Today the editorial board (which means the editor) of USA Today wrote a column stating that we should resurrrect the Feinstein Assault Weapon ban.
One idea they gave of course isn't a ban on assault weapons. "And to outlaw the high-capacity magazines, with more than 10 rounds, that help make them so deadly." I can challenge this since they are arguing that a new ban would have prevented the Orlando shooting. Why do I say it wouldn't, because the shooter already had background checks and licenses that match a law enforcement officer. And no gun controlist is calling for Police to be bared from access to high capacity magazines. So this shooter wouldn't have been prevented. As to the gun ban the "Editorial Board" said "The 1994 law might have been even more successful had it been crafted more strictly. But gun makers are adept at finding legal loopholes, and this was no exception. They tweaked their products and sold the revised version legally." Actually, the government assisted in this and the evidence has already been sent to europe (via the internet). You see the Federal government had a reason for getting the AR-15 off the ban sheet, as well as the M-1A. Just as California first lobbied Bushmaster to make a fixed magazine version of the AR-15, to be followed by Jerry Brown identifying guns equiped with a Bulllet Button magazine release are not assault weapons. He has rejected two laws sent him as Governor to make the bullet button illegal. In short the editorial board is claiming that after almost 20 years they are unaware of why the Clinton Administration changed the CMP gun requirements to "MANDATE" the use of the AR-15 and all the guns used in the higher level CMP events have to be made by manufacturers on the Army list of approved gun makers to manufacture AR-15 components during a war. After 20 years the "editorial Board" can no longer claim culpable deniability. After the shootings in Orlando I reviewed my pages on gun control in anticipation of the political calls for new gun control laws. What I noticed in doing this was that we truly have become selective in our memory of events.
On radio broadcasts people have suggested the terrorist were only using guns to restart the gun control debate. Others point to the AR-15 as the gun that is always found at mass shootings and thus try to restart the assault weapon ban debate. But as I stated at the beginning, we have become highly selective in our memories. Soon after the shootings at Umpqua Community College, President Barrack Obama made a comment regarding deaths in the United States by terrorism compared to gun deaths. It was a comment he should have never made since his own administration seemed unwilling to recognize any deaths, murders, or attack as being a terrorist event. That is unless said event could be branded against white, protestant gun owners. Virginia Tech in 2007 held the record for the most deaths at 33 until Orlando. He did it with only two pistols. What amplified his lethality was that he put locks on the main exits, turning the engineering building into his personal hunting grounds. Fort Hood in 2009, it took until 2016 for the Obama Administration to label it as terrorism. The original statement was workplace violence. Major Hasan used two pistols, one a revolver, to kill 13 soldiers and wound 33 others. His plan was he would be the only one armed. In 2012 the Aurora Colorado theater shooting got everyone’s attention since he was a white boy (James Eagan Holmes), highly educated, and he used an AR-15. He killed 12 people and wounded 70 before his capture. The darkness of the theater, plus the limited exits worked for him. The Tsarnaev brothers attack on the Boston Marathon in 2013 used only homemade bombs. They killed only three people, but they wounded over 260. In general casualties (killed and wounded) they still hold the record even over the 100 killed and injured at Orlando. The San Bernardino shooters are remembered for their use of two assault rifles in a state that banned them years ago. What is not remembered is the pipe bombs they left to explode when the paramedics arrived. Thankfully, like the bombs at Columbine that they mirrored, they didn’t go off. Again the June 17th 2015 shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church fit peoples needs since it was a White boy with a fetish for Confederate flags. But the nine people he killed died because he had one pistol: no bombs, and no assault rifle. Equally lost is the Umpqua Community College shooting I previously mentioned? An African American shooter, but that fact has been made to disappear from the record. Also that he killed 10 people and wounded at least 7 more. He didn’t use an assault Rifle or even a semi-auto pistol. Instead he had five revolvers, though more notice was made of a long gun he left in the car. Also lost to memory is that the shooter was wearing a flak jacket. We remember the race, the means and even the reason when they suit our personal views. When they don't we just try and make it disappear. In April a new book was released attempting to revise history regarding firearms in Early America. Like the Bellesiles book Arming America in 2000, this book claims that the American gun culture was the product of good marketing after the Civil War. To do that, as Bellesiles did before this new author (Ms Haag), you simply make the War of 1812, the Mexican American War, the Texas War for Independence and of course every Indian war before the trail of tears vanish from history.
