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Trevor Burns Commentary October 2, 2015

America Is Not Japan, and ‘Common Sense’ Won’t End Mass Shootings

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Except:

Mass shootings should not be the centerpiece of gun-control policy. Mass shooters are motivated, difficult to detect, and commit only a tiny fraction of gun violence in America. Pretending that stopping these psychopaths is a matter of passing “commonsense” laws is just moral grandstanding for cheap political points. If all that is keeping us from being mass-shooter-free is failure to heed the suggestions of Obama and other champions of “common sense,” then I invite them to try — and then to take personal responsibility for every one that they miss.

Passing effective gun-control policies in a nation brimming with 300 million guns is difficult; don’t believe anyone who tells you otherwise. Have we come to accept that a certain amount of gun violence in our country is inevitable? The hard truth is that we have, just as we accept that deaths by automobile accidents, drowning in swimming pools, and industrial accidents are inevitable. This doesn’t mean that there is nothing we can or should do, but the first thing that we must do is to stop pretending that ending mass shootings is merely a matter of “common sense.”

 

Why Open Borders?

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by Jared Grifoni

as posted on Facebook by Jared Grifoni

After the attacks of 9/11/01, Americans stood united with one another based on the principles contained within our Declaration of Independence and Constitution. The right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness of our fellow Americans was of primary concern. When the towers collapsed, Americans were not thinking about the race, gender, sexual orientation, political party, or socio-economic status of those impacted by what we were witnessing. Seeing our fellow Americans race for their lives out of those towers, some completely covered in dust, helping or carrying the coworkers, friends, family, or strangers out of danger, it is difficult today to remember without feeling the same pain we all felt on that day, 14 years ago.

Dust, dirt, debris, and worse. That was the skin color of the people that heroes helped that day.

Finding a loved one. It didn’t matter the gender just that we all couldn’t even imagine how horrible the feeling would be to not be able to locate the person we loved that day. We wanted them all to find their way homes.

American. That was the only political party that mattered.

Values. Liberty was the way of life we wanted to protect.

Checking up on friends and neighbors, talking with strangers in our communities, taking care of those who needed help – in the aftermath of the attacks we were shown the bonds with our fellow man that has made our country great. A simple, yet genuine concern for each other with a “How are you doing?” shared between two strangers… sometimes a devastating tragedy can be the catalyst that shakes us awake to what really matters.

9/11/01 didn’t just bring together Americans who were horrified at the vicious, unconscionable murder of innocents that day. It brought sympathy, partnership, and friendship from many corners of the globe from our allies but it even thawed some old Cold War and Middle Eastern rivalries.

All of those things, maybe we didn’t realize it then but could it all be any more blatantly obvious now as we look back on that day?

9/11/01 brought us together, true, but in many ways as the days, months, and years passed it became a tragedy utilized to split some of us apart. I remember how over time my shock, sadness, and empathy slowly morphed into anger, fear, confusion, and retribution. Liberty turned into security. Our Bill of Rights went from being what elevated America above other nations in the world to what many of us perceived as a weakness that allowed the attacks to occur.

It took years for me to realize that what I loved about America and Americans on 9/11 was being sacrificed and lost to the policies, foreign and domestic, and the emotions, fear and security, which I believed were the only way in a post-9/11 world.

While we are lucky that our nation has not had to deal with another attack on our soil as devastating in scope as what happened that day, our nation has had to deal with the lasting impact of the debate over foreign entanglements, inalienable rights, the Fourth Amendment, indefinite detention, torture, the balance between liberty and security, and respect for our fellow man and the choices they make in their private lives.

Let us remember those who died on 9/11/01. Let us remember the goodness of our fellow Americans we experienced in the days after 9/11/01. Let us never forget: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Gene Healy, Vice-President of the Cato Institute, comments on the militaristic tendency of various presidential candidates here.

Excepts:

“I’m the most militaristic person there is,” Donald Trump boldy bragged upon his return to Fox News Tuesday morning, after the clown-car wreck of last week’s Republican primary debate.

….

But “most militaristic?” Even for the Donald, this is a boast that goes a bit too far. In the 2016 election cycle, the “serious and responsible” candidates for the presidency are so bellicose they make Trump look Cindy Sheehan. He can’t even compete with the current Democratic president or the most likely Democratic nominee.

 

 

Alex Nowrsteh in a Cato Liberty Blog, A Poor Defense of Bernie Sanders, rips Richard Eskrow’s defense of Bernie Sanders support for immigration controls.

Excerpt about immigration effects sovereignty:
The laws of economics limit the ability of governments to arbitrarily set price controls, too, so does that mean the United States is not a sovereign country? Will we not be a “sovereign people” until we declare our independence from scarcity, gravity, mortality, psychology, and all of the other inconvenient limitations on human behavior?

Thanks to Tim O’Brien for posting on Facebook
source

Steven Horwitz explains Why the Candidates Keep Giving Us Reasons to Use the “F” Word

Excerpt:

So what does this have to do with Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump?

I would argue that they are both “nationalist socialists.” That is, they both embody key elements of fascism. They both think the nation comes first, and they both think the United States is an organization (not a spontaneous order) that should be under someone’s control.

The difference is that Sanders sees both the problems and the solutions from the workers’ perspective, so he’s focusing on both the exploitation by capitalists and keeping immigrants out to protect the wages of US workers. The losses to US workers matter more than the large gains to foreign-born workers coming here.

Trump sees all of this from the CEO/owner/capitalist perspective. He thinks the United States is, or should be, like a big firm where we all work together for a common goal. He envisions himself as the CEO, negotiating deals with other countries as if they, too, were just big corporate firms. But nations are not firms — they are spontaneous orders.

A recent article in the Huffington Post reminds me that the practice of majority rule by the Supreme Court is flawed. If 9 trained lawyers cannot agree on the constitutionality of a law than either the law or the constitution is ambiguous, and at least one or both should be amended before legislation becomes enforceable law.

We would have more respect for both the law and the Supreme Court if unanimous decisions were required, just like criminal juries.

 

Philosophy professor Jason Brennan provides a summary on the usefulness of various branches of philosophy in a short essay.

Excerpt:
This is all in good fun. Don’t take it too seriously.

We don’t need metaphysics. If we want to know what the fundamental nature of reality is like, we’ll ask the physicists.  read more

Jeffery Tucker reminded us of  the the final part of F.A. Hayek’s Nobel speech in 1974:

If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order, he will have to learn that in this, as in all other fields where essential complexity of an organized kind prevails, he cannot acquire the full knowledge which would make mastery of the events possible.

He will therefore have to use what knowledge he can achieve, not to shape the results as the craftsman shapes his handiwork, but rather to cultivate a growth by providing the appropriate environment, in the manner in which the gardener does this for his plants.

There is danger in the exuberant feeling of ever growing power which the advance of the physical sciences has engendered and which tempts man to try, “dizzy with success”, to use a characteristic phrase of early communism, to subject not only our natural but also our human environment to the control of a human will.

The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men’s fatal striving to control society — a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals.