A Gun Ban That Makes No Sense

What the heck is this?

The regulations range from new restrictions on high-powered pistols to gun storage requirements. Chief among them is a renewed effort to keep guns out of the hands of people who are mentally unstable or have been convicted of domestic abuse.... Aside from these issues, some gun rights advocates have also raised concerns about upcoming ATF rules that would require gun dealers to report gun thefts, provide gun storage and safety devices, and place restrictions on high-powered pistols, among other things.

'High-powered' pistols? I'm guessing this means pistols powerful enough to overcome Level III ballistic armor, or possibly even IIIA. The same logic would seem to require us to ban all rifles. However, these handguns aren't going to be fielded by professional criminals in any numbers. They just aren't well suited to crime.

Consider the Ruger Vaquero, which is a single-action cowboy gun like the ones Colt used to make back in the 19th century except for the incorporation of modern safety features, such as those designed to prevent accidental discharges. It's perhaps the least likely firearm in the world to cause accidental harm.

It's a firearm almost uniquely unsuited to crime. It only holds six rounds. It's extremely slow to reload as you have to reload each round one by one. Not only does it only fire one round per pull of the trigger, you have to manually cock the hammer before it will fire even that one round. I favor it because, if you're riding a horse and get thrown, or a motorcycle and are involved in a wreck, it's physically impossible for it to fire on impact.

Can it defeat body armor? Well, it depends on the ammunition you put in it. Because it's made out of modern cold-rolled steel, and because it is built strong and sturdy for safety reasons, it can handle very high pressures. Thus, it can fire +P or even +P+ ammunition in the magnum ranges.

If you really wanted to overcome body armor with it, you can buy these cartridges. Almost no one does, even among the relatively small part of the gun-owning community that shoots .45 Long Colt (as opposed to the very common .45 Automatic Colt Pistol, a much smaller and less powerful cartridge made for semiautomatic handguns). This round is hard cast and features +P force. It is designed for penetration.

Should we ban the ammunition, then? Well, no. It's not designed for anti-personnel use, you see. It has far too much penetration to be of much good against a human target. All that force will pass through the body and be wasted on the other side. Body armor or not, it's not very likely to kill a man because it won't dump much energy inside his body and it won't expand in his body.

What this ammunition is designed for is the biggest of North American big game. I own some because I take my family hiking in bear country -- I'm just about to go out to Wyoming, where one encounters grizzly bear and moose (who are even more aggressive than grizzlies).

Usually gun-control advocates go after cheaply made firearms that will blow up in your hand, but whose cheapness means that they can be found in large quantities in America's poorer neighborhoods. Or they go after firearms that fire rapidly, or that have large quantities of ammunition before they must be reloaded. Or they go after firearms that are regularly used by criminals, or at least in theory are particularly suited to criminal activity.

This class of firearms would seem to me to be the least likely class to satisfy any of those requirements. Who came up with this idea?

The Late Beau Biden

Condolences to the family of the Vice President on the death of their son, Beau Biden, formerly Captain Biden of the United States Army.

Biden’s unit was activated to deploy to Iraq on October 3, 2008, and sent to Fort Bliss, Texas, for pre-deployment training, the day after his father participated in the 2008 presidential campaign’s only vice presidential debate. His father was on the record as saying, “I don’t want him going. But I tell you what, I don’t want my grandson or my granddaughters going back in 15 years, and so how we leave makes a big difference.”

The caption on the second photo says "Beau Biden in Iraq," but I never saw any part of Iraq with grass and trees like that.

The young gentleman died of brain cancer, at the age of 46. I extend my sympathies in particular to the Vice President, who has buried more than one of his children.

The line-up

Jonah Goldberg and Kevin Williamson want to add a couple more.

Ranger School Update

Ranger School is really hard. The Darby phase is still pretty early in the training.

At the end of Darby phase your squad will evaluate your efforts within the squad and someone has to be last, just as someone has to be first. Ranger candidates will explain to RI’s how the members of the squad are when they think no one is looking: This one of the most important parts of Ranger School. It is set up specifically to challenge the weak link and to see if that link strengthens or if it breaks. By the time the RI’s decide your fate at the end of Darby phase, people begin to question their reasons for being there.

