The Gunner's Blog

   Every shooting misadventure I hear about involves violation of at least one of the Four Rules of gun safety. In this story from the Chronicle, cops in San Francisco shot at a suspect, missed, and hit two bystanders. This shows us the reason for Rule Four,    Be sure of your target and what is beyond your target. To the obvious question, "What were the officers thinking," the obvious answer is, "They weren't." The suspect was uninjured.

I do not believe claims that Obama is intentionally working to tank the American economy, by following the radical Cloward-Piven strategy . I am no fan of Obama but this seems to me an unwarranted charge. For it to be true, we would have to prove the same against all the European heads of state. Europe has the same kinds of problems we do: The governments spend too much, borrow too much and lack the political courage to make changes that are big enough to amount to more than halfway efforts at reform. Since Europe has the same problems, we would need a worldwide conspiracy theory to explain why all the governments are headed by Cloward-Piven radicals. It's ridiculous. What Europe and America are finding out is that government programs for social welfare--public solutions to private problems--are double whammy poison. These programs suck money out of the production economy. At the same time they take labor out of the economy, to the extent that people take gover...

The Obama administration has launched a new web site where right-minded followers can report media, net traffic and rumors unfavorable to the Prez: This begs the question of how you tell an "attack" from the usual, and necessary, debate that happens in elections. Is it an attack to say Obama is massively confused on basic issues to do with the economy? Or is that a legitimate thing to say, if you think it? The attackers featured on the site today include rival candidates Rick Perry and Mitt Romney, and broadcaster Glenn Beck. You can also click a link to get "the facts," such as: By providing assistance to auto companies, President Obama saved more than a million jobs and prevented the American auto industry from collapsing. The Affordable Care Act promotes quality, affordable health coverage for all Americans, regardless of the industry they work in or their union status. I hope this is all transparent to American voters: It is an attempt to put a ...

The country's financial course is unsustainable. The way I visualize it is as a train on a track. We need to get off the track we are on, and switch onto another. Yet we continue to rumble past the switches that could head us toward safety, as government shows a lack of political will to do what is necessary to live within its means, which means within our means. Washington continues to spend money nobody has. Representative Maxine Waters, long a proponent of generous government spending, is now calling for a trillion dollar jobs program . She is one of the most vocal proponents of a particular vision of government: To right wrongs and solve problems, the government must spend money. Lots of it. She is not alone; there are many who share this vision, of a world where things are put to rights by the strong hand of government intervention, including the wielding of vast sums of public money. I am not sure what Rep. Waters would say to it, but some of her fellow liberals plainly...

The awkward thing about being a fiscal conservative, these days, is I'm right whatever anyone says. The old order, in Washington, passeth away. So also the state governments, city councils and borough banditries. Either they run a much tighter ship, on all fronts of government spending, and shrink in proportion to the money that can be allotted them, or else governments are going to go broke. They are reenacting the old story of the goose that laid golden eggs. It's an awkward time because I like the part about having being right all along, but on the other hand I dread the consequences when irate grannies riot in the streets because the Social Security checks didn't show up--older folk  can be quite spry for a little while if we take plenty of aspirin along with caffeine. More immediate dangers arise when the urban poor, who have been funded for so long by social welfare schemes that it now seems their right to continue to be so, decide to stir things up a bit. England...

What the European riots are about, at bottom, seems clear. The social welfare state is unsustainable and its clients are feeling that keenly. The recipients of various benefits need more largess from the government: more, though, is not to be had. They need more because in the present economic climate of inflation and unemployment and little growth, the dole doesn't go as far as it used to. While I was not the first to guess the direction things would take, I was accurate at least. If you rob Peter to pay Paul, Peter goes broke eventually, and then Paul turns rebel. It's not only happening in Europe. We are beginning to get reports from America of the disaffected and disadvantaged acting out in similar ways. There is not a lot of press coverage: an incident at the Wisconsin State Fair, some peculiar events in Philadelphia. More incidents are, doubtless, coming soon. The Western democracies are discovering the fundamental error in their thinking about social welfare spendin...

I have written previously about the excessive growth of government and the economic hazards that poses. I now read that government workers--state, local and federal combined--outnumber those employed in all these private sector areas, combined:   Construction Manufacturing Farming Fishing Forestry Mining Utilities  As the author of this article points out, the takers outnumber the makers. Now, looking around, it seems to me that we are up to our elbows in various government functionaries and we have laws and rules and forms in triplicate for every  occasion . The cost and scope of government have grown beyond anything  envisioned  by the nation's founders or ratified by the people.  The good news is our excess of government will collapse of its own weight, if we do not manage to rein it in, for things economically unsustainable do not continue. The bad news is the same.