Freedom of Speech Is Priceless

There’s been bias in media for a very long time. I think it was probably 1989, maybe earlier, when Rush Limbaugh gave new life to AM radio by using it as a platform for conservative talk. He did that because there wasn’t another platform for those opinions. There was mainstream news, which by comparison today may have appeared nonpartisan, but even then it wasn’t.

Eventually Fox News got started, with a bias toward conservatism—from its commentators. But the news is still pretty centrist. It’s just that anyone who wanted a Democrat or progressive slant could get that on ABC, NBC, CBS, and then CNN, then MSNBC, and in the New York Times and just about any other newspaper.

There are some of us who get tired of being fed news that we know is slanted, so that we have to search elsewhere to get the real story. While it would be preferable to get the actual truth straight up, since journalists are human that might be too much to ask; if so, then next best is knowing up front the bias of the presenter, to allow the listener to cautiously sift out the bias.

The internet has been good at opening up conversations—also for opening up contentious arguing. But that’s a risk you take when you have free speech.

Those who’ve had control of the message for all these many decades are up in arms now about the lack of control over the message that gets out to the masses. Because—obviously, from the last presidential election—that has consequences.

So there have been covert efforts to quash non-sanctioned messages. And now we’re also seeing overt efforts.

Among the covert efforts, from within the Obama administration, was the weaponization of the IRS against conservative groups.  The court case for True the Vote is about to be settled, about eight years in. The IRS did indeed target them illegally. Founder Catherine Engelbrecht said this about it: here. [Correction added 6-20-2019: there's an additional video I intended to link to, from June 6, 2019, here.]

True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht
screenshot from here

Meanwhile, the overt efforts are heating up. It sort of heated up some months back with shock jock/conspiracy theorist (and non-conservative) Alex Jones being banned. There were people who spoke up—not because they agree with anything he says, but because the reasons for banning speech were just wrong. If you’re not calling on people to act violently, or doing some other of a very short list of illegal speech (making threats, libel, slander), then what is the reason? And if the reason is arbitrary, who is safe?

Lately Steven Crowder has been attacked. YouTube demonetized him. That means his videos, which he places on a platform that allows for them to bring in money through advertising can no longer do so. The purpose is to prevent him from having the resources to speak. If he were actually inciting violence or doing some other illegal speech (see short list above), that would be understandable for YouTube to do. But, after investigation, they find that he has not violated their platform rules.

Steven Crowder, of Louder with Crowder
image from here

YouTube is a private company; they can set up their own rules, but they admit he has not violated them. Nor has he violated any laws. But they decide—because they don’t like his message, or maybe his tone—that they are demonetizing him anyway.

There’s a bit more to the story. The progressive/socialist “news” outlet Vox complained about Crowder—for using terms to describe one of their commentators that the commentator uses to describe himself. Vox put pressure on YouTube.

Ben Shapiro and friends talked about this last week. One aspect is that the leaders of the Big Tech platforms support Democrats and their progressive/socialist agenda, so they’re willing to give in to pressure toward their natural leanings. But there’s also this, which is even more insidious:

The mainstream media that are proclaiming day in and day out that Donald Trump is an existential threat to the press—people like Jim Acosta who are doing books about how Donald Trump is calling them an enemy of the people, and therefore he’s trying to shut down freedom of the press. These people are all in. I mean, all in, in trying to get Big Tech to censor people. Vox is a supposed journalistic outfit. It is a pseudo-journalistic trash heap. Their editor-in-chief put out a letter explicitly saying, “We know that Steven Crowder didn’t violate any of your rules. That’s why we are telling you, as an editorial newspaper, we are telling you that you should change your rules.

In recent Senate hearings Google president Sundar Pichal responds to questions concerning employee behavior during the 2016 election. Senator Jim Jordan questions him regarding a four-page memo, written the day after the November 2016 election by Eliana Murillo, Google’s head of Multicultural Marketing, concerning her work with the Latino vote. The memo talks about Get Out the Vote efforts, which aren’t a problem, but then the memo indicates they were only targeted in key states for a specific outcome—which means for political purposes. Sundar’s response is that they have found no evidence—but the evidence is the memo before them that he’s being asked about.

Again, Google is a private company and can set its own rules. However, right now those rules apply to it as an open platform; if it is not essentially randomly open, but is favoring or disfavoring based on content, then it cannot continue to be treated as an open platform.

That’s the case with YouTube as well. Is it an open platform or a content curator?

Facebook has been facing these questions for a while. Facebook jail is a real thing. People I have known have been put in it. That means their specific content is removed and no longer seen, or it may mean they cannot post anything for a certain amount of time, usually a day or a week. The punishment happens without notice, and often without explanation. There’s supposed to be an appeals process so a person can learn why they were barred from posting, but it doesn’t seem to be because of any identifiable—and thus avoidable—reasons.

