Wednesday, March 11, 1925. Private manufacture of arms.

The League of Nations abandoned proposals to limit the private manufacture of arms in advance of a conferences on arms trafficking  The thought was the United States would oppose such actions, which is interesting in that this is the first instance of such a proposal of which I'm aware.  

Gun control itself had gained support, somewhat, after World War One.  It did exist to some extent before, but after the war it really started to advance, in no small part due to social concerns, rather than criminal ones.  It came into the UK for the first time, for example, as the British upper class feared that the lower class had been radicalized.

Last edition:

Monday, March 9, 1925. Try this in your happy home.

Labels: 1920s, 1925, Adolf Hitler, Bavaria, Cartoons, German Weimar Republic

Obfuscation watch. Tweaking the English language so what you say isn't quite true.

I've been meaning to start a thread like this for some time, but given recent events, massive obfuscation is really in evidence in debates and news.

Indeed, here's one area where the news media does the public a genuine disservice. Right wing critics of the press complain that it's biased, and in terms of the language they adopt, which tends to come right from liberal speak, they have a point.

This will be one of those trailing threads, so it will no doubt grow over time.

This is not, I'll note, intended to have a right/left theme to it.  It's just noting what ought to be noted. The older terms here, which people grew uncomfortable with, were honest ones.  The newer ones are intended to cloud the issue.

June 27, 2022

Some in the news or recently in the news starters.

Reproductive Rights:  This just means abortion.  When the press or an advocate speaks of "women's reproductive rights", what they mean is a woman having the legal option to kill her fetus. That's all they mean.

This has, we'd note, replaced being "Choice" as the word of the hour, that meaning the same thing.

The term "abortion" has never gone away, and based on the last week's news, people on both sides know what these issues mean in this sense, so the use of the less clear term is really pointless.

Gun Safety:  This means gun control, and nothing else.  The word was changed as gun control is widely unpopular, but everyone is keen on safety.

Whether a person is for gun control or not, just say it. There's no reason to suggest that anyone is really lead to some other point when discussing the issue by calling it "gun safety".

Undocumented Immigrant:  This means illegal alien.  The term illegal alien was used for decades, but that points out the fact that immigration without approval of the receiving nation is illegal, which those who are basically in favor of an open border, or uncomfortable with enforcing the nation's immigration laws, don't like to point out.  Being "undocumented" suggest that you just have to get some papers in order, which is incorrect.

Constitutional lawyer:  This seems to come up in describing lawyers with boutique practices, law professors who want to comment on the Constitution, or news people with law degrees.

There's no such thing as a "Constitutional lawyer".  All lawyers make use of the Constituion, and frankly lawyers who practice criminal law do so the most.

Two Neighbors: 'Gun nut' has a warning in the U.S., Trudeau breaks out the soy milk in Canada.

A disclaimer right off the bat.  This is not a "pro gun control" post here on Lex Anteinternet.  

If you read it all the way through, that'll be plain.

This is an op ed from the Star Tribune.  It probably frankly will get this guy a lot of hate mail.  But it's worth reading.

Sexton: 'Gun nut' has a warning

This past week I ran an item noting that the Biden Administration has indicated it's going to try to implement some gun control measures.  I'm sure it will, but I also doubt that they'll come into effect.  If they do, they'll be a lot of howling and screaming, but one of the parties that will really deserve the blame for this, the National Rifle Association, will be one of the ones howling the most.  Sexton nails the reason why.

Advertisement for a semi automatic Remington rifle from prior to World War Two.

Sexton is really bold in spelling something out that's going to have to be addressed:

By my twenties I had a sizable collection of rifles, pistols and shotguns. Some people I knew had a “pre-64” Winchester, a rifle renowned for its quality. Or they had a Browning Auto 5, a beautiful shotgun. A friend had ten of those in various gauges.

But gun nuts today are a different breed entirely. When they talk about guns they don’t get into describing graceful lines, tight grain wood or immaculate bluing. At gun stores today what I hear praised is firepower that comes out of black plastic and steel. And these weapons are not for hunting, they’re assault rifles sometimes called “modern sporting guns.” The kind of sport they’re good for is not spelled out.

I can indicate what sort of sport they're good for.  For one thing, rifles of the AR type are now necessary for those who shoot service rifle competition.  The M14 type rifle was necessary for that before.  At some point the ODCMP changed the rules, and they really had to, to require the AR type rifle to be used as it was embarrassing to have the M14 kicking the butt of the rifle that replaced it, the M16, and the justification for the service rifle competition, which is a serious discipline, is to promote military style marksmanship in the civilian population, so that it's useful in time of war.

They're also a plinker, frankly, and they're useful for that.  I.e., they're easy to shoot and they have low recoil so they're something that a person can spend hours at a range, or wherever, shooting and never really feel like they beat you up.  And that's legitimate.  Where they are of very low utility is in the game fields (which will be discussed below) as the 5.56 isn't a really great hunting cartridge and in my view shouldn't really be an approved big game cartridge and, moreover, the AR is actually a pretty lousy firearms design.  Just the other day I discussed the Army's long running effort to dump both the cartridge and the AR.  It's frankly pretty junky, in spite of its present civilian reputation.*

Before a person goes to far on this, such competitions aren't unique to the United States.  Switzerland, for example, has an equivalent. So does Norway.  It is a sport, and a fully legitimate one.

But here's the problem.

Something has happened, and the NRA participated in spades, in which this sort of use was no longer focused on, and hunting use was no longer focused on, but it became the full-scale campaign based on fear and frankly an unreasonable fear. The thesis was that everyone lived in a state of constant unyielding peril where a gun battle was about to break out any moment.  And over time that developed into an undercurrent that suggested that it wasn't just a gun battle, but basically the Battle of Stalingrad that was about to break out.

Free Syrian Army soldiers in Syria.  To read the pages of the American Rifle man and other firearms stuff now days, you'd think this is what daily life in Parker Colorado is like.

Now, let me be perfectly clear.  I support the right to keep and bear arms and my view of that right and ownership of firearms to protect yourself is pretty supportive of it.  I still think what Jeffrey Snyder stated in A Nation Of Cowards is right on the money.  I also think that John R. Lott proved  his point with More Guns Less Crime.  I do believe that there are people who need to carry a handgun to protect themselves, and moreover, a person has to judge that for themselves, rather than have some governmental agency judge it for them.  And unlike Sexton, I don't question that there are reasons for civilians to own ARs of any type.  If I were a resident of Dayton or Detroit, I might very well want a military style rifle to defend myself in some circumstances.

None of that is the point.

What the point is, is the culture of the topic, and that's a developed one, and that's where Sexton has a point.

The NRA really became involved in opposing gun control with the Gun Control Act of 1968.  If you looked at the covers of its magazine, the American Rifleman, you'd rarely have realized that at the time, however, and mostly would have seen firearms that were used in hunting, or competitive shooting, or which were historical in nature featured.  You'd have had to read the journals editorial section to be aware of that, for the most part.  In the 1970s and 1980s its big writer was Finn Aagaard, a former professional hunter in Kenya and a dedicated hunting rifle expert.**  Rifles like Mauser 98s and Winchester Model 70s appeared.

