ActRight

DENVER -- For Colorado Republicans, 2016 was supposed to be the year. The purple mountain majesties described in “America the Beautiful” were inspired by this state’s Pikes Peak,...

'While the tyrants shut the immigration door in your faces, open in their faces the door of jihad.'

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump tweeted Wednesday that he will meet with the National Rifle Association to discuss a gun control proposal. “I will be meeting with the NRA, who has endorsed me, about not allowing people on the terrorist watch list, or the no fly list,...

A Marine veteran is being hailed as a hero after helping dozens of people escape during the terror attack at an Orlando nightclub.

Orlando Police Chief John Mina and his officers are facing scrutiny over decisions they made during Omar Mateen's deadly rampage at Pulse nightclub that left 49 people dead.

Milo Yiannopoulos has had his Twitter account suspended

Milo Yiannopoulos has had his Twitter account suspended

Vulnerable Republicans are showing signs of compromising on gun restrictions as Democrats push hard for provisions to bar suspected terrorists from purchasing weapons such as those used to kill 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando.

Many senators are simply refusing to say anything about their presumptive nominee.

Early Sunday morning, a radical Muslim born in the United States murdered at least 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando. President Obama, as he always does, downplayed the terrorist attacker’s connections to Islam, instead vaguely ascribing the attacker’s radicalization to “various extremist information.” #ad#The next day, Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, went on Fox and Friends to discuss President Obama’s statement. And there, as he always does, Trump stuck his foot all the way down his throat. “Look,” said Trump, “we’re led by a man that either is not tough, not smart, or he’s got something else in mind.” He could have left it there — but once Trump has his teeth in something, he must continue chomping: And the something else in mind — you know, people can’t believe it. People cannot, they cannot believe that President Obama is acting the way he acts and can’t even mention the words “radical Islamic terrorism.” There’s something going on. It’s inconceivable. There’s something going on. He doesn’t get it or he gets it better than anybody understands — it’s one or the other and either one is unacceptable. The implication, given Trump’s context, is that Obama is a covert Muslim. This would not be the first time Trump has made such a suggestion. In 2011, as Trump called for Obama’s birth certificate (he said Obama was probably ineligible and born in Kenya), he stated, “Maybe [his birth certificate] says he is a Muslim.” In 2012, Trump tweeted, “Does Madonna know something we all don’t about Barack? At a concert she said, ‘we have a black Muslim in the White House.’” A significant number of Republicans agree with this theory by polling data. On Tuesday, President Obama retaliated. Obama, who appeared visibly upset — far more upset than he was in his original statement discussing the murder of 49 Americans by a radical Muslim terrorist in Orlando — went after Trump directly. He explained that there was no need to use the term “radical Islam” — that would simply make things worse: That’s the key, they tell us. We can’t get ISIL unless we call them “radical Islamists”’ What exactly would using this label accomplish? What exactly would it change? Would it make ISIL less committed to trying to kill Americans? Would it bring in more allies? Is there a military strategy that is served by this? The answer is, none of the above. Calling a threat by a different name does not make it go away. This is a political distraction. There is no magic to the phrase “radical Islam.” It’s a political talking point; it’s not a strategy. Ironically, this argument — “Would not terrorism by any other name smell as sweet?” — is itself a political talking point, not a strategy. Nevertheless, Obama’s not reticent to talk about radical Islam because he’s Muslim. He’s reticent to talk about radical Islam because he’s a leftist. Obama believes, as doctrinaire leftists do, that human beings do not derive meaning from ancient religious superstitions and deep-seated ideas about how the universe ought to operate. Given relief from material want and prevention of emotional distress, Obama believes, all human beings would get along just fine — and would then be free to cultivate themselves as they see fit. Karl Marx wrote that “life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing, and many other things.” In this view, unhappiness derives from scarcity in these resources or from social relationships created to guarantee these primary needs for some at the expense of others. Religion, meanwhile, exists only to misdirect such unhappiness toward the cosmic rather than toward one’s fellow man. Hence Marx’s belief that abolition of religion is “the demand for their real happiness.” Poverty and violence do not correlate. But poverty of ideology and violence do correlate. If that’s the case, then there’s no reason for Obama to mention “radical Islam.” It’s an opiate of the masses, just like Christianity (“You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years . . . it’s not surprising then they get bitter”). To get beyond the threat of “radical Islam” requires a real strategy, in the Obama view — a strategy of material redistribution, of power equalization. Take away the guns, centralize all the power in Washington, D.C., and then turn human beings into materialist widgets in thrall to that centralized power — and you’ll have peace. Don’t, and you’ll have chaos. That’s why Obama attributes terrorism in Jakarta to shootings in Chicago: “I have seen the desperation and disorder of the powerless . . . how narrow the path is for them between humiliation and untrammeled fury; how easily they slip into violence and despair.” Of course, this is all wrong. Terrorists in Indonesia aren’t just angry because they’re poor. Neither are kids in Chicago. Poverty and violence do not correlate. But poverty of ideology and violence do correlate. Trump understands that, which is why he blames radical Islam for the Orlando terrorist attack. But meanwhile, Trump is blind to the fact that American leftism is a religion all its own. Ironically, Trump — supposed scourge of the Left — believes that leftism can’t be the rationale for Obama’s soft-on-radical-Islam perspective. He believes, instead, that Obama must be a secret Muslim. That’s because he fundamentally misunderstands modern leftism, and the alliance between the modern Left and radical Islam to tear down the gates of Western civilization to make way for the new. Once the gates are down, of course, the Left will find out soon enough that radical Muslims do exist, and that they can’t be bought off with a few material concessions — the Europeans are finding that out daily. But until then, Obama will call for gun control. He’ll suggest that the real problem is hurt feelings and lack of opportunity. And Trump, puzzled as ever, will continue to misdiagnose leftism as radical Islam. — Ben Shapiro is the editor-in-chief of the DailyWire.com.

