Media claim white men are the problem; the facts say otherwise. The Second Amendment is under siege. In the New York Times, retired Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens urged its repeal. A national survey conducted by The Economist and YouGov found 21 percent of Americans support repealing the Second Amendment. Not surprisingly, support varies... Read More

Steven Runciman’s 1951 History of the Crusades is nowadays regarded with some skepticism by serious scholars; but it’s the one I was raised on, and it’s wonderfully cynical. And for cynics, the story of the Children’s Crusade is especially satisfying. This Crusade was led by Stephen of Cloyes, “a shepherd-boy of about twelve years old,”... Read More

The Third World child soldier is a familiar image—a young boy (usually aged 14 or younger), dressed in ill-fitting fatigues, frequently smoking a cigarette and totting an AK-47. These soldiers are widely condemned and banned by international treaty, and for obvious reasons. Do these youngsters really grasp what they are fighting for? Are they sufficiently... Read More

There is an old joke, known I am sure to most of my listeners, about the Second Coming. That instinct to look busy is common to all bureaucratic organizations, including of course the federal government. It seized President Trump this week. On Wednesday, February 28, he held an hour-long televised session at the White House... Read More

"In America," observed Oscar Wilde, "the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience." So it is with the activist kids who’ve emerged from the Parkland, Florida, school massacre of February 14th, in which 17 of their own were murdered. Each one sounds like... Read More

My impression is that the U.S.A. is a much more hysterical country than it used to be. You can, in your imagination, conjure up the way particular human types will react to some public event. How would a thoughtful, law-abiding, middle-class family man react? How would a vinegary old maid react? How would a ditzy... Read More

Another school shooting, another flurry of pointless arm-flapping from the commentariat, every commentator mounting his favorite hobby-horse and galloping off to the races. Most popular: Stricter federal gun control! Couple of problems with that, most notably: It’s not what Americans want. Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution tweeted out a very nifty little video showing the... Read More

Introductory note: I wanted to touch upon this subject for a long, long while, because it is one I care about a lot. However, it is also totally off-topic for this blog. However, since in Russia there is a lull (that is putting it mildly) between New Year and the Orthodox Nativity, I decided to... Read More

Today we will ponder America, a country, even a civilization, that existed long ago where the United States is today, but bore little resemblance to it. It will be like studying cave drawings, or Sargon of Akkad. Pay attention. The is original source material of historical importance. I was there, in America: Athens, Alabama, at... Read More

Since Hillary has presumably gone to a home for used basilisks, we will perhaps hear less about gun control for a bit. As in, maybe, eight years. The unending drive to outlaw firearms remains fascinating in various ways, first in that it represents a desire for conclusive abandonment of constitutional government. This is far along... Read More

Every day, on average, seven kids and teens are shot dead in America. Election 2016 will undoubtedly prove consequential in many ways, but lowering that death count won’t be one of them. To grapple with fatalities on that scale -- 2,500 dead children annually -- a candidate would need a thoroughgoing plan for dealing with... Read More

In the U.K. Spectator, American freelance hack Eric Weinberger reviews Another Day In The Death Of America, a book about America’s “gun culture”, written by Gary Younge, a black UK. Guardian writer who was born in the U.K. to Jamaican parents. It’s based on an investigation of 10 deaths that happened in one fairly average... Read More

It was a beautiful evening and the kids -- Madeline, two; Seamus, almost four; and Rosena, nine -- were running across a well-tended town green. Seamus pointed his rainbow flag with the feather handle at his sisters and “pow-powed” them, calling out, “Yous are dead now, guys. I shot yous.” Madeline and Rosena laughed and... Read More

It’s award time at the Department of Homeland Security. So fleeting has been the focus on the systemic, intractable failures of the DHS apparatus—that failed functionaries feel sufficiently at ease to move on to the business of backslapping and promotion. But first, the latest outrage to emerge from Barack Hussein Obama’s Islamophilic Federal Bureau of... Read More

The people in the government who want to control our personal choices are the enemies of freedom. And the enemies of freedom can be very clever and seductive. Last week, these folks, manifesting their lust to keep us dependent upon the government by rejecting the natural right to self-defense, coined a clever phrase: "No fly,... Read More

The “Islamic homophobe” thesis bites the dust in less than 24 hours Right from the start, the Orlando shooting made no sense to me and I said so pretty clearly in an article I posted the same day. You can read the full article here, so I will only mention my main conclusion: that this... Read More

I’m going to move to Mexico. I swear I am. Except that I already have. Well, I’m going to move there twice. It’s to get away from Hussein Obama. Who is this President? How did we get him? Does he have anything in common with me? Is there anything even American about him? He is... Read More

The reaction to last week's shooting massacre in Hawaii---among the worst in American history---indicates that our national gun control debate is driven less by reasoned analysis and more by political demagoguery. Gun control supporters who regularly urge tougher laws after each such shooting were forced into a quandary: Hawaii already has America's strictest gun laws... Read More