The number one single today in 1961:
The number one British single today in 1964 was sung by a 21-year-old former hairdresser and cloak room attendant:
That day, the Rolling Stones made their second appearance on BBC-TV’s “Top of the Pops”:
On Thursday night, the American public learned two bombshell pieces of information regarding the Parkland, Florida mass shooting. First, we learned that the Broward County Sheriff’s Office was told in November that the Parkland shooter “could be a school shooter in the making” but deputies didn’t bother to write up a report; that report “came just weeks after a relative called urging BSO to seize his weapons.” Then, in even more shocking news, we learned that an armed school resource officer at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School sat outside and waited for four minutes during the six minute attack that ended in the deaths of 17 human beings.
So, here’s what we know.
We know the FBI was warned specifically about the Parkland shooter not once, but twice — and did nothing.
We know the Broward County Sheriff’s deputies were called to the home of the Parkland shooter at least 39 times since 2010.
We know that the Broward County Sheriff’s Office was warned multiple times about the Parkland shooter.
We know that an armed officer was present during the shooting and did nothing — and that JROTC students showed far more courage.
And yet we are told that the solution to mass shootings is for law-abiding citizens to give more authority to the authorities that failed, and to turn over our only way of protecting ourselves?
Why in the world would a single law-abiding gun owner hand over his or her weapon to the same authorities that did nothing to protect the children of Parkland? Why would a single law-abiding gun owner turn over his or her capacity for self-defense to people who were incapable of defending children at every step of the way?
And why in the world should we blame the NRA, which literally had nothing to do with Parkland, for the failures of every institutional barrier to a massacre? Why should we blame law-abiding gun owners who didn’t shoot up kids for the failures of those who are paid to do stop evil monsters like the Parkland shooter? Why should we take Sheriff Steve Israel seriously when he blames lack of gun control, Dana Loesch, and the NRA, rather than his own radical incompetence and the radical incompetence of those under his authority?
Children are dead not because millions of good citizens own AR-15s, but because dozens of pathetic incompetents and cowards in a position to do something instead did nothing. All the misdirection in the world isn’t going to change that inconvenient fact.
The other thing we know, this being government, is that no heads will roll. The school resource officer resigned, but the three other deputies who reportedly failed to go inside to find the shooter won’t lose their jobs. Nor will their boss, Democratic Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel, unless voters boot Israel from office. Nor will the FBI agents who didn’t do their jobs by passing on the numerous information about the shooter. No, only law-abiding gun owners will be punished for government malfeasance.
About Israel, National Review writes:
It is impossible to imagine circumstances under which Broward County sheriff Scott Israel could attempt to perform his duties with the confidence of the public. He should resign immediately, and if, as he promises, he refuses to go quietly, then he should be shown the door by the people he professes to serve.
The numbers tell the story: 23 sheriff’s calls involving the Parkland shooter; 18 sheriff’s calls involving the shooter’s behavior directly (some of the others were principally about his brother); four sheriff’s deputies, armed and trained, cowering outside the high school while the killer within carried out his massacre; 17 dead.
In spite of having the school’s armed “resource officer” — an on-site deputy — and three other sheriff’s deputies outside the school during the massacre, no one lifted a finger to stop the shooting until police from Coral Springs arrived and entered the building, at which point the killer escaped, walking off the campus with the rest of the stunned students. He then walked down the street to a fast-food restaurant and ordered himself a drink, and wandered around the neighborhood for a while (past an elementary school) before being spotted by a Coral Springs police officer, to whom he surrendered without incident. He eventually made his way into the Broward County sheriff’s custody — when he was delivered there in handcuffs.
Coral Springs city manager Mike Goodrum subsequently had a confrontation with Sheriff Israel he described as “heated.” We can imagine.
The failure of the Broward County sheriff’s department in this matter has been comprehensive — before and during the incident, obviously, and after it, too, with the continued sanctimonious blame-dodging of the sheriff. The sheriff’s department (and other law-enforcement agencies from Palm Beach County to the FBI) had every reason to believe not only that the killer was a danger to others but that he was specifically planning a school massacre. People who knew him called in with that specific worry, and the killer boasted online of his plan to become a school shooter. Those boasts were forwarded to the FBI, which did precisely nothing in response. The killer himself called police to tell them he had been having trouble after the death of his mother.
Pointing out these failures isn’t attacking law enforcement, as some supporters of gun control allege, but demanding minimal competence on a matter of the utmost public import. Such is the ardor of the most committed gun controllers that they are willing to look past every failure by authorities that doesn’t accord with their agenda (one of the Stoneman Douglas kids the other day said it was understandable that the SRO didn’t engage the shooter because no one wants to confront an AR-15 — of course, the officer had no idea in real time that the gun was an AR-15, which regardless isn’t particularly powerful for a rifle).