In a Wednesday op-ed, The New York Times editorial board argued that the Republican Party is to blame for the murder of 49 people in an Orlando...

The head of the United Nations Human Rights Council just demanded that political leaders in America enact, ??robust gun regulation? ? code for U.S. citizens to give up their guns. ABOVE: Zeid Ra’ad Zeid Al-Hussein, a Jordanian who is among the most influential officials within the U.N., tells America to give up its guns NOW. ????? ?

ORLANDO, Fla. ? In the midst of the chaos early Sunday morning at Pulse nightclub, the team at News 13 in downtown Orlando was covering the story when a producer took an ominous phone call. &…

In the wake of the Orlando shootings Mark Steyn talks about Douglas Murray describing the "Party at the End of the World".

Share on Facebook 1 1 SHARES Is there anyone who has ever endorsed Donald Trump who wasn’t embarrassed by the decision less than two weeks later? The most recent honoree in the Trump endorsement embarrassment sweepstakes is the NRA, who woke up to this tweet this morning from Donald Trump: I will be meeting with the NRA, who has endorsed me, about not allowing people | Read More »

If you have not heard any proposals for a “universal basic income” (UBI), you will soon. Under a UBI, the federal government would send each American (including children, in some plans) a monthly check of, say, $800 or $1,000 to cover basic needs. A couple would receive $20,000 per year, regardless of other income earned; a family with children would get more. The bloated welfare state? Streamlined! Poverty? Solved! And all of it supposedly paid for by eliminating safety-net programs that would no longer be necessary. Columnists are intrigued, “data journalists” excited, “explainers” cloyingly enthused. Technologists, certain that their breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and robotics will leave everyone else unemployed, see a UBI as critical to their utopian future; some are even funding a pilot program. But others think the time for a UBI has already arrived. Finland and Canada are experimenting with UBIs, and Switzerland has just held a national referendum on creating one (it was rejected by more than three to one). Andy Stern — the former head of SEIU, America’s largest private-sector labor union — has just published a book arguing for a UBI here. Charles Murray, a prominent scholar on the right, has also made the case for a UBI. Former labor secretary Robert Reich, plugging Stern’s effort, says, “America has no choice.” #ad#Actually, we do have a choice — one that goes far beyond safety-net details to reach the very heart of state and society. A UBI would pose severe practical challenges, which will be discussed later in this article. But even if it could work, it should be rejected on principle. A UBI would redefine the relationship between individuals, families, communities, and the state by giving government the role of provider. It would make work optional and render self-reliance moot. An underclass dependent on government handouts would no longer be one of society’s greatest challenges but instead would be recast as one of its proudest achievements. Universal basic income is a logical successor to the worst public policies and social movements of the past 50 years. These have taken hold not just through massive government spending but through fundamental cultural changes that have absolved people of responsibility for themselves and one another, supported destructive conduct while discouraging work, and thereby eroded the foundational institutions of family and community that give shape to society. In The Dream and the Nightmare (1993), his masterly account of the social currents that produced the entrenched poverty of the underclass, Myron Magnet wrote: “When it behooved mainstream culture to assert traditional mainstream values with conviction, the Haves refused to assert to the poor and the black the most fundamental of those values: the worth of the respectable working life, however humble.” Why would we want to repeat that mistake with a UBI? Clearly defined responsibilities, from educating children to caring for the elderly to fighting in wars, are fundamental to a society’s character. They establish the terms of relationships, the scope and role of civil society, and the expectations against which people judge one another. And few are as important or pervasive as the responsibility of providing — for oneself, for one’s family, and for future generations. Over the past century, America has shifted some of that responsibility from family and community to government. The elderly and disabled now receive regular cash payments and health coverage. For a time, single mothers received cash support as well, though welfare reform significantly curtailed that assistance. Most low-income households can receive a variety of in-kind benefits, such as food stamps, housing vouchers, and Medicaid. Over the past century, America has shifted some of that responsibility from family and community to government. The