Government as Family
For Uncle Sam to become Big Brother and your Daddy, a lot of people have to get screwed.
40 reasons why guns should be banned
1. Banning guns works, which is why New York, DC, & Chicago cops need guns.
2. Washington DC’s low murder rate of 69 per 100,000 is due to strict gun control, and Indianapolis’ high murder rate of 9 per 100,000 is due to the lack of gun control.
3. Statistics showing high murder rates justify gun control but statistics showing increasing murder rates after gun control are “just statistics.”
4. The Brady Bill and the Assault Weapons Ban, both of which went into effect in 1994 are responsible for the decrease in violent crime rates, which have been declining since 1991.
5. We must get rid of guns because a deranged lunatic may go on a shooting spree at any time and anyone who would own a gun out of fear of such a lunatic is paranoid.
6. The more helpless you are the safer you are from criminals.
7. An intruder will be incapacitated by tear gas or oven spray, but if shot with a .357 Magnum will get angry and kill you.
8. A woman raped and strangled is morally superior to a woman with a smoking gun and a dead rapist at her feet.
9. When confronted by violent criminals, you should “put up no defense – give them what they want, or run” (Handgun Control Inc. Chairman Pete Shields, Guns Don’t Die – People Do, 1981, p. 125).
10. The New England Journal of Medicine is filled with expert advice about guns; just like Guns & Ammo has some excellent treatises on heart surgery.
11. One should consult an automotive engineer for safer seatbelts, a civil engineer for a better bridge, a surgeon for internal medicine, a computer programmer for hard drive problems, and Sarah Brady for firearms expertise.
12. The 2nd Amendment, ratified in 1787, refers to the National Guard, which was created 130 years later, in 1917.
13. The National Guard, federally funded, with bases on federal land, using federally-owned weapons, vehicles, buildings and uniforms, punishing trespassers under federal law, is a “state” militia.
14. These phrases: “right of the people peaceably to assemble,” “right of the people to be secure in their homes,” “enumerations herein of certain rights shall not be construed to disparage others retained by the people,” and “The powers not delegated herein are reserved to the states respectively, and to the people” all refer to individuals, but “the right of the people to keep and bear arms” refers to the state.
15. “The Constitution is strong and will never change.” But we should ban and seize all guns thereby violating the 2nd, 4th, and 5th Amendments to that Constitution.
16. Rifles and handguns aren’t necessary to national defense! Of course, the army has hundreds of thousands of them.
17. Private citizens shouldn’t have handguns, because they aren’t “military weapons”, but private citizens shouldn’t have “assault rifles”, because they are military weapons.
18. In spite of waiting periods, background checks, fingerprinting, government forms, etc., guns today are too readily available, which is responsible for recent school shootings. In the 1940’s, 1950’s and 1960’s, anyone could buy guns at hardware stores, army surplus stores, gas stations, variety stores, Sears mail order, no waiting, no background check, no fingerprints, no government forms and there were no school shootings.
19. The NRA’s attempt to run a “don’t touch” campaign about kids handling guns is propaganda, but the anti-gun lobby’s attempt to run a “don’t touch” campaign is responsible social activity.
20. Guns are so complex that special training is necessary to use them properly, and so simple to use that they make murder easy.
21. A handgun, with up to 4 controls, is far too complex for the typical adult to learn to use, as opposed to an automobile that only has 20.
22. Women are just as intelligent and capable as men but a woman with a gun is “an accident waiting to happen” and gun makers’ advertisements aimed at women are “preying on their fears.”
23. Ordinary people in the presence of guns turn into slaughtering butchers but revert to normal when the weapon is removed.
24. Guns cause violence, which is why there are so many mass killings at gun shows.
25. A majority of the population supports gun control, just like a majority of the population supported owning slaves.
26. Any self-loading small arm can legitimately be considered to be a “weapon of mass destruction” or an “assault weapon.”
27. Most people can’t be trusted, so we should have laws against guns, which most people will abide by because they can be trusted.
28. The right of Internet pornographers to exist cannot be questioned because it is constitutionally protected by the Bill of Rights, but the use of handguns for self defense is not really protected by the Bill of Rights.
29. Free speech entitles one to own newspapers, transmitters, computers, and typewriters, but self- defense only justifies bare hands.
30. The ACLU is good because it uncompromisingly defends certain parts of the Constitution, and the NRA is bad, because it defends other parts of the Constitution.
31. Charlton Heston, a movie actor as president of the NRA is a cheap lunatic who should be ignored, but Michael Douglas, a movie actor as a representative of Handgun Control, Inc. is an ambassador for peace who is entitled to an audience at the UN arms control summit.
