“Above the Law” Goes Beyond Stupid

By Jeff Knox

I just read one of the most idiotic rants I think I’ve ever encountered. It was written by a fellow named Elie Mystal, whose arrogance is only exceeded by his ignorance, at least where the constitution and gun laws are concerned.

The article was titled “The Rare Gun Regulation I Think Was Actually Stupid.”

Let’s begin by clarifying that he’s not lamenting a stupid regulation against rare guns, but rather declaring that, while he rarely comes across a gun regulation that he disagrees with, he recently happened upon one that he thought was actually stupid.

To make his point, after that brilliant headline, Mr. Mystal opens up with a broadside of stupid to set the tone for the piece.

“I support the government’s right to regulate firearms, since that right is enshrined in the Constitution, but this regulation failed to appreciate human weakness.”

Excuse me? The government’s right to regulate firearms is enshrined in the Constitution? Is that what they’re teaching at Harvard these days, that the Constitution enshrines the rights of the government?

I ask about Harvard because Mr. Mystal received both a degree in Government, and a Juris Doctorate from that prestigious institution. I’m sure Alan Dershowitz must be thrilled to have this guy representing his school. Perhaps he was out sick the day they went over the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, or maybe the rest of us are just confused, and the reality is that when the Constitution says “the people,” that really means the government.

Stunningly, the article actually goes downhill from there. Who would have imagined that there was room to go down from such a low starting point? But Mr. Mystal managed to do it.

The ordinance he’s referencing in the title and opening paragraph was one issued by a town in North Carolina in advance of Hurricane Florence, which forbid the sale, purchase, or carry of a firearm during their declared state of emergency. While that is indeed a stupid regulation – and an illegal one at that – Mr. Mystal’s rationale for calling it stupid isn’t based on rational arguments such as the threats posed by looters and thugs during times of crisis, when there are no police to come to one’s aid. Nor was he concerned about the problem of leaving guns unattended in homes that were likely to be targets for those same looters and thugs. No, the reason Mr. Mystal thinks the ordinance is stupid, is that it was silly of the City Council to think that ignorant, knuckle-dragging gun owners, who can’t be convinced to divest themselves of their dangerous weapons during good times, are certainly not going to give them up during a crisis, when they are feeling threatened and vulnerable, so it was stupid of the Council to try.

Part of that rationale is very true; it is foolish to think that people who regularly go armed would forego doing so during a crisis, but his characterization of gun owners was pretty insulting, especially when wrapped in the incredible ignorance he displayed about guns and gun owners throughout the article. The whole piece can be summed up as follows:

Mystal knows nothing about guns, and probably doesn’t know anyone who even owns guns. He takes as gospel, everything ever put out by the Brady Bunch, Bloomberg, or any of the various “researchers” on their payrolls, which claim that guns do only harm, put their owners and their families at greater risk, and serve no useful or positive purpose in civilian hands. And he dismisses out of hand any research or opinion which differs from his own. According to Mr. Mystal, anyone who chooses to own – much less carry – a firearm is stupid. People who oppose gun laws are stupid and/or evil, and politicians who pass gun laws like the town in North Carolina are stupid for not recognizing how stupid gun owners really are and not understanding that passing such laws is futile in the face of such stupidity.

This Harvard-educated, New York City former attorney turned self-proclaimed “online provocateur,” thinks the Constitution protects the rights of the government, and “the people” are too stupid to make decisions for themselves. He celebrates his ignorance with a level of arrogance and self-importance that’s simply stunning, even for a Harvard-educated, New York City dweller.

But even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then, and this pompous ass offered up this one:

“We shouldn’t make laws and interpret the Constitution based on the unrealized fears of the dumbest and most resistant to facts among us.”

But of course, he is unable to see that he’s talking about himself with that statement. His hollow insults about the lowly, gun-loving trailer-trash of the hinterlands provides a strong argument against leaving such important matters in the hands of coastal elites like Mystal.

The Self-Defeating Republican Strategy

By Jeff Knox

(September 7, 2018) As we pass out of Primary Season here in Arizona, and enter General Election Season nationwide, I’m struck by the lack of any sort of cohesive election strategy on the part of the GOP. While Senate Republicans are focused on confirming Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, the House Republicans are milling about doing little beyond throwing rocks at each other and the President over accusations of misconduct on the part of a couple of their members, and a pair of unsourced, but sensational portraits of chaos in the West Wing.

