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It’s Not That Simple.

By Mike Cronin

“If it saves just one life, isn’t it worth it?” Not when it means diminishing freedom – for at least two reasons:

  1. “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” – Thomas Jefferson. Hundreds of thousands of our countrymen and women paid with their lives to give us our freedom; it is unconscionable to insult those sacrifices by letting freedom go for everyone on the chance that might buy a few lives. Especially when you consider that…
  2. …Whatever loss of (other people’s) liberty you propose to trade for a life, or a hundred, or a thousand, could just as readily cost as many lives and livelihoods as you think it might save. For example, you might save someone from COVID 19 with the lockdown, but condemn another to die at the hands of an abusive spouse, or of an overdose, or from suicide. And people have already died from not getting elective surgery.

“Not wearing a mask is selfish.” You make that sound like a bad thing. If “selfish” = concern for oneself, and wearing a mask is ineffective and potentially worse than not wearing one, then of course not wearing one is selfish. Guess what? Wearing a mask can be a form of virtue signaling. “Look at me, I’m a good person who has to be seen to be doing the pseudo “responsible” thing and giving the appearance of protecting others from my germs. That makes me feel good about myself.” That’s selfish, too, so what’s your point?

“Opening your business and “forcing” your employees back to work is greedy and exploitative.”  The funny thing about private business is that they can’t force their employees to do anything.  Another funny thing is that small businesses typically operate on small margins. Both the owner and the employees need to eat and pay the rent, so they need to work! And a big business owner like Elon Musk may not need the profit from his enterprise, but the employees and suppliers still do.

“Protesting the lockdown is white privilege.”  If all we have to go on is the mainstream media photos of the protests in the US, it might look that way. But it’s not:

In Wuhan, China, some people tried to resist the lockdown, and the government welded them into their houses:

And there have been lockdown protests around the world. Korea:

 

Italy:

Brazil:

Libya, Lebanon, Iraq, India…

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/coronavirus-protests-lebanon-india-iraq/2020/04/19/1581dde4-7e5f-11ea-84c2-0792d8591911_story.html

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What is Your Right to Life?

Declaration Of Independence: Do Our Rights Come from God, the ...

By Mike Cronin

In this time of uncertainty, the great concern is that COVID-19 cases will overwhelm our hospitals with more patients than the system can handle. Therefore, we are admonished, or even compelled by executive order, to stay home, close our businesses, keep our distance, wear masks, and so forth.  This is supposed to “flatten the curve.” In other words, we are to forfeit our rights in order in order to slow down the spread of the virus, so that the hospital system can keep up, and thereby save lives.

Indeed, if “life” consists solely of beating hearts, breathing lungs, and the continuation of other biological processes, such measures may indeed be effective in keeping the body count down in the hospitals.

But human life is more than mere biological functioning. Shutting down the country may keep the COVID body count down, but the nation is no better-off because of it.  In fact, the closure of the economy is causing, and will continue to cause, untold destruction to lives, livelihoods, and indeed, the American way of life.

Consider: our Founders encoded the concept of individual rights into our national DNA when they wrote the Declaration of Independence. They said that we are endowed with the rights to “…life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and that the purpose of government is to “secure these rights.”

How can the government secure our rights by violating them? I submit that it cannot.  The old saying goes that the “road to hell is paved with good intentions.”  Well, the lockdown may have been well-intended, but it is quickly becoming apparent that the final destination will be hell to live with.  Stupidities and absurdities have already emerged before we’ve even reached the first mile-marker:

  • The police department that sent its unmasked officers to affront common sense and violate social distancing rules to arrest an isolated surfer (even as people were advised to seek exercise and get fresh air during their isolation) because the beach was closed.

Malibu surfer in handcuffs after enjoying empty, epic waves ...

  • The politicians who stand shoulder-to-shoulder during COVID-19 press conferences.

March 13 coronavirus press conference

  • The tone-deaf celebrities and politicians who, surrounded by more luxuries immediately to hand than most Americans will experience in their entire lives, offer well-meaning “public service announcements” about enriching ourselves while staying at home – in many cases without any means to pay for the mortgage or rent.
  • Mal-designation of some businesses as essential and others as non-essential – by politicians who don’t have any idea how an economy works. (e.g. The designation of veterinarians in Georgia as non-essential – as if pets’ lives aren’t essential to the morale of their owners, and as if vets are only for pets. What about working animals? Livestock?  Might not food and dairy ANIMALS need veterinary care? Should we now add Mad Cow disease to this mess?)
  • The COVID-19 relief bill that provides 15% more aid to hospitals per COVID-19-related death, thus incentivizing medical systems to declare every death to be COVID-19-related.
  • The politician who threatened to extend the lockdown to punish everyone if some individuals violate it.
  • The nosy Nelly who threatened to call the police to inform them her neighbor is violating the lockdown – when the neighbor was going to work at her job as a 911 dispatcher.
  • The nurse with mask-marks on her face charging lockdown protesters with being selfish because they might infect someone, thereby causing even more strain to the medical system.

That last point may not sound all that absurd to you, but consider what it means: For ~240 years or so, Americans have held their military in high esteem because some of its members (many of whom were drafted) have been maimed or killed defending our rights and freedoms.

Arlington National Cemetery – America's Largest Military Cemetery ...

There is a grass-roots campaign by medical providers to urge people to stay home.  Urging others to stay home is rational and violates no one’s rights. But it’s not enough for some; a few want to destroy those very same rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness by using the coercive power of government to compel people to stay home –  because some doctors and nurses are getting marks on their faces from wearing masks all day.

These are the nurses on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic

Anyone who has ever worn a gas mask for an hour or two has had similar marks. Manual laborers and tradesmen get blisters, cuts, zaps, pokes, gouges, blunt trauma, chopped, and mangled. Ranchers walk in animal dung all day. Athletes get sprains, breaks, and concussions. I mean no disrespect to the medics enduring this battle; in fact, I salute you.  But it is a battle.  A few lesions go with the territory; earning them is no justification to curtail individual rights!

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War Wears On

Image result for war on drugs

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I.  Wouldn’t it be nice if we could celebrate the end of all war?  I’d love it if my day job ceased to exist because war became a thing of the past.  Of course, that’s not going to happen any time soon. There are too many groups with irreconcilable differences and different valuations of human life. And let’s face it, war is good for business.  Even if we discount the obvious, such as the war against ISIS, or the threat of war against North Korea, China, or Russia, our politicians like a good war to keep the gravy flowing.  If there isn’t one handy, they’ll make a problem into a pseudo-war in order to generate a little fervor: The War on Poverty. The War on Obesity.

When I’m feeling cynical, I find it too easy to believe that our politicians actually create problems in order to give the appearance of solving them. The solutions never seem to end the problem, only “combat” it.  We are supposed to keep reelecting the politicians so they can keep perpetuating working on the problem. For example:

The “War on Drugs.”  It’s arguably worse for the country than the drugs themselves. Let’s compare:

Legalized Drugs

The War on Drugs
Some people become addicted to harmful substances Some people become addicted to harmful substances
Addicts immiserate themselves and those close to them Addicts immiserate themselves and those close to them
  Drug prohibition causes prices to skyrocket, incentivizing organized crime
  Gangs take over urban ghettos, immiserating entire communities
  Turf battles yield higher gun violence & homicide rates. More misery
  Many addicts must turn to crime to obtain funds to afford their drug – yet more property and violent crime, often with guns, sometimes including homicide. More misery
  No taxes are collected on drug sales
  More police are required
  Police must become more militarized in order to do their jobs – and get killed in the line of duty more often, immiserating their friends and families
  Courts get clogged with possession cases
  Prisons get clogged with non-violent offenders. America tops list of incarceration rate among developed countries. Overcrowded prisons – here and abroad, harden convicts instead of rehabilitate them. More misery
  Cartels form in source countries and often outgun the local and national government – and/or they corrupt same. Homicide rates soar, immiserating the country
  Illicit trafficking networks multiply in transit zones – drugs, weapons, people, & money get moved “underground.”   More misery
  Illegal immigration and other border crime issues multiply. More misery
  Politicians take a “tough” stance and promise to increase funds to “win” the war on drugs – with better equipped and/or more police, stronger sentencing laws, more prisons, asset forfeiture laws (which violate the 4th Amendment), gun laws (which violate the 2nd Amendment AND disarm the innocent), border walls, surveillance states, and so on – year after year, election after election.

I don’t have any desire to use drugs for recreation, and I don’t want my kids or other loved one to use them, either.  But making the drugs illegal has done nothing to reduce the chances of that happening. The chance that my kids will be exposed to drugs still exists, but now it’s in the shadows. I have fiends and family in law enforcement – I don’t want them harmed in no-knock raids, or shot by a panicking addict. I work for the Air Force.  I’ve met and worked with fellow Airmen from Latin American air forces.  I’d much rather partner with them to help disaster victims that to learn they’ve been killed by cartels.  Perhaps the best way to end the War on Drugs is to stop fighting it.

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The Ford Focus

Related image

By Mike Cronin

We were supposed to believe that Judge Kavanaugh’s questionable interpretation of the Fourth Amendment was worth barely a ripple to his consideration for Supreme Court Justice, but a weak and uncorroborated sexual assault allegation should completely disqualify him.  We were supposed to ignore the convenient timing of Dr. Ford’s accusations and the lack of evidence supporting them. Democrats succeeded in giving the country a “Ford Focus,” but failed to stop Kavanaugh’s confirmation. Ironically, they might have turned a few Republicans against Kavanaugh had they gone after him on Constitutional interpretation!

We’re supposed to believe due process is a tool of “rape culture.” We’re now supposed to “believe women” when they accuse another of a sexual crime – and convict the accused in the court of public opinion, if not actually in law, simply on the accuser’s say-so. This is somehow OK, even if an innocent man were to be convicted.  This is the essence of “social” justice: Conviction and penalization of innocent individuals solely based on their characteristics, served as cosmic retribution for the crimes committed by others of “their kind.”

Lest you think I’m being unfair to Ford; the right wing would have us believe that Kavanaugh is innocent simply because there is not enough convincing evidence to prove his guilt.  He might be completely innocent, as he stipulates, and legally we must grant him that benefit of the doubt- but that doesn’t mean we have to trust him utterly.  We should be on our guard.  Just because radical leftists created the “white privilege” boogeyman so it could mobilize an army of aggrieved SJW snowflakes doesn’t mean there aren’t cases and circumstances where high-status white males get away with criminal conduct.

There is an old Roman saying: “Do justice, and let the skies fall.”  “Social” justice is unjust, and so is getting away with criminal conduct owing to one’s status.  Impartial investigation and due process are the best tools available to ascertain the facts and act accordingly.

 

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A Walk-out on Reason?

By Mike Cronin

I received an email from my kid’s high school administration this past Wednesday. The message advised me that many of the students participated in a 17-minute walk-out as part of the nation-wide event to remember and support the 17 faculty and kids who were killed in the Parkland, Fl school shooting.

The message further informed me that the kids who participated enjoyed the full support of the school administration in exercising their First Amendment rights and would not be penalized in anyway. All well and good, as far as it goes.  School is a highly appropriate venue for kids to learn about their rights; and the curriculum should be flexible enough to incorporate current events when they provide salient learning moments.

There is a problem, though.  There have been plenty of such events over the span of my kid’s school career, but the walkout on Wednesday was only the second one I can remember that generated a “learning moment” significant enough to warrant a message to parents from the administration. (The first was the recent solar eclipse, and the message to parents was about viewing safety. Hardly controversial.)

Worse, the moment on Wednesday was billed locally as a lesson on practicing First Amendment rights and/or solidarity for the Parkland victims, families, and friends, but the ultimate aim of the organizers of the nation-wide event was further curtailment of Second Amendment rights.

If you’ll recall, there have been several mass shootings/mass murders during previous administrations, including several at schools, but no group saw fit to so dramatically use the nation’s school children as puppets to protest for more gun control during that span of time.

