Bookworm Room

Conservatives deal with facts and reach conclusions; liberals have conclusions and sell them as facts.

A history professor wrongly claims the Founding Fathers loved gun control

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A Fordham professor folds, spindles, and mutilates colonial-era history to claim that the Founding Fathers supported stringent gun control laws.

Founding Fathers Gun Control Government Class Signing Declaration of IndependenceOne of my Facebook friends was delighted to come across an article from an American History professor at Fordham trumpeting that the Founding Fathers loved gun control, and interpreted the Second Amendment to mean that gun ownership should be subject to draconian government restrictions. According to Saul Cornell, the Founders:

  • Required weapons registration
  • Prohibited public carry
  • Limited stand-your-ground laws to the home
  • Mandated safe storage
  • Required loyalty oaths to protect weapons

As Cornell sums up his own conclusions, heavy-duty gun regulation was the name of the game for the Founders:

The framers and adopters of the Second Amendment were generally ardent supporters of the idea of well-regulated liberty. Without strong governments and effective laws, they believed, liberty inevitably degenerated into licentiousness and eventually anarchy. Diligent students of history, particularly Roman history, the Federalists who wrote the Constitution realized that tyranny more often resulted from anarchy, not strong government.

I have been researching and writing about the history of gun regulation and the Second Amendment for the past two decades. When I began this research, most people assumed that regulation was a relatively recent phenomenon, something associated with the rise of big government in the modern era. Actually, while the founding generation certainly esteemed the idea of an armed population, they were also ardent supporters of gun regulations.

This sounded wrong to me, since I’ve read verified quotations from the Founders that see individual arms’ possession as an important bulwark against tyranny. If you give the nascent tyrant preemptive control over arms, you’ve vitiated that principle — and encouraged the road to tyranny.

Still, I haven’t done any in-depths studies about the Revolutionary Period so I could be wrong. I therefore turned to my friend and fellow blogger, who knows more about the Revolutionary Period than any person I’ve ever met. For Professor Cornell, as for most academics, Revolutionary history is a job. For Wolf Howling, it’s an overriding passion. I’d trust him on the subject before I’d trust anyone else. Here’s what he wrote me when I put Cornell’s article before him: [Read more…]

Democrats and Illegal Aliens versus the NRA and the Second Amendment

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There’s a disconnect between Democrats’ approach to deadly illegal aliens and their approach to the NRA and guns, especially the AR-15.

Democrats AR-15 NRA Illegal Aliens Guns
(To enlarge, click on image and then, in new screen, click on image again.)

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What Business Thinks

It’s time to check out What Business Thinks once again *UPDATED*

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Because attacks on the NRA are a dynamic issue, I’m sticking this post at the top of my blog so people can easily find both What Business Thinks and the Google Sheets page. Scroll down for newer posts.

With businesses starting to boycott the NRA, it’s time for you to check the What Business Thinks app so you spend your money where your values are.

What Business ThinksLast year, I introduced What Business Thinks, a database I created that has information about over 5,000 businesses and their stances on various hot topic issues, everything from pure politics, to guns, to LGBT stuff, to climate change, and more. With the Left escalating its insane attacks against the NRA, I’ve spent the morning updating the app with companies that are refusing to do business with the NRA (First National Bank of Omaha) or that are cutting out benefits once extended to NRA members (Hertz and Enterprise). It therefore think it’s time for people to bookmark the website on their computers or smart phones so that they can make sure they’re doing business with companies that don’t hate them and everything they stand for.

As I said last year when I started collecting information for the database, we’re living in a unique time. It used to be that customers might boycott a business. Now, we have businesses boycotting customers. Isn’t it time you know whether a business hates you and your values before you spend your money there? [Read more…]

Bookworm Beat 2/22/18 — our Second Amendment illustrated edition

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After the school shooting ends, the insanity goes on with uninformed, mean attacks on the Second Amendment. Trump is smart, tho’, and so are these posters.

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The peculiar case of David Hogg exposes media incompetence *UPDATED*

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Is David Hogg, the post-Florida shooting media darling, the real deal or a Leftist plant? The New York Times provides no facts to help answer that question.

