Wednesday
I am just back from an
agonizingly long airplane trip from IAD to LAX. We had powerful
headwinds and the flight, normally about 5 and a half hours, was
more like 7. Plus, we had a long wait at IAD to board. Luckily, I
was able to have a hot dog from Five Guys. It was great, as is
everything they sell.
Anyway, I had a long time to think on the plane and this is a
little bit of what I thought about:
Of course, like every other human being, I am horrified by the
murders of innocent children and adults at Sandy Hook elementary
school in Newtown, Connecticut. The tragedy is overwhelming.
I have read a lot of nonsense about the subject since the
murders. The most startling was an article by a medical doctor that
said that only a small percentage of premeditated mass murders were
done by mentally ill people — and a really tiny percentage of all
murders were done by mentally ill people.
How can that possibly be? Doesn’t the act of murdering a fellow
human being by itself define the killer as mentally ill? It reminds
me of a conversation I once had with a man who had, as a young man,
interviewed Adolf Hitler. I asked the interviewer if it were
obvious right away that the Führer was mentally ill.
The man said that Hitler was not at all mentally ill. He was
just a clever politician.
“But, sir,” I asked him, calling him “sir” since this man was a
very, very high ranking official in government, and a longtime pal
and classmate of my Pop, “doesn’t the historical truth that Hitler
ordered the murder of six million innocent Jews by itself show that
he was insane?”
The man looked at his salad and said nothing. He was famous for
keeping his own counsel, one might say.
Anyway, let’s assume that all murderers are insane and there are
a great many of them out there. Let’s assume that we will not
knowingly sell any kind of gun to a mentally ill person. And let’s
for certain sure swear we will never allow another mass murder at a
school. How do we do it? How do we keep the kids safe at
school?
In my mind, a clear answer comes out: hire guards, and lots of
them, at schools, assign them bulletproof jackets and guns, and
there you are. If there are armed guards all over a school, there
cannot be any more Sandy Hooks or Virginia Techs. Why don’t we do
this? Guards are not expensive and even if they were, they are
worth the money. They may be intrusive to look at, but we’ll get
used to them. We have accustomed ourselves to armies of TSA agents
at airports.
Whatever it costs, let’s get on the job. We cannot track down
all mentally ill men. There are too many of them. There are already
200 million firearms floating around the nation. Very hard to
control. That ship has sailed. Plus, it really is true: guns don’t
kill people. People kill people.
But guards at the doors and in the halls — guards like the TSA
at the airports only armed — that’s simple and direct. We just
have to do something and this seems like the most direct route to
safer children and schools.
What do we have to lose? Newtown cannot ever happen again. Gun
control is not the answer, unless they can make a weapon that
cannot be fired by someone who has failed the Minnesota Multiphasic
Personality Inventory — and is not in uniform. So, guards are the
simple answer and I like simple answers.
But there is a lot more to be said. We talk a lot about how much
we love our children and how much we want them to be safe and
loved. At least some of us talk a lot about that.
But, do we really love our children?
If we really loved our children, would we bring three out of
four of our black children into single parent homes, where their
chances of a happy, fulfilled life without incarceration are
greatly reduced? If we really loved out children, would we bring
about one third of all white children into single parent homes?
If we really loved our children, would we kill roughly three
thousand a day of our children in the womb, as totally innocent
souls?
Most of the members of my family and many of my closest friends
are liberal Democrats. They talk a great deal about how much they
love their kids and kids in general. They spend immense amounts to
send them to private schools and psychiatrists. We buy them
psychoactive meds to keep them from flipping out. Believe me, I
know a lot about that one.
But then why do our liberal friends and relatives think it’s
imperative to allow unlimited abortion, which by definition is the
killing of an innocent child? Where did that immense dichotomy,
that Orwellian doublethink, come from in the minds of the
pro-abortion crowd?
I keep thinking that at least half of all of the unborn babies
aborted are little women. That means at least 525,000 women killed
each year by abortion. And the pro-aborts complain about a GOP “War
on Women”? Isn’t there a “War on Children” going on right now?