This time around, the shooting happened during a Republican administration in a county led by a sheriff that was a strong supporter of Hillary Clinton for President, and a strong supporter of the Democrat Party. The sheriff and school district participated in an Obama Administration initiative designed to end the so-called “school to prison” pipeline. The initiative boils down to not arresting or prosecuting non-white school-age kids who violate the law, in order to keep them in school and show how tolerant and non-discriminatory the community is.  The policy failed spectacularly. There was something on the order of 66 missed opportunities to keep the Parkland shooter from his appointment with infamy over the course of his high school career. But even with all of those chances, the future killer couldn’t make it to graduation. He was expelled. Fast-forward to valentine’s Day, 2018. When the shooting was in-progress, as many as four Broward County Sheriff’s Deputies felt no compunction to enter the school and attempt to stop the 19 year-old gunman. When it was all over, the killer was arrested. So even though he was given every chance, he will still end up going to prison (or the looney-bin)- straight from the scene of the 17 murders he committed in the school he was expelled from.

Did that come up in classroom conversations across the country before or after the Wednesday walk-out? No?

The organizers of the walkout would have us believe that the Parkland massacre was caused by the NRA and the AR-15. Their solution is more gun control.  But Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School was already under the most restrictive gun-control regime possible: It was a gun-free zone. It said so right on the label. On the other hand, the community was not a lunatic-free zone, and I’m not just referring to the shooter. 17 people were shot by the killer, and they were sacrificed on the alter of leftism as a consequence of virtue signaling by the lunatic leftist sheriff and the lunatic school board of Broward County, Florida.

So, school administrators: If you want to impress on me that my children are being taught in an environment where rights are respected and exercised, and were education includes free and open inquiry, and they are not just being indoctrinated into leftism and being fattened up for potential future sacrifice, here are few things you might try:

Mock elections during national election cycles

Current event and issue debates

A civics class that has each kid take on the role of a Founder, and over the course of the semester the “Founders” discuss rights and the purpose of government, and write a Declaration of Independence and a Constitution

A stand-alone course on logic, fallacies, reason, and critical thinking

Improved physical security

Allowing willing and able teachers and administrators to be armed, and advertising that fact to deter would-be killers

Strict policies on removing dangerous kids.

 

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Kumbaya vs Molon Labe*

*Μολών λαβέ. Greek, from a Spartan dare meaning “Come and Take Them.”

By Mike Cronin

One of the roots of modern liberal thinking seems to be the premise that we are all “our brother’s keeper.”  Under such a proposition, the idea that the individual might be responsible for his own safety and security, rather than “his brothers” (i.e., someone else, such as the police) is anathema, therefore it is worrisome when someone who does believe he is responsible for his own self protection takes those responsibilities seriously and arms himself – and in so doing also gives himself an increased ability to hurt and destroy (even though he has no such intent).

One of the roots of leftist thinking is that the collective (family, tribe, identity group, clan, ethnic group, party, race, state, religion, etc.) is the primary unit of existence, and individuals and individuality are lesser considerations. Here also the armed individual is to be feared. How dare he think himself worthier of protection than his fellow collective members? Take his weapons and cast him out!

Note the overlap in the two positions: The armed individual and his weapons are a threat to be feared, and protection is either someone else’s job, or it’s a collective responsibility applied only to the collective as a unit. In essence, the individual member of the collective is not responsible for himself, the collective is.

The majority of the mainstream media, academia, and international political bodies are either liberal or leftist. Even their most factual, “non-fake” news and research about mass shootings, murder rates, and guns usually begins from one of these collectivist premises, so of course they will generate, locate, and/or manipulate statistics that lend credence to their arguments. It is confirmation bias on an industrialized scale.

Nor are they alone. The rarer elements of the media, academia, and political bodies that lean right are just as likely to engage in confirmation bias. It is nearly impossible to find gun crime data untainted by either bias.

