At Ricochet, Son of Spengler notes that the more Obama and other democrats attack private ownership of firearms the more gun sales occur and stocks of firearm manufacturers shoot upward.

[This effect] is driven by a fundamental paradox of gun control: In their push to restrict access to firearms, the president and his allies are unintentionally highlighting the government’s failure to maintain public safety. …

Ironically, the more the White House insists we are unsafe, the more apparent it becomes that we are exposed. If our leaders are unable (or unwilling) to distinguish the obvious sources of recent gun violence — terrorism, mental illness, gang violence, inner-city lawlessness — then there is no way the government can effectively protect us from those threats. Indeed, the White House’s obsession with guns raises legitimate questions about governmental competence. A government distracted by red herrings will be incapable of fulfilling its mission to protect its citizenry from real threats.

So, as our government falls down on the job, the mature and rational course of action is to take responsibility for one’s own self-protection. In no small part, that means buying a gun and learning how to use it.

Uh-oh! Red State reported yesterday that the FBI is now investigating Hillary, not only for security violations, but for corruption.

This was sort of inevitable. No sentient being ever saw the Clinton Foundation as anything other than a way to provide the Clintons with tax free income. No one ever thought that the Clintons and their inner circle were not enriching themselves by trading on Hillary’s position as Secretary of State. In fact, it is my contention that a significant number of the 1300+ classified emails held on Hillary Clinton’s private email server were US government information that was being used as currency to enrich Sid Blumenthal, his deceased crony Tyler Drumheller, and others.

Read the whole thing.

Bringing Hillary down would be a gigantic feather in James Comey’s cap, and Comey is pretty much as ruthless and unethical as she is. I’d say that, this time, Hillary may be in for big trouble.

Colonel Townsend Whelen (1877-1961)

At their April 2-3 auction, Amoskeag will be selling seven more rifles previously owned the greatest gun writer of the first portion of the last century, Townsend Whelen. Full descriptions are not yet available.

The rumor on Internet gun discussion groups is that these rifles are part of the ongoing residue of Mark Benenson‘s astounding collection.

Townsend Whelen’s Griffin & Howe Springfield

Anthony Burgess, author of Clockwork Orange, resident in 1973 in Rome, was overdue in supplying “a thinkpiece” commissioned by Rolling Stone, and wrote his editor (Hunter S. Thompson) offering to submit a 50,000-word novella he’d just finished on the condition humaine instead. Thompson replied thusly:

Hat tip to David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye.

Juan Bautista Alberdi 1810-1853

“Juan Bautista Alberdi sostenía que la Libertad produce en el hombre de a pie la angustia de la responsabilidad y por eso añora la monarquía absoluta, donde no debía decidir. Y al morir el Antiguo Régimen, se volcaba hacia el socialismo. Lo vio con 100 años de antelación.”

[Juan Bautista Alberdi argued that Liberty produces in the common man the anguish of responsibility and he therefore yearns for an absolute monarchy and no obligation to decide. Thus the death of the Ancien Regime spills over into Socialism. He saw a hundred years ahead.]

Bob Henderson lost more money in 2008 than I did, and he seems to have learned a few things about the limits of the calculative powers of human reason. A model is only a model.

I’d lost almost $200 million in October. November wasn’t looking any better.

It was 2008, after the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy. Markets were in turmoil. Banks were failing left and right. I worked at a major investment bank, and while I didn’t think the disastrous deal I’d done would cause its collapse, my losses were quickly decimating its commodities profits for the year, along with the potential pay of my more profitable colleagues. I thought my career could be over. I’d already started to feel those other traders and salespeople keeping their distance, as if I’d contracted a disease.

I landed in London on the morning of November 4, having flown overnight from New York. I was a derivatives trader, but also the supervisor of the bank’s oil options trading team, about a dozen guys split between Singapore, London, and New York. Until this point I’d managed the deal almost entirely on my own, making the decisions that led to where I … we … were now. But after a black cab ride from Heathrow to our Canary Wharf office, I got the guys off the trading floor and into a windowless conference room and confessed: I’d tried everything, but the deal was still hemorrhaging cash. Even worse, it was sprouting new and thorny risks outside my area of expertise. In any case, the world was changing so quickly that my area of expertise was fast becoming obsolete. I pleaded for everyone to pitch in. I said I was open to any ideas.