David HoggIt was inevitable that, after the school shooting in Florida, Progressives would demand that Americans surrender their Second Amendment rights. Their campaign this time has a new twist. Rather than merely using frightened and grieving parents, Progressives in the media decided to turn the political attack into something John Hinderaker has aptly called a “children’s crusade.” This children’s crusade has included endless visuals of hysterical teenagers at the Florida Statehouse — which, to its credit, resisted the hysteria and refused to enter into gun grabbing mode. The students have also been engaging in interviews with drive-by media outlets and, with help from the hard-Left, antisemitic, anti-white Women’s March crew, organizing mass marches and school walkouts.

The Progressives, both the professionals in media and politics, and the useful idiots who routinely hew Left in social media, have bestowed upon these students the same “absolute moral authority” they granted grieving Mom and anti-war fanatic Cindy Sheehan — that is, they gave her that authority right until Obama was in the White House, at which time she ceased to be useful to them. They seem blind to the irony that they are imputing wisdom to the same people they claim are so helpless they must remain on their parents’ healthcare until they are 26. They are telling us we have to let the same people who eat Tide Pods dictate America’s constitutional policy. Of course, these are also the same people who insist that girls as young as 12 get the Pill and abortions without parental consent, but that tanning and ear-piercing must have a parent’s signature. We don’t look for logic with the Left.

Given the way the Left weaponized teenagers after the Florida shooting, it’s scarcely surprising to see that pro-Second Amendment Americans are striking back by taking a long, hard look at these same teenagers. The conservative side of my Facebook feed is a phenomenal resource for this push-back. One of the major forms of push-back bubbling up questions the bona fides of these students, especially the most prominent among them, a kid named David Hogg.

Please note that I do not vouch for the veracity of any of the material below. It could be true. It could be Photoshopped and I’d have no way of knowing. It could be pure tin foil conspiracy stuff. It could have a grain of truth wrapped in gauzy fantasy. I have no idea. I just want you to see what’s out there so that you will understand how dismally incompetent the New York Times was when it decided to challenge the theories set out below. [Read more…]

Bookworm Beat 2/19/18 — thinking about the Second Amendment

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It’s all here: Making Proggies admit they want to repeal the Second Amendment, revealing their simplistic thinking, and questioning transgender treatment.

Second AmendmentFacing the silly Proggies on Facebook. I always avoid my real-me Facebook page in the days after a much-publicized shooting (the media is drawn to shootings involving white kids in the suburbs as opposed to black kids in the ghettos), because I simply can’t stand the hate, ignorance, and hysteria. Occasionally, though, I try to introduce a little rationality into their discussions.

For example, when my Proggie friends simultaneously demand gun control while pointing to a story about how some enterprising reporter bought a gun illegally, I ask them if they have a better idea than gun control. It’s at that point that they say the Second Amendment isn’t an individual right, something I shut down by pointing to the Heller decision. That usually ends with nasty remarks about Justice Scalia.

A lot of my gun-control Proggies post memes about the wonders of restricted gun ownership in other countries, with those posts always ending with some line about gun ownership being a privilege, not a right. If I still feel like engaging, I’ll remind them that, in the U.S., the Second Amendment means that gun ownership is a right, not a privilege. They hate that point.

And so, inevitably, we get to where my Proggie friends really want to go: Full repeal of the Second Amendment, followed by confiscating all guns in private hands.

If I still have patience, and depending on how friendly I’m feeling, once they honestly admit their goal, I’ll point out a few things: (a) Considering how they hate Trump, do they really want Trump to have all the guns? (b) Considering how they think police are racist killers, do they really want police to have all the guns? (c) And if they’re really hardcore Lefties, as opposed to useful idiot Proggies, considering how they think soldiers are baby killers, do they really want soldiers to have all the guns?

To one man, a Jewish man, I said that, since he was obviously not evil, I was surprised that he wanted to reduce Jews to the same position they were in when they faced genocidal Nazis, all armed with guns, between 1933-1945. He responded by snarking at me that he thanked God he wasn’t a Canadian blindly loyal to the Second Amendment. I told him that I thanked God too that he was a Canadian and wouldn’t be voting in any American elections. Canadians, I said, are to sheep-like, remaining convinced, all evidence to the contrary, that government is always good and will always protect them.

I don’t persuade anybody, but I do hope I cause people to think, at least a little bit. Thinking, as opposed to mindlessly repeating, can be the first stop on the road to abandoning bad or stupid ideas. At the very least, I want Proggies to be honest about the fact that they don’t believe in gun control and don’t really want it. They want to do away with guns entirely by repealing the Second Amendment without doing the hard work of actually repealing it. As Charles C.W. Cooke essentially said, bring it on.