Isn’t it being waged by the very same people who talk the loudest
about wanting to protect children?
It is all extremely disturbing. But then I am very tired so
maybe I am just confused.
Friday
Hey, I see that the NRA has just
come out for armed guards at all schools and now the gun control
people are mocking them for it. But why is it a bad idea? Maybe it
is a bad idea because the liberals say it’s a bad idea.
Friday
Bad, bad news.
I was staggered to read in the newspapers this morning about the
passing of Robert Bork. He was a great thinker, a great patriot,
and a great friend of the Steins.
I was immensely privileged to have had him as a teacher of
Constitutional Law at Yale in 1967-68. Frankly, I was too stupid to
“get” quite what he was explaining to us about how the evil Warren
Court had just made up a “right” of privacy by looking at
“penumbras and emanations,” as Mr. Bork contemptuously called them
from earlier cases.
He ripped to shreds a Connecticut case, Griswold v.
Ct., which created a “right” to a zone of privacy and thus
invalidated a Ct. Law against birth control devices. He said it was
pure fantasy created by the Supreme Court’s political and social
views.
He said what we needed was legal reasoning that was based on
“neutral principles” which could be applied no matter what the
political slant of the case or the court.
He stood there, like a big smart Irish pixie, just spitting out
genius as he smoked cigarettes. His usual arguing opponent was my
dear pal, Duncan Kennedy, a true genius who has gone on to great
renown as a law professor and a founder of Critical Legal Studies,
a school of legal thought that shows amazing insights.
I have to say, I was almost always on Duncan’s side, not that it
matters much.
But later on in life, when Mr. Bork became solicitor general for
RN and a close pal of my parents, I came to love him. He called me,
“Benjy” and was affectionate to me.
He stood up for the Constitution and against the elite corps of
impudent snobs (Agnew’s phrase) and got rid of that arch snob,
Elliot Richardson. Then he became a distinguished judge of the DC
Circuit Court of Appeals.
Then, when Ronald Reagan appointed him to the Supreme Court, he
was attacked by the left and the media and the academy. The charges
were that he was anti-woman, anti-black, pro-life. All lies and
smears. Naturally, the truth came down to this: Bob Bork was genius
of original intent legal thinking. He would have curbed the Court
in its efforts to write laws from the bench. He would have stood up
for the Constitution and against attempts at a court that thought
of itself as legislator, executive, and supreme court.
You bet he would have voted to repeal Roe v. Wade. He
would have voted to save the Constitution and save innocent lives.
That was his crime. He loved the Constitution.
The charge against him was led by Senator Edward Kennedy, a
truly wicked man. To think that Ted Kennedy, another snob, but also
a man of simply horrible characteristics of contempt for human
life, especially the life of Mary Jo Kopechne, a man with no
respect at all for truth, a man who had never shown anything but
disdain for law, to think that he stood in moral judgment over Bob
Bork… well, that’s art. Ted Kennedy judging Bob Bork. It takes my
breath away. He killed that nomination, just as he killed RN’s
proposal for a sensible universal health care law.
My mother, God rest her soul, kept a list of all of the senators
who voted against Bob Bork on her refrigerator door all of her
life. I think she held a hatred against them all of her days.
She was very close friends with Mrs. Bork (Mary Ellen) and
fiercely loyal to him and to her as she was to all her friends and
anyone on RN’s side.
When I saw him at events, usually at Chris DeMuth’s glorious
AEI, he called me “Benjy.” That’s how he heard my parents call me.
So, that’s what he called me. Original intent.
Now, he is gone. To think that the nation was deprived of his
service on the high court because of the mischief of the likes of
Ted Kennedy. Unbelievable.
Well, it was an evil day. Now, he is in a better place and God
bless him. But men like Bob Bork come along seldom. We must value
them when the Lord gives them to us. We didn’t in the case of Bob
Bork, and what a mistake we made.