Recently it was leaked that Facebook has a “hate agent”status they apply to users based various bits of data from on and off the platform. It’s a guilt by association formula. If you appear in photos with someone they deem hateful, without knowing context for your being there, that can get you labeled. So can comments about immigration, particular tattoos, being neutral about someone Facebook thinks you should disapprove of, or saying something in private that is later made public that Facebook deems unacceptable.

The attempt is to draw a circle of association around actual haters or violent groups to claim a person should not be heard. This is an extension of what the Obama administration did when it created a terrorist watch list that included things like being in a Tea Party, or being patriotic. I think I checked 28 boxes on their list, as a conservative Christian grandmother with nothing more that a couple of traffic tickets on my lifetime record. It’s how you get crazies saying that Ben Shapiro (Orthodox Jew, conservative) is a white supremacist leader of the Alt-Right. (The actual Alt-Right criticized Shapiro more times than any other media person last year.) It’s how you get them saying Candace Owens is all about white privilege (she’s black).

In other words, you can’t trust their algorithm, because you can’t trust people who believe that only their ideas should be allowed.

One of the things Facebook has been doing lately is to alter your feed. They notice if you’re getting “too much” content from one point of view, and then they send you similar content from a different point of view. They’re trying to keep people from being radicalized, they say. That is a little creepy, but it would be mostly innocuous—except that it’s aimed only at correcting people who see conservative content. The thing is, conservatives see opposing viewpoints all over the place. 

Meanwhile, there are those on the Democrat/progressive/socialist side who seem to be unaware that it’s possible for thinking, functional people to differ from them.

It turns out that Pinterest, our personal online bulletin board, where we go for crafts and food and other interests, has joined other Big Tech monitors of speech. They recently fired a whistleblower, Eric Cochran, for coming forward about their censorship of conservative voices. Specifically, they labeled Lila Rose and her pro-life organization, Live Action, to be porn, so they could ban it. There isn’t anything in it that could be construed as porn; they lie. They also removed Zero Hedge and PJ Media. Bible verses—a common use for Pinterest—are also considered too “sensitive” to be allowed.

I think Ben Shapiro is right; the opposition to freedom, prosperity, and civilization are trying to control the message, to keep anything they disagree with from getting out to the people. And the intensity at this time is tied to the upcoming 2020 presidential election.

We saw it with Obama, with the IRS attacks that affected the 2012 election and beyond. Only now, most of a decade later, when that administration is no longer in office, does a resolution come.

Suggested solutions include regulating the Big Tech companies. But we know that greater regulation on big businesses—which are regulated according to how those big companies want, and pay their lobbyists to get—support only the big companies and cause barriers to entry for startups.

Another suggestion is to break up the big companies, the way the phone companies were broken up some decades ago.

An alternative is to start—and support with subscriptions—alternative platforms. Glenn Beck’s The Blaze and Ben Shapiro’s The Daily Wire, both with subscription fees, have been attempting that. But to reach beyond their current subscribers, they depend on YouTube and Facebook to allow their content to be seen.

Jordan Peterson announces Thinkspot.com
image from here

Another announcement last week was from Jordan Peterson, who has been working to develop an alternative subscription free-speech platform called Thinkspot.com, which will not limit speech beyond legal limits. It will be an anti-censorship version of Patreon. No censoring content based on using a “wrong” word or having a “wrong” opinion. This is meant to be useful both for content providers and for responses, to encourage dialogue. There will be rules, such as a minimum comment length, to encourage deeper thinking. As Peterson puts is, “If minimum comment length is 50 words, you’re gonna have to put a little thought into it. Even if you’re being a troll, you’ll be a quasi-witty troll.”

My preferred solution is whatever best allows truth to flourish. I don’t have a lot of money to spare, but if the subscription is worth it, I’m willing to pay a bit to make it happen. Because our freedom of speech is priceless.

Handle Fire with Caution

Government is a tool similar to fire. It’s very useful when kept within careful limits. But if left to grow, it can do great harm.

Through most of history, in most parts of the world, government has leaped beyond a fire circle out into the forest, harming the very people who needed just a little of that power.

To some of us, the idea that the fire should be kept within safe boundaries makes natural sense. But there’s a substantial portion of the public who essentially say, “We need more fire. Go ahead and let it burn free. Sure, that’s been bad everywhere it’s been tried, but somehow we'll make it burn just right.”

We need to know the specific bounds to put upon government—and why. And then how.

Think of it as if you’ve just bought a new outdoor grill, one of those high temperature ones that can cook a steak perfectly seared outside without overcooking the inside. In other words, fire is involved. That means some danger. Really high heat. The possibility of getting burned. Fuel is involved.

When used correctly, you get delicious results, and the grill is a blessing to your life. When used casually or carelessly, it can cause burns. Maybe severe burns. Harm to people and environment. 

There’s a comic in the paper making fun of a guy, Crankshaft, who always has mishaps when he brings out the grill for the first time each summer. Some years all the neighbors require warnings. Some years the fire department is on call. Pretty much every year the grill explodes and shoots up into the sky. It’s a comic, so no lives our house are lost in the annual mishap. But you get the idea. What is supposed to be a useful management of fire turns out to be a danger.

