Special/Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

 

A version of this column is scheduled to appear in the May 10 issue of “Firearms News” (formerly “Shotgun News”), in mailboxes and on newsstands this week.

On March 22, Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson signed “campus carry” legislation into law. On March 23, the USA Today newspaper and its Web site, “The Big Lead,” responded with a prominent opinion piece recommending a boycott of National College Athletic Association events in Arkansas, to protest the fact that those who undergo proper training and acquire a proper permit will now be “allowed” to carry concealed firearms for self-defense on campuses there.

“A new gun rights measure signed yesterday could allow concealed weapons to be carried into Arkansas football and basketball games as early as 2018,” noted senior writer Kyle Koster. “Opposing teams should consider boycotting participating in these games should this become a reality in practice. Not due to any political motivation or stand against the law, but because there is a reasonable case to be made that this will put them in an unsafe position.

“No matter one’s beliefs about the Second Amendment, the new measure will likely create a situation where one group of people are allowed to carry and others are not,” the columnist explains.

Of course, that’s always been true. There have always been armed men at Razorback ball games. Arkansas police officers — some in uniform and some not — are human beings, capable of getting excited over a Razorback win or loss. Yet neither columnist Koster nor visiting teams or fans have ever reported feeling threatened by the armed presence of police in Fayetteville, or anywhere else. The underlying premise of the Washingtonians — Gannett’s flagship newspaper is headquartered in the D.C. suburb of McLean, Virginia — is that adult Americans with no criminal history cannot be trusted with arms unless they “work for the government.”

Why?

I have no idea whether stadium facilities in Arkansas will attempt to ban “carry” during games. But either way, the obvious answer to Mr. Koster’s objection — assuming he’s really being forthright about this “some will be armed and some won’t” business — would be national recognition of concealed carry permits across state lines. But since that’s something the Trump administration has proposed, you can bet that’s not a solution that would lead the panty-wetters at USA Today to reply, “Oh, that’s OK, then — never mind.”

The only people this law is really designed to prevent from going armed for self-defense are minors and those with criminal records, neither of whom can get permits in Arkansas. Anyone carrying into a sports facility should be expected to refrain from drinking alcohol, just like a “designated driver.” And any gun owner who DOES expect to enjoy a few beers is free to leave his or her sidearm locked in the car.

Mr. Koster worries that “Fans … can get unruly and irrational during games,” leaving visitors and even visiting players “feeling more unsafe than before.”

Right. And drivers who are “allowed” to carry self-defense weapons in their cars will “turn our roadsides into the OK Corral” after every minor traffic mishap. Have we heard any of this, before? (Needless to say, this wave of “fender-bender homicides” never came to pass.)

For that matter, Vermonters have been “allowed” to carry concealed weapons to athletic contests (without so much as a “permit,” as Vermont requires no “permit”) since long before there WAS an NCAA. How many of the Catamounts’ home games end with the visiting team and their fans lying dead in pools of blood in Burlington?

The behavior predicted is not part of the American culture. If we worry that we may see more of such behaviors among those who are allowed to come here despite not being American and not wanting to assimilate into the American culture, the solution is to stop admitting waves and masses of people who show no intention or predilection to “become American” in their culture and behaviors. Of course, this is precisely what the Trump administration is trying to do — lawful and sensible steps, favored by the maority of Americans INCLUDING legal immigrants, which the whining Leftists keep jurisdiction-shopping for depraved, egotistical leftist judges to block, delay and prevent.

Have “gun bans” made Chicago and Baltimore and Washington, D.C., safer cities in which to attend sporting events? Yet USA Today’s answer to this imagined problem is to recommend “boycotting NCAA sporting events in Arkansas.”

Meantime, the number of states now allowing concealed carry WITHOUT any permit has now reached 13, and climbing, while only eight “blue” states still allow government officials to deny permits to any applicant regardless of background or training. How many states would Mr. Koster like the NCAA to boycott? Why doesn’t he just come out and say what he really means – that NCAA college sporting events should only be allowed in states that voted for Hillary Clinton?

THEY NEVER STOP

Comfortable with their 50-year dominance of academia and the “news” and entertainment media (if there’s any longer any difference), the “Progressive Left” has grown so accustomed to success with this kind of bullying that they can no longer imagine such tactics will ever fail.

A quarter-century ago it was the threat to boycott any state that refused to adopt a “Martin Luther King Day” holiday. More recently, states have been threatened with similar economic consequences if they pass laws protecting the traditional arrangement under which (you could not make this stuff up) boys are expected to use the “Boys’” lavatories and shower rooms, and girls the “Girls’” lavatories and shower rooms, especially in public schools.

