The Big Three Villains — Laziness, Stupidity, Corruption — and the Gun-Control Debate
...The Democratic party’s dramatic slide into naked authoritarianism — voting in the Senate to repeal the First Amendment, trying to lock up governors for vetoing legislation, and seeking to jail political opponents for holding unpopular views on global warming, etc. — has been both worrisome and dramatic. The Democrats even have a new position on the ancient civil-rights issue of due process, and that position is: “F— you.”...
The purpose of a list is, lest we forget, to be cleared. If Jim Bob is on your list of terrorist suspects, what do you do? Just sit on the list forever and think up new things that Jim Bob should not be allowed to do. (Exercise his First Amendment rights? Protest? Write a letter to the editor? Go to church?) No. You can: 1) Investigate until you have evidence of a crime and hand down an indictment; 2) clear him from the list after investigation; 3) come up with a specific rationale for continued surveillance. But that’s not what we’re doing. We’re just making eternal lists, which the Democrats intend to use for eternal harassment of their political rivals. It hasn’t occurred to them to wonder what a President Cruz or, God save the Republic, a President Trump might do with the sort of executive power they contemplate....
...Conservatives are naturally inclined to indulge the police, but the fact is that the run of them are specimens of what you get when you take the same lazy unionized public-teat-suckling lumps over at the DMV and put guns on their hips and tell them that they are “at war” with the people they serve. Our intelligence guys aren’t in the main Blackford Oakes or James Bond: They’re drones compiling Excel reports until their pensions kick in. That cow-eyed young TSA gate agent with the “GANGSTER” neck tattoo grabbing your nozzle at the airport isn’t the best and brightest, and the guy he works for only has to be one step up. The distance between the guy staring dumbly into your traveler-sized tube of shaving cream and the guy making policy about staring dumbly into traveler-sized tubes of shaving cream is about 300 points on the SAT....
...It is time for Americans to grow up and to sober up. It may push your soy-latte buttons every time Bubba down in Muleshoe, Texas, buys a scary-looking black gun and declares war upon a row of defenseless Budweiser cans, but inconveniencing Bubba isn’t going to get the job done. Laziness, stupidity, corruption: The U.S. government exists for the sole purpose of protecting the rights of U.S. citizens, but somehow the fine minds at the New York Times conclude that the federal government should do more to burden the citizens to whom it owes every duty than, say, so-called refugees from Syria to whom the U.S. government has no duty whatsoever. Why? Because the alternative is expecting the employees of our federal, state, and local governments to do their duties, and that is just too much work.