Military arms or military type arms rarely appeared on the covers and when they did, they tended to be collector items.  In 1968, for example, a female marksman, dressed in a dress, a heavily engraved large revolver, and the firearms of George Washington made the cover.  In 1980, quite awhile later, hunting rifles and shotguns, and sporting pistols made the cover.  The only military cover, if you will, featured a pistol target shooter at Camp Perry, the big annual service arm competition.  The same was much the true in 1981, except that year a marksman at Camp Perry and revolvers from the Union Army in the Civil War made the cover, so there were two military themes, if you will.  In 1982 a combat type arm didn't make the cover at all.

The legendary rifle range at Camp Perry, Ohio, in 1913.

Indeed, I don't know when the AR15 type rifle first made the cover, but it may have been in May, 1985, when the Vietnam War Memorial was pictured.  I'm sure there was discussion of it as early as the 1960s, and I'm also pretty sure early on its noted stoppage problems were discussed in the journal.*** 

Anymore, while I wasn't able to pull it up to really determine the numbers, the AR is constantly on the cover. And so are politics.  Now politics have been on the cover at least as far back as the Reagan administration, as he was friendly to the NRA. But leading up to 2016, the NRA went full scale into the Trump campaign.  Indeed, back in the 70s and 80s, the NRA still acknowledged it when Democratic politicians were friendly to their positions, but starting with the Obama campaign, the organization unleashed unyielding vitriol no matter what positions were actually being taken.  With Trump it reached a state of near hagiography.

The evolution in its content was pretty significant over this time.  In the 60s, 70s, and 80s, you could expect to find their position on gun control in their magazine, but  it was clear that the readers of the magazine were mostly those who shot on ranges or in the game fields, and with arms of fairly conventional types.  Advertisements reflected that as well.  Now, however, article after article features the AR and its near fellows and a casual reader would assume that the magazine was geared towards those who expected to find themselves in combat in an American street.

Troops of the U.S. Army in Manilla, 1945.  The way that some gun magazines read today, you'd think that the readers expect to find themselves fighting here.

Coincident with this, and perhaps in part due to their earlier positions, American streets have become safer and safer.  Some large American cities such as New York could be regarded as credibly headed towards anarchy in the 1970s, but this simply is no longer true.  Murders in New York are at all time lows and almost all involve unique circumstances that the average person is pretty unlikely to get caught up in.  And the NRA can claim credit for being hugely successful at rolling back the tide on gun control, which needed to be rolled back.

But by embracing a vision of the world in which everyone is about to find themselves in combat its encouraged a view that's fed into an increasingly militarization of a section of the American populace.  This past summer we saw, here in our city, people packing military type weapons on the streets for several days ostensibly to "protect" store owners from rioters who didn't exist.  The only gathering that occurred at the time was one made up of young people and people who like gatherings during the George Floyd episode.  A person quietly taking a handgun to work or their store, or something like that, may have made sense.  Patrolling the streets as if its Hue, 1968, really didn't.

At the same time that this has occurred something really weird has happened in American culture concerning the worship of all things military.  Indeed, this is feeding back into the military itself, something we'll address some other time.

On this, however, I'd note that when I was growing up almost every male had been in the service.  All of my in town uncles had been and so had my father.  It was so common, you nearly assumed that every male had been, and indeed because of World War Two and the Korean War, this was nearly true.  The Vietnam War was on for my entire early youth, and that speaks for itself.  That war was huge by modern standards, although small in comparison to World War Two, requiring as many as 500,000 American servicemen to be stationed in the country at one time at its height.  And as earlier noted here, I served in the National Guard.

I note that as it simply wasn't really common for civilians to display any element of hero worship over servicemen at the time.  Nobody said "thank you for your service" and usually you didn't even mention it to anyone.  Indeed, in the wake of the Vietnam War, you really hesitated to, as there was an anti military feeling in the country in the 70s that went on for a long time in the 1980s, irrespective of a lot of Americans continuing to serve in the military.  

I don't know when it started, but I think it might be tacked back to the "Greatest Generation" tag that baby boomers started to use for their parents after they felt sufficiently guilty about kicking them around for decades.  The generation that fought the Second World War suffered enormously, given that they also had to content with the Great Depression, but the hagiography that's attached to them since the book of that name came out has really been over the top.  Frankly, neither the World War Two generation or the Baby Boomers deserve any special prizes for societal virtue, although once again, the generation that fought World War Two suffered uniquely.  The one that fought World War One suffered uniquely too, and the Civil War stands out by itself as something disasterous.  Anyhow, after Tom Brokaw decided to start praising his own parents generation, all of a sudden "thank you for your service" started showing up everywhere.

That spilled over into feeling pretty badly about having kicked Vietnam veterans around following their return from the war, although the extent to which that has been over portrayed is pretty significant. Be that as it may, it did occur and for some time popular entertainment depicted every Vietnam vet as a psychopathic nut.  That swung around in the 1980s when Reagan entered office and popular entertainment started depicting every Vietnam vet as an underappreciated hero.

Marines in Hue in 1968.  Goats one moment, heroes the next.

It was also Reagan who started the habit of giving service members a snappy salute, and he had of course been in the Army Reserve prior to World War Two (at a time when the Reserve was in fact very small) and in the Army during the war, although never in a combat role.  Some would and did belittle that, but I'm not going to as service of any kind is real service and, moreover, its more service than John Wayne had, who is commonly oddly regarded as some sort of military hero.

Ronald Reagan greeting Margaret Thatcher and wearing a G1 flight jacket.  Reagan typically saluted the Marine guards when he came on or off Marine One, and the same for servicemen when he came on or off Air Force One.  For some veterans of the day, including my father, it was incredibly irritating.  For that matter, the latter day change in service regulations that allows veterans, myself included, to salute for certain things is incredibly irritating to me, and I don't do it.  The recent habit of Presidents wearing service flight jackets also seems to go back to Reagan, who after all had been an actor and who knew a lot about presentation.

Anyhow, this all gets into the law of unintended consequences, but the Cold War ended in 1990 and the service started shrinking.  Fewer and fewer people served just as at the same time praise of servicemen grew louder and louder.  The wars that followed the Cold War were fought by volunteers and National Guardsmen, who are volunteers, and not by conscripts as had been the case for World War One, World War Two, Korea, and Vietnam.  And as that happened, the praise of servicemen turned into hero worship, and that has now turned into something else.  And that has fed into what Sexton has noted, and what has gone on in regard to firearms noted above.

Just as fewer and fewer American males had any sort of military service, forces in the culture kept telling them that they should be expected to fight at any moment.  Men who had never been issued a military rifle, who had never been made to memorize the Rifleman's Creed, or forced to march to the Jody Call of "This is my rifle, this is my gun", or who had never marched along chanting to the imaginary "Captain Jack" about meeting him with rifle in hand at the railroad tracks, or who had never been made to chant the lament "I used to date the high school queen, now I carry an M16" were told they absolutely need to have a M4 carbine to defend their house.  Indeed, by this point quite a few of those men are two generations removed from an era when military service was nearly universal.****

Indeed, by way of an example, during my long service in the National Guard I served with a large number of Vietnam veterans and, as this is Wyoming, lots of them were shooters or hunters.  I didn't know a single one who claimed to own an AR15 and they almost all detested the M16.  One experienced combat veteran I was friends with was a dedicated hunter, and he hunted with a full military M1903 Springfield rifle with iron sights, as that's what he'd hunted with as a kid.  A long ways from the pages of the American Rifleman which maintain that everyone needs to use the AR15 and its clones for everything.

