Author: Christopher Burg

Sincerity

President Trump is taking the issue of violence so seriously that he’s meeting with executives in the video game industry instead of winding down the country’s overseas wars:

A variety of potential actions have been discussed to limit school violence in the wake of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL last month, from the uninspired option of raising the minimum age of potential gun-buyers to President Trump’s controversial suggestion of arming teachers. But a familiar target for blame appears to be on the mind of the president, as well. In today’s White House press briefing, press secretary Sarah Sanders said that Trump would soon meet with “members of the video game industry” to see what could be discussed around “protect[ing] schools around the country.”

A lot of people are rightly poking fun at Trump for his announcement. Of course many of the same people are also angry because Trump is blaming one inanimate object, video games, instead of another inanimate object, guns. It always amazes me how people can learn only the part of a lesson that jives with their worldview.

Most Hated Person in America

There are several contestants for the coveted Most Hated Person in America award. Trump has been the likely winner for 2018 but now he faces some stiff competition:

The Broward County Sheriff’s Office has identified to Fox News the captain who, according to sources, directed responding deputies and units to “stage” or form a “perimeter” outside Stoneman Douglas High School, instead of rushing immediately into the building, as the mass shooting unfolded there.

Multiple law enforcement and official sources said the commands in the initial moments after Nikolas Cruz allegedly opened fire would go against all training which instructs first responders to “go, go, go” until the shooter is neutralized. As law enforcement arrived, the shooter’s identity and exact location were still unknown.

Multiple sources told Fox News that Captain Jan Jordan was the commanding officer on scene. In an email responding to Fox News’ request for information, a BSO spokesperson wrote, “Capt. Jordan’s radio call sign is 17S1.”

Before giving Jan all of the blame, it should be noted that this remains an allegation. I’m sure the department is desperate to throw somebody under the bus and several officers could be trying to do that with Captain Jan. Unless more information comes to light, it’s difficult to say. But this is America so individuals are guilty until proven innocent so I’m pretty sure Jan will win that coveted award regardless.

No matter how one looks at it, the Broward County Sheriff’s Office really fucked up the handling of this shooting. While it’s easy to pin the blame on a single individual, the problems in the department likely run far deeper than just one incompetent individual.

Persona Non Grata

Gun control advocates haven’t enjoyed a great deal of success in recent times. I believe part of the reason for this is that the Internet has provided us gun owners with a mechanism to voice our side of the story. It was more difficult to be heard by the masses before the Internet, especially if what you were saying didn’t agree with the views of the major media outlets. It appears that gun control advocates are finally recognizing this and are trying to return gun owners to their “proper place” where they may be seen once in a while but never truly heard:

Gun-control advocates are now pressuring Amazon, Google, AT&T, Roku, and other streaming platforms to ban NRA TV — the organization’s private channel of gun-rights advocacy and other weapons-related programming. This takes the fight against the group to a different and dangerous level. It is one thing to condemn the NRA and even to ask businesses not to work with a group that offends some people. It is quite another to silence the point of view of an organization that represents millions of Americans. If successful, the ban on NRA TV will mark a turning point not so much in the battle over gun control as in the debate over political speech and what is permissible within the public square.

It should be noted that attempts to silence NRA TV are just one effort on this front. Gun control advocates have already enjoyed some success by pushing Facebook, Google, and other major websites to curtail the voice of gun owners in many ways.

Private entities have no obligation to provide goods or services to anybody. If Facebook or Google want to ban any mention of firearms, they have a right to do so. But us gun owners are also free to create our own services, which is how we managed to get our voices heard on the Internet in the first place. Before major social media sites became a thing, gun forums, blogs, and Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channels were how us gun owners linked up with one another and put our side of the story out to the public. The nice thing about these forums and blogs is that they were owned and operated by gun owners. I’m not familiar with an IRC server expressly owned and operated by gun owners but it would have been a simple enough matter to setup such a server if needed. Today more and more gun talk is taking place on major social medias sites, which are often owned and operated by individuals who are gun control advocates. Us gun owners have migrated from our own platforms to platforms controlled by our ideological opponents and we have thus made ourselves vulnerable.