Crankshaft comic from September 11, 2018

Often Crankshaft is found pouring lighter fluid on the grill. Too much. He doesn’t follow basic instructions or safety protocol.

If we’re looking at government as the grill—the way of using the fire for good—it would be a good idea to know enough to use it safely. We probably ought to carefully read the instruction book, and be experienced enough to understand basic safety rules such as using oven mitts and long-handled utensils to keep ourselves from getting burned.

We have an instruction book for our country. It’s the US Constitution. It’s short—about the length of a typical grill instruction manual. I keep a pocket version in my wallet.

But what did the Founding Fathers of America do before that was written—when there was “some assembly required” to come up with the right size government that would safely use the fiery power for good? They read a lot of the same things—as though they had all read the Boy Scout handbook on fire safety, plus related wilderness survival guides, and any other sources of wisdom.

The Founding Fathers were a diverse group, with a fairly wide range of educational sources, from somewhat random home tutoring and self-teaching, to a formal Harvard education. Yet, besides reading widely, they covered many of the same materials. You’d be hard pressed to find a founder who hadn’t read:

·         The Bible

·         Classic sources—in their original languages

o   Polybius

o   Cicero

o   Plutarch

o   Aristotle

·         Contemporary philosophers and historians

o   John Locke

o   Thomas Hobbes

o   Adam Smith (The Wealth of Nations, published 1776)

o   Montequieu

o   Blackstone

o   Gibbons (Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, volume I published 1776)

·         History

o   Greek and Roman

o   Anglo-Saxon

o   European

o   English

Books were still something of a luxury in the 18^th Century, and yet these men managed to find them in the frontier land of the American colonies—and find the best among many books. They shared them with one another. George Wythe suggested reading for Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson advised and shared books with James Madison. Benjamin Franklin had a study group of friends who studied a wide range of information. While they didn’t all know each other, living in various colonies in times when travel was a bigger challenge than today. But their reading choices were surprisingly uniform. As if a divine teacher had laid out a curriculum for them.

We can be grateful that these men understood both the dangers of too much government power (i.e., coercion, force = tyranny) and just the right amount. Harnessing just the right amount of government power was risky—but it has led to the best outcomes in human history.

In our day, at minimum we should be reading our founding documents: the Declaration of Independence, and the US Constitution. In addition, reading The Federalist Papers will give a fair amount of background to the thinking that went into the writing of the Constitution. These were newspaper editorials written mainly by Thomas Jefferson, John Jay, and Alexander Hamilton. They didn’t always agree, but they shared the idea that federalism, or distributed power, would work. Then, to see opposing views (those who were very concerned about too much government), you can try The Anti-Federalist Papers, also newspaper editorials attempting to express the dangers they thought the federalists were not fully addressing.

A more contemporary book that addresses the issues the founders faced is Skousen’s The 5000-Year Leap. And I’ve previously listed other suggestions. 

There are resources on government that I think are plain wrong, and harmful; these are about accumulating power over the masses—the opposite of what our Founding Fathers were looking for. They might be worth reading to understand the opposition, however. These include Machiavelli and, closer to our day but surprisingly relevant, Marx and Engels.

Enough time has passed that, along with a good understanding of history, we can see that the work of our founders is not simply theoretical. We can compare.

Just a decade or two ago, Venezuela was the most prosperous, modern country in South America.

screenshot from Stuart Varney report on Venezuela August 2018

Today it looks like a war zone. But without a war. The result is the burn of too much government.

If you want to see the result of too much government even here in our country, take a look at Detroit. I wrote about that here. Last night a friend shared with us a video from early in Steven Crowder’s career, a short documentary on Detroit. And, in the spirit of supporting free speech, after he’s been censored online, I believe unfairly, I’ll end today’s piece with that cautionary tale.

Still Celebrating Columbus

In honor of Columbus Day today, PragerU has a new video, presented by Steven Crowder.

Crowder’s purpose is to debunk the trendy idea that Columbus committed genocide, which he did not.

screen shot from "Goodbye, Columbus Day,"
from PragerU

Did natives die? Actually, quite a lot, on the island of Hispaniola, where Columbus first landed—but not from warfare. They died of infectious diseases. It turns out that, back almost half a millennium before medical science discovered the causes of infectious diseases under a microscope, what you don’t know can hurt you. What would have been a mild cold to a group of people used to certain germs could be catastrophically life threatening to a group of people never introduced to those germs.

It’s hard to hold someone accountable for something they had no way of knowing about nor could they have anticipated.

Also, while there has been war, there has never been anything in the way of policy or practice that could accurately be called genocide against native peoples in this country.

Another thing that’s not true, as Crowder puts it, is that natives

lived in harmony with the environment until Columbus arrived, and European settlers destroyed the land with their evil technology.

Truth? Not only did the Natives brutally take out PEOPLE, but they took out entire forests and hunted species to extinction.