Republicans keep following a non-strategy of just reacting to the latest media attacks, and their strategists appear to be as disdainful of their own base as the Democrat elites are. They show no signs of having a plan for winning in November, so here’s a suggestion for them. For years I have encouraged state grassroots groups to adopt a double-pronged legislative agenda. The first prong is their Action Agenda – the legislation they really want to get passed – while the second prong is their Political Agenda – legislation that might not be passable, but which will force legislators to take a stand prior to reelection season.

Congress should be taking a similar approach. The confirmation of Kavanaugh is pretty good election season fodder for Republicans, but it is also firing-up the Democrat base. Rather than dragging it out as they are doing now, the Republican leadership should dispense with the kabuki theater of drawn-out hearings, and simply move forward with a confirmation vote. No new information about Judge Kavanaugh or his positions will be revealed in these hearings, and the hearings are not going to change any minds or votes. The only purpose the hearings serve is a forum for showboating on both sides, and an opportunity for a lot of whining and outrageous accusations flowing from the left and their media allies. Senator Grassly should abbreviate the committee hearings, going through the proforma motions as quickly as possible and moving straight to a vote of the Judiciary Committee. Then Mitch McConnell should act similarly, moving the confirmation debate quickly and getting straight to a vote. We all know that this will be a straight party-line vote, and that it is not Democrats who will decide whether Judge Kavanaugh is confirmed, but Republicans, specifically Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Jeff Flake of Arizona.

The slim, one-seat majority Republicans hold in the Senate was, until last Monday, in reality a 49-49 split, since John McCain was still holding a seat, even though he hadn’t been present for a vote in months. That meant that one Republican defector would have been able to sink the Kavanaugh nomination. Collins and Murkowski want to keep their seats for a few more terms, and being the Republican who kept the Supreme Court in play for more anti-rights leftist abuse, would be a hard label to live down. Flake on the other hand is retiring from the Senate, and he’s demonstrated a nasty vindictive streak where President Trump is concerned, so there was some real worry that he might take his war with the president to a new low by voting against Kavanaugh, or simply not show up for the vote. Thankfully that shouldn’t matter now that Jon Kyl has been appointed to fill McCain’s seat. While Kyl falls far short of being a reliable conservative, he has been shepherding Kavanaugh around to Senate offices and is unlikely to undermine his own work.

So why are Republicans drawing out the confirmation process? The Democrats wrote the new rules, and Republicans should play be those rules. Drawing the process out does nothing to help Republican prospects in the midterms, but it is serving as a rallying point to activate the Democrat base. Instead Republicans should get the confirmation process done, and move on to an issue where there is strong bi-partisan support – among voters – and serious vulnerability among Democrat incumbents: Guns.

A dozen Senate Democrats are vulnerable in the coming midterms. At least 10 of those would be significantly damaged by a record vote against a popular gun bill. Voting for a gun bill would do no harm to the electoral prospects of any Republican senators, and would help most.

In the House, Republican prospects are not looking great. Many Republicans announced their retirements last year in anticipation of a wave of Democrats in response to the election of President Trump. That wave was growing to a tsunami late last year, but quickly lost momentum with passage of the president’s tax bill in December, and has been rising and falling like a weak tide ever since, mainly dictated by the president’s Twitter activity. Most Americans seem pleased with the direction Congress has taken over the past two years, and the condition of the country. Republicans should be in great shape, but President Trump seems determined to keep feeding fuel to the Democrat base.

Like the Senate, Republicans in the House would significantly benefit from public debate and action on firearm-related legislation. GunVoters have been seriously frustrated by Republicans’ failure to follow through on promises to pass pro-rights legislation. The National Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act passed out of the House last December, but has been stalled in the Senate ever since. That bill is ripe for action in the Senate as soon as Justice Kavanaugh is confirmed. The other key bill that GunVoters have been waiting for action on in the House is the Hearing Protection Act. We thought we were going to see action on that last year, but it was successfully shot down by a crazed Bernie Sanders supporter who decided to take target practice at a Republican baseball practice.