I saw this book just today in a bookstore. Couldn’t even get past the start of Chapter 2 when it suddenly claimed Interchangeable parts was a British invention that we Americans only began using after 1840. Even the worst histories state a Frenchman was the first to develop the premise, work that was followed by Eli Whitney in his arms factory in Connecticut. Granted the book mentions Whitney’s work in the first chapter, talking about the demonstration he gave Jefferson in the early 1800s. This is strange given the subsequent statements of it being a British invention and developed after the 1830s, which she makes in chapter two. Of course she got the Whitney demonstration wrong too by stating Whitney assembled a rifle for Jefferson from random parts he brought with him. The demonstration only involved parts for gun-locks: By the way, Whitney’s government contract was to make smoothbore muskets, not rifles. She then seems to go on a tangent suggesting Whitney only survived as a gun maker through his Federal contract. She completely paints over the fact that Whitney was making arms for the Federal Government, the individual States and for Civilians. During the War of 1812 he was given a Federal contract to build a musket for the government that he had already been building for the state of New York. She in turn mentions this in an off handed manner by mentioning the Wickham Musket of 1812 and Callender Irvine’s attempts to cancel musket contracts issued by his predecessor Tench Coxe to people like Whitney. She of course is ignorant of the fact that within a year of trying to end these contracts, Irvine was frantically trying to find any gun he could to arm the Federal Army as it now faced the cream of the British Army at Washington, Baltimore, Plattsburg and finally New Orleans (AKA the missing War of 1812). Regarding the contracts, she only mentioned one civilian gun contract, the 1798. Probably because this was the contract Whitney was in. She then uses this one contract to make the argument that the vast majority of Arms in America were made at Springfield and Harpers Ferry. This is in line with the argument there were few American gunsmiths, and that even the ones we had during the Revolution had gone into other trades. She supports that claim by mentioning a “gunsmith” that ran a powder mill during the revolution, who supposedly then went into the Coffin business. When I saw that reference I remembered the story of a Powder Mill on the Brandywine river that exploded late in the Revolution. I’ll have to see who managed that powder mill. I am being mean here, since any good gun historian knows that after DuPont immigrated to the United States to escape the French Revolution his powder milling operations would effectively corner the Black powder market by the Civil War, supplying half the powder used by the Union Army (and Navy). And of course, in her quest to separate the federal arms from civilian contractors at this time in American history, she clean forgot that Springfield Armory and Harpers Ferry didn’t make powder. So where then did the Federal government get the power for not just its muskets, but all its cannons (both land and sea based) if it didn't have any civilian contractors. Back to the contracts for guns, she obviously missed the 1792 rifle contract, the 1807-1808 rifle and pistol contracts, and finally the musket contracts in 1808-1810. But again, its so much easier to say there was no civilian manufacturing when you won’t even recognize all the Federal and state contracts to these civilian contractors. Simpler also to suggest we were heavily importing arms from France, or even England, during this time when both nations were fighting each other in the Napoleonic wars. Federal records show many State and Federal arms purchase requests to Europe in the early 1800s were never filled. And of course I doubt she ever mentioned the Federal Tariff on importation of arms from Europe, one of the first laws ever passed by Congress. Why have a tariff if there is no industry to protect. Again, this is just what I saw in the first one and a half chapters. It will be interesting how the media, which so far is supportive of this book deals with my forthcoming book on the War of 1812 were I list the number of arms in the militia returns. Arms people like Ms Haag, say did not exist. For many Americans, Memorial Day is to remember those who have died to keep this nation free and democratic for more then two centuries. Some tend to limit the remembrance to those who died in our most recent wars, while Obama remembered those going back to the Civil War at Arlington. I try to at least remember those who fought before even that, including my ancestor who was in the revolution, or the later one who fought with Andrew Jackson at New Orleans.
