Vin Suprynowicz

By Vin Suprynowicz

It’s the holiday season, when we’re reminded to give thanks. Indeed, we risk going into a tailspin if we concentrate only on our problems, without remembering to be thankful for health, for friends and loved ones, for living in a country where we can stand up for our liberties by speaking and reading and writing pretty much as we please.

I almost said “where we can STILL read and write as we please,” but recall that before 1962 Americans faced jail sentences if they tried to send birth control information through the mail (even to married couples!) or to publish such books as “Ulysses” or the works of Henry Miller, then deemed “filth” but which are now considered among the cornerstones of straight-talking modern literature. (Read a lot of Anthony Trollope, lately?)

So, to start with, let’s give thanks that our sworn enemies for life, the forces of gun confiscation, are still led by such incorrigible idiots.

Mind you, idiots can do a lot of damage if they’re allowed to prey on a populace dumbed down by an institution as destructive as our current government schools, which far from teaching young minds to discern logic from propaganda instead concentrate mostly on DISHING OUT propaganda — see “global warming,” “carbon dioxide as a pollutant,” and “We’d be safer if all guns were seized and melted down.”

Nonetheless, they’re idiots, which always helps.

What is their main argument for even more victim disarmament, these days? Reduced to its simplest, it’s: “Our current high rate of crime and particularly of multiple-victim shootings is due to the easy availability of high-powered guns.”

Not only is this not the truth, it’s the opposite of the truth.

First, leaving aside turf battles among inner-city drug gangs (which we’ll get back to), the FBI reports our rates of major crime are generally down, not up — primarily because of an aging population. Senior citizens don’t commit many crimes — except maybe “working for cash under the table” — and we simply no longer have enough teenage thugs to go around.

Nor are many crimes committed with “high-powered rifles.” Crimes with .50-calibers? Virtually unknown. Anything larger is already effectively banned. And if the short cartridges used by an AR-15 or a semi-auto AK-47 clone are “high-powered,” I submit the term has no meaning.

The “ready availability of guns”? Fifty years ago, when I was 12, I took my rifle to school and was taught marksmanship there. I bicycled around my rural Connecticut town with my .22; I could buy ammo for it at the town store. I remember seeing stewardesses on airplanes helping hunters fit their cased hunting rifles into overhead luggage bins. Seventy years ago — within living memory — Americans could order working firearms, with no limitation on caliber, from ads in magazines and have them delivered to their homes without any ‘government background check.” Guns were far more readily available then (except that most of our families were poorer), yet we had none of these “mass shootings” we read about today. The real causes must lie elsewhere.

So why don’t our current crop of politicians look into what HAS changed? Because, when it comes to these multiple-victim shootings, our current crop of politicians don’t want them reduced; they want more. After all, these incidents serve their agenda, which is NOT to reduce crime, but to turn America into another disarmed, collectivist slave state of the sort previously accomplished by Herr Hitler and Comrade Stalin.

Such a bold assertion begs for proof. But the proof stares us in the face. Our politicians could reduce crime and multiple-victim shootings enormously, in mere months, by doing any of the following three things (though doing all three would be best):

THREE MODEST PROPOSALS

1) End their war on drugs.

Drugs aren’t new. A hundred years ago, Americans could get all the cocaine they wanted by buying brand-name coca wine or (original formula) Coca-Cola. They could get all the opium they wanted by buying laudanum or paregoric over the counter at the local pharmacy without any hard-to-obtain “doctor’s prescription,” or by purchasing Mother McCree’s Soothing Syrup, which was advertised for teething pain in infants and contained plenty of opiates.

It’s not drug use that’s changed. It’s the “WAR on drugs” which encourages inner city drug gangs to settle their turf battles with firearms.

Do beer distributors shoot it out in the streets, any more? Of course not — though they did in the 1920s.

What changed? Since 1933, when Roosevelt and his Democratic Congress re-normalized the commerce in booze, their distribution contracts can be enforced in court. Re-legalize opium and cocaine and the same thing will happen.
Why don’t our politicians do this? Because an ongoing epidemic of crime caused by drug prohibition serves their ulterior, totalitarian, victim disarmament agenda.

(“But Vin! Today’s drugs are so much more powerful and addictive than what people used a hundred years ago!”)

Alcohol Prohibition turned us from a nation of beer drinkers into a nation of hard liquor drinkers (the trend has since reversed, somewhat) because the stronger stuff was more cost-effective, more valuable per gallon, for bootleggers to manufacture or smuggle into the country. You can look it up. The prohibition of other plant extracts has similarly led smugglers and dealers to offer more powerful refined drugs because this reduces their risk by allowing them to transport smaller quantities that are worth more per pound. Today’s higher drug potency is CAUSED by prohibition.

