had enough intellectual honesty to admit that gun control laws would not have helped prevent this attack.

So why the white patriarchy? Ciccariello says that it enables white males to believe they can have anything they want.

Professor Ciccariello has a history of saying crazy things about white privilege, taking it to the most insane of extremes when he tweeted, “All I Want for Christmas is White Genocide” in 2016.

A Chicago journalist set out to prove last year just how easy it was for anyone to buy an “assault rifle.” In the process, the gun store rejected him for failing his background check – to which he concluded that the store held him to a different standard than “the American public.”

Neil Steinberg, a journalist at the Chicago Sun-Times, tried to buy a semi-automatic rifle at Maxon Shooter’s Supplies in Des Plaines, Illinois, following the Orlando nightclub massacre to prove how easy it was to obtain an “assault rifle.”

To make the purchase Steinberg needed a Firearm’s Owners’ Identification Card (FOID), which he had, and he needed to fill out the background check forms that are required to buy a firearm.

During the 24-hour waiting period, the gun store informed Steinberg that he was not legally eligible to purchase the gun because he failed his background check due to “an admitted history of alcohol abuse, and a charge for domestic battery involving his wife.”

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In his article, Steinberg tried to dismiss the reason why he was rejected by trying to claim that terrorists could buy guns but reporters could not.

“Would-be terrorists can buy guns. Insane people can buy guns. But reporters . . . that’s a different story,” Steinberg wrote.

Steinberg also claimed that the standards applied to him by the gun store were not the same standards applied to the American public – despite offering no proof to validate his claims.

“Were that same standard applied to the American public, there would be a whole lot fewer guns sold,” Steinberg continued. “Beside, they knew I planned to immediately sell it back to them.”