As for the sheriff, he is a pretty typical politician, hiring friends and political allies, treating his law-enforcement position as a nakedly political fief. His arrogance is astounding: When asked about his penchant for hiring his supporters and looking after his own interests first, the sheriff replied, “Lions don’t care about the opinions of sheep.” But the people of Broward County didn’t hire Scott Israel to be a lion; they hired him to be a sheepdog, a task at which he has failed so completely as to make regaining the public trust impossible. Indeed, it is not clear he ever deserved that trust to begin with. If he has any respect for his oath, his badge, or his community, he should step aside. If his sense of duty does not prevail, he should be forced out.
The stress-relieving aspect of not being on Twitter and Facebook — I signed off a year ago — is never more evident than in the wake of a mass shooting. “Gun control” clearly is the high profile issue about which otherwise sensible people are completely ignorant.
To prove the point, pistol owners should try this experiment, one that I plan to use with a group of guys who gather each morning at my neighborhood Starbucks.
Tell them you own a “semi-automatic assault weapon.” Watch their eyebrows raise and their jaws drop. Then show them a picture of your weapon — in my case a Smith & Wesson MP pistol. …
Clearly, it’s an “assault” weapon, as it could be used in self-defense to assault an attacker. Just as clearly, it’s “semi-automatic,” as a round is automatically chambered after each trigger pull.
When I used to be on Facebook and Twitter, I fell into the trap of responding to “friends” or “followers” who made knee-jerk calls to ban “assault” and/or “semi-automatic” weapons following a tragedy such as occurred earlier this month in Florida.
Asked to define what they would ban, the typical response was a picture of an AR-15, accompanied by an assertion such as “No one needs a machine gun!” I found it did little good to describe current laws that heavily regulate ownership of a fully automatic weapon, i.e., a “machine gun.” And, of course, I endured full mockery after explaining that an AR-15 is but a rifle where a round is chambered after each trigger pull. (How would the debate play out if AR-15s looked more like a traditional rifle?)
Just for discussion, say AR-15s were banned and existing confiscated from lawful owners.
With a little practice, an unbalanced person such as the Florida perpetrator could become proficient, with a pistol such as mine, at discharging 100 or more rounds in < 5 minutes. It’s easy, with practice, to discard and reload a 20-round clip in <10 seconds.
When confronted with those facts, some honest gun controllers will ‘fess up and say they’d really like to ban guns, period. Some will take the logical next step and advocate confiscation of guns now lawfully owned.
A social media “discussion” with gun controllers is never complete without chest-thumping assaults on the NRA. At my local gun club I have taken six courses, in addition to an 8-hour concealed carry session, from NRA-authorized instructors. These are some of the straightest shooters, so to speak, that I’ve ever encountered. Down-to-earth. Relentless emphasis on safety, safety, and often more safety. People in the classes I’ve taken likewise are as threatening as your grandmother.
While I’ve put Twitter and Facebook in my past, it’s tough to escape the ignorant, media-enabled narrative that crowds out real news after an event such as the Florida shooting. It’s clear that the bulk of the sign-carrying students personify the fundamental ignorance of firearms that drives the media narrative.
I found it interesting and encouraging that President Donald Trump presided over a useful discussion of the issues that included participants with views across a broad spectrum. Too bad that is likely to be the exception to the rule.
Today in 1955, Billboard magazine reported that sales of 45-rpm singles …
… had exceeded sales of 78-rpm singles for the first time.
The number one single today in 1966:
The number one album today in 1966 was the Beatles’ “Rubber Soul”:
The number one country and western single today in 1956 was the singer’s number one number one:
The number one British album today in 1984 was the Thompson Twins’ “Into the Gap”:
The number one single today in 1984 was adapted by WGN-TV for its Chicago Cubs games — a good choice given that the Cubs that season decided to play like an actual baseball team:
The number one single today in 1973:
Today in 1976, the Eagles’ “Their Greatest Hits” became the first platinum album, exceeding 1 million sales:
Today in 2000, Carlos Santana won eight Grammy Awards for “Supernatural”:
[Wednesday] night, the nation witnessed what looked a lot like an extended version of the famous “two minutes hate” from George Orwell’s novel 1984. During a CNN town hall on gun control, a furious crowd of Americans jeered at two conservatives, Marco Rubio and Dana Loesch, who stood in defense of the Second Amendment. They mocked the notion that rape victims might want to arm themselves for protection. There were calls of “murderer.” Rubio was compared to a mass killer. There were wild cheers for the idea of banning every single semiautomatic rifle in America. The discourse was vicious.
