Getting Even With Society

                A commentary

                By J. F. Kelly, Jr.

                There have been, as of this writing, 68 mass shootings this year and the year is young. It’s a safe bet that the record for mass shootings will be set this year and that the United States will once again lead the world in that category. What will we do about it? Well, the usual things, of course. The media will write and talk about it for days. There will be photos of sobbing survivors, makeshift monuments, candlelight vigils and grieving parents.

  Politicians and relatives will demand justice for the victims but it would come too late for those who have been slain. The media will keep the story alive with the ritual search for answers. Each search, like previous ones, will yield the same causes such as easy access to firearms, lack of attention to warning signals, mental disease, etc. The usual suspects will be blamed, i.e., gun manufacturers, assault rifles, gun owners, violence in the media, etc. There will be additions to the growing body of statistics but little will change because we are, as with most major problems facing our nation, deeply divided over the causes and the solutions.

A mass shooting is generally defined as one involving multiple victims, excluding robberies and family violence, resulting in four or more deaths. While widely publicized, they account for just slightly over 1% of all firearm deaths. However, 90% of the deadliest mass shootings in the U.S. have occurred since 2007. Between 2019 and 2022, the number of gun-related deaths increased by nearly one third. The increase in shooting deaths have been accompanied by an increase in dangerous road rage incidents.

A National Institute of Justice study of mass shootings from 1966-2017 found that half occurred after 2000 and one-fifth in the last five years of the study, so obviously the problem is growing. Psychosis played a minor role in a quarter of the cases but a major role in only 10%. Nearly half of the assailants leaked their plans in advance and many also displayed suicidal tendencies. Over one-fifth studied other mass shooters. 64.5% had a prior criminal record and 62.8% had a history of violence. The mean average age was 34 but ages ranged from a low of 11. Nearly 98% were male. The common perception that most perpetrators of mass shootings suffer from mental diseases is not supported by the statistics. Neither is the notion that so-called assault rifles are the weapons of choice in most cases. Most weapons used were purchased legally.     

                Mass shootings are uniquely American although the problem is spreading. It is true, of course, that relatively easier access to guns in the United States is a contributing factor. Still, U.S. cities with the most stringent restrictions on firearms, like Chicago, have the highest rate of gun violence. Gun ownership has been part of the American culture since before the west was won and has been constitutionally protected since the nation’s birth. Yet mass shootings, other than those involved in military operations, are a fairly recent phenomenon.

                Nor is there much evidence that poverty or financial stress are causal factors. Those few of us who grew up during the Great Depression in the 1930s and are still alive recall that nearly everyone was suffering financial distress to put it mildly but mass shootings were rare and confined mostly to organized crime activities. We never even locked the doors to our homes or our autos, if you were affluent enough to own one, In our working-class neighborhood. Neither was access to guns a problem. We really never thought we needed them, though. The beat policemen did a pretty good job maintaining peace in the neighborhood and they were respected and welcomed.

                Obviously then, something has changed and, having lived long enough to have seen how things used to be, it’s the culture that has changed and it has spawned a rise in lethal violence, particularly among young males. The culture has produced a growing class of victims whose members have been socialized to blame society for their own failures or lack of achievement. This has been facilitated by the breakdown of the family unit and an alarming decrease in parenting skills, especially in single-parent families headed by a working female too busy just trying to put food on the table to learn, without a resident male parent to model appropriate male behavior. It is left, therefore, to the schools, or street gangs, to instill values.

                Calls for tougher gun control come too late. The police are demonized, demoralized and often underfunded and repurposed. No longer willing to risk acting pro-actively to prevent crime and protect people, their role is reduced mainly to taking reports. People understand this and are buying guns to protect their families and themselves because they know that the police no longer can.

                The nation is suffering from an epidemic of violence caused mainly by young males with an exalted sense of their importance and rights who are quick to act out their rage against others for their own failures or because they feel that they have been disrespected. It won’t change until the culture changes again and parents and teachers learn how to re-instill respect for all laws and those charged with enforcing them. Meanwhile, we might try actually holding parents and guardians legally responsible for the criminal behavior of their minor children.         

