by Bob Barr | Mar 15, 2021 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily CallerIt was only a matter of time. We knew it was coming – gun control.Newly installed Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has long advocated for limits on the right of citizens to own guns, so has Speaker Nancy Pelosi; and Vice President Kamala Harris always has been a cheerleader for gun control. Who can forget then-presidential candidate Joe Biden in 2020 publicly declaring he might, if elected, make extreme gun control advocate “Beto” O’Rourke his “gun czar.”The waiting is over. The battle for the Second Amendment is underway in earnest, and the GOP had better be prepared to do serious battle or they (and the American people) will have their constitutional pocket picked clean.Last week, House Democrats sent two bills to the Senate. Measures that enthrall the gun control crowd, not by making it more difficult for criminals to obtain firearms but by making it significantly harder for law-abiding citizens to purchase guns for self-defense or other lawful purposes.Both bills — H.R. 8 and H.R. 1446 – come with the time-worn gun control label as “common sense” measures designed solely to close “loopholes” in the National Instant Background Check System. While the “NICS” system has not worked perfectly (what federal program has?), it has served surprisingly well for more than two decades at preventing sales of firearms to individuals prohibited by law from possessing them. Regardless, gun control advocates have been looking for ways to expand it ever since it was first passed by Congress in 1993.In fact, neither H.R. 8 nor H.R. 1446 are benign “reform” measures.H.R. 1446, the “Enhanced Background Checks Act of 2021,” is the more insidious of the...
by Bob Barr | Mar 10, 2021 | Townhall Article |
TownhallIt was a bad week for British Royals. While one royal family, the Windsors, handled damage control following last Sunday’s interview between Oprah and the now-California based Royals formerly known as Sussex, another British monarch was making waves on Twitter for all the wrong reasons. Burger King UK decided to use International Women’s Day to announce a new culinary scholarship program for women with the tweet, “Women belong in the kitchen.” As expected, it quickly went all to pot.One might wonder how a brand, especially a global one with armies of marketing and advertising professionals, could publicly disseminate a tweet so obviously tone-deaf it would not even pass for a bad joke in a country club locker room. This is what “woke blindness” looks like, where someone or something is so “woke” their pious self-righteousness makes them oblivious to normal human sensibilities. Basically, they believe their wokeness, like funding scholarships for women chefs, means they can do no wrong – even when making a joke of misogyny. As Burger King quickly discovered, woke movement scolds lack any sense of humor or mercy (common sense disappeared long ago).Contrary to the image of unity around the issue of “wokeness” (whatever it functionally means), the social justice movement is actually a highly fractured, highly competitive composite of intersectional groups, each with their own priorities, morality, and superiority complex. On the surface, they cooperate and generally unite around common causes (especially anti-capitalist ones), but when their paths cross – watch out. One of the best examples of this intersectional infighting is summarized in a 2018 article about Vanesa Wruble, a Jewish woman who helped found the Women’s March. When Wruble...
by Bob Barr | Mar 9, 2021 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily Caller Thirty-two years ago, in his final State of the Union address, Ronald Reagan described America as the “shining city on a hill.” That characterization of the United States was accurate then and it is accurate today, though according to a nonpartisan analysis of human freedom around the globe, our shine has lost some of its luster.The CATO institute in Washington, DC recently published its annual Human Freedom Index, according to which the United States dropped nine points, and now qualifies as only the 17th freest county among 162 nations ranked. New Zealand, Switzerland and Hong Kong continue to hold the top three spots as the freest countries on earth, with Venezuela, Sudan and Syria holding the dubious distinction as the least free. Japan and Estonia are among the nations whose citizens fared better than did ours in the encyclopedic survey.The data on which this 2020 index is based is from 2018, insofar as that is the most recent year for which comprehensive data was available to CATO. Looking ahead to 2019 and 2020, there is little reason to expect New Zealand or Switzerland to lose their coveted positions atop the list, as there have been no significant economic or political policy changes in either country as would likely affect their status, at least relative to other countries. For Hong Kong, however, it would not be surprising to see its top-three ranking suffer as a result of crackdowns over the past two years by the parent regime in Communist China on the degree of liberty that had been enjoyed by Hong Kong’s businesses and citizens.CATO’s analysts consider a dozen indices of...