But as we remember our dead, others remind us that the world is not at peace even after all these sacrifices. In North Korea, another missile test was done in violation of the UN. Russia this week also essentially threatened Poland and Romania because of the deployment of Anti-Ballistic Missiles. China is still moving forward in its base building in the South China Sea with many expecting it to ignor the UN if that body rules against its actions. The seizing of a chinese fishing boat by Indonesia Monday will not help in this matter. Why do I expect more sales of my old book on nuclear weapons by November. Obama's visit to Hiroshima did what he wanted it to do, open old wounds and bigotry's. He went to Hiroshima as the inferior he is viewed as by elements in Japanese culture that still exist today to make a statement on how the bombing should not have been done. Obama then met with Hiroshima survivors and then talked about how they will soon be gone, and their memory of the event then lost. The Story of Hiroshima he says must never be forgotten,
But everything else must to forgotten. Has Obama ever met jewish death camp survivors who are equally passing into history. Is not their memory of events equally worth remembering to prevent it happening again. One has to wonder how Obama truly feels about his White Great Uncle who liberated a death camp just months before Hiroshima. The man who Obama said in 2008 spent six months in the attic after he returned to the US, harmed by what he saw in that one camp. What about what he saw in comparison to the now all important memories of the Hiroshima survivors. They say that in Japan Pearl Harbor is less important then Hiroshima because the Japanese took care to not bomb American civilians deliberately. Is that also true of Nanking in China, or the brutality shown to the civilians in Manila where over 100,000 civilians died. Obama mentioned thousands of Koreans killed in Hiroshima. Surprisingly no one mentions that to the Japanese government there were no Korean survivors of Hiroshima. Why? Because the government doesn't want to pay any support or reparations to those who were forced to work in Japanese factories during the war. In 2007 ago President Abe formally apologized for the bombing of Nanking and other attacks made against Mainland China because it supposedly legitimized the later American bombings Japan. Not just Hiroshima and Nagasaki but Tokyo as well in which over 100,000 people died in one night. Obama said "Death Came From The Sky" at Hiroshima, a variation of "The Night Hell Fell from the Sky" used to describe the Tokyo raid of March 1945. No one wants to now remember how Abe then took it back in 2013 by stating the American bombing missions violated international norms, and then stated that the American raids may not have actually violated any international laws of the times. By doing so Abe took back his apology since Japan also didn't violate any international laws. But still Obama was expected to apologize. A single point needs to be made in all this: The second World War which Japan willingly helped ignite killed over 70 million people. The axis powers that Japan was aligned with killed the lion share at just over 60 million of which 45 million were civilians. In all the careless Allies, so cavalier in our bombing practices, only killed four million axis civilians.
It was just announced that John Kerry will be visiting the Memorial to the first Atomic Bomb attack at Hiroshima. Its interesting how many Nuclear related subjects have been in the news lately. From the Nuclear summit last week that Russia decided to not attend, to the China announcing they were going to field a new mobile ICBM, to North Korea actually suggesting they were going to Nuke Washington and Beijing if they didn't get what they wanted. In some ways the comments from Iran's leaders (punctuated with missile launches) are actually tame compared to the rest of the world. Particularly when our president seems to feel climate change is more important then the possible restart of the Cold War, but now with multiple new players.
But to me there is also some irony to Kerry visiting the shrine at Hiroshima. As I now begin working on a revised edition of my book on nuclear weapons I have been asking myself do I need to comment on the various nuclear myths that have become so common in our world. One is the view that the US and Japanese government has been covering up facts about the attack on Hiroshima. I had one reviewer of my first edition state I needed to rewrite the section on the Little Boy bomb and use the destruction numbers put out by another author for a Nagasaki class Flat Man bomb. It seems that according to this other author the death zone at Hiroshima should have been larger for a bomb of 20 kiloton class. Also, where the shrine Kerry will visit is, is also where the crater is supposed to be. Yet the building he will visit was standing at the sight before the attack in August of 1945 and was also there immediately afterwards. I would explain further, but as I say I am considering do that in the revised edition. They reported this evening that Donald Trump cancelled a rally in Chicago because of a large number of protesters at the location. The Democratic party has been building up these groups for almost a decade: from The occupy movement, to the anarchists, to now Black-Lives matter. For some its just the right thing to do to silence Trump by any means necessary, including the young Egyptian student who now must leave the United States because he threatened to kill Trump. Democrats have been promoting the death of Bad Republicans since the George Bush Administration where even a movie was made. During the 2008 campaign Democrats made demonic images out of pictures of John McCain to again rationalize their actual hatred. Now the people they have been grooming since John Kerry placed the link to the daily Koz on his website in 2004 are threatening to become "acceptable" brownshirts in the name of stopping the "Nazi" Donald Trump.