This is where people start to miss home, talk about how their families need them or how they have to quit in order to go to combat with their unit. These candidates have yet to walk mount Yonah, pass the knot test, or conquer the nighttime descents of mountaineering. They have yet to enter the copper head inhabited Yellow river of Florida where alligators will swim next to their zodiac or have upward facing tree stumps ravage their legs as their bodies battle hyperthermia. On average, about 45 percent of Ranger School students will graduate.

Yet it is the Darby phase that has defeated all of the female candidates in the one-time trial program to introduce women to Ranger School. Eight of them were recycled, but they have all failed again. Of these, two will be permitted to retry a third time. That sets the maximum success rate for the Darby phase at 10% for the female candidates, if those two manage to do on the third try what they have twice failed to do. And that just gets them to the Mountain phase at Frank D. Merrill.

The Havok Journal celebrates this, not out of disdain for the women, but because it means the standards have not been lowered. High standards in an elite combat unit save lives on the battlefield.

Others feel otherwise.

But there is another opinion quietly being voiced as well: that Ranger School is more akin to a rite of passage – an opportunity for men to “thump their chest,” as one Ranger puts it – than a realistic preparation for leading in war. That women can actually make Ranger units more effective. And that the standards that keep them out are outdated....

The question, he adds, is: Are these standards a fair measure of the challenges of combat?

Dempsey recalls being in violent Kunar province in Afghanistan and hiking up to the rugged Pakistan border. Along for the mission was a male first sergeant who was also a Ranger-tabbed Golden Gloves boxer. The unit had to stop for the first sergeant because he needed to rest during the strenuous march.

“No one’s going to say that the first sergeant is a deadbeat. We need him, and we’re just going to take a break.”

On other occasions, he adds, the combat patrols would simply make the decision not to bring along their heavy packs.

“The equipment we carry is just insane,” Amerine says. “We all have back injuries at the end of our careers.”

The No. 1 Department of Veterans Affairs claim – made by 58 percent of all claimants – is muscular-skeletal injuries.

“If we really are serious about integrating the force, the equipment we carry is going to be one of the things we have to have a hard conversation about,” Amerine says. “It’s in our grasp technologically to make things a lot lighter.”

That doesn't sound like an argument that the standard is outdated, but that until we make huge changes in how we outfit our troops the standard points to a very real issue. If it's already a huge problem even for men, and we haven't yet made things any lighter, why wouldn't the ruck march at Ranger School be a practical test? First Sergeant's an E-8, so he's probably in his thirties somewhere. At one time he was able to make the ruck march. As a Golden Gloves guy he was at one time in fantastic shape. As an NCO in an infantry unit, he's kept himself in at least pretty good shape for a thirty-something. If even this guy is having trouble later in his career, and back injury rates are so high across the force, why would we think that people more prone to such injuries (and other allied injuries) would be a wise addition?

We should thank everyone who participated for exploring this with us, and declare the experiment closed.

Now There's Something You Don't See Everyday

According to the monitor, the Christian fighter, a member of the minority Assyrian community, found the jihadist in the local village of Tal Shamiram.

"He took him prisoner and when he found out he was a member of IS, the Assyrian fighter beheaded him in revenge for abuses committed by the group in the region," Observatory chief Rami Abdel Rahman said.

Justification

The dog in this article is a beautiful animal.

After meeting up with Crystal, Ashlee examined the kittens, who were approximately three weeks old. The little cats were covered in fleas and were in very poor condition.

“They were just skin and bones – completely emaciated,” Ashlee recalled. “I immediately treated them for fleas and worms and then took them home. I fed them and gave them a nice warm place to sleep.”

What you mean when you say that you 'treated them for fleas and worms' is that you poisoned the fleas and the worms. In other words, we found in nature three sets of animals struggling to survive, chose one of them, and destroyed the other two for the benefit of the one.

What's the justification for that? We feel perfectly justified in doing it because we like cats (very much) more than fleas and worms. We certainly have the power to do it, so if power is its own justification -- might makes right -- then our aesthetic preferences coupled with our power are enough.

