Glock
Gun-Safety Loophole is a Government Loophole
Or, let the Gun Market Close Government Loopholes
By ILANA MERCER
It’s award time at the Department of Homeland Security. So fleeting has been the focus on the systemic, intractable failures of the DHS apparatus—that failed functionaries feel sufficiently at ease to move on to the business of backslapping and promotion.
But first, the latest outrage to emerge from Barack Hussein Obama’s Islamophilic Federal Bureau of Investigation is this: it transpires that a friend of Orlando mass murderer Omar Saddiqui Mateen had done his duty and reported Mateen to the FBI.
Mohammed A. Malik had also worshiped at the Islamic Center of Fort Pierce and had become alarmed when Mateen openly professed to an infatuation with the videos of Yemeni Jihadi Anwar al-Awlaki. Not only did the FBI discount Malik’s report, but when Malik softened his assessment of the danger his friend posed to others—a natural human tendency—the FBI acted post haste on that assessment. In mitigation of the FBI’s decision to back-off Mateen, Director James Comey even cited Malik’s good reference.
Better that FBI agents watch reruns of CBS’s Criminal Minds, than follow FBI Standard Operating Procedure, dictated by the Obama administration. Taxpayers would be safer.
The mad farrago got more maddening when Attorney General Loretta Lynch (confirmed by Republican lickspittles) stepped up to assure the public that federal authorities were scouring their contacts with Mateen, and those around him, to ferret out whether they’d missed anything. When grilled about Mateen’s wife, a key figure in the investigation and a possible co-conspirator, Lynch replied that Noor Salman was … missing.
Missing, too, from the doctored transcripts of Mateen’s June 12, 911 call, released by the FBI and the Department of Justice, were the words “Allah,” “Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi” and “Islamic State,” to which Mateen alluded during the call.
Still worse: since the focus is no longer on the “investigation” into two other tender, tormented souls, the Farooks, it’s time to bestow special commendation on those who botched, even thwarted, the probe into the butchers of San Bernardino.
Up for an award for her failings is Irene Martin. Reports the British Daily Mail: “An immigration official who stopped Homeland Security agents from arresting the alleged gun supplier of the San Bernardino terrorists the day after the attack, and then lied about it to department investigators, is to receive an award for her work.”
The agency that rewarded Martin had booted true hero Philip Haney. The soft-spoken, demure, forcibly retired employee of DHS has divulged that the Administration “nixed the probe into the Southern California jihadists,” and eliminated a program he, Haney, developed. That database would’ve helped connect certain networks, Tablighi Jamaat and the larger Deobandi movement, to domestic terrorism rising. Haney’s files were expunged and he subjected to an internal investigation for doing his duty to protect Americans.
Political correctness run amok is how pundits on Fox News have euphemized the FBI’s SOP under BHO.
Treason seems more like it.
Consider: You hire a private company to protect you, only to discover that, as part of the scheme to “protect” you, your guards undergo sensitivity training that desensitizes them to potential evildoers, thus giving the latter easy access to you and yours. Given that this strategy, if it can be so called, would undermine your life, and considering this company would be in violation of its contractual obligation to defend you—you’d first fire the firm. Next, if the negligence came at a cost; you’d sue.
You’d put this “business” and its “business plan” out of business.
One wonders when honors will be conferred on those who refused to dignify warnings about the Tsarnaev Brothers of Boston Marathon infamy. Russian state security twice pleaded with the FBI and the CIA, in 2011, to place Tamerlan Tsarnaev on counterterrorism watch lists. Russian credibility was mocked because, well, “The Russians don’t like the Chechens.” American elites have always sided with the Chechen cause as against the Russians, and have encouraged the former to carve out an independent, Chechen Islamic republic from the Russian Federation. Again, there’s nothing unusual about the mindset or misconduct of these agencies.
