Month: July 2019

The discussion of gun violence during last night’s Democratic presidential debate started with a misleading question, which prompted answers that were both misleading and irrelevant. “There were three large-scale shootings this past week in America, at a park in Brooklyn, on the streets in Philadelphia, and one that left three dead and 12 injured at a food festival in Gilroy, California,” said one of the moderators, CNN’s Don Lemon. “Mayor Buttigieg, other than offering words of comfort, what’re you specially going to do to stop this epidemic of gun violence?”

Since Lemon referred to an “epidemic of gun violence,” you could be forgiven for inferring that homicides committed with firearms are on the rise. In fact, the number of such crimes fell in 2017 and 2018 after rising in 2015 and 2016. And even at the recent peak of 11,138 in 2016, the number was nearly two-fifths lower than in 1993, just before violent crime began to fall, a trend that continued for two decades. Since the population grew during that period, the gun homicide rate fell even more sharply, from 7 per 100,000 in 1993 to 4.5 per 100,000 in 2017, which is higher than the low of 3.6 in 2010 and 2011 but still 36 percent lower than the 1993 peak.

Responding to Lemon’s question, South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg compounded the confusion. “This epidemic of gun violence has hit my community too, far too many times,” he said. Later he added: “I was a junior when the Columbine shooting happened. I was part of the first generation that saw routine school shootings.”

Mass shootings like the one at Columbine High School in 1999, or like the ones Lemon mentioned in his question, account for a tiny share of gun homicides: 1 percent in 2017, which had an unusually high death toll because of the Las Vegas massacre, which killed 58 people. But is Buttigieg right that school shootings, which account for an even tinier share of gun homicides, became noticeably more common after Columbine?

According to research by Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox, fatal school shootings peaked in the early 1990s, when they were far more common than in 1999 or the following decade. “There is not an epidemic of school shootings,” he said last year, noting that deaths caused by firearms at schools remain very rare. During a 25-year period, he found, an average of about 10 students died that way each year. Seven times as many children die from drowning each year, and 10 times as many are killed in bicycle accidents.

Nor do Buttigieg’s solutions—”universal background checks,” “red flag laws,” and “an end to assault weapons”—make much sense as a response to mass shootings or gun violence generally. Mass shooters typically do not have disqualifying criminal or psychiatric records, and common criminals easily avoid background checks by buying guns on the black market or through proxies. The effectiveness of so-called red flag laws hinges not only on the ability to identify would-be murderers ahead of time but on their compliance with court orders. All rifles combined, a subset of which politicians would describe as “assault weapons,” accounted for less than 4 percent of gun homicides in 2017.

Handguns accounted for 64 percent of murders with firearms that year, and they are also the kind of weapon used in most mass shootings, including two out of the three incidents mentioned by Don Lemon. The perpetrator of the Gilroy shooting used a rifle he legally bought in Nevada that is banned as an “assault weapon” in California, which The New York Times seems to think is a big deal.

“In Nevada, the purchase by the 19-year-old was legal,” the Times says. “But just across the line in California, where the minimum age for purchasing a rifle is now 21, the weapon is banned and should never have been brought into the state, according to the state’s attorney general, Xavier Becerra.” Yet a graphic explainer accompanying that article notes that bans like California’s have no significant impact on the lethal capacity of legally available firearms, which are “nearly indistinguishable from illegal assault weapons.”

Why is that? Possibly because the “military-style” features that legislators dislike, which in California include pistol grips, folding stocks, and flash suppressors, have little or nothing to do with a gun’s functionality in the hands of a mass murderer. “Gun owners say those features are largely cosmetic and don’t necessarily make the weapon more dangerous,” the Times notes. “The proof, they say, is that the same features remain legal for rifles with a fixed, or attached, magazine.”

But as far as Buttigieg is concerned, the burden is not on him to show that his policy prescriptions would actually have a measurable impact on gun violence. “Something is broken if it is even possible for the same debate around the same solutions that we all know are the right thing to do,” he said. “They won’t prevent every incident. They won’t save every life. But we know what to do, and it has not happened.” In place of an argument, Buttigieg offers poll numbers. How do “we all know” the policies that Buttigieg favors are “the right thing to do”? We just do.

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In 2018, the journalist Kevin Williamson was hired away from the flagship publication for the conservative movement, National Review, by one of the oldest and most-prestigious magazines in American history, The Atlantic. The editor of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, explained that Williamson’s hire was done to help bring ideological diversity to the pages of a publication that skewed liberal or left on most things.