Also by example, we were pretty careful in telling anyone we were Guardsmen at the time.  Nobody was going to thank us for our service and there was a better risk that some girl we might be trying to ask out would be turned off right away, or at least give us a lecture.  Nobody was going to walk around town with a "molon labe" t-shirt.  I don't even remember seeing unit shirts.  Some of us had artillerymen's t-shirts, as that's what we were, which means that nobody ran around pretending to be a sniper.  Indeed, the entire time I was a Guardsman I met an actual sniper once, in South Korea.  He didn't seem to be particularly impressed with himself as a sniper.^

Now that's all changed, and not for the better.

Some years ago I happened to be at a youth event in which a group was taking up space we needed.  I casually walked up to them to discover that they were a group of civilians that were getting yelled at by an instructor drill sergeant style.  These people, mostly male but including one woman, had paid this fellow to instruct them in the use of combat arms.  They apparently also expected, as part of that, to be yelled at as if their instructor was a DI.

Now, there is a shooting game that does just this, and its legitimate. But that's not what these people were doing.  They'd paid to be yelled at so that they could pretend in their minds they'd been trained like combat soldiers.  Training combat soldiers takes months, not a few hours, but that's what they were doing.  Why did they think they needed that?

Once again, I don't belittle training people how to use defensive handguns.  I'd rather people know how to do that if they're going to carry than not. And I don't belittle people who take part in competitions based on the combat use of firearms, the same which date back at least to the 1970s.  But training civilians to fight like soldiers as they imagine that they're going to need to fight like soldiers is odd.

But there are a lot of people who have been encouraged in that belief.

And that gets us back to where we are now.

On January 6 some of the people who had been encouraged in that belief stormed the Capital.  Prior to that, on November 4, some of the people who had been encouraged in that belief were elected to Congress.  No matter how many people have been encouraged in that belief, there's a lot more people who don't see things that way at all, and now they're really scared.^^

And they're going to react.

It's common for gun owners to point to Nazi Germany or Communist Russia as examples of the dangers of gun control.  I don't really know if the examples are valid, particularly that of Nazi Germany, as it was actually Weimar Germany that had brought gun control in, and that story is really complicated and tied to the Versailles Treaty.  It's probably true of Communist Russia following the Civil War.  A better example might be the Irish Republic, however.  

The Irish Republic came into existence through the use of firearms, which the British prior to World War Two really didn't restrict.  The Irish sure did following Irish independence, however.  Ireland had seen their use in civil combat and acted to pretty much completely control their ownership in order to stop anything like that happening again, Ireland's independence by that means notwithstanding. 

The NRA has been hugely successful in rolling back gun control  Coming out of World War Two and all the way into the 1970s, the majority of Americans supported an outright ban on the ownership of handguns.  If you'd asked me in 1981 what I thought would occur, I would have told you that the days of control of handgun ownership were right over the horizon.  And the NRA has been a factor in lawsuits and the support of judicial appointments that have done a lot to roll that frontier back.  Much of that was achieved before the Trump Administration, however, and in actuality at least as far back as the 2008 election Democrats had quietly dropped gun control as something they were really pushing.

That got them no credit and instead the NRA not only continued to lambast President Obama, who had done very little in this area, but it backed Donald Trump full scale. At the same time they went from an organization that publicly focused shooting sports very strongly to one that really emphasized the defense role of weapons in cities.  As this occurred, fewer and fewer Americans served in the military and more and more, mostly men, became fascinated with what they think the military is about, or at least imagined themselves as soldiers.  And then, from 2016 forward all of this was encouraged by a political atmosphere that portrayed party of the country as the enemy of the other, and that suggested we were near a life and death struggle over the fate of the nation.

And that's going to have an impact. And that impact will be what those who struggled in the NRA in the 70s and 80s feared the most.  The Democrats have no need to fear the NRA anymore.  It's not going to give them any credit and the Republican Party in the wake of Donald Trump is fractured and potentially headed into two parties. The element of that party that's most likely to howl over gun control is probably headed towards political irrelevancy.  The Wyoming GOP will probably pass bills that attempt to preclude the Federal law from being enforced, but unlike Canadian provinces, states can't nullify the Federal law and this will, in short order, just look pathetic and further distance the state from any political influence.

Normally, of course, the question would be asked, "what can be done?".  Probably nothing.  Only the courts can really stop anything that's passed now, and they might, but they very well might not.  Congress might not, as noted, pass anything.  The impact of things in Congress is slow.  Some states certainly will, however.

If courts hold things up, and if Congress fails to do anything quickly, this is the breathing room, and there's previous little of it, that those concerned about Second Amendment rights will have.  And what that means is acknowledging that firearms have a role in personal safety, but a civil war isn't going to break out.  It'd be well worth remembering that, in American history, backing insurrection has been a bad bet in every sense, particularly politically.

And then there's our neighbor to the North.

I hadn't really intended this post to include Canada, but right after I started the Canadian Liberals (a party, not a category) which control the Canadian government via a minority government (they don't have an absolute parliamentary majority) introduced its second major gun control bill in two years.  It's grossly overbroad.

Canada doesn't have a "gun problem". For that matter, the United States doesn't have a "gun problem" either.  The United States is developing an odd alt right mindset problem in one large section of its population which is excessively focused in some quarters, on the concept of a Stalingrad right around the corner, even though it hasn't happened and its not going to.  Indeed, most of those M4 Carbine replicas do nothing more than gather dust.  Canada has developed a far left fuzzy thinking problem.  They're practically mirror images of each other.

Canada is sometimes imagined as "The Great White North", but in reality modern Canada is the Great Urban Belt.  90% of Canadians live within 100 miles of the US. border.  That makes the US a mirror in a way, but what also tells you is that Canada's population density is basically sort of like that of the US coasts.  Canada has a huge landmass, but people largely don't live in it anymore.

Up until the 1950s they did. 

Canada was once a highly rural and highly conservative society. There's a reason that Canadian troops in World War One and World War Two were good soldiers, just as Australians were. They came from a largely rural background.  

Now, none of that is true.

And what we're seeing in pretty soy boy PM Justin Trudeau's gun control package is a reflection of that.

Just as the alt right wing of the US political spectrum sees a civil war right around the corner for which everyone needs to be armed, the Canadian left sees everything other than going to a children's soccer match as excessively dangerous.  Neither side in these respective camps is capable of seeing the views of the other.

Indeed, Canadian liberalism, a post World War Two development, features the elitist "I know what's good for you" arrogance that all such upper middle class liberal movements do.  It's not that htey don't understand the views of rural and western Canadians, it's that those people shouldn't have those views at all.

Indeed, there are regions of Canada where it makes a lot more sense to be carrying a firearm on a daily basis than in the United States.  While 90% of Canadians may live 100 miles within the US border, 10% don't, and there are still rural Canadians.  In much of the rural United States the most dangerous things a person might encounter would be snakes (which are dangerous) and wild hogs (which are also dangerous). Canada, on the other hand, has really big bears, and they're certainly dangerous.

Given that, what Canada proposes to do is, well, stupid.

This all stems from a 2019 event in which an unhinged lunatic in Nova Scotia impersonated a police officer and killed 22 people over a 13 hour period.  Guns control wouldn't have prevented this.

The killer had some sort of odd fixation on the police, although the murders started with his attacking. but not killing, his common law spouse on the day of their "anniversary" (how a common law couple can have an "anniversary" isn't really clear).  Following that, the killer dressed as a policeman and went around for a prolonged period of time killing people.