And one more myth that’s not true: that natives lived in pacifistic harmony until Western civilization introduced war. Not so. As Crowder tells it,

The truth is... not so much. When Columbus arrived, the islands were inhabited by two main tribes: the Arawaks, who were passive and friendly, and the Caribs, who were vicious cannibals. The Arawaks actually lived in fear of the Caribs for—you guessed it—the reasons being that they hunted them down to enslave them and eat them. Yes—eat them. Ironically, we get the name “Caribbean Islands” from those famous people-eaters.

The only way settlers were able to conquer this land was through the help of Native Americans who teamed up with them to settle the score with other tribes who were even bigger jerks than they were!

That’s not even to mention the populations in Central and South America, famous for ritual human sacrifice. You think Cortes was able to command and conquer with only 500 or so Conquistadors? Of course not! It took 50,000 screaming, ANGRY allied natives who’d had it up to here with being tortured, enslaved and forced to carry gold for the other native Aztecs. At some point, they decided to roll the dice and go with the guys sporting funny beards and metal hats.

So why do we get told about Columbus and the evil he supposedly committed? Good question:

Columbus is not the issue here, and never was. This whole “Indigenous Peoples Day” charade is about teaching your children to despise Western civilization and anybody who dare defend it.

The next logical question, of course, is, Why do people teaching our children these things so despise Western civilization? And the answer to that—which is beyond the scope of this particular PragerU video—is that certain people use a misguided but common self-disparagement disguised as humility as a manipulation tool to get weaker, immature minds to submit to assertions of power over them.

I wrote a fuller discussion (including a lot of PragerU videos that day too) in “Self-Hatred Isn’t Virtuous,” from August of this year.  

Last year I also spent Columbus Day debunking some of the myths, probably also worth reviewing, here. 

Truth is always a good way to celebrate this historically memorable day, and every day.

Here’s the full PragerU video:

Being Capable of Self-Rule

I don’t like the idea of elite vs. the great unwashed, or the proletariat, or the uneducated masses. I’m with Martin Luther King, Jr., willing to look at the content of a person’s character, rather than where they come from or some other arbitrary detail.

But the purpose of politics is to persuade large numbers of people—people who may or may not be educated or clear thinking enough to understand the issues on their own and be capable of recognizing solutions.

The difficulty is that, in a democratic society, the persuaded masses rule, whether they’re right or not.

Our founding fathers tried to prevent the damage that could happen from a straight-up democracy—which is essentially mob rule. They gave us a Constitution, which limited government to certain enumerated powers. And within those constraints, they set up a representative government, with a bicameral legislative body, with the House of Representatives based on population, and the Senate based on the separate states equally. The House would respond more directly to the people, but the Senate would be a more deliberative body, thinking more of state interests than individual interests.

"Scene at the Signing of the Constitution"
painting by Howard Chandler Christy
image from Wikipedia

They separated the legislative, judicial, and executive branches, with more or less equal powers that would be a check and balance on each other. All of this was to prevent any branch from usurping powers it was not granted.

The founders took great care to set up government to do only what it was intended to do: protect life, liberty, and property.

But a self-ruling people—that is, a people who set up their own government, rather than become subjects of a ruler—must be capable of ruling themselves.

Usually I have a lot of faith in people in general to think things through and try to do the right things. That’s what I do. So sometimes I believe any normal person does that.

But there’s a lot of evidence that large portions of the populace do not think things through. And that leaves them subject to being swayed by propaganda rather than truth.

There was an example this week. Steven Crowder did one of his “Change My Mind” sessions at a college campus. This one was “White Privilege Is a Myth: Change My Mind (2nd Edition)” on the campus of Texas Christian University. It’s rather long, most of an hour. But I’ve included it in full below.

Most of the conversation is between Crowder and a young black woman who defers mostly to her white friend (Crowder points out that the white girl is “white-splaining” for the black girl). The white woman claims that America was set up by white men for the sole benefit of white men, and has been corrupt and oppressive from its inception.

While she is right that women didn’t originally have the right to vote (and, depending on the state, neither did white or any other race of men if they didn’t own property), she fails to understand that all of the Bill of Rights pertained to women every bit as much as men. Slaves were originally excluded in slave states—but of course we suffered a Civil War to correct that.

When Crowder asks what evidence she has of men having privilege today, she claims it is really white male privilege; there’s no privilege for black men, who get sent to jail for having a quarter ounce of weed while white men would get away with it. Crowder asks for statistics; she has none. He uses his handy phone and looks up data on the NAACP website, which shows that black men are incarcerated at higher rates, but that site has no mention of behavior. The girl insists that of course black men don’t commit crimes at higher rates, because it’s all about the racist system. She knows that is so, but she doesn’t have data. Crowder provides some for his side, but she cannot. But she’s sure it’s just a matter of doing a little online search, and then her views would be proven.

Except they’re not.

After Crowder talks with her, he has a young black man and his Asian friend, neither of whom believe they’re oppressed in America. Their conversation is more uplifting.

