RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/gun-control-melodrama-back-another-season-bruce-thornton/

A new Democrat administration and two recent mass shootings mean it’s time for another episode of the gun-control melodrama that’s been running for decades. We all know the scenario: an obviously deranged person murders several people, Dem pols and pundits start fulminating about our lax gun control laws and gun-obsessed white males, followed by a bunch of ineffective proposals and policies that will do nothing about crime, but will annoy law-abiding gun-owners, which is ultimately the real purpose of the show––demonizing a political enemy.

The Biden outfit has announced “six initial actions to address the gun violence public health epidemic,” the White House informed us last week. None of them will do anything to stop mass killings, and some are trying to fix problems that existing federal laws already address. Two federal statutes concern homemade “ghost guns,” for example, which don’t have serial numbers. And state “Red-flag” laws would allow the police or family members worried about a seemingly unstable spouse, neighbor, or student to ask a judge for a temporary restraining order that would allow confiscation of the weapon. The potential threats to Second, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights, and the moral hazard of giving the vengeful or malicious an opportunity for weaponizing the law, should be obvious.

Then there’s the usual hysteria about “assault rifles.” The popular AR-15 (pop quiz: What does the AR stand for?), which anti-gun-nuts usually bring up when decrying “assault rifles,” is no such thing. It’s not an automatic weapon, which have been illegal since 1934, and is perfectly legal. It can be accessorized in ways that frighten those ignorant about guns and gun-laws, just as cars can be sold with optional spoilers or other racing accessories. But that doesn’t make them illegal.

Perhaps worst of all, Biden is making professional gun-control lobbyist David Chipman the head of the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agency. You can get the measure of Chipman’s rabid partisan prejudices and impaired common sense by his comment that the surge of gun purchasers last year comprises conspiracy theorists prepping for the zombocalypse; and by his looney claim that members of the Branch Davidians––the group targeted in the 1993 Waco, Texas armed attack by FBI and ATF agents that killed 76 people including children––shot down two government helicopters.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/bidens-u-n-ambassador-white-supremacy-is-weaved-into-our-founding-documents-and-principles/

Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said Wednesday that racial equity is a top focus for her as “white supremacy is weaved into our founding documents and principles” in the U.S.

“When we raise issues of equity and justice at the global scale we have to approach them with humility,” Thomas-Greenfield said in remarks at the National Action Network’s virtual conference. “We have to acknowledge that we are an imperfect union and have been since the beginning and every day we strive to make ourselves more perfect.” 

She recounted a recent speech she gave before the UN General Assembly for the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in which she spoke about how her great-grandmother was the child of a slave “just three generations back from me.”

The ambassador said that she grew up in the segregated south where she was bused to a segregated school.

“On the weekends, the Klan burned crosses on lawns in our neighborhoods,” she said. “I shared these stories and others to acknowledge on the international stage that I have personally experienced one of America’s greatest imperfections.”

“I’ve seen for myself how the original sin of slavery weaved white supremacy into our founding documents and principles,” Thomas-Greenfield said.

https://lawliberty.org/radicalized-political-ingratitude/

“Gratitude for the privileges that American citizenship bestows, and for those who made those privileges and their extension possible is in short supply.”

On February 25, a New York Times front-page story exposed a specious incident of alleged racial harassment at Smith College. In July 2018, Oumou Kanoute, a black student who had grown up in Manhattan but whose parents came from Mali, claimed to have experienced a near-“meltdown” because both a janitor and a campus police officer asked what she was doing in a dormitory lounge as she lunched there. She viewed their interruption of her meal as an “outrageous” sign that some Smith personnel questioned her presence at the College, and indeed her very “existence overall as a woman of color.” She also disclosed her terror at the possibility that the police officer might have been carrying “a lethal weapon.”

Not surprisingly, given the recent political environment on American campuses, Smith’s president Kathleen McCartney immediately issued an apology for the incident and put the janitor on paid leave, remarking—prior to any investigation—that the incident served as a painful reminder of “the ongoing legacy of racism and bias … in which people of color are targeted while simply going about their daily business.”

As the Times recounts, a report issued three months later by a law firm hired by Smith to investigate the episode drew little attention. This report found no evidence of bias, and instead determined that Ms. Kanoute had been eating in a dorm that was closed for the summer. The janitor had been encouraged to notify campus security if he saw any unauthorized people there, and the security officer who followed up on the report was (like all Smith College police) unarmed.

In the meantime, Jackie Blair, a veteran cafeteria employee who had reminded Kanoute that students weren’t allowed to be eating in the vacant room, was targeted by Kanoute on Facebook as a “racist,” along with a janitor who’d been employed at Smith for 21 years and wasn’t even on campus at the time of the incident. Blair, who received threatening notes and phone calls as a consequence of the accusation, had to be hospitalized when the threats generated an outbreak of her lupus. The janitor resigned his position after Kanoute posted his photo on social media, charging him with “racist cowardly behavior.”

The 2018 incident recently returned to the headlines thanks to a letter of resignation issued by Jodi Shaw, a former student support coordinator at Smith, in response to the lasting effect that the College administration’s treatment of the Kanoute affair and its offshoots had on the Smith community, and on her job in particular.