32. Police operate with backup within groups, which is why they need larger capacity pistol magazines than do “civilians” who must face criminals alone and therefore need less ammunition.
33. We should ban “Saturday Night Specials” and other inexpensive guns because it’s not fair that poor people have access to guns too.
34. Police officers have some special Jedi-like mastery over handguns that private citizens can never hope to obtain.
35. Private citizens don’t need a gun for self- protection because the police are there to protect them even though the Supreme Court says the police are not responsible for their protection.
36. Citizens don’t need to carry a gun for personal protection but police chiefs, who are desk-bound administrators who work in a building filled with cops, need a gun.
37. “Assault weapons” have no purpose other than to kill large numbers of people. The police need assault weapons. You do not.
38. When Microsoft pressures its distributors to give Microsoft preferential promotion, that’s bad; but when the Federal government pressures cities to buy guns only from Smith & Wesson, that’s good.
39. Trigger locks do not interfere with the ability to use a gun for defensive purposes, which is why you see police officers with one on their duty weapon.
40. Handgun Control, Inc., says they want to “keep guns out of the wrong hands.” Guess what? You have the wrong hands.
“I didn’t know” is not an excuse
So now we learn that Tom Daschle also has a tax problem, having failed to pay over $100,000 in taxes. There are two issues here;
- Common citizens can’t get away with this lame excuse
- That Daschle didn’t even consider the fact that someone gave him a car and DRIVER for free might have repercussions?
Might this be another example of how we need to clean up the tax code AND Washington? Thanks to Instapundit for the heads up.
The New Face of Socialism
Obama defined Biden’s role within the government this week, and apparently he will be “the great equalizer.” (My words, not Obama’s).
Apparently low-income citizens wil now be able to grab a piece of the American pie “if they are willing to work for it.” Shame on us for thinking that in a free society anyone has that right if they so choose.
Here is the face of new socialism-what’s old is new again:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/strongmiddleclass/
Quote of the Day
From this NPR piece, Obama Gives Keynes His First Real-World Test:
“Prescribing Keynesianism to some politicians is like prescribing crack to a coke addict.”
(If they ran more of this during pledge drive week, there would be no need for taxpayer funding.)
Is This Really Happening
Why does a city have a Peace and Justice Commission? And why is it making it difficult for the city library to get its scanner fixed? I know, you can’t make this shit up.
Oh well, lets all tip our glasses to Berkeley, the leftist joke.
Who Knew They Were Comedians?
Wen and Putin slam the US fiscal system… Seems almost laughable. Two systems that are so out of whack and in trouble (of their own doing) are blaming us? One system is based on oil exports. That is it. The whole thing rests on exporting oil. Good luck to them. The other is based on cheap, cheap labor and excessive gov’t spending.
Oh well, when all else fails, blame someone else. Lets see how they are doing in 12 months versus the US. I am sure they won’t be any better off.
10 Great Reasons to Sink the Stimulus Package
1) A 2005 study by Andrew Mountford and Harald Uhlig “analyzed three types of policy shocks: a deficit-financed spending increase, a balanced budget spending increase (financed with higher taxes) and a deficit-financed tax cut, in which revenues increase but government spending stays unchanged. We found that a deficit-spending shock stimulates the economy for the first 4 quarters but only weakly compared to that for a deficit-financed tax cut.” In other words, FDR vs. Clinton vs. Reagan, Reagan wins.
2) Harvard economist Robert Barro looked at the multiplier effect of World War II military spending — supposedly the Mother of All Stimulus Plans and found that “wartime production siphoned off resources from other economic uses — there was a dampener, rather than a multiplier.” Barro prefers eliminating the corporate income tax to massive government spending.
3) Alberto Alesina of Harvard and Luigi Zingales of the University of Chicago want to adress the fear and confidence issue by creating “the incentive for people to take more risk and move their savings from government bonds to risky assets. There is no better way to encourage this than a temporary elimination of the capital-gains tax for all the investments begun during 2009 and held for at least two years.”
4) An initial CBO analysis found that a mere $26 billion out of $274 billion in infrastructure spending, just 7 percent, would be delivered into the economy by next fall. An update determined that just 64 percent of the stimulus would reach the economy by 2011.
5) University of Chicago economist and Nobel laureate Gary Becker doubts whether all this stimulus spending will do much to lower unemployment: “For one thing, the true value of these government programs may be limited because they will be put together hastily, and are likely to contain a lot of political pork and other inefficiencies. For another thing, with unemployment at 7% to 8% of the labor force, it is impossible to target effective spending programs that primarily utilize unemployed workers, or underemployed capital. Spending on infrastructure, and especially on health, energy, and education, will mainly attract employed persons from other activities to the activities stimulated by the government spending. The net job creation from these and related spending is likely to be rather small. In addition, if the private activities crowded out are more valuable than the activities hastily stimulated by this plan, the value of the increase in employment and GDP could be very small, even negative.”