The earlier white girl was absolutely certain that she was right. And she was absolutely certain that what she was saying was common knowledge and common sense. Even though it was either unsupported opinion or provably false.

She was a college student, and made it clear she had gotten a scholarship for being top of her class. So she knew what she knew—accusing Crowder of enjoying privileges that were unrelated to his life growing up in a French Canadian culture with a fair amount of oppression and difficulty, not coming to the US until adulthood.

As Reagan used to say,

“It isn't so much that liberals are ignorant. It's just that they know so many things that aren't so.”

On Tuesday, working at the polls—primary elections where Republicans and Democrats had to awkwardly share a room for their separate polling places—I was gratefully aware that voters were trying to do their civic duty. But I was also aware that not very many spend as much time as I do researching and figuring out who to vote for, especially for the many smaller judicial races. I do believe if everybody studied as hard before voting as I do, we would have better outcomes, even though they wouldn’t always agree with me. 

In order to be an informed—instead of a propaganda-manipulated—people, we need to know the criteria to look for. A nice candidate who seems articulate isn’t enough. And it certainly isn’t enough for a candidate to try to sway voters by appealing to their tribal issues (race, gender, etc.) We need voters who understand how our government is set up.

When you’re looking at candidates, there are questions that help gauge just how likely a person is to pursue freedom, prosperity, and civilization for all. These are Spherical Model questions, rather than right/left questions. I laid them out in 2015, here.

If you—or your representative—need to decide on an issue, you can ask these freedom-leading questions: 

·         Is the policy being debated something that an individual has the right to do, and therefore has the right to delegate to his/her government?  For example, a person has the right to protect his own life and property. He can, therefore, combine resources with his neighbors and hire a government entity, such as a sheriff, to do that job for him. Similarly, the several states can combine to delegate the power of defending the nation to a national government entity. Conversely, a person does not have the right to take his neighbor’s excess grain production, for example, and bestow it on himself, because his neighbor was more prosperous in a particular season. He can, of course, ask his neighbor for charity, but he cannot coerce the neighbor to give. That would rightfully be considered theft. Therefore, the person cannot delegate the redistribution of wealth to the government to do for him. 

·         Does the policy infringe in any way on the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights? Does the policy infringe on the free exercise of religion or try to establish a particular sect as a state religion? Is political speech hindered? Does the policy infringe on the right of citizens to bear arms? Does the policy constitute an illegal search or seizure? Does the policy deprive a person of life, liberty, or property when the person has not committed a crime for which that deprivation is the just sentence? Does the policy try to claim for government a power that was not specifically granted in the Constitution? etc. If the policy infringes on the God-given rights, then government cannot take that power without usurping power from the people.

·         Is the idea being debated a proper role of government, some aspect of protection (including defense, protection from interstate crime, enabling international and interstate commerce, standardized weights and measures and currency, the judiciary that guarantees the protective laws), as enumerated in the Constitution? If not, then accepting the idea is outside the Constitution and below the northern 45th parallel.

Two years ago I listed the Five Essential Attributes of Active Citizens, as outlined in a speech on Citizenship by Lawrence C. Walters.

1. Accept responsibility.

2. Do their homework.

3. Engage with others.

4. Take action.

5. Learn from their experiences.

If we’re going to remain a self-governing people, rather than slip downward into being ruled by power mongers, then we need a critical mass of educated populace, willing to do their part. If you’re reading this, that’s a start. You’re probably doing your part. So share it with anyone who has a sense of civic responsibility. If enough of us do that, then we can trust it will be enough.

Scary Guns

A free people ought not only be armed and disciplined, but they should have sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain a status of independence from any who might attempt to abuse them, which would include their own government.—George Washington

Since it’s President’s Day, it seems appropriate to start this discussion with George Washington’s words on the subject of the day

The hue and cry for gun control, in the wake of last week’s school shooting in Florida, is deafening but unconvincing. Emotions of course run high after such a senseless massacre. But sometimes things that seem like the “obvious” solution when you’re high on emotion look a lot less sensible when you calm down and look at facts.

I’m not a gun expert. What I do is look at the factors that lead to freedom, prosperity, and civilization. Those are the northern hemisphere of the Spherical Model. The southern hemisphere is made up of all stripes of tyranny, poverty, and savagery.

The school shooting was savage. Any response that is southern hemisphere by nature—such as coercion—will not lead away from savagery up to civilization.

Since that is a principle I know—or, rather, is a theory I believe plays out in society—I am looking for facts to either prove or disprove the theory. Facts are less emotional, and therefore more logical. Feelings have their place, but I won’t allow them to take society southward into tyranny and all bad things if I can help it.

So I’ve been gathering some facts. There is a short piece at Ricochet.com by contributor Henry Racette, with some statistics that give perspective to start with:

At the current rate, an American high school student faces a risk of being murdered in a school shooting in a year of about 0.0014%.

That’s about one in 71,000.

Based on last year’s crime statistics, the overall probability of a person in the US being murdered in a year is about 0.005%.