government’s assumption of such obligations has helped to mitigate severe hardship, but it has also changed economic incentives and cultural norms in ways that promote dependence over self-reliance and replace accountability with entitlement. Debate continues over whether this shift has gone too far or not far enough. But through it all, even if diluted, a crucial principle has survived: If you are able to work, you should work. The safety net ensures that no one starves, freezes, or dies on the hospital steps, but it does not typically offer a full substitute for employment. Even when the economic value of safety-net benefits might approximate the earned income of a low-wage job, those benefits arrive with constraints on how they can be spent, and with the weakened but still potent stigma of welfare. Yet more important than the stigma is the inverse praise: Those who work to provide for themselves and their families know they are playing a critical and worthwhile role, which imbues the work with meaning no matter how unfulfilling the particular task may be. As the term “breadwinner” suggests, the abstractions of a market economy do not obscure the way essentials are earned. A UBI would undermine all this: Work by definition would become optional, and consumption would become an entitlement disconnected from production. Stripped of its essential role as the way to earn a living, work would instead be an activity one engaged in by choice, for enjoyment, or to afford nicer things. For many proponents of the scheme, this is the point. Releasing people from any responsibility to support themselves or their families represents the zenith of a hyper-individualistic culture. The goal is to maximize freedom and satisfaction by minimizing obligation and constraint. As the slogan of the moment proclaims: “You do you.” This should give pause to anyone who believes that the good life entails more, or that a free society requires its members, as Yuval Levin writes in his new book The Fractured Republic, to “commit ourselves to more than our own will and whim. It requires a commitment precisely to the formative social and cultural institutions that we have seen pulled apart from above and below in our age of fracture.” Even if a UBI represents just one more slip in our culture’s long downward slide, that is no argument in its favor. Only after halting the slide and regaining its footing can the culture hope to reclaim lost ground. But UBI proponents themselves recognize the radical nature of the shift they suggest. Writing at the leftist website Jacobin, Shannon Ikebe observed that “a UBI has been embraced in particular by the post-productivist left, which carries a strong feminist and ecological bent and rejects the traditional left’s valorization of labor and the working class.” Ikebe quoted other scholars describing universal basic income as a “capitalist road to communism” and a “postwork political project.” In the New York Times, columnist Farhad Manjoo explained: One key factor in the push for U.B.I., I think, is the idea that it could help reorder social expectations. At the moment we are all defined by work; Western society generally, but especially American society, keeps social score according to what people do and how much they make for it. The dreamiest proponents of U.B.I. see that changing as work goes away. Manjoo’s comment illustrates how support for a UBI fits neatly alongside the widely held belief that technological advances will make work “go away.” But when prior technological revolutions made a large share of farm and then factory labor obsolete, people continued to find new and productive vocations. More than four in five employees now work in the service sector. The present technological revolution shows no signs of following a different course. The U.S. labor market has kept pace with population growth, adding 80 million net jobs since computers started coming on the scene in the 1960s and more than 25 million since the Internet became mainstream in the 1990s. Approximately 60 percent of the working-age population remains employed — slightly above the post-war average. Certainly, as has happened before, technological change poses both great opportunity and great challenges for the labor market. But work itself remains both necessary and valuable. Undermining it because it might hypothetically someday end would be a senseless act of preemptive self-sabotage. What about poverty? Proponents say a UBI would end it, because each American would receive a check lifting him above the poverty line. But poverty is not only, or even primarily, a matter of material well-being. If it were, the $20,000 in safety-net spending per person below the poverty line, the presence of air conditioning and cable television and cell phones in the majority of such households, even the obesity epidemic ravaging low-income communities would all be signs that the war on poverty is nearly won. But we care about social as well as material conditions, and we care about upward mobility. By these measures, a UBI makes things