By John Seiler

Here’s a question: Will more gun control laws in California chase away even more businesses and jobs than our high taxes already do?

I think the answer would be, Yes. A lot of people simply will not tolerate being disarmed against criminals and will move to states where they can adequately defend themselves and their families.

It will take about a decade to see the results of the draconian new attempts by New York and other left-wing states to grab the guns of the law-abiding. These states, like California, also like mugging taxpayers for more money. So a study would have to find out how to tease apart who is leaving only because of the higher taxes, who only because of the new violations of gun rights, who for both reasons and who for entirely different reasons.

As to guns, Thomas Sowell just wrote, “Gun control costs lives“:

“Most factual studies show no reduction in gun crimes, including murder, under gun control laws. A significant number of studies show higher rates of murder and other gun crimes under gun control laws.

“How can this be? It seems obvious to some gun control zealots that, if no one had guns, there would be fewer armed robberies and fewer people shot to death.

“But nothing is easier than to disarm peaceful, law-abiding people. And nothing is harder than to disarm people who are neither — especially in a country with hundreds of millions of guns already out there, that are not going to rust away for centuries.”

CA gun control

Despite that, California’s extremist left-wing Legislature is obsessed with taking away the guns of law-abiding citizens. It’s cynically using the Sandy Hook tragedy as an excuse to violate our Second Amendment “right to keep and bear arms.” The latest, as reported by the Chronicle:

“As President Obama prepares for a battle in Congress over proposed gun control legislation, California and San Francisco are moving forward with even more far-reaching proposals.

“The Golden State already has some of the toughest firearms laws in the nation, including a sophisticated background check database that has resulted in the confiscation of more than 10,000 guns since 2006.”

The article does not point out that leaves approximately 40 million guns remaining in the state, almost all of them owned by law-abiding citizens.

The Chronicle:

“San Francisco has been at the forefront of gun regulation, though its laws haven’t always withstood legal scrutiny. Now, both at City Hall and in Sacramento, politicians want to regulate another aspect of guns: ammunition.

“‘Bullets are what make guns deadly,’ said Assemblywoman Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley, who has authored legislation that would require ammunition buyers to provide identification and undergo a background check, and force sellers to apply for a state license and report all transactions to California authorities.”

But criminals easily could get bullets on the black market, or from out of state. So the law only would hurt the law-abiding.

30 bullets

Another target of the anti-gun rights fanatics is the number of bullets held in a magazine. But  Sowell, who taught marksmanship in the U.S. Marine Corps, writes:

“There are people who have never fired a shot in their life who do not hesitate to declare how many bullets should be the limit to put into a firearm’s clip or magazine. Some say 10 bullets but New York state’s recent gun control law specifies seven.

“Virtually all gun control advocates say that 30 bullets in a magazine is far too many for self-defense or hunting — even if they have never gone hunting and never had to defend themselves with a gun. This uninformed and self-righteous dogmatism is what makes the gun control debate so futile and so polarizing.

“Anyone who faces three home invaders, jeopardizing himself or his family, might find 30 bullets barely adequate. After all, not every bullet hits, even at close range, and not every hit incapacitates. You can get killed by a wounded man.

“These plain life-and-death realities have been ignored for years by people who go ballistic when they hear about how many shots were fired by the police in some encounter with a criminal. As someone who once taught pistol shooting in the Marine Corps, I am not the least bit surprised by the number of shots fired. I have seen people miss a stationary target at close range, even in the safety and calm of a pistol range.

“We cannot expect everybody to know that. But we can expect them to know that they don’t know — and to stop spouting off about life-and-death issues when they don’t have the facts.”

What extremist leftists like Skinner don’t know would fill the Library of Congress. Yet they still want to take our guns and leave us defenseless against roaming hoards of criminals. Hypocritically, she works in the Capitol in Sacramento, which is guarded by heavily armed California state troopers. If she thinks guns are evil, she should first ask the troopers to get rid of theirs.