The firearms the killer had were all illegally held and, moreover, he was reputed to be basically a long term criminal who had never been caught.  The police were criticized for failure to properly react.  Faced with this, soy boy Trudeau is sponsoring a bill which would have done nothing whatsoever to address what actually occurred.  

This gets into the Liberal Party's flipside, but interestingly similar, world outlook as compared to the American alt  right.  The American alt right sees the world happy on the edge of societal collapse and a world in which it'll be dog eat dog and combat in the street, so everyone needs to be armed.  The Liberal Party sees the world on the edge of being on the edge of blissfully slipping into a My Pink Pony episode in which nobody needs arms of any kind.  Each is equally way off the mark.

Indeed neither seem to have a fundamental grasp of the nature of firearms at all.  

Canada already has a pretty extensive gun control regime right now, although unlike the United States', it can flip over night and it can, moreover, be trumped by provincial refusal.  Indeed, the latter happened when a prior Canadian liberal government instituted the "list", requiring everything to be registered. Alberta simply refused to comply.  Ultimate the following Canadian Conservative government reversed the law.  Lots of Canadian gun owners are hoping for this to occur again.

Current Canadian law has a host of semi automatic rifles that are restricted and licensed in a special fashion, and prohibits the carrying of a sidearm without a local permit.  The new bill would ban the semi automatics, propose to buy them back and for those who would not surrender them (and if post compliance with Canadian firearms laws is any indicator, that would be a huge percentage of the owners), they could license them in a special category where they basically were restricted in how they sued them and couldn't pass them on to anyone else.  In other words, the semi autos would be temporary "rack queens" until their owners died.

The bill would allow Canadian cities to restrict handgun any way they wanted to, right up to and including banning them.  Some Canadian cities, notably Vancouver, have already said they would.

This would actually achieve next to nothing, but it shows the skewed mindset of the Liberals, which is remarkably similar to that of the American alt right.  The American alt right sees Stalingrad right around hte corner and is arming up.  The Canadian liberals seem to think that Stalingrad is right around the corner if they don't ban it.

Neither is correct.

Truth be known there's very little Canadian firearms crime and there's really nothing about that crime that Canada does have that can be distinctly tied to long arm type.  In the rare instances of terrorism that Canada experiences, Canada's experiences show the same features as terrorism anywhere else. Terrorist will get the means.  Mostly what this is about, therefore, is the Liberal government figuring that such weapons are disreputable, as they feel all weapons are disreputable.

Indeed, a video put out by a Canadian minster shows that. She relates how she grew up on a farm and her father carried a rifle or shotgun in his truck for hunting.  But not one of the banned weapons which "are only good for one thing".  They actually are good for more than the "one thing", but this does relate back to the American AR emphasis over the past decade which suggests we need to arm up for that "one thing".  As we've noted elsewhere, however, mechanically there's little existential difference between these arms and semi automatic sof a century or more ago.

The pistol part is even more revealing.

Canadian pistol carry restrictions are frankly absurd as it is. T here's a lot of Canada where a sidearm would be pretty handy.  In the vast Canadian outback, for one thing, they certainly would be, for one thing, due to the fauna.  But beyond that, Canada has its share of murders in remote areas where there's no protection other than yourself.

Indeed, the new law is very illuminating in this fashion.  Vancouver proposes to ban handguns as there are criminal gangs in Vancouver that use handguns.  The thing that Vancouver is missing on this is that there are criminal gangs in Vancouver.  If you are a member of a criminal gang, the legality of your sidearm is unlikely to be a matter of real consideration.  And Vancouver has criminal gangs as its a port city, and every port city on Earth has criminal gangs as they are port cities.

But beyond that, the new law proposes to remove carry permits from local officials to a national office, no doubt because rural western Canada, which doesn't care for any of these laws, is more willing to issue carry permits that hte Liberals would like.  It isn't that they're a problem, it's that the Liberals don't feel you need a permit.

Nobody really has a right to tell anyone when they're imperiled and when they are not, and self defense is an existential right.  The central authority isn't going to see it that way, however, as it'll be a big police authority.  Big police departments (as opposed to small ones) don't think anyone needs to protect themselves as that's their job.  Simple logic tells you that for the most part the police really can't protect you as you call them after something has happened.  If the police could protect people in advance, the entire Nova Scotia incident would not have occurred.  But in giving police the controlling authority, they'll use it. When it doesn't work, they'll ask for more.  And when that doesn't work, they'll ask for a bigger budget and more police.

How this spins on is already evident in the United States. Plenty of big city police departments are so heavily armed and equipped they look like military units and they behave like them too.  That's caused over policing in the United States and we're in the midst of a major backlash. Canada will get that too, ands oon the local RCMP units will look like the Canadian 1st Infantry Division.  Not a good trend.

So here we have the irony.  The US might get more gun control because, in part, a certain section of the firearm's world has been glorifying the military nature of some weapons, and scaring people into thinking everyone needs to carry a gun no matter what.  Canada is probably going to get more firearms as the Liberal government thinks that it can order everyone to live in a cartoon fantasy land.  

Reality has left the building.

_________________________________________________________________________________

*The AR, and more particularly I suppose the military variants like the M16 and M4 Carbine, have a fan aura that surrounds them and which is particularly pronounced with weapons of the Vietnam War.

The M14 which the military started off with and which neither the Army or the Marines wished to abandon, was well regarded by the soldiers who carried it.  If you read the Internet gun stuff now, however, you'll read how it was a horrible weapon.  Oddly, therefore, it's peculiar that it never really went away and it still hasn't.  Every time the service needed a serious rifle. . . to include even the Navy, it reappeared. The only one who were really keen on leaving it was the Air Force, which is really focused on a different sort of fighting.

Servicemen I knew who served in Vietnam hated the M16, but now all sorts of fans love it.  Servicemen who served after the Vietnam War, to include me, hated it too.  Indeed, all sorts of complaints about it have come out of Afghanistan.  No matter, if you read the American Rifleman it's billed as "America's Rifle".  Bleh.

The M60, on the other hand, was a machinegun which people who carried it, including me, really liked and trusted.  But if you read the Internet stuff now, it's just awful.

**Aagaard was a Kenyan, in that he was born in Kenya, of Norwegian parentage.  He'd grown up in Kenya, served in the British Army while there, and gone on to be an African professional hunter. When the country obtained independence it enacted a series of laws that were really more directed at its colonial legacy than anything else, and Aagaard accordingly lost his profession there.

If he was bitter about it, it didn't show in his writing.  He relocated to Texas and was a writer there.

***Part of the propaganda for the AR has been to rename it the "Modern Sporting Rifle", but there's nothing modern about it.  It's been in service since 1964 or so and its design is based completely on World War Two technology.  Nothing about it pioneered anything new, and even the cartridge wasn't a new one designed for it.  Put in proper context, it's basically a World War Two generation weapon firing a 1950 vintage cartridge.  In comparison, the M14, which it replaced, was a 1930s vintage rifle, in terms of design, firing a 1900s vintage cartridge.

****While it technically ended two years later, conscription really ceased in 1973, which means that the youngest of the former conscripts are now 65 years old.  The last servicemen to see Cold War service are now 49 years old.

^He was identifiable as a sniper as he was carrying a standard M14.  I asked him about it and he noted he was a sniper, but that he didn't carry his M21 in training so that it wasn't damaged.