But here’s the thing: The United States of America was not founded on collectivist premises. It was founded on individualism.  The attitude the founders enshrined in the Charters of Freedom (The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights) boils down to this premise: An individual is sovereign over his own life, so long as he does not violate the rights of others. The price of such individual freedom is individual responsibility.  The individualist believes himself to be responsible for everything he does and everything he fails to do. That includes defense of self and of loved ones.

A collective built around the liberal or leftist premises outlined above looks at a mass school shooting and is predisposed to blame the feared object, or the Congress, or the President, or the NRA, or “society,” for the horrors. They are blaming institutions, iconic figures, or inanimate objects, not the individual perpetrator, because a collective can’t conceive of an individual as a unit of volitional action that goes against the collective.

The collective cries, “When will we pass a law banning these scary weapons?” “How many kids have to die?” And so on. This, despite the fact that laws already enacted for the very purpose fail to stop the perpetrators: It is illegal to commit murder; that doesn’t stop homicidal maniacs.  It is illegal to take a firearm on to (most) school grounds (i.e., there is already a total gun ban on most school campuses); that doesn’t stop armed crazies from doing so. Certain firearms are, or have been, illegal to possess; that hasn’t made such guns magically evaporate.

Rational laws don’t stop mass murderers, especially when the murderer means to die in the commission of his crimes. But they do provide the basis for prosecutions and punishment, should the murder(s) be arrested, tried, and convicted.  On the other hand, enacting more laws, each to prohibit lesser acts than those already illegal, in order to somehow make them more illegal, or to somehow deter the demonstrably un-deterrable, is absurdity.  Adding laws on top of laws is not a rational strategy designed to actually prevent mass murders or enable more effective judicial proceedings. It is the panic response of a collective which can only serve to temporarily comfort the collective.

Even scarier? The worse mass-murders in US history weren’t committed by lunatics with guns, they were committed by by terrorists using airplanes (9/11) or trucks full of fertilizer and diesel fuel (Oklahoma City) as bombs, or even worse, by the very body the collective turns to for comfort and assurance: The government itself (Sand Creek, Wounded Knee, Waco).

The individualist sees the problem through a vastly different frame:  People who are dangerously incompetent to exercise the responsibilities attendant in being free – must not be free. Such people should not have unsupervised access to the public. That would mitigate part of the problem.  Of course, not all mass school shooters were known to be dangerously incompetent beforehand, but they all demonstrated a singular preference to target locations where it is highly unlikely they will meet any armed resistance: the “gun-free” zone.  Ergo, the response of the person who has built their life around the individualist premise is that there shouldn’t be any such “gun-free zones,” and if some lunatic or terrorist disregards the risk to themselves and starts shooting up the place? SHOOT BACK!

 

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Rigghhhht.

By Mike Cronin

Lefticles have created a culture that treats minority identity as a badge of courage, masculinity and reason as toxic, and boyhood exuberance as a disorder. They disdain the enforcement of immigration laws, election laws, classified information laws, privacy & spying laws, drug laws, tax laws, free speech protections, or existing gun laws. Lefticles hate and/or disrespect the Constitution, the police, the military, and the flag, and think our current president is an idiot or another Hitler in cahoots with the Russians (or both). But now they are demanding the people they hate trample on the charter they hate in order to further restrict the right they hate most of all. Rigghhhht.

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ACT LIKE A PREDATOR, GET OSTRACIZED; ACT LIKE PREY, GET PREYED UPON

By Mike Cronin

With all of the celebrity sexual misconduct coming to light in recent weeks, you might be tempted to believe that all men are created predators.  Certainly, some prominent figures want you to believe exactly that. But is it true? Let’s look at it.

To start with, homo sapiens are indeed predators – the most successful predators on the planet. In a very real sense, we are animals: vertebrates, mammalians, primates, at the very top of the food chain. Or at least we still have all of the genetic traits of animals, including the drive to survive – both as individuals, which we fulfill by eating, seeking shelter, etc., and as a species, which we fulfill via the individual drive for procreation. With a few specific exceptions, we use the same physical equipment and engage in similar behavior for both drives: We use our senses and our appendages to seek out suitable “subjects.” This makes it is easy to equate predation for food with “predation” for sex.