A further thought about super valuable children. My post yesterday posited that we live in a unique historical time that sees middle-class white children as more than usually precious to their parents. No matter how loving parents were in the past, that was always tempered by a fatalism that said that some children will die (not may die) before their parents. It’s no coincidence that, for hundreds of years, American children said as their bedtime prayer, “Now I lay me down to sleep; I pray the Lord my soul to keep; and if I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” That is not an optimist’s prayer.

My brother-in-law pointed out, though, that the killers may not be thinking about hurting the parents. They just want to hurt the other children. There’s a sort of fierce emotional socialism behind that thinking that also relates to hyper-precious American children.

These maladjusted killers, who either come from unloving homes or are too emotionally damaged to feel loved, want their peers to suffer as they do. “I’m not loved and I’m not going to let you be loved.” It is, as Churchill said of socialism, the equal sharing of misery. In past times, when there was more emotional distance between parents and children (even loving parents and loved children), the chasm between damaged children and their peers might not have been so large and obvious to those damaged children. [Read more…]

Our children are attractive targets because they don’t ordinarily die

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Today’s middle-class parents have a unique cohort of obsessively loved children. No wonder they’re attractive targets to young men intent on inflicting pain.

Children on dangerous playground equipment 1920-1940In America, we are experiencing something unique: For the first time in history, the clear majority of children die after their parents, not before. Before the modern era, half of all children died before they turned 5. That’s why Jane Austen’s parents, who could afford to do so, farmed all their children out to a wet-nurse until the children were three. Not only did this process get the parents past the midnight feedings and dirty diapers in an age before indoor plumbing, it also prevented the parents from bonding with children who were likely to die.

Even if children survived to five, life for everyone in the pre-modern era was so Hobbesian that there was still no guarantee that parents would predecease their children. A young woman’s mother might have survived childbirth, but there was no saying that the young woman would. People died young constantly, from viruses, infectious diseases, infections, food poisoning, internal maladies, and accidents. Death was always “Just around the corner.”

Nor is this what I’ve described long-dead history. I’m only middle-aged, but my parents still came from the generation in which you stayed home if you had a cold, because a cold was never just a cold. It was a doorway to pneumonia, pleurisy, and all sorts of other nasty diseases. My father had scarlet fever and measles, and my mother had diphtheria and tuberculosis. A family friend dragged his legs behind him from polio.

Daddy was born within just three decades of the “Golden Age of Germ Theory.” He and Mom were the first generation of children that routinely got pasteurized milk (although given the Weimar-era Berlin slum into which my Dad was born, while he may technically have been of that generation, he probably wasn’t one pasteurization’s beneficiaries). My parents were children when Fleming made his accidental breakthrough with penicillin. They were adults before antibiotics became a part of every doctor’s arsenal.

If antibiotics had existed during WWI, Rupert Brooke might have lived long enough to walk away from his youthful Victorian romance with chivalric war and have become a more jaded poet, a la Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon. As it was, he died early in the war, not from a bullet, but from an infected mosquito bite he got during the Gallipoli campaign. Something we would treat with a smear of Neosporin and a clean Band-Aid killed him.

One of my friends, a man in his early 60s, boasts of being one of the first people in America to survive a ruptured appendix. It’s true that operations had become common in the first half of the 20th century, before he was born, thanks both to the Golden Age of Germ Theory and the development of anesthetics. However, without antibiotics, once someone’s appendix ruptured, spreading infection throughout the abdominal area, no surgeon could stop death. Only antibiotic’s advent changed that, allowing my friend to live.

It wasn’t until 1955, just six years before I was born, that the First World wiped out polio. Before Jonas Salk’s vaccine, polio was a scourge that routinely savaged children. As I noted above, I still knew one of the survivors. Because my children have not been to Africa, they’ve never seen someone showing polio’s effects.

It’s therefore only since 1955 that the norm in America is for children to survive their parents. We bury them; they don’t bury us. [Read more…]

The shooting in Florida — open thread

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The horror in Florida hasn’t shattered my faith in the Second Amendment. Let me explain why — and please join in the discussion.

Florida High School shootingI came home from a scintillating talk by Evan Sayet (which I’ll write about later) to find awaiting me the news that there was a shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida — and, of course, the Lefties are calling for gun control, along with their usual claim that America is aberrant when it comes to violent. A few points and then I’ll turn the floor over to all of you.