It was also slanderous. There were millions of Americans who watched all or part of the town hall and came away with a clear message: These people aren’t just angry at what happened in their town, to their friends and family members; they hate me. They really believe I’m the kind of person who doesn’t care if kids die, and they want to deprive me of the ability to defend myself.
The CNN town hall might in other circumstances have been easy to write off as an outlier, a result of the still-raw grief and pain left in the wake of the Parkland shooting. But it was no less vitriolic than the “discourse” online, where progressives who hadn’t lost anyone in the attack were using many of the same words as the angry crowd that confronted Rubio and Loesch. The NRA has blood on its hands, they said. It’s a terrorist organization. Gun-rights supporters — especially those who oppose an assault-weapons ban — are lunatics at best, evil at worst.
This progressive rage isn’t fake. It comes from a place of fierce conviction and sincere belief.
Unfortunately, so does the angry response from too many conservatives:
While I don’t live in New York and D.C., I do interact with quite a few members of the mainstream media — from cable hosts to producers to print reporters — and I can assure you that this sentiment is every bit as slanderous to their characters as the claim that gun-rights supporters “don’t care” when kids are gunned down in schools.
Moreover, videos like this run alongside the NRA’s hard turn toward Trump and its angry ads that blur the lines between peaceful resistance and Antifa riots while condemning the “violence of lies” from gun-control advocates.
One thing’s for sure: Every single conservative who argues that such rhetoric is merely “fighting fire with fire” or making the enemy play by its own rules is matched by a progressive who argues the same darn thing. If you’re looking for one, you’ll never have trouble finding a reason to demonize your opponents.
My colleague Kevin Williamson has long argued that the gun-control debate isn’t a matter of policy but of “Kulturkampf.” The mutual disdain isn’t limited to vigorous disagreement about background checks; it extends to a perceived way of life. As Kevin says, some progressives believe that firearms are little more than “an atavistic enthusiasm for rural primitives and right-wing militia nuts, a hobby that must be tolerated — if only barely — because of some vestigial 18th-century political compromise.” They simply do not grasp — or care to grasp — how “gun culture” is truly lived in red America.
This loathing isn’t one-sided. It’s simply false to believe that the haters are clustered on the left side of the spectrum, and the Right is plaintively seeking greater understanding.
This loathing isn’t one-sided. It’s simply false to believe that the haters are clustered on the left side of the spectrum, and the Right is plaintively seeking greater understanding. Increasingly, conservatives don’t just hate their liberal counterparts; they despise the perceived culture of blue America. They’re repulsed by the notion that personal security should depend almost completely on the government. The sense of dependence is at odds with their view of a free citizenry, and — to put it bluntly — they perceive their progressive peers as soft and unmanly.
This divide won’t go away, and it has the potential to break us as a nation.
Unlike the stupid hysterics over net neutrality, tax policy, or regulatory reform, the gun debate really is — at its heart — about life and death. It’s about different ways of life, different ways of perceiving your role in a nation and a community. Given these immense stakes, extra degrees of charity and empathy are necessary in public discussion and debate. At the moment, what we have instead are extra degrees of anger and contempt. The stakes are high. Emotions are high. Ignorance abounds. Why bother to learn anything new when you know the other side is evil?
It takes more than a constitution or a government to hold a nation together. The ties that bind us as Americans are strong and durable, but the great challenges that formed them are receding into the past. Geographic differences create cultural differences, and cultural differences hasten ever-greater geographic change. Like clusters with like, and it results in the fury we saw last night, when one of the bluest communities in America vented its rage at the red emissaries in their midst.
A nation cannot endure forever when its people are consumed with such hate.
February being Black History Month, David Kopel and Joseph Greenlee present something that should make liberals uncomfortable:
Guns have historically protected Americans from white supremacists, just as gun control has historically protected white supremacists from the Americans they terrorize.
One month after the Confederate surrender in 1865, Frederick Douglass urged federal action to stop state and local infringement of the right to arms. Until this was accomplished, Douglass argued, “the work of the abolitionists is not finished.”
Indeed, it was not. As the Special Report of the Paris Anti-Slavery Conference of 1867 found, freedmen in some southern states “were forbidden to own or bear firearms, and thus were rendered defenseless against assault.” Thus, white supremacists could continue to control freedmen through threat of violence.
Congress demolished these racist laws. The Freedmen’s Bureau Bill of 1865, Civil Rights Act of 1866, and Civil Rights Act of 1870 each guaranteed all persons equal rights of self-defense. Most importantly, the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, made the Second Amendment applicable to the states.
Kansas Senator Samuel Pomeroy extolled the three “indispensable” “safeguards of liberty under our form of government,” the sanctity of the home, the right to vote, and “the right to bear arms.” So “if the cabin door of the freedman is broken open and the intruder enter…then should a well-loaded musket be in the hand of the occupant to send the polluted wretch to another world.”
