January 2013

The gun control proposals, including the proposed executive orders that will be issued by the White House, in my opinion, are not the true endgame. The real goal here is to provoke a few hot headed gun owners into enacting a “Second Amendment remedy.” Once this happens, the President will have the excuse he needs to declare martial law. This is the true reason behind this unconstitutional power grab.

To you Republicans: This is where I get to say “I told you so.”

Cheaper than dirt received a lot of criticism because they stopped selling firearms in the wake of the Newtown shooting. They also raised PMAG prices from $12 to $60 in an attempt to profiteer on the instant demand.

Many shooters, myself included, vowed to never buy there again. Now they are back pedaling, and claiming that the stoppage in firearms sales was caused by large demand. Funny, that isn’t what they said initially. Many comments on the post that are critical of CTD were deleted, and now comments are closed.

Frankly, I hope they go under.

Suppose that I came up with a plan to eliminate poverty once and for all: Let’s give every person in the country $100,000. That would enable everyone to buy whatever they want, right? Except who would go to work the next day at the car lot, the sandwich shop, the grocery store, or anywhere else, knowing that they would only get $10 or less, when they had a shopping spree to take care of?

So after a day or two, the vast majority of people in the country would be out of food, and out of gas. Since no one is at work, there are no goods to be had anywhere at any price. People will be screaming for stuff. It begins with craigslist, a man selling sandwiches for the low price of $500. They sell like crazy to the starving.

He decides to open himself up a sandwich shop. The only problem is that no one is going to work for $10 an hour, so he has to pay his people $1,000 an hour. Sandwiches now cost $750 each.

That is how inflation works, although at a slower pace. In 1962, what $100,000 could buy you today could be had for just over $13,000. In 1912, that same hundred grand worth of products would have cost a mere $4,350. As the government continues to put more money into circulation, it takes more and more money to entice people to continue working. We call that inflation. As the government continues to print and borrow money in order to give it to others, it causes more and more inflation.

This is why this so-called economist is an idiot. His plan is for Obama to mint a one trillion dollar coin, and use it to buy debt from the fed. In essence, print the money out of thin air. He claims that this will do no economic harm. Well, of that is true, lets go ahead and mint up 30 of those coins, pay off the entire debt, and then cut every American a check for $50,000. Dumbass. Paul Krugman needs to contact the college he graduated from and demand his money back.

This is a follow up to the post last month on the effect of urbanization on crime rates and why it is not an even comparison between the US and Canada.All of the data following comes from the FBI Uniform Crime in the United States report for 2011.

There were a total of 14,022 deaths declared to be “murder or nonnegligent manslaughter.” To make things simple for me to type, and to make this post more readable, I will refer to this category of death as “homicides” for the rest of this post.

In the United States, there are just shy of 88 million people who live in cities with a population of 100,000 or more people. (Population groups I and II) This represents 28.15% of the total population of the country.

If we combine groups I and II, we see that there were 7,424 homicides in this population group. This resulted in a homicide rate of 8.46 per 100,000. For the remaining 224 million people in the country, the homicide rate is 2.94 per 100,000. In other words, 28 percent of the country is responsible for 53 percent of the homicides.

I downloaded the data to a spreadsheet, and did a little more arithmetic.

Cities that have a population of 1 million or more, with a total population of 25.2 million, were the site of 2,223 homicides. That means that the 8 percent of Americans who live in cities of over one million are responsible for 15.8 percent of the murders.

So let’s reduce that to the Canada versus US discussion. For the purposes of this, we will exclude the Americans who live in cities of over 500,000. There are approximately 269 million people in the US that are not living in cities of over 500,000 people. In those areas, there were 10,043 homicides, leaving a rate of 3.73 per 100,000.

Canada reports a homicide rate of 1.6 per 100,000. However, Canada only includes first and second degree murder, manslaughter, and infanticide in their statistics as “homicides,” furthermore, Canada requires that a person must be CHARGED with the crime in order for the death to be reported as a homicide. The United States, on the other hand, includes all intentional killings of one human by another (except deaths caused by negligence, suicide, or accident; and justifiable homicides), and no arrest must be made. This means that unsolved murders do not count towards Canada’s statistics. For this reason, a direct comparison between the statistics of the two nations is not valid.

Even so, the disparity between the murder rates of the two nations is much narrower than the anti gunners would have us believe.

My prediction for the year of 2013:
The Democrats will propose a plethora of gun control bills. That is a no brainer, but here is where I go out on a limb: The Republicans will pick one, and they will go along with it. We will get a new ban on some sort of firearms. The reason is that the Republicans are first and foremost wanting to get reelected. A constituency that is energized and ticked off will be likely to repeat the sweep that happened after the 1994 ban was passed. You must understand that this is politics, and the one thing that ALL of congress wants is to keep their money, power, and prestige. They want it more than they believe in any quaint idea like duty, honor, or country, words that have become a joke in today’s language.

My next prediction is that the gun owners, for the most part, will do nothing about it. Sure, they like to bitch and complain on the internet, but you can’t seriously expect a group of people who can’t even be bothered to show up for a rally or to write a letter to their congressional representatives to actually join any kind of armed resistance.

Elections have consequences. This election was doomed to fail from the start: we had to choose between a gun-grabbing racist socialist and a gun-grabbing rich socialist. There was no chance from the start.

In the end, this is all just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic: We are currently $16 trillion in debt, with another $144 trillion in unfunded liabilities. There are $trillion + budget deficits as far as the eye can see. This is the beginning of the end, and there is no avoiding it now. The problem is that large, powerful governments do not go gently into the good night. The questions that I have are:

– How long will it take?
– How much will the American public take? Will we reach a breaking point of the people before we wind up in a police state? In the meantime, how much power will the large, powerful government take for itself before the end finally comes?

We live in interesting times, and things are going to get A LOT worse before they get better, if they ever do get better.