1. My thoughts are with the victims and their families, which is where all our thoughts should be. I can’t even begin to imagine — I never can begin to imagine when terrorists shoot up masses of people — what the terror of being there must have been like.

2. Contrary to the usual Leftist babble, mass murders in schools are not limited to the here and now in America. For more than 100 years, they’ve happened all over the world, with all kinds of weapons, for myriad reasons (Beslan, anyone?).

3. The Leftists are resurrecting their claim that there were 11 school shootings in January alone. This claim is a lie if one believes, as I do and as the Leftists know most people do, that the phrase “school shooting” has a distinct meaning. That distinct meaning refers to a situation in which a crazy person walks onto a campus during school hours, intent upon murdering as many schools as possible. The numbers the Leftists actually use, though, related to any type of shooting that happens anywhere near a school, but that is, in fact, irrespective of the school. (Reddit has a good thread on the NYT’s January lie.)

4. Unlike Japan or European countries before 2015, America is not a small, ancient, homogeneous nation in which everybody shares the same values. It is a roiling, boiling, dynamic nation with a constant ebb and flow of the population, both legal and illegal, reflecting hundreds of cultures. That’s going to mean more violence. That’s just a fact.  It’s also going to mean more wonderful things in terms of innovation and energy. As European nations stock up on their Muslim and African populations, they’re going to find that, as their homogeneity vanishes, they are going to have a lot more violence too. It’s questionable whether innovation or energy will come their way as well. Japan has made a conscious decision to keep its culture and population homogeneous, even as its population diminishes past the point of return.

5. Schools are ideal targets: A vulnerable, disarmed population for easy killing, followed by a phalanx of media talking heads for post-shooting infamy. It’s the ultimate power trip for the sick and the evil. [Read more…]

Bookworm Beat 1/28/18 — the brilliant Trump Jay-Z beatdown edition

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From Trump’s epic response to Jay-Z, to Dennis Prager’s surprise admission, to Daniel Greenfield’s Leftist exposé, and more — there’s lots of brilliance here.

Jay-Z foolishly engages TrumpTrump’s genius approach to Jay-Z’s “superbug” attack. I am getting wise to the ways of Trump. That’s why I know that the war into which he’s entered with Jay-Z is one of his more brilliant moments. I’m sure, without looking, that some “higher minded” #NeverTrumpers are horrified that, after Jay-Z insulted him, Trump decided to go on the attack. I, on the other hand, am delighted. Let me go back to the beginning to explain why.

First, you might want to know who Jay-Z is. He’s a rapper, he’s black, he’s married to super star Beyoncé, and he’s sold more than 100 million records. He’s big. Really, really big. His demographic, as a rapper, is young people, especially black young people. Jay-Z’s real name is Shawn Corey Carter, so his twitter handle is Mr. Carter (@S_C). He has 3.34 million followers, at least some of whom are not bots.

Jay-Z was a guest on Van Jones’s new CNN show. Van Jones is a self-admitted black communist who got a gig in the Obama administration. When that ended, he found his natural home at CNN. When Van Jones contended that Trump called “every African country” a “shithole” (something Trump and others at the meeting strongly contest), and then asked his guest Jay-Z to comment, Jay-Z had this to say:

You don’t take the trash out, you keep spraying whatever over it to make it acceptable. As those things grow, you create a superbug. And then now we have Donald Trump, the superbug.

George W. Bush would have ignored that insult in dignified silence. Trump is smarter than George W. Bush. He sent out this tweet:

The only thing that would have made that tweet better is if Trump had included Jay-Z’s twitter  name it to ensure that the tweet hit Jay-Z’s feed. But maybe that would have been too obvious.

As it is, though, one can make a reasonable guess that some part of Jay-Z’s 3.3 million Twitter followers are being exposed for the first time to data that the MSM hoped would never enter their worlds. Moreover, the media, because it’s as incapable of resisting Trump’s tasty treats as a mouse is incapable of resisting cheese in a snap trap, is now headlining black unemployment:

CNN headlines black unemplolyment

Dig down into that article, and you will discover that, despite the headline, CNN is scared to touch Trump’s data point . . . because it cannot. There’s no mention in the article of actual employment rates.

The reality, however, is that anyone with a smidgen of curiosity, especially those aching to prove Trump wrong, will search up “black unemployment,” and come with data like this:

Unemployment among black workers is at its lowest since at least the early 1970s, when the government began tracking the data.

