'If Gun Control Worked, Chicago Would Be Mayberry Right Now'

Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty

August 23, 2013

'If Gun Control Worked, Chicago Would Be Mayberry Right Now'

My friend Cam Edwards spoke at the Independence Institute's Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms event last weekend. His speech is supposedly going to air on C-SPAN sometime in the near future, but can be seen on YouTube here.

Two of the many good sections:

If gun control worked, Chicago would be Mayberry right now! And Weld County and El Paso County would be Thunderdome! You guys wouldn't have [Weld County] Sheriff [John] Cooke, you would have Tina Turner and Mel Gibson running around! It would be horrible! But that's not real life! Real life is gun control not working in Chicago. Real life is gun control failing in Camden, New Jersey and Oakland, California, and a lot of other communities in this country . . .

We are pushing back with the lawsuits, with the phone calls to our legislators, by electing officials and supporting elected officials who listen to us. But we're also pushing back by being grownups, and by being okay at it. By having hundreds of people show up at a range and fire thousands of shotgun shells . . . and everybody's okay! And now we're enjoying cigars and drinks and we'll all get home safely tonight, right?

Because we can control our lives! We can manage our lives! It's not too difficult. We're not perfect. We may eat a little too much dessert every now and then. We may not be able to beat that one bad habit, like smoking cigarettes, whatever. But we're a heck of a lot more capable than our government gives us credit for, aren't we?

And now, on to the grim stuff . . .

That Increasingly Popular 'Middle East Chaos,' Now Available in Lebanon

You may want to cancel that weekend getaway in Tripoli, Lebanon:

Found on Twitter here and here. Appears to be two separate bomb blasts, one in the downtown area, another outside a Sunni mosque. Speculation is that it's tied to Syria.

I'm starting to feel like Michael Graham:

In Syria, it appears that more than 1,000 people, many of them children, may have been victims of chemical warfare by the Assad regime. What did Obama say about that a year ago?

Now, this is the point in a column when the writer typically turns his snark up to 11 and uses Obama's own words about "red lines" and "game changers" to make him look hypocritical and foolish.

You know what? Who cares about looking foolish? Have you seen the video of those bleeding, gasping Syrian kids? Did you know that more than 100,000 Syrians have died since Obama took office — most at the hands of an Assad regime he tried to "re-set" relations with?

Who cares that Obama didn't keep his word about "serious consequences" in the past? What matters now is that his feckless ineptitude means he can't stop the killing now. If Assad didn't gas any kids today, he certainly has nothing to fear from Obama if he gases them tomorrow.

The same in Libya, Egypt and Iraq, where the wheels are flying off the Arab Spring bandwagon and nobody even bothers to wonder how Obama feels about it. Who cares? What's he going to do — spout off a few "let me be clears" and "I am urgings" before wandering off to sneak a cigarette behind what was once the most powerful office in the world?

The Middle East is burning down, our president doesn't want to get involved, a majority of the public doesn't want to get involved, and there's little sign anything will get any better anytime soon.

And they told us George W. Bush was ruining that corner of the world?

The Gordian Knot of America's Economic and Social Problems

Here's our conundrum — or at least one of them:

Americans' standard of living won't dramatically improve until our workforce is better prepared for the challenges of the modern, globalized economy. If you're an unskilled worker, your options and opportunities are lousy and shrinking. But our workforce can't get more prepared without a better education system. While there are a lot of ways we can and need to improve our education system — school choice, greater accountability, charter schools, etc. — our schools can only do so much for the kids who don't have a good environment at home. Maybe the best teachers can break through when a child has no father in the house, discord and instability in the family, no good role models around them, and so on. But it's hard for most teachers to get a child to learn when there's no support at home.

A big part of that problem is young adults' decision to have kids before they're ready, and the increasing cultural consensus that separates marriage from raising a child.

But there is no federal Make Bad Parents Become Better Parents Act, and there is no state-level Give People Better Judgment Act.

I mention all this because over at Commentary's Contentions, Pete Wehner argues Republicans need a governing agenda:

Mr. Obama, then, is not only not up to confronting the problems of this era; he is exacerbating them. But even those of us who are critics of the president should admit that the problems afflicting the American economy–including (but not exclusive to) wage stagnation among the middle class, less social mobility among the lower class, and increased inequality–predate the Obama presidency. They are complex and defy simplistic partisan explanations.

Depending on which trend we're talking about, they are rooted in deep cultural shifts (including a weakening marriage culture), globalization and advances in technology (which have moved us toward an economy that favors skilled over unskilled labor), a decline in workforce participation rates, rising health care costs, educational mediocrity (and downright awful education for the underclass), the structure of our entitlement programs (our transfer payments are increasingly regressive and benefit households headed by older adults, who tend to be wealthier than young adults), a byzantine tax code, and slow growth (the post-2008 recession growth rate has been roughly 2 percent).

In the face of America's deep cultural and structural problems, assembling an agenda–including a comprehensive social-capital agenda that equips Americans, especially poor Americans, with the skills, values and habits that will allow them to succeed in a modern, free society–is a hugely complicated task. It will require a thoroughgoing reform agenda focused on entitlements, education, immigration, our financial system, and our tax code. A lot of good work is being done by policy experts and public intellectuals, by governors, and some members of Congress. (At a later date I'll lay out what I think would constitute the broad outlines of an agenda, but for starters it might be worth reading this , this, and this.)

For the most part, however, Republicans and conservatives sound out of touch, their solutions stale, as if they fail to take into account new circumstances. And it is no wonder that Republican policies seem stale; they are very nearly identical to those offered up by the party more than 30 years ago.

The country's well-being needs Republicans to have a coherent, well-thought-out, compelling governing agenda. But that is a separate question from what Republicans need to win. With the president having largely been elected on his cultural identity, Hillary Clinton apparently determined to run on the country's need for a woman president, and the rising star of Julian Castro as the preeminent politician of his ethnic heritage and his age . . . we're seeing the opposition run campaigns where policy is distinctly second to their cultural identities.

ADDENDUM: Ben Affleck will play Batman in the next big movie from Warner Brothers, opposite Henry Cavill's Superman and . . . really, I can't come up with anything funnier than that to end the week. Have a good weekend.

NRO Digest — August 23, 2013

Today on National Review Online . . .

RICH LOWRY: Ted Cruz is from the intellectual elite but not of it, and that's why he so infuriates the media. A Traitor To His class.

KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON: Pronouns and delusions do not trump biology. Bradley Manning Is Not a Woman.

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: There are no good options in the Middle East, but the somewhat bad option is better than very bad. The Choice in Egypt.

CHARLES C. W. COOKE: An activist — and Organizing for America volunteer — invented a much-talked-about spate of hate crimes at Oberline College. The Subtlest Racism.

MICHELLE MALKIN: No one should be surprised the latest "hate crimes" on a college campus were faked. Hoax of the Year.

RYAN T. ANDERSON: Should public-interest claims override religious liberty? Clashing Claims on Same-Sex Marriage.

JOHN FUND: Who stands between Client #9 and control of New York's pension funds? How Spitzer Could Be Stopped.

To read more, visit www.nationalreview.com

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