worse. The greatest crisis facing less educated and lower-income Americans is social, not economic. As Charles Murray’s Coming Apart (2012) documents in harrowing detail, measures of social health that once looked roughly equal across economic classes now show gaping disparities, from family formation to employment to civic engagement to basic levels of trust. In 1960, Murray reports, more than 95 percent of white children were living with both biological parents when the mother turned 40, regardless of class. By the 2000s, the upper-class figure was 90 percent but the lower-class figure had declined to barely 30 percent, a level “so low that it calls into question the viability of white working-class communities as a place for socializing the next generation.” The story for other races is similar. The greatest crisis facing less educated and lower-income Americans is social, not economic. Appreciating the status of work in these communities is critical to understanding their decline. Work gives not only meaning but also structure and stability to life. It provides both socialization and a source of social capital. It helps establish for the next generation virtues such as responsibility, perseverance, and industriousness. Yet of the lower-class  households Murray studied, the share with a full-time worker declined from 81 percent in 1960 to 53 percent in 2010. Facing that trend, society cannot afford to withdraw its remaining expectation that able-bodied people try to make ends meet and its remaining respect for those who do. Yes, a UBI might flood these communities with additional resources. But a similar flood has already occurred over the past 40 years, with safety-net spending increasing eightfold. The result has been ever greater social erosion. Many UBI advocates deny that a UBI would produce any great discouragement to work, but their claims are undermined by a vocal subset who embrace this result. Good riddance, they say, to lousy jobs taken only out of need. “I think it’s a bad use of a human to spend 20 years of their life driving a truck back and forth across the United States,” Albert Wenger, a venture capitalist, told the New York Times. “That’s not what we aspire to do as humans — it’s a bad use of a human brain.” This attitude recalls the investment banker quoted by Myron Magnet who lamented “the man and his wife slogging away in menial jobs that are dead-end jobs, with three kids, trying to deal with an environment that is very depressing, . . . living dead-end lives.” Why, asks Magnet, does this family, working to support itself and raise upstanding citizens who will start families of their own, represent “a dead end rather than a human accomplishment worthy of honor and admiration”? This dead-end message is especially toxic for upward mobility because it tells prospective low-wage workers that, in Magnet’s words, “the first step they once could have taken toward achieving [respect] — putting a foot firmly on the bottom rung of the job ladder — has had respectability withdrawn from it.” Young people with limited skills and education are already too disconnected from the labor force. A UBI that reduces the perceived importance of work while putting cash in their pockets can only reduce the likelihood of their making the daily trek to low-wage jobs. And a subculture composed of their peers would presumably become less rather than more supportive of the choice to seek work. For unemployed workers of any age, the UBI’s guaranteed paycheck would only reduce the pressure to find work or relocate in search of opportunity. Yet for those at the bottom of the economic ladder, there is simply no substitute for stepping onto the first rung. A UBI might provide the same income as such a job, but it can offer none of the experience, skills, or socialization. A nation in which people sitting beside the ladder live more comfortably but are less likely to climb it may be one with a lower government-reported poverty rate, but it is not more effectively combating poverty. The best argument for a UBI is that, while it may reduce the upside of a job, it also reduces the downside because a recipient does not lose the UBI when he starts to work. This contrasts with a conventional safety net, in which benefits are phased out as a recipient’s earnings increase. On average, in the United States, the phase-out reduces benefits by around 30 cents for every dollar earned. But over some income ranges and for some recipients, a dollar of wages can cost the earner nearly a full dollar of benefits. Some programs, such as disability insurance, can also force recipients into a binary choice: Either work or receive the benefit. So, other things being equal, someone who could keep his UBI would be more likely to seek work than someone who would lose some or all of his safety-net benefits as a result. Does the UBI’s positive feature of eliminating benefit phase-out exceed its negative feature of making work unnecessary? Unfortunately, a policy whose greatest effects are cultural lends itself poorly to pilot studies, because