February 23, 2023

Our Nation’s State Is Not that Great

                A commentary

                By J. F. Kelly, Jr.

                President Joe Biden used the State of the Union address, as most of his predecessors have, to recite his accomplishments. It is usually left to the opposition party to address the failures and shortcomings. That opportunity fell to the newly-elected governor of Arkansas, Sarah Huckabee Sanders. The nation’s youngest governor and former president Donald Trump’s press secretary delivered a very nice speech about the differences between the major parties but had little to say about the notable failures that marked the first half of Mr. Biden’s term and the inaccuracies contained in his speech which provoked outbursts from Republican members including shouts of “Liar!” and “Your fault!”.             The outbursts, to which Mr. Biden responded, were another departure from protocol and good manners which increasingly characterize American political debate and invite comparison between Congress and the British Parliament.

                It was left, therefore, to conservative pundits to remind Americans of the failures of the Biden Administration so far with two challenging years left to muddle through. They constitute the chief reason for Mr. Biden’s abysmally-low approval rating and the main reason why a majority of Democrats don’t want him to run for re-election.

                Among the more serious failures are the continuing chaos at the southern border caused directly by the abrupt reversal of Donald Trump’s policies without a workable plan in place for dealing with the predictable surge in illegal border crossings and asylum seekers plus a flow of dangerous drugs and criminal elements into our country. Mr. Biden blames his failure to deal with this security and humanitarian crisis on the failure of Congress to support immigration and asylum reform legislation.

                The administration carried out a precipitous and badly-flawed withdrawal from Afghanistan, endangering the lives of thousands of Afghans who aided us, leaving behind millions in valuably military equipment, causing the death of 13 American service members, undoing years of progress in social reforms for Afghan women and causing the government to collapse. The botched withdrawal undoubtedly encouraged Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine, especially after Mr. Biden waived sanctions on Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline supplying Europe with fuel and raising doubts about America’s willingness to respond forcibly to Russian aggression against its neighbors. NATO and the United States displayed weakness and incompetence in failing to deter Putin from invading Ukraine, resulting in a brutal war about to enter its second year, causing widespread food and fuel shortages and supply disruptions and massive destruction and loss of life and again, with no end in sight.

                The U.S., under Mr. Biden, is committed to support Ukraine’s defense by whatever it takes, yet refuses to provide all of the weapons it would take to decisively defeat the Russians and recapture all of its territory including Crimea. Meanwhile, Russia is preparing for another major offensive which will prolong this destructive war. Moreover, Russia will never agree to give up Crimea which it annexed in 2014 and which contains the home base for Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. It will likely win a war of attrition against its smaller neighbor.

                Our greatest security threat is China which plans to establish sovereignty over Taiwan, by force if necessary, at a time of its choosing. Mr. Biden has verbally committed to the armed defense of Taiwan. However, we are not prepared for a war with China, least of all while fighting a proxy war with Russia, nor do we have the defense industrial surge capacity to provide the naval and air forces necessary to ensure a successful outcome. China now has more land-based intercontinental range missile launchers than we do, according to the U.S. Strategic Command. While we still have a larger nuclear arsenal, they are not building these launchers to remain empty. The People’s Republic is clearly on a path to overtake us militarily and will almost certainly act before we catch up if, indeed, we still can.

                The U.S. military allowed a Chinese spy balloon to enter our airspace, fly over Alaska and Canada and cross the lower states before being shot down off our east coast. It later acknowledged that past Chinese surveillance flights over the U.S. mainland had gone undetected, raising concerns that we are increasingly vulnerable to attacks on the grid which could paralyze the nation.

                On the domestic scene, our major cities contain cesspools of crime, gang activity, drug addiction and homelessness. Police are demoralized, underfunded and unable to act proactively to protect the communities they are charged with protecting. The Biden Administration’s response is tougher gun control legislation and more restrictions on policing.

