Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

Gun owners should be used to it. Some high profile shooting—preferably in a school—gets people worked up. They panic, and decide we’re all going to die if something isn’t done about guns. Sociopathic congresscritters—but I repeat myself—file massive victim disarmament bills. We fight them, wasting resources we should have spent on ammunition.

Maybe we win, maybe we lose some more rights. In recent years, we’ve tended to win at the federal level, and sometimes in the states.

But it’s all lather, rinse, repeat. We’ll see shoddy “research” supporting the alleged need for more people control. The fight goes on endlessly.

So the COVID-19 pandemic was tailored made for more infringements. We’re all going to die if we don’t “social distance.” We’ve let politicians shut down the nation because the control freaks finally found something scarier than a mass shooting.

We even got the shoddy research. The Trump administration rationalized the shutdown based on the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation’s SARS-CoV-2 model. It “proved” that if we didn’t isolate ourselves to “flatten the curve” the hospitals would be overwhelmed with millions of patients. And hundreds of thousands would die even so. Millions, if we didn’t isolate.

What are our First and Second Amendment rights to a threat like that?

Let’s take a look at that model. It’s garbage, even after they stopped letting Stephen King run it. Or maybe it was Gropin’ Joe Biden.

As of this writing, that model projected this data for April 9, 2020. Bear in mind these numbers were run after they “fixed“ the model that seemed to be simulating Captain Trips, which frightened Trump and state governors into shredding the remaining scraps of the Constitution.

• Hospital Beds Needed: 90,274
• ICU Beds Needed: 18,413
• Ventilators Needed: 5,652
• Total Deaths: 16,644

Clearly our medical services are going to be swamped, right? Let’s look at reality.

• Hospital Beds Needed: 41,264
• ICU Beds Needed: 10,215
• Ventilators Needed: 4,416
• Total Deaths: 14,705

IHME is now projecting a grand total of 60,415 deaths for the US COVID-19 pandemic. That’s fewer than the seasonal flu has already killed. The flu already required as many as 730,000 hospitalizations, yet somehow didn’t overwhelm the system. For this, we let our glorious leaders impose an unconstitutional police state.

But, I pretend to hear you say, "Trump et al didn’t know that at the time; the model used to say it would be worse." I reply, they knew better.

On March 31, the model claimed we would need 95,581 beds. The real number was 17,157, less than a fifth of the projection. That data is readily available, which is why people were mocking IHME on social media like Twitter (note the hidden replies). Worse still, by April 5, the model had been revised, and claimed—retroactively, when they had the real data—that 107,638 beds were needed on 3/31. How does one make an honest error that inflates real data by over six times? How does an honest planner believe that, and decide the country’s economy needs to die?

You were lied to; as extensively as China has lied to the world. It was just our own "leaders" doing it this time.

Good luck voting them out. My governor has already "postponed" elections again.

 

Carl "Bear" Bussjaeger is a columnist at The Truth About Guns and The Zelman Partisans. He is the author of Net Assets, Bargaining Position, The Anarchy Belt, and more. See www.bussjaeger.org.