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crime and punishment folly ideological culture media and media people moral hazard national politics & policies responsibility

God Knows You’re Good

“The trouble with fighting for human freedom,” wrote H. L. Mencken, “is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels.”

Henry Louis Mencken (1880 — 1956), master prose stylist and social critic, knew whereof he wrote. But he also penned things to which few would give their hearty assent.

Today, we find several controversialists who, like Mencken, side with individualism against collectivism. They are raising a ruckus.

But are they “scoundrels”?

Does it matter?

The big news, last week, was the anti-​Milo Yiannopoulis riot in Berkeley. But also last week, Robby Soave explains, “Black bloc ‘anti-​fascists’ attacked right-​wing media figure Gavin McInnes outside a New York University building,” where things got so crazy that one protester, a professor, screamed at the police for protecting Mr. McInnes when they “should” have — get this — been beating him up!

She called McInnes a Nazi. And insinuated he was a rape threat, etc.

So what did Reason writer Soave do? “McInnes,” he noted, “routinely says obnoxious things that deserve criticism. He’s something of a Diet Milo.”

What Soave did not do was ever address the Nazi charge, the rape charge, or any of the calumnies hurled at McInnes. Were Mencken the one being attacked, would he have written that the Sage of Baltimore “routinely writes obnoxious things that deserve criticism”? 

Sure, true. But is that the stance you want to take? 

Soave finds Milo and Gavin icky.

I feel his pain. But … when “Nazi” is the charge, calling the accused “obnoxious” and “deserv[ing] criticism”? 

Gavin McInnes isn’t a Nazi. Or a rapist. And he retains free speech rights, regardless of what one thinks about his anti-​feminism, or other controversial opinions.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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crime and punishment general freedom ideological culture media and media people Second Amendment rights

The Truth About Gun Control

Confucius said that our first task is to “rectify the language.”

That amounts to word control, but we probably should not take that too literally. We cannot “control the language.” Instead, we should take caution: error often rests upon improper word choice.

Take as an example not word control, but …

Gun control.

Which, Thomas Sowell reminds us, isn’t what it seems to be. “The fatal fallacy of gun-​control laws in general is the assumption that such laws actually control guns,” Sowell wrote on the first day of winter. “What such laws actually do is increase the number of disarmed and defenseless victims.”

A new wisdom? No. Sowell, in 2016, is disabusing The New York Times for its inanities regarding the bearing of arms. In 1925, H. L. Mencken took on The Nation.

Gun control, Mencken wrote, “would not take pistols out of the hands of rogues and fools; it would simply take them out of the hands of honest men.”

Sowell argues that, no matter how irrational spree and mass murderers may seem, they “are usually rational enough to attack schools, churches, and other places where there is far less likelihood of someone being on the scene who is armed.”

Mencken noted that the gunman of his day “has great advantages everywhere. He has artillery in his pocket, and he may assume that, in the large cities, at least two-​thirds of his prospective victims are unarmed. But if the Nation’s proposed law (or amendment) were passed and enforced, he could assume safely that all of them were unarmed.”

Maybe, following Confucius*, we should call laws against concealed carry not “gun control” but “citizen disarmament.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* “Confucius” is the Western name for Kong Qui (551 – 479 B.C.E.), the great Chinese sage. He was often referred to by the honorific Kong Fuzi, meaning “Grand Master Kong,” which Jesuit missionaries to China in the 16th-​century Latinized to “Confucius.”


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