Lesson from Boston

Violent criminals and lunatics welcome gun controls, because they create a safer work. It's a Government-mandated fringe benefit.

Pass all the magazine limits you want, the bad guys will have 30-rounders.

The only sensible definition of "enough" is "one more than you need."  Seven rounds is ridiculous.

The Boston cops sent over 200 rounds downrange, and one of the pair escaped, anyway.

I don't know this, but I suspect the cops were firing a lot of handguns and not enough .30-caliber rifles that shoot through car doors, etc.

Old military axiom:  "The primary purpose of your sidearm is to fight your way back to your rifle."

Byron

Crazy PhD

There’s No Comeback for the PhD

"The internet is a great destroyer of any traditional business that relies on the sale of information."

For example, music, books -- and universities, at least in their present form.  The entire credentialing industry seems almost certain to undergo dramatic changes.  The focus will be on what you can demonstrate that you know and can do, with where you learned it of lesser importance. (In the old days, you didn't have to go to law school to be licensed to practice law; all you had to do was to pass the bar exam in your state. How you prepared was you business, usually by "reading the law" for a few years from a local lawyer's law library in exchange for sweeping out his office. The law schools fought to change that, of course...)

The models for external certification are medicine, law, and a few other professions, where to practice you have to pass licensing exams set by an external authority responsible for certifying you competence.  In PhD programs as they now exist, the department that trains you also certifies your competence. Hmm.  A change to external certification will have dramatic effects on the content of many PhD programs, particularly in the social sciences and humanities, which are currently free to vary all over the place, from the sublime to the ridiculous.

Byron

NPR on Thatcher

I was interested to see how NPR would handle Margaret Thatcher's passing, and as usual I was not disappointed.

Their coverage this morning carefully encompassed the entire gamut of opinion, from Super-lefty Polly Toynbee at the "left-leaning" (!) UK Guardian (she characterized Thatcher's legacy as "devastating") all the way over to an economist from the staunchly left London School of Economics, an outfit founded by the Fabian Socialists and rigidly and proudly true to those colors (various shades of red) ever since.

NPR, of course, prides itself on being very strong on "Diversity."  Well, except for their own operation, which is partially taxpayer-funded (WHY? WHY? WHY?), which contains not a single conservative or libertarian voice of any form, type, or description, zero, zip, nada.

One proud taxpayer,

Byron

Food Stamp Economy

 People Not In Labor Force Soar By 663,000 To 90 Million, Labor Force Participation Rate At 1979 Levels

Had Labor Participation Held Constant, Unemployment Would Be 11.1 Percent

Obama's Euro-style "recovery":  Taxpayer money is used to expand the Government-dependent Democrat voting bloc, and all blame is put on the investing/employer class, which is demonized as the "Selfish One Percent."

Meanwhile, Government victimizes the young by running up a staggering intergenerational debt load, while keeping interest rates near zero, which devastates the incomes of retired and elderly savers.  At the same time, Wall Street traders do just fine, and favored crony capitalists do also, as piles of taxpayer money are shoveled their way to be squandered in green energy boondoggles the capital markets wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole.

Obama is doing either a godawful job, or an awesomely good job -- depending on what you think he's trying to do.

Byron

Outrageous

Psychiatrist warned campus police about Aurora shooter a month before mass murder

Now we find that the Aurora, CO, shooter could have been stopped in advance, and nobody would have died, if police had merely done their job after being alerted by the shooter's psychiatrist. But the police failed to do their job, and people died as a result. So...let's restrict the gun rights of the law-abiding?  Excuse me?

If the anti-gun crusaders were honest, this vindication of the NRA's position -- that mass shootings are primarily a mental health issue -- would be a very big deal indeed. But they aren't honest, instead using events like Aurora as helpful for advancing their perennial anti-gun agenda. They couldn't care less about the true meaning and implications of any particular shooting incident, but only about pushing their gun-phobic regulatory demands.  Being purposefully ignorant and entirely emotion-driven, they are impervious to evidence or counter-argument.

Byron