Crime
March 15, 2013 — Scott Johnson
Edward Jay Epstein is incapable of writing a dull book. He is the author, for example, of several fascinating books on the Kennedy assassination and related intelligence issues. Among these books are Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald and Deception: The Invisible War Between the KGB and the CIA. Also related to the subject are his ebooks Killing Castro and James Jesus Angleton: Was He Right? as well
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January 30, 2013 — John Hinderaker
President Obama is pressing for more gun control laws, but what about the many gun laws that are already on the books? The Obama administration has been lax with respect to gun crime enforcement, with prosecutions down by 25% to more than 50%, compared with the Bush administration. It is ironic that an administration so committed to passing new laws, that will only have the effect of harassing law-abiding gun
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January 11, 2013 — John Hinderaker
Today it was the turn of video game makers to meet with Joe Biden to talk about cures for violence. The conversation didn’t seem to go far–no surprise there–but the idea of regulating or banning violent video games offers a thought experiment. I personally never play video games, and care nothing about them. I think the violent ones are aesthetically appalling, morally repellent and a symptom of the degradation of
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January 2, 2013 — John Hinderaker
Scott Rasmussen finds that most Americans, and especially most parents of school-age children, view the idea of armed guards in schools positively: Fifty-four percent (54%) of American adults would feel safer if their child’s school had an armed security guard. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 26% would feel safer if their child attended a school where no adults were allowed to have guns. Another 20%
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December 25, 2012 — Scott Johnson
One of my 2013 predictions — coming soon! — is that rifles will trail knives as murder weapons of choice in the coming year as they have in the most recent five-year period for which statistics are available. Magical thinking underlies the calls for gun control in the wake of the slaughter of the innocents at the Sandy Hook school, but a relentless logic is at work in this anecdote
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December 24, 2012 — Scott Johnson
Glenn Reynolds is still awaiting answers from gun-control advocates Rupert Murdoch and Michael Bloomberg about the guns used by their security details in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook massacre. The silence is telling, for the political and media hysteria whipped up in the wake of the killings is mixed with equal parts bad faith and magical thinking. A healthy dollop of misinformation is overlaid on the bad faith. The
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December 21, 2012 — Scott Johnson
In “them” (the title of her award-winning 1969 novel) I noted the fantasy of violence that prominent liberal novelist Joyce Carol Oates projected onto NRA members in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook massacre. Oates took to Twitter to announce: If sizable numbers of NRA members become gun-victims themselves, maybe hope for legislation of firearms? Words being her stock in trade, Oates has now circled back to clear up any
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December 19, 2012 — Scott Johnson
The Newtown massacre has given rise to something like mass hysteria on the left. Illogic and misinformation aren’t the worst of it. Out of the leftist id fantasies of violence have have erupted as well. Novelist Joyce Carol Oates, for example, has taken to Twitter to vent her fantasy: If sizable numbers of NRA members become gun-victims themselves, maybe hope for legislation of firearms? (More here.) Now that is sick,
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December 18, 2012 — John Hinderaker
It’s too bad the members of the New York Times editorial board don’t sign their editorials. If they did, we could ridicule them by name. The Times, as an institution, has chosen to place ideology above accuracy. That decision was on display yesterday when the paper editorialized–how many times is it now, one wonders?–against guns. The headline sums up the paper’s point: “In Other Countries, Laws Are Strict and Work.”
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December 18, 2012 — Scott Johnson
Stephen Hunter is the Pulitzer Prize-winning former film critic of the Washington Post and author of the Bob Lee Swagger series of novels, whose latest entrant — The Third Bullet — is forthcoming next month. Steve writes to comment with respect to the Newtown massacre: It seems odd that in the orgy of recrimination, faux solemnity and glycerine tears of the past few days on the issue of “What can
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December 18, 2012 — John Hinderaker
I noted here that the news media’s performance on the Sandy Hook elementary school murders has been terrible, with news outlets committing one factual error after another. Yet in all the calls for “soul searching” that have followed Adam Lanza’s rampage, I haven’t seen a single one suggesting that reporters and editors should reflect on their own conduct, either in publicizing (and thereby encouraging) mass murderers like Lanza, or in
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December 16, 2012 — John Hinderaker
It is remarkable how self-righteous America’s reporters and editors tend to be, when their own performance is so often dismal and their own motivations so frequently base. The Newtown massacre is the latest of many stories that illustrate the point. Desperate to profit by satisfying the public’s thirst for information about the Sandy Hook murders, news outlets–just about all of them, as far as I can tell–rushed to publicize “facts”
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December 15, 2012 — John Hinderaker
In the wake of yesterday’s mass murder at Sandy Hook elementary school, calls for government to “do something” are everywhere. President Obama says we must take “meaningful action” on gun violence. OK, but what action is that? He didn’t say. A logical starting point is to ask why mass murderers like Adam Lanza do it. Most of them don’t intend to survive; their murders are a form of suicide culminating
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December 7, 2012 — Scott Johnson
Here we conclude our Christmas extravaganza previewing the Fall issue of the Claremont Review of Books. From Aristotle to affirmative action and the painful election of 2012, we have covered a lot of ground with a few highlights from a characteristically excellent and indispensable issue. Among its other highlights are our own Steve Hayward’s review of CRB editor Charles Kesler’s I Am The Change: Barack Obama and the Crisis of
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October 29, 2012 — John Hinderaker
I had a terrible time getting to my office this morning. I heard on the radio that the reason was a fatal accident on Highway 494, one of the Twin Cities’ major arteries. It turned out that the accident was caused by an unlicensed motorist who ran out of gas on the highway, causing a pile-up. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported: The sequence of events began when a minivan driven by
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October 26, 2012 — Paul Mirengoff
Bill Otis points out that, contrary to widespread belief, the great majority of felons either never lose their voting rights or automatically get them restored upon completion of their sentence. And because felons overwhelmingly favor Democrats, their vote represents a potential gold mine for President Obama. Generally, it’s not considered good politics to pitch for the felon vote. According to Reuters, however, the Obama campaign has reached out to felons
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August 15, 2012 — Paul Mirengoff
I mostly concur with John’s thoughts about today’s shooting at the Family Research Council. However, I find more merit than John does in criticism of the MSM’s reticence about the incident. It is instructive, I believe, to compare that reticence regarding this patently partisan political shooting in the offices of a conservative organization to the noisy, reckless, anti-conservative approach the MSM has taken in instances where there was no sound
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