Yes, it is. And I know that's not kind and sensitive.
And, no, I don't mean to suggest for a moment that all vegans are nuts. But
veganism is a nutty diet and nutty diets lend themselves to nuts or
becoming a nut.
Indeed, Nasim Aghdam is a symbol of about all that's wrong with Western Society right now. Over urbanized, self absorbed, at war with our human natures and at war with nature itself.
Okay, let's break this down just a bit, as the entire Nasim Aghdam attack on Facebook should tell us a lot about where we are at as a society right now, and the lessons are disturbing.
Lets start with Aghdam herself. Who, and what, was she?
Well, we don't know that much about her, but what we makes it clear that she was an absolute nut.
She was an Iranian immigrant who likely came over with her family was a child, but was old enough to have retained her Persian accent. She was a member of the Bahá'í faith, which has its origins in Iran and which has been persecuted since day one there. She was a vegan and an animal rights activists. She was a Vlogger. She was a body builder.
In short, she was a mass of contradictions such that, if you didn't start off insane, after combining all of these, you likely would be.
Now, no, I don't mean to say that all Persians, bodybuilders, Bahá'í adherents, or vegans are nuts, although I'll be frank that the last one, except perhaps in some extraordinary circumstances, if flat out nutty.
And I do mean that only a society that has become so urbanized, effete anemic and frankly safe, could produce folks of this mindset. Other societies produce nuts, and always have, but this brand of mixed nut is uniquely western. Had Aghdam grown up in her native Persia, she may have been a nut alright, but of a different type. Only in the west would such a self absorbed person at war with nature have acted out against unknown individuals working for Youtube. Frankly, while all this social media stuff is fun, most of it is pretty inconsequential, including this blog that I post this stuff on. To be so self absorbed that you would think that it does, and that low viewership would merit murder, is insane. But its a type of insanity that's symptomatic of a bigger problem.
And for that matter, so is veganism itself and "Animal Rights" as a cause.
Now, I don't mean to suggest for a moment that all vegans are nuts. But veganism is a nutty diet and nutty diets lend themselves to nuts or becoming a nut. It's grossly contrary to our natural diet which we are evolved to eat. Eating outside of our evolutionary base is putting a stress of a unique type on us that will have deep implications at some point. To counter that a person has to be extraordinarily zealous to make up the protein that a person would acquire from meat, and few will.
And the view that animals are equal to humans is an expression of a deep hatred of the natural world. We clearly are not, and if we are close to a state of nature our relationship with other animals is quite plain. All early humans were hunters and gatherers and all humans remain that at some level. To deny that is to despise the world. To pretend that it's out of love is to make a mockery of real love, or to at least express a lack of understanding of it at a deeply elemental level. So right from the onset, this woman was emblematic of a sickness in our society that we've developed as we've become more and more deluded in our concrete jungle and we express more and more hatred for our condition.
Now, I noted all of her known characteristics so I should flesh that out as well. Not only was she an animal rights activist and a vegan, but a body builder.
There's nothing wrong with body building and there's certainly nothing wrong with exercise, but anyone who has ever stumbled across the writings of really dedicated body builders can't help but be disturbed a bit. It's one of the things that a person can simply take too far, going from health, to narcisissm.
And that would describe much of what's out there in the Vlogger space, to say the least.
And, to maintain, as she did, that she could post on Persian culture while being a vegan is well. . . an embarrassment to Persian culture really.
Anyhow, it's interesting how far down this road, and the further we get from small towns and villages, we slip into this deep hatred of nature. It's so bad that the people exhibiting don't even realize that they're expressing a deep hatred of the nature as it is. And while I will not go so far as to claim that this is a fulfillment of a prophesy, this sort of thing can't help but bring to mind 1st Timothy to me, in which it was stated:
Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from
the faith by giving heed to deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons,
through the pretensions of liars whose consciences are seared, who
forbid marriage and enjoin abstinence from foods which God created to be
received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth
1st Timothy, Chapter 4
So, at the end of the day, she was a nut. A nut whose acts is no doubt amplified because of the conditions in which she lived, by which I mean, modern society, which tolerates and even celebrates the sort of wacky conduct and ideas gave rise to her dementia.
So, what lesson can we draw. More gun control, right?
Not hardly.
This attack stands as an example that just living in a state with lots of gun control and thinking good thoughts will protect a person from the acts of random nuts. It won't. And this provides an example of where the Second Amendment afforded protection but it apparently wasn't taken up.
Youtube can be nifty, but it's also a reservoir of everything disturbing in the world that there is. It isn't just a place for cute cat videos.
Not hardly.
Every disturbing belief in the world finds expression there. Every nut who feels the world needs to hear from him, and most nuts hold that view to some extent. And every narcissistic fool with a view.
And for that reason, you'd think Youtube would have known that it was a target for the very sort of deranged people that it promotes. Protecting itself would have been in order.
But likely not a very happy one, given the rise of Bolshevism in Russia, the captivity of the Czar, and all sorts of violence in Turkey including the disaster that had befallen Armenia.
It wouldn't be obvious, if you read the newspapers for this day, April 6, 1918, but Operation Michael was over. Called off yesterday after the failure of a final big German push near Ancre.
The initial German advance had been significant, but equally significant is that the Germans had failed to take any of their objectives and by April 5 they were halted.
The German plan had failed to achieve any of its objections and had suffered absolutely massive casualties.
But the German high command wasn't prepared to give up on the Kaiserschlacht. Perhaps, really, it couldn't. . .
On this day in 1968 the Black Panthers staged a twelve man nighttime raid on the Oakland Police. The raid was in ostensible retaliation for the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who of course would not have approved of the same. The raid turned into a siege and after about 90 minutes the besieged Panthers, led by Eldridge Cleaver, surrendered.
What happened from there isn't clear. Cleaver claimed that the police shot Hutton during the surrender. The police claimed that 17 year old Hutton attempted to escape and was shot as a result of that.
Cleaver, for his part, went on to have a very unlikely biography before dying at age 62 of pneumonia. Fleeing for a time to Algeria due his activities and a pending murder charge, he later became a born again Christian and attempted to revive the codpiece in the form of his "virility pants" he called "the Cleavers". He'd ultimately come back to the United States, go through a series of religious conversions before converting to Mormonism, and politically becoming a conservative Republican.
From a poor and highly troubled background Ray had fallen into increasingly racist views in the years prior to the assassination. Following his murderous act he fled to Canada and then to Europe, using false names, before being arrested in the United Kingdom in June. He admitted guilt for the crime.
Dr. King's assassination in some ways punctuated the increasingly violent nature of the times, with his emphasis on non violence then being challenged by more radical individuals. A central figure in the Civil Rights Movement, his death left it in some ways without a central figure to complete the process of desegregation that had commenced in the second half of the 1940s. His speech of the prior day in some eerie way almost seems to have predicted what followed on this day in 1968.
Remington Arms Manufacturing Company filed for bankruptcy the Sunday before last.*
It's a national tragedy, truly. The fact that some will rejoice in this shows how effete and pathetic the society has become, indeed to such an extent that its truly a crisis in our own society.
There's a lot of analysis out on this right now, some of which is correct, but much of which is quite shallow. The common commentary, correct in so far as it goes, is that Remington is a victim of the Trump Slump. An irony of the recent history of firearms sales in the US is that Barack Obama was the, as wags had it, the greatest gun salesman in the nation's history, and indeed, starting with Hillary Clinton's first run against Obama in the primaries there was an over eight year boom in firearms sales. A lot of those sales were of things that people thought would soon be banned, but it was nonetheless simply amazing in extent. Ammunition cleared the shelves out of fear that laws restricting ammunition sales would come in make ammo hard to get. Sales of AR type rifles when through the roof. The NRA, which of course is the primary organization that campaigns to protect the rights of gun owners, frankly grossly overplayed their hand, to the long term determent of companies like Remington, by keeping up an eight year panic educing campaign against President Obama when in fact he did nothing at all in regard to firearms for almost the entire eight years.
Remington's advertising has always focused on Remington being a manufacturer of sporting, primarily hunting arms. This stands in contrast with some other companies, such as Colt, who emphasized other roles of their arms. Even today Remington strives to set apart its AR type sporting rifles from those manufactured by other companies on this basis, if they are sold under the Remington name.
But after Trump won the sales slumped, and indeed to some degree went
into a tailspin. People haven't been afraid that there would be bans. Trump was endorsed by the NRA in a way that no other President ever has been, further alleviating the fears of gun owners.
Indeed, even with all the recent talk of gun control, including some suggestions by Trump that he'd support some of it, there hasn't been a
huge national reaction on the part of gun owners, although there has apparently been a bit of a
one on the demand side that has a national impact.
This, we are told, hurt Remington as Remington is a major manufacturer of AR type rifles, and indeed it is. Remington has manufactured M4 carbines for the military, starting in 2012, but it also owns Bushmaster, one of the better manufacturers of AR type rifles including some really fine competition versions of the rifle in the M16A4/A5 style. At any rate, Remington was heavily into the AR platform and now, the story goes, is really suffering for it.
And that's partially correct.
But only partially.
What Remington is also suffering from, in a major way, is corporate conglomeration. Remington could frankly benefit from some Distributism, but then, so could the entire nation for that matter. Too bad that this hasn't been a recent policy of the United States such that what happened to Remington, would not have.
Remington has made a semi automatic sporting rifle since 1908. It's had a sporting semi automatic rifle almost continually since then, but its association with Bushmaster ended up causing Remington to fully adopt the AR type rifle into its lineup, in the guise of being a modern hunting rifle, and that in turn meant that Remington was competing against itself.
Remington has been in existence since 1816. It was founded Eliphalet Remington in that year (indeed the "ERA" on World War One Eddystone M1917 Remington stands for E. Remington Arms, not Eddystone). It's had its up and downs. It almost went bankrupt in fact, immediately after World War One. Remington was a major manufacturer of Mosin Nagant Rifles for the Imperial Russian Army, P14 rifles for the British Army and M1917 rifles for the U.S. Army during the Great War, dedicating two plants to that latter task (Winchester also had one). The collapse of Imperial Russia put it under severe stress, but that was relieved when the United States purchased the existing stocks of Russian rifles, which it did in turn use for the American commitment to Russia during the war. Remington switched its P14 production over to M1917 production, the two rifles being the same design distinguished only by cartridge, shortly after the US declared war and found itself short of M1903 Springfields.
When the war suddenly ended in November 1918, the contracts were cancelled virtually overnight. That nearly drove Remington under, although it struggled by and picked up the pieces, literally, converting them into the fine sporting rifle, the Remington Model 30. Even at that, the company struggled. The lesson was so stout that when World War Two Remington was very reluctant to enter into military contracts, although it did, ultimately producing the M1903s that were used by the Army during the Second World War, albeit on equipment that had come form the government itself. It also manufactured other weapons during Second World War and was positioned, unlike Winchester, to exploit that in the post war economy, which unlike the post Great War economy, did not slump.
Nonetheless following World War Two Remington, as an independent company, did not seek nor desire military sales. It didn't seek to make M1 Garands during World War Two or the Korean War. When the service sought outside suppliers, early on, for some components of the M14, it didn't seek to acquire those contracts. It didn't introduce a 5.56 rifle for consideration even though it was the company that had developed the round, for sporting use (the 5.56 is the .223 which was developed from the .222 Remington) , that was basically under consideration even though its manufacturing was every bit as advanced as Armalites. It didn't seek to acquire M16 contracts during the 60s, 70s, and 80s when many such contracts were entered into. It never sought foreign military sales. The only military rifle it offered for decades was the sniper variant of the Remington Model 700 hunting rifle, which is something that was only made in small numbers and which, by its very nature, said a lot more about Remington as a supplier of sporting rifles than it did anything else.
Indeed, while its counter-intuitive, firearms manufacturers do best when not basing their sales on military contracts, and at least to an extent the civilian versions of them. Colt's heavy dependence on the M16 for sales came at a time when it was having real problems and it can be argued that its reliance on the AR to carry it through in fact failed. Going all the way back to the immediate post Civil War period, manufacturers that heavily depended on military sales, such as Spencer, tended to fail when the crisis was over even if they tried to translate those sales into a civilian market. The big exception to the rule is in handguns, but the oddity of that is that handgun manufacturers have tended to lead military designs by years, and so when the service purchases a new handgun, it is frequently acquiring something that was already developed or partially developed for the civilian market, in the United States.
Colt is a real exception to the rule in traditional American firearms manufacturing advertising. While it is not the only example, Colt advertised on the basis of its military contracts on occasion, such as here. Colt also emphasized that its handguns provided solid protection, anticipating (but not wholly uniquely) the modern carry movement. In contrast, nearly every longarm manufacturer, Remington included, completely avoided military themes in their advertising and relied instead on depicting their sporting and hunting uses.
So Remington survived two centuries without going bankrupt.
And then entered Cerberus. Cerberus Capital Management, L.P. is a private equity firm,specializing in "distressed investing". If the name sounds familiar to you and you aren't a student of economics, that may be because you recall the hideous three headed dog that haunts Hell in various works, such as Dante's Divine Comedy, where he eats the tortured souls of gluttons.
Now, to be fair, Remington ceased to be a family owned company in 1888, when the Remington family sold it to a holding company that also owned, at that time, Winchester, ironically enough. During the Great Depression it was purchased, along with United Metallic Cartridge, by Dupont, the gunpowder manufacturing company. Real disaster started to set in, however, in 1993, when Dupont sold it to the investment firm of Clayton, Dubilier & Rice. In June 2007 Cerberus Capital Management bought the company from Clayton, Dubilier & Rice for $370,000,000 and thereby acquired $252,000,000 in
assumed debt.
Prior to Cerberus purchasing Remington, it had already purchased Bushmaster and put it into a moronically named entity it called "Freedom Group", which was formed as a firearm's manufacturing holding company. The founder of Bushmaster, which as noted simply specialized in AR platform rifles, took $70,000,000 in that 2006 sale.
Cerberus folded Remington also into Freedom Group, but since that time that dumb ass name has been changed to Remington Arms Company, with Cerberus thereby choosing to keep the name of the most well known entity as the name of the holding group.. Somewhere along the way, since Cerberus took over, Remington picked up Advanced Armament (silencers), Marlin Firearms (which already owned H&R Firearms) and Para USA, a Canadian company, originally, that specializes in M1911 pistols. Para USA has ceased to exist entirely with its M1911s being made under the Remington name. H&R has ceased to exist entirely.
And hence the current disaster.
Due to Cerberus' swallowing up of assets what had been five firearms manufacturing companies, all occupying separate and distinct niches, and of which only two competed against each other (Marlin and Remington) has become effectively one, with three major brand names. Marlin, which had a distinct product line, continues to. H&R is dead. Para Ordinance, which became Para USA, is now fully absorbed by Remington, in a move that absorbed its product line into Remington but which may not have absorbed its fan base at the same time and, because M1911s are past any patent restrictions, only gave Remington a minor advantage, if any at all, through the acquisition. Bushmaster, which Cerberus claimed it was going to divest itself of, still is owned by Remington and Remington has gone whole hog into the AR product line including having secured, as noted, a contract for M4 carbines.
All of which suggest that Cerberus knew nothing about the firearms industry and nothing about the companies it was acquiring.
So what is Cerberus?
Well something can be discerned about it simply because its named for the three headed hound that in mythology guards the gates of Hades. It's an acquisition company, which virtually by definition, and filtered through my cynicism, exists to acquire, and divest when necessary or advantageous, companies. It owns or has owned the following, or has acted in concert with the following:
Cerberus entered into a financing deal with
satellite imagery company GeoEye to the tune of $215,000,000 in March 2010.
That same month Cerberus acquired an
ownership stake in Panavision as part of a debt restructuring agreement
with shareholder MacAndrews & Forbes.
Also that same month Cerberus agreed to buy Caritas Christi Health Care, now Steward Health Care for $830,000,000. Caritas Christi was rebranded Steward Health Care.
In April 12, 2010 Cerberus acquired private government services contractor DynCorp International for approximately $1,000,000,000 and the assumption of $500,000,000 million of debt.
In November 19, 2010, Cerberus and Drago Capital acquired a a real estate portfolio consisting of 97 bank branches from Spain’s Caja Madrid in a 25-year lease back transaction.
On March 17, 2011, Cerberus acquired the senior bank debt and
completed a debt restructuring of Maxim Office Park, a one million
square foot office and logistics complex in Scotland
On March 31, 2011, Cerberus acquired a real estate portfolio of 45 Metro Cash & Carry properties in Germany.
On May 16, 2011, Cerberus completed the acquisition of Silverleaf Resorts.
On May 16, 2011, an affiliate of Cerberus agreed to acquire the
U.S.-based global billing and payments unit of 3i Infotech Ltd. for $137,000,000
On October 4, 2011, Cerberus and Garanti Securities formed a joint initiative to pursue investments in Turkey with an
initial commitment of $400,000,000
On October 19, 2011, Cerberus chose J.P. Morgan Worldwide Securities Services to
provide fund administration and related securities services for Cerberus
investment funds.
On October 27, 2011 Cerberus and Chatham Lodging Trust purchaseed Innkeepers USA Trust for $1,002,000,000. Innkeepers operates various hotel,s including the Marriott, Hyatt, and Hilton
On December 22, 2011, Covis Pharma, a specialty pharmaceutical
company owned by affiliates of Cerberus, aquired full commercial rights for Fortaz (ceftazidime), Zinacef (cefuroxime), Lanoxin (digoxin), Parnate (tranylcypromine sulfate), and Zantac Injection (ranitidine hydrochloride) in the United States and Puerto Rico from GlaxoSmithKline.
On March 8, 2012, an affiliate of Cerberus acquired
a controlling interest in AT&T Advertising Solutions and AT&T
Interactive, which were then combined into a new entity YP Holdings LLC.
AT&T received approximately $750,000,000 million in cash, a $200 million
note and a 47-percent equity interest in YP Holdings LLC.
In January 2013, Cerberus acquired 877 stores in the Albertson's, Acme, Jewel-Osco, Shaw's, and Star Market chains from SuperValu for $100,000,000 and the assumption of $3,200,000,000 of SuperValu debt. On March 6, 2014, Cerberus followed by announcin a Definitive Merger Agreement with already owned Albertsons and Safeway.
On December 17, 2015, Cerberus Capital Management announced a $605,000,000 strategic partnership with Avon Products, Inc. in which Cerberus acquired 80% of
Avon North America and a nearly
17% stake in Avon Products, Inc.
On January 26, 2016, Cerberus owned Keane, a well completion services company agreed to acquire the majority of
Canada-based Trican Well Services Ltd.’s (TSX: TWC) U.S. assets for $247,000,000
On June 23, 2016, Cerberus aqcuired, GE Money Bank, to an affiliate of Cerberus Capital Management.
On July 1, 2016, Cerberus Capital Management acquired ABC Group
In February 2018, Cerberus acquired HSH Nordbank.
And this isn't all. Cerberus has its hands, or paws, in everything. It bought Bayer's plasma products business. It acquired a paper business and Georgia Pacific's distribution and building products division. It has an interest in Portuguese airlines. It's a large government services contractor to the U.S. government. As noted above, its in the grocery business..
And its It's in the transportation industry.
In fact, and instructive in this story, it and 100 other investors purchased an 80% interest in Chrysler in 2007 for $7,400,000,000. Of course, Chrysler, along with General Motors, went bankrupt in 2009. As part of that bankruptcy, Cerberus, in exchange for the government buyout that then occurred, gave up its interest in Chrysler. Don't cry for them, however, they ultimately recovered nearly all they had invested in the company through various financial arrangements.
So what do these things have to do with Remington?
Well, quite a lot in my view.
A quite a lot with the American economy as well.
Cerberus doesn't make anything, in a definitive sense. It buys and sells other entities that make things. Cerberus has no interest in the firearms industry, or the automobile industry, in a concrete fashion. They're interested in the money those entities make and they buy them in hopes of maximizing on that, or sell them for the same reason.
And that's wrong.
Cerberus is a type of entity that really shouldn't exist. They don't exist in order to manufacture anything, they exist in the hopes that what they buy will do well and they'll make money that way, or they hope to sell when its advantageous. They're all about money.
And they're into everything that seems likely to make money. The three headed dog is at the grocery store and in the sporting goods store.
And that's the problem with what the American economy has become. It's all about making money.
Oh, John Sherman, where are you now?
John Sherman, author of the Sherman Anti Trust Act and lesser known brother of William Tecumseh Sherman.
John Sherman?
Yes, John Sherman, who gave the country the Sherman Anti Trust Act. A powerful bill that seems to have fallen into disuse recently and which, in my view, ought to be sued to chop two of Cerberus' three heads off and pull all the teeth out of the remaining one.
Oh my. How anti business.
No, not so much. Pro business really.
Now making money is fine. But the truth of the matters is that, except for a really sick person, making money to make money isn't very satisfying. Being poor is bad, but all the data suggest that being really rich doesn't make a person that much happier after a certain point is reached in the Middle Class. Being free from want is one thing. Being obsessed with money is quite another. And an outfit like Cerberus is about nothing but money.
But companies actually tend to be about something else.
Remington Firearms was about sporting arms for the most part. Yes, it made military arms, but that was never its focus and it sometimes actually avoided making them. But in the hands of those who lost sight of that it lost its way. By acquiring Bushmaster and folding Bushmaster into it, a specialty AR manufacturer took over and started to taint Remington. Remington began to incorporate AR type rifles into its sporting line and thereby actually compete against itself and damage its own product line. By picking up Para Ordinance it entered the field of pistol production with a pistol that was already widely manufactures (just like the AR was) by other competitors. By picking up Marlin it acquired a manufacturer whose reputation, which was very good, was based in no small part on a rifle whose design had long been in the public domain and which they could have made without acquiring Marlin, if they really needed. All adding Marlin really did was to give it another production line to compete against itself in a certain area of centerfire hunting rifle and also against itself in the .22 LR product line.
So the story is, it would seem, that once companies become nothing more than trinkets for investment holding companies, they are doomed.
Or at least they are doomed if they occupy a distinct place in the economy.
And what are these holding companies anyhow? It's perfectly obvious that a company like Cerberus plays no really useful role in our economy, for the most part, and operates sort of like a pack of ravens, circling above the economic highway and coming down to feast on things that get hit there.
Or maybe an analogy to wolves would be better.
At any rate, no company can possibly have that much of an informed interest in anything, and for that reason, their role is ultimately always destructive to the larger economy in general. No economy really needs outfits like Cerberus. An economy needs investors, but it doesn't need that kind or anything even approaching that kind. What Remington needed was ownership that knew the product. Cerberus thought it knew the market, and it apparently thought, or allowed the management of Remington to think, that market was ARs. But it wasn't.
So, Remington is bankruptcy. Let's hope a result of that its that Cerberus has to shed Remington, but without the soft pillow that was there when it shed Chrysler. And let's hope that Remington and Marline are separated. Maybe even H&R can come back. Bushmaster should continue on, but as its own company as well, just as it was back in the day.
So let's talk about Chrysler.
Eh? I thought this was about Remington?
It is, but also about economics and outfits like Cerberus. And so that takes us to Chrysler.
Dodge Brothers trucks. Dodge didn't become part of Chrysler until 1928, after this 1920 photographs was taken.
Now, consolidation in the automobile industry is nothing new. In the 1920s there were a zillion American automobile manufacturers. Even during the Great Depression, which drove a lot of them out of business, there were more than there are now. And every current automobile manufacturer is a conglomeration of several prior companies. Every single one.
But what they were, for a long time, is a conglomeration of automobile manufacturing companies, just like I said. Chrysler, however, has had a unique recently history. In the 1980s and 1990s it both bought and was bought by European automobile manufacturers and it ended up being owned by Daimler, the giant German manufacturer. Daimler, famous for Mercedes amongst other things, seemed like an ideal owners given its long history of manufacturing diesel vehicles, a Chrysler strong point, but in fact Daimler could never figure out what to do with Chrysler.
In 2007 Daimler sold Chrysler to Cerberus, while retaining a 20% ownership in the company. It didn't own it long, however, as the 2008 economic crisis pushed General Motors and Chrysler to the edge of bankruptcy and special bankruptcies ended up being crated for both. Chrysler, in that process, shed a lot of its debt and emerged as a new company, free of Cerberus and Daimler. In the process Fiat bought the company, and like Daimler, has been struggling to figure out what to do with it. In the whole process Cerberus voluntarily gave up its share of Chrysler to the Federal government but retained its auto financing division.
Now, a person wouldn't think that was a big deal, but it really is. Cerberus went on to sell that to another entity and made up all the money that it otherwise would have lost. They came out, therefore, okay.
Well, so what.
Well, just this. Cerberus is good at making money, it seems, but it doesn't make anything. Big finance is a necessary part of industry, but is this sort of finance really good for the economy? Would lending from large banks and financial institutions make more sense? I submit that it would. Buying and selling these entities for profit generates that, but it doesn't necessarily generate longevity the same way that industries concerned about their industry would.
Okay, what about that whole line. You know, the one Justice Stevens brought up. Assuming that the US military isn't going to attempt a coup, as after all it hasn't for over 200 years, and assuming that the government isn't going to misuse the military in a dictatorial way, which it hasn't ever done, can't we assume at this point that the government. . .well it'd have to be governments given the incorporation of the Second Amendment by the Fourteenth, can protect everyone well enough that we don't really need a right to keep and bear arms anymore?
Police in a SWAT team, in this case actually Air Force APs in a SWAT team. Ironically, these USAF APs are donning less in the way of combat gear and apparel than a lot of modern police forces do. This police force is militarized by default, but do we really want a country with a huge amount of police, and militarized police at that?
In other words, was John Paul Stevens correct, historically? Basically what he was saying, was, well sure, when there was a legitimate fear that Congress would do away with state militias and co-opt 100% of the armed forces in the United States there was a real risk that there'd be a dictatorship that would come in, but that's not a risk now. The military isn't going to be used by the government to depose state sovereignty and the military itself isn't going to engage in a coup. There isn't going to be a Seven Days In May, Dr. Strangelove, Manchurian Candidate or Fail Safe event, in other words*
Well, starting with those assumptions and Stevens statement, let's assume something else. If there was no Second Amendment, state and Federal governments would in fact restrict the right to keep and bear arms.
No, they likely wouldn't take all the firearms away. Even nations with heavy restrictions don't do that. Contrary to the purveyor of Facebook memes, for example, people can and do own guns in Japan. You can own military style semi automatics in quite a few countries (most notably those with strong democratic habits). You can own handguns in quite a few more. So it wouldn't be the case that everything would be taken away.**
But there would certainly be a lot more restrictions than there currently are, no doubt. And a lot of those restrictive provisions would be drafted by people who are completely clueless about firearms at that.
And with history being our guide, we can presume that once the restrictions starts they just keep rolling. The UK didn't have any meaningful firearms restrictions until after World War One and they were very mild until after World War Two. Now their restrictions are severe and have gone far beyond any rational relationship to any threat of violence the nation's citizens actually faced. That's the typical pattern. As regulations are drafted by those who seek to restrict, rather than those who seek to use, that's the natural trend line. That's why no racing fan, for example, would want me to draft up regulations for stock car racing and why no football fan would turn over football regulation to me.
But setting aside the points I raised in my other posts of John Paul Steven's comments, what about the underlying point he raised. The whole worry is now past us and so we no longer need a Second Amendment.
Well, to do that, we need to grasp why we had one in the first place, and Stevens got part of that right. The states were worried about a coup and by preventing the Federal disbandment of their militias, their concern was partially alleviated.
That fear isn't quite correctly expressed, as that dimension of it was only partial. The framers didn't want a standing army as standing armies were a threat to democracy. A militia isn't a standing army, so the defense establishment of the United States was originally based on militias. Indeed, to a significant degree it remains so, in the form of the National Guard, which is a type of militia.*-* No standing army, was the thought, no threat of a coup.
But the thought was actually much more than that. No standing army meant that a future Congress or President couldn't wipe out the sovereignty of the states. No standing army, no ability to occupy Connecticut. You get the point.***
But even broader than that, a militia based defense based on armed citizens let people take care of their own immediate security problems.
That had been the nation's history up until then, and it would be for quite some time after, and in recent years with the draw down of the Cold War military, it's become very much the case again. We'll address if it still is below. But colonial militias had been 99% of the people's protection against any threat, internal, external, native, etc., from Plymouth Colony on. Not just in the case of big wars, mind you, but also in the case of small local matters of importance. Local wars, local violence, all manners of things that required an armed defense.
And a lot of times that armed defense was exceedingly local. One Indian band that rose up. . . or one band of highwaymen that terrorized a route. Things of that type.*-*-*
But that's all gone now, right? Because you can depend on the government to handle all of this. Right?
Well. . . not so much.
Imperial Chinese walled city. In modern times, quite a few wealthier communities in the US have begun to take on this visage.
A really comfortable aspect of this argument, for people who make it, is
that's what the police are for and the police can protect you. It's
highly ironic that this argument comes in an era in which every
substantial city I've been to in recent years has walled in communities
and some have private security. People in Steven's class make this
argument but then (and I don't know about him personally) they drive
through security gates and go into what are little walled compounds,
much like Medieval cities. Most of the rest of everyone lives outside
the walls, where presumably the barbarians are.
This alone would suggest that if the police can really handle everything then the same class of people who so frequently argue that must be paranoid. No threat, no need for walls.
Or maybe there is.
Assuming that you are like most people, and you have no need of "new walls", or of your own private samurai, you might at least have something to consider.
Let's stop and talk about Samurai for a second?
Really?
Yes, really. The analogy might be more useful than it might at first appear.
In Medieval Japan, samurai were basically self employed. That is, they attached themselves to an employer, and were fiercely loyal to that employer.
They were also the only class that was allowed to own military arms.
Now, that should be disturbing.
In Steven's future United States I'm quite confident that the folks who guard gated communities would fit into some exception where they'd get to carry arms. Private security, I'm sure, would get a pass, employed by the rich as they would be. The rich and industry for that matter.
Are you disturbed yet? Well if not, you are a trusting soul indeed.
Shades of 1688 there.
Indeed, not only did that not work well in Japan, it didn't work well in the United States, and we have plenty of evidence of that.
Some of that evidence is from my very own backyard. The Wyoming Stock Growers Association, in the late 19th Century, employed range detectives who were indeed armed. Of course everyone was armed, but they, even as privately employed men, were given the power of arrest, which was perfectly legal (railroad detectives, also privately employed, retain that right today). And it is pretty clear that right was abused in Wyoming.
Indeed the Stock Growers Association came so comfortable with the use of force it used it on a massive scale, the Johnson County War, which was halted by private citizens somewhat under the leadership of the Johnson County Sheriff's Office. Armed on their own, they intervened to stop a private army.
And this isn't the only example of this in the United States. If you don't like 19th Century examples, take 20th Century ones. The armed police of coal companies back in Pennsylvania. . . the armed police of mining entities in Ludlow Colorado (augmented by the Colorado National Guard, as luck would have it). . . the armed employees of mining companies in New Mexico that expelled IWW strikers. . . examples aren't hard to find. And you can find them at least up until the mid 20th Century.
Not so much since then, to be sure, but since then we haven't exactly had an industry and private monopoly on force and we've had a really open and quick press. Do you trust the rich, well connected and powerful so much that you figure that era is truly past us if there's a monopoly on force.
Tom Horn. . . an armed industry assassin of the 20th Century.
But let's go the next step, having explored that, how much of a danger in everyday life, leaving aside a nightmarish private police force future, in the current real life world of today?
This is where I'll be frankly I've tended to dismiss many on the most extreme pro gun part of this argument. Indeed, I've done it just recently where I argued that Americans shouldn't really go around pretending that the Battle of Stalingrad is going to break out in their neighborhoods. And they shouldn't. But that doesn't mean that all Americans lead a threat free life by any means. And it also doesn't mean that the police can really protect everyone either.
German lieutenants in Stalingrad. . . these guys probably aren't coming to your neighborhood.
So let's be frank about the police. The long time motto, often unofficial, of police forces in the US used to be "To protect and serve". And while I've criticized the police here a lot, that's what they try to do. But to really believe that the police can protect 100% of all people all the time is frankly just flat out absurd. Plain resort to the news will show that as often police's role starts after a crime is committed.
Now, crime is going down in the US, dramatically, particularly violent crime, and I've already addressed that more than once. But is that because we have a lot more policemen in the country than we used to?
I don't think so.
It's probably simply going down for demographic reasons. Gun advocates will say that the reduction of gun control has played a role in that, and there's at least some evidence that is in fact true. What clearly isn't the case is that more gun control reduces crime nor does anyone ever seem to think that if they pass gun control laws they need to dramatically increase the number of police.
And dramatically increasing the number of policemen in the country would be what would really be necessary to make any kind of impact in this area. The increase would have to be enormous. It'd have to reach the point where every public building had an armed police force and every building generally open to the public. Can we imagine a country in which there's be two or three policemen at every popular bar and restaurant? I doubt it.
And we wouldn't want that because at some point that very sort of police protection becomes part of the very thing that the framers were in fact worried about. You'd have a police state by default, and with that, there'd be a definite decrease in liberty and even simply a decrease in the quality of life. So that's really a non starter.
None of which means that some increase in police presence in some areas isn't warranted. It clearly is.
But by the same token some increase in private security may be warranted too, and that's actually what the denizens of those walled compounds have done, which leaves them with little room to argue. If you live in a walled development and it has private security that's armed, you in fact are living with a type of private militia, like it or not. And if you argue for significantly removing privately held firearms, you are really arguing those guys ought to go and ought to be replaced by city police. But the city isn't going to do that for you.
For the rest of us, we have to judge our exposure to risk, ourselves. Most people are never going to carry a gun and most feel they have no need to.
But is that a universal?
Now I often see what I'd regard as amusing and over dramatic, indeed paranoid, references to people who talk as if they're under constant threat. But that doesn't necessarily mean that there are no threats in the world at all. There are.
The advertisement of handguns for personal protection isn't a new phenomenon, but it did take a big break in the mid 20th Century before returning in the late 20 Century
Indeed, in my own life I've experienced things in which I needed some element of protection directly at least five times, and I don't lead a really dangerous life. Two of those times I was in fact coincidentally armed and that may have made a real difference. And this doesn't count the odd occasions in which I took up some protection for myself due to threats that related to one of my occupations, even though nothing developed.
And I'm just a regular guy.
Thinking on it, I can think of at least three other instances in which various folks I know were confronted with situations, out of the blue, in which they had to protect themselves and were armed. At least two of them were extremely severe occasions that arrived without expectation. There's no telling what would have occurred if they hadn't been armed. In two out of the three, they might have been killed on the spot.
In not one of these instances could the police have possibly been any help. The only thing they would have been able to do would have been to investigate a shooting after the fact. Not much protection, just investigation.
Stuff like this happens more than we might imagine, and in more places than we might imagine. Most of it simply goes unreported, everywhere. In none of the instances I'm personally aware of were the police ever called.
So, frankly, even in the 21st Century there are plenty of instances in which an individual resorts to arms and a crisis passes. Most of those go completely unnoticed. They wouldn't if the individual who made resort ended up badly injured or dead, but those statistics don't exist because they don't exist.
And like it or not, these things happen in Canada, Australia, the UK and France. The difference is that there, when they happen, the person who protected themselves just shuts up and moves on so as to not risk any attention at all.
Okay, that's one sort of area where Justice Stevens is probably flat out wrong in his probable assumptions, or he assumes that in a post Second Amendment United States licensure will still let this occur (although I doubt he thinks that). What about the second area? What we've talked about so far is the threat from individual actors. It's pretty clear that the police would have to be enormous to take this on. But what about that more militia like area referenced by the Second Amendment?