It’s hard to discuss this trend without a reference to the more general -– though equally bizarre — political picture prevailing in Washington City in the spring of 2017. The Left -– concentrated in New York, New England, and Southern California — continues to insist Donald Trump is somehow the “accidental” possessor of a “stolen” presidency who must be “resisted” and threatened with impeachment at every turn (they even try to stall and block his routine attempts to staff his administration — a first in the 230-year history of the Senate) as they promote a shrill and evidence-free narrative that Vladimir Putin and the Russians somehow “stole” the 2016 presidential election from the vastly unpopular Hillary Clinton.

It appears they actually expect us to believe legions of Russian spies spent last summer and fall fanning out across the American heartland, donning John Deere caps as they swarmed Trump rallies with their tykes on their shoulders and convinced tens of thousands of blue-collar voters with ties to the coal and other energy industries — long past fed up with “environmental” regulations destroying their jobs in order to supposedly fight the phantom of “global warming” -– to change their registrations from “Democrat” to “Republican.”

And we’re apparently supposed to believe the all-powerful Russkis did this In order to keep out of office … the woman who had already sold them 20 percent of our uranium, and who as Secretary of State approved the Russian takeover of an outfit called Uranium One in exchange for $1.35 million in “donations” to the Clinton Foundation from Ian Telfer and $5.6 million from others with ties to Uranium One. (See …http://www.nationalreview.com/article/441573/hillary-clinton-corruption-foundation-was-key.)

What The American radical Left cannot accept is precisely what President Donald Trump keeps saying -– that this movement for restored economic liberty and prosperity and jobs isn’t about him, it’s a movement that’s been looking for a plain-talking outsider to serve as their standard-bearer for a decade or more. The turn of the tide was overdue. As the goals and demands of the Left have grown ever more bizarre, the pendulum had to finally start swinging back.

(Again, for the record, I find neither the protean Mr. Trump nor the oversized, often arrogant federal government he administers to be anywhere near perfect. It still far exceeds its proper, constututionally authorized size and authority, especially in areas like the unconstitutional and counterproductive Drug War — which is really an unwinnable “War on Some Plants” — and its fraudulent claim to own and control the whopping majority of the land area of most of the sovereign Western states … just for starters. Add the perverse complexity of a “Republican Congress” that for the most part only pretends to favor smaller government, whose members now cringe in horror at being expected to “put up or shut up,” and we should expect disappointments.)

Yes, the “Progressive Left” can claim partial credit for some real accomplishments in America in the past 50 to 80 years (“partial” because almost all the necessary legislation had to be enacted by solid majorities of legislators who happened to be mainstream, moderate, mostly white, Judeo-Christian, gun-owning men — plenty of them Republicans … Hillary’s now famed “basket of deplorables.”)

All of us can and should be proud that a black mom taking her kids downtown to go shopping no longer has to worry about encountering lunch counters or rest rooms with “Whites Only” signs. That’s great. We also can and should be proud that homosexuals in America no longer fear harassment, even the threat of jail, for living as they choose in company with other consenting adults.

And the environmental movement has given us much to be proud of (though private industry and the states deserve a lot more credit than they usually get for responding to the demands of consumers, long before there WAS a federal “EPA.”) Virtually all our lakes and rivers are now safe to swim in; many are even safe to drink. Dark clouds of brown and orange smoke no longer obscure the sun in industrial capitals like Pittsburgh.

We should celebrate and be proud of all these things. But the Progressive Left can never bring itself to say, like the Lone Ranger, “I think our work here is done, Tonto. Let’s throw a victory party and go home, asking Congress to cut our budget by 90 percent, leaving only a skeleton staff to do occasional inspections.”

Nooo! The bureaucracies continue to grow long after the job is done. After all, to fight “global warming” we now have to ban the production of carbon dioxide — a gas necessary to life on earth. And the states have to receive detailed instructions from Washington on allowing boys who “identify” as girls to use the Girls’ bathroom on any given day, and how “transgender” 7-year-olds are to be treated – even going so far as to ban references in the schools to “mommies” and “daddies” so no one will be “offended” by encountering such “outdated gender-role stereotypes.”

Elementary School kids too young to understand even normal, heterosexual, reproductive sex have to be trained to undress together, trained in how to unroll a condom onto a cucumber, indoctrinated in how “fisting” and cross-dressing and other aberrant behaviors are “cool.” If the result is more rapes of 14-year-olds in the bathrooms as in the recent cases in Omaha and in Rockville, Maryland — by illegal aliens or by anyone else — well, there are some things you’re just going to have to get used to.