                The total national debt has reached $31.6 trillion. We merely quibble over reducing the annual budget deficit which only slightly slows the rate at which the total debt grows. Halfway through his term in office, Mr. Biden has added nearly $5 trillion more to that spiraling debt. Nor do Mr. Biden’s plans for the future offer much reason to celebrate the state of the nation. While conceding that we will need the oil industry for another decade, he proposes quadrupling the corporate tax on companies buying back their stock to pay dividends. He seems blissfully unaware that American energy consumption in 2021 consisted of 79% fossil fuels and fossil fuels will be needed for many decades to come throughout the world. With regard to stock by-backs, has it occurred to him that most investors buy stock primarily to make money, not to signal virtue? Why would they invest in companies that the Biden Administration plans to put out of business in the next ten years? And why would those companies seek to invest in greater capacity?

February 19, 2023

Debtor Nation

                A commentary

                By J. F. Kelly, Jr.

Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif) won his long-sought role as House Speaker after 14 unsuccessful ballots by making significant concessions to fellow Republican House members in order to gain their support. One of these was a commitment to insist upon spending cuts in return for raising the debt ceiling. Without increasing the debt ceiling, the federal government will soon run out of money to pay for federal expenses already approved. Since the federal government usually spends more than it receives in revenue, Congress has frequently been called upon to raise the debt limit since a limit was first imposed in 1917 during WW-I.

Since raising the ceiling is necessary to pay for bills already due, and to default on these obligations would harm the credit of the United States and risk shutting down the government, it’s a given that the debt ceiling will be raised. Such shutdowns have occurred in recent years because of demands by the opposition party that the administration commit to reducing federal spending. The administration naturally usually takes the position that the good credit of the nation should not be held hostage by the opposition party by forcing spending reduction for programs they oppose and that the debt ceiling should be raised without conditions. It seems to me that this is sort of like telling your bank that you want your line of credit extended but you intend to continue to spend far more than you earn on whatever you please.

President Joe Biden has indicated that this time he wants the debt ceiling extended and that there will be no negotiations. That’s not going to happen for two reasons. First, Speaker McCarthy has made several commitments in order to gain the speakership, one of which is to negotiate spending reductions in return for support in raising yet again the debt ceiling. If he caves on this, I doubt that he will be speaker for long. Second, the gross national debt has reached $31 trillion of which $24 trillion is held by the public. The service on this debt is crowding out other discretionary spending including defense at a time when defense spending needs urgently to be increased to counter or defer aggression by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) while continuing to finance Ukraine’s defense in a war with no end in sight. With rising interest rates, service on this debt will grow rapidly, burdening future generations.

Taking negotiations off the table is not a realistic approach to this problem. The public is not served by government shutdowns while the political parties play a game of chicken to see who blinks first. Yes, we must raise the debt ceiling because we have no choice if we want to continue borrowing and yes, we must reduce spending because debt is spiraling out of control and we are now borrowing even to pay the interest on what we’ve already borrowed. There is a limit to lenders’ trust in the ability of our federal government to repay its debt.

Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has berated Mr. McCarthy and the Republicans for demanding negotiations without a plan for what to cut. But let’s agree on a framework at least in order to avoid a lot of false starts and wasted time. Here’s some suggestions. Without increasing defense spending we will be unable to deter a conflict with China. A war with China will bust the budget to say the least and the outcome would be uncertain. Investing in the defense infrastructure necessary to build the ships, aircraft, sensors and weapons systems we need to keep pace with the PRC will create tens of thousands of good jobs and give the economy a boost.

With more energy resources than any other nation on earth we should be able to benefit from our good fortune and market this advantage while helping developing nations by providing a reliable source of fuel. We must build the pipelines, processing and export port facilities necessary to supply clean natural gas to fuel-starved nations. We most end the futile war on fossil fuels and recognize that oil and natural gas will be an essential part of the world economy for decades.

The negotiations between the parties to get the debt ceiling raised so that the federal government can pay its outstanding bills while agreeing to realistic spending reductions which are urgently needed to keep the federal debt from spiraling totally out of control need not be a game of chicken. It is incumbent on both parties to negotiate in good faith which is what they were elected to do. Future generations who will bear the burden of this debt caused by our profligate spending will judge us harshly if they fail.