there is no way to take into account such society-scale shifts: A test group will do artificially well if it experiences the upside of receiving cash without the downside of the transformed cultural norms and social institutions. Better — and deeply discouraging — evidence comes from the effects wrought by the aggressive welfare-state expansions of the recent past. But the question is academic, because the UBI’s purported advantage is not real. Maintaining a pure, guaranteed UBI with no phase-out for increasing income would require a budget dramatically larger than what is now spent on the safety net. To see why a UBI fails in this way, we must now consider its implementation. Three key variables characterize a UBI: its size, its rate of phase-out, and its source of funding. Proponents like to describe a UBI in which each person receives a benefit adequate to live on, the benefit phases out very gradually at very high income levels (or else not at all), and the total cost is covered by replacement of existing safety-net programs. But this violates what Professor Kevin Milligan, of the University of British Columbia, has called the “basic-income impossible trinity.” Of those three objectives, a policymaker can choose only two. UBI advocates observe that the existing safety net in the United States or any other developed nation spends on each person roughly what a livable basic income would cost. But it does this for only a small subset of the population, for whom benefits phase out quickly as their incomes rise. A UBI limited to the budget of the existing safety net could therefore offer either a small benefit to everyone or a large benefit that phases out quickly, but not both, and a UBI that offers a large benefit to everyone would require a massive budget increase. A UBI limited to the budget of the existing safety net could therefore offer either a small benefit to everyone or a large benefit that phases out quickly, but not both. Any proposal claiming to overcome the impossible-trinity problem invariably contains a flaw. Take, for instance, Charles Murray’s proposal for a $13,000-per-year UBI paid to all adults over the age of 21, with a partial phase-out (to a minimum of $6,500) beginning when annual earnings exceed $30,000. Murray would fund the program by eliminating not only the entire safety net of anti-poverty programs but also Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, agriculture subsidies, and “corporate welfare.” The first flaw is his inclusion of Medicare and Social Security. Medicare already spends more than $11,000 per recipient; Social Security spends $16,000. So Murray’s UBI covers only half of what the elderly’s “earned” entitlements paid. Anyone left to rely on the UBI would be unable to afford both Medicare-quality insurance and other essentials. Note also that Murray has excluded children. A single mother with two children, receiving a total of $13,000 per year, would be only two-thirds of the way to the 2016 federal poverty guideline of $20,160. And Murray’s plan, having eliminated Medicaid, would explicitly require her to spend at least $3,000 on health insurance. So her disposable “income” of $10,000 would reach less than halfway to the poverty line. Murray’s plan, designed to attract conservative and libertarian support, underscores exactly why liberals are so wary of proposals that supplant the existing safety net. His effort is caught in a Catch-22: If the benefit is small enough to be funded by eliminating the existing safety net, it is too small to permit the existing safety net’s elimination. Yet a UBI that was designed to coexist alongside a safety net would be so expensive and complex that it would quickly lose appeal for the Right. Murray rather undermines his pitch when he says: “If the guaranteed income is an add-on to the existing system” (as his design ensures it would have to be), “it will be as destructive as its critics fear.” The same impossible-trinity problem means that avoiding a phase-out cannot be considered among a UBI’s advantages over the existing safety net, because a livable UBI that does not phase out cannot be funded from the existing safety net. A UBI could perform better than the existing safety net only by costing dramatically more, but of course the safety net could also do a better job if given that extra money. For example, it could circumvent the phase-out challenge by simply offering food stamps and Medicaid eligibility for all. That would cost the same as a no-phase-out UBI while avoiding the unconditional cash handouts that most badly damage the respect accorded to work. The point is not that the safety net should look like a UBI, but rather that a UBI is not good anti-poverty policy. If employment works, then — for any given spending level — safety-net reforms that respect, promote, and even subsidize employment will yield better results than a UBI seeking to supplant it. — Oren Cass is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. This article originally appeared in the June 27, 2016, issue of National Review.

