Can we trust the politically correct, radically leftist FBI to protect the public?

The politically correct FBI fails and fails and fails again
The politically correct FBI fails and fails and fails again

Wow, I can remember back 10 years ago when my opinion of the FBI was that they were the morally good law enforcement agency. Now it seems that the only thing they are good at is demonizing Christians and conservatives, committing adultery with each other, covering up for corrupt Democrats, and collecting fat taxpayer-funded pensions.

We know that the FBI failed miserably to follow up on public death threats made by the Florida school shooter under his own real name. Apparently, this might have been due to the fact that the shooter was non-white, and law enforcement became very politically correct under the past Democrat administration. They certainly don’t want to make Muslim terrorists a priority.

Michelle Malkin explains:

According to a probable cause affidavit filed by the Palm Beach County police, 17-year-old Corey Johnson bought a knife last Sunday and brought it with him to a sleepover at longtime friend Kyle Bancroft’s house. At 4 a.m., he decided to kill Kyle’s mother, Elaine; his brother, Dane; and Dane’s friend, Jovanni Sierra Brand.

Corey repeatedly stabbed Jovanni in his bed and slit his throat. Then he attempted to murder Elaine as she approached the boys’ bedrooms in response to Jio’s last gasps. Dane rescued his mom and sustained 32 stab wounds. Both were hospitalized and survived. Jio was buried last Friday—less than a week after celebrating his 13th birthday at a pizza party attended by Corey.

The accused killer told police he “stabbed the victims because of his Muslim faith,” watched videos of “Muslim jihadists” on his cellphone, and “was reading the Quran from his phone just prior to the attack to give him courage to carry out his intentions.”

[…]Corey’s brutal attack was no bolt out of the blue, no unexpected incidence of sudden jihad syndrome. Local school officials and police in Palm Beach County, along with federal and international law enforcement authorities, had encountered more red flags in their years of dealing with Corey than at a Communist May Day parade in Havana.

In middle school, Corey had reportedly stalked a student and sexually harassed her. She told school police. Nothing happened. He dabbled in white supremacy, anti-Semitism, and gay-bashing, and then immersed himself in radical Islam—rising at 5 a.m. daily to pray and revere the Syrian flag.

Corey’s online jihad agitation, physical abuse, and addiction to ISIS beheading videos prompted his sister in 2016 to confide in a school therapist, who contacted the local sheriff’s office.

Corey’s mom, the sister told school officials, was in denial. The sister so feared for her life she slept with a knife under her bed.

Law enforcement officers at the Jupiter Police Department and Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office convened at Corey’s high school last January to investigate the self-radicalized teen’s contact with ISIS as he sought to join the terror group.

The FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force became involved after European intelligence counterparts told them Corey had used Instagram to issue security threats to a Catholic high school in England. The threats “were so severe in nature,” local officials discovered, “that up to 100 students were removed from the school fearing some kind of attack.”

One of the messages threatened: “By Allah, we will kill every single Infidel student at this school.” Corey told FBI agents he “was supportive of known terrorist Anwar al Awlaki”—the spiritual patron of lone-wolf jihadists.

The FBI’s plan of action? Inaction. The agency watched and waited and wanly admonished Corey to knock it off because authorities “believed a redirection approach would be the most beneficial regarding his conduct.”

“Redirection” is akin to the alternative social justice strategies school officials and police used in Parkland, Florida, before 17 innocent students and teachers died at the hands of a teen shooter who was a walking neon sign for a mental health catastrophe.

No referrals, no charges, no records, no problems.

Except for the fact that Corey ignored the FBI and continued his Islamic instigation online. After nearly a year of foot-dragging, the FBI gathered enough evidence to bring federal charges against Corey for his social media terror threats.

According to records released by the Jupiter Police Department, local officials were told the charges would be brought in the summer of 2017. But on the early morning of the jihad stabbings at Palm Beach Gardens last week, the FBI and U.S. Attorney’s Office had yet to take action on a known radicalized threat who had menaced his family, his schoolmates, and innocents abroad.

It’s a familiar narrative for the FBI—from the Boston Marathon bombers to the Orlando nightclub shooter to the Fort Lauderdale airport jihadist to the San Bernardino terrorists. Family members, teachers, neighbors, and co-workers saw something and said something.

It’s just workplace violence, as Barack Obama would say. The system worked, as Janet Napolitano would say. The real priority of law enforcement should be to crack down on anti-Muslim hate, as Loretta Lynch would say. These are the imbeciles who were running federal law enforcement during the last administration.

This is the politically correct, ineffective FBI that the radically leftist media is defending these days. The leftist news media doesn’t want you to own a gun or defend yourself. They want you to trust the government to protect you and your family.

Facts vs feelings in the debate on gun control vs self-defense

I found a splendid at the Daily Signal article that ought to be read by everyone who has an opinion about the conflict between gun confiscation vs self-defense.

Here are the 8 points made in the article, then I’ll comment on my favorite one:

  1. Violent crime is down and has been on the decline for decades.

  2. The principal public safety concerns with respect to guns are suicides and illegally owned handguns, not mass shootings.

  3. A small number of factors significantly increase the likelihood that a person will be a victim of a gun-related homicide.

  4. Gun-related murders are carried out by a predictable pool of people.

  5. Higher rates of gun ownership are not associated with higher rates of violent crime.

  6. There is no clear relationship between strict gun control legislation and homicide or violent crime rates.

  7. Legally owned firearms are used for lawful purposes much more often than they are used to commit crimes or suicide.

  8. Concealed carry permit holders are not the problem, but they may be part of the solution.

Whenever we discuss gun violence, it’s very important to exclude suicides using a gun from the overall rate of gun deaths. Once you do that, you will find that the rate of violent crime has been declining as more and more law-abiding Americans have gone through the process to purchase a firearm for self-defense.

Let’s talk about the gun homicide rate and how the steady increase in firearm ownership has affected that.

Here is a graph:

Gun ownership up, gun violence down
Gun ownership up, gun violence down

The question I want to address is this: why would someone want to own a gun in the first place?

Here are the points from the list of eight points that are relevant to that question:

Higher rates of gun ownership are not associated with higher rates of violent crime.

  • Switzerland and Israel have much higher gun ownership rates than the United States but experience far fewer homicides and have much lower violent crime rates than many European nations with strict gun control laws.
  • Higher rates of concealed carry permit holders are even more strongly associated with reduction in violent crime than are “right-to-carry” states. The probable reason for this is that “right-to-carry” studies often include “open carry” states, which have not been shown to correlate with more people actually carrying or even owning firearms. Rates of concealed carry permit holders are better indicators of the number of people who actually possess and carry firearms within a given population.

There is no clear relationship between strict gun control legislation and homicide or violent crime rates.

  • Homicide and firearm homicide rates in Great Britain spiked in the years immediately following the imposition of severe gun control measures, despite the fact that most developed countries continued to experience a downward trend in these rates. This is also pointed out by noted criminologist John Lott in his book “The War on Guns.”
  • Similarly, Ireland’s homicide rates spiked in the years immediately following the country’s 1972 gun confiscation legislation.
  • Australia’s National Firearms Act appears to have had little effect on suicide and homicide rates, which were falling before the law was enacted and continued to decline at a statistically unremarkable rate compared to worldwide trends.
  • According to research compiled by John Lott and highlighted in his book “The War on Guns,” Australia’s armed and unarmed robbery rates both increased markedly in the five years immediately following the National Firearms Act, despite the general downward trend experienced by other developed countries.
  • Great Britain has some of the strictest gun control laws in the developed world, but the violent crime rate for homicide, rape, burglary, and aggravated assault is much higher than that in the U.S. Further, approximately 60 percent of burglaries in Great Britain occur while residents are home, compared to just 13 percent in the U.S., and British burglars admit to targeting occupied residences because they are more likely to find wallets and purses.
  • It is difficult to compare homicide and firearm-related murder rates across international borders because countries use different methods to determine which deaths “count” for purposes of violent crime. For example, since 1967, Great Britain has excluded from its homicide counts any case that does not result in a conviction, that was the result of dangerous driving, or in which the person was determined to have acted in self-defense. All of these factors are counted as “homicides” in the United States.

Legally owned firearms are used for lawful purposes much more often than they are used to commit crimes or suicide.

