…many worry that Guatemala’s poor are already suffering from the diversion of food to fuel. “There are pros and cons to biofuel, but not here,” said Misael Gonzáles of C.U.C., a labor union for Guatemala’s farmers. “These people don’t have enough to eat. They need food. They need land. They can’t eat biofuel, and they don’t drive cars.”
This isn’t a market failure. It’s a deliberate distortion of markets through government policy. In some sense, it’s almost as criminally egregious as the behavior of the British during The Hunger in Ireland.
[Cuomo’s proposal] is beyond stupid. Rifles, notwithstanding Adam Lanza’s murder spree, are involved in hardly any homicides. More than five times as many Americans are murdered with knives than rifles – all rifles, not just “assault rifles.” More Americans are murdered with blunt objects; more are beaten to death with bare hands. The idea that banning “assault weapons” is the key to a more peaceful America is ludicrous.
Likewise with “ammunition magazines that carry more than 10 bullets.” I own two such magazines; there are countless millions in circulation. A magazine is a simple device, made from sheet metal and a spring; many thousands of Americans could make them in their garages. But let’s suppose that you could magically make all such magazines disappear. All a would-be mass murderer needs to do is pre-load, say, four 10-bullet magazines and carry them with him. People do this all the time. It takes only a second or two to drop an empty magazine from a semiautomatic rifle or pistol and slide a new one in. The idea that lives will be saved by making magazines smaller is pathetic. And yet, this is pretty much what the Democrats have to offer.
That’s what happens when you operate on emotion instead of facts and logic.
This bill is ostensibly a response to last month’s massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, where the shooter used a Bushmaster rifle that was legal under Connecticut’s “assault weapon” ban, which uses the same criteria as New York’s current law. Therefore the legislation Cuomo supports presumably will cover that particular model and configuration. But since the features disfavored by these laws have little or no functional significance in the hands of mass murderers, why should that be considered an accomplishment? “Of 769 homicides in New York State in 2011,” the Times notes, “only five were committed with rifles of any kind.” Even if one or more of those rifles would qualify as an “assault weapon” under Cuomo’s new definition, so what? Any “assault weapon” ban that is even arguably consistent with the Second Amendment will leave people like Adam Lanza with plenty of equally deadly alternatives.
Here is how Cuomo explains the need for new gun control laws: “I think what the nation is saying now after Connecticut, what people in New York are saying, is ‘do something, please.'” There’s no denying this is something.
“Something must be done! This is something. Therefore, it must be done!”
One of the features that distinguished Bolshevism from Tsarism was the insistence of Lenin and his followers on the need for a complete overhaul of society. Old-fashioned despots may modernize in piecemeal fashion if doing so seems necessary to maintain their power, but they do not aim at remaking society on a new model, still less at fashioning a new type of humanity. Communist regimes engaged in mass killing in order to achieve these transformations, and paradoxically it is this essentially totalitarian ambition that has appealed to liberals. Here as elsewhere, the commonplace distinction between utopianism and meliorism is less than fundamental. In its predominant forms, liberalism has been in recent times a version of the religion of humanity, and with rare exceptions – Russell is one of the few that come to mind – liberals have seen the Communist experiment as a hyperbolic expression of their own project of improvement; if the experiment failed, its casualties were incurred for the sake of a progressive cause. To think otherwise – to admit the possibility that the millions who were judged to be less than fully human suffered and died for nothing – would be to question the idea that history is a story of continuing human advance, which for liberals today is an article of faith. That is why, despite all evidence to the contrary, so many of them continue to deny Communism’s clear affinities with Fascism. Blindness to the true nature of Communism is an inability to accept that radical evil can come from the pursuit of progress.
And like “progressive,” “progress” is in the eye of the beholder.
The policy has been in effect for years in Utah, and there have never been any problems caused by armed teachers. Not a single one.
At Utah public colleges and universities, the same law has applied for years, so that school employees, and students who are least 21 years old, can carry lawfully. That has been the rule at Colorado State University since 2003, at almost all other Colorado public institutions of higher education since 2010, at the final hold-out (the University of Colorado) since early 2012, when CU lost 7-0 in the Colorado Supreme Court. Opponents have raised all sorts of hysterical scenarios (e.g., 18-year-olds bringing Kalashnikov rifles to a kegger; students pulling a gun during a heated debate in a literature class), but of course none of these scenarios have come to pass.
But hysterical and ignorant speculation is all they have.
