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The argument in favor of arbitrarily revoking the Second Amendment rights of college students, as is done in dozens of states, has ostensibly been rooted in safety concerns.

And it just got a lot weaker.

Two anti-gun professors wrote in the Washington Post that campus-carry laws will invite tragedies on college campuses, not end them. Another liberal professor, writing for the New York Times, warned that when there are more guns around, there is more risk its as simple as that.

The trouble with such predictions is that they tend to be tested as time goes by. And as it turns out, they simply werent true. Students just aren't waging the gun battles that anti-gun activists expected. A new report from the College Fix looked into this narrative, and it came up empty.

When a reporter reached out to numerous universities that permit campus carry, all of the schools that responded confirmed that they have seen no uptick in violence since their respective policies were put in place. Responding colleges included Emporia State University, Dixie State University, and Valdosta State University. Separately, the Texas Tribune has reported that after the Lone Star State implemented campus carry at four-year colleges state-wide, it resulted in no sharp increase in violence or intimidation, and in fact, the following year was quiet and uneventful.

These are just a few examples, but even studies cited favorably by gun control advocates admit that results certainly do not prove that campus carry causes more crime. Essentially, it's now clear that conservatives and libertarians had this one right. Allowing American adults aged 18 to 22 to exercise their Second Amendment rights on public college campuses is a no-brainer, as there are few rights more fundamental than the right to self-defense. Plus, the inconsistent nature of current gun-free campus rules already makes little sense.

The current system in many states bans college students from carrying guns but would allow adults of the same age who do not attend college to carry firearms. This is an arbitrary inconsistency that makes little sense, as there's nothing to suggest that college students are more violent or less responsible than their noncollege peers. So, too, guns are often allowed at high-risk off-campus sites such as fraternity houses, yet barred from the actual campus a glaring inconsistency that makes little sense. And now its officially confirmed that arbitrarily revoking college students Second Amendment rights doesnt even make anyone safer.

Its impossible for blue-state legislators and liberal college administrators to keep justifying their harsh anti-gun policies. That is, unless theyre willing to admit that they just hate the idea of gun rights.

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Myth busted: Campus carry never caused that increase in violence liberals predicted - Washington Examiner

Updated December 13, 2019 20:38:11

Scott Morrison is picking up that Australia's devastating, prolonged fires are producing a soured, anti-government mood among many in the community.

It may not be entirely rational for people to turn on politicians in such situations. The actual fighting of the fires, driven primarily at state and local levels, appears to have been efficient.

But the Government has invited anger in terms of the broad debate by being so inactive and partisan about climate change over the years.

Morrison is struggling to navigate his way through these fraught days before Christmas.

He's stressing unity: "I want to reassure Australians, that the country is working together to deal with the firefighting challenge."

He's refusing to meet calls for a national summit or a COAG meeting on the fire effort, but he's highlighting the Federal Government's coordinating activities.

He's placing the most positive spin he can on what Australia is doing on climate change, but all the time emphasising Australian emissions are only a tiny portion of the global total "so any suggestion that the actions of any state or any nation with a contribution to global emissions of that order is directly linked to any weather event, whether here in Australia or anywhere else in the world, is just simply not true".

The fires are putting pressure on the Government by elevating the climate issue and opening new division among Liberals. Only this time, and importantly, the internal wedge is coming from the left rather than the right of the party.

The PM is being pushed to do more, rather than being held back.

Morrison is no longer able to gloss over the climate debate. The big question for the next year or two is whether he will reposition the Government.

As former treasury secretary Ken Henry has argued, "today's catastrophic bushfires, and rapidly vanishing water security, again following years of drought, put the present government in a similar position" to when John Howard moved on climate change in 2006.

"The political economy of late 2019 is looking a lot like late 2006," Henry writes in an article titled"The political economy of climate change".

Morrison is the ultimate pragmatist and so, if he sees it in his interest, he may well be willing to readjust.

Not radically, nor quickly. Just enough, as and when he judges it, to satisfy middle-ground voters.

He did a little of this before the election when he topped up funding for "direct action" and advanced pumped hydro, although some read more into the shift than was there.

This week NSW Liberal Environment Minister Matt Kean bluntly called out his federal colleagues' dancing around the climate-fires link.

"Let's not beat around the bush let's call it for what it is. These bushfires have been caused by extreme weather events, high temperatures, the worst drought in living memory, the exact type of events scientists have been warning us about for decades that would be caused by climate change," said Kean, who is the leader at state level of the moderate faction.

