In 1996-1997, Australia confiscated and destroyed roughly one million semi-automatic and pump-action rifles and shotguns through a compulsory gun “buy back” program.
Daren Jonescu notes that Hillary Clinton has already openly adopted gun confiscation Australian-style as a campaign promise and evaluates the practicalities of just how such a radical and invasive policy might be implemented.
That a wide-scale confiscation program could be arranged from a purely logistical point of view is obvious, as such programs have already been successfully carried out in other nations, and far more complicated programs are administered by the U.S. federal government every day. Her reserved phraseology, then, is a bureaucratizing euphemism to mask the real problem that would make such a program difficult to “arrange” in America: resisters.
Clinton knows what every American gun control advocate knows, namely that a substantial number of Americans see their weapons as political tools of last resort. They will not relinquish their firearms at their government’s “request.” Any national confiscation program would involve many episodes of government agents — police or military — visiting citizens’ homes to search for and seize guns, against some level of resistance from gun owners. Some of these episodes would become violent, involving gunfire and bloodshed, probably on both sides, resulting in the use of increased levels of government force, and in heightened public tension in the face of these armed confrontations between private citizens and the government. …
[A] major part of the discussion on this issue, among progressives of all stripes, is the question of how, whether, or when this resistance might be reduced to “acceptable levels,” and quelled without stirring broader social upheaval. This is the question buried within the bureaucratic coldness of Hillary’s conditional clause, “if that could be arranged.”
Let us consider aloud a matter that progressives might prefer to reserve for private cocktail party conversations, namely what sort of “arrangements” would be required to make a national gun confiscation viable in the United States.
Ever since I learned about Barack Obama’s tormented childhood, I waited for the wackiness to come out. Abandoned by his black father and his white mother. Coddled and loved by his white grandparents. Trying to be white for years, then figuring out that the percentages were with playing the race card.
That man, with all of that turmoil inside him, was never going to be a healer. He was angry. You cannot be abandoned by your father and mother without being angry unless you have come to find some God in your life, which Mr. Obama clearly has not. Plus, if he were at peace, he would not have married a woman as furiously angry at her country as he did.
So, as my pal Phil said, all that counted was his unconscious agenda. We soon knew what that was: to loathe America. To apologize for America before the worst tyrants of the world, to refuse to adequately defend America. …
So, if we got policy that mirrored his inner split between white and black, between some measure of gratitude and a huge dollop of anger, we would get what we have gotten:
Policy that infuriated his nation’s friends and coddled our enemies. Policy that allowed Barry, the outsider, to attack other outsiders, especially Jews. Policy that would not stand up for the country that he basically hated, but also loved to con, and whose adoration he loved. Who does not love to be adored?
The most pristine examples: the deal with Iran that will allow the world’s most militant and dangerous country, solemnly pledged to annihilate Israel, to have nuclear weapons, even though every responsible expert warned against it.
And now, an even more perfect artifact of the hatred and split within Barack Obama. On one day last week, his fine Secretary of Defense, Ashton Carter, a genuine patriot and super smart guy, published an article in the Wall Street Journal about the absolute necessity of having a steady, reliable, predictable defense budgeting program. The article was sensible, well reasoned, and inspiring.
The very next day, the exact next day, Barack Obama vetoed the defense appropriations bill. That’s right. For the first time in recent history, the President vetoed a defense spending bill passed by a bipartisan majority in Congress.
He did it because — well, he had all kinds of nonsense reasons why he did it. But his real reason for doing it was to spit in the face of the country he is supposed to be defending and protecting. Literally as the ink is still wet on his own DOD Secretary’s words about the need for predictability in defense spending, he introduces the maximum possible uncertainty.
This is a man wrapped up in hatred and confusion and betrayal of his trust.
Self-driving cars! What could be better? Instead of hundreds of millions of individuals making individual decisions moment by moment, the experts managing the administrative state could decide what lane you’re in, how fast you travel, and –in extremis– whether you live or die. The fear is that unenlightened bitter clingers might object.
Imagine that in the not-too-distant future, you own a self-driving car. One day, while you are driving along, an unfortunate set of events causes the car to head toward a crowd of 10 people crossing the road. It cannot stop in time but it can avoid killing 10 people by steering into a wall. However, this collision would kill you, the owner and occupant. What should it do?
One way to approach this kind of problem is to act in a way that minimizes the loss of life. By this way of thinking, killing one person is better than killing 10.
But that approach may have other consequences. If fewer people buy self-driving cars because they are programmed to sacrifice their owners, then more people are likely to die because ordinary cars are involved in so many more accidents. The result is a Catch-22 situation.
I found this quoted in “Heather Mixture”, a sporting novel published in 1922 by “Klaxon” (pen name of Lt. Cmd. John Graham Bower D.S.O.). It is apparently a traditional folk song collected in North Yorkshire and published circa 1900 by Robert Blakeborough.
‘T Were a dree neet, a dree neet,
as t’ squire’s end drew nigh,
A dree neet, a dree neet,
to watch, an pray, an’ sigh.
A local sculptor, Alexander Milov, in the Ukrainian city of Yuzhne, outside Odessa, converted a statue of Lenin which was scheduled for demolition as the result of de-Communization legislation requiring the removal and demolition of all Soviet-era monuments into a statue of a figure more popular in today’s Ukraine: Darth Vader.
The Vader statue contains a router in its head, broadcasting WiFi locally.