That’s about one in 20,000.

Also based on last year’s crime statistics, a citizen of St. Louis, Baltimore, New Orleans, or Detroit—including children in those cities—has a risk of being murdered in a year of about 0.049%.

That’s about one in 2,000.

If the current rate continues, there will be about two dozen school shooters this year—based on a reasonable definition of what constitutes a school shooting. Their total victims will constitute about one half of one percent of all United States homicides.

Overall, in the United States, about 16,000 murders will be committed this year. Most of them—about two-thirds—will be committed by males between the ages of 17 and 35.

The 30 most violent cities in America represent about six percent of the US population but account for about a quarter of all murders.

There is nothing trivial about school shootings, but there is also nothing typical about them. If we wish to reduce their frequency, we have to find ways to reach the last 0.0003% of the male high school population. Put differently, 99.9997% of the young men in our high schools are not in danger of becoming school shooters.

Let’s look at the two dozen who are and try to understand their pathology. But let’s not mistake them for normal. Most of the other 99.5% of murders in the United States this year will be more typical, more predictable, and more preventable.

What we’re looking at in school shootings are outliers. Oddities. Atypical events.

They’re horrible. If we can find a way to prevent them, we should do so. Maybe it’s time to consider metal detectors and armed guards in every school, and possibly teachers who voluntarily qualify to carry concealed weapons. These and other measures that don’t infringe on the rights of law-abiding citizens might actually work.

As Brandon Minoff, a young man from the high school, said about football coach and security guard Aaron Feis, who was killed, “If coach Feis would have had a gun or any of the other security guards would have had a gun it definitely would have been less fatal," he said. "[The shooter] and coach Feis were face-to-face and he just shielded kids instead of having the ability to kill the shooter."

In the immediate aftermath, we were told the killer had not had a criminal record. That wasn’t exactly true. He had a long record of incidents, 39, many violent, in his home over many years. But as a juvenile. Yet the moment he turned 18, that record was hidden from people who may have needed to see it, such as the gun seller doing a background check. Police and other authorities knew of his record. The FBI had received what now appear to be credible tips about the killer’s plans to carry out a school shooting.

Do we need to get better at identifying these threats and finding ways to prevent? Absolutely. If there is a law that needs adjusting, it may be that violent youth crime shouldn’t be hidden just because a person reaches a particular birthday, since a birthday is no guarantee of change in behavior. It may need to be case-by-case. I don’t know. Those kinds of things could be debated in legislatures.

But the debate tends to be, instead, on “common sense gun laws,” often meaning getting rid of those “assault rifles.” The term lacks definition. There is no legally defined such thing. But the term is used to imply scary, military style weapons, with great capacity to do mass murder. Many of the people making these arguments just lack facts. So let’s start with more information about these guns.

This 5-minute Glenn Beck video clip is from 2013. The whole thing (below) is useful visually. I’ll describe a few parts of it:

Glenn picks up a scary looking metal gun, which he terms an “assault rifle,” and also a rifle with a wooden stock, which he says is a 22.

Paul Michael, owner and instructor at Strictly Defense, says. “They’re both the same caliber. They both can do the same damage. One just looks different from the other.”

The 22 holds 17 bullets. The other holds a high-capacity magazine of 20 bullets. Not much difference.

Of the collection of guns displayed on the table, Glenn suggests, if he took all the wood-stock guns off the table and left the metal ones, you might look at that collection and say the owner was a madman. But if you take away “the spooky black shotgun” and replace it with “this nice shotgun,” then people would assume the owner was a hunter.

What’s the difference between the two shotguns? Michael says, “Cosmetics. They’re both the identical shotgun. They’re both Remington 1100s.” The only differences are a synthetic (black) stock, an extended barrel, and extended magazine tube. Why the black? Glare. Some hunters believe the game can get a glint off the shiny metal parts, so they prefer a matte black finish.

There’s further discussion about a hunter-looking rifle and a slightly smaller black gun. The rifle is more accurate. The black one is less accurate, but lighter weight, easier for a woman or a less experienced gunman to use in a pressure situation. In other words, it’s good for self-defense. It has the added self-defense benefit of the pump sound, which can scare off an intruder who suddenly realizes someone has a gun ready for him.

Using handguns, they discuss the difference between a revolver and a semiautomatic. With the revolver, it’s mechanical. You need to pull back the handle to load the bullet to be ready to fire by pulling the trigger. The semiautomatic uses gas pressure from the cartridge to load the next bullet to be ready to fire, so it does one step for you. Depending on your skill, the revolver can be as fast, or nearly as fast, as the semiautomatic handgun.

Neither of those is automatic—which means, like a machine gun, firing multiple bullets with a single trigger pull. Production and sale of automatic weapons to the public have been illegal for several decades. They are not technically outlawed, in that you can buy existing ones, for very high prices (around $20,000 and up compared to around $500 for a semiautomatic but otherwise similar gun), and with lots of paperwork about how it will be stored, who can touch it, how it can be transported, and how and where and under what circumstances it can be shot.

The Tommy guns of the 1920s might be what you picture. But since this law went into effect, no mass shooting in the US to date has used an automatic weapon.

We could add that,  those “scary guns,” aren’t the weapon of choice for gun crimes; handguns are used in 80% of gun-related crimes. Nicholas Johnson gives the full story is in this PragerU video:

Earlier in January 2013, Glenn Beck had another discussion with David Barton, of Wallbuilders, on natural law and self-defense.

Natural law is where we disagree with anti-gun people. And its irreconcilable. We are not granted the right to defend our own lives, loved ones, and property by government—not even by the Second Amendment. We are granted that right by God. And God-given rights are inalienable—they cannot be infringed legally, only by tyranny.

Rescinding the Second Amendment, as has been suggested again this week, would not take away the natural law—nor the natural reaction to fight off an attacker—that you know inside you is your right. Think about it. If someone is attacking your child, do you have the right to fight them off? You do.

If that person is using a gun against you or your child, don't you have the right to use a gun or other lethal force to fight back? If you’re saying, “Yes, but not a scary black gun,” then it’s on you to explain that distinction.

We’re not saying, “Tough luck! We just have to tolerate the mayhem.” Again, we should be talking about what can and ought to be done to prevent attacks. But you might be comforted to know that the anti-gun lobby (including the media) has been lying to you when they say, “More guns mean more gun deaths.”

Steven Crowder responds to an anti-AR-15 piece, and includes video from March 2016, in which he debunks a Vox video that tries to pass off propaganda as a dispassionate demonstration of facts—just not true ones. It’s longish, but it will help you understand why it’s easy to be manipulated if you don’t think things through. For example:

Ah, see, now this chart is comparing countries. But this chart is not about homicide; it’s not about firearm deaths. It’s only about gun ownership. All of this is designed to lead you into believing that gun ownership—legal gun ownership—results in increased violent gun crime. Important to note: If gun ownership as seen in this chart is so much higher, but the United States still ranks 28th in gun-related deaths, why is that the case? It also ironically unravels her own point. If gun ownership is so drastically higher in the United States, but we’re only 28th ranked in overall gun homicide rate, that means proportionally legal gun owners in the United States are committing fewer crimes.

Also doing some debunking is Ben Shapiro, in his show from Friday, February 16. He’s responding to a Bret Stephens piece in the New YorkTimes, which Shapiro says is the best argument around for getting rid of the Second Amendment, but it’s not a good one.

There’s this, for example:

Stephens cites a study in the American Journal of Public Health from 2013 to show the “states with high rates of gun ownership have disproportionately large numbers of death from firearm-related homicides.” But there’s only one problem with the study. This examines the statistics on a state level, which doesn’t make any sense, given that virtually all murder in the United States takes place not in the rural areas of states, but in the big cities. In those big cities there are very harsh gun laws. In the big cities, that’s where nearly all murder in the United States takes place, in big cities. So there is very little link, actually, between state law and state homicide rate, as Eugene Volokh of the Washington Post pointed out.

Shapiro uses John Lott’s website, the Crime Prevention Research Center, which goes through the annual death rate from mass public shootings, comparing the European countries to the US and Canada on a per capita basis, instead of sheer numbers. As Shapiro says,

One of the things that happens is that the United States is compared to Britain, for example. He says there are a lot more shootings here than in Britain. Right, but we’re a much larger country than Britain. When you actually look at the death rate per million people from mass public shootings from 2009 to 2015, according the Crime Prevention Research Center, the number one country was Norway, because they had that horrible Anders Breivik shooting. And then it’s Serbia, France, Macedonia, Albania, Slovakia, Switzerland, Finland, Belgium Czech Republic, and then the United States.

How about frequency? Forget about the number of dead. How about frequency of mass public shootings? So, if you look at the frequency of mass public shootings from January 2009 to December 2015, per million people, in order it’s Macedonia, Albania, Serbia, Switzerland, Norway, Slovakia, Finland, Belgium, Austria, Czech Republic, France, and then the United States.

The average incident rate per 28 EU countries is 0.0602 with 95% confidence interval of 0.0257 to .09477. The US rate is .078 higher than the EU rate. But the US and an average for EU countries are not statistically different. In other words, we’re having about the same number of mass shootings as are happening in other countries, and we have significantly more guns. So this idea that everything lines up is just not statistically correct.

“Common sense gun laws,” and “No one needs an assault weapon” are code for “We want to ban all gun ownership for self-defense or any other purpose.” But despite what media and various celebrities would portray, the American public is very much against full-scale gun confiscation and outlawing firearm ownership. That's why, when Democrats had both houses and the presidency, they didn't even bring up gun legislation; they know the people won't stand for it. 

The more the anti-freedom people lie about what they really intend, the more likely they will lose the debate in a nation that knew better from its founding than to cede natural rights to a tyrannical government.