"There has been a lot of talk since the federal election about ending the climate wars. I think that that talk has been misplaced. It's not time to end the climate wars. It's time to win the climate wars."

Kean also notably acknowledged the "leadership" on the climate issue of Malcolm Turnbull (who again prodded the bear on Monday's ABC Q&A).

One federal Liberal says, "for a long time [Kean's line] is where the overwhelming majority of the party has stood [but] nobody was willing to say it. The community is so concerned it has given us the cover to come out and say it".

The MP points to the impact of the issue in Liberal heartland seats in Sydney and Melbourne.

The Federal Government has repeatedly derided the Victorian and Queensland Labor governments for what it argues is their excessive ambition on renewables and emissions reduction. Kean has flagged NSW plans to strengthen its stand. The Federal Government is clearly exposed as the odd player out.

Yet it is the states' targets for renewables that are helping the national effort on emissions reduction, according to figures just released by the environment and energy department in its report"Australia's emissions projections 2019".

Looking at Australia's progress towards its 2030 Paris target of a 26-28 per cent reduction on 2005 levels, which, incidentally, can only be reached via the much-criticised course of carrying over Kyoto credits, the report has revised down its 2018 estimate for projected 2030 emissions.

Reasons for this revision include the boost to the "direct action" fund and "stronger renewables deployment". A factor in the latter was "the inclusion of 50 per cent renewable energy targets in Victoria, Queensland and the Northern Territory".

The projection is now for Australia to have renewables generating 48 per cent of its electricity by 2030, very close to the Labor policy of 50 per cent of which the Government was so critical.

Energy Minister Angus Taylor's speech at the United Nations COP25 conference in Spain this week showed how, as the inevitable transition to clean energy progresses, the Government is conflicted.

Regardless of years of scepticism about renewables from the federal Coalition, Taylor in Madrid lauded Australia's achievements in this area.

"In Australia, an unprecedented wave of low emissions energy investment is already underway," he boasted.

"Last year, renewable investment was Australia's highest on record at A$14.1 billion, which is world-leading investment given our population. Renewables are now more than 25 per cent of our electricity supply in our National Electricity Market."

Reality is gradually proving stronger than ideology as the energy mix changes, but not entirely.

The debate around a new coal-fired power station goes on.

The Government before the election promised a feasibility study into a possible venture in Queensland, and the Nationals continue to push for action.

If a feasibility study left the way open for a coal-fired station, would the Government be willing to provide any financial help or guarantee for a portion of the energy output? Given the reluctance of private capital, that would likely be the only way it could happen.

There was a certain irony in Anthony Albanese touring coal country in central Queensland this week, given the climate debate.

Visiting Emerald, Rockhampton and Gladstone among other stops, Albanese was beginning his mission to reconcile the strands in Labor's climate messages, after Bill Shorten failed to do so, costing vital Queensland votes.

This week, Albanese has been talking up the domestic transition to renewables, while providing reassurance to the coal areas by declaring the world will continue to want Australian coal for the foreseeable future.

He says the role of government in relation to new coal mines is to make the environmental judgements; if they pass that test, then such projects live or die on their ability to raise private finance. On Adani, he says it has its approval and he's urging it to get on with providing the jobs (the company says it is doing so).

As to a new coal-fired power station: he believes it would not get private finance.

Very aware Shorten was smashed for trying to walk in different shoes on climate and coal when he was in the inner city and in regional Queensland, Albanese is aiming for a story to which he can get a favourable reception all around the country.

That won't be easy. Then nothing is, for anyone, on the climate issue.

Michelle Grattanis a professorial fellow at the University of Canberra and chief political correspondent at The Conversation, where this article first appeared.

Topics:government-and-politics,politics-and-government,federal-government,federal-parliament,anthony-albanese,scott-morrison,climate-change,pollution-disasters-and-safety,climate-change---disasters,environmental-policy,environment,australia

First posted December 13, 2019 07:25:53

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Will devastating bushfires and division among Liberals force Scott Morrison to rethink climate policy? - ABC News

The two groups are at loggerheads - but not on one crucial issue

Earlier this month, a skirmish broke out on the American right between white nationalists and classical liberals. The white nationalists, calling themselves the groyper army (dont ask), have been attending campus events organised by classical liberals in order to ask questions about demographic replacement, US support for Israel and the morality of homosexual acts topics on which the two sides disagree.

