Foreign Policy.

This cocktail of criminality, extremism, and insurrection is sowing havoc in parts of Central and South America, sub-Saharan and North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia. Not surprisingly, these conflicts are defying conventional international responses, such as formal cease-fire negotiations, peace agreements, and peacekeeping operations. And diplomats, military planners, and relief workers are unsure how best to respond. The problem, it seems, is that while the insecurity generated by these new wars is real, there is still no common lexicon or legal framework for dealing with them.   Situated at the intersection of organized crime and outright war, they raise tricky legal, operational, and ethical questions about how to intervene, who should be involved, and the requisite safeguards to protect civilians.

Mexico is on the front lines of today’s metastasizing crime wars. Public authorities there estimate that 40 percent of the country is subject to chronic insecurity, with homicidal violence, disappearances, and population displacement at all-time highs. States such as Guerrero, Michoacán, Tamaulipas, and Veracruz are paralyzed by extreme organized violence, as routine discoveries of mass graves attest. Since former President Felipe Calderón ratcheted up the country’s war on drugs in 2006, violent competition among the Mexican military, police, cartels, and criminal factions has left at least 200,000 dead. There were more than 29,000 murders in 2017, but 2018 is set to see even more—perhaps the most ever. In Guerrero alone, more than 2,500 people were killed last year, many of them victims of clashes between 20 autodefensas (self-defense militias) and 18 criminal outfits. Owing to endemic violence and the government’s slow retreat from crime-ridden areas, some towns are now run by parallel governments made up of criminalized political and administrative structures. In what are increasingly labeled “narco-cities,” the entire political and economic apparatus exists to perpetuate a drug economy.

In Brazil, meanwhile large portions of some of the country’s biggest cities are under the control of competing drug trafficking factions and militias. 

Some 1,000 low-income communities, roughly 20 percent of Rio de Janeiro, for example, are controlled by the Comando Vermelho (Red Command), Amigos dos Amigos (Friends of Friends), or Terceiro Comando Puro (Third Pure Command). São Paulo, meanwhile, is purportedly entirely under the authority of the Primeiro Comando da Capital (First Capital Command, or PCC). And in smaller cities across north and northeastern Brazil, gangs and militias are starting to battle for dominion in the favelas. Already, they effectively administer state prisons. Some vigilantes have started to try their hands at politics and are running for office, while others seek to influence elections through buying and selling votes. Organized and interpersonal violence killed almost 64,000 Brazilians in 2017, much of it concentrated among poorer black youth. The mayhem has also triggered repeated federal military interventions.

Where is all of this headed?  The authors recommend Rio de Janeiro as an example of a “pilot program” that can be examined.  Very well.  Let’s examine it.

So the problems introduced by globalism – international crime gangs, crime warlords, payoffs, corruption, open borders – are all to be dealt with by an overarching police state.

America is travelling along in parallel with the rest of the world.  Plan accordingly.

The Washington Times.

But the biggest question remained: Where does the president stand?

“That’s an important piece — if the president doesn’t support it, there’s no point. It’s not going to become law,” Mr. Hawley said.

It was not clear what Mr. Trump thought of the proposal, with lawmakers pointing out that he hasn’t signed off on it and Mr. Barr was taking a temperature check.

I told you so.

NYT:

When Mr. Manchin volunteered to take his name off the background checks bill, Mr. Murphy said, the three senators were huddled around a speakerphone, talking to Mr. Trump from Mr. Toomey’s Capitol hideaway office.

“The president is a guy who thinks about branding,” Mr. Toomey said. “I think we just want to make it clear to the president that if he was going to do this, that he should get credit for it.”

Oh, no one has to worry about that.  Whatever new gun control makes its way into law, Trump will own it.  Completely.

Of the things that turn gun owners against gun manufacturers, these three things are highest on the list.

1. Aligning with gun control
2. Exclusive focus on military contracts
3. Reliance on name branding in lieu of true appreciation for the customer (e.g., H&K).  Look up the H&K memes like “Hi, we’re H&K and we hate you.”

It’s difficult to understand what’s so hard about this.

David Hunt on the Trench Gun.