Because of the 14th Amendment, gun control laws now had to be racially neutral. But states quickly learned to draft neutrally-worded laws for discriminatory application. Tennessee and Arkansas prohibited handguns that freedmen could afford, while allowing expensive “Army & Navy” handguns, which ex-Confederate officers already owned.
The South Carolina law against concealed carry put blacks in chain gangs, but whites only paid a small fine, if anything. In the early 20th century, such laws began to spread beyond the ex-Confederacy. An Ohio Supreme Court Justice acknowledged that such statutes reflected “a decisive purpose to entirely disarm the Negro.”
When lynching increased in the 1880s, the vice-president of the National Colored Press Association, John R. Mitchell, Jr., encouraged blacks to buy Winchesters to protect their families from “the two-legged animals … growling around your home in the dead of night.”
Ida B. Wells, the leading journalist opposing lynching, agreed. In the nationally-circulated pamphlet Southern Horrors, Wells documented cases in Kentucky and Florida, “where the men armed themselves” and fended off lynch mobs. “The lesson this teaches,” Wells wrote, “is that a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give.”
After the thwarted lynching in Florida, the state legislature enacted a law requiring a license to possess “a pistol, Winchester rifle or other repeating rifle.” A Florida Supreme Court Justice later explained: “the Act was passed for the purpose of disarming the negro laborers” and “was never intended to apply to the white population and in practice has never been so applied.”
While lynching began to decline in the early twentieth century, race riots increased. According to historian John Dittmer, blacks fought “back successfully when the mobs invaded their neighborhoods” during the Atlanta riots in 1906. When police stood idle as 23 blacks were killed during riots resulting from a black man swimming into “white” water near Chicago, blacks used rifles to kill 15 attackers.
During the Tulsa Race Riot in 1921, whites (with government approval) burned down a square mile of the prosperous district nicknamed “Black Wall Street,” killing 200 blacks. There would have been more devastation had blacks not fought back, killing 50 of their attackers.
Firearms made possible the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Charles Cobb’s excellent book, “This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible” describes how pacifist community organizers from the North learned to accept the armed protection of their black, rural communities.
The Deacons for Defense and Justice was an armed community defense organization, founded in 1965. With .38 Special revolvers and M1 carbines, they deterred terrorism in the “Klan country” region of Louisiana and Mississippi. When Dr. King led the “Meredith March against Fear” for voter registration in Mississippi, the Deacons provided armed security.
Condoleezza Rice became a self-described “Second Amendment absolutist,” because of her experiences growing up in Birmingham. She recalled the bombings in the summer of 1963, when her father helped guard the streets at night. Had the civil rights workers’ guns been registered, she argued, they could have been confiscated, rendering the community defenseless.
Similarly, when the Klan targeted North Carolina’s Lumbee Indians in 1958 because of their “race mixing,” the Lumbee drove off the Klan in an armed confrontation, the Battle of Hayes Pond. Klan operations ceased in the region.
Justice Clarence Thomas’s opinion in the 2010 McDonald v. Chicagoexplicated the history of gun control as race control. Historically, people of color in the United States have often had to depend on themselves for protection. Sometimes the reason is not overt hostility by the government, but instead the incapability of government to secure public safety, as in Chicago today.
Self-defense is an inherent human right. The 14th Amendment is America’s promise that no law-abiding person will be deprived of that right, regardless of color.
The number one song today in 1991:
Today in 1998, the members of Oasis were banned for life from Cathay Pacific Airways for their “abusive and disgusting behavior.”
Apparently Cathay Pacific knew it was doing, because one year to the day later, Oasis guitarist Paul Arthurs was arrested outside a Tommy Hilfiger store in London for drunk and disorderly conduct.
For those skeptical of Donald Trump’s conservative credentials, this confirms your cynicism (from WMUR-TV):
President Trump promised to be “very strong on background checks” during a listening session with parents, teachers and students affected by school shootings. Then on Thursday he tweeted his support for comprehensive background checks.
“I will be strongly pushing Comprehensive Background Checks with an emphasis on Mental Health. Raise age to 21 and end sale of Bump Stocks! Congress is in a mood to finally do something on this issue – I hope!”
This proves, for those who should have known better, that Trump’s political beliefs are based on who’s in charge and what’s popular. With Republicans in charge in Congress, Trump does conservative things. When the public (wrongly) wants more gun control, Trump accommodates them.
The hiccup here (besides what Congress will pass, which is a bigger question than what Trump says he wants) is that Trump’s hardcore supporters, Trump’s principal audience, are not fans of more gun control. So that is odd. But politicians gotta be political.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 