Vic Socotra

22 July 2009

August, 1914

We are just about into the Dogs Days of August, when the city at the confluence of the Potomac and the Anacostia melts into the softening asphalt.

Of course, that is not happening this strange season. It makes me think something is going on, and I feel hyper-alert about it. There was a time when I would have relied on The Gray Lady of New York to help me understand tough problems, but I have to view them with more than a little skepticism these days.

It may be that the standards of journalism have slipped in these late days of the Republic, or maybe it is that reporters are just the same as the rest of us- biased, harried and too busy to find out the real story.

You know this as well as I do- any time we have had real knowledge of something that is in the paper or on the television we can see that they have something fundamentally wrong.

In that vein, I was interested to see the sun-spot thing finally appear in the Times this week. The article managed to tell some of the story in a way that seemed accurate and impartial. They made a nod to the correlation between solar activity and earth’s temperature, and acknowledged that we are likely to have a period of cooling.

The key judgment was provided by one of the climate change dudes, though, a fellow from England named Terry Sloan, who grandly stated that effect of solar radiation was probably small. He thought cosmic rays could account for about 20 percent of the warming of recent years. That caused me to flip back through some older issues of the Times itself, in which earnest learned people explained that the number one producer of greenhouse gases- above power plants and automobiles- were the dairy and beef businesses.

Now, before you run to smack me as a heretic, I would offer this up for consideration. If cattle account for the majority of green house gas emissions, and solar radiation is another fifth, then all the cap-and-trade legislation in the world is only tinkering on the margins of the problem.

If it is a problem, that is. Or better said, at least that problem.

We are embarking on several massive programs of social change, and there is a drumbeat of urgency to them that seems a little curious. Cap-and-trade, a massive encroachment on the free market to regulate commerce is reasonable enough if it were a global approach to a global problem.

China and India have each, in a relatively polite manner, said “No thanks.”

If you take the debt from the Bush and Obama stimulus packages, add cap-and-trade in carbon, ladle on the trillion for health care reform, you have a transformation in process that is quite breathtaking.

It is no wonder that our leaders do not want to slow down and talk about the cost of it all in one place.

There are a lot of people who are forming their own ideas about what is going on. The Intern and I saw the sign on the locked glass door of the Gilbert Range just this weekend.

“One box of ammunition per caliber per customer per day. No Exceptions.”

Seems like there is a supply and demand issue in the ammunition supply. I was curious about what might be causing the shortage, since there are no actual threats out there of which I am aware. There are those who say that you are only paranoid only if someone is really not out to get you.

There appears to be something going on.

Some of the citizenry is hyper alert. Earlier this year, a story about the Government shutting off sale of once-fired ammunition casings to industry spread like wildfire. It sounded hysterical, but it actually happened, just like the government initiative to charge combat-wounded vets their own insurance.

I am happy to say that both ill-considered policies were quickly rescinded once a wave of opposition washed over the Hill and the White House. None-the-less, the ammunition issue got a lot of traction, and the story continued to reverberate around the net for months, and is still out there.

You can find it easily enough if you Google (or Bing) the words: “Georgia Arms is the 5th largest retailer of 223 Ammo in America,” you will find the original hysteria, which is summed up nicely by a friend of mine.

He says it this way: It’s easy. They can't take away your guns but the Second Amendment doesn't say a thing about ammo. That's why so many gun owners that can load their own are stocking up on raw materials. They will attempt to de-arm us by other means, even by atrophy.”

Once I realized that the government had backed off its initiative (on pressure from two US Senators), the supply of once-fired brass was again secure. But there was something about the way the press had presented the issue and then moved on that seemed wrong.

I dug into the matter, since military supply lines are normally separate from civilian ones, and if someone is scooping up available supplies, I was interested in who it might be.

The press had been all over this during the Bush Administration, with stories reporting concern that police organizations were unable to get the ammunition they needed.

It was agenda-based reporting, naturally, and a thinly-veiled attack on the war in Iraq. The implication was that conflict overseas left our law enforcement less capable and our people less secure.

In a way they are. Advances in weapons and body armor used by the military have migrated to criminals, and beginning a decade ago, the police began to find themselves out-gunned and out-armored by criminals. The consequence, accelerated by 9/11, has been a gradual militarization of the law enforcement inventory, and a sky-rocketing need by new weapons systems for ammunition. The Cops may need as much as forty percent more.

Despite the economic downturn, ammunition plants are running 24/7, and they are building new lines and hiring. They still can’t keep up with the demand.

I applaud capitalism in most of its manifestations, but this one gives me pause. The Administration made a lot of noise during the campaign for the nomination to shore up their base in the left wing of the Democratic party. The President himself has favored gun bans and announced an intent to reinstate the flawed 1994 assault weapons ban authored by then-Vice President Gore.

Once the campaign reached the race for the general election, of course, both candidates lurched back to the middle, and gun control has not been on the top of anyone’s agenda. It appeared to be an issue that even Speaker Pelosi seemed reluctant to push. There were other, much more radical things on the agenda.

But the people who so memorably “cling to their guns and their religion” are not forgetting. I urge you to read the entire quote, by the way. It is a much more thoughtful comment than candidate Obama got credit for.

But the damage was done. We now have both law enforcement and an armed citizenry engaged in a massive weapons build up, a sort of asymmetric arms race that has nothing to do with foreign affairs, and everything to do with the Republic.

As economies become unstable and people lose jobs, crime rates go up. It is an economic fact of life, just as it is perfectly logical that citizens who are worried about an increase in crime arm themselves during economic downturns. That in turn leads to increased demand for firearms and ammunition, particularly those types at the highest risk of being outlawed- again.

It is a self-feeding frenzy.

They used to say that in the days before August, 1914, we were all too interconnected for anything really bad to happen. It was not in our self-interest, and logic would prevail. Still, technology and weaponry moved forward, and in the event, it turned out that the civilized nations were not so connected to one another that they were not perfectly willing to join in a suicide pact.

Barbara Tuchman describes this pretty well in her masterwork, The Guns of August. It is great late summer reading.

Not that I have time. I did find a place that has a supply of the right caliber ammunition. It happens to be a pawn shop not far from here. Go figure. But I think it might be prudent to stock up.

Just in case.

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