The enemy didn’t like the trench broom one bit. In September 1918, the German government issued a diplomatic protest, complaining that the Model 97 Trench Gun was illegal because “it is especially forbidden to employ arms, projections, or materials calculated to cause unnecessary suffering” as defined in the 1907 Hague Convention respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land. When the Americans rejected this, the German high command then threatened to execute any soldier caught with a Trench Gun or even just Trench Gun shells. General Pershing replied that, henceforth, any Germans caught with flamethrowers or saw-bladed bayonets would be lined up and shot. As far as is known, no American or German POWs were executed under such circumstances.

For a lesson in history, visit his article.

But not so fast.  The shotgun is still a weapon of war.  As I’ve pointed out before, the U.S. Marine Corps used shotguns for close quarters battle in Now Zad, Afghanistan.  I snagged this shot of a YouTube video of fighting there when I was covering Marine Corps work in that theater.

So the next time some loud mouth tells you that “civilians” should not have “weapons of war designed only to kill others,” inform them that every soldier or Marine is first and foremost a civilian (in that he came from our ranks and will return to our ranks), and that every weapon that has ever been designed, or improvised, by an insurgency or uniformed army, is a weapon of war.  There are no exceptions, from sticks to rocks, from shotguns to rifles, from revolvers to pistols, from bolt action long guns to machine guns.

That’s a Red Herring anyway.  They don’t care about the details.  They just want you disarmed of all weaponry.  You’re easier to control that way.

Via David Codrea, FPC has a brief analysis here.

The invocation of “chain of title” is also problematic, as it suggests a legitimate government interest in maintaining searchable records of all firearm transactions. In other words: a universal registry masquerading as a background check system.

It’s a bad idea for a whole host of reasons.  But I wanted to point out one thing on this that you may have overlooked.

There are so many articles out there where it’s claimed that the White House said “Trump hasn’t bought any of this yet” that I cannot cite them all.

Here’s what I think happened.  These are ideas collectively promulgated by both Trump (a gun controller from way back) and Barr (a gun controller from way back).  Don’t believe it when the articles hint that this is all Barr and Trump is waiting on the Congress to lead by interacting first with Barr.

Barr is his boy on this.  Trump wants plausible deniability, and this effort is him sticking his finger in the wind.  Whether he gets all of this or not, at least now you see where Trump’s hearts is: “chain of title.”  Or in other words, a national gun registry.

Via Wirecutter, this disturbing report.

In a Reddit post entitled ‘Question regarding abortion and breeding fetish’, one user reveals how she has “a female friend who has a really powerful fetish for breeding” and never used birth control.

“She is with a male partner currently who is just like her, into breeding and they have been practising their fetish for quite a few abortions,” the post reads.

“I know this fetish. My girlfriend and me have the same fetish. My girlfriend enjoys her pregnancies and she enjoys the abortion. Her preferred date to abort is between 20 and 24 weeks of gestation. I enjoy making her pregnant. And I enjoy the time of her pregnancy. She has no menstrual period and she is sexually very active,” he writes.

“In the last ten years in our relationship we have done seven abortions and my girlfriend is pregnant again with a little girl,” he adds.

Good Lord.

And then there is this report of Union Theological Seminary students praying to plants.

Students at Union Theological Seminary prayed to a display of plants set up in the chapel of the school, prompting the institution to issue a statement explaining the practice as many on social media mocked them.

“Today in chapel, we confessed to plants,” the nation’s oldest independent seminary declared Tuesday on Twitter. “Together, we held our grief, joy, regret, hope, guilt and sorrow in prayer; offering them to the beings who sustain us but whose gift we too often fail to honor. What do you confess to the plants in your life?”

The same article notes what Dietrich Bonhoeffer had to say about this place after his short tenure (before returning to Nazi Germany and being executed).

Bonhoeffer wrote they “are completely clueless with respect to what dogmatics is really about. They are not familiar with even the most basic questions. They become intoxicated with liberal and humanistic phrases, are amused at the fundamentalists, and yet basically are not even up to their level.”

Bonhoeffer remembered that students “openly [laughed]” at a lecture on sin and forgiveness, and accused the seminary of having “forgotten what Christian theology in its very essence stands for.” Disillusioned, he decided to return to Germany to resist the Nazi regime, where he was executed at the Flossenbürg concentration camp in 1945 for his role in the July 20 plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler.

So read these reports and tell me we aren’t at the end of the American age.  Read these reports and tell me we aren’t at Romans 1:22-25.

