Former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Ryan Crocker sums up in a single word the recently announced framework of an agreement between the United States of America and the Taliban: Surrender.
“This current process bears an unfortunate resemblance to the Paris peace talks during the Vietnam War,” writes Crocker in a Washington Postop-ed. “Then, as now, it was clear that by going to the table we were surrendering; we were just negotiating the terms of our surrender.”
He’s not wrong.
It may seem strange that, after successfully toppling the Taliban government, a savage regime that had given safe haven to Al-Qaeda to launch its 911 attacks against us, we would now, nearly two decades later, be anxious to cut a deal with that same Taliban, even possibly bringing them into a power-sharing role.
Anything to get the heck out of Kabul and back to the good ol’ USA. And it is a recognition, right or wrong, that the Afghan government is unsustainable.
The alternative? Keep a significant contingent of U.S. troops in Afghanistan … forever. Or until we have fashioned a brand new westernized-Afghanistan that is no possible threat to us.
Yep, forever.
“Winning may not be an available option,” contends a new Rand report, “but losing … would be a blow to American credibility, the weakening of deterrence and the value of U.S. reassurance elsewhere, an increased terrorist threat emanating from the Afghan region, and the distinct possibility of a necessary return there under worse conditions.”
One of the things many people no longer understand about these United States is its — their — peculiar genius: decentralism.
The extreme of this is that contentious notion of state nullification of federal law, which most “smart” people deride (contra Jefferson and Madison) as itself made null and void by the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution.
And yet even nullification skeptics often support some form of nullification, like fighting marijuana prohibition or ObamaCare at the state level. State initiatives, especially, have driven much of this resistance to centralist, top-down regulation.
But a state initiative in Washington State, I‑1639, passed last year, has devolved the nullification idea to where it gets even trickier. The gun control measure passed last year 60 – 40, but residents of rural counties are none too pleased. As reported in The Guardian, many of the sheriffs in the 27 counties that voted against the measure are not enforcing the law, which they see as unconstitutional.
“The refusal of law enforcement officers to enforce the new restrictions plays into a longer history of so-called ‘constitutional’ sheriffs resisting the gradual tightening of gun laws,” says The Guardian, which goes on to mention “the doctrine of ‘county supremacy,’ long nursed on the constitutionalist far right, which holds that county sheriffs are the highest constitutional authority in the country.”
Whatever its legal merits, this form of resistance to state law enjoys a deep American tradition.
As regular readers know, I am a big proponent of initiative and referendum rights. And one reason to support them is to add a countervailing power against central authorities dominated by special interests and political elites.
In Washington state, a freshly implemented ballot initiative and a raft of new bills may produce some of the tightest firearms regulations in the US. But standing in the way is a group of rural law enforcement officers who say point blank that they won’t enforce any of it.
The Klickitat county sheriff, Bob Songer, is one of them. He told the Guardian that the initiative passed last November “is unconstitutional on several grounds. I’ve taken the position that as an elected official, I am not going to enforce that law”.
Songer also cited ongoing litigation by the National Rife Association gun industry lobby and others which aims to demonstrate the laws violate both the second amendment and the state’s constitution. He also said that if other agencies attempted to seize weapons from county residents under the auspices of the new laws, he would consider preventively “standing in their doorway”.
In November, the state’s voters handily passed an initiative, I‑1639, which mostly targeted semi-automatic rifles. As of 1 January, purchasers of these weapons must now be over 21, undergo an enhanced background check, must have completed a safety course, and need to wait 9 days to take possession of their weapon. Also, gun owners who fail to store their weapons safely risk felony “community endangerment” charges.
Feeling the wind at their backs after the ballot, gun campaigners and liberal legislators have now gone even further in the new legislative session. Bills introduced in the last week to Washington’s Democrat-dominated legislature look to further restrict firearms. Some laws would ban high capacity magazines and plastic guns made with 3D printers. Others would mandate training for concealed carry permits, and remove guns and ammo during and after domestic violence incidents.
Washington’s attorney general, Bob Ferguson, who proposed several of the bills, said in an email: “Now is the time to act. Washingtonians have made it clear that they support common-sense gun safety reforms.”
Kristen Ellingboe, from Washington’s Alliance for Gun Safety, which has long campaigned for more firearms restrictions, said that “for a long time our elected officials thought that gun violence protection was somehow controversial, but they have been behind where the people of Washington are on this issue”.
But like other west coast states, Washington exhibits a deep cultural and political divide between its populous, coastal cities and its more sparsely populated rural hinterland.
I‑1639 passed on a roughly 60 – 40 split; in the big, blue counties west of the Cascade Mountains, such as King county, where Seattle is located, the margins were even bigger.