By extension, policemen in charge of investigating the pre-marathon murder of three young Jews, likely by Tamerlan Tsarnaev, are long overdue for commendation. The throats of these three youngsters, who happened to be friendly with Tamerlan, were slit on the 10th anniversary of 9/11. The mother of one of the slain men “told the New York Times she was taken aback by the lack of intensity in the police investigation into the slayings.”
The military has its own Jihadi protection program. It kicked-in, most memorably, to cover for “Major Nidal,” as he was fondly known. Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan of the Army Medical Corps committed fratricide at Fort Hood in 2009, where he was permitted to openly proselytize for his faith. Coupled with a substandard professional performance, preaching Islam to the traumatized U.S. veterans in his care did nothing to hinder Hasan’s rise through the ranks. He continued to enjoy a high employment status, a six-figure income, and secret security clearance. Hasan even breezed about the base in a Jihadi jumpsuit. About Holy Hasan, the wise monkeys of the military saw no evil, heard no evil, and most certainly spoke no evil. To his higher-ups, Hasan was merely a Muslim driven by devotion to a peaceful Islam.
Look, the conservative-minded love “the military.” But the military as an institution should not be conflated with the men and women who man it. The military is government: it works like government; is financed like government, and sports the same inherent malignancies and perverse incentives as government, down to the racial- spoils system.
Well known is The Navy Affirmative Action Plan (NAAP), matched by the Department of the Army Affirmative Action Plan, which practically demand preferential treatment for recruits like Hasan.
When Aaron Alexis, a former Navy reservist with a checkered past, gunned down 12 military contractors in the capital, in 2013, liberals demanded to know, “Why was Alexis able to buy guns?”
Again, ask the government.
Gun sellers must use the FBI-run National Instant Criminal Background Check System for background checks on customers. Sharpshooters Small Arms Range, from which Alexis bought the Remington 870 shotgun used in the crime, was in compliance. The shop checked Alexis out with the Feds. The Feds gave them the go-ahead.
Democrats have just wrapped up a sit-in on the floor of the lower chamber, demanding their way or no way on gun legislation. The so-called greatest deliberative body in the world has joined the anti-Trump, my-speech-or-no-speech, rioters, the Black Lives Matter (Only) mobs, and the Occupy Wall Street encampments.
Down with this Third World impetus was Hillary Clinton, who tweeted out: “This is what leadership looks like.” In agreement too was “moderate” Republican Senator Susan Collins.
Collins, at the time of the Washington Navy Yard shooting, had questioned “the kind of vetting contractors do.” All roads lead to Rome, Representative Collins. Not contractors and not gun-store owners conduct background checks; government does. “The government maintains the final approval authority,” explained Rear Adm. John Kirby to CNN‘s Wolf Blitzer.
And for government officials, no infraction committed by the characters aforementioned was too egregious to ignore.
Mateen may have been a latent homosexual, but he was out of the closet about his Jihadi orientation. While he failed to flag anyone, Mateen made earnest attempts to be noticed by the FBI. Witnesses and friends reported that Mateen celebrated 9/11, boasted of family ties to Bin Laden, swore fealty to al-Awlaki, to al-Baghdadi, to al Qaeda (or any other Jihad org that would have him), took fieldtrips to Saudi Arabia, cursed out infidels, threatening to visit violence upon some in his circle, and hobnobbed some with suicide bomber-to-be Moner Abu-Salha.
Gun shops are not the problem; government is. Agents like Haney are punished if they dare zero-in on or rationally profile the logical target population. If anything, gun-store proprietors are the solution. A gun-shop owner contacted the nation’s spooks when Mateen sought to purchase military grade body armor at his establishment. (It should be obvious by now that Lotus Gunworks’ warning was ignored.)
In fact, gun stores would be perfect to the task of stopping the Mateens of the world. Private enterprise has far stronger an incentive to avoid becoming known as the business that armed a mass murderer. To be branded as the business that weaponized such a man is bad for business.
Conversely, who took the fall for Attorney General Eric Holder’s gun-running, “Operation Fast and Furious”? Nobody took the fall for that, other than Agent Brian Terry and the many Mexicans who died at the hands of criminals armed with weapons supplied by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
The gun-safety loophole is a government loophole.