Much more recently we evolved the capacity to reason. Some animals can adapt their surroundings to themselves in very limited fashion. A variety of animals make nests. Termites can make temperature-controlled mounds.  Various other animals have some rudimentary problem-solving skills. They can use a stick to dig, or a rock to smash open a nut. Some very bright primates can even use sign language to communicate with humans. But no other animal can derive abstractions from concretes and principles from abstractions. No other species has mastered fire, or the ability to make more complicated tools out of simpler ones, or to make written language, or to do any of the myriad other things that only humans do.

This highest function has given humans something no other animal species has: the ability to consciously override our most basic drives. In contravention of the drive to survive, humans can commit suicide, go on hunger strikes, and take crazy physical risks.  In contravention of the drive to procreate, humans can be chaste, or they can resist the full force of the sex drive in subtler ways, such as monogamy and self-restraint, for example. Holding our animal natures under a degree of restraint has enabled the rise of civilizations.

On the other hand, the actions of sexual predators are easy to interpret: they are the actions of people (usually men) that have chosen to give in to their animal urges. Some of their actions are completely natural in the context of animal behavior, but they are abhorrent in the context of civilization, and absolutely destructive in the context of rights-respecting societies. Perpetrators of such acts deserve to be ostracized and punished.

In the case of the ongoing sexual misconduct revelations in the mass media: clearly, many powerful men have either chosen to stop being civilized, or they felt entitled to take such liberties as reward for their prominence, or both. Dozens (and perhaps hundreds, by the time the dust settles) of men will be implicated. This is not typical of all, or even most, males. If most males engaged in such behavior, there would be no such thing as civilization; we would be stuck at the hunter-gatherer stage of technological advancement.

So, what about women? Just as surely as men, women have animal drives. In females, the drive to procreate manifests in attraction to males who are best suited to ensure their offspring achieve physical maturity.  The preferred indicators of such suitability vary among women, but they boil down to “Alphaness.” A suitable male might be regarded as such for his dominance (not domineering) behavior, wealth, physical appearance, intellect, confidence, prominence among others, or some combination of such factors. Regardless, a male with a high degree of “Alphaness” will be more attractive to more women than a male with less.

In the context of cases now being played out in the media: There are women who are naturally attracted to prominent men for their “Alphaness,” such as the ones now being revealed for their sexual misconduct. While it is true that no criminal liability should attach to the victims of sexual misconduct, it is fallacious to think that any and all such victims were selected completely at random. Predators look for easy prey. So, what was it about these victims that screamed “prey” to these predators?  Youth/inexperience. Incapacitation/innebriation. Low situational awareness. Low confidence. Isolation. False or misinterpreted willingness signals. It could have been any combination of any of dozens of factors.  If sexual predators can notice these “victim signals,” they are ipso-facto noticeable. We can identify them and teach people how to avoid giving them – or to mitigate their effect.

So, what can we make of this?

  1. Most men are not sexual predators, but a few are.
  2. Sexual predators choose to ignore civilizing restraint and act on baser animal drives. This often results in criminal conduct.
  3. Most victims of sexual assault are not random. They were selected based on giving some combination of “victim” signals the predator found enticing. The victims might not have been aware they were giving off such signals. “Victim signaling” is not criminal. We shouldn’t blame or punish the victims for it. But it’s not undetectable; we can identify it and teach people to avoid it.
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ANTI-RATIONAL LEFTISM

By Mike Cronin

It’s not always immediately obvious when the ideas of leftist lunatics are invalid. On the other hand, sometimes they build a philosophical foundation on the very thing they claim to hate – in order to achieve a slightly different (yet just as bad) version of that thing. A current case comes to mind: Antifa, the self-styled “anti-fascist” militant movement.

Merriam-Webster’s defines Fascism as: “a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.”  (Emphasis added)

Sure, Antifa is laudably against the KKK, White Supremacists, Neo-Nazis, and the so-called “alt-right,” but they are not so laudable in their choice of tactics: The exact same ones used by Hitler’s Brownshirts: protests and riots and violence employed to stifle opinions they oppose.  In other words, the “anti-fascist” Antifa groups use fascist tactics, in order to achieve…what?