Republicans roundly rejected President Obama’s rationale for refusing to use the term “radical Islam” in describing terror attacks, responding that: “You have to define the enemy to defeat it.”

The Left is fixated for cultural reasons on firearms, which are associated in the suburban minds of sociology professors with backward rural life and government-mistrusting Second Amendment activists. Hence, Democrats constantly are seeking gun-control solutions to problems that have little or nothing to do with gun control, and hence the entirely unsurprising call by Hillary Rodham Clinton and others, in the bloody aftermath of Orlando, for a renewed ban on so-called assault weapons. A problem: Assault weapons do not, strictly speaking, exist. #ad#“Assault weapon” is an almost exclusively aesthetic category, having nothing to do with the ballistic characteristics of the firearms in question. A sporting rifle with a walnut stock is just another sporting rifle; pull that walnut stock off and replace it with a black plastic one with an L-shaped grip and you have an “assault weapon.” The operation of the firearm remains unchanged, but the configuration of the stock (“the shoulder thing that goes up,” as New York Democrat Carolyn McCarthy famously put it) or the presence of barrel threading to accommodate a muzzle-flash suppressor (an accessory of keen interest to those who shoot in arid, wildfire-prone areas) makes an ordinary rifle an “assault weapon,” as does the presence of a lug for mounting a bayonet, though it has been a while since bayonet charges were much in the news. An “assault weapon” is the Sicilian widow of the firearms world: a little scary-looking and all dressed in black. Firearms makers themselves haven’t been above using “assault rifle” in their marketing materials, appealing to the aesthetic sometimes derided in gun-enthusiast circles as “tacti-cool.” But the wicked looks have nothing to do with the function of the gun, no more than putting a big rear wing on a Honda Civic makes it go faster. The idea that American streets are running with blood because of ‘assault weapons’ is entirely unsupported by the evidence. The hard facts help establish perspective here: Of all the gun deaths in the United States in a given year, the large majority — 60 percent or more — are suicides. Of the ones that are homicides, all rifles and shotguns together account for about 4 percent, and so-called assault rifles account for such a minuscule number of murders that law-enforcement agencies do not even keep statistics on them. The idea that American streets are running with blood because of “assault weapons” is entirely unsupported by the evidence. Which shouldn’t be that surprising: Such weapons generally are expensive and difficult to conceal. For many years, the firearm most often put to criminal use in the United States was the .38-caliber revolver. And while that handgun did enjoy a certain cultural cachet in Mickey Spillane novels and private-eye movies, there wasn’t anything about it that was particularly conducive to crime: Compact and handy, it was simply the most common handgun among Americans, and hence, unsurprisingly, also the most common handgun among American criminals. #share#The most popular rifle in the United States today is the AR-style rifle, similar though not identical to the Sig Sauer rifle used in the Orlando slaughter. Given how common AR-style rifles are, it is surprising that such weapons are as seldom used in crimes as they are. But the AR has a way of attracting myths: Contrary to urban lore, the “AR” in the name denotes “Armalite,” the name of the firm that designed the weapon, not “assault rifle.” It is not, contrary to the pronouncements of any number of Hollywood’s finest thinkers, a “machine gun” or a “fully automatic” rifle; instead, it is a semiautomatic rifle, meaning that it fires one round each time the trigger is pulled, like a revolver or a duck-hunter’s