LEFT & RIGHT WEDNESDAY, JUNE 17 2020

Civil War historian and newspaper columnist Bill Marvel again sits in the left chair. He doesn’t fit neatly into any political category, but agreed to appear on the show again to discuss political polarization in the America today and compare it to polarization in 1860.

Bill says he doesn’t fit anymore on the left, not because his views have changed, but because the Democrat Party has shifted dramatically to the left, making him appear center-right. We discuss specific examples of that.

Speaking of the tentative subject for Bill’s 20th book on the Civil War, he says that today’s political conflict and the one in 1860 both “started with an election that no one would accept.”

Bill says ignorance of history today due to the poor state of our public schools, prevents the public from realizing how quickly a society can collapse.

Bill reflected on a recent spate of letters to the editor in the Conway Daily Sun which lump the two of us as ideological twins, and suggested it was an orchestrated effort. When I questioned him about that he said,  “Unlike the clairvoyant cognoscenti of the millennial mob, I don’t know."

I love that impromptu phrase.

Conversation then ranged from the Rodney King incident to the Michael Brown incident to the George Floyd incident comparing and contrasting the incidents themselves and media reaction to them.

The producer asks who Joe Biden may pick for a running mate and we discuss those possibilities at some length.

We also discuss gun control and the 2nd Amendment in the context of leftist threats to ban guns.

What's Not Happening

It’s been a while, but I haven’t seen any gunfights in the streets of Maine or New Hampshire the past few years and I live very near the border between the two. That’s what progressives predicted would occur if gun laws loosened and people didn’t have to get permits to carry concealed guns. I haven’t seen any newspaper articles or television reports about increased gun violence either after each state passed legislation eliminating concealed carry permits. It’s been three years in New Hampshire and more than four years in Maine, so were the progressives wrong when they predicted both states would turn into the wild, wild west?

Police chiefs in both states were also against the new laws claiming their officers would at risk. What do they say now? Nothing. Vermont never required concealed carry permits and it’s always been one of the safest states in the country. That fact was ignored by progressive gun control advocates when they argued against New Hampshire and Maine revisions of concealed carry permits to copy Vermont.

Many people in the three northern New England states still leave their doors unlocked and crime rates remain very low. Is that because guns here are as common as unlocked doors? That’s probably a factor but not the only one. Most people own guns here and know how to use them. That’s a deterrent, certainly, but they also know who their neighbors are. There’s a much stronger sense of community. People here tend to look out for each other and are wary of strangers and unfamiliar vehicles in their neighborhoods. 

Most rural towns in northern New England don’t have police departments either. They rely on county sheriff’s deputies and the state police. Because of logistics and geography, response times for those larger law enforcement agencies are slower than police departments are in New York City or Boston. Rural people know this so they’re not only more prepared to defend themselves, they’re more willing to do so as well. They’re much less likely to cower in the face of criminal aggression of any sort.

There’s been no let-up in gun crimes for either state since gun laws were relaxed, but the perpetrators usually had prior felony convictions, so carrying a gun remained illegal for them. That didn’t stop them, of course, but then it never did. If you look around and see where most gun crimes are committed, you’ll quickly learn that they’re places with strict gun control laws like Chicago and New York. Gun laws on those places have only been obeyed by the law-abiding. Criminals have historically ignored them.

Although Bernie Sanders has always been a doctrinaire lefty on nearly every issue since he was elected Mayor of Burlington, Vermont almost forty years ago, his position on gun control didn’t fit the mold. Is that because he knew he would never have been elected to state-wide office there if he favored gun restrictions? His army of supporters would likely argue that Bernie has always been guided by principle over political expediency, but is that changing?

According to an article by Russell Berman in the February 27 issue of The Atlantic: 

The senator from Vermont’s hallmark has been his consistency as an unbending progressive over four decades in elected office. Yet if Sanders has embodied left-wing purity more than any of the other potential Democratic nominees, gun policy is one area where his record has been far from pristine in the eyes of progressives… But it’s telling that on gun control, he has gone further this time around to repudiate his past positions and align himself with the Democratic Party’s mainstream opinion. “The world has changed, and my views have changed,” he said at the February debate in New Hampshire.

Was Bernie sincere about his gun control views forty years ago? Is he caving in to political expediency here in 2020? He really wants to be president, but what if he loses to Biden or Trump? Can he be reelected senator in Vermont now that he’s become a gun control advocate? We may never know because he’s not up again until 2024 and by then he’ll be eighty-two years old. Maybe he’ll retire. Maybe he’ll change his position again.

While Democrats consider abortion their most important issue, gun control seems to have become the next most important. Maine and New Hampshire have been voting Democrat the past few cycles, and Vermont has been solidly “blue” for even longer. Maine and New Hampshire, however, are moving the other way on gun control. While Vermont has become even more leftist, there’s no indication they’ll tighten up on guns.

Left & Right June 5, 2019

Mark Guerringue again sits in the left chair. The producer asks us both if we support President Trump's increasing tariffs on China and Mexico. I support the China tariffs but not necessarily the recent ones on Mexico. Mark questions all tariffs and thinks conservatives should too. They always did.

Mark says tariffs never worked anywhere but I point out how the US Government used tariffs almost exclusively to support itself until the Graduated income tax was enacted in the early 20th century. Mark raises history too saying that tariffs on Merino wool were a boom to sheep farmers in northern New England in the early 19th century resulting in all the stone walls through what are now woods.