The black unemployment rate of 6.8 percent in December was the lowest since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started tracking it in 1972, a year in which the rate ranged from 11.2 percent to 9.4 percent. In the 45 years the data has been tracked, the unemployment rate for black or African-American workers aged 16 years and older has never fallen below 7 percent.

Trump is rapidly proving himself to be the smartest president in my lifetime, perhaps in the last 100 years, perhaps ever. Thanks to Van Jones (communist) and Jay-Z (shallow thinker), with one tweet Trump brought to an otherwise misinformed public accurate data about something that’s very important. Bravo, Mr. President! Bravo! [Read more…]

The Bookworm Beat 12/15/17 — the humongous net neutrality edition

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The Left’s hysterics over net neutrality reveal an ideology in the midst of a mental breakdown — which is disturbing, but still good for political humor.

Net neutrality free speech

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A cursory look at some of the day’s most interesting news

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Every day lately brings some interesting news. This post sums up a few of the top stories, along with my opinions about why they matter.

Woman reading interesting newsI’m watching, fascinated, as events unfold in Saudi Arabia. I suspect Trump has a hand in it and I certainly hope the Crown Prince’s modernization push goes well. If it doesn’t, much badness will follow. I wish I had more to offer, but absent more concrete information about arrests, exiles, helicopter crashes, and alleged Lebanese war declarations, I’m in wait-and-see mode.

I haven’t missed the fact that the killer in Texas got his gun because the government — in the form of the Air Force — failed to put his felony conviction into the gun registry databases. The problem with gun control, of course, is that it not only leaves most of the guns with the government, it also puts government in charge of the guns remaining in citizen hands. As best as I can tell, government see-saws between over-zealous and completely incompetent.

The other thing I haven’t missed about the tragedy in Texas is that it was citizens who saved the day. An NRA instructor with an AR-15 attacked the killer, causing him to stop shooting. (I keep telling my Lefty friends that the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun . . . and that it can take a long time before the police show up with their guns.) Then, it was two citizens who chased the killer down, causing him to crash his car. At that point, that human detritus either died from a self-inflicted shot or from an AR-15 bullet. I don’t know and I don’t care.

Incidentally, the heroic citizens who saved the day are Stephen Willeford, the NRA instructor who stopped the madness, and Johnnie Langendorff, the man who gave chase (with Willeford in the car with him). I refuse to name the killer. He deserves to be disparaged anonymously and then forgotten entirely.

I continue to believe what I tell anyone who is willing to listen to my views about the Second Amendment: There is no such thing as perfect safety. When we avoid one danger, we tend to pitch o ourselves headlong into another. Combustion engines were hailed in the early 20th century as the answer to terrible (horse) pollution. Nobody envisioned lead and other toxic emissions. Modern football helmets, were seen as the ultimate head protection. Nobody predicted that (a) players would start to use their heads like battering rams and (b) modern players, instead of being wiry little guys, would be giants.

When it comes to guns, the invariably unimaginative Leftists see only that guns kill people. They don’t see that guns save people (as happened with Willeford’s appearance on the scene of what could have been a much more terrible outcome). They don’t see that government is a terribly inefficient engine to protect us from guns.

Most of all, they don’t see (or refuse to see) that the surest way to die on the wrong end of a gun is to leave all guns in government hands. Those who could bear witness to this fact are dead — they’re dead in every land, ghetto, and concentration camp that the Nazis controlled; they’re dead in every land that the Soviets controlled; they’re dead in every place that the Maoists governed; and they’re dead in Cuba, North Korea, vast swathes of Africa and Latin America, and in every place in which Islamofascists gain control.

If I have to accept — as we all must — that there is no such thing as perfect safety, I’d rather put my faith in my fellow Americans than in my government. And yes, only Progressives could be stupid enough to demand government control over guns at the same time that they’re still vociferously claiming that our government is in the hands of a madman. That cognitive dissonance alone shows just how bad their arguments are. (You can read more of my thoughts on the subject here.) [Read more…]

Trevor Noah misses an obvious point about gun control

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Trevor Noah, a black man from South Africa, fails to see the irony in his demand that Americans turn their arms over to the government.

Trevor Noah South Africa Apartheid Second Amendment Gun Control

This is what it looks like when only the government has guns.