However, 27 of Washington’s 39 counties rejected the ballot measure. Many of those counties are in the state’s more rural, sparsely populated districts.
It is in these counties that many – including sworn officers – are promising to resist the laws.
In Ferry county in eastern Washington, more than 72% of voters rejected I‑1639. In the county’s only incorporated city, Republic, the police chief Loren Culp asked the council in November to declare the city a “second amendment sanctuary”. That vote has been delayed until March, but in the meantime, like Songer, Culp says he will not enforce.
The sheriff in Ferry county, Ray Maycumber, told the Guardian that he would not be enforcing the laws either, at least until the NRA’s litigation is completed.
“There’s a window of time when I get to make the assessment”, he said. Should the NRA not succeed, he said, he would “consider if I want to go on in the job”.
The “sanctuary” idea has caught on with other rightwing activists. Matt Marshall is the leader of the Washington Three Percent, a patriot movement group which has held several open carry rallies in downtown Seattle in the last year.
Marshall is attempting to persuade rural Washington counties to adopt local second amendment sanctuary ordinances. Next week, together with the Patriot Prayer founder and former Senate candidate Joey Gibson, he is addressing a meeting of Lewis and Pierce counties to try to persuade them to adopt resolutions which would mean that the gun laws were not enforced.
The refusal of law enforcement officers to enforce the new restrictions plays into a longer history of so-called “constitutional” sheriffs resisting the gradual tightening of gun laws. There are also hints, in the stance, of the doctrine of “county supremacy”, long nursed on the constitutionalist far right, which holds that county sheriffs are the highest constitutional authority in the country.
Such notions have long been promoted by figures like sheriff Richard Mack, who leads the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association. As gun laws throughout the west have gradually tightened in recent decades, resistance along these lines has become prevalent in areas with strong political support for gun rights.
Since the initiative passed, and they made their positions public, both Songer and Culp have been lionized in conservative media. Earlier this month, Songer detailed his position on the Alex Jones show, where he appeared with Gibson.
On this resistance to the new wave of gun restrictions in Washington, Ellingboe, the gun safety campaigner, said that “it’s disappointing that the gun lobby is trying to undermine the will of Washington voters”.
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Some rural sheriffs in Washington State say they will not enforce the state’s new gun laws — which could wind up being some of the strictest in the country — arguing that they are unconstitutional, the Guardian is reporting.
Some of The Country’s Strictest Gun Laws
In the wake of recent mass shootings — including one at a Las Vegas music festival in 2017 and another at a Parkland, Florida high school last year — Washington’s voters passed initiative I‑1639 in 2018, which by-and-large regulates semiautomatic rifles. Since January 1, 2019, purchasers of such weapons must be 21 years of age or over, must undergo an enhance background check and complete a safety course, and must wait nine days to take possession of their weapons. Further, weapons must be stored properly, or their owners will face felony endangerment charges.
Washington’s legislature, now controlled by Democrats, has demonstrated a willingness to take things even further when it comes to gun laws. Some proposals recently introduced into legislature would ban high capacity magazines and plastic guns made with 3‑D printers. Other initiatives would require training for concealed carry permits, and remove guns and ammo during and after domestic violence incidents.
The Deep Divide Between Washington’s Rural And Urban Population
Like other liberal West Coast states, Washington isn’t all blue. In fact, the political and cultural divide between the state’s urban, liberal voters and conservative, rural voters, is almost palpable. Of Washington’s 39 counties, 27 of them – the least-populated, most rural – all rejected I‑1639 handily. Statewide, however, the initiative passed by 60 percent to 40 percent.
Refusing To Enforce The New Laws
It’s in these rural counties where county sheriffs say they won’t enforce the new laws. One of them is Klickitat County Sheriff Bob Songer.
“[I‑1639] is unconstitutional on several grounds. I’ve taken the position that as an elected official, I am not going to enforce that law.”
Songer went on to claim that if another Washington State agency tried to enforce gun laws against citizens in his county, he would stand in their doorway as a barrier between the citizen and the agent.
Over in Ferry County, Sheriff Ray Maycumber said that until the National Rifle Association’s (NRA’s) lawsuit against Washington’s new laws is resolved, he won’t be enforcing the laws, either. And if the NRA fails, he’ll consider whether or not he wants to remain in law enforcement.
2nd Amendment Sanctuary Cities
Taking a cue from the illegal immigration debate, some elected officials in rural Washington are calling for towns and counties in the state to be “2nd Amendment Sanctuary Cities,” where law enforcement would simply not enforce the new gun laws, and where residents would be protected by local law enforcement against arrest and confiscation of their weapons.