The problem in all this is the history of Nazi Germany. To use the term brownshirt today invokes images of SS troopers. But the real Brownshirts, or SA, were just men who were fanatical followers of Ernst Rohm. Rohm in turn had chosen to support Hitler, but for a price. When Hitler became chancellor thanks to the strong arm tactics of Rohm's men, Rohm then began pushing for more power including the replacement of the Army with his men. Eventually Hitler, who had no intension of sharing power with Rohm, had no choice but to act and June 30th, 1934 Hitler personally arrested Rohm and over 200 of the leaders within the SA. The following day Rohm told Hitler he wouldn't commit suicide and was then killed by two SS troopers. By that time over 80 of the other arrested SA members had been killed- some estimates are that all were eventually executed. Its new leaders were then selected by the Nazi party and the organization was greatly reduced in power and size (many of the younger men forced to join the Army following the start of the war). The point of this discussion: in 1968 the Democratic party held its presidential convention in Chicago. Earlier in the year Black activists and citizens had come out in a riot following the death of Martin Luther King. This and the protest at the pentagon prompted a slew of young, politically inspired, students to show up for the convention. Modern histories try to pain the "Hippies" as peaceful or even enlightened. The reality was quite a few came ready for a fight, a fight that became all the more their plan when the hordes of protesters the leaders expected didn't materialize. In the end members actually hoped they would force mayor Dailey to declare martial law (to reinforce their views). Now the Democratic party has formed groups even more radical then the ones in 1968. Will they stay away from the planned presidential convention and allow it to go forth without incident. Or will they show up to demand their share of power, particularly since many support Bernie Sanders who is rapidly being denied the nomination by the Democratic party's undemocratic policy of super delegates. To see them using Nazi tactics to silence Donald Trump is actually expected. But equally expected is to now see them show up for their payment for services at the pending Democratic convention. And thus, when will the Democratic party decide these groups are more trouble then they are worth. Donald Trump may have in advertently exposed how corrupt the H-1B Visa system has become during the recent Republican Debate by saying he's now evolving on the subject. Its got to wield a lot of money for it to suddenly convince the "Donald" to change from standing against it to possibly supporting it. And that money was exposed a day later when India filed a Trade dispute with the United States over an increase in American fees for sponsoring these foreign workers.
Many people, including Trump have noted that Mexican workers send a lot of money back to Mexico from the United States. It is estimated that some 23 billion dollars goes to Mexico each year from both legal and illegal workers. Surprisingly India also receives an estimated 10.5 billion dollars in remittances from its citizens working abroad in the United States. But this money is a tenth of the amount now reported to go to India from the H-1B visa program. Its called the outsourcing sector and it generates over 150 billion dollars to India each year by sending workers abroad to support high tech jobs. Its almost beyond imagining that 3/4 of India's annual revenue from the United States comes from deliberately sending workers abroad under the H-1B system. It does though explain why so many of these "trained engineers" always come with credentials showing their capability even as they- individually- show they can't do the work. It also explains the push by such suppliers as Tata Consultancy of certain tests to be used to screen applicants which universally show American STEM workers as incompetent while always passing the foreign workers supplied by Tata, etc. No one seems smart enough to consider that these suppliers are coaching their applicants on the right answers and or weighting the test against the standard training of American workers. Anything to insure the sponsoring of the indian worker who generates so much revenue for their home country. This said, the change in the fees alone is expected to cut profits by only 400 million dollars (less then 0.03%) which is still enough for India to file a trade suit. The fact these workers are working at reduced wages to the American workers they are many times replacing is not of concern to India. To India, the change in fee costs is putting Indian workers in a less favorable condition to their American counterparts. American counterparts they are otherwise putting out of work. In the end the real scandal is yet to occur. It will come when the majority of these temporary workers return to their homes in India with skills and knowledge that was embargoed under US law from export. ITAR rules may sound like they only cover munitions, but since the 1990s they cover encryption technology and software and technology for space flight and satellite systems. Technology many of the high tech American firms are employing the foreign workers for. Soon the cost associated with these H-1B workers for American companies will go way up. |
James N. GibsonPublished Author, Degreed Engineer and amateur Military Historian. Archives
January 2024
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