As is the case with all Progressives who have a late night television perch, Trevor Noah, the black South African who took over Jon Stewart’s post at The Daily Show, has been open about his wish that the U.S. government should seize all guns in private hands. (By the way, you’ve surely noticed that none of these Progressives seem disturbed by the fact that they’re attempting to give Donald Trump, the man they love to hate, virtually unlimited control over an unarmed American populace. The lack of logic confounds me but — hey! — they’re Leftists, so why am I expecting logic anyway?)

Trevor Noah’s on-air remarks about guns are same-old, same-old, so I won’t rehash them here. When it comes to gun grabbing, the Left has nothing original to offer. What’s more interesting is what Noah said off camera:

In a between-the-scenes moment from “The Daily Show” posted online Thursday, Noah took on critics who have questioned whether the foreign-born comedian should be chiming in on gun control. “This is an American conversation,” conservative radio host Larry O’Connor told Fox Business in a clip Noah showed his audience.

“People go, ‘Why do you have an opinion about this?’ And I say, ‘I hear what you’re saying but ask yourself this question: Why did nobody say that when Americans were protesting for South Africans to get freedom during apartheid?’ No one asked that question.”

Noah makes a valid point. People of good will, when they see something wrong, tend to have opinions. But if Noah is going to compare modern America with apartheid South Africa, he’d do well to take that comparison one step further and, instead of asking us whether he’s allowed to have an opinion, ask himself a different question: “Would apartheid have existed in South Africa if that country had a Second Amendment?”

The only possible answer to that question is “No.” The white South African government was able to exert tyrannical control over black South Africans, who were a majority, because the latter had no recourse. They were disarmed and helpless before tyranny.

Before opining again about gun control, Trevor Noah would do well to read Kevin Williamson’s truly splendid discourse on the rights articulated in the Second Amendment, rights that live in all people without regard to “documentary proof”: [Read more…]

Bookworm Beat 10/6/17 — the Second Amendment illustrated edition

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The Second Amendment recognizes that evil exists by giving free people the best weapon to fight back. Sometimes, tho’, life is such that evil still wins.

Bookworm Beat logoNow that the Progressives have gotten into their groove attacking the Second Amendment, there is a lot of material defending the Second Amendment and exposing just how bad (and tyrannical) Progressive arguments are. I’ve also included a few other topical and just plain funny posters.

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Our Second Amendment Rights — guns save lives (book excerpt)

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When it comes to the Second Amendment, Leftists measure it by those who die from guns; constitutionalists measure it by those who survive thanks to guns.

Second Amendment GunsWith the Las Vegas massacre having reopened the endless Progressive attack against the Second Amendment, I remembered that there’s a book on the subject — my book to be precise: Our Second Amendment Rights In Ten Essays. In an attempt to inveigle you into buying it, here’s an excerpt from Essay 5: “Gun Grabbers Ignore That Guns Not Only Take Lives, They Save Lives” (end notes omitted).

5. Gun Grabbers Ignore That Guns Not Only Take Lives, They Save Lives

When it comes to guns, the gun grabbers suffer from a very bizarre limitation: Their mental horizons allow them to see only those who died because of guns, not to recognize those who did not die thanks to guns. This myopia creates the giant intellectual chasm that separates those who oppose the Second Amendment from those who support it. The former see only the people who died in the past while the latter also see the ones who will live on into the future.

Logically, we all know that people are going to die under any circumstances. Given that existential reality, the important question is not whether people will die because of guns. Instead, the important question is whether more people will live than will die thanks to guns. Leftists, however, cannot grasp that simple idea.

Perhaps it would help these gun-grabbing Leftists to read Frédéric Bastiat’s magnificent Parable of the Broken Window, which the French economist wrote in 1850. If the parable doesn’t seem relevant at first, please bear with me, and I will explain why it matters:

Have you ever witnessed the anger of the good shopkeeper, James Goodfellow, when his careless son has happened to break a pane of glass? If you have been present at such a scene, you will most assuredly bear witness to the fact that every one of the spectators, were there even thirty of them, by common consent apparently, offered the unfortunate owner this invariable consolation – “It is an ill wind that blows nobody good. Everybody must live, and what would become of the glaziers if panes of glass were never broken?”

Now, this form of condolence contains an entire theory, which it will be well to show up in this simple case, seeing that it is precisely the same as that which, unhappily, regulates the greater part of our economical institutions.