This situation can be reversed and if things continue going as they have been in recent times, will need to be reversed if us gun owners want to continue voicing our beliefs. Relying on a hostile entity is always foolish and we may want to consider reversing the trend of doing so.

When You Hire Storm Troopers to Enforce Laws

Apparently the San Francisco Police Department is hiring many of the Storm Troopers who found themselves unemployed after the Empire fell:

Authorities in San Francisco released body camera videos on Tuesday of a dramatic shootout in which police officers fired their weapons at least 65 times in 15 seconds at a murder suspect.

[…]

“Nobody was struck by gunfire during this incident. The evidence in the case so far indicates Armstrong fired two rounds from a weapon, and that seven officers fired 65 rounds from their department-issued weapons,” SFPD Commander Greg McEachern told KTVU.

65 rounds were fired and nobody was hit? That’s almost impressive.

What makes this matter funnier is that these are the people to whom gun control advocates want to give a monopoly on legal gun ownership. While any gun owners is capable of firing 65 rounds and failing to hit a target, they are at least held accountable for their actions. The officers involved in this shooting will probably face no consequences for recklessly endangering bystanders, especially since they were extremely lucky and failed to hit any of them.

A Government of Governments

What do you get when you establish a government made up entirely by other governments? Another terrible government:

New revelations about the sexual exploitation of hundreds of women by United Nations peacekeepers have emerged a decade after the organization first identified the problem.

In a draft report obtained by the Associated Press, the U.N.’s Office of Internal Oversight Services — a U.N. watchdog within the U.N. — said members of a peacekeeping mission had “transactional sex” with more than 225 Haitian women. The women traded sex for basic needs, including food and medication.

“For rural women, hunger, lack of shelter, baby care items, medication and household items were frequently cited as the ‘triggering need,’” the report said. In exchange for sex, women got “’church shoes,’ cell phones, laptops and perfume, as well as money” from peacekeepers.

I don’t have a problem with prostitution when prostitutes are performing the job voluntarily. However, no interaction with a government agent is truly voluntary. Moreover, the United Nations is holding a good deal of the Haitian population in its prison, err, refugee camps, which gives the government of governments almost absolute control over many Haitians lives.

There is also the issue of accountability. The United Nations was established to oversee national governments. But who watches the watchmen? There is no organization to oversee the United Nations, which means it seldom faces consequences when it does something wrong. While the organization may claim that it prohibits its soldiers from having sex with the people it is oppressing saving, there is nobody to hold it accountable when it ignores its own soldiers who are breaking that rule.

If Nobody Knows About a Discount and You Take It Away, Does It Really Matter?

Many companies have announced that they’re severing ties with the National Rifle Association (NRA) after the latest shooting in Florida. Why companies are severing ties with an organization that had literally nothing to do with the shooting is beyond my ability to comprehend but it has lead to at least one rather funny revelation. Did you know that Delta offered NRA members discounts on flights? I’ve been a member of the NRA (it’s a membership requirement at the range that I’m a member of) for quite a few years now and I was unaware of this. It looks like I’m not alone:

But the airline said only 13 passengers ever bought tickets with an NRA discount. That translates into each discount costing the airline about $3 million in tax breaks.

If nobody knows about a discount and you take it away, does it really matter?

The State of Georgia responded to Delta’s announcement by revoking roughly $40 million of tax breaks but I’m fairly certain Delta didn’t expect this response. It probably looked at the number of discounted tickets it had given out, realized that nobody even knew about the discount for NRA members, and decided that removing that discount would be a cheap way to do some public virtue signaling. What may have appeared magnanimous (to gun control advocates at least) was really just an extremely cheap way to get some publicity (although it ended up not being so cheap in the end).