Privatize background checks. Let America’s stunningly fecund business men and women conduct background checks, tailored to the perceived threat. Gun owners (check) would gladly shoulder the initial costs if it means lives saved. As is the case with market capitalism, a proliferation of the service will introduce competition among providers, all of which will bring down costs. Benefits in costs and security will redound to consumers.
ILANA MERCER is the author of “The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed” (June, 2016) and “Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa” (2011) She has been writing a popular, weekly, paleolibertarian column—begun in Canada—since 1999. Ilana’s online homes are www.IlanaMercer.com & www.BarelyABlog.com Follow her on https://twitter.com/IlanaMercer
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The Benighted Remains of the Day
The Benighted Remains of the Day
Ilana Mercer notes that it takes brains to understand liberty
During the Bretton Woods Conference, in 1944, Lord Halifax is said to have “whispered to Lord Keynes: ‘It’s true: they have the money bags but we have all the brains.’” By “they,” Halifax meant the Americans.
His frustration with the American mind—often prosaic and anti-intellectual—during the critical Bretton-Woods negotiations seems as valid today. As odious as Britain’s elites are, boy, are they cleverer than ours. Take the impromptu interview, on June 28, which Richard Quest, CNN’s imported British broadcast journalist, conducted with Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party.
Farage had emerged exhilarated from the coven that is the European Parliament, where he had shared some home truths with the ponces leeching off Britain.
Other than to mouth formulaically about “small government, big military, balanced budgets and the penny plan”—America’s chattering class and ruling elites seem incapable of expressing the principles undergirding freedom. And members of this political Idiocracy dissolve into a puddle if their cue cards disappear.
Farage, however, spoke to some difficult ideas with ease, and without notes.
The act of secession, the quests for sovereignty, decentralization and regional autonomy from a second tier of tyrants—the first being the national, British government—involve comprehending complicated ideas.
About this, Milton Friedman forewarned in the introduction to F.A. Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom.” Whereas “the argument for collectivism is simple if false; it is an immediate emotional argument.” “The argument for individualism” and freedom, on the other hand, “is subtle and sophisticated; it is an indirect rational argument.”
Put differently: it’s difficult for dummies to understand liberty, let alone defend it, a problem the scintillating, cerebral Mr. Farage doesn’t have.
“You as a political project are in denial,” he told the grumbling laggards in the EU chamber. The EU had, “by stealth by deception, and without ever telling the truth to the British and European people, imposed political union upon them.”
Heckling Eurocrats were reminded by Farage that when, in 2005, the people of the Netherlands and France said adieu to an enforced political union—the Eurocrats had “ignored them and brought in the Lisbon Treaty through the backdoor.”
Indeed, the last refuge of a Brussels scoundrel is the bureaucracy. When voters scuttled the EU Constitution in that referenda, the rogues being upbraided by Farage simply dissolved one illegitimate political structure and constituted another.
“What the little people did,” continued Farage; “what the ordinary people did, what the people who’ve been oppressed have done is to reject the multinationals, reject the merchant banks, reject Big Politics, and demand their country back, their fishing waters back, their borders back. We want to be an independent self-governing nation.”
A series of similar watersheds would follow, predicted Farage.
Fleetingly, at least, Farage’s fluency with the ideas of freedom took effect. The blank faces flanking UKIP’s leader looked somewhat animated. Fewer jeered; some even clapped and cheered as Farage went on to submit that no stalling would be tolerated. The will of the British people would be heeded forthwith. Called for was “a grown-up and sensible attitude” toward executing popular—in this case, naturally licit—wishes.
Mr. Farage was not done, going on to impress upon EU parliamentarians—none of whom had “held a proper job” in their lives, “or worked in business or worked in trade, or indeed ever created a job in [their] lives”—that unlike a coerced political union, trade in goods was mutually beneficial and voluntary and would continue.
