LibertyVoter.Org

By Trevor Burrus

Trevor Burrus

The “March for Our Lives” brought hundreds of thousands of
people to the National Mall to protest gun violence. It was an
understandably emotional and evocative event that hopefully can
spur a constructive discussion about what to do about the problem.
As someone who has studied gun violence for more than 10 years, a
productive discussion would be a welcome change from the yelling
and shouting that typically accompanies the gun debate. The kids
have spoken, and I applaud them for their passion and effective
activism. Now it’s time for the adults to talk about what to
do.

America is a great nation that, when it buckles down and stops
bickering, can do great things. In 1961, President Kennedy
committed the country to putting a man on the moon before the
decade was out. So let’s make a similar pledge: let’s commit
ourselves to lowering American gun deaths-meaning both homicides
and suicides-by 50 percent in the next ten years. Like the moon
landing, we will employ the best thinkers on this issue and
instruct them to doggedly pursue the task at hand.

Every thinker we put to this task will tell us the same thing:
don’t focus on mass shootings and “assault weapons,” focus on
inner-city violence and suicides of middle-aged men. Fifty percent
of gun deaths equates to roughly 17,000 per year. Because suicides
are two-thirds of gun deaths, any policy proposal that doesn’t
focus on those will not, by itself, get us to our goal. Even
eliminating all gun homicides would not get us there.

Here’s a further break down of the gun-death
numbers. Roughly 6,000-7,000 people are killed in homicides using
pistols, and two-thirds of those are young black men between the
ages of 15-34, often living in urban areas. “Assault weapons” are
difficult to define, but they are a type of rifle that is sometimes
used in high-profile mass shootings at schools and elsewhere. All
rifles, of which “assault weapons” are a subset, killed approximately 524
people in 2016, compared to 7,105 killed by pistols (there are some
holes in the FBI’s data). While we’re not sure because the data
don’t go deep enough, “assault weapons,” as a popular subset of
rifles, likely kill approximately 200-300 people per year. About
10 students per year
are killed by gunfire in schools, sometimes by “assault weapons.” A
“mass shooting” can be defined in a variety of ways (it’s a highly
contentious question),
but if we’re talking about public “spree killings,” where someone
goes to a public place to indiscriminately kill, they’re only …read more

Source: OP-EDS

By Ted Galen Carpenter

Ted Galen Carpenter

Recent actions that Congress and President Trump have taken
threaten to shatter a crucial, delicate balance in U.S. policy
towards Taiwan. Their conduct provokes China and is heightening
already worrisome tensions between Washington and Beijing. U.S.
officials need to reassess their course of action before it
triggers a major crisis in East Asia.

On March 1, the Senate passed the Taiwan Travel Act, which the House of
Representatives had previously approved in January. That measure
states that it should be the policy of the United States to
authorize officials at all levels to visit Taiwan to meet with
their counterparts and allow high-level Taiwanese officials to
enter the United States for meetings with U.S. officials. Notably,
the TTA specifically encouraged interaction by “cabinet-level
national security officials.”

The measure does not compel the executive branch to change
policy, but it clearly constitutes a congressional desire for
closer U.S. ties, especially defense ties, with the Taiwan
government. Since the Senate passed the legislation with no
dissenting votes, it reinforced the intensity of the congressional
position. At the very least, the Taiwan Travel Act creates the
foundation for a much more substantive bilateral relationship and
prods the Trump administration to move in that direction.

China’s government clearly seems worried that a significant U.S.
policy shift may be on the horizon. Beijing strongly protested
passage of the TTA. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said China was “extremely
dissatisfied” with the legislation, which “seriously contravenes”
the understanding between the two countries.

Although it was a matter of informal restraint rather than a
legal requirement, Washington’s policy since it switched official
diplomatic relations from Taipei to Beijing in 1979 has been to
authorize only low-level policymakers, usually economic, to
interact with their Taiwanese counterparts. Prominent officials
such as the President, Secretary of State, and Secretary of
Defense, were always careful not to provoke China by meeting with
leaders from Taiwan.

It is not certain such caution will dissipate now, but the
likelihood certainly exists. President Trump could have allowed the
measure to become law without his signature. Instead, he signed the
bill, signaling his approval of the substance-a step that heightens
Beijing’s dissatisfaction.

Chinese leaders already had reason to be uneasy about Trump’s
stance on the Taiwan issue. The much-discussed December 2016
telephone conversation between
then-President-elect Trump and Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen
created a major stir. No previous president-elect since the 1979
recognition of the PRC as China’s rightful government had ever
interacted with a Taiwanese leader. PRC officials worried that the
incoming administration might abandon the “one-China” policy that
served as the basis of U.S.-China relations. Trump alleviated those
concerns when he assured President …read more

Source: OP-EDS

By Ilya Shapiro

Ilya Shapiro

Former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens’
New York Times op-ed calling for the repeal of the
Second Amendment has made quite a stir. It’s one thing for
traumatized teenagers to demand that we “do something” to stop gun
violence, quite another for a distinguished jurist to call for a
fundamental constitutional change.

Yet Stevens effectively agrees with the high-schoolers, arguing
that the rallies they orchestrated last weekend “demand our
respect” because they “reveal the broad public support for
legislation to minimize the risk of mass killings of schoolchildren
and others in our society.”

But what does that mean? Should all schools be on permanent
lockdown, with entrance and exit allowed only if accompanied by a
parent or administrator? Should they be required to have armed
guards — which Parkland did, and they failed to act —
and metal detectors (which many urban schools already have)? Or
maybe we should mandate even higher-level security equipment and
procedures more typically seen on army bases and prisons?

It’s one thing for
traumatized teenagers to demand that we “do something” to stop gun
violence, quite another for a distinguished jurist to call for a
fundamental constitutional change.

Heck, get rid of lockers and any other opaque storage facilities
and make students go to school in their underwear. There are plenty
of things that could “minimize the risk of mass killings” that are
ridiculous nonstarters. For that matter, traffic accidents cause
astronomically more deaths annually than gun crime, so why don’t we
set all speed limits at five miles per hour and institute the death
penalty for DUI?

So we have to be clear about what we’re talking about —
and whether it would indeed “minimize the risk of mass killings.”
Because actually enforcing existing law by updating
background-check databases and investigating suspicious reports
(like they weren’t in the Parkland case), would have prevented a
lot more tragedies than raising the age of purchase, limiting
magazines to 10 rounds, and any other number of “common sense
reforms” now bandied about.

Moreover, you can’t simply legislate all guns away. Even if the
Second Amendment were repealed — which would mean that state
and local bans would be constitutionally permitted, not that guns
would instantly be illegal nationwide — there would still be
more than 300 million firearms out there. Would we send law
enforcement to hunt down the ones that aren’t voluntarily turned
in?

And that’s before you even get to Stevens’ argument that the
“March for Our Lives” is a “sign to lawmakers to enact legislation
prohibiting civilian ownership of semiautomatic weapons.” This
apparently needs repeating every single time gun policy is in the
national …read more

Source: OP-EDS