Law Struggles To Keep Up in Arms Race
By Winthrop Quigley
Journal Staff Writer

Even though some gun owners believe Barack Obama or other conspirators are on the verge of dispatching the military to disarm us all, ours really is a nation of laws. The tradition and culture underlying that reality is what makes the United States strong, not its armament. The law of the land, per the Supreme Court, is that Americans who can pass a background check have what appears from the Alito decision to be a virtually unfettered right to own firearms. Civil and military authorities can be relied upon to respect that decision.

        The old arguments probably won’t stop, but the court has rendered them moot. It is now pointless to say that if guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns. Guns can’t be outlawed. It is immaterial to say that guns don’t kill people; people kill people. The court has ruled that guns are a constitutionally protected fixture of our society, so if people choose to kill people, guns can be part of their armory.

        This leaves us with yet another technological complication the framers of the Constitution could never have anticipated. The musket that George Washington was familiar with took 10 to 30 seconds to load. It had very limited range, and its accuracy was problematic. The thug’s weapon of choice (because there wasn’t much choice) when I was a kid in Cleveland was the Saturday night special. If the thing didn’t jam or blow up in your hand, the round it fired sometimes didn’t have enough kick to break a car windshield.

        Robert Reza, who killed two people and himself and wounded four at Emcore, was armed with a .45-caliber semiautomatic handgun capable of firing 13 powerful and accurate rounds in less time than the most skilled minuteman needed to load a musket once. With today’s technology, the most inept gunman firing into a clutch of people will almost inevitably hit someone. Statistics suggest that people aren’t any more inclined to violence than they ever were, but technology has made the few people who are so inclined far more successful at violence than ever before.

        Technological realities inevitably lead to political conundrums.

ABQJOURNAL UPFRONT: Law Struggles To Keep Up in Arms Race

Over at NewMexiKen, there has been a discussion about the Albuquerque Journal’s awful, awful website. Someone called it an embarrassment to the community, and I agree. I’m not going to waste time collecting screenshots to make my point. I’ll just add here that my latest effort to read a couple of articles online reminds me – if I could only forget, but cannot – just how freakishly awful the Albuquerque Journal website is.

Check it out for yourself. Scan the first page. Notice how it loads in fits and starts. Try to grasp the layout – what’s important on this page? Can you figure that out? Can you relate this page to the front page of the paper itself? Follow a link – any link. Have you ever seen another site like this one?

As a blogger, I like to quote directly from sources on the Web. The Journal website makes this very painful, in part, because it uses linefeeds instead of paragraph codes – quoted text runs together badly. Yeah, it’s a nerdy gripe and the Journal could not care less about pleasing bloggers, but it contributes to my belief that whoever works on this site has never seen another website anywhere. I’m reluctant to beat up a 14-year-old who gets minimum wage, but the Journal could and should do much better than this, especially after so many years of the same awful stuff. Send that kid to classes. Buy him a Dummies book. (Sorry, kid, I know your bosses don’t give a shit.)

I’ve quoted Quigley before. He’s an insightful writer.

ABQJOURNAL UPFRONT: In Afghanistan, the Question Is Everything 

By Winthrop Quigley
Journal Staff Writer
      As President Obama weighs his options in Afghanistan, the disquiet that Afghanistan will become another Vietnam grows.
    If the United States is to avoid another Vietnam in Afghanistan, the Obama administration needs to understand the short-term failure in Southeast Asia (short-term because Vietnam became a trading partner and regional ally of the United States) was a result of our complete lack of understanding about Vietnamese culture and society. American policymakers, products of a Western, rationalist, future-oriented culture, kept pushing buttons and pulling levers that connected to nothing in Vietnam’s Confucian, animist, ancestor-focused culture. The Americans could never find the buttons and levers that did connect to something.
    Afghanistan’s culture and society could not be less like our own. Until Barack Obama is certain he knows what buttons and levers connect to something in Afghanistan’s tribal, multilingual, Islamic culture (and there is not a lot of evidence that he does), additional troops won’t accomplish anything useful there.

ABQJOURNAL UPFRONT: In Afghanistan, the Question Is Everything

Winthrop Quigley is in a class by himself as a writer. He does a superb job of breaking down complex topics. Everyone should read all of his column on health care coverage (linked).

ABQJOURNAL BIZ: For sake of argument, stick to the facts
By Winthrop Quigley
Of the Journal
         If the nation is to have any hope of a reasonable debate about health policy, people on both ends of the political spectrum would do well to renounce some cherished myths about health care not only in the United States but in the rest of the world.
       Policies based on reality really should work better.
       There is a case to be made that commercial insurance has no place in health care. There is a case to be made that government has no place in health care. …

[updated 8-25-09]

Not a Bad Return
By Winthrop Quigley
Monday, 24 August 2009 15:02

Some of the predictable sniping occurred at Martin Heinrich’s town hall on the health care bills Saturday. A noisy but minority cohort insisted on describing as socialism proposals to cover more low-income people with public funds and to establish a government-operated competitor for insurance companies.

Socialism as a theory says that the only input to production of any value is labor and therefore the only return from production should be to labor. As a practice, socialism generally means central planning and state ownership of factors of production.

I am not a big fan of the federal bail-out of GM and Chrysler. I have written in the Journal that I doubt the government-run insurance company that President Obama favors will make any meaningful difference to health care in America. I do not believe that any business is too big to fail.

But I am a big fan of calling things by their proper name. The people screaming about socialism at Heinrich’s town hall were upset about the car company bailouts, the need of the government to recapitalize Fannie Mae, investments in Citigroup, loans and warrants in the finance sector. What they are upset about is not socialism but state capitalism — state investment in the private sector.

There is a bunch of that around. The state of New Mexico invested in Eclipse Aviation. China’s sovereign wealth funds have positions in natural resource companies. The United States owns stock in Citigroup.

Like any owner, sovereign owners have a say in how things are done, but they are no more interested in running the companies they invest in than is the average worker who owns shares of IBM through his 401K plan.
But here’s the fun part: It turns out Uncle Sam has been a very saavy investor. We the taxpayers own 34 percent of Citigroup, and based on its recent stock price so far we’ve made $11 billion. (Citi is the only bank in which the U.S. government has an ownership stake.) We earned 23 percent on the TARP money we gave Goldman Sachs. In fact, it looks as if the government will make money on most of the deals it did during the financial turmoil of the past year or so.