Well, that presupposes that what we have talked about wasn't part of the what the militia in earlier times did, which I'd argue is in error. Walled compound denizens, as I already noted, are fielding a type of mercenary militia. But let's go away from that and talk about military type threats. That is, armed bodies or single actors who are acting for an organized cause.
If you are a rancher on the southern border of the US you don't really need to get much further than this, I suspect. It's easy to dismiss this threat but if you are running cattle outside of Eagle Pass, Texas, drug and human cargo smuggling gangs are just as much of an organized armed body threatening you as ISIL ever will be. Indeed, while there's nobody who pretends these groups live an area where its legal to acquire them, they are armed with military weapons. If you are going out to check your cattle in that area, you'd be nuts not to take along a firearm.
Most Americans, of course, will never be confronted by such a threat. But we have have had a host of violence of that type spill over the border (since about 1910 actually) and we have been subject to terrorist attacks on our own soil since the 1993 Twin Towers bombing attempt. We're so disinclined to recognize these things for what they are that we forget some and discount others. They are, however, what they are. We've endured several of them within the last couple years and there's no way to believe that individuals motivated by, for example, Islam, or by sheer greed in another example, are capable of being deterred by the mere existence of a set of laws.
It'd be nice to believe that domestic intelligence sources will catch all them all before they act, but they simply will not. They probably catch more than we know. But they won't catch them all.
Now, no doubt, you are thinking that you really don't need to arm yourself against ISIL. And you likely do not. But on occasion, there are those will probably will need to, and perhaps should have done so, or just accidentally happened to be. Pretending that we can build a police state sufficient to catch every Tamerlane Tsarnaev is really engaging in a fantasy. But imagining that the response by the city of Boston was "brave" is equally fanciful. It wasn't. It was a disarmed response however.
But it was also probably a response you are comfortable with if you live in West Roxbury. If you live in the Southside. . . well not so much.
*Of interest, while such an event seems so extraordinarily far fetched, even in modern times, let's say post World War Two, democracies have been occasionally pronto to such risks or even actual events. Both the Greek and Turkish states have fallen repeatedly to coups, although Greece seems to have gotten past it. Turkey hasn't, in that its' undergoing a massive reversal of its democratic fortunes through its chief executive right now.
Russia has certainly seen its democratic fortunes reversed and is now ruled by a strong man, by way of another example. But even the United Kingdom was subject to some serious thought of a coup attempt in the 1970s, oddly enough, by some members of its establishment. The moment came and went without action, but it did in fact occur.
**And contrary to what some seem to think, there are some countries in the world with strong "gun cultures" other than the United States. Switzerland being a prime example.
*-*State Guards units are also organized militia forces in some states, but not all. Like the National Guard, they receive Federal funding, but only some.
State Guard units have an interesting history as they were in some ways a protest over the Dick Act, which some states opposed on the basis that they didn't want the state militias so closely aligned with the U.S. Army following that 1903 act. It was also part of a slow boiling New England movement that dated back to the Mexican War in which those states were really unhappy with their militia units being called up for unpopular foreign wars. The Philippine Insurrection may have been the boiling point on that and so by World War One some states were maintaining two militia establishments. Most states only did this during wartime as the National Guard needed to be replaced while mobilized. Its come back into popularity, particularly along the Mexican border, in recent years.
Quite a few states by law regarded every male over sixteen years of age and under some older age, typically sixty, as members of their states militia. The power to mobilize this group of men is exceedingly rarely exercised.
***And they had real experience with just such a thing. The right to keep and bear arms wasn't something that had been simply thought up by Congress. As is sometimes noted, the same right appeared in some state constitutions. More than that, however, it had been a feature of the English Bill of Rights, which the English seem to have now forgotten, as had a provision limiting standing armies. Those provisions provided that the King had violated the rights of Protestant Englishmen (Catholic Englishmen didn't get the same rights) in the following ways:
Standing Army.
By raising and keeping a Standing Army within this Kingdome in time of Peace without Consent of Parlyament and Quartering Soldiers contrary to Law.
Disarming Protestants, &c.
By causing severall good Subjects being Protestants to be disarmed at the same time when Papists were both Armed and Imployed contrary to Law.
So the following was provided:
Standing Army.
That the raising or keeping a standing Army within the Kingdome in time of Peace unlesse it be with Consent of Parlyament is against Law.
Subjects’ Arms.
That the Subjects which are Protestants may have Arms for their Defence suitable to their Conditions and as allowed by Law.
This was passed in 1688, just a little under a century prior to the American Revolution.
*-*-*In recent years its been really popular for critics of the Second Amendment to point out that in Southern states militias also were used, it's claimed, to chase runaway slaves.
I don't know how often that really happened, not often I suspect, but Southern states did worry about slave rebellions. But that wasn't the only reason they had militias by any means and this point is grossly exaggerated in that context.
On this day, in 1918, the Allies had 1,340,000 combat troops on the Western Front. The Germans, 1,569,000, a considerable German advantage.
This doesn't, of course, take into account the Austrians, now teetering on the brink of exhaustion, and heavily committed in Italy. Nonetheless, the Central Powers had a definite advantage, even if it was one that they had failed to make even greater. They could have greatly bolstered earlier, and on this day, if they were less committed in the East, irrespective of the war in the East being over. And while the United States still have only a few divisions in France their numbers were increasing every day.
By mid June, Americans arriving in France would boost Allied numbers to the point where it intersected with German combat losses for a German Army that was heavily drained by the German Spring Offensive. And the Germans would decline every month thereafter. The Allies would peak out in September and then decline themselves, but still retain a huge advantage over a much depleted Germany.
The Spring Offensive followed by the 100 Days Offensive.
American troops were being deployed in less active sectors by this time. I'm not sure why, but my guess it was to free up experiencd French troops and to give them some combat experience at the same time.
Gustav Adolf Joachim Rüdiger Graf von der Goltz, German infantry commander. He'd remain in the region until June 1919, leading elements of the Freikorps that were very closely connected with Germany against the Reds, and others, in Finland, Latvia and Estonia.