Censorship Is Good for Business

A lot of popular websites have begun increasing the amount of user content they censor. This post isn’t going to devolve into a freedom of speech rant. I believe that private companies have every right to decide what they will and will not host on their websites. This post is going to be discussing an interesting economic phenomenon related to censorship.

I think many of the people who have been pushing sites like Facebook, Twitter, Discord, and YouTube to more heavily scrutinize user content honestly believe that if those companies remove content, that content ceases to exist on the Internet. While the content ceases to exist on those websites, it can be uploaded elsewhere, which creates a business opportunity for competitors of those websites.

The users being censored will seek another way to publish their content. These users become a new potential customer base that didn’t previously exist. Entrepreneurial types can profit from this by attracting that customer base with an offer to exercise less scrutiny over user content.

Online censorship doesn’t remove content, it merely shifts revenue. While YouTube may stop hosting a video, one of its competitors may be willing to host it or an entrepreneur may decide to start a website that is geared towards hosting content that has been censored by YouTube. Whoever ends up hosting the censored content stands to make money that YouTube is no longer making.

This phenomenon is nothing new though. Censorship has always been good for business. Whenever a publication has refused to publish something, another publication either stepped in or was created.

I Am Altering the Deal

I have a theory that the biggest threat a government poses to an economy isn’t any specific set of regulations but constantly changing regulations. One day your business venture is perfectly legal, the next day it’s illegal:

The 2015 Butte wildfire had ripped through nearly 71,000 acres in Amador and Calaveras counties and left millions of dollars in damages behind. More than 900 structures were destroyed in the two counties, according to Cal Fire. Some residents left the community, deciding not to rebuild.

County supervisors embraced legalizing cannabis as a way for the local economy to generate revenue that could help it recover. Enticed by cheap land and friendly laws, the rural county of 45,000 people saw an influx of pot growers.

Not long after, however, anti-pot supervisors, including Mills, were elected to the five-member board. They had promised to ban cultivation in Calaveras County. In January they scored a victory with a 3-2 vote ordering growers to cease operations by June.

With a single vote a bunch of perfectly legal businesses became illegal. While the farmers are talking about suing, they won’t be able to operate their farms during the lawsuit, which could last years, and may not win anyways.

I think this story also explains the obsession most business ventures have with maximizing profits at all costs. Anti-capitalists like to blame capitalism for this obsession but any capitalist would tell you that maximizing long term profits is a better way to maximize overall profits… unless you’re operating in an environment where your business might be declared illegal overnight. I’m of the belief that business ventures are obsessed with short term profits at all costs, at least in part, because they have no idea what the rules regulating their business will be tomorrow. You can’t make any realistic long term goals when you don’t know what the rules will be tomorrow, in a month, or in a year.

This story will likely incentivize cannabis growers in California to maximize short term profits and give little through to long term profits. And when they do, anti-capitalists will blame capitalism instead of the real culprit, government.

So Much for That Narrative

“In order to prevent tragedies like the one that happened in Florida, we must ban magazines that can hold more than 10 rounds,” said the gun control advocate. “The shooter didn’t even use standard capacity magazines,” said the person who actually reads the news:

The Parkland shooter did not use magazines larger than 10 rounds, but gun reform lobbyists are calling on lawmakers to ban higher capacity magazines after the Valentine’s Day tragedy.

The 19-year-old school shooter who killed 17 in Florida on Valentine’s Day had 150 rounds of ammunition in 10-round magazines. Larger ones would not fit in his bag, Sen. Lauren Book, D-Plantation revealed.

Many gun control advocates claim that forcing shooters to reload more frequently by banning standard capacity magazines will both reduce the number of people a shooter can kill and give law enforcement a window to engage the threat during one of their periodic reloads. Neither claim is based in reality. Reloading a firearm doesn’t take that lone, certainly not long enough to reduce the number of killing or to provide a long enough window to reliably engage the threat.