  • In 2013, President Barack Obama ordered the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to assess existing research on gun violence. The report, compiled by the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council, found (among other things) that firearms are used defensively hundreds of thousands of times every year.
  • According to the CDC, “self-defense can be an important crime deterrent.” Recent CDC reports acknowledge that studies directly assessing the effect of actual defensive uses of guns have found “consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies.”
  • Semi-automatic rifles (such as the AR-15) are commonly used as self-defense weapons in the homes of law-abiding citizens because they are easier to control than handguns, are more versatile than handguns, and offer the advantage of up to 30 rounds of protection. Even Vox has published stories defending the use of the AR-15.
  • AR-15s have been used to save lives on many occasions [list omitted by WK]

Concealed carry permit holders are not the problem, but they may be part of the solution.

  • Noted criminologist John Lott found that, as a group, concealed carry permit holders are some of the most law-abiding people in the United States. The rate at which they commit crimes generally and firearm crimes specifically is between one-sixth and one-tenth of that recorded for police officers, who are themselves committing crimes at a fraction of the rate of the general population.
  • Between 2007 and 2015, murder rates dropped 16 percent and violent crime rates dropped 18 percent, even though the percentage of adults with concealed carry permits rose by 190 percent.
  • Regression estimates show a significant association between increased permit ownership and a drop in murder and violent crime rates. Each percentage point increase in rates of permit-holding is associated with a roughly 2.5 percent drop in the murder rate.
  • Concealed carry permit holders are often “the good guy with a gun,” even though they rarely receive the attention of the national media. Concealed carry permit holders were credited with saving multiple lives [list omitted by WK]

So, I think that those points provide a very necessary balance for the “ban guns” crowd. Gun ownership is a vital part of a free citizen’s right to self-defense. People who want to discuss gun confiscation vs self-defense need to be aware of the way guns are really used by law-abiding people to protect themselves and their families.

Single payer health care: man denied medical treatment is offered euthanasia

Fraser Institute, 2015: the cost of single payer health care
Fraser Institute, 2015: the cost of single payer health care

What sort of health care can you expect in a system where you pay mandatory taxes to government bureaucrats whose primary purpose is to buy votes in order to win re-election? Can these bureaucrats be trusted to give you the health care that you’ve paid for?

Well, in Canada, health care is paid for by mandatory collection of taxes from those who work. You don’t pay for what you use, you just pay based on what you earn. The more you work, the more you pay in taxes. But paying more in taxes doesn’t mean that you will get treatment. In Canada, you’ll get behind people who don’t pay a dime into the system. You’ll wait for months. And you’ll be waiting in line behind people who want IVF, abortions, sex changes, and free heroine injections. Because in Canada, health care is just vote buying. The healthiest hardest working people pay and don’t use. The laziest and most irresponsible people don’t pay and use too much.

But there is one thing that the Canadian government will do for you – they’ll offer to murder you in order to keep you from draining health care dollars away from the people whose votes need to be bought.

Evolution News explains:

[…][A] Canadian man with serious disabilities has been refused coverage for independent-living services — but offered payment by Canadian Medicare for the costs of obtaining a lethal jab. From the CTV News story:

[Roger] Foley’s request to the Centre for Independent Living in Toronto (CILT), where he was directed to apply, was denied last year. Foley asked for a review of that decision, but his lawsuit alleges that the review process has been delayed multiple times as the CILT defaulted on deadlines.

So he hired lawyer Ken Berger.

“We don’t really understand why it’s not being solved and why we’ve had to file this lawsuit for Roger,” Berger, who specializes in health law, told CTV News. “We really didn’t want to reach this stage, but we were left with no alternative.”

According to Foley’s statement of claim, the only two options offered to him have been a “forced discharge” from the hospital “to work with contracted agencies that have failed him” or medically assisted death. Refusing to leave the hospital and unwilling to die by a doctor’s hand, Foley claims he has been threatened with a $1,800 per day hospital bill, which is roughly the non-OHIP daily rate for a hospital stay.

Can you imagine the screaming if a private health-insurance company were alleged to have forced these alternatives on a man with disabilities wanting assistance for independent living? The screaming would be heard in China.

But this is socialized single-payer socialism. So, expect a much more muted response.

Coercion to “choose” assisted suicide or euthanasia will come in many guises. This is one of them. Those with eyes to see, let them see.

Let me tell you something very important. You cannot demand quality from a service or product provider if you have already paid them. The time to ask for a lower price or higher quality is when you have your money in your pocket. That is why we are so happy to buy things from Amazon.com, but not so happy with the Postal Service or the Bureau of Motor Vehicles. Where there is competition, there is higher quality at a lower price. The free market works better than a government monopoly.