I bring up historian and biographer Dave Garrow's claim that Martin Luthor King was much more of a womanizer than previously reported. He participated in orgies and witnessed a rape by a fellow minister and laughed. Mark questioned why I brought it up and I answer that it shows mainstream media's bias against stories that don't fit their left-wing narrative. Mark says it's insulting when I question the professionalism of the New York Times and others in media. We go back and forth on that for quite a while.

At about the halfway point Mark brought a print-out of my column submission to his newspaper for the week and voiced several criticisms, ultimately saying he would not run it. It pertained to the Drag Queen Story Hour due to run at the Conway Public Library later this month. I see it as a danger for drag queens who are usually homosexual men to be models for children aged 3-8 who may become confused about their own sex. Mark says I'm wrong to conflate drag queens, homosexuality, and transgenders.

I contend there's a spectrum and what is lately referred to as gender dysphoria is on it. Mark says that's just wrong and they're all separate and distinct. This discussion takes up nearly all the second half of the show and gets heated. He claims I pull people out of thin air who support my ideas.

I cite research by Lisa Littman MD of Brown University who documented a group of fourteen-year-old females that together declared they were males after showing no signs of gender dysphoria previously. Mark contends she rescinded her study but I disagreed, pointing out that the former dean of Harvard Medical School backed up the science behind Littman's study. (Later I learned that she republished the study with minor modifications but didn't change her basic claims.)

Mark suggests I'm unenlightened and need therapy because my beliefs run counter to the LGBTQ narrative. I obviously disagree and claim that whoever dares publish data or opinions contradicting that narrative is publicly vilified by the LGBTQ lobby and Littman suffered a politically-correct assault at Brown University reminiscent of fascist tactics.

Train Teachers To Shoot Intruders

Five years ago I wrote a column titled: “Time to Arm Teachers.” That wasn’t a popular notion in 2013 but perhaps its time has come after the Florida shootings last week.

The idea was pitched to me by men uniquely qualified to train those teachers willing to carry concealed weapons and confront armed intruders in schools. One was father to a former student who’d done several tours in the Middle East as a Green Beret. He was still doing three-month hitches in Afghanistan with his team of other highly-trained, contracted soldiers who would deploy for ninety days over there, then serve another ninety here in New England protecting courthouses, then back to Afghanistan, and so on.

When asked my opinion of their proposed enterprise I said it was a great concept, but public schools would never allow it, being almost completely staffed by anti-gun leftists who believe only stricter gun laws will prevent school shootings. Maybe school officials have since taken a lesson observing Chicago over the interim five years where even with the strictest gun laws, almost as many young people are shot every weekend as were shot last week in Florida.

Our schools have been “gun-free zones” for twenty-eight years now since Senator Joe Biden introduced the bill that became federal law in 1990, and how has that worked out? We could argue that “Gun-Free Zone” signs posted at schools attract whackos like Nikolas Cruz who can be assured that nobody in the school will be able to shoot back.

Gun-free zones parody

People like guns where I live in rural Maine because when seconds count, the police are minutes away — and my town doesn’t have a police department. We rely on the Oxford County Sheriff’s Department and the Maine State Police. They do as good a job as they can, but it’s not enough. Armed criminals tried to break my neighbor’s house across the street and were repelled after discovering the old man who lived there with his elderly wife had a gun of his own. Police arrested the men later based on my neighbors’s descriptions.

“When you see something, say something” we’re told by the FBI, but people have said something several times lately to no effect. The FBI was warned about the Tsarnaev brothers who blew up the Boston Marathon. They were warned about Omar Mateen before he shot over a hundred people in the Orlando night club massacre. And, they were also warned about Nikolas Cruz before he killed students and teachers last week.

When I started teaching here in rural Maine forty years ago, young men came to school with high-powered, semi-automatic rifles on racks across the back windows of their pickup trucks during hunting season. Those guns could have been used to shoot up the school but they weren’t. Guns haven’t changed since then but people have — and that’s clearly the problem.

Mainstream media don’t report stories like that, or incidents like my elderly neighbors scaring off intruders with their gun. They don’t fit the progressive, Democrat, gun-control narrative. Media did print warnings about what would happen if Maine and New Hampshire allowed citizens to carry concealed weapons without permits, but those states went ahead anyway.

Concealed carry permits were never required in Vermont and sensible people knew it wouldn’t be a problem in Maine or NH either. It’ll be three years this summer here in Maine and there’s been no increase in gun violence. It’s been a year in New Hampshire. Vermont never had a problem.

There’s a squad car parked outside Whole Foods in Portland every day. Inside stands an armed cop who I asked one day why he was always there. There’s usually a cop in Portland supermarkets he said, often in plain clothes. We see them in airports and court houses. The student council at my last school had to pay a cop to guard school dances. During my last few years I could only use the main entrance because other doors were locked on the outside. Why not post an armed guard there and arm teachers in every wing of the school? That’s what Israel does — a country in a constant state of war. They’ve had only two school shootings in over forty years.

Ever since Columbine twenty years ago, brave teachers have died shielding students with their bodies at nearly every school in which shootings have occurred. Imagine if those teachers had been armed. How many students could they have protected if they shot back at the intruder instead of just absorbing his bullets? Had they been armed, we would likely be seeing stories of how Nikolas Cruz was killed attempting to enter the school instead of the national keening we’re undergoing now.