Field & Stream.  I will note for the record that the average price is high because this is a left-skewed distribution.  There are some reasonably priced rifles (like the Browning X-Bolt, Mauser M18, Savage M10 Stealth, and Bergara B-14), with the highest price being $3,999 (for the Proof Switch).

So maybe the mean should have been a geometric mean rather than arithmetic mean.  In any case, you get the point.  Accuracy doesn’t necessarily have to come with a big price tag these days.

Sean Sorrentino.

The Dems (driven by the gun grabbers) rejected it out of hand.

Why would they do that? If they wanted gun sales to proceed only after a background check, why would they make it impossible to conduct those checks outside of an FFL? The answer is obvious. They don’t care about the background check. They only care about getting the transfer on paper. If they don’t get the transaction written down and permanently recorded, they can’t later take that information and create the firearms registry that they actually want.

[ … ]

It’s a test. If you just wanted Background Checks, this is everything you’ve asked for. But if “Background Checks” are just a stalking horse for the universal firearms registration that you REALLY want, then this is the worst possible thing in the world.

Gun grabbers can’t possibly accept this.

But they can’t reject it either.

Damned if they do, damned if they don’t.

They will reject it. They have to. Accepting it is an off ramp on the highway to gun banning. It throws a permanent roadblock between them and their fantasy of registering all guns, licensing all gun owners, and slowly reducing the numbers of both. It’s a stake in the heart of their long term plans.

But if they reject it, they get two things.
No Background Checks at all.
Their duplicity exposed for all to see.

And then for ever after we get to beat them to death with “We offered you background checks and you refused. You don’t actually want background checks, what you really want is registration.”

I would never have offered it to begin with because it’s toothless unless there is a law requiring its use.  And if there is a law requiring its use, that’s just one more infringement.  And no, I don’t personally want such a thing, and I would never use such a thing,

Furthermore, this sort of brinksmanship is objectionable to me because it places God-given rights on the bargaining table as some sort of gambling bet.

Finally, such a system would be a monster of a divulgement of personal detail.  So what if solider A or Marine B was diagnosed PTSD after OIF or OEF, and the VA submitted their names to FedGov for gun prohibition.  What does that do to their chances to land a good job?  To their chances of ever having their reputation restored? To the unjust actions taken by the VA to begin with?

How does one stop unauthorized usage of NICS for blackmail and other nefarious purposes such as hiring decisions or insurance coverage?

No, no, no, no, and a thousand times no.  I do not offer it, I will not abide by it, and I will not sing the praises of this Trumpesque stupidity.

James Wesley Rawles.

The U.S. Senate returned from its summer recess on September 9, 2019. It has been widely reported that the Senate’s Republican leadership has caved in to media pressure. They have promised to create a Senate version of H.R. 8 — the “Bipartisan Background Checks Act of 2019”. (It already passed in the House, back in February.)

The phrases “Universal Background Checks” and “Comprehensive Background Checks” sound all warm and fuzzy to the leftists. But here is what they really mean: “We’ll make you a felon if you sell a gun to your next door neighbor”. Please don’t allow this blatantly unconstitutional bill to become law. Turning a fundamental right into a felony is the worst sort of legislative tyranny.

In the Senate version of the bill, they’ll probably carve out an exemption for transfers within immediate families. And they might make an exemption for holders of current CCW permits. There will of course be a compromise version of the House and Senate bills, in Conference Committee. So the exact wording of the finalized law is uncertain. But if the effective date stipulated in the House version is left intact, then the new law will take effect 210 days after it is  signed. (“The amendments made by this Act shall take effect 210 days after the date of the enactment of this Act.”)

President DJT has made repeated public announcements that he wants to see a “universal background check” law.  So there is a very high probability that he will sign the bill, if it crosses his desk. Once that 210-day window opens, watch out.  I predict that we’ll witness the biggest gun-buying frenzy in U.S. history.  President Obama was jokingly named Gun Salesman of the Year for a couple of years, but Donald Trump is about to become The Gun Salesman of the Century. And his signature on that law may even cost him getting re-elected.

James then goes on to outline some very specific implications of what’s coming, as well as lay out some very specific recommendations.

He ends with this: “Once the 210 Days of Freedom window of opportunity has closed, it will probably be closed permanently–at least in our lifetimes.”

Sober words for a sober time.