Anyone holding that our established immigration laws -– enacted over the years by healthy majorities of lawmakers of both parties -– should be enforced, that the illegal aliens living among us should again be rounded up and deported, as Dwight Eisenhower did 60 years ago (without ever being called a racist) -– is reviled by bellowing, violent, paid mobs of masked communist agitators as … well, “a racist.”

The Left insists that illegals who have raped and killed and been deported and returned to rape and kill again should be given “sanctuary” from the immigration laws (and drivers’ licenses and the de facto right to vote), that illegal immigration is a “human right,” that no limits should be set on radical Muslims wishing to come here to set up communities with their own Muslim police forces enforcing Sharia law rather than American Constitutional law.

(See the Muslims of Dearborn, Michigan, some of whom publicly state they believe the penalty for handing out the New Testament on a public sidewalk in an attempt to convert Muslims should be the same as it is in Saudi Arabia, thanks to “Sharia Law” — “death” — https://www.thomasmore.org/news/sharia-the-usa-christians-jailed-preaching-muslims-dearborn-mi-officials-sued/ , … and … http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/136330/stoned-dearborn-christian-speaks-gadi-adelman .)

These characters not only support but actually go forth and COMMIT bombings and stabbings and mass murder because they’re “not being provided with enough prayer rooms” ( http://www.wnd.com/2016/11/muslim-refugee-goes-on-stabbing-spree-at-ohio-state-university/ ) … yet if we speak up about this stuff, we’re “racists”?

(Not to mention routine genital mutilation of little girls — http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/04/27/report-detroit-fgm-doctor-mutilated-girls-far-worse-admits/ — and the “honor killing” of daughters and sisters who adopt Western dress and date regular Americans. Seehttp://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2014/06/30/honor-killings-a-new-kind-of-american-tragedy/ and http://pamelageller.com/2011/02/lawsuit-honor-killings-covered-up-by-city-of-dearborn-demand-a-special-investigation.html/ .

Complain about any of that and you’re now “a Nazi who opposes religious liberty,” according to the Amtrak Press.

THE RETURN OF COMMON SENSE

The American people have been patient with this culturally suicidal nonsense for years, assuming the Left would come to their senses. No more. Donald Trump’s election was no “accident” — Americans have been yearning for years for an outsider they could send to Washington to tell the emperor he’s not wearing any clothes.

If America is going to survive as an economy, as a culture, as a nation, it is indeed time to slash green “regulations” that cripple our economy for little or no net additional gain in cleaner air or water — enforcing the bizarre anti-Christian Gaian religion under the guise of making sure that not one more obscure weed or bug or slime mold is ever allowed to go extinct (when God’s plan obviously involves millions of species and sub-species going extinct and being replaced by other creatures better suited to that evolving ecological niche, a process that was going on long before mankind came on the scene.)

If America is going to survive as an economy, as a culture, as a nation, it is indeed time to limit immigration to that smaller number of people who can demonstrate they really want to become Americans in law and culture — not form beachheads of anti-American rape, terror, and genital mutilation in our midst.

See Western Europe.

Political predictions can be risky -– most politics is local, and things rarely move in predictable straight lines. But I suspect a Democratic Party that goes jurisdiction-shopping to find individual judges who believe it is they — not the Congress and President of the United States — who get to set policies in all these areas, in violation of the law, is likely to fare about as well in 2018 and 2020 as the anti-New-Deal Republicans did when the pendulum began its last great swing to the Left in 1936.

Common-sense Americans will decide how and what to teach their own children about families and sex roles, thank you very much. Common-sense Americans will decide which and how many people from foreign lands will be allowed to come here and live among us … despite the vicious name-calling of the Amtrak elite, thank you very much.

And Americans will continue to assure our continued freedom by continuing to keep and bear arms, despite the pathetic braying of collectivist gun-grabbers who think “rounding up all the guns like they did in Australia is worth a try” — bearing arms just as we’ve been doing for 400 years, making this the freest and most prosperous nation on the face of the earth.

As left-wing newspapers and cable channels operating out of the Amtrak-served, collectivist capitals of Washington and New York — shrieking in manufactured terror for ever more “gun control” — continue to go out of business due to lack of public support, left and right.

Vin Suprynowicz was for 20 years an editorial writer and columnist at the Las Vegas Review-Journal. He blogs at www.vinsuprynowicz.com.