6) Christina Romer, the new head of the Council of Economic Advisers, coauthored a paper in which the following was written about taxes: “Tax increases appear to have a very large, sustained, and highly significant negative impact on output. Since most of our exogenous tax changes are in fact reductions, the more intuitive way to express this result is that tax cuts have very large and persistent positive output effects.” And former Bush economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey tack on this addendum: “The macroeconomic benefits of tax cuts can be two to three times larger than common estimates of the benefits related to spending increases. The relative advantage of tax cuts over spending is even clearer when the recession is centered on the household balance sheet.”
7) Economists Susan Woodward and Robert Hall find that the multiplier effect from infrastructure spending maybe just 1-for-1, less than that 3-to-1 ratio for tax cuts that Romer found: “We believe that the one-for-one rule derived from wartime increases in military spending would also apply to increases in infrastructure spending in a stimulus package. We should not count on any inducement of higher consumption from the infrastructure stimulus.”
Economist John Taylor thinks it better to let the Federal Reserve deal with the short-term problems in the economy, while fiscal policy should attend to long-term issues: “In the current context of the U.S. economy, it seems best to let fiscal policy have its main countercyclical impact through the automatic stabilizer … It seems hard to improve on this performance with a more active discretionary fiscal policy, and an activist discretionary fiscal policy might even make the job of monetary authorities more difficult. It would be appropriate in the present American context, for discretionary fiscal policy to be saved explicitly for longer-term issues, requiring less frequent changes. Examples of such a longer-term focus include fiscal policy proposals to balance the non-Social Security budget over the next ten years, to reduce marginal tax rates for long run economic efficiency, or even to reform the tax system and Social Security.”
9) Massive stimulus didn’t work in the Great Depression. As this Heritage Foundation study notes: “After the stock market collapse in 1929, the Hoover Administration increased federal spending by 47 percent over the following three years. As a result, federal spending increased from 3.4 percent of GDP in 1930 to 6.9 percent in 1932 and reached 9.8 percent by 1940. That same year– 10 years into the Great Depression–America’s unemployment rate stood at 14.6 percent.” Same goes for Japan and its Great Stagnation of the 1990s.
10) Olivier Blanchard, the chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, coauthored a paper which found “that both increases in taxes and increases in government spending have a strong negative effect on private investment spending.”
Not What We Are Told
So, only 1% of guns related to crimes are purchased through licensed dealers? WHAT? I thought it was “they” who are the scrourge of crime in this country:
Federal data indicate otherwise. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics report, “Firearm Use by Offenders,” only about 1 percent of guns used in crimes come from gun shows. In fact, most crime guns — 57 percent — come from just 1 percent of licensed dealers. Federal and state law-enforcement agencies should come down on those renegade dealers like a ton of bricks.
Another study, by the FBI concerning attacks on law-enforcement officials, found that 97 percent of the offenders had procured their weapons through illegal means.
The Ice Cream Election
The presidential election was heating up and some of the third graders showed an interest. It was decided they would have an election for a class president. They would choose the nominees. They would make a campaign speech and the class would vote.
To simplify the process, candidates were nominated by other class members. It was discussed what kinds of characteristics these students should have. There were many nominations and from those, Jamie and Olivia were picked to run for the top spot. The class had done a great job in their selections. Both candidates were good kids. It seemed Jamie might have an advantage because he has lots of parental support. Olivia’s mother was nowhere to be seen.
The day arrived when they were to make their speeches Jamie went first. He had specific ideas about how to make our class a better place. He ended by promising to do his very best. Everyone applauded. He sat down and Olivia came to the podium. Her speech was concise. She said, “If you will vote for me, I will give you ice cream.” She sat down.
The class went wild. “Yes! Yes! We want ice cream.” She surely could say more. She did not have to. A discussion followed. How did she plan to pay for the ice cream? She wasn’t sure. Would her parents buy it or would the class pay for it? She didn’t know. The class really didn’t care. All they were thinking about was ice cream.
Jamie was forgotten. Olivia won by a landslide.
Every time Barack Obama opened his mouth he offered ice cream and fifty-two percent of the people reacted like nine year olds. They want ice cream.
The other forty-eight percent of us know we’re going to have to feed the cow and clean up the mess.
Author: Unknown