Thou Shalt Not Kill!

By William L. Garvin

During the Golden Age of Radio, the Shadow knew “what evil lurked in the hearts of men.”  The protagonist, Lamont Cranston, would be hard pressed to understand the twisted minds and blackened hearts that assault innocent victims in this day and age.  He would be even more frustrated at the lack of logic that permeates current political thinking on economic issues.

For instance, the Simpson-Bowles bipartisan commission recommended $3 in cuts for every $1 increase in revenue.  Unfortunately, our President has an obsession with confiscating ever increasing amounts of property from the achievers whom he defines as “the rich.”   His fixation closely resembles the madness exhibited by Captain Ahab in his deathly pursuit of Moby Dick.  The President campaigned against “millionaires and billionaires” but tried to impose increased taxes on those who make $250,000 per year.  He and his sycophantic followers ignore the fact that the income raised by such a measure would run his bloated government for a maximum of ten days and would do ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to reduce the national debt.  They also assume no negative “unintended consequences” of such an act nor do they propose any actual cuts to any budget.  They only propose to reduce the rate of growth of government.

Even though President Obama has previously stated that it makes no sense to raise tax rates in a fragile economy, he seems ready to do exactly that.  He seems fully prepared to go over the “fiscal cliff” so he can score political points by blaming Republicans.  Why shouldn’t he?  After all, if there is no agreement, taxes will go up on everyone thereby giving him short term funding for his profligate spending.  Of course, those in the lowest income taxpayer bracket, whom he is supposedly looking out for, will see their taxes go up a whopping fifty percent!  He will simultaneously kill economic and job growth.  The economy will undoubtedly go into recession and the US credit rating will once again be reduced.  That will instantly increase our costs of borrowing.  But he will have won…he will have harpooned his rich Moby Dick!  If you don’t think he won’t sacrifice the middle class, keep in mind that the first people he threatened to throw under the bus during the last debt ceiling debate were the military and Social Security recipients.

Equally illogical is the liberal reaction to the Newtown killings.  While parents were still in shock, before the tears had even begun to flow let alone dry, liberals were in full throat and in a maniacal pursuit of their own—the Second Amendment.  Naturally their only issue is guns.  Their arguments ran the gamut from ridiculous to hypocritical.  The ridiculous was the Code Pink disruption of the NRA news conference.  Code Pink of course supports Planned Parenthood which has terminated millions of innocent lives.  Code Pink is to liberals what the KKK was to Southern Democrats—a terrorist arm of the party…albeit less muscular.  Then there’s University of Rhode Island professor Eric Loomis who retweeted:  “First f***er to say the solution is for elementary school teachers to carry guns needs to get beaten to death.”  What a perfect example of liberal hypocrisy, intolerance, and irony!

When NRA President Wayne LaPierre said "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun," liberals went apoplectic.  When he proposed an armed guard in each of our schools, liberals were aghast.  One liberal even opined that innocent children might be caught in a cross fire.  Apparently, it is better for children to die at the hands of an unopposed assassin.  These “low information voters” also fail to recall their roots.  In the year 2000, on the one year anniversary of the Columbine shooting, President Bill Clinton asked for another $60 million to place another 452 officers in 220 communities as part of his “COPS in Schools” program.  He bragged about placing 2,200 officers in more than 1,000 communities across our nation, where they are heightening school safety….”  In 2011, President Obama’s Department of Justice also provided $13 million to local law enforcement agencies (according to the DOJ, COPS website) to respond to growing school safety and security concerns.

Senator Feinstein quickly pointed out that the two armed guards at Columbine didn’t stop the intruders.  Of course she failed to note that her assault weapons ban, which was in effect at the time, didn’t stop them either.  Strict gun laws haven’t stopped murders in Chicago or Washington D.C., or Mexico.  Lawbreakers will always break laws.  Putting new ones on the books will only make it more difficult for law abiding citizens to protect themselves.  We should be looking at the mentally ill, movies, media, music, and video games as well as gun safety.  You can’t keep crazy people from stealing weapons to kill people in gun free zones but let the hysteria begin.