by Bob Barr | Apr 13, 2022 | Townhall Article |
TownhallGun control measures enacted in recent decades have failed to stop mass shootings. This has baffled Democrats in much the same way a dog chases its tail but never quite catches it. Even the liberal Los Angeles Times appeared exasperated by the latest criminal mass shooting near the state Capitol in Sacramento, lamenting that, while state “lawmakers have enacted the nation’s toughest gun control laws [they] remain confounded by how to stem mass shootings.” At least this one Democrat mouthpiece actually seemed for a brief moment to recognize that gun control is not the answer to criminal gun violence. Yet, they remain afraid to say so out loud. In this conundrum, what does the Left do? That’s an easy question to answer — they call on President Biden (as they did with presidents Obama and Clinton before him) to propose more gun control. This scenario confirms once again the definition of “insanity” often attributed to Albert Einstein, as “doing the same thing over and over but expecting a different result.”The latest gun-control boogeyman for the Left is the “ghost gun” — an apparition with no more actual substance than were the ghosts of Christmases past, present, and future that tormented Ebenezer Scrooge. Unlike the ghosts in A Christmas Carol, however, the “ghost gun” apparition on which Biden now has seized, is a political maneuver rather than a morality play.The term “ghost gun” is a moniker conjured by gun control advocates to scare the uninformed into believing such devices are extremely dangerous, are the weapon of choice for mass murderers, and that if regulated, will stem the tide of such criminal activities as took place recently in...
by Bob Barr | Apr 11, 2022 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily CallerThe increased defense spending in the Biden administration’s recently released FY 2023 Budget may have upset the radical left wing of the Democrat Party, but U.S. military policy continues to flounder under the leadership of President Biden and his “woke” Defense Department team.The setting for what has become an embarrassing national defense posture was laid out at the very start of Biden’s tenure and has only worsened since then.But first, the numbers. In the budget sent to the Congress at the end of March, the president proposed to spend $831 billion for defense, a number that drew a harsh rebuke from the Congressional Progressive Caucus. It is all for show.While the administration’s proposed 4% increase in defense spending angered the likes of Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal, the fact is that a 4% increase in spending for the next fiscal year does not come even close to accounting for loss of military buying power due to the record level of inflation we are experiencing; now close to 8%.The actual weaknesses in the proposed defense budget are now becoming clear. For example, immediately after the anemic 4% defense spending increase was announced, the Department of the Army stated that its active-duty troop strength would be reduced to what is reported to be the lowest number since just before WW II – 473,000.A top Pentagon official, Army Undersecretary Gabe Camarillo, declared that cutting the service’s active troop strength was not a “budget-driven decision.” If not in fact budget-related, such a statement raises major questions about precisely what factors are “driving” this administration’s national defense policies.At the very same time that the Army undersecretary was claiming (with...
by Bob Barr | Apr 6, 2022 | Townhall Article, Uncategorized |
TownhallWhy has the U.S. Postal Service been permitted to develop a domestic spy arm? And will the Congress ever rein it in?Red flags were everywhere regarding the United States Postal Inspection Service’s Internet Covert Operations Program, or “iCOP” for short. But no one in Washington cared enough to heed themThe first clue was that an agency supposed to deliver mail – that is, a postal service — was engaged in online surveillance. The next red flag was that in conducting surveillance, the postal service was employing controversial technology, including facial recognition, fake profiles, and social media scrapes of terms involving constitutionally protected activities (like “protest”). Finally, there was the fact that a recent audit by the USPS Inspector General concluded that none of this was legal to begin with. It gets worse.The most frightening aspect of the Post Office’s latest snooping program was not so much the tools the agency was using, but that their tactic, in the words of a Vice.com report, was “casting the widest net possible then working their way backwards” to determine who and what was a relevant catch in their high-tech fishing expeditions. This happens to be the polar opposite of what is constitutionally required of law enforcement agencies; namely, reasonable suspicion must at a minimum exist and precede an evidentiary search. Here, the postal inspectors would search for a potential target, and if one was found, work back from that to gather evidence justifying the search.Have we learned nothing about the nature of federal of law enforcement since Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the National Security Agency? Apparently not, as in the subsequent nine years, the same “investigate...
