Never Waste A Potential Reichstag Fire

It’s been in all the papers – there was another spree killing yesterday.  40-year-old Wade Michael Page killed six at a Sikh temple before a cop killed him.

My condolences and prayers, naturally, go out to the victims and their families, as well as those of the cop wounded in the exchange.  Many Sikhs came to America to escape this sort of thing; their sect has been the target of considerable violence from both Hindi and Muslim extremists in India.

Naturally, the left is already politicizing the hell out of this; it’s a crisis and so not to be wasted.  The waves of attacks on the law-abiding gun owner, the NRA, and by some accounts the biggest enemy of all, the Middle Aged White Guy, have already begun.

But all but the most over-the-edge lefties agree that there are some people who do get to have guns.  For most, the military is one of them. And Page  is a veteran, albeit not one that’s going to appear on any recruiting posters

CBS News reports that Page enlisted in the Army in April 1992 and was given a less-than-honorable discharge in October 1998. He was last stationed in Fort Bragg, N.C., serving in the psychological operations unit.

Speaking of psychology:

The Southern Poverty Law Center told the Associated Press that Page was a musician in white power bands whose lyrics express hate against minorities and ethnic groups.

Mark Potok, spokesperson for the Southern Poverty Law Center, said Monday that Page had been on the white power music scene for more than a decade in bands including Definite Hate and End Apathy.

Potok says the music is so violent and full of lyrics talking about carrying out genocide against the Jews and other minorities that the whole business exists almost exclusively over the Internet.

In the wake of the Aurora shootings, the boundlessly vapid Fareed Zakaria, on a segment on his CNN snoozer that was a thinly-veiled “Violence Policy Center” press release, “responded” perfunctorily to the idea that psychology is more a predictor of violence than is access to firearms, saying “you can have you opinion, but you can’t have your own facts”.  And that was all he said – as if invoking a cliche resolved the issue.

The fact is, legal access to guns is a dangerous thing, statistically speaking, only on conjunction with a few fairly identifiable factors; namely, if someone in contact with a legally-purchased firearm has…:

  • a criminal record
  • a drug or alcohol problem
  • a dangerous mental illness
Furthermore, a gun in the hands of someone without any of those factors, and with a modicum of training, is statistically a couple of orders of magnitude more likely to deter or repel a crime – usually-to-inevitably caused by someone with one or more of the factors above – than to be involved in one. 
That would be the rational response to the episode.
The left, the media and the administration, however, will go the demonization route. 

6 thoughts on “Never Waste A Potential Reichstag Fire

  1. You make sense, Mitch. That’s your problem. You need to reason with criminals who would do you harm. There are countless books on the powers of persuasion and none of them prescribe bullets.

  2. With all the issues, like these, needing *immediate* action by the executive branch perhaps what we need is some sort of “enabling act” a law that would allow Obama to directly or through his legally appointed cabinet officers pass the laws necessary to save our country.

    We could call it something catchy like An Act to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Nation or Gesetz zur Behebung der Not von Volk und Reich for those who are not nekulturny..

  3. Hell DG (where’s your homework) is already calling for the roll-back of President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 Community Mental Health Centers Act and the return of coercive psychiatry to rid our street and families of mental defectives.

  4. Of course, Kel, DG is a good little collectivist and socialists worldwide believe anybody who disagrees with them is either wicked and must be killed to prevent us corrupting innocents, or must be suffering from a mental illness so by locking us up, she’s doing us a favor!

    .

  5. Nate, one of the great things about socialists is that they are peculiarly good at identifying those among their own populations who are most disposable, and then in the name of efficiency and “science” they set about disposing of them – Margaret Sanger used to refer to it as “social hygiene”.

  6. Lost in the mix on this guy is the nature of his discharge. ‘Other than honorable’ is a catchphrase in the military for bad enough to get kicked out, but not bad enough to go through the work of a court martial which is usually required for a ‘dishonorable’ or ‘bad conduct’ discharge.

    The civilian equivalent is a plea deal-the guy is guilty of something, but the cost of litigating it makes it a losing battle. Unlike the civilian side, there is no pro-bono legal representation; legal counsel is provided by the government itself, so the cost of a trial is borne completely by the service branch.

    The other aspect of the difference in discharge is the residual benefits you can receive from the VA. Dishonorable discharge waves your benefits altogether, while a general discharge or ‘other than honorable’ gives you limited VA benefits.

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