shotgun. There is nothing particularly fast about its rate of fire or remarkable about its accuracy, and, contrary to so many media reports, it is not a “high-powered” rifle, firing, as it does, the .223 Remington or 5.56mm cartridge, which isn’t even powerful enough to be used to hunt deer or similarly sized game legally in most of the United States. It is, however, more than powerful enough to murder 49 unarmed and undefended clubgoers, as the horrifying scene in Orlando demonstrated. But then, practically any firearm would be. And, indeed, many of the worst atrocities in American history involved no firearm at all: The Oklahoma City bombing relied on a truckload of fertilizer; the worst school massacre in U.S. history (in Bath, Mich., in 1927, long before Columbine) employed dynamite; the 9/11 attacks were perpetrated in part with $2.99 box-cutters available at any hardware store. From 1994 through 2004, a federal ban on ‘assault weapons’ was in place, and it had no detectable effect on crime. We have a unique advantage in judging calls for a ban on so-called assault weapons: We’ve done it before. From 1994 through 2004, a federal ban on “assault weapons” was in place, and it had no detectable effect on crime. The independent Task Force on Community Preventative Services found no evidence that the assault-weapon ban prevented any violence. The National Research Council’s review of the academic literature on the question found that the data “did not reveal any clear impacts on gun violence.” The Justice Department’s own study suggested that any effects of the law were too small to be statistically measured. Indeed, the only statistically significant outcome that could be detected was a steep rise in prices for various firearms that weren’t banned. Political realities being what they are, it is no surprise that Smith & Wesson shares went up almost 7 percent after the Orlando murders. Many Americans do in fact have high-powered rifles in their homes: These are the very hunting rifles that the Left always promises it has no intention of going after, but which are far more powerful than .223-chambered AR-style rifles, and many of which operate in the same semiautomatic fashion. It’s rare that anybody is murdered with one. The fact is that the United States does not have an assault-weapons problem, nor does it have a general gun-control problem. It has a series of interconnected problems related to defective criminal-justice practices and a failed mental-health system, the collapse of the family, and the predictable spiritual crisis belonging to an age of nihilism. And, most relevant to Orlando, it has the problem of being an open, liberal society rather than a garrison state, which means that its public places will always be vulnerable to terrorism of the sort perpetrated by the ISIS groupie responsible for the Orlando atrocity, whether they use guns and bullets or matches and gasoline. Some of these things can be addressed by public-policy reforms, but having Washington micromanage “the shoulder thing that goes up” isn’t one of the more promising ones.

Jim Matheson is becoming CEO of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association.

Philippines: Muslims behead Canadian hostage Clinton's fear of a clash of civilizations in avoiding the jihadist threat to homeland security

EXCLUSIVE: Wilders On Orlando, Paris: 'Ramadan Is Deadliest Time Of The Year... Time To Stop Muslim Immigration'

CBS News poll respondents weigh in on Obama, Clinton, Trump responses, whether shooting was terrorism or hate, and nation's gun laws

Confucius rebukes Obama Philippines: Muslims behead Canadian hostage

An Islamic preacher who says homosexuals should be put to death and who lectured near Orlando in April has left Australia after his visa was reviewed.

“I will be meeting with the NRA, who has endorsed me, about not allowing people on the terrorist watch list, or the no fly list, to buy guns.”