^^It's worth noting that in the 1960s and 1970s when radicalized left wing groups such as the Black Panthers also trained with military weapons and wore military gear there was no sympathy for them among conservatives at all even though, quite honestly, African Americans are one of the groups of Americans for whom the Second Amendment is the most valuable.

Reaping what's sewn. The National Rifle Association.

Romeo kissing Juliet.

In 2016, as the Republicans were running up to nominating Donald Trump, I posted several threads that warned that embracing Trump had real risks.

I also published some that tried to explain what I thought were the underlying reasons that Trump was doing well, and then ultimately prevailed.  But in there, there was a warning.  Embracing Trump, which was different than embracing the populist platform he ran on, involved a real risk of taint.  

Trump, no matter what you think of his policies, is a crude man.  Indeed, he's so crude and cynical in some ways there's been reason to believe all along that he might not have that strong of connection to his policies, but adopted them as he knew that he could sell himself as the backer of those policies.  

American history has a distinct sub thread of real issues becoming absorbed by the personalities of their proponents, one way or another.  The Great Man theory of history is supposedly discredited, but frankly looking at history suggests that it shouldn't be wholly.  

There was an actual substantial Communist penetration into the American government in the 1930s and 1940s.  That was real.  What Joe McCarthy claimed about that was largely correct.  But he was also a brash oaf in his presentation of the facts (which it seems clear to me were provided to him by J. Edgar Hoover).  "McCarthyism" has been roundly condemned due to McCarthy, and its been believed, erroneously, ever since that what McCarthy was saying was without merit.  It was.  It was McCarthy's personality that had merit problems.

John F. Kennedy, in contrast, had the personal morals of an alley cat and is responsible for the disaster of the Vietnam War.  His shiny image, however, was so effective that even now he's remembered fondly, when he ought to be remembered as one of he least successful Presidents in our history and arguably the most morally icky one we've ever had.  Being a drug addicted, ill, sex addict isn't really Camelot, but you wouldn't know that based on the frequent citations to his Presidency.  Image again.

And now we have the National Rifle Association in bankruptcy.

Make no mistake about it, the leadership of the NRA can be blamed for embracing Trump like Romeo embraced Juliet, and like Romeo, now it may go down in a bloody death.

The NRA filed for bankruptcy yesterday.

The National Rifle Association has existed since 1871.  It was only since the Gun Control Act of 1968, however, that its been a strongly lobbying organization for the Second Amendment.  That act shocked the NRA into action, leading to an overthrow of its existing leadership which not only wasn't inclined to oppose the act, but actually was willing to help draft it.  This sparked a reaction in the organization and it became a dedicated organization which successfully opposed what seemed to be an advance of gun control that had widespread popular support in the United States in the 20th Century.

A distinct evolution occurred in the NRA over this period of time.  The NRA was mostly dedicated to sport shooting with an interest in the technology of new firearms, including military firearms, in the background but there.  It had an interest in handguns, but it was a rifle association.  It's journal wrote frequently on hunting weapons but it had a strong target shooting thread running through it (and still actually does).  A person might expect to find articles about the M1903 rifle, the M1 Garand, or the M14, in their day, but a person was much more likely to read about the Winchester Model 70 or the hunting variants of the Mauser 98.  It's big, big columnist of the 1970s and 80s was Finn Aagaard, a former professional hunter from Africa who had relocated to the United States.  It adored Jack O'Connor.

It's leadership in this time evolved to become freakishly stable and, in the eyes of some, non democratic. Wayne LaPierre came to be its head and seemingly its head for life.  As it started to get successful it slowly evolved in strategy to where its emphasis on the range and the game fields evolved into one that frankly anticipated urban combat.  A reader of the journal in 1971 might expect to read about hunting in Alaska. .  .one in 2021 might expect to read about carrying a self defense pistol in Chicago.

There's always been opponents to the NRA among firearms owners inside and outside of it.  Some inside of it actually complained that it was too lenient on gun control, a really silly position to say the least.  Some outside of it, however, grew slowly disgusted with the emphasis on combat weaponry.

The emblem of the NRA whos an eagle perched on two sporting rifles on top of an American shield. Today that emblem really ought to show the eagle perched on top of two M4 Carbines.  There's not an issue of its journal that's published that doesn't feature the not all that great AR platform rifle, the American military's unfortunate stepchild. The NRA deserves a lot of the credit or the blame for the popularity that junky now obsolete never very good rifle fanatically enjoys today. Forced on the military by Robert Strange McNamara, one of the worst Secretaries of Defense the United States has ever had, it's gone mad in civilian sales in part through the NRA's fanatic boosting of the concept that civilians really need combat arms.

Some may need combat arms, and there's nothing existentially wrong with anyone owning what is really an overgrown obsolete World War Two technology problematic .22 rifle.  But there is something wrong with pitching the idea that idea that a person is going to have to fight the Battle of Stalingrad on the way to Mini Mart.  The constant drumbeat on that theme created an atmosphere that has not been healthy and its increased the opposition to the NRA.

Giving Donald Trump a massive embrace didn't help either. The NRA used to take the position that it was non partisan, but it really gave that up during the Obama Administration.  Donald Trump's White House has actually been at least as supportive of gun control as Obama's was, which is to say barely at all, but to listen to the NRA you'd think that Obama consficated every firearm in the United States and Trump gave them all back.

In reality, going into the 2016 election the Democrats had given up on gun control. They'd lost support in prior election on the issue and they knew that.  They weren't about to try and advance it much, although they likely would have due to various events.  But the fact that they stepped away from it got them no credit with the NRA at all.  In the 2016 election the NRA all but became a lobbying arm of the far right wing of the Republican Party.

Some of that gamble paid off in that the Federal judiciary, which was already getting more conservative, was cemented in that direction, at least for a time, by Trump appointees.  But it also meant that Democrats really started taking the gloves back off and made the NRA itself a target.  

And it turns out, to my surprise, to be a fairly vulnerable target.  The ossified leadership of the organization has been tottering as even high up in the organization questions are raised about why Wayne LaPierre, now 71 years old, doesn't step down.  The organization has been sued by the State of New York in an overtly political effort to drag it down, but it obviously is doing poorly in defending itself.  In some ways a victims of its own success, revenues are down even while gun sales are way, way up.  And individuals who would naturally be members of it have been driven away by its hardcore allegiance to the extreme right of the GOP.  Lots of gun owners now will quietly state that they don't support the organization as they don't support Trump.

The events of the last two weeks are going to be a disaster for the organization.  The urban combat it imagined happening almost did, but those bringing it about were not BLM or Antifa or the like, but individuals who support much of what the NRA does.  Reading its editorials in recent months made that quite plain.

We've doubted whether the GOP will remain one party here, or two.  And here's another thing to doubt. The NRA is going to reorganize in under the laws of Texas, abandoning New York, right as long term rends in Texas are making it a "purple" state.  Texas in 2022 and more particularly in 2024 isn't going to look, politically, like it does now.  Houston and Austin already don't.  

The NRA insists it will survive and be back.  It'll survive, but whether it'll be back like it was is really questionable right now.  It's going to have no influence at all in Congress for the next two years and its going to be distracted by simply trying to survive.  As this occurs, the voices for the Second Amendment will be really radical, and really wholesale ignored.  For firearms supporters, these are going to be really dark days.  The politicians fear of angering the NRA is really going to wear off, and quickly.

There's a lesson here about who you embrace.  She may like the same things that you do, but if she stinks, you're going to too, and that's what people will remember about you.

And young leadership doesn't stay young.  Leadership that never changes eventually brings about death to the organization.  We're seeing a lot of that now days.

Arguing in Ignorance

I can't  help but notice that a lot of the most strident opinions I see argued on the net, and mostly on Facebook at that, are done in blistering ignorance.

This includes, I'd note, recycled "why this or that" items other people have prepared that are posted in as if they're really informative, just because they exist.

Make no mistake, arguments, no matter how self convinced, that are presented in ignorance, aren't very convincing except to the already convinced in ignorance.  These mostly reinforce a strongly held, but not very well examined, belief the poster holds.  They don't advance any argument at all for that reason.

For example, there's a lot of people who argue for gun control that are completely ignorant on firearms, the use of firearms, and even on actual crime rates. . .anywhere.  Given that, we get stuff that's really stupid like "Why Japan has a low murder rate and why we should adopt Japanese gun control".

Japan does have a low murder rate.  It also has a really high suicide rate.  It's also xenophobic,  homogeneous, and frankly fairly racist and has a culture that really accepts nearly complete control on what people will or can do with their lives in all sorts of ways.

That's not a model for anything other than Japan, accepting that its a model for Japan, which it arguably shouldn't be.

The same sort of "walk this way" mentality that allowed Japan to engage in regional murder and imperial expansion in the 1920s through the 1940s allows it to control who will own what and why in terms of firearms.  It also helps create a culture in which a lot of Japanese would rather be dead.  And the culture is so vastly different from the American one, where people feel that they get to do what they want with what they want, that it's not a model for anything whatsoever.

But people who don't use firearms adopt the model because, well, they don't use firearms and haven't though thought it out.

It isn't even really accurate.  There is, for example, a thing on "Why Japan has a low murder rate" circulating right now that urges the US to adopt the same policies in cartoon form, but it doesn't even have Japan's policies on guns down correctly.  It claims that after a very difficult process a Japanese person who has a need for a firearm that's demonstrated, and who jumps through all sorts of hoops, can get a shotgun or an "air rifle". Wrong.

First of all, the Japanese policy on guns is difficult, to be sure, but not as difficult as people who cite to it like to claim.  Japan does tightly restrict firearms ownership, but in terms of simply banning an entire class of sporting firearms, only handguns are actually banned.

And, fwiw, Japan is experiencing a growth in hunting (and fishing) as women in the country enter those sports.  So, cartoon circulators, you're way off the mark.

Citing to Japan in the US in any event makes about as much sense as me making suggestions for NASCAR and football, both of which I can't stand.  I can't stand them, and I don't understand them, which is why I don't make suggestions for football and NASCAR.

But I could.

And some do. I  know, for example, that football has a tragic concussion rate and there are those who really worry about it.  I worry about that some, as I know that young people play the game.

But I can't stand the game personally so I try not to spout off about it.  But, perhaps, I could say that "Japan has a low youth concussion rate?  Why? Well it doesn't let its youth play football.  Instead, they draw anime on their computers and briefly flirt with weird cuteness and a culture that approves of cartoon character that feature a superhero called "Rape Man".  Yes, that's what we should do too".

Does that make sense.  No, and while there is a Japanese cartoon character called "Rape Man" and the Japanese culture does (or perhaps did) have a weird thing for "cute", I'm sure it's otherwise way off the mark.

Just like it is to suggest that Japan offers anything to inform us about gun control.  The only culture that can inform u son that topic is our own.

That includes Australia, I'd note.

I also see a lot of citations to Australia as a prime example of what we ought to do regarding guns.  Well, actually Australia's murder rate is just about the same as the US one in the states with low gun control.

What?  Yes, that's right.  US states with low gun control have low murder rates and Australia with high gun control has low murder rates.  Which suggest that perhaps the murder rates in these two English speaking and European culture countries might be tied to something else.

Indeed, in stupid arguments, I recently saw a post by an Australian that if he lived in the US he'd carry a gun all the time as its so dangerous here. Well, Oz, just about as dangerous as Perth, actually.  I.e., not very.

Of course Americans have done a good job of making their own cities look horribly dangerous by portraying them that way on television.  Most aren't, however.  Big ones usually have a district that is, but most big cities everywhere do.  Even cities that are really dangerous, like Chicago, aren't as dangerous as television and the movies portray them.  According to television, for example, Chicago is in a four alarm fire all the time.

And while we discuss "something else" in terms of English speaking European cultured countries, I saw a headline posted on the net the other day entitled "Why Canada Does Things Better than The US".  I'm not sure I'd agree that Canada does do things better than the US, but if it does, perhaps having a more homogeneous culture that has less than 10% of the American population might have something to do with that. 

People hate it when you say that, and Americans particularly do as we like to cite to the claim that "we're a nation of immigrants" and "diversity is our strength" but in truth, while it doesn't say anything for or against our immigration policies, homogeneous nations with lower population generally do everything better, except (usually) accepting immigrants. Canada, which has done that, except not like the US, is an exception to that rule.  Anyhow, if the US had a population of 30 million rather than over 300 million, yes it too probably would be doing everything just super.  That's not an argument for or against anything, but when you argue "we're doing super" and you are a nation of low population. well. . . .

But you can't pat yourself on the back, if you are Canada, for that, as it looks bad.  "Yes!  Our climate and history means we've kept the population lower and less diverse!  Hooray for liberal us!"  No, you can't do that.

Nor can you pat yourself on the back, really, for "good old American know how".  While I see memes on that sort of thing all the time, the US became the powerful nation it is in large part because it had a combination of English Common Law (which we didn't think up), free market economics (mostly accidentally) and vast unexplored natural resources (which we didn't put there).  Almost all of the nations that have shared these benefits, such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the US have done super.

On another topic, I have a couple of friends who are really hostile to religion. They hate it.  They are also amongst those whose personal lives are such a titanic mess that they could best benefit from religion. . .any religion, as they've made such a dog's breakfast of their own existence.  And yet they'll blame religion for everything.  "Christianity is keeping people down!"  Hmmm, your string of failed relationship, broken marriages, and drug use might have something to do with keeping your economic status in the dumpers. . . just saying.

These folks typically have no idea what the tenants of any religion actually are. They just now that religions, at the end of the day, say that there's something greater than oneself out there, and they hate that idea more than anything else.  They often also tend to be fairly hostile to life, for one reason or another, but don't recognize that.

On that, an ignorant argument by anti life, i.e., "pro choice" people, will be, "oh  yeah, well you pro life people sure don't care anything about life outside the womb!".  That's complete bull.

If you look at it, the same people who are pro life tend to be radically pro adoption and very very frequently opponents of the death penalty.  They're likely more charitable towards the young in stress or need than anyone else.

Which brings up an ignorant argument from the last election cycle.  Last election cycle, as things began to go down the tubes for Hillary Clinton, people kept saying "she's worked her whole life for women".

I'm not sure what Clinton did for women, but quite frankly you can't claim to be a worker for the interest of women and also be an abortion proponent, as over half the babies killed in that process are female.  So, in reality, if Clinton worked her whole life for women, it has to be qualified as working for women who are born only.  It's a fairly significant qualifier.