Meanwhile, the almost inevitable imposition of more gun control in California is another reason to advance any bug-out plan. Gun-rights Arizona is only 225 miles away.

In Arizona, you don’t even need a permit to carry a concealed weapon. What a breath of freedom.

Jan. 7, 2013

By Chris Reed

Last week, a prominent Los Angeles-based sportswriter for Fox Sports libeled California’s leading African-American libertarian/conservative thinker, Thomas Sowell of Stanford’s Hoover Institution. This wasn’t just another stupid media flap to me. When I read Sowell’s work in high school, it changed how I thought about the world. Here’s what I wrote about the bizarre cheap shot on this blog:

A high-profile Los Angeles-based African-American sportswriter took to Twitter on Wednesday afternoon to compare Thomas Sowell of Stanford’s Hoover Institution to the house slave character in Quentin Tarantino’s new film “Django Unchanged.” Sowell, 82, is a leading African-American libertarian-conservative intellectual who won the National Humanities Medal for his wide-ranging work, which blends economics, history, sociology and other scholarly fields in sophisticated fashion.

Jason Whitlock, the Fox Sports writer who made national headlines last month when NBC’s Bob Costas quoted his anti-gun views on Sunday Night Football, mocked the idea that Sowell was brilliant, saying he was admired because he told people what they wanted to hear, like Sean Hannity or Bill O’Reilly of Fox News. Whitlock has nearly 155,000 followers on Twitter.

The comparison struck those familiar with Sowell’s long academic career as odd. His views about welfare causing dependency and about the value of free markets were forged 50 years ago while getting a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago. They weren’t conjured up in recent years in a bid to become a media star. Sowell is low-profile beyond his syndicated column.

The comparison is also odd given Whitlock’s own views. He was one of many who rebuked ESPN’s Rob Parker for questioning whether Washington Redskins quarterback Robert Griffin III was authentically black. The link to Whitlock’s post on the Fox Sports site was headlined “ESPN and Parker not elevating conversation about race.”

Beyond that, Whitlock shares Sowell’s passionate disdain for the drug war. Whitlock wrote in the Huffington Post that “America’s war on drugs is a scam to lock up poor people, a prop to advance political careers and an easy way for corrupt police and politicians to funnel millions of untraceable dollars into their own pockets.” Sowell has been ripping the war on drugs since Whitlock, 45, was a child.

Whitlock did not respond to my Twitter remarks to him.

Now, finally, Whitlock has responded (see picture of exchange at top of this item), and it is pretty pathetic: He suggests that it is acceptable to libel people on Twitter if you don’t do it in a print column.

Wow. He really should be embarrassed.

Jan. 3, 2013

By Chris Reed

A high-profile Los Angeles-based African-American sportswriter took to Twitter on Wednesday afternoon to compare Thomas Sowell of Stanford’s Hoover Institution to the house slave character in Quentin Tarantino’s new film “Django Unchanged.” Sowell, 82, is a leading African-American libertarian-conservative intellectual who won the National Humanities Medal for his wide-ranging work, which blends economics, history, sociology and other scholarly fields in sophisticated fashion.

Jason Whitlock, the Fox Sports writer who made national headlines last month when NBC’s Bob Costas quoted his anti-gun views on Sunday Night Football, mocked the idea that Sowell was brilliant, saying he was admired because he told people what they wanted to hear, like Sean Hannity or Bill O’Reilly of Fox News. Whitlock has nearly 155,000 followers on Twitter.

The comparison struck those familiar with Sowell’s long academic career as odd. His views about welfare causing dependency and about the value of free markets were forged 50 years ago while getting a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago. They weren’t conjured up in recent years in a bid to become a media star. Sowell is low-profile beyond his syndicated column.