Both sides, and most commentators, have emphasised these disagreements. But the most remarkable fact about the controversy may be the one point of absolute agreement: the value of free speech.

By asking edgy questions and taunting the classical liberals for their unwillingness to take them up, the white nationalists appealed to this value, often explicitly. And their appeal was successful. Charlie Kirk, one of the classical-liberal leaders in this fight, was forced to write a conciliatory article declaring his belief in free speech.

We should not shy away from our differences but embrace the dialogue in good faith and with the understanding that the best ideas and the best leaders will win, and the conservative movement will be better off as a result, he wrote.

Nick Fuentes, a leader of the groypers, crowed over the article. Well, I agree!I agree with all of that I agree that we should not shy away from our differences.I agree we should embrace dialogue. And I also agree that the best ideas and the best leaders will win.

It is important to note this agreement because many classical liberals have assumed that the way to defeat white nationalism is to double down on freedom: free trade, free speech, free love. They assume that in the marketplace of ideas (unlike in real markets) bad currency somehow will not drive out good. In a speech denouncing the groypers, Ben Shapiro said: Whathelps America win the culture war is freedom: freedom against a government encroaching on your activities that dont harm anyone else.

Despite what so many well-meaning people believe, an ever more radical insistence on freedom will not defeat white nationalists. For many years, conservatives once the party of censorship and discretion, as men such as Irving Kristol well understood have revelled in provocation (triggering libs), disrupting safe spaces, and advancing an absolute idea of free speech. This shift in emphasis has reflected broader changes in our legal culture. Against longstanding precedent, the First Amendment is now widely seen as a licence for all manner of obscenity.

Conservatives now insist on free speech in large part because they fear being censored. For example, when the Satanic Temple tried to organise a Black Mass at Harvard, Robert Miller, a conservative law professor and a Catholic, wrote an article explaining Why Harvard was right not to ban the Black Mass. Millers argument came down to a concern that a similar sort of ban would one day be turned against Christians.

In 2010, the same concern moved Liberty Counsel, a Christian conservative legal organisation, to file an amicus brief in defence of Westboro Baptists supposed right to shout gay-baiting obscenities at the funerals of fallen soldiers. Today it is the offensive speech of the Phelpses, and tomorrow it could be religious, pro-life or pro-family speech, a press release said.

Underlying these very un-conservative arguments is an assumption that we cannot and should not distinguish between goodand evil, argument and obscenity, truth and falsehood. In contexts not remotely governed by the First Amendment, free speechis invoked against anyone who opposes the spread of evil ideas.

Classical liberals bear some blame for the rise of white nationalists. They spent years decrying censorship and according prestige to edginess and triggering. They defended Black Masses and Westboro Baptists, lest someone someday restrict the Catholic Mass and Southern Baptists. They thus rendered the conservative movement unwilling and unable to call evil evil and good good. One of their most eloquent champions, David French, has said: The fact that a person can get a room in a library and hold a Drag Queen Story Hour and get people to come? Thats one of the blessings of liberty.

Now classical liberals find themselves calling for dialogue with the likes of Nick Fuentes, who uses anti-Semitic slurs (Jewy Jewstein), has described the writer Matt Walsh as a race traitor he hates white people, and says of racial segregation: Even if it was bad, who cares? Once again, classical liberal conceits provide an opening for falsehood. Meanwhile, the alt-right trolls who pride themselves on opposing liberalism appeal to the same liberal conceits as mainstream conservatives.

In order to defeat the white nationalists and anti-Semites, conservatives must become less liberal. Only a conservatism that praises restraint and discretion will have weapons to fight those who are just asking questions about the Holocaust. Only a conservatism that abjures viewpoint neutrality will be able to side with truth against lies.

Conservatives must be ready to say that the freedom to host drag queen story hour is not a blessing of liberty. At the same time, they must be able to say loud and clear that they oppose white nationalists and anti-Semites, especially ones that wrap themselves in Christian garb. Our civilisational inheritance is spiritual, not racial. We were taught by a Jew to love; we were not taught to hate Jews.

Classical liberals have built a conservative movement that valorises dangerous ideas, thereby allowing people whose ideas are dangerous indeed to gain a foothold. That is why in the latest conservative debate, both sides need to lose.

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How classical liberals paved the way for white nationalists - Catholic Herald Online

VICTORIA (NEWS 1130) The impending transit strike has taken top billing in Question Period in Victoria on Tuesday.

Its no surprise that things got political in B.C.s capital, as Liberal Leader Andrew Wilkinson accused Labour Minister Harry Bains and the province of doing absolutely nothing to resolve the ongoing dispute.

Can we hear from anyone on the government ranks who has an idea of what they are going to do tomorrow rather than sit in their offices and watch television, Wilkinson said.

Liberal Jane Thornthwaite also took jabs at the B.C. NDP as the clock continued to tick while workers and students scramble for back up plans.

What message does the minister have to the thousands of students who wont be able to get to class tomorrow morning? she said, to which someone in the Legislature responded with: Call an Uber.

Bains has maintained that outside interference, like a mediator, is not the solution.

Holding firm that collective barganing is the path to a deal, Bains said that is a process the Opposition has shown they do not respect.

It is really sad that the Opposition are trying to score cheap political points at the expense of the labour dispute, Bains said. They know the dispute will be resolved at the bargaining table and the parties are at the bargaining table. It will be resolved and Im fully hopeful.

He added that he remains hopeful a deal will be reached before transit screeches to halt after midnight.

Im more optimistic than that party over there is ever going to be when it comes to collective bargaining, Bains said of the Liberals.

Still, the minister said he understands how stressful this situation can be for transit users, and said TransLink and the union do too which is why they are back at the bargaining table.

The union representing bus and SeaBus workers, joined by their national president, sat down with Coast Mountain Bus Company and TransLink on Tuesday to try and hammer out a deal.

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Liberals accuse NDP of doing absolutely nothing to help resolve transit strike - CityNews Vancouver

Here's what our writers and editors are reading this week.

Matt Purple, managing editor:Earlier this month, I wrote a piece about C.S. Lewiss That Hideous Strength, which I find to be one of the most compelling dystopias ever written. But I neglected to mention its prequel, Perelandra, the second entry in Lewiss Space Trilogy and probably the best novel he wrote. As fiction, its deeply sublime (not pretty, as his dreaded Green Book might have had it). Set largely on the planet Venus, it finds the trilogys hero, the suspiciously Tolkien-esque Dr. Elwin Ransom, trying to save the local Adam and Eve from being corrupted by evil as happened back on Earth.

What stands out most in Perelandra is the world building. Whereas That Hideous Strength is confined largely to faculty rooms and laboratories, Perelandra allows Lewis the full breadth of his imagination, and he unfurls before us an otherworldly Eden. There are shifting islands and massive waves, vivid colors and delicious fruits, friendly dragons and strange frogs, along with the King and Queen, the planets first man and woman who live amid all this in harmony. Lewis crafts his world with such carehis descriptions, though extensive, are never boringthat by the time he introduces evil, you find yourself dreading that any of it might be sullied.

Beneath Perelandras story is a subtler version of the critique of Francis Bacon that Lewis also makes in That Hideous Strength. To be good is to fill ones hierarchical place in nature under God; evil arises when one comes to see this as subjugation, when one heeds Bacon and tries to gain knowledge about nature and thus power over it.

What else? Ive been on a Greek kick lately. In that vein, I recently read the Oresteia, another trilogy, this one of Greek tragedies written in the fifth century BC by the playwright Aeschylus. For those who remember the Odyssey and are curious about this Agamemnon fellow about whom none of the characters can say hello without extensively bemoaning, these are the plays for you. They tell the story of Agamemnons return from Troy, his murder at the hands of his treacherous wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus, the revenge of Agamemnons son Orestes, Orestes trial for murder, and his ultimate acquittal by the goddess Athena as the foundation of Athenian law. The plays arent just tragic but often gruesome, covering a sequence of death and revenge that began long before Agamemnon. As the chorus puts it: The slayer of today shall die tomorrow / The wage of wrong is woe.

Aeschyluss The Persians is also worth a read, if only because it so brilliantly demonstrates the suppleness of the Greek mind. It tells the story of Greeces victory in the Greco-Persian wars, but from the Persian point of view and without devolving into cheap schadenfreude. Its remarkable how many supposed hallmarks of contemporary storytelling were anticipated by the Greeks 2,500 years ago. We moderns are not as special as we like to think.

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TAC Bookshelf: Of Christians and Liberals and Greeks - The American Conservative