Category: general freedom

The CDC on Self-Defense

This April, a Nashville homeowner shot an intruder intent on burglary.

Also this month, a St. Louis apartment dweller shot an intruder who threatened to kill his family.

A Newport Beach homeowner recently shot an intruder as well.

Aside from the obvious, what do such incidents, often in newspapers, have in common? The government is hiding research about them.

In December 2022, Fox News reported that to appease gun control activists, the Centers for Disease Control had deleted reference to a study on how often guns are used in self-defense from its published research.

The CDC-commissioned study by Gary Kleck showed that “instances of defensive gun use occur between 60,000 and 2.5 million times” annually. But in 2021, after being lobbied by the gun control activists, the CDC pretended that Kleck’s study didn’t exist.

Kleck said: “CDC is just aligning itself with the gun-control advocacy groups. . . . ‘We are their tool, and we will do their bidding.’ And that’s not what a government agency should do.”

CDC’s conduct was not new. In 2018, Capital Research had asked why the agency was “Hiding Its Defensive Gun Use Statistics.”

For decades, we’ve had abundant data on how gun owners defend themselves from violent bad guys. CDC, which investigates something or other related to this subject, won’t share all that it knows.

We can’t legally require the media to stop hiding critical information. But we should be able to require our government to stop doing so.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Tags CDC, gun, Second Amendment, self defense, statistics

Fifth Amendment rights general freedom international affairs

Brussels Conference Squelched

Post author By Editor
Post date April 19, 2024
3 Comments on Brussels Conference Squelched

What happened in Brussels?

“In Brussels, in the heart of the European Union, in a western liberal democracy, we’re unable to have a conversation about identity, migration, borders, family, and security without facing attempts to have it shut down,” says Matt Goodwin, a British professor.

The mayor of a Brussels district, Emir Kir, had ordered the shutdown of the National Conservatism Conference in order, he said, to “guarantee public safety.”

But Kir also stated the real reason, that in his neck of the woods “the far right is not welcome.” He apparently disagrees with viewpoints to be elaborated at the conference.

Police took steps to stymie would-be attendees.

Prime Minister of Hungary Viktor Orbán said: “The last time they wanted to silence me with the police was when the Communists set them on me in ’88. We didn’t give up then and we will not give up this time either!”

This is a more open targeting of political speech than erasing the “misinformation” of social media posts. Does it signal a new strategy throughout Europe?

Hard to say. The immediate reaction of other European politicians, including many on the left, was dismay and shock that anybody would attempt such a thing.

“Banning political meetings is unconstitutional. Full stop,” proclaims the Belgian prime minister.

“Extremely disturbing,” says a British spokesman.

Could be sincere; could be a realization that “Uh oh, we’ve gone too far”; could be a mixture of both.

The next question: will it happen again?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Tags authoritarianism, Belgium, censorship, conservative, freedom

Accountability general freedom government transparency

Less Oversight?

Gretchen Whitmer, Michigan, Audit, spending, taxes

There are long-standing debates among those who oppose big government. One is whether we should promote every budget cut and any tax cut, or whether we should more-or-less carefully support only some cuts — on the grounds that some possible cuts might scuttle future reforms.

This came to mind upon hearing Michigan Governor Gretch Whitmer’s plan to reduce the budget of one of her state’s bureaucracies by 28 percent.

Hooray!

But wait a moment: the department to be cut is the Office of the Auditor General!

Whitmer’s proposal is to take the $30 million budget and bring it down to a lean $21.7 million.

The point of an auditor is to make sure that government does not misuse the money taken from taxpayers, allegedly for the public benefit. Take that away, and what do you have?

Waste. Corruption — a recipe for it, anyway. Maybe an engraved invitation for it.

Is there any merit to this reduction? Democrats are not known to love budget cuts.

They say Michigan’s auditor’s office has been “too partisan” — and certainly said things about Democrat programs that don’t make those programs look good!

“If there is ever a place in Lansing where we should rise above petty partisan politics, it should be oversight and ethics,” Rep. Tom Kunse (R-Clare) said, expressing a perspective I share.

So what’s really going on here? Well, the state is facing a $418 million surplus. That’s a lot of money to play with. What’s the likelihood that the party in charge wants to reduce the Auditor’s Office for any other reason than to reduce scrutiny of how they plan to spend that money?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Tags Audit, Gretchen Whitmer, Michigan, spending, taxes

free trade & free markets general freedom too much government

Supermarket Slavery

How to sue supermarkets for shutting down:

One. Move to San Francisco.

Two. Support a proposed ordinance “amending the Police Code to require large supermarkets to provide six months notice to their customers and the City before permanently closing, and to explore ways to allow for the continued sale of groceries at the location.”

Three. If the ordinance passes, wait for a large supermarket to go out of business without having known six months in advance that it would need to do so.

Four. Sue.

That the proposed law would amend the police code is perversely apt. The idea is use the state’s police power to penalize ending an activity that as a free man, not a slave, you have no obligation to continue.

Ending any project may inconvenience people who benefit from what you’re doing. But unless you are bound by contract, these other people have no right to your further efforts.

Not for six months, not for six seconds.

The San Francisco ordinance would exempt supermarkets that must close because of a natural disaster or other circumstance not “reasonable foreseeable.” These exemptions don’t solve the problems that the ordinance could cause for innocent businessmen. As Reason magazine notes, any stores that closes “without providing the proper notice” could still be sued for damages, supposedly exempted or not.

In the 1980s, when this notion was originally proposed (unsuccessfully), supermarket executives argued that making it harder for them to shut down would also discourage them from opening a store to begin with.

True. But that’s just common sense.

I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Tags California, free markets, regulations

Fourth Amendment rights general freedom privacy

GOP Fails on FISA

“The House appears ready to reauthorize FISA 702 — which has been abused literally hundreds of thousands of times to spy on Americans without a warrant — without requiring the government to get a warrant,” tweeted Sen. Mike Lee (R–Utah) on X last weekend.

“The U.S. government uses the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to spy on Americans without a warrant,” Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) seconded, also on X. “This week, the House will vote to require the Feds to get a warrant to snoop on Americans. Sadly this vote is likely to fail. I will demand a recorded vote & post results.”

The “sadly” indicates that the Republicans in Congress are split, despite years of complaining about how the FISA courts treated Trump . . . and us. (A common complaint has been that the courts almost never say No to a FISA request from the Deep State.)

The Electronic Freedom Foundation explains the nitty-gritty of Section 702: “As the law is written, the intelligence community cannot use Section 702 programs to target Americans, who are protected by the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures. But the law gives the intelligence community space to target foreign intelligence in ways that inherently and intentionally sweep in Americans’ communications.”

So while de jure the Deep State is disallowed from peering into our digital data, de facto our paid government snoops do it all the time.

Rep. Massie seeks to add a warrant process to FISA requests, but it looks like his amendment will fail. In that case, Massie urges Republicans not to re-authorize the whole FISA program.

But that effort will probably fail, too.

Our representatives are just not that into the Fourth Amendment.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts