THE COLUMN: Guns N' Roeses

It has long been a dictum of mine that, as far as the progressive Left is concerned, "they never stop, they never sleep, they never quit." After their twin defeats at the Supreme Court last week, regarding two of their most sensitive issues (both of which derive from their devotion to cultural suicide, which is their principal objective), don't expect them to give up easily. They subscribe to their version of Islamism or the Brezhnev Doctrine: once they've conquered moral or physical territory, it can never go back to the way it was. They see themselves as the heroes of their own movies, good red-diaper babies constantly battling the forces of revanchism and irrendentism, which are you. The idea that they're the bad guy never occurs to them:

These are, after all, the same people who refused to accept George W. Bush's narrow presidential victory in 2000 ("selected, not elected"); refused to accept Bush's win over John Kerry in 2004; rained hellfire and brimstone down on poor Sarah Palin, whose only crime was a surfeit of motherhood, and snarlingly turned on her running mate and their erstwhile favorite maverick, John McCain in 2008; and went bonkers over the surprise victory of Donald Trump in 2016, thus triggering the entire "Russian collusion" hoax that started with Hillary Clinton and eventually came to embrace the FBI, the intelligence community, the media, and the judicial system.

In the same way, having outlawed school prayer and, from that beachhead, having driven almost any expression of the Christian faith from the public square—the offending prayer in question read, “Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our Country," which the pestiferous Madalyn Murray O'Hair and her ilk somehow equated with the "establishment" of a religion—they have gone to the mattresses to expunge anything that smacks of Christianity, especially any proscriptions against the form of baby murder that goes by the sobriquets of "choice" and "women's health." To wit: abortion.

About their only admirable trait is their refusal to give up—something that brands them in perpetuity as sore losers, with whom we have to live as long as these United States stay together. The question is, how much longer can this go on?

"The State’s licensing regime violates the Constitution."

They won't realize it, of course, but justice Clarence Thomas, in the Bruen decision, and Samuel Alito, in Dobbs/Roe, just did them a big favor. In Bruen, Thomas and the majority invalidated New York State's Sullivan Law, a gangland-era judicial excrescence that for more than a century has been a clear violation of the Second Amendment. As I wrote in the New York Post ten years ago:

The father of New York gun control was Democratic city pol “Big Tim" Sullivan — a state senator and Tammany Hall crook, a criminal overseer of the gangs of New York. In 1911 — in the wake of a notorious Gramercy Park blueblood murder-suicide — Sullivan sponsored the Sullivan Act, which mandated police-issued licenses for handguns and made it a felony to carry an unlicensed concealed weapon.

This was the heyday of the pre-Prohibition gangs, roving bands of violent toughs who terrorized ethnic neighborhoods and often fought pitched battles with police. In 1903, the Battle of Rivington Street pitted a Jewish gang, the Eastmans, against the Italian Five Pointers. When the cops showed up, the two underworld armies joined forces and blasted away, resulting in three deaths and scores of injuries. The public was clamoring for action against the gangs.

Problem was the gangs worked for Tammany. The Democratic machine used them as shtarkers (sluggers), enforcing discipline at the polls and intimidating the opposition. Gang leaders like Monk Eastman were even employed as informal “sheriffs,” keeping their turf under Tammany control. The Tammany Tiger needed to rein in the gangs without completely crippling them. Enter Big Tim with the perfect solution: Ostensibly disarm the gangs — and ordinary citizens, too — while still keeping them on the streets.

As befits the criminal organization masquerading as a political party, that's exactly what the Democrats did. And what Justice Thomas just undid: "“Because the State of New York issues public-carry licenses only when an applicant demonstrates a special need for self-defense, we conclude that the State’s licensing regime violates the Constitution." You can read the opinion for yourself, and you should:

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The two most important words in Thomas's opinion are "self defense," an unalienable right from time immemorial. "Self defense" is also a concept that the Left has worked tirelessly to abolish, not simply via the Sullivan Law but with the countless thousands of "common sense" infringements they and their baleful cadres of lawyers have diligently inserted into state and municipal gun laws all across the country. Like Big Tim Sullivan, they know that when guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns, and that's just fine with them: the outlaws are doing their dirty work for them. Every shooting on the streets of Chicago, every mass murder by incel 18-year-olds who should never have been allowed near a firearm, brings them closer to their desired fascist/national-socialist state, one in which the government need not control the means of production but instead controls the only thing that matters: you and your fellow Americans. For the common good, of course.

But "self defense" smacks too much of freedom, and for the Left the only freedom they believe in is sexual license, untrammeled by any social, political, physical, or legal consequences. Such as special exotic diseases or, worse, children. Reproduction by proselytization is their preferred method of replication, the old-fashioned way being too cisnormative or heterogenerative or whatever their term of opprobrium du jour is at the moment. Their howls of outrage at Justice Alito's Dobbs decision come from a very deep and ugly place: as with Bruen their preferred outcomes are diktats from a central authority, and not the messy result of constitutional republican democracy, in which all matters not expressly delegated to the central government are reserved for the states and the people. 

A crime, never a "right."

Ah, but to superannuated "feminists" such as Gloria Steinem, "democracy"=abortion. “Obviously,” she wrote, “without the right of women and men to make decisions about our own bodies, there is no democracy.” Never mind that the deliberate killing of a quickened child within a woman's womb was not only never considered a "fundamental right" as the wizened poltroon pretending to be president said the other day; unless you were an ancient Baal-worshipping or Moloch-adjacent Canaanite or Carthaginian, it was a crime. As Alito noted in his eloquent opinion for the majority:

Not only was there no support for such a constitutional right until shortly before Roe, but abortion had long been a crime in every single State. At common law, abortion was criminal in at least some stages of pregnancy and was regarded as unlawful and could have very serious consequences at all stages. American law followed the common law until a wave of statutory restrictions in the 1800s expanded criminal liability for abortions. By the time of the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, three-quarters of the States had made abortion a crime at any stage of pregnancy, and the remaining States would soon follow.

Roe was egregiously wrong from the start. Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences. And far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe and Casey have enflamed debate and deepened division. It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.

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Alas, the returning of the abortion question from the purview of nine unelected white men in 1973 to the vibrant diversity of America in 2022, a country in which the principles of federalism can once again be given free reign, has set off paroxysms of fury on the Left, whose insurrectionary extremists have attacked Christian pro-life centers and called for the abolition of maleness, among other things. The political uses of violence have always appealed to them—that's what the old Sixties concept of "direct action" means, and what "by any means necessary" explicitly embraces—so their hyperventilated overreaction was to be expected. But deep down in the hard core of their animus toward a world whose reality stubbornly refuses to conform with their political ideology, they know peaceful co-existence is impossible. "Pro-choice," my ass: you will be made to care, comrade.

Care about all their transient neuroses, of which their contemporary sexual lunacy is only one of many. There is no stasis in Leftism: you're either breaking boundaries and pushing envelopes and shattering glass ceilings or you're losing. The reason they never stop is that they cannot stop. They can't be satisfied with a small victory. It's all or nothing. It's their fatal flaw, their Achilles heel. 

They could have taken their victories and shut up, but they couldn't. They had to push and push and push and push until they finally ended up in court. They can't stop because their rage comes from the vast, burning nihilistic emptiness inside them that no amount of expanded abortion rights or "pride" months or drag queen story hours or transgressive love stories in Disney cartoons can ever satisfy. The two big decisions last week have given them an out: blue-state fantasy homelands of their very own where they're free to abort babies and celebrative 52 genders and chemically castrate their XY birth-defectives and drive magic electric cars and heat and cool their homes with windmills and eat bugs and refuse to defend themselves and defund the police and enforce "equity" and anything else their hearts desire, even if it kills them.

Because, in the end, that's what they really want. An end to their restlessness and their war against their own savage gods. All we want, by contrast, is to be left alone with a culture we love and prize and wish to pass on to our children. But they want to take us with them because, as we all know, misery loves company. Either we'll learn to care, or they'll die trying. Because in their world, right now, everything's coming up guns and Roeses, and they can't have that, not now, not ever. 

To Protect and Serve?

Eighty minutes. That’s the amount of time that elapsed on May 24 between the first report of trouble at Robb Elementary school in Uvalde, Tex., and the moment the gunman was shot and killed. We are understandably dismayed by this. How, we ask, when there were so many police officers at the school within minutes of the first 911 call, can it have taken so long to confront the gunman?

Two weeks on, the Uvalde massacre has largely receded from the news, the attention span of the typical American being roughly equal to that of a mosquito. But despite the fact that the horrors of that day are no longer on the front page, a reckoning awaits. Sad to say, but that reckoning will leave nearly everyone disappointed.

You may assume, having seen video of the prolonged inaction by the police that day, that civil suits will follow and juries will hold the responsible parties accountable. But no matter what malfeasance is revealed by the investigations now ongoing, it is unlikely that anyone will be held civilly liable for his failures.

Bag 'em and tag 'em.

As nonsensical as it may seem, police officers are immune from civil liability for failing to protect any individual from harm, even when that failure is as egregious as it appears to have been in Uvalde. In the U.S. Supreme Court cases of Castle Rock v. Gonzales and DeShaney v. Winnebago, and the D.C. Court of Appeals case of Warren v. District of Columbia, the courts held that police and other government entities could not be held liable for their various lapses that resulted in harm to the plaintiffs.

In Castle Rock, Colorado police failed to arrest an estranged husband for a restraining order violation in the hours before he murdered his three daughters. In DeShaney, social workers in Wisconsin failed to protect a child from an abusive father whose beatings inflicted permanent brain damage. And in Warren, police in D.C. responded to a reported break-in at a home but failed to exert even minimal effort to investigate the circumstances, with the result that three women were kidnapped and subjected to 14 hours of sexual torture. The details of these cases are heartbreaking, and though we may wish otherwise, they reflect the current state of the law. Anyone filing a civil suit against the police in Uvalde is likely to find no more relief than did the plaintiffs in these cases.

But there is a higher standard that police officers should be expected to observe than the legal one. No matter what laws are passed in Uvalde’s aftermath, no matter which police policies are changed, no matter how great our professed commitment to preventing more school shootings may be, similar incidents will follow. And cops responding to the next one may find themselves in a situation similar to that faced by the ones in Uvalde. They may stand idly by and ponder what their legal obligations are, but in that moment they must realize their moral obligation is clear: They must act to the very limits of their abilities to protect innocent life. Anything less is a dereliction, whether the courts hold them to account or not.

Some have accused the police in Uvalde of being cowardly for waiting so long in the hallway while the gunman continued shooting in the classroom. I see it differently. According to this timeline, three Uvalde police officers entered the school at 11:35 a.m. in pursuit of the gunman but retreated when they were grazed by gunfire. A momentary retreat in these circumstances is forgivable, and these officers were not cowards. They were soon joined by four more officers, and still more within a few minutes. Neither were these officers cowards. They were, rather, lacking direction. In most police departments a chain of command is strictly observed, and though brave cops may rush to the scene of a crisis, they are worthless if they are not properly led. In my mind, this was the breakdown in Uvalde that day.

Gotta check my phone first.

The timeline is not clear as to the moment Uvalde School District police chief Pete Arredondo assumed the role of incident commander, but it seems obvious he was not up to the task. Putting aside the fact that he was not properly equipped for the role, having no police radio with which to talk with responding officers, it appears he failed to accurately assess the tactical situation he faced.

The incident had not changed from an active shooter to a barricaded suspect, as Arredondo is reported to have believed. It remained an active shooter incident, albeit one in which the shooter was more sporadically active than he had been. With 19 officers in the hallway, and dozens more outside, Arredondo appears to have fallen into tactical tunnel vision, remaining focused on the classroom door while other avenues of entry could have and should have been considered. Surely there were sufficient personnel and resources available to find an alternate path into the classroom had there been an incident commander able and willing to give the necessary orders.

Yes, Arredondo was the chief of the school’s police department and as such was technically the highest ranking officer at the scene, but when rapid, tactical decisions are called for, the highest ranking officer may not be the most qualified to make them, and in most cases, he is guaranteed not to be. Such was the case in Uvalde.

In time since the shooting I have waited for Arredondo to explain the rationale for the decisions he made – or failed to make – in the assumption there must have been facts known to him but not yet publicly revealed. With each passing day it seems more likely that no such facts will be forthcoming.

Eighty agonizing minutes, during which God only knows how many of those precious children may have bled to death from wounds that would have been survivable with prompt medical attention. No, Arredondo will not be held civilly liable for his actions that day, but the court of public opinion operates on a moral standard, not a legal one. Its verdict will be harsh.

THE COLUMN: Forget Guns. Whatever Happened to Men?

The Uvalde school shootings, coming as they did just before Memorial Day, have thrown into high relief one of this country's most vexing problems. No, it's not guns, even "military-style" guns, to use a term that has no meaning except apparently to journalists—who should also brush up on the meaning of "semi-automatic" while they're at it but probably won't. Guns have been a part of American society since the Pilgrims shot their first turkeys, and have served the country well throughout its history. That some of them have been used in the commission of crimes by criminals hardly outweighs their usefulness to the founding and maintenance of the Republic. Just ask Sergeant York.

The perfect cannot be the enemy of the good. A disarmed domestic society is not something devoutly to be wished for. In any case, what the gun-grabbers are really aiming for is not "gun control" or "common sense" gun laws but confiscation and abolition. And with nearly 400 million firearms in the country, and gun ownership widely popular, that is not going to happen as long as the Second Amendment is the law of the land. In the meantime, see what just happened in Canada, which is now completing its post-Covid descent into a fascist tyranny:

The Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, today announced the introduction of new legislation to further strengthen gun control in Canada and keep Canadians safe from gun violence. Bill C-21 puts forward some of the strongest gun control measures in over 40 years. These new measures include:

  • Implementing a national freeze on handguns to prevent individuals from bringing newly acquired handguns into Canada and from buying, selling, and transferring handguns within the country.
  • Taking away the firearms licenses of those involved in acts of domestic violence or criminal harassment, such as stalking.
  • Fighting gun smuggling and trafficking by increasing criminal penalties, providing more tools for law enforcement to investigate firearms crimes, and strengthening border security measures.
  • Addressing intimate partner violence, gender-based violence, and self-harm involving firearms by creating a new “red flag” law that would enable courts to require that individuals considered a danger to themselves or others surrender their firearms to law enforcement.

Luckily, here in the U.S., "shall not be infringed" has a meaning that is clear to everyone who speaks English, even Supreme Court justices and emotive half-wit Connecticut senators who shamelessly exploit dead children for their own political purposes. Gun confiscation from overwhelmingly law-biding legal gun owners makes about as much sense as locking down the healthy during a relatively minor viral epidemic. Oh wait...

No, the fault, to paraphrase Shakespeare, is not in our guns but in ourselves, and specifically in our men. For half a century masculinity has been under concerted attack in this country—fish, bicycle is one of the more benign forms, although still passive-aggressively hateful—until today it has been deemed "toxic" by the harpies of fourth-wave feminism and their very strange bedfellows in the QWERTYUIOP+ brigades. The unsurprising result has been the diminution and removal of genuine masculinity from the public square— even in the military, which now prizes women and trans-wokeness over men—and its replacement with sundry culturally unacceptable substitutes.

Chief among the missing males have been fathers: real, biological, spiritual, emotional, disciplinary fathers. Not "baby daddies," to use the ghetto term that has percolated its way up and into the larger culture. Not transient sperm donors, who wouldn't exist in the first place without trampy women to enable them. Not semi-functioning biological males embedded in the transgressive woke community who take an "X" for the team. But real men, who not only take responsibility for their children but impart responsibility to the next generation, especially to their sons. In their absence, this is what you get (warning: scorecard necessary): 

No, the problem isn't "gun violence," it's the enforced emasculation of teenage American males via liberalism, feminism, academia, psychiatry, pharmacology, and the media, which all too often explodes in inchoate rage. Innate female impulses and values are critical to civilizational formation, but they are antithetical to civilizational preservation, prizing collectivism over individuality, shared instead of personal responsibility, and constant, generally irrational fears for physical and emotional safety. ("Safety" on line? Twitter can instantly "suspend" you permanently and Facebook can send you to Sugarmountain Prison on the spot for unspecified "harassment," but the Uvalde shooter can yap on social media about his desire to assault a school and nothing happens to him, algorithmically speaking.) There has never been a successful matriarchy in Western history and there never will be. Neither sex would or should want it. And as for the 19th Amendment and its effect on American history, don't get me started...

And yet within recent memory there were gun clubs at nearly every American high school, rifles teams too. In my youth it was not uncommon to see boys with BB guns and air rifles on the streets, or teenagers in JROTC uniforms carrying disabled M-1 rifles, to and from drill practice or home for field-stripping and cleaning. Hell, I even co-wrote a movie about a military-school drill team for Disney, which turned out to be their highest-rated Disney Channel show and highest-rated original movie when it was first shown in 2002—and now, in an ironic turn of events, has been whole-heartedly adopted by the lesbian community, even though that subject never once came up during the writing, development, and shooting of the movie.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution to America's violence problem but surely all but the wokest among us can agree that the current state of affairs is not only unacceptable but intolerable in the literal meaning of the word: no longer to be endured. So what about this for a start:

It goes without saying that the services would have to be purged of current leadership in order for this to be effective, but no doubt such a purge will be one of the first things President Ron DeSantis does upon taking office in 2025.

No vote, no guns, no dorms, no unsupervised booze until legal coming of age. Think of the lives and the parental fortunes that would be saved, plus the services, which haven't won a war since Truman was president, would revert to being largely masculine provinces, while education would return to the custody of women. Both the services and colleges could at once fire all their diversity directors and Title IX warriors and return to concentrating on teaching and fighting. Win-win!

The restoration of legal adulthood seems especially pressing. The invention of "adolescence" —by "psychologists," of course—has resulted in its extension to well into one's twenties now (think Obamacare, which defined "dependent children" up to age 26!) Unsurprisingly, this has resulted in increasing "mental illness" among teens and thus a gigantic make-work program for DSM-5 charlatans everywhere. Perfectly normal feelings like "sadness" and "angst" suddenly became the object of study by practitioners of Viennese Voodoo when every other culture that came before ours would have classified the resultant misbehavior as a failure of discipline, and dealt with it accordingly. Rome didn't last two thousand years, from the beginnings of the Republic to the fall of Constantinople, because it was weak.

Or our forefathers would have dubbed such behavior as "evil," which is what the shootings in Texas and in Buffalo—and the weekly carnage in places like Chicago—are. Please don't "judge" him, said the Texas shooter's mom, "he had his reasons." No real man cares what his "reasons" were. Indeed, the sooner we get the shrinks out of the criminal justice system entirely, and replace them with morality, the more justice we're going to get for criminals. Some people are just born to be bad and no amount of shrinking is going to help them; it only excuses them. But just as plane crashes get more media attention than fatal auto accidents, so do mass murders command the headlines, even though they are extremely rare and their death tolls are far smaller than run-of-the-mill urban violence. But don't take it from me, take it from NPR:

As the U.S. deals with two mass shootings in a single week, public outcry about racism, gun violence, gun rights and what to do about these issues is high... As a criminal justice researcher, I study gun purchasing and mass shootings, and it’s clear to me that these events are traumatic for victims, families, communities and the nation as a whole. But despite the despair about their slightly growing frequency, they are actually uncommon incidents that account for just 0.2% of firearm deaths in the U.S. each year.

The most recent research on frequency of mass shootings indicates they are becoming more common, though the exact number each year can vary widely. But not all experts agree. Some argue that mass shootings have not increased and that reports of an increase are due to differences in research methods, such as determining which events are appropriate to count in the first place. Speaking about school shootings specifically in a 2018 interview, two gun violence researchers said that those events have not become more common – but rather, people have become more aware of them.

Oh, we're aware now. The sight of the lard-bottomed Uvalde cops standing around while a punk with reasons was murdering the town's children is one we won't soon forget. Not a real man among them, and that goes for the women on the force too. Hey—a guy could get killed charging an "active shooter." (The only adult who showed any gumption was the woman who acted on her maternal instincts and rescued her own children.) But if the first consideration of your local cops is for their own safety, get new cops pronto. Just because courts have consistently ruled the police have no affirmative duty to come to your aid—that "protect and serve" thing? Just kidding!—doesn't mean you have an affirmative duty to become a victim.

Their job is to collect the bodies after the carnage stops and then "solve" the crime. Your job is to make sure it doesn't happen in the first place. That is, if you're man enough.

Murder by Death

There is none so blind, goes the old saw, as he who does not want to see. Witness the intellectual contortions inspired by the FBI’s recent release of crime data for 2020. Murders rose 30 percent over 2019’s figures, the largest single-year increase since the FBI began compiling the data 60 years ago. There were 21,570 people murdered in the United States last year, almost 5,000 more than the previous year.

Our sophisticated betters in the media are at pains to explain this, attributing this horrifying surge in bloodshed to the Covid pandemic, poverty, and, naturally, the ubiquity of guns in our culture. Summing up perfectly the attitudes of east-coats elites was James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University, who was cited in the Washington Post. The year 2020 was a “unique situation,” he said. He attributed the rise in homicides, as paraphrased by the Post, to “a confluence of factors, including the coronavirus pandemic, conflicts over politics and race and people just generally having too much free time.”

One assumes Mr. Fox’s views on the matter are more complex than reported. Or does he really believe people with too much free time are more disposed to homicide than others? “I don’t want to minimize what’s happened,” he told the Post. “I just don’t want people to believe that the sky is falling and that this is a permanent” trend. He added that even with 2020’s surge in killings, the situation is less dire than that experienced during the crack cocaine epidemic of the late 1980s and early ‘90s. This is akin to saying people who have experienced the disaster of a 6.5 earthquake should be comforted that it wasn’t as bad as the bigger one 30 years ago.

Who's afraid of the big bad gun?

And of course there were those who were quick to assign blame for the bloodshed to guns. John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety, was quoted in the same Washington Post story. “This jump in murders,” he said, “is just the latest proof that we are experiencing a gun violence epidemic within the Covid pandemic. This death spiral will continue until we stem the flow of illegal guns and invest in proven intervention programs.”

Mr. Feinblatt ignores the fact that a gun is “violent” only when someone chooses to pick it up and put it to violent use. If the availability of guns is truly the key factor in homicides, perhaps Mr. Feinblatt can explain why the guns-per-capita data do not track with the murder rates in many states. The Hunting Mark website reports that Wyoming has more guns per capita than any other state, yet it’s near the bottom on a list of states and territories ranked by murder rate. What makes people in Wyoming so much less violent than those in the District of Columbia, which is second on the list of guns per capita but first in homicides? What about Louisiana, which has the highest murder rate yet is number 15 in gun ownership? And how would Mr. Feinblatt explain New Hampshire, which ranks fourth in gun ownership but 41st in homicides? Clearly there are other, far more significant factors at play here than the availability of guns.

What many in the media are loath to admit is that the rhetorical attacks on policing, which were well underway for years but reached a peak after George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis last year, have sapped the will of the street police officers charged with going out each day and arresting lawbreakers. In those neighborhoods most affected by crime, police officers tend to know who is responsible for it and devote most of their attention to these chronic offenders. But today, if an officer spots a gang member he suspects is carrying a gun, the officer knows if he attempts to stop the man it may result in a foot chase, a wrestling match, or even a shooting.

It's not the physical dangers inherent in these outcomes the officer finds daunting, it is the potential aftermath if things result in anything other than a textbook outcome, one free of injury or even offense to the suspect, especially if the racial calculus in the encounter tips a certain way. No cop wants to play the villain in the next viral YouTube video, a genuine risk if a stop goes awry. No matter how unblemished the officer's record or how lengthy the suspect’s rap sheet, people will stampede in judgment against the cop while lionizing the criminal.

His legacy lives on.

Criminals know this as well as the cops do and they respond accordingly. Absent any internal moral controls, they are restrained from their predations only by the risk of being arrested and imprisoned. When those risks are minimized as they have been in recent years, more crime will follow as night follows day.

It is the very people our educated elites purport to champion who suffer most from this. Blacks are just 13 percent of America’s population yet were 55 percent of 2020’s murder victims, a stable figure even as murder rates have risen and fallen over the years. This is acceptable to those who work themselves into a lather over every perceived instance of police abuse yet stand mute as the black bodies pile up in our country’s morgues.

It is politics that has led us here, the poisonous brand of racial politics to be precise, as our more craven politicos seek advantage in parroting the mantras of the professionally and perpetually aggrieved, and too many others refuse to oppose them for fear of the mob. Yes, things are not as bad as they were 30 years ago, but dare we be satisfied with this when the degree of success or failure is measured in human lives?

Feral Hogs Cause Global Warming!

The left had a lot of fun a few years back making fun of a man named Willie McNabb who commented on a tweet about gun control that he needed his AR-15 to protect his kids from the mass of wild hogs which traipsed across his property, near where his children played.

The tweet went viral, and a quick glance through the thousands of mocking replies and retweets will show you the standard response, which boiled down to disbelief that this could be a real problem, and lots of speculation that this yokel was going to eventually shoot his kids.

Well, here's some vindication for Mr. McNabb -- there has recently been more widespread acknowledgement of the fact that wild hogs are a horribly invasive species, and are now present in forty-eight states (up from twenty-seven since the turn of the century). They are potentially dangerous to humans, really dangerous to non-invasive species, and they cause between $1.5 and $2.5 billion worth of damage to crops in the United States every year.

Moreover -- and here's where lefties might really start to pay attention -- they have also been accused of contributing to rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere and having a negative impact on the climate.

According to a new study published Monday in Global Change Biology, wild pigs around the world are releasing the equivalent of 1.1 million cars’ worth of carbon dioxide each year—just from digging around in the dirt.

This, the study explains, is because dirt stores a great deal of carbon, but wild hogs search for food by rooting around in the dirt, using their snouts and tusks as little shovels to disturb often-untouched patches of soil.

According to the models O’Bryan and his colleagues developed, wild pigs are uprooting anywhere between almost 14,000 square miles (36,214 square kilometers) to 47,690 square miles (123,517 square kilometers) in their non-native habitats. And all this digging has serious consequences for the carbon dioxide stored in soil. Around 5.37 million tons of carbon dioxide each year are released due to wild pig activities....

Scientists have called wild pigs, or Sus scrofa, “one of the most prolific invasive mammals on Earth.” ... their population ranges between 6 to 7 million in the U.S., and experts say managing this big group of pigs might mean a mass killing of between 60 percent to 80 percent of them... The new findings show their impact on the climate is one more reason to end feral hogs’ reign of terror.

Reign of terror is right! To save our crops, the climate, and our children, I hereby propose to you, dear leftists, a truce. If you guys ease up on your anti-legal gun ownership furor, we'll round up a few hundred thousand gun nuts to thin out the wild hog menace by the expert recommended "60 percent to 80 percent." We will even divvy up the bacon so that you all don't have to worry about hog bodies laying about.

Then, once we've bought us all some climatic wiggle room, you can stop bellyaching about gas guzzlers and electric vehicle mandates at least until there are a million more cars on the road than their are today.

Deal's on the table, take it or leave it.