Also as qualifiers, quite frankly are the zillions of simple minded heart warming stories that start of with some surprising fact and then take you to some amazing conclusions.  You know, "This boy was left in the woods. . . wolves found  him. . . but they brought him a burger from a Burger King dumpster. . . " and you go on to find its Bill Gates.  Hmmmmmm . . .probably more to that story. . . 

I guess the lesson in all of this might be this.

Facebook advocacy snippets tend to be dumb.

Reflections on a Canadian Shooting and on Canada itself.

I hesitate to post on this at all, for a variety of reasons.  First of all, because I tend to think these things get more attention that they should, and therefore I hesitate to be part of that.  Secondly because, as a person posting from the United States, such posts can come across as posted in the wrong spirit. Certainly I frankly find a lot of Canadian postings on American tragedies to nearly be in the nature of gloating and I don't want that to seem to be the case here. 

Downtown Toronto, January 2015.

But I am a Canadian, even if I'm one who never has lived in Canada, so maybe I have a right, and perhaps as a Canadian living outside of Canada, who has always lived outside of Canada, I have a different and unique prospective.  One that's both Canadian, of a sort, and sort of not, and frankly, one that's from the older, and I'd argue better in some ways, Canada rather than the contemporary one.

On all of that, I'm a dual citizen of the United States and Canada.  My mother was from St. Lambert, Quebec (which as will be noted below, adds to what is perhaps a unique prospective).  Her family had roots in Quebec that go as far back as roots can go there and, while she ultimately became a dual citizen herself, I think she was in her 70s when she did that, so for most of her life she was a Canadian and always identified in that fashion.  So, she was not only a Canadian, but she was from Quebec which has a unique history, but she had also lived in Alberta, which also figures into this post below.

 

My mother, probably in the late 1940s or the early 1950s, Shrine of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupre in Quebec in the background.

What's all of that have to do with this post? Well, let me put in a little history, as in the end, history always defines everything in some way.

Canada is one of the most urban countries in the world. It's much more urban than the United States.  Shoot, for that matter, its more urban than the United Kingdom.  Most Canadians live in cities.

But that wasn't always true. Indeed, it's only become true very, very recently.

Up until the 1950s, Canada was an incredibly rural country. It's undergone a process that has happened throughout much of the world following (and commencing well before) the Second World War of urbanization, but its transformation has been more dramatic and frankly, in my view, almost wholly negative.*  Canada, going into the Second World War, certainly had some large and indeed, at least in Quebec, some very European cities, but the mass of its population was not city centered.  Even Quebec, which had a Euro-Canadian population dating back to the 1600s, was principally rural in character.**  Almost no nation that undergoes this transformation rapidly, and Canada did, does it really well, and Canada is no exception.***

This does not mean that its population was uniform in character, although it was much more uniform than that of the United States.  Quebec certainly varied in that it had a large French population that was distinct in nearly every fashion from the rest of Canada.****  The country also had significant populations from the remainder of the British Isles, and then starting in the early 1900s it acquired, in some (but only some) locations a significant Ukrainian and Russian population. All the while it retained a significant Indian population.  Having said that, however, the Dominion was distinctly British in character even while being distinctly Canadian.

Canada up until the mid 1950s was a nation that looked at itself and the rest of the world through distinctly different, quite British (and sometimes French), rural eyes.  Like a lot of areas the English had been, in some ways, it was "more English than the English", although using that phrase to attempt to define Canada at any one point would be highly unfair.^  Nonetheless it was a nation that, in spite of its small population, was steadfast in support of nearly every English overseas enterprise up to the end of World War Two.  Canada was left alone, for the most part, for most of the War of 1812 and had to fight against American invasion largely on its own, which it did very well.  It nonetheless rose to the occasions of the Boer War, World War One and World War Two, although in each instance it was largely its English speaking population that did so.  The French population opted to sit out, to the extent possible, all such English enterprises.

Memorial in Toronto to "Our Glorious Dead".

It's been almost forgotten by Canadians that this was the case.  Canadian troops served under overall English command in three wars of fairly close succession in impressive numbers and with impressive valor.  Other than internal wars against native populations, of which there were some, Canada's first war during which it was not part of an English army was the Korean War.  Since that time Canada, which has served more overseas than people care to admit, has never again served as part of a British overall army.

That 1945 departure date, i.e., the end of World War Two, would prove to be significant in more ways than just a coincidental separation from the United Kingdom in a military sense.  It proved to be a real bright line.  People who are familiar with the history of Quebec like to speak of the "Quiet Revolution", but in truth the entire country went through the same process and it was simply Quebec that entered it last and with a different character, as it was different.  Going into the war, Canada remained highly English in many ways.  Coming out if it, much of that Englishness was yielding to a type of Canadianism, but in a form that was different from that which exists today. That conservative Canadianism dominated from 1945 into about 1960, when it began to crack and yielded the liberal Canada that we have today. . . which isn't as liberal as it imagines.

This same process played out in different forms in different former English dominions and colonies, and the entire process seems fairly closely related to it.  Countries that had a distinctive separation from the United Kingdom prior to that time, such as Australia, were impacted much less.  Countries that were very closely tied to British Empire England, however, even if they resented it (or not) were much more heavily impacted by their separation from the UK and that story still plays out today.  The two most dramatic examples may be the Canada of today and the Ireland of today, both of which would regard themselves as now being long separated from the United Kingdom but which in fact, culturally, defined themselves with and against the British Empire so strongly that they continued to do so for some time after the Empire had actually fallen and they still are reacting to that today.

In both instances the countries were very conservative at first abut then began to experiment with a liberalism that in some fashions reminds a person of the occasional teenager that seeks to establish his or her self by being in total reaction to the values of his parents.  In this case, however, ironically, the parent had so many problems and became such an entity back into itself that the reaction was hardly noticed much at all.  In Canada, conservative political values yielded and are still yielding to increasingly liberal ones, as is the case with Ireland.  Ironically, at the same time, much of the population remains deeply personal conservative even while not wishing to publicly acknowledge it.  The entire thing is sort of a cultural house of cards that won't last.

Typical early 20th Century poster from Canada urging immigration for those who wanted to be farmers.  Canada remains an agricultural giant today even if Canadians tend not to think of the country that way and interestingly enough it still draws European immigrant farmers, frequently Dutch, who sell their European farms to purchase larger Canadian ones.

At the same time a very British Canada was turning its back on being British, it was also urbanizing at a blistering rate.  Canada had largely been settled as an agricultural enterprise in the first place, and it continued to focus on that for a time after World War Two. But soon after the war this changed and the country became highly urban. Canada is still an agricultural giant, but the overwhelming majority of Canadians live in urban areas and the country became both high urbanized and highly cosmopolitan.  As it did t his it developed a new sense of itself, largely centered on the Canadian concept of Canadianess based on the urban Canadian's view. At the same time, however, rural Canada, while depleted, did not disappear and an urban/rural, east/west divide developed.  All of this is true of the Untied States as well, but in the Canadian context the rural and Western divide is, if anything, stronger than it is in the US as its more extreme in nature.

Romanticized image of farmer in Canada in front of the first Canadian flag.

And that circles us back to this topic.

One of the features of the East/West and Urban/Rural device in Canada is that urban areas have become very powerful in terms of federal legislation and they have in turn proven to be extremely liberal post 1960.  Indeed, Canada in some ways defines the Jeffersonian view about what concentrations of populations mean.  Urban Canadians are not "liberal" in the classic Lockean libertarian sense but "liberal", or perhaps, "progressive" in the Social Democrat sense. Completely contrary to Americans, Canadians as a whole are much more accepting and even embracing of statism and government sponsored social control, although that will inevitably crack and retreat under the strain of the extreme lengths to which it has now been put.  Typically liberals claim to espouse the ideals of liberty within democracy but Canadians have accepted real controls of speech and expression that nearly any sector of the American public would regard as absolutely abhorrent.