Here the booing resumed.
If, in sensing an opportunity to exert unauthorized political power, this unelected mob intended to reject trade between Europe and England, reinstate tariffs and quotas—Mr. Farage was pleased to inform them the consequences to Europe would be worse.
No doubt: as statist and regulated as the once great merchant and maritime nation of Britain has become—Europe under the Brussels machinery is practically paralyzed.
Few in the US media appreciate that language that effectively conveys clear ideas has got to be strong. Weasel words won’t do. Thus Ashley Banfield was flabbergasted by Farage’s verbal whips. CNN’s verbose host was appalled, you guessed, at the “tone” taken by Farage in his pointed remarks to the EU.
Days prior, two lunatic American women, dressed in matching Mao-like tunics, had stormed a stage together, where they had a petit mal fit over Donald Trump. Yet the two—Hillary Clinton and “Pocahontas,” aka Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts—made reporters like Banfield giddy with Girl Power.
Never was Warren depicted as angry or out-of-control. Instead, she was a “towering” liberal Democrat, who delivered not ad hominem but “energy, folksy appeal and a populist roar …”
By contrast, Quest, Banfield’s British-born colleague, was able to settle down to a blind panic by the time he conducted his exhilarating interview with Mr. Farage.
No longer in a post-Brexit frothy, Quest even accepted Farage’s forceful instruction to “stop this nonsense about the markets. The pound has been in a bear market since July 2014. Fact!” Jittery markets had begun to self-correct, the Dow was bouncing back.
Unlike their hysterical colleagues in the US, British liberal journalists have even begun to pull back slightly in embarrassment. Were they really going to persist in lamenting losses suffered by global puppet-master George Soros and the financial sector, all just to take aim at the Little People? In so doing, was not the Left showing it loved the lumpenproletariat only as long as they got with The Left’s program?
Moreover, Quest’s professional counterparts in Britain (indubitably the smarter cohort) seem to have backed off of accusing 17.5 million “Leave” voters of being old, uneducated, racist, and generally obsolete right-wing extremists. In other words, Trump voters. The liberal brain trust stateside has yet to grant this courtesy to Tea Party pioneers, much less to Trump voters.
For his part, Quest showed the same intellectual agility as his opponent: “So, how on earth do you have the effrontery to criticize Wall Street, the banks, you criticize a big business when you were part of those markets?”
Imagine a American politician attempting to respond to such a question with a First-Principles answer!
Farage did. He stumped Quest by explaining that markets aren’t the creatures of big business. “Good markets have small and medium size competitors trading in them too.” He then pivoted to the crony actions of the free-market flouting Goldman Sachs. “In cahoots with this European commission,” such bad-faith actors did much mischief: usher “Greece into the Euro,” for example.
Ordinary people are slowly coming to realize that adding a second tier of tyrants—EU, NAFTA, UN, NATO, WTO—to their own tyrannical national governments has benefited them as a second hangman enhances the health of a condemned man.
So when Quest resumed his nervy narrative about the “terrible message” being sent “about what’s happening in Britain,” their representative shot back:
Taking back our country, our laws, our courts, our borders, our pride and self-respect is a great message. Our political class has let us down like a cheap pair of braces and what we did last week in that referendum was say, ‘Get thee gone.’
Nigel Farage’s repartee is in a class of its own. Observing its brilliance accentuates the absence of a similar facility among our own mainstream clodhopper commentariat. The verbal swordplay initiated by Farage, leader of the UKIP, often gets lost in translation stateside.
The dumbed-down transcript, provided by CNN, had turned Farage’s “get thee gone” into “get the gun.”
ILANA Mercer is the author of “The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed” (June, 2016), and “Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa” (2011). She has been writing a popular, weekly, paleolibertarian column—begun in Canada—since 1999. Ilana’s online homes are www.IlanaMercer.com & www.BarelyABlog.com. Follow her on https://twitter.com/IlanaMercer
Follow these links to Ilana’s new book “The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed”
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