This just in: oblivious little boys still play cops and robbers.
Just as in days of old.
Wait. Hold on. Breathe. Just breathe. This sociological fact doesn’t mean that we’re a nation of incipient international terrorists but for the galumphing grace of grumpy zero-tolerant schoolmasters.
Common sense says you don’t suspend toddlers from school for wiggling their fingers as if wielding a gun, or for sculpting a “gun” out of a slice of Wonder Bread or Freihofer’s. Yet evidence continues to mount that all too many teachers and administrators are immune to considerations of reasonableness when it comes to kids who misbehave. (Or “misbehave.”)
Such enemies of childhood innocence must be hindered. So let’s give two and a half cheers to Ohio lawmaker Peggy Lehner, who proposes to legislate an end in her state to suspending children in the third grade or younger who aren’t threatening anybody. (I’m not sure why kids in grades later than third can’t catch the same break.)
A new, probably imperfect government regulation is not the only way to counter blunderbuss government-school policies. The most fundamental alternative is the free market.
Ideally, no public-school monopoly plagued by mandatory insane rules would exist. Ideally, all K‑12 (and university) educational offerings would be provided by an unregulated market economy, making it much easier for families to drop insane schools and patronize sane ones. The pressures of market competition would encourage school officials to become students of common sense.
Stop me if I repeat myself … but maybe we don’t need elaborate explanations for poor performance in America’s public schools.
Maybe it comes down to this: they are run by people as unhinged as the administrators of the Stacy Middle School in Middleford, Massachusetts.
Yes, it’s time again for American Play Gun Theater, in which children (usually boys) pretend to have toy guns in their empty hands, emit fake gun sounds from their mouths, and scare the living Horace Mann’s out of government employees.
The current case? That of Master Nickolas Taylor,. He formed his hand to vaguely resemble a revolver (index finger as barrel, thumb as hammer — don’t try this at home, kids!) and mimicked some ray gun sounds towards two girls in lunch line, and then blew his finger tip, as if smoke drifted up from firing.
I am not aware of ray guns needing this, but it does have panache.
His punishment? Suspension. The 10-year-old malefactor needed to be taught a lesson, by gum.
Had he done something truly dishonorable, like cut in line, some punishment was probably in order. But if all he did was pretend to have a toy gun (two layers of pretense here at least!), then the worst probably should have been to put him in Pretend Jail, with no bars and no irons and some irony.
The lad’s father and grandmother came to his defense; the local newspaper put him on the front page.
The lesson? For supporters of today’s abysmal public schools: Don’t reload. Rethink.
And if I’ve said this before, point a finger at me and make ray gun noises.
“In schools,” the Washington Post headline warned, “a pointed finger or a toy gun can spell trouble.” The front-page feature detailed a far too extensive and growing list of zero tolerance, zero commonsense punishments meted out to children as young as five at various “educational” institutions.
A ten-year old boy in Alexandria, Virginia, showed kids on the bus his new toy gun, which sported a bright orange tip to let even the most dense person know its essential toyness. Police arrested him the next day.
His mother points out that her son did not threaten anyone. Or pretend to. Nevertheless, he has been “fingerprinted and photographed,” writes the Post. “He now has a probation officer, lawyers and another court date.”
In my Virginia county, Prince William, an eight-year-old boy contorted his hand and fingers into an apparently loaded pistol and through insidious manipulation of his mouth and lips may have imitated the sound of firing hot lead at a classmate, while said classmate was, in an evil orgy of violence, simultaneously pretending to be shooting arrows from an invisible bow.
The finger-slinger was suspended for “threatening to harm self or others.” He did neither, of course, but his offense is equivalent to having waved a loaded gun. (No word on the whereabouts of the silent-but-deadly pantomime archer.)
A five-year-old girl was interrogated by three school staff members, summarily found guilty of issuing a “terroristic threat,” and suspended for ten days for allegedly attempting to murder her friend and then commit suicide. She offered to unload her weapon all over her friend and herself. The weapon? A Hello Kitty gun, which fires bubbles.
The Post suggests the schools are jumpy after the shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. But this zero tolerance insanity didn’t begin last December.
My grandson was suspended from his public school more than a year ago. He was six and playfully shot his finger at several fellow students.
Educators, who long ago abandoned the distinction between play and reality, must have been shocked at the lack of fatalities.
Does the crusade against crime really require public institutions to reject, utterly, common sense?
The current case? That of 
His mother points out that her son did not threaten anyone. Or pretend to. Nevertheless, he has been “fingerprinted and photographed,”