The Finnish parliament had been driving out of Helsinki by Finnish reds. That resulted in its request for German assistance. Accordingly, on this day in 1918 German troops landed on the Finnish mainland and would soon commence advancing on Helsinki. The German force consisted of the : 95. Reserve Infantry Brigade and 2. Guards Cavalry Brigade, augmented by additional German support, naval and artillery forces. About 10,000 troops in all.
This demonstrates how the Germans remained capable of being diverted at the same time they were suffering devastating losses in the West. Perhaps this commitment made more sense, however, in that Finland falling to the Reds would have been a disaster for the Germans, and ironically the world as well.
Which shows us how complicated things had become by this point. The Germans would actually fight on in the region after World War One ended, with troops who had volunteered to do so in a thin guise of their being Freikorps. Things were, by this point, really confused.
John Paul Stevens is hardly the first person to suggest repealing the Second Amendment of the Untied States Constitution and he's not even the first person to opine as to that in the New York Times. Heck, he's not even the first person named Stephens/Stevens to do so. Bret Stephens wrote an op-ed captioned that in the Times in 2017. But Stevens very short editorial (it's so short, it's more in the nature of a typical letter to the editor) is different in that Stephens was a United States Supreme Court Justice. And that should give us pause, but not for the reason that he likely things it should. It should give us pause for this statement contained within it:
Concern that a national standing army might pose a threat to the
security of the separate states led to the adoption of that amendment,
which provides that “a well regulated militia, being necessary to the
security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms,
shall not be infringed.” Today that concern is a relic of the 18th
century.
Stevens short article contains more than that. Indeed a lot of the text is taken up by an argument that not until the Heller decision was any individual right recognized. This is disturbing in and of itself as Stevens should be well aware that up until very recently very few Second Amendment cases made it up to the Supreme Court, indeed its still the case that that very, very few do, and that was because the Supreme Court avoided the amendment like the plague. It likely did that as there is in fact no rational way to interpret it other than that it conveys an individual right. Indeed, it very clearly restricted, originally, the United States government from passing legislation involving restrictions on the ownership of small arms and, like the rest of the Bill of Rights, there was no earthly way that it wasn't "incorporated" to similarly restrict states by the Fourteenth Amendment. Indeed, the dirty little secret of interpretation of the Second Amendment is that its exceedingly easy to do and exceedingly easy to understand what it means.
Indeed Justice Steven's implicitly admits that by the text of the paragraph set out above. While he goes on in his text about how no Court prior to Heller had held that governments couldn't restrict firearms ownership, he then admits that the very purpose of the Second Amendment, from the very onset, was to do just that.
And he's at least partially correct in his position. The framers of the Constitution, with very good reason, feared standing armies and feared that if there was one some future government would use it to destroy the independence of the states, and maybe democracy in the nation itself. There's small chance of that today, Stephens asserts, so there's no need for the Second Amendment.
Indeed, he's implying there's no chance of that today.
And that's where Patrician Stevens is massively incorrect.
There may well indeed be no or little chance of a future government or President using the Army to effect a coup. Indeed, the closest we've come to a coup of any type was the Obergefell decision which was a species of judicial coup as it was not even close to being supported by the law. Stevens had no role, as he was retired by that time, in that case, but that event provides the most notable example of a governmental entity seizing power in a significant way. And that takes us to our next point.
Stevens assumes that we're past an age when the government is a threat to the states in any fashion, or by extension to the people. So he's comfortable with, and is in fact urging, that a right be surrendered as unneeded. Don't worry, he's saying the government will protect you.
For what its' worth, the concept of keeping and bearing arms was not unique to the United States at the the time the Constitution was adopted. It was in fact an English common law right, as long as you weren't Catholic. Catholics were deprived of that right, but then they were also deprived of the right to freely exercise their religion as well, and that takes us to the greater point.
Rights exist as they're rights. Once a person feels that rights can be surrendered as the government will take care of them, they convert themselves into a ward of the state. This is the very thing that Jefferson predicted would happen to the American nation once it became largely urban, as he felt that urban people couldn't sustain a democracy as they were always wards of a nanny state that gave them things. And this in fact what occurred, during Jefferson's own lifetime, in France, which went from being a monarchy, to a republic, to a dictatorship with a "benevolent" dictator the French still admire in very short order.
If we can trust the government to protect us at all times (and more on that in a moment) and therefore we need no longer have any right to do so ourselves, then we should also be able to trust the government with information.
Does anyone?
That is, if a benevolent and loving government will protect our persons, wouldn't it always tell the truth? So whatever a government says about another nation, it's leader, global warming, various dangers, the need for war or peace, well. . . you can trust them, right?
So there ought to be no need for freedom of speech or the press either. Indeed, just think of how much more peaceful the world would be if I only had to get the "news" from the official government spokesman.
Would Stevens accept that?
Indeed, would he accept everything said by President Trump as truthful? He should. He trust the government to always do right and protect us.
By the same token, we surely should do away with the 4th Amendment protection from unreasonable search and seizures. A government that wants to protect us would never make an unreasonable seach, just reasonable ones, wouldn't it?
Indeed, why have trials by jury? Or even really trials at all? If the government, which we trusts so completely and fully with our welfare, is so benevolent at all times that we need always trust it, it's not going to accuse anyone falsely. It's kind and protecting officers would never make a false accusation, or perhaps even simply an inaccurate one.
Rights exist for a reason and the moment you begin to compromise on one, you compromise on them all. The examples to that effect are too plain to ignore. But perhaps to Stevens, with his very long career in the government, that's not plain. Indeed, it's rarely the case that members of any one class or occupation feel themselves to be in the wrong as a group.
Trust us. Nearly any body says that.
Or trust in yourself and keep your rights. That may be the better, if more intellectually difficult, as then you have responsibility, option.
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.
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.
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.
Today In Wyoming's History: April 1: 1918 It was reported that by this day, for a period dating back to December 1, 1917, Wyoming's revenue's from oil royalties had increased 74%, an impact, no doubt, of World War One.