Religious folks like myself can appeal to Genesis 1, of course, but that's not going to serve as a legal justification under a regime that does not allow for the establishment of religion.

Will the EPA someday prevent us from picking up kittens and "treating" them for fleas and worms? If not, why not? Just because the aesthetic preference is so common?

An Excellent Question

Byron York: "If Hillary becomes president, who will make her obey the law?"

It appears to be the case that no one can make the President obey the law, though a united Congress can impeach him (or her, in Hillary's case). However, there's no reason to believe that Congress will unite on the point in the supermajority required.

So: no one will make her obey the law. Next question: what are the consequences of turning her loose from all legal restraints, coupled with the power invested in a President?

UPDATE: Related.

American Trains Iranian Fighter Pilots

I expect that this guy and I must know some of the same people, because I've been hearing this story too. It's certainly not implausible, given the tight ties between the Iranians and the Iraqi Security Forces right now. It would be a little surprising if there weren't infiltration by Iranian agents.

Clinton Cash

The amounts are very large.

According to Sirota’s accounting from public records, the Clinton-led State Department authorized $165 billion in sales to 20 nations that donated to the foundation. State also authorized another $151 billion in “Pentagon-brokered deals” with 16 nations that coughed up cash for the family charity. Some of the defense contractors involved also donated to the foundation, and a few of them paid big money to Bill Clinton for speeches.

The US routinely conducts arms sales to allies, but this wasn’t a case of business as usual. Comparing the three full fiscal years of Hillary’s tenure at State to the corresponding timeframe of the Bush administration’s second term, Sirota found that the State Department nearly doubled the sales to those nations, and increased the amount of Pentagon sales by 143 percent.

On the other hand, it is possible to push this point too far.

Sirota notes that the Clinton Foundation took cash from regimes like Saudi Arabia, Oman, Algeria, and Hamas’s diplomatic ally Qatar while approving large arms sales. The Israelis objected strenuously to a $29 billion arms sale to the Saudis, and even Clinton warned about their lack of cooperation on counterterrorism strategy. Qatari cooperation against terrorism was “considered to be the worst in the region,” Hillary also declared in internal memos exposed by Wikileaks years later.

Qatar is also a key US ally, and the home of US Central Command's forward-deployed headquarters. Painting them as merely Hamas's ally obscures that the picture is not as clean. They are also our diplomatic go-between when we want to talk with the Taliban. Sometimes, in diplomacy as in war, you have to work with actors whose motives are dubious from your position. Probably our motives appear dubious at times to them.

The story is powerful enough as a painting of the appearance of massive corruption and conflict of interests. Trying to make it into a 'Clintons have ties to terrorist supporters' story is too far. As a diplomat, it was her job to have ties with people who support terrorism. Sometimes diplomacy means routing them something they want. It's the nature of the business, and it's a necessary business for nations to engage in sometimes.

Eternal Punishment

Generally a sentence to punishment like this has been practically reserved to the divine, and for good reasons. Some things it would be better not to invent.

Schlock Mercenary did a bit with an AI that was trapped in isolation for "megayears."

The Problem with American Intelligence

In my experience, this author is exactly right.

Let’s be honest about what it would mean to fix the problems Morell describes. CIA officers would have to get out of protected enclaves to spot and recruit the principal agents who, in turn, could find sources within the jihadist lair. Staying “inside the wire” isn’t just ineffective, it’s dangerous...

The agency has been wary of sending case officers onto the streets in war zones without bodyguards from the paramilitary Global Response Staff. But John Maguire, a veteran of many dangerous CIA assignments, says officers traditionally understood the rubric that “you will not be captured.” Under a special training program called Case Officer Defensive Action, operatives were taught to evade surveillance and, if that failed, shoot their way out of trouble. This course was abolished, Maguire says....

For decades, the CIA and the military have tried to fix intelligence problems by relying on National Security Agency surveillance. But the jihadists have gone to school on the leaks about U.S. capabilities and learned to mask their operations. Gathering intelligence against this 21st-century jihadist adversary, paradoxically, will require the kind of old-fashioned spying and resistance operations we associate with the CIA’s founding generation in the OSS.

The British Press

They have their moments and their flaws, but they do know how to write a great headline.

Cultural Domination

An excellent paper from the English Historical Review asks, "Why did the Anglo-Saxons not become British?" (H/t: Medievalists.) The question may be of interest to us today, not merely for historical reasons, but because of our own mass immigration from very different cultures than our own: different in language, education, poverty, and so forth. What prevented the Anglo-Saxons from fading into the British culture?

The 19th century idea, which the paper considers and rejects, was that the Anglo-Saxons had simply destroyed the native population or driven it out -- rather like early Americans did with the Cherokee. We did not become Cherokees because we cleared the land of them and their civilization, and thus there was little chance that we would intermarry or become subsumed. (I'm told that, in Latin America, genocide against the native population is euphemistically called "the North American solution" to the problems their cultures still today face integrating Spanish civilization and the native ones.) The 19th century thinkers found this view plausible because of the racial theory of the day. Unlike other peoples, those descended from good Anglo-Saxon blood were of a moral character fit for self-government; and since much of moral character was thought to be carried in the blood, obviously the Anglo-Saxon bloodline must be substantially different from, say, the Welsh.

That turns out to disagree with both the historical record and the genetic one. What happened instead was that the Britons intermarried with their conquerors. Rather than the Anglo-Saxons becoming British, the British became Anglo-Saxons in those areas where the new culture could command. In regions further flung, the native culture continued to dominate in spite of intermarriage.

Importantly, then, the issue has to do with language. So why did the Anglo-Saxons not become Frenchmen after the Norman conquest, when French became the official language of court and law?

In an important sense, they did: they became "frank" and free men who were fit for the "franchise." Their old thanes became "franklins." Amusingly, the very concept of being a people whose moral character fitted them for self-government that was fielded by the 19th century scholar with pride in his Anglo-Saxon roots was a French import. It was because they were "frank" that the English were fit to be free men.

(And that of course is true, in a way: the virtues of honor and forthrightness that the Franks saw in themselves are indeed a necessary condition for sustainable self-governance. What is not true is that they are especially French virtues, or especially Anglo-Saxon ones.)

The French language didn't come to dominate in England the way that English did, however. There simply were too few of the Anglo-Normans, and they spread themselves thinner yet: they went to Scotland and became Anglo-Norman-Scots, like Robert the Bruce, whom today we think of as the very model of a Scot. They went to Ireland and became Anglo-Irish, and while today the Normans are referred to by the Irish as "the Old English," even by the day of Elizabeth I they were more Irish than the Irish themselves. They were also the locus of Irish resistance to English rule, as they were the locus of Scottish resistance to English rule. I suspect Tolkien's concept of Black Numenorians is rooted here, in spite of his own stated preference for "Anglo-Saxon" characteristics more like the Eorlings and the Hobbits than like his Numenorians. The Normans like the Numenorians went everywhere the sea would take them, conquered and intermarried, and came to be the ruling element of different and disparate peoples. In the West, they were the leaders of the defense against Sauron; in the East and Harad, they were commanders of his legions.

The lessons for today are... well, again, obvious, aren't they?

Emergency? Why Didn't We Do This All Along?

A story from our friends across the pond, who like us are trying to use their central government to reform local schools' lunch menus.

Pupils at a Bath primary may have to be fed sandwiches from the local pub as an emergency measure while the school struggles to upgrade its kitchens to comply with the expansion of the government's free school meals programme.

The Devil you say! Sandwiches from the pub? Why, it's monstrous. Could the pubs just take over feeding all the students, do you think?

I'd endorse the idea here in America, only we haven't got enough pubs. Though perhaps if they were given responsibility for feeding all the students, we might get pubs in every town....

Call your Senator!

What's a Little Anthrax Between Friends?

Oops!

Wise Advice

Elizabeth Price Foley and Naomi Schaeffer Riley agree that this behavior is problematic, and that it is an excuse:

But this idea that it doesn’t look right for a male boss to be alone with a female employee sounds like it comes straight out of Victorian England. And it’s probably just an excuse.