Williamson’s first piece for The Atlantic—a column declaring that “The Libertarian Moment” heralded by Reason was deader than a doornail—appeared on April 2, 2018. He was fired on April 5, after a years-old tweet had come to light, one in which the pro-life Williamson argued that women who have abortions should not only be charged with homicide but executed, preferably by hanging. It’s worth pointing out that Williamson was joking, at least about the hanging part, because he’s generally against capital punishment.

Williamson rejoined the staff of National Review, where he continues to author a mix of heavily reported articles from the backroads of America and opinion pieces that are always incredibly well-written and challenging to libertarian sensibilities—many of which the 46-year-old Texan shares. He’s also just published The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics, which he had actually started writing before he got fired by The Atlantic.

Nick Gillespie spoke with Williamson at FreedomFest, the annual gathering of libertarians in Las Vegas, about his brief, tumultuous experience at The Atlantic, why he thinks Trump supporters are often just as bad as left-wing ideologues when it comes to shutting down divergent opinions, and how America might actually start encouraging people to think for themselves again.

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

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At last night’s Democratic presidential primary debate in Detroit, the contenders repeatedly excoriated each other for regurgitating Republican talking points on health care, environment, student debt forgiveness, and government spending. But the one issue on which they all seemed content to play on President Donald Trump’s turf was immigration.

For all their lip service to implementing humane border policies that don’t involve ripping suckling infants from the breasts of migrant moms, not a single candidate thought to systematically stick up for immigrants because they are good for America. Senator Amy Klobuchar (D–Minn.) came the closest when she noted, “Immigrants don’t diminish America; they are America.” But that was a single throwaway line in a 150-minute gabfest that none of her rivals picked up. They all talked about immigrants as if they were supplicants—debating whether handing them this or that benefit would draw too many of them—rather than producers and contributors who are the source of America’s dynamism and strength.

Bernie Sanders insisted that his universal health care designs wouldn’t become a magnet for illegal immigration because of “strong border protections.” How precisely his border strongness would avoid Trump-style border inhumanity, he didn’t explain (unless you count his suggestion of a hemispheric conclave to chatter about the problem of fleeing asylum seekers). Ditto for Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper. Meanwhile, Beto O’Rourke, the alleged BFF of immigrants who has long sung paeans to the safety of El Paso, the Texas border town where he lives, despite its huge presence of undocumented immigrants, refused to hop on board with plans to decriminalize illegal border crossings. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) did enthusiastically favor decriminalization but beyond that muttered vaguely about “living our values” instead of actually saying something positive about immigrants and what they’ve done for America.

In other words, Democrats allowed President Trump to control the immigration conversation without him having to get anywhere near the stage.

But if Democrats really want to move the needle on this issue, they will have to change the narrative and talk about immigrants as the assets that they are—rather than the liability that they are not. Democratic candidates ought to be reminding Americans day and night that immigrants don’t threaten their jobs and wages. To the contrary, they boost productivity and innovation.

This shouldn’t be that hard given that even foes of immigration such as Harvard University’s George Borjas (whom I debated here) concede that after accounting for the schooling, health care, and other fiscal costs, immigration still produces a $50 billion annual GDP surplus for the country. One recent study even found that without migration, U.S. economic growth from 1990 to 2014 would have been roughly 15 percentage points lower; and 1.5 percent lower every year from 2011 to 2016, the years after the Great Recession. “This is enough to cancel out the majority of post [financial] crisis gains,” the study concluded. In other words, without immigration America would have been in for an even longer recession, which would have hurt native wages.

More immigration boosts productivity by removing crucial labor bottlenecks in the low-skilled and high-skilled industries where there aren’t enough Americans able or willing to do the jobs. But it also boosts innovation because new people bring new ideas.

Everyone accepts that an increase in skilled migration directly increases the aggregate level of mental capital, the lifeblood of a knowledge economy. But even more low-skilled immigration ultimately boosts the availability of this capital. How? Low-skilled workers relive high-skilled workers (especially women) from menial chores, allowing them to devote themselves to other pursuits.

It is hardly an exaggeration to suggest that if America’s economy has become the innovative hub of the world, dominating virtually every industry in the 21st Century from IT to Media/Entertainment, it is because of immigration.

Indeed, immigrants and their children were responsible for founding 46 percent of all the Fortune 500 companies in America in 2017, including, of course, Apple, which was started by the son of Syrian refugees. Immigrants have started more than half (44 of 87) of America’s startup companies valued at $1 billion dollars.