And urban Canadians, in the same spirit, have embraced very extensive gun control.

Rural Canadians have not and indeed much of what I have noted above has not been embraced by Western Canadians or rural Canadians.  Canadian rejection, in rural areas, of gun control measures is known to be widespread even while at the same time urban Canadians are so ignorant of rural Canadian firearm us that urban Canadians will frequently claim that guns can't be owned in Canada.  This citation is made by urban Canadians often in accusation against the United States, with it being claimed that there is no violence in Canada, more or less, because Canadians are not allowed to own firearms.  In fact, this is completely false on both scores and shows a real lack of understanding on the part of people making the statement about actual laws and cultures (plural) in Canada itself.

Firearms most definitely can be owned in Canada and, like rural Mexico, simply ignoring more recent gun control measures is a widespread Canadian thing.  Indeed, while Canadians have somewhat sneered at the United States for its lack of extensive gun control, at least the press is now reporting things honestly in Canada in regards to criminal firearms usage an not blaming it on the United States.  It's known that most illegally used and owned firearms in Canada come into illegal usage through other Canadians, and indeed an entire lucrative black market has sprung up in which those who acquire firearms legally pass them into illegal hands at great profit. That same market once existed in a lot of American big cities but it has passed away over the years as restrictions on firearms ownership which fostered the black market, as all such restrictions on material ownership always do, went away.  And there are lots of firearms in Canada, which up until very recently had firearms that were considerably more lax than those of the United States.

And what this has shown, as the Australian example also did, is that gun control really doesn't achieve anything.  Indeed, Toronto just had another mass killing, with a van, just before this.  As with the Western World in general, violence in Canada has continued to decline, overall, at about the same rate as it otherwise was.  Horrific acts, however, still occur.  The real impact of gun control has been to make life difficult for rural Canadians.  In spite of this, the likely Canadian reaction, or at least that in Ontario, will be to boost the already existing calls for even stricter gun control.

And as with the United States, Canada is occasionally plagued with acts by those who are mentally impaired, as was apparently the case here. That does not, as far as I'm aware, happen with the seeming same frequency as it does in the US, but Canadian rates of violence were always lower than those of the United States, and no doubt for a variety of reasons.  Toronto's rate of violence, for what its worth, has been climbing in recent years, which says something but its not clear what.  The Canadian economy is in good shape so whatever is spiking it has nothing to do with that, nothing to do with gun access, and nothing to do with the United States.  Something else is going on.

So what all can we learn from this?  Well, whatever it is, we're probably not going to.  But if we were to, it perhaps should give those from one country pause about lecturing another about following its own example, as all the examples are pretty flawed.  Another is that restricting implements at the end of the day doesn't really accomplish much other than to burden people who are very unlikely to ever burden you.

What we might learn, however, if we learn anything, is that people can be violent and the mentally disturbed are more likely to be violent than others.  People can imagine that they can legislate that away, but they really can't, or at least not by "you can't own" type of laws.  That requires some other focus.

Well, there's been no "we're all Torontonians" movement.  A random act of senseless violence just doesn't draw them like ones that can seemingly be politicized.  But perhaps they should be, as those might say more than anything else.

________________________________________________________________________________

*In fairness, this process started with the Industrial Revolution, of which the Electronic or Computer or Information Revolution is a mere part.

**Quebec City was founded in 1608.

***The United States underwent the same transformation, it should be noted, but much more slowly and indeed much less completely.

****Except. perhaps, that it too was largely rural.  Indeed, it was the French Canadians rural character, not the couple of large cities in Quebec, that allowed it to remain distinct over the centuries.  Being primarily rurual in character, and supported by the Catholic church in every fashion including culturally, it withstood the solvent of English culture and administration. The same is true of Ireland.  In both instances the culture would not even exist but for the  Catholic Church.

^It's more fairly used to described New Zealand and what was Rhodesia.

Statistics, if presented without scrubbing, are simply the presentation of facts. Some about Gun Control

Facts, as they say, are stubborn things.

We've been spending some time looking at the Second Amendment and Gun Control proposals out there.  In doing so, we haven't been all the time "anything at all times" in our arguments, and some of our arguments have been subtle and have dealt with  attitudes and even marketing.  We've consistently argued here a number of things that are repeatedly lost in the current discussion, and particularly are in the current one.  These are:

1.  Violence in the United States, and indeed globally, is way, way down.

2.  Mechanically, there's very little that's really changed with semi automatic weapons for a century or more.

3.  The incidents caused by the current debate are so distinct in their nature that its highly evident that they have a physiological and societal cause that almost no one is willing to admit or address.

That last item is by far the most important one.  And like most American debates the reduction of the debate to a simple one isn't doing the topic any favors. 

One thing that people might actually want to do, if they're discussing firearms, is look at the actual records.  I've tried to do that, but here somebody else has put it together in a nice graphic form.

From:  https://www.ammunitiondepot.com/blog/the-truth-about-gun-control-n29

This is a pretty simple table, but this pretty much sets out a set of facts that are actually facts.  There's a lot of constant debate on this topic which are based on erroneous arguments and all that will do is lead to a result that's not likely to do anything.

Amongst those arguments, by the way, are the ones that I've heard recently that at least admit a bit of a demographic and then get it wrong.  That is that this is a "white male problem".  That's in correct and racist.

One thing that argument totally seems to miss is that even in this age of diversity, most Americans are in fact "white" and many of those who are not "white" will likely be so categorized in later demographics for the same reason that the Irish and Italians were once not "white". The entire concept of "white" is pretty vague anyhow, but it's worth noting that the majority of any crimes should be committed by whites, and as males commit most crimes, most crimes in the United States should be committed by white males.  Until there's some real statistical analysis of this topic, that argument is suspect.

Particularly as it omits John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, who were male but not white males.  Under the weird way that race is categorized it would also omit Nidal Hasan, who should clearly be in this category.  And it would omit Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik.  Nor would it include Omar Mateen.  Only Farook and Malik, moreover, can really be argued for omission from this category by categorizing them as terrorist, but then when you start to do that you find that there's a very strong tendency to take out anyone who doesn't seem to quite fit as a terrorist, while taking out those who commit such acts but who aren't from the Middle East as non terrorist.  Michael Zehaf-Bibeau was a self confessed terrorist, for example, but as he was not from the Middle East he's been regarded as simply a sick individual.

He  may have in fact been sick, but the problem with such omissions is that terroristic acts appeal to the sick.  ISIL doesn't really reject people for mental health reasons.  

So, once again, the common analysis here is wrong.

What is correct, and we've noted it before, is that these acts end up being committed by the politically motivated and the mentally ill.  Sometimes they're committed by the politically motivated mentally ill.  Political motivation presents a separate topic entirely, but fortunately for the United States, we don't really see it enough that we need to discuss gun control in that context in this thread, but we will in an upcoming one.

And we're not going to go back over our prior discussion on the what we're seeing socially and societally in regards to the other group other than to note this.  In order to address that problem, you actually need to address that problem.  And none of the current proposals do that. As that's a hard and difficult conversation to have.