More likely the congressmen, like the professors I’ve spoken to, don’t want to leave themselves open to claims of sexual harassment and the lawsuits that might result.

I don't think it's an excuse at all. I think "it wouldn't look right" means that some people might think that something sexual is going on, and the point is to dispel any possibility of people coming to that conclusion. It's not just that you might harass someone sexually, it's that the two of you might be doing something perfectly consensual that violates your wedding vows or even just the spirit of the workplace. This was the advice I got from my father decades ago on how to deal with women in the work place: do it in the public eye, so that people come to understand that you never leave yourself room for anything inappropriate.

Once a sufficient bond of trust or friendship forms, of course, things can change. Still, it's hard to be friends with a superior or someone who reports to you directly, just as it was hard for a king to have friends. So the best thing, if you're dealing with someone who reports to you, might well be to deal with them only with the doors open.

The Venerable Bede

In addition to being Memorial Day, Monday was the Feast of St. Bede of England. I assume you all know his history, and its influence. You may not know how he came by the title "Venerable." No one does, really, but tradition holds:

The title Venerabilis seems to have been associated with the name of Bede within two generations after his death. There is of course no early authority for the legend repeated by Fuller of the "dunce-monk" who in composing an epitaph on Bede was at a loss to complete the line: Hac sunt in fossa Bedae . . . . ossa and who next morning found that the angels had filled the gap with the word venerabilis. The title is used by Alcuin...

...from the house of Charlemagne.

Discretion

The Libyan Adventure and 2016

It seems as if 2016 will feature former-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a prominent role. The debate over her tenure in that job is turning more and more toward the Libyan adventure, as it appears to have been her special project, and it appears to line up neatly several arguments about her corruption and incompetence. The most important aspect of the Libyan adventure, though, was that it was conducted as an exercise of pure executive power without any permission from Congress.

Clinton may have been the primary proponent in the administration of overthrowing a foreign government without consulting with the People's representatives. That she did so at the behest of a corrupt adviser who personally profited from it is bad; that the planning and execution of the adventure led to a failed state now functioning as a colony of the Daesh Caliphate is worse. The key thing, though, is the degree to which she proved to have contempt for the division of powers, or the seeking of permission from the People before taking us to war.

Had she sought a debate, I would probably have been on her side. This post is cryptic only if you do not know me: it cites Gadaffi's use of rape rooms as a tool of state policy without commentary from me. Yet the use of rape rooms as state policy was my reason for supporting the Iraq war, a fully sufficient justification for overthrowing Saddam in my opinion without regard to any questions about WMD. I wrote something very similar about Iran's use of rape in state policy. There are just reasons not to go to war in such cases, as for example if you believe you cannot win the war (for then you would be bringing about the harms of war without the hope of victory). However, if you think you can win such a war, it is always morally just to wage war against a state that uses rape as a tool of its policy. That is too deep a violation of human nature to be compatible with just government. Such governments are wicked and ought not to survive.

It ought to be most important in our consideration of her qualifications that she did not care for the limits of the law or the Constitution on such a mighty question.

We live in an hour in which we are told that democracy is the answer to political problems; and therefore, we should be interested in the great questions of the day. Yet the systems are such that, short of breaking the systems, we can have no hope of affecting the questions at issue. The law means nothing -- as we have seen in the case of the war in Libya, where the War Powers Act has proven toothless. I am in favor of that war, and indeed of a more emphatic approach to it, but the law is broken here. The administration shows no deference to the law.... It isn't right to say that we can do nothing; but I wonder if we can do anything meaningful that is also lawful. If democracy is the answer, the Stoic philosophy is of less use; we are bound to be involved, and engaged. Should we say that these matters are nothing to us? The laws are carefully crafted to keep our efforts from having an effect; and where they are not, they are ignored outright.

Democracy can ill afford another such administration. Is there no candidate for office who believes in obeying the limits of the Constitution? Are there no candidates who will feel bound by the laws they swear to enforce?

Happy Birthday, John Wayne