Between 2000 to 2017, immigrants won nearly 40 percent of the Nobel Prizes for America —and we aren’t talking about the fake Nobel Peace Prize that President Obama won before he started drone-bombing foreign lands, but those in chemistry, medicine, and physics. About 83 percent (33 of 40) of the finalists of the 2016 Intel Science Talent Search, the leading science competition for U.S. high school students, were the children of immigrants. In fact, 75 percent—30 out of 40—of the finalists had parents who worked in America on H-1B visas. That compares to seven children who had both parents born in the United States. Heck, a 2006 study by the National Foundation for American Policy even found that the great American sport of baseball would be far less great without immigration:

In the American League in 2006, 7 of the top 9 batting averages belonged to foreign-born players, while the leading home run hitter (David Ortiz) and the two leaders in runs batted in (Ortiz and Justin Morneau) were foreign-born.

In the National League, two of the top three hitters for average (Albert Pujols and Miguel Cabrera) and home runs (Pujols andAlfonso Soriano) were foreign-born. Dominican-born pitcher Johan Santana led the major leagues in strikeouts, earned run average and wins (tied at 19 with Chien-Ming Wang).

And even as folks like Rep. Steve King (R–Iowa) yammer about saving Western civilization from foreign hordes, said hordes are saving the English language. Indeed, foreigners have been dominating the National Spelling Bee competition, including this year, when 7 of the 8 finalists were Indian Americans.

Despite these massive contributions from immigrants, Democrats are allowing President Trump to depict them as moochers and criminals who threaten American culture. Until they wrest the conversation back from him and set the record straight on just how vital immigration is to this country’s success, even if one of them wins the White House, he or she won’t be able to accomplish zilch on this issue, presuming that they want to.

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You’d think New York Police Department officers were being tied up and forced to walk the plank the way lawmakers and police union representatives are talking about a handful of incidents in which troublemakers drenched officers with buckets of water.

It’s been a hot summer in New York City, and residents are looking for ways to cool off. According to news reports, some NYPD responding to unruly gatherings around open fire hydrants were aggressively mocked and then drenched with water.

Union officials are reacting as though these folks came out swinging with baseball bats. The typically hyperventilating response from the NYPD Sergeants Benevolent Association shrieked that “NYPD cops are in DANGER!” and insists that police are going to get killed as a result of this behavior.

Today, blaming lackluster Mayor Bill De Blasio and “radical leftwing politicians” for a culture of disrespect toward the NYPD, State Assemblyman Mike LePetri (R–Long Island) held a press conference announcing proposed legislation to make it a Class E felony to drench officers with water or any other substance. A conviction could result in a jail sentence of one to four years in prison:

LIVE: Police union, lawmakers denounce water attacks on NYPD, announce new legislation https://t.co/qi5iEkTdj1

— Eyewitness News (@ABC7NY) July 31, 2019

“This time it’s water, but what’s next? Gasoline? Acid?” LePetri opines. He accuses his Democratic political opponents of creating an “us versus them mentality” between citizens and politicians.

The problem with that argument is that far too many police officers approach their job with an “us vs. them” mentality because their training encourages them to treat every encounter with citizens as potentially life-threatening. This “warrior cop” mentality has led to increased police militarization and made officers fearful of the people they’re supposed to protect.

LePetri is encouraging this mentality. Does he think that people are playing around in the street with buckets of acid or having gasoline fights? If “disrespect” toward police is violence, does police disrespect toward the people they’re supposed to protect also amount to violence? There are consequences to treating police officers as more fragile than regular people and simultaneously letting them off the hook for bad policing.

What’s more, LePetri’s bill is largely unnecessary. There have been four arrests of men who were involved in the drenching and charges of harassment, disorderly conduct, and criminal mischief. One man who drenched a couple of officers was ordered held on a $3,500 bail. It’s already a crime to throw something genuinely dangerous on a police officer. We don’t need a new law to address this program.

To be clear, I’m not trying to downplay the potential for some of these incidents to have turned violent. But saying “Some people threw water at the police and we need to put those people in prison” ignores the mood of the scene. When things did get heated, and one man threw a bucket at an officer making an arrest, the officer exercised an admirable amount of restraint. Not further overreacting probably saved lives.

What LePetri is proposing does not actually help create a better relationship between NYPD officers and the community. It instead fosters an idea among officers that “disrespect” is the equivalent of a threat, and should be met with an arrest and possibly violence. That will only further tatter an already frayed relationship between the NYPD and the New Yorkers they police.

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