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Reece Terry, publisher
Opinion
Mark Boehler, editor
4 • Saturday, September 21, 2013
Corinth, Miss.
Impossibility of gun control The Navy Yard massacre won’t revive the gun debate in Congress for a simple reason: There is no gun-control agenda this side of a total ban and confiscation that would have stopped Aaron Alexis. The Toomey-Manchin bill could have passed Congress unanimously. The assaultweapons ban could still be in place. Gun-controllers could have achieved their long-ago goal of barring the private purchase of handguns. And every step of his mayhem at the Washington Navy Yard have been unimpeded. Rich would The media rushed, based Lowery on erroneous reports from National law enforcement, to place Review in his hands an AR-15, the popular rifle that has been used in mass shootings before and that an assault-weapons ban would prohibit. The front page of the New York Daily News blared “Same gun, different slay.” The newspaper’s columnist Mike Lupica worked himself into lathers of dudgeon over the offending gun. “They call semiautomatics like this sports rifles,” he fumed. “You bet. Mostly for the sport of killing innocent people, and killing them fast.” Lupica’s screed would have been absurd if an AR-15 had been the murder weapon -hundreds of thousands of them are bought annually, by people with no interest in killing innocent people -- but it wasn’t. When the Newseum has a special exhibit on the journalistic history of going off half-cocked, Mike Lupica should be an honored guest. According to law enforcement, Alexis used a shotgun in his rampage. That is a weapon, as it happens, that has been endorsed and promoted by the vice president of the United States. Joe Biden sounded like a pitchman for Remington at a Facebook town hall earlier in the year when he urged a mother concerned about safety: “Buy a shotgun, buy a shotgun.” This may be fine advice, but there should be no mistake: Shotguns are dangerous. When it comes to “the sport of killing innocent people,” almost any gun will do, especially if it is in a permissive environment where no one else is likely to be armed. This makes a hash of the conceit that the government can ban a few select guns and make shooting rampages less likely. Other common panaceas would have had no effect, either. Alexis bought his shotgun from a duly-licensed dealer, not at a gun show. He passed a federal background check with no problem. He didn’t have a high-capacity magazine. He reportedly got the handgun or handguns he may also have used in the attack after shooting a security officer. So the Navy Yard rampage demonstrates the essential sterility of the gun-control debate. It is true that James Holmes and Adam Lanza used AR-15s. But Seung-Hui Cho and Jared Loughner used 9 mm semiautomatic pistols. And Aaron Alexis used a shotgun. The common theme is that they were all deeply disturbed young men whose acts of murder had a sickening aspect of utter senselessness. The Daily News got it backward. Its headline about the Navy Yard should have read “Different gun, same slay.” Maybe this time we can have a real debate about mental illness. To this point, we’ve had a simplistically instrumental focus. It’s like seeing a madman wearing a tinfoil hat to protect himself from radio waves and thinking, “If only we could ban tinfoil ...” When Aaron Alexis called the Rhode Island police a month ago to tell them that enemies were harassing him with a microwave machine, it was clear that he was suffering paranoid delusions and needed help. But the authorities let him go his merry way, evidently to sink deeper into the madness he mistook for reality. If we had the same callous disregard masquerading as compassionate nonjudgmentalism for people suffering from Alzheimer’s, they would be sleeping in our streets and rotting in our jails. It needs to be easier to compel treatment for the mentally ill. There will be another Aaron Alexis. If we can’t predict what gun he’ll use, we already know his mental state. (Daily Corinthian columnist Rich Lowry can be reached via e-mail: comments. lowry@nationalreview.com. He is editor of the National Review.)
Prayer for today My Father in heaven, may I hear thy voice to-day. May I be quiet as I listen to thee. Above the clamor of the crowd, may I hear thee calling me. May I hear thee in my joys and in my sorrows; in my work and in my leisure. May I listen to thee oftener, that I may be familiar with thy ways. Amen.
Soviets gloat over Navy shooting We live in a vicious world. It took about one hour before the Russians started gloating about the Washington Navy Yard massacre. Alexei Pushkov, chairman of a foreign affairs committee in the Russian parliament, tweeted: “A new shootout at Navy headquarters in Washington -- a lone gunman. ... Nobody’s even surprised anymore. A clear confirmation of American exceptionalism.” The last paragraph of Vladimir Putin’s New York Times op-ed from last week claimed there is no such thing as “American exceptionalism.” Russia remains a bad country, full of internal corruption and, in its foreign policy, supportive of the worst elements on Earth. Folks like the Syrian tyrant Bashar al-Assad and the murderous mullahs in Iran can expect the full cooperation of Russia along with all the arms they can buy. Outrageous? You bet. But
the sad truth is that the United States has largely lost the moral authority to call Russia Bill out, and the O’Reilly world knows it. The O’Reilly Much of Factor America’s problem lies within. We are living in a narcissistic age in which millions of folks have withdrawn from life as we used to know it and have fabricated a false world for themselves on the Internet. Instead of experiencing life in its many natural forms, folks are now rejecting faceto-face social interaction, preferring to spend their time on machines. According to his friends, the Navy Yard killer, 34-year-old Aaron Alexis, spent almost every night playing violent video games, isolating himself from reality. Then he apparently
snapped. It will happen again. With its emphasis on abundance, the United States has become a target of intense jealousy from all over the world. Even poor Americans have conveniences many people overseas will never have. A recent study by the Census Bureau says the poorest Americans have color TVs, air conditioners, computers, cellphones -- almost every modern convenience. Poverty is a serious situation, and I don’t mean to belittle it, but here in the USA, the poor are better off than in most other places on the planet, proving that democracy and capitalism do work. But you’ll never convince the anti-American people of that. And they will seize any excuse to diminish this country. We the people are giving our foes tons of ammunition, so to speak. We continue to be a violent society, with much of the car-
nage fueled by angry young men who lacked a father while growing up. The only solution to the violence problem in America is a return to traditional parental involvement. Every elected official should encourage this. Also, the abandonment and neglect of children by their parents should have civil consequences. Who exactly is looking out for children who are ignored? The answer right now: No one. America remains a great country, a place where most people have a decent chance at a successful life if they’re honest and work hard. But we have lost our way when it comes to family matters. The bullets prove it. (Daily Corinthian columnist and veteran TV news anchor Bill O’Reilly is host of the Fox News show “The O’Reilly Factor” and author of the book “Pinheads and Patriots: Where You Stand in the Age of Obama.”)
Democrats no longer follow Obama’s agenda Presidents tend to set the agenda for their parties. Most of the party’s members of Congress tend to go along. This has been increasingly the case as Americans over the last two decades have got out of the habit of splitting their tickets and have voted, in proportions not seen since the 1940s, entirely for candidates of one party or the other. When Barack Obama first took the oath of office in January 2009, his fellow Democrats, with their large majorities in Congress, hurried to pass his key legislation. The $787 billion stimulus package was passed in February. In June, the House of Representatives passed cap-andtrade legislation intended to reduce carbon emissions. Obamacare took longer and was nearly derailed when Republican Scott Brown won the special Senate election in Massachusetts in January 2010. But in March, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Obama rallied the House of Representatives to pass it anyway. Democrats didn’t need and didn’t do much to seek Republican support. Three Republican senators voted for the stimulus. Eight House Republicans voted for cap-and-trade. Not a single Republican voted for Obamacare. The large majority of Democrats voted for all three. Some paid a political price when Democrats lost 63 House seats in November 2010. But even after
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that, almost all Democrats continued to support Obama’s positions on major issues. Michael Democratic Barone voters went along, too. The 2012 exit poll shows that 92 percent of Democrats voted for Obama. Now, suddenly, we are seeing some signs of Democratic discontent. The revelations of National Security Agency surveillance disturbed many Democratic voters and a not-inconsiderable number of Democratic senators and congressmen. This was not the change they were seeking. In the past two weeks, congressional Democrats have done more than express dismay. They have stymied two presidential initiatives on important public policies. After Obama called for a congressional authorization of the use of military force in Syria, Democrats did not line up in large numbers in support. The whip counts of various news organizations and blogs showed some Democrats opposed and many Senate Democrats and most House Democrats as uncommitted. The White House might have lined up enough to pass a resolution in the Senate. But with most House Republicans opposed, that seemed impossible in the
lower chamber. Obama’s policy turnaround might of made this academic. Perhaps the unwillingness of Democrats to accept this agenda item may have undermined the credibility of any presidential threat to use force in Syria or elsewhere. Congressional Democrats also prevented Obama from nominating the person he evidently wanted for one of the most important jobs a president can fill, chairman of the Federal Reserve. In a television interview in June, Obama signaled that current chairman Ben Bernanke would retire -- or at least not be renominated. When attacks were launched on his former economic counselor and Clinton administration treasury secretary, Lawrence Summers, Obama responded with angry defenses. His body language suggested Summers was his choice. Summers might have been confirmable in July. But there was a crescendo of opposition in left-wing blogs. Many on the feminist left endorsed Janet Yellen, currently Fed vice chairman and like Summers, an economist of genuine intellectual heft. Last week, four of the 14 Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee came out against Summers. That meant that confirmation would require the other 10 Democrats and at least a few of the 10 Republicans. You don’t have to be an
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economist of genuine intellectual heft to read those numbers. On Sunday, Summers withdrew -- or was persuaded to withdraw -from consideration. One reason for Democrats’ discontent with Obama is that he doesn’t schmooze with them. As Tip O’Neill used to say, people like to be asked. Obama doesn’t like to ask. Much more important, many Democrats have principled reasons for opposing Obama on NSA, Syria and Summers. Critics of George W. Bush’s war on terror have reason to oppose Obama on NSA and Syria. Economist populists have reason to block a Fed chairman with recent Wall Street ties who is associated with moderate Clinton policies. The danger for Obama is that he may lose his party base, as Bush did after Katrina and the Supreme Court nomination of Harriet Miers. In which case, his job approval could plummet below the current 44 percent, as Bush’s did. A president with low approval still has executive powers. But he no longer sets the agenda for his party. (Daily Corinthian columnist Michael Barone, senior political analyst for The Washington Examiner, is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Fox News Channel contributor and a co-author of The Almanac of American Politics.)
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