Antifa groups aren’t advertising a clear end-state beyond shutting down their enemies, but the roots of the movement date to communist/socialist protests against fascism in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 30s. You know, Communism? That “benevolent” form of human political organization which Merriam-Webster defines as “a totalitarian system of government in which a single authoritarian party controls state-owned means of production?”

Ah. It’s not that Antifa objects to central government control of everything and everybody, it’s merely not having the precisely correct flavor of that bitter sauce that gets their turbans in a twist. Because gulags are just so much better than concentration camps and plantations, right?

 

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HERE WE GO AGAIN

By Mike Cronin

Yet another mass shooting has shattered lives and sensibilities across the nation. While the dead bodies were still warm and the facts opaque, the usual demagogues began firing off the usual salvo of blame-storming.  Guns, or types of guns, or parts of guns, or gun accessories, were to blame. Angry white men. Congress. Gun manufacturers. Republicans. The NRA. You get the idea.

As usual, the only solution to the believers of The Narrative is to ban firearms. Not all firearms, of course (at least not all at once), just the evil ones.

Such people are often impervious to reason. Even so, I feel compelled to once again offer some reasoned, logical thinking on this issue.

Either we have the right to life or we do not.  Our Founders believed we do. They enshrined the “right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence.  If we have the right to life, then inherent in that right is the subordinate right to self-defense from any threat, to include the threat of tyrannical government. Our Founders ensured we had the capability to fight any and all such threats by means of the Second Amendment. During the centuries between the ratification of the Constitution and today, Americans have amassed hundreds of millions of firearms and billions, if not trillions of rounds of ammunition.

Since so many guns legally exist in the hands and homes of millions of people who have the protected right to possess them, and since a legal ban on guns could not make all guns everywhere magically evaporate, it follows that the only way we could eliminate all (privately held) guns everywhere in this country would be for well-armed government agents to confiscate them. One small problem. A government that once protected the rights of its people that then abolishes those rights by force is by definition tyrannical!

Therefore: Because guns exist and can be used against the people, the people must have the right to have guns. Put another way: Infringing on the right to keep and bear arms is infringing on the right to life. Banning firearms would be nothing less than banning our right to exist.

You might ask: “What about the victims of these mass shootings? Didn’t they have a right to exist? Doesn’t allowing criminals and crazies access to (insert the detested firearm variety here) give them all the power to kill and destroy?”

Of course the victims had a right to life. Of course we should limit the power of criminals and crazies to kill and destroy. The best way to do that isn’t by eliminating everyone’s access to firearms, it’s by limiting the criminals’ and crazies’ access to society!

It is my contention that people with histories of violence, or diagnoses of psychological conditions making them prone to violent behavior, or those using prescriptions that have side effects that include tendencies toward violence, must be escorted in public, incarcerated, or institutionalized.

“But Mike, criminals and crazies have just as much right to access society as you do!”

No, they don’t. Rights come with the responsibility to respect the rights of others. Those unwilling or incapable of fulfilling such responsibilities have less claim to any rights than those who are responsible. The rights of the incompetent do not outweigh the rights of the competent.

To paraphrase an analogy proffered by Bill Whittle:  There are predators and there are prey. The leopard hunts the gazelle with stealth and claw and fang; the gazelle can fight back with numbers, speed, hooves, and horns.  We cannot defeat, or even deter, the leopards of the world by erecting “no cat zone” signs (pro-tip: leopards can’t read) and cutting the horns off all the gazelles. However, we might improve the situation by trapping or “belling” the cats!

Oh, one other thing: note that I did not mention the name of the latest mass murderer. Another mitigation we might consider: A significant number of the criminals and crazies out there want nothing more than notoriety. Lets deny it to them. Our media can stop mentioning or publishing the names of the shooters. Yes, doing so is well within the bounds of “newsworthiness” and the names are indeed part of the facts of the case – but why fuel these monsters’ cravings?