The comparison is also odd given Whitlock’s own views. He was one of many who rebuked ESPN’s Rob Parker for questioning whether Washington Redskins quarterback Robert Griffin III was authentically black. The link to Whitlock’s post on the Fox Sports site was headlined “ESPN and Parker not elevating conversation about race.”

Beyond that, Whitlock shares Sowell’s passionate disdain for the drug war. Whitlock wrote in the Huffington Post that “America’s war on drugs is a scam to lock up poor people, a prop to advance political careers and an easy way for corrupt police and politicians to funnel millions of untraceable dollars into their own pockets.” Sowell has been ripping the war on drugs since Whitlock, 45, was a child.

Whitlock did not respond to my Twitter remarks to him.

I’ve been reading Thomas Sowell for about 35 years now. He’s one of the few economists who can write in clear prose. Check out his columns and “The Thomas Sowell Reader.”

Or spend a month of evenings on his trilogy on global cultures. He spent several years traveling the world, analyzing what he saw. In modern America, especially on university campuses, “diversity” is used as a way to turn us against one another, with the government taking over greater portions of our lives.

But for Sowell, diversity represents the delightful variety of humanity, and is something to be enjoyed. The keys to tolerance are freedom and limited government.

Sowell has lived in California for a couple of decades and has an office at the Hoover Institution. I was delighted  to meet him about a decade ago when he stopped by our offices at the Orange County Register, when I was an editorial writer there with my colleague Steven Greenhut, to promote a book. Sowell is a true social and economic genius. He has a cheery affinity for California.

Jerry’s Choo-Choo

Sowell writes today about California’s absurd Jerry Brown and the governor’s obsession with the equally absurd California High-Speed Rail authority: “California has a huge state debt and Washington has a huge national debt. But that does not discourage either Governor Jerry Brown or President Barack Obama from wanting to launch a very costly high-speed rail system.

“Most of us might be a little skittish about spending money if we were teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. But the beauty of politics is that it is all other people’s money, including among those other people generations yet unborn.”

He writes about how Spain’s system is supposed to be a model for California’s bullet train. But he notes the the Iberian high-speed rail is subsidized by the Spanish government, which in turn is subsidized by the European Union.

He continues: “Someone once said that government is the illusion that we can all live off somebody else. Spain’s high-speed rail system is not even covering its operating costs, never mind the enormous costs of setting up the system in the first place. One reason is that half the seats are empty in the high-speed trains in Spain.

“That is what happens when you don’t have the population density required for passengers to cover the operating costs. You would need the hordes of Genghis Khan riding the high-speed rail system to cover the additional costs of the rails and the trains.

“An economics professor at the University of Barcelona says that Spain ‘has not recovered one single euro from the infrastructure investment’.”

Japan’s Train

Sowell points out that Japan’s bullet train between Tokyo and Osaka carries 130 million passengers a year. “But Tokyo alone has more than three times the population of San Francisco and Los Angeles put together.”

I would add that Japan’s population density is 873 people per square mile. But California’s is just 242 per square mile. That’s less than a third as much. So the ridership, and the productive population to support the infrastructure, is much smaller.

He notes that the first leg of the rail network supposedly will be laid between Fresno and Bakersfield, away from the state’s major population centers. “The only reason for even thinking about building a high-speed rail line between Fresno and Bakersfield is just to get the project underway with federal money, making it politically more difficult to stop the larger project for a similar rail line between San Francisco and Los Angeles.

“In other words, they are going to start wasting money out in the valley, so that they will be able to waste more money later on, along the coast. This may not make any sense economically, but it can make sense politically for Jerry Brown and Barack Obama.

“An old song ended, ‘You’ve been running around in circles, getting nowhere – getting nowhere very fast.’ On high-speed rail.”

What a joke the whole thing is, beginning with Gov. Moonbeam.

But I dug out a YouTube of the song Sowell mentioned. It’s by the great Irving Berlin. Here’s a version by Der Bingle, Bing Crosby, another Californian:

Feb. 1, 2012