Incompatible with Civilization

Monday night the Manchester Arena was bombed, at the end of a concert, where many young people—often along with their parents—were attending. The perpetrator was among the 22 dead. He was an Islamist extremist. Of course.

In today’s world, despite news media going far out of their way to hide names, ethnicity, and religion, heinous mass murder attempts are 99% of the time Islamist extremists.

There’s always this overweening concern that if the fact is mentioned, there will be a backlash against non-extreme Muslims. While that backlash has been mostly non-existent, the failure to provide truth is stirring people to anger. Muslims who are not Islamist extremists have a stake in clarifying who they are, in contrast to the terrorists. They need to find a way to separate out the wicked from among them, for their own sake as well as for civilization at large.

I don’t know how they should go about this. But I wish them well, because the friends we’ve had who are Muslim are very well suited to civilization, and we want them with us.

I believe clarity will help. Since I’m about defining civilization, I appreciated a response from Steven Crowder on Tuesday.

Instead of civilization, he refers to Western culture, but for now we’ll call that a synonym. He lays out several beliefs that are incompatible with Western culture:

• Want sharia courts? You’re not welcome.

• Think it’s okay to marry a six-year-old? You’re not welcome.

• Think it’s okay to strike your wife for ANY reason? You’re not welcome.

• Believe in ANY kind of punishment for apostasy? You’re not welcome.

• Believe in ANY kind of punishment for “blasphemy”? You’re not welcome.

It’s a big more specific than what we at the Spherical Model call the requirements for Civilization:

·         Honor God—which must include freedom of thought, freedom of belief, and freedom of speech that disagrees with those who believe differently. As one of the Articles of Faith in my religion puts it, “We claim the privilege of worshiping Almighty God according to the dictates of our own conscience, and allow all men the same privilege, let them worship how, where, or what they may.” [Articles of Faith 11]

·         Honor life—protect the life of each innocent human life, including the weak and defenseless, such as the unborn and the elderly and the afflicted. All human life is valuable, more valuable than other animals; no groups of humans can be categorized as subhuman. Categorizing any “them” as subhuman leads to atrocities.

·         Honor family—respect parents, and reserve sex for marriage, where mother and father raise children faithfully to adulthood.

·         Honor property—never taking what belongs to someone else, never expecting something to be given to you at someone else’s expense.

·         Honor truth—real objective truth, that exists outside ourselves and we are obliged to do our best to perceive.

Crowder’s list mainly targets freedom of thought and honoring life. But he’s right; you can’t get along in the civilized world when you’re believing savage things. We have to say, “If you believe in savagery, you’re not welcome among us.”

The full video is about seven minutes, and includes commentary on the need to “shame” the believers of what he accurately refers to as political Islam—because it’s seeking power rather than righteousness. Worth watching:

Some people are crying that this is Islamic terrorist attack is a new low—targeting children. But that’s not accurate. This savagery has long included targeting children. Michelle Malkin, in her piece "The Forgotten Slaughter of the Innocents," reminds us of eight previous attacks targeting or including young people and children.

She didn’t include Beslan, September 2004. Glenn Beck retells that event, from his days at CNN:

There’s a school in Beslan, and it started on the first day of school. In Russia, they have this tradition that the parents bring their kids to school for the first day of school. And so the parents brought their little kids into school, and there waiting for them were monsters, armed Islamic groups. They ushered everybody into the gym. Anybody who spoke out, anybody who cried, was killed. The mothers and the daughters were raped in front of everyone. It lasted three days. There were 1100 hostages, 777 children. They killed 385.

Every civilized person in the world can recognize this behavior as savage. There is no reason within the sphere of civilization that can include this behavior. The perpetrators will have no place in the afterlife but hell, and they have no place among civilized human beings on this planet.

What should be the civilized response? Celebrities, such as Katy Perry, call for love and unity. Blogger Matt Walsh responds to that call:

I realize that celebrities who pontificate about love and unity aren’t talking about the kind of love or unity that actually requires us to do anything or make any kind of sacrifice. That’s why they feel comfortable telling us about “love” even as they treat their own spouses and children like disposable props. The love that keeps a marriage going is active and self-giving. The “love” Katy Perry refers to is just a vague feeling of pleasant indifference towards all of humanity. She “loves the world” by shrugging her shoulders at it. And when she tells us to respond to these tragedies with “love,” she means only that we ought not do anything to actively stop it from happening again. Instead, we should throw our hands up in loving surrender, and if more of us are brutally slaughtered, well, that’s a price Katy Perry is willing to pay.

Perry and others who call for “no borders or barriers” hypocritically live in gated, guarded homes. They know, for the sake of their own life and property, they can’t just invite the world to “co-own” their home.

But, just to consider the “love” response, let’s keep an open mind and assume, if you could retrain the brains of these brainwashed savages, they could come to choose civilization. Theoretically I’d like to believe that’s possible. 

But you can only do that if you put a stop to their killing first. And that requires defense: killing, imprisoning, or containing in their own walled-off corner of the globe—every single one who holds the belief that killing us is a delight to them and their god.