Republicans in the House should immediately start pushing through the SHARE Act, which is an omnibus hunting, fishing, and land access bill that includes the Hearing Protection Act, along with several other much-needed firearm law reforms. The SHARE Act enjoys some bi-partisan support, and is an excellent vehicle for Republicans to regain support of GunVoters. Bringing the SHARE Act back into the spotlight would give House Republicans something positive to talk about, and passing the bill out of the House would give Senate Republicans some leverage for offering Democrats a no-win choice of voting on either the National Carry bill or the SHARE Act, forcing them to either allow one of the bills to go to a vote, or take a hard stand to block them from the floor. Either choice hurts them.

As I have said repeatedly in these pages, Guns Win, and it’s high time that Republican “leadership” figured that out.

Gun Control in Nazi-Occupied France: Tyranny and Resistance
by Stephen Halbrook

Book Review
By Chris Knox

No discussion of gun control goes for very long before someone mentions Nazis. Yet surprisingly little historical research has delved into what the Nazis actually did, both in prewar Germany, and in the countries that fell before the invading Nazi armies. With his recently-released Gun Control in Nazi-Occupied France and its 2014 predecessor, Gun Control in the Third Reich. Dr. Stephen Halbrook has started mining a long-ignored vein in the history of World War II.

That historians have so carefully avoided the topic for so long is remarkable in itself. Dr. Halbrook avoids accusations, but he succeeds in gently raising the question of why the topic has been ignored. It just might be that academic backers of “commonsense” restrictions on guns find it uncomfortable to see policies they favor being modeled by the archetype of totalitarian government. Whatever the reason, the topic has gone virtually unstudied for the past seven decades. Halbrook’s work is a good start on remedying that lack of scholarship.

Working from a trove of historical source documents in French and German, and from questionnaires he sent to veterans of the French Resistance, Dr. Halbrook has produced a detailed and meticulously researched picture of how the invading Nazis viewed arms in the hands of ordinary Frenchmen, and the steps they undertook to eradicate what they considered a menace to the success of their occupation.

Despite academia choosing to avoid the topic, the Nazi policies made an impression on WWII GIs and on the folks back home. The idea of “gun control” was foreign to most American ground-pounders, but they saw and heard of the atrocities committed by the Nazis against ordinary people for the crime of keeping a gun handy – proving to those unsophisticated “grunts” just how badly those guns were needed. As the Nazi blitzkrieg rolled across the low countries into France, they followed the same procedure in each town they entered. Upon subduing a town, soldiers immediately put up posters in the local language ordering that all guns be turned in, usually including threats of execution. Where registration records were available, the Nazis referred to the records and paid visits to the addresses they found there.

It was these oft-repeated, but rarely verified stories that made an impression on the American GIs, and that led to gun registration being political poison through the postwar years. One such story, this one set not in France, but in Belgium, was related by a refugee-turned-soldier, to my late father, Neal Knox. For years Dad told the story of The Belgian Corporal, usually after dinner with friends when someone asked him how he got into the fight for the Second Amendment. Dad committed the story to print only once or twice, partly because he could not substantiate the tale, and because he did not want the story to become trite.

What is undeniable is the impact that the story had on Dad and on our family. What is now also undeniable is the outline of that story, where a registered gun that could not be found led to an entire family being machine-gunned in the town square, was repeated not only in Belgium, but in France, the Netherlands, and without any doubt, in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and elsewhere.

The French gun registration law was moved into place with the best of intentions, as all such laws are. A global depression was in full swing in 1935, and crime was high – a handy excuse for disarming the populace. The real reason however, was that revolution was in the air, and fights between armed extremists were all too common. The French government saw it prudent to register the guns in order to confiscate them if need be. The politician who pushed the French registration law was none other than Pierre Laval, who would later lead the Vichy puppet regime, and would eventually be shot as a collaborator. The German Wehrmacht would find those registration records quite handy as they moved in to administer their new puppet state.

Halbrook’s book details the almost comical swings between orders to turn in guns or be shot followed by amnesties to turn in guns with no questions, followed again by death threats against those who failed to report those who had guns, followed by more amnesties. I say “almost comical” because the matter was serious business. Thousands lost their lives. Trees that served as stakes where condemned gun owners were tied up and shot fell over, cut down by the daily barrages of the firing squads. Yet the French people, especially those in rural areas, defied the orders hiding their own guns or passing them on to the Resistance.

The Nazis lack of success in making France a “gun-free zone” might provide a lesson for current politicians. A good portion of Frenchmen did not give up their guns in the face of firing squads. The low rates of compliance with registration laws in California, New York, and Connecticut really should not be all that surprising.

Stephen Halbrook has again written an important book, one that deserves a place on the bookshelf of anyone who holds the Second Amendment dear. The history of the Nazis and their gun control should not be buried in obscure footnotes. It should be readily available and studied for the important lessons that can be learned and applied today. Halbrook’s books are a great start.

“Murder Made Me Famous”
Media feeding the demons.

By Jeff Knox

Sitting in a fast food joint at DFW Airport, eating a breakfast bowl, while waiting for my ride, I happened to glance up at the TV. Of course it was playing CNN, and I noticed a series of almost iconic photographs flashing across the screen. Not only did I recognize most of them, I could name them, and describe their crimes. They were all famous murderers, and what I was watching was a promo for a cable series called “Murder Made Me Famous.”

Here’s the description of the series from the channel’s website:

“Murder Made Me Famous is a fact-based crime documentary series that examines killers who gained public notoriety when their crimes generated intense media coverage and made the killers household names. The unnerving psychology behind murder has long been source material for television, books and movies but why do certain killers capture the attention of millions?”

If it bleeds it leads, says the old saw about news coverage, and unfortunately, bloody massacres don’t only lead in newspapers and on TV, they also lead in ratings. People are sucked into the horror and it becomes a symbiotic feeding cycle. The attention given to murderous degenerates is so pervasive that it’s virtually impossible to get away from it. Saturation coverage, with its speculation and salacious details being rehashed every 15 minutes for weeks after an event, then regularly dredged back up for another “in-depth” look every few years for decades, makes the murderers some of the most recognizable and well–known people in the world. And that fame and notoriety is known to be a major motivating factor, and inspiration to others to seek similar fame by committing heinous crimes of their own.

Polls say that fame and celebrity have replaced wealth, power, athletic achievement, even happiness, as the most desired life-goal of the post-Baby Boom generations. Simply “being famous” is now considered a great achievement, even if the fame is based on some negative, embarrassing, or criminal event.

Media movers and shakers know all of this. They know that there is a direct correlation between the amount of coverage they give to a murderer, and the likelihood of copycats. When they were presented with a similar correlation several years ago, regarding suicides, media leaders came together and developed reporting guidelines designed to minimize the occurrence of “contagious suicide.” But the temptation – of money, ratings, and political gain – is too great, and few reporters or outlets have done anything to even attempt to address the issue of “Rampage Killer Contagion.”

All of the major news outlets are guilty of exploiting murder for ratings. They cross well beyond careless and callous, and demonstrate almost a gleeful indifference to the role they play in promoting these heinous acts, even as they point accusing fingers at innocent gun owners, gun makers, and the NRA.

Changing the way the majority of media report on suicides, has resulted in less “suicide contagion,” saving countless lives and untold tears. Their refusal to even seriously discuss adoption of similar rules for their reporting on mass murder events, is dispicable.

At its core, a mass shooting is almost always an elaborate suicide. Few perpetrators have any exit plan other than a hail of bullets. Evidence shows that some killers are literally attempting to run up a gruesome “score” to increase their notoriety by exceeding the carnage – and news coverage – of some previous murderer. This has prompted an array of psychologists, psychiatrists, social scientists, and, to their credit, a few members of the media, to call on the Society of Professional Journalists, and all media to adopt something like the suicide reporting guidelines when reporting on mass-murderers. So far these calls have fallen on deaf ears, and every time there is a mass-killing that receives heavy press coverage, we know that there will be copycats striking within days or weeks.

It is past time for mass media to stop exploiting murder for ratings. It is time for them to stop repeatedly naming suspected murderers and showing their photos – over and over and over again. Stop speculating on motives, assigning rankings, comparing one atrocity to another, and publishing lunatic manifestos. It’s time for them to adopt guidelines such as those repeatedly submitted to the Society of Professional Journalists in a petition called the “Don’t Inspire Evil” initiative, or the several other, heavily researched, scientifically backed proposals that have been put forward in recent years.

Adopting a few reasonable, sensible, voluntary changes in the way the media reports on murders would unquestionably save lives without interfering with anyone’s rights. But the media and politicians would rather blame gun owners, and demand we surrender our rights to schemes that have never worked, and have historically failed to protect anyone. That’s hypocritical and immoral.

Unfortunately, change is unlikely so long as the media can use sensational coverage to get eyeballs for their advertisers. Perhaps it is the advertisers that need to be persuaded.