[Late-morning update]
The strange case of white supremacy.
Yes, America is such a horrible racist place that millions of people of all races are clamoring and even risking their lives to get here.
And say, did you know that being pro-life is a white-supremacist position?
Yes, that’s right. Those evil white supremacists are trying to prevent the murder of millions of black babies in the womb.
…and gun-shooting statistics:
For a variety of reasons having to do with social and economic factors the firearms murder rate went down. What the current debate really seems to be about is whether rapid-fire guns increase the frequency of a special kind of crime called mass shootings. However, this is a somewhat artificial category. Mass shootings are a subset of the larger phenomenon of mass killings, sometimes referred to as rampage killings. “A rampage involves the (attempted) killing of multiple persons at least partly in public space by a single physically present perpetrator using (potentially) deadly weapons in a single event without any cooling-off period.”
It is one killer, one place, one time, many victims in a setting outside of war. The data collected on this type of even notes the type of weapon used, which is not always a firearm. It is mass killings that one would want to reduce, not just mass shootings.
The brothers in the Boston Marathon bombing didn’t use guns. As with the “War on Terror,” this is the insanity of going after inanimate objects, instead of the would-be murderers.
[Monday-morning update]
Six ways Bill Clinton lies about the “assault weapons” ban.
To be fair, though, Bill Clinton lies about a lot of things.
Are they psychology tall tales?
…will leave libertarians better armed than most.
Sounds good to me.
Has anyone actually read it?
He seems to be an ecoterrorist. But among many other things, that’s inconvenient to The Narrative.
[Update a while later]
Now the owner of 8-Chan says that the shooter wasn’t the one who uploaded the manifesto. So that means it’s likely that he didn’t even write it.
But at least, unlike the Dayton fascist, we have him to question.
[Update late morning]
Sorry, first link was missing. Fixed now.
[Afternoon update]
“In a sense, we were lucky with the terrorists from faraway places. We weren’t with the ones from the suburbs of Dallas, and the traditional tools of intelligence and organized-crime investigation probably are not going to prove effective in dealing with these. None of the major gun-control measures under discussion would do much to prevent these acts, either, and many of them would do nothing at all. (We should understand that for the gun-control lobby, these horrifying crimes are only convenient pretexts; they want to prevent the legal sale and use of firearms irrespective of any effect on mass shootings or ordinary crime; their motivation is almost purely cultural and tribal — Icky rednecks and their icky guns.) That so many self-proclaimed do-gooders turn first and instinctively to gutting the Bill of Rights and suspending due process for socially marginal types and purported subversives tells us only that political power must be kept from those who desire it most. When the Democrats propose new constraints on Americans’ constitutional rights — and not only the right to keep and bear arms — and when it is clear that those constraints would do nothing at all to prevent massacres like the one in El Paso, it is fair to ask what their real motives are and why they apparently are unable to be honest about them with the public.”
“As soon as I started eating meat, my health improved,” she said. “My mental acuity stepped up, I lost weight, my acne cleared up, my hair got better. I felt like a fog lifted.” All of the meat was from healthy, grass-fed animals reared on the farms where she worked.
Other former vegetarians reported that they, too, felt better after introducing grass-fed meat into their diets: Ms. Kavanaugh said eating meat again helped with her depression. Mr. Applestone said he felt far more energetic.
“It can be hard to balance your diet as a vegetarian, especially when you’re younger, and I wasn’t doing it right,” he said.
I continue to hold out hope that we’ll be able to grow grass-fed beef in a lab.
Time to declare war on it.
Dennis Prager: America is drowning in them.
…from Mark Steyn:
Is he a nice person? Well, he’s left an awful lot of human wreckage in his wake. Some of the women he’s used and discarded seem to me, without naming names, to be sad and profoundly damaged from their brief intersection with his wandering zipper. His latest squeeze seems likely to be moving into Number Ten without benefit of clergy – a first for the Tories and a sign of how desperate they are after years of letting all the sober, serious, earnest types turn their party into a laughingstock.
What does he believe in? Other than himself, not terribly much. About a decade ago, I was in London for a couple of days and had lunch with him and Stuart Reid at a favorite Italian restaurant. Stuart was the deputy editor who did all the hard grind at the Speccie, while Boris was the great fizzing impresario fronting the operation – a business model he transferred successfully into his mayoral regime, and will no doubt be trying again in Downing Street. He was going on the BBC’s “Question Time” that night and was worried that he didn’t have anything sufficiently arresting to say, so asked if I had any tips. I gave him a few thoughts on the passing scene, and he considered them not in terms of his own public-policy positions (if any) but in terms of attitudinal cachet. Finally, I said, “Why don’t you really stir them up and put in a word for social conservatism?”
“You mean abortion and all that? Oh, G od..,” he sighed, and ordered dessert.
If that seems to be (for self-interested reasons) his most firmly drawn red line, don’t nevertheless overstate his ideological flexibility. Like Boris, Theresa May schemed and maneuvered for decades to reach the top spot …and, by the time she pulled it off, she’d spent so much time and effort on the scheming and maneuvering that she had no idea of what to do once she got there. Boris is likewise invested in himself, but, having reached the finial of Disraeli’s greasy pole, he doesn’t intend to be just the latest seat-filler. Mrs May wanted to be prime minister; Johnson wants to be a great and consequential prime minister.
Between him and Trump, we are in for interesting times.