2) End the current welfare state. Black economists including Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell point out that, before the Second World War, blacks in America were making good progress towards higher rates of literacy, home ownership, and children being born into married families with two parents. Yes, we still had systematic racial discrimination and that was evil; I’m glad we’re rid of it. But the fact remains that once the current welfare state got going in the 1960s — even as arbitrary racial barriers were coming down — many of these healthy social and economic trends were REVERSED, especially in our inner cities. Today the massive government welfare state subsidizes the very things it claims to be set up to combat: Sloth, joblessness, illegitimacy, dependence, boys being raised in homes without working fathers as role models.

And nothing is a better predictor of crime than boys being raised without fathers in the home.

So why don’t our politicians end it? Our rate of borrowing and money-printing surely show we can’t afford it much longer. If government “charity” were cut back by more than 80 percent, till it benefited only orphans, real cripples (pardon my straight talk, but don’t give me drunkenness as a subsidized “mental disability”) and the infirm elderly, overnight we’d see inner-city women again demanding marriage as a condition of child-bearing. Inner-city men of all races would then have to find work to support their families, earning back their pride and leaving them little time for crime.

(“But Vin! There aren’t any jobs!”)

Funny how our illegal Mexican “guest workers” always seem to find employment. The difference is that jobs are always available “for cash, under the table.” The jobs that are disappearing are those that are reported to the government, and thus subject to mandatory income tax withholding, the new ObamaCare requirements, et cetera ad infinitum — all of which impose prohibitive bureaucratic costs on job creators.

But under our plan, we just got rid of at least 80 percent of the welfare state, remember? With that gone, we no longer need an income tax, or any government-mandated paycheck “withholding.” Get rid of any requirement that jobs be reported to the government, get rid of any difference between a “legitimate, legal” job and a “gray-market, cash-under-the-table” job, and there’s no reason anyone who wants work couldn’t find work, even if they had to start part-time till they proved their worth. It worked pretty well for our nation’s first century and a half, when people flocked here by the millions for opportunities now ridiculed as “dog-eat-dog, subsistence-level, demeaning, dead-end . . .” blah blah blah.

Why won’t our politicians do this? Because they love crime and dependency — it makes them feel “needed,” like a year-round Santa Claus.

WHERE ARE ALL THESE CRAZY PEOPLE COMING FROM?

And finally, 3) Our multiple-victim shootings are caused by lunatics running around loose. We all know this.

No, I’m not recommending we go back to locking away anyone who “acts funny.” The question is, since this is the common link among nearly all recent “multiple-victim shootings,” why isn’t this where the politicians are concentrating their energies? Is it because, once they defined violent lunacy as an “illness,” they can’t bear to be seen as “discriminating against people just because they’re the victims of an illness”? Talk about being trapped by your own, politically correct double-talk!

No, it’s so much easier to go back to what they know, which is bugling about “gun control” — a much easier sell to quasi-literate, ignorant-of-history welfare moms who know nothing about how guns helped win us our liberties, but who sure can vote.

(My ideal fourth reform would be to restrict voting to those who are net tax PAYERS, withholding the franchise from net tax RECIPIENTS, though most of us sense it’s too late for that.)

Is dealing with crazy people before they kill really impossible? First, we could reduce their numbers by reforming our schools to teach academics as they did a century ago. Remove all the time-consuming propaganda about “social issues” including “global warming” and kids could get a better education than that represented by today’s high-school diploma in a mere eight years — no more need to dope up bored teen-age boys with Ritalin and Luvox to get them to sit still in their seats till they’re 18. Don’t you think it might help if our 16-year-olds were out finding jobs and planning marriage to their sweethearts instead of wasting years in anger and frustration, playing violent video- and role-playing games in dark basements?

Meantime, speeded-up commitment hearings for those who show evidence of being violent lunatics-in-waiting could be made a high priority. Ask members of their own FAMILIES whether they think they need closer supervision, for heaven’s sake.

Why don’t today’s politicians do any of these things I’ve suggested? Either they’re placing a higher importance on their ulterior agenda of victim disarmament . . . or they’re idiots. Case closed.

Meantime, the next holiday coming up is Christmas — and what could be a more fitting gift than to buy a young person a firearms safety course, before the holiday? Now, is there some kind of present they might find under the tree, as a reward for successfully completing such a course? Let me think . . .