February 10, 2023

Preparing for the Worst

                A commentary

                By J. F. Kelly, Jr.

                Is war with China inevitable or can the world’s top two economies and military powers manage to live together in peace and prosperity in spite of their differences? Are Beijing’s aims to replace the United States as the largest economy and mightiest military power by whatever it takes and at any cost achievable through a relatively peaceful rivalry or will the significant differences and red lines eventually result in armed conflict? As with most predictions about the future, we can only hope for the best and prepare for the worst. War should never be considered inevitable because the cost to both sides and to the world would be enormous.

                Americans need, therefore, to understand that we are far from being prepared for the worst, that being a war with China. The risks are great. They include an attempt by the People’s Republic to occupy Taiwan, continued militarization of the South China Sea and interference with freedom of navigation and attempts to undermine the security of the United States through cyberwarfare and espionage.

                An attempt by the PRC to occupy Taiwan currently presents the greatest risk of war. President Joe Biden has said on at least three occasions that we would defend Taiwan against such an attack. Xi Jinping, however, insists that this is a red line that we dare not cross. But if we fail to honor our agreement with Taiwan under the Taiwan Relations Act, we would lose all credibility with our Asian allies. Taiwan, a leading producer of microprocessors and an important trading partner, is of far more strategic importance than Ukraine whose defense against the Russian invasion we are largely funding and supplying.

                China is unlikely to attempt an invasion of Taiwan, however, unless they are confident of succeeding or convinced that the United States will not respond with force. It is imperative, then, that we deter such an invasion by demonstrating convincingly that they cannot win, much as we demonstrated to the Soviet Union after the Cuban Missile Crisis that they could not prevail in a conflict with us, resulting in the collapse of the USSR and the end of the Cold War. Convincing the PRC will require a strong alliance including Japan, Australia, South Korea, the United Kingdom and others but it must be led by the United States. It will also require a substantial increase in the size of our military, especially our navy and air force.

                The United States has committed more than $27 billion in military equipment and supplies to Ukraine resulting in a shortage of ammunition and some weapons which the military would need in a war with China. Our defense industries have struggled to replenish these supplies. The shortages will only grow worse as the war drags on with no end in sight. Nor is it entirely clear what the end would be, other than driving the Russian occupiers from all of Ukraine, including Crimea which Russia annexed before the invasion. Under the current rules by which aid is provided, Russia is free to attack Ukraine but Ukraine cannot attack Russia so even if the Ukrainians succeed in driving Putin’s troops out of Ukraine, it would not necessarily end the war if Russia remains free to regroup and attack again. It is difficult to see a realistic path to victory for Ukraine in a war of attrition with its huge neighbor.

                As U.S. weapons and ammunition inventories shrink, it is apparent that U. S. defense industries, having experienced mergers and consolidations since the Gulf Wars, are not equipped to rapidly replenish or surge production in the event of war with China. But expanding that capacity requires heavy investment in facilities and workforce which these companies will not make without firm commitments from the federal government that survive changing administrations. Given the time it takes to expand this capacity and to build ships, aircraft, tanks and complex weapons systems, we are far from ready to respond to the worst-case scenario or to deter China from initiating a conflict at a time of its choosing.

                Studies have shown that the U.S. would run out of ammunition and missiles early in a protracted war with China. Recent war games have demonstrated that ship and aircraft losses and personnel casualties would be very high on both sides even if only conventional weapons were used. The sooner the U.S. can shift the burden of Ukraine’s defense to its European neighbors where it belongs, or negotiate an end to this destructive war, the sooner we can intensify our focus on Asia where it belongs.

                Preparing for the worst is expensive and not what Americans want to hear given the size of our federal debt and our domestic priorities but we have little choice. An expansion of our defense industry’s capacity to surge up production levels capable of deterring or, if deterrence fails, winning a war with China is needed before it’s too late, if it not already is. This means less money wasted on climate control measures that have zero effect on global climate control, the war on fossil fuels and other feel-good programs and pork. On the positive side, a needed defense build-up would result in many thousands of good jobs for a very good cause, much as the defense build-up before and during WW II ended the Great Depression.

February 4, 2023