Suppose it cost six francs to repair the damage, and you say that the accident brings six francs to the glazier’s trade — that it encourages that trade to the amount of six francs — I grant it; I have not a word to say against it; you reason justly. The glazier comes, performs his task, receives his six francs, rubs his hands, and, in his heart, blesses the careless child. All this is that which is seen.

But if, on the other hand, you come to the conclusion, as is too often the case, that it is a good thing to break windows, that it causes money to circulate, and that the encouragement of industry in general will be the result of it, you will oblige me to call out, “Stop there! Your theory is confined to that which is seen; it takes no account of that which is not seen.”

It is not seen that as our shopkeeper has spent six francs upon one thing, he cannot spend them upon another. It is not seen that if he had not had a window to replace, he would, perhaps, have replaced his old shoes, or added another book to his library. In short, he would have employed his six francs in some way, which this accident has prevented. (Emphasis mine.)

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Bookworm Beat 10/4/17 — the Second Amendment edition

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While not all of the links in this post discuss the Second Amendment, most do. There’s other stuff too, about health care, the economy, etc. It’s all good.

Second Amendment GunsA great book about the Second Amendment. This post focuses heavily on the Second Amendment because, once again, Progressives are using an evil act to justify depriving Americans of a singularly important Constitutional right. I’m therefore opening by shilling my own little book on the subject: Our Second Amendment Rights In Ten Essays. The ten essays are

  1. A Typical Discussion With Gun Grabbers; Or, What Second Amendment Supporters Are Up Against
  2. Guns Are Most Dangerous When The Government Is The Only One That Has Them
  3. America’s Founding Fathers Ratified The Second Amendment Because They Knew That Government Is Dangerous
  4. A Self-Defended Society Is A Safe Society
  5. Gun Grabbers Ignore That Guns Not Only Take Lives, They Save Lives
  6. Beware Of Arguments Comparing American Gun Crime To That In Other Nations; These Arguments Are Always Dishonest
  7. The Only Way Gun-Control Activists Can Support Their Position Is To Lie
  8. Disarming Americans Is A Racist Thing To Do; Therefore, Second Amendment Supporters Are Anti-Racists
  9. Jews, Of All People, Should Always Support The Second Amendment
  10. If We Really Want To Protect Our Children, We Shouldn’t Ban Guns, We Should Ban School Buses

Those who took the time to review the book were good enough to say nice things:

“An exceptional set of essays addressing with the common progressive attacks on our Second Amendment right, as well as the historical origins of the right and its tremendous importance to our “free state.” In light of the stated intent of certain of our politicians to overturn the Heller decision and make a nullity of the Second Amendment, I would recommend that you read these essays closely.”

“A quick read, but packed with commonsense tracing the history & variously failed implementations of gun control in contravention of our Constitution.”

“Read it, live it, breathe it … for freedom. History shows time and time again that only despots want to disarm citizens. The result? Learn from history.”

“An excellent and incisive book written by one who has a firm grasp of both the subject and the issues at stake.”

“Well written, understandable, and timely. Excellent information.”

“Read this. Your freedom is a risk.”

“Well written and quite thoughtful.”

At the risk of sounding immodest, as the Progressives’ increase their strident demands that we turn all of our weapons over to Donald Trump (yes, that’s effectively what they’re demanding), this book has some useful ways of thinking about guns and a civil society that may help you rebut the insanity.

Nothing like a little data to reveal the stupidity behind gun control. If you haven’t already heard about and read Leah Libresco’s anti-gun control opinion piece at the WaPo, you must. It’s an honest acknowledgement that everything that the gun control crowd argues is wrong — and it comes from one who once supported those arguments until her data studies revealed they had no basis in reality:

Before I started researching gun deaths, gun-control policy used to frustrate me. I wished the National Rifle Association would stop blocking common-sense gun-control reforms such as banning assault weapons, restricting silencers, shrinking magazine sizes and all the other measures that could make guns less deadly.

Then, my colleagues and I at FiveThirtyEight spent three months analyzing all 33,000 lives ended by guns each year in the United States, and I wound up frustrated in a whole new way. We looked at what interventions might have saved those people, and the case for the policies I’d lobbied for crumbled when I examined the evidence. The best ideas left standing were narrowly tailored interventions to protect subtypes of potential victims, not broad attempts to limit the lethality of guns. (Emphasis mine.)

Read the whole thing — and then politely, ingenuously wave it under the noses of your anti-gun friends and colleagues. [Read more…]