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Sunday, June 19, 2016

Miscellany: 6/19/16

Quote of the Day
Beauty, truth, friendship, love, creation
these are the great values of life. 
We can't prove them, 
or explain them, 
yet they are the most stable things in our lives.
Jesse Herman Holmes

Tweet of the Day
Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT)'s Awesome FB Rant on the Gun Restriction Filibuster

I think most faithful readers know or infer my blog conventions: in Facebook threads, blue type is a posted item description,  fonts like my QOTD for an antagonist point of view, and my comments are in red or black type. (The red goes back to my teaching days of evaluating student work.) For longer extracts, I often use italics and/or indented/margins. So the passage below is Sen. Lee's work and not my own.

United States Senator Mike Lee

One might hope that after the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11, Democrats would get serious about protecting Americans from ISIS. But instead of uniting with Republicans to identify common ground in the fight against terrorism, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) launched a 15-hour filibuster Wednesday demanding an end to what he called the “gun show loophole.”
Now Murphy was honest enough to admit that the Orlando shooter did pass a background check, but then Murphy went on to say:
“Let's say that the Orlando shooter was on a list that prohibited him from buying a weapon and he went to a store and was denied that AR-15-style weapon because he was on that list. But all he would have to do is go to a weekend gun show or go online, and he would be able to get that weapon without a background check.”
This is just plain false. There is no such thing as a “gun show” or “online” loophole to federal background check requirements. Federal law does not care where or when a gun transaction happens, only who is involved in that transaction.
So if you go to a “weekend gun show” and buy a gun from one of the many licensed gun dealers there, you will still have to undergo a background check. Same if you buy a gun online.
What matters is who is selling the gun and how often they sell them. If you sell your friends or neighbors an occasional firearm, you don’t need to conduct a background check. But if you are “engaged in the business” of selling firearms, then you do need to administer a background check on every sale.
And that wasn’t the only tall tale Murphy told. Murphy also claimed that: "AR-15-style weapons weren't legal in the United States until 2004 after being banned for 10 years. It is not coincidental that there was a massive increase in mass shootings in this country after 2004.”
Again, this is just plain false. According to Northeastern University criminology professor James Alan Fox there were about 18 mass shooting a year in the two decades before the assault weapons ban, 19 mass shootings a year in the decade during the assault weapons ban, and 21 mass shooting a year after the ban.
Murphy’s post-assault-weapons-ban shooting spike is pure myth.
Finally, Murphy also claimed, “in States that have imposed those reasonable limitations” on guns “there are less gun crimes. There are less homicides.”
This is also false. While it is true that states with more guns do have more “gun deaths,” once you remove suicides from the equation, the correlation disappears. When you look at just “gun crimes” and “homicides” strict gun control laws have no effect.
Emotions are always high after a deadly attack. Americans want to do something to stop the pain.
But acting on emotion, and not facts, is terrible public policy and a danger to all of our constitutional rights.

 Rush Limbaugh On Countering Violent Extremism



More On Sweden

You may want to revisit the Norberg video I posted earlier this weekend. The reporter in this clip is trying to hype Swedish national healthcare, and he's implicitly referencing the national progressive "smarter spending" catchphrase. In particular,, Norberg specifically pointed out that other countries, including Sweden, freeload off American medical innovation.



Choose Life: Adding To the Family






Political Cartoon

Courtesy of Chip Bok via Townhall
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Vocalists

Whitney Houston (with CeCe Winans), "Count On Me"

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