From the Desk of Bob Barr

Townhall

No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.

–Edmund Burke, 1757

Fear may serve as an effective motivator for individuals facing danger, but as a basis for law-making, it consistently leads to poorly crafted legislation and even dangerous public laws. So it is with gun control, a path on which a bipartisan group of Senators appears now committed.

Fear of domestic terrorist attacks following the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and of further foreign terrorist attacks after 9-11, led directly to laws that demonstrably were far broader than necessary to address whatever shortcomings those incidents revealed, and which have seriously eroded individual liberty in the years since.

In the current frenzy to guard against tragic mass shootings such as occurred last month at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, federal lawmakers appear ready once again to use “fear” as a motivating force for legislative action. This week a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers, led by Texas Republican John Cornyn and New York’s perennial gun control orchestrator Chuck Schumer, announced a framework for a gun control package aimed at easing the minds of “families [who] are scared.”

Details beyond the initial framework are sparse, but we do know the bill seeks to tackle mass shooting violence by recycling many of the familiar policies of gun control past – red flag laws, “boyfriend” loopholes, and deeper background checks. There does appear to be some attention being afforded to mental health and school safety programs, but initial information indicates these will not be among the legislation’s main priorities.

Begin with the enhanced background checks for gun buyers under 21 years of age. The proposal rests on the questionable ability for the FBI to access juvenile arrest and mental health records, and the ability to connect with various state databases. System architecture challenges aside, juvenile records are typically confidential (for reasons championed by both the Left and Right) and are unlikely to legally be fair game for federal background checks. Verdict: Implausible.

Next, closing the “boyfriend” loophole. Ignoring the trope of yet another non-existent “loophole” in gun laws, the reason the law as currently established considers marriage, cohabitation, or a shared child as bases for denying firearms to individuals with criminal records, is to provide a degree of objective measure as to the seriousness of a personal relationship. Fake or exaggerated allegations of abuse or sexual assault are already a problem in the dating process, without adding a new tool for revenge: depriving a person of his or her Second Amendment rights. Verdict: Dangerous.

Most importantly, there is the issue of so-called “Red Flag laws” (more technically, “Extreme Risk Protection Orders”). As I have noted previously, Red Flags are a crowd-pleaser as a tool to prevent mass shootings, but they often are written in such a way that abuse of individual rights is likely, if not encouraged. Broadly drafted, as many are, the laws permit nearly anyone to enlist local law enforcement and a judge to seize a person’s firearms based on “fear” the individual may in the future commit a bad act with a gun.

The threshold for issuing a Red Flag order is incredibly low, and entirely subjective. Florida, just one state among the 19 (plus the District of Columbia) that have enacted such laws already, has issued nearly 9,000 firearm protective orders since 2018.

Moreover, the due process remedy available for defending against these ex parte orders is often not clearly defined, leaving the gun owner with little to no legal recourse for restoring his or her Second Amendment rights, and leaving him or her with what is essentially a serious blemish on their record.

Unless the red flag provisions are very narrowly tailored and written to reflect individuals’ constitutional rights (something Democrats appear unwilling to do), all that will have been created by Uncle Sam giving money to states to enact such laws, is to create yet another and extremely powerful tool by which law enforcement and judges are able to summarily deny rights expressly guaranteed by our Constitution. Verdict: Very dangerous.

That leaves the only workable “solution” of this latest bipartisan framework on a gun “deal,” to be funding for mental health and school safety. However, when I read that the proposal proposes to spend taxpayer dollars establishing “Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinics,” as a panacea for deeply troubled young men prone to violence, it is hard to take any of this seriously.

Bob Barr represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He served as the United States Attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990 and was an official with the CIA in the 1970s. He now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia and serves as head of Liberty Guard.

Daily Caller

Despite an excessive degree of regulatory intervention, American-style free market economics remains the gold standard for organizing an economy. Unfortunately, one of Uncle Sam’s favored tools with which to attack the business sector – antitrust power – is being considered by both major parties in the U.S. Congress to undercut that advantage.

American innovators have improved the lives of generations of citizens. Consider, just among recent success stories, the invention of the Apple iPhone, the Twitter method of communication, the Google search engine, Uber’s ride-sharing concept and the use of Facebook to keep up with family and friends. Amazon is a company that was critical in moving goods to people everywhere during the recent pandemic.

While none of these companies are perfect, all are miracles of free market economics and rewards in a nation that embraces entrepreneurs.

Now, those same wildly successful companies are under attack by liberals who have a profound distaste for private enterprise and success, fueled by a deep skepticism of free market capitalism.

There is an emerging effort to give Washington power players even more power to attack so called “Big Tech,” under the pretext of antitrust law. This attack emanates from both major political parties — the populist right and progressive left, in a way that will greatly harm a struggling national economy.

Giving more power to government bureaucrats to micromanage the economy has never been a good idea, but it is especially bad at this juncture.

The current centerpiece of this attack on “Big Tech” is S.2992, mistitled the “American Innovation and Choice Online Act,” which singlehandedly will stifle innovation and limit consumer choice. Worse, it will empower federal government agencies to initiate attacks on business in a way that shifts the burden of proof to companies so they will be presumed guilty of violating the new proposed law.

According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the bill is “designed to empower unelected officials at the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission to make critical decisions regarding the organization and function of the American economy.” The major concern is that this will allow government, not market forces, to manage “competitive outcomes in the market instead of promoting competition.”

As always, it will be the American consumer who will be hurt, with higher prices and more limited choices. Companies will pull back from innovation, justifiably fearful of being punished by politically motivated bureaucrats if they vertically integrate services.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and his colleagues know their plan to grant new and sweeping regulatory and prosecutorial powers to the executive branch would not be on the GOP’s agenda when, as expected, they regain control next January. Hence, as The Wall Street Journal reports, “the bill has received little debate, yet Majority Leader Chuck Schumer wants to hold a vote pronto.”

Cleverly, Democrats have used GOP anger towards “Big Tech” to secure a number of Republicans to support their effort. There is a well-documented history of a faction of Republicans slipping away from the defense of free markets for short term political gain.

After all, it was a Republican president, Richard Nixon, who once said, “we are now all Keynesians.” This anti-free market sentiment reflected a tacit agreement between the Republican and Democratic Parties that it is acceptable for the federal government to micromanage the economy. In furtherance of this warped perspective, Nixon infamously ordered the end to the gold standard in 1971 and imposed wage and price controls, creating problems that haunt us even today.

Simply consider the Federal Reserve’s free money policies that have helped cause today’s high inflation numbers as but one outcome of Nixon’s ill-advised removal of the dollar from the gold standard.

A few decades later, there was another offensive against the free market in the form of Wall Street bailouts. Another Republican, President George W. Bush, provided a taxpayer insured bailout of insurance giant AIG followed by a subsequent TARP program that had the support of a significant number of members of both parties. That use of the federal government to bail out bad private sector decisions was an example of crony capitalism at its worst.

If Republicans join hands with progressive Democrats on this legislation to empower the FTC and the  Justice Department to control the tech sector of the economy, what little “free” the free market now enjoys will be smothered to virtual nonexistence.

Bob Barr represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He served as the United States Attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990 and was an official with the CIA in the 1970s. He now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia and serves as head of Liberty Guard.

Townhall

Remember when the Atlanta Braves’ “tomahawk chop,” a long-established stadium rallying cry, came under attack for allegedly perpetuating racist stereotypes? That controversy, which flared up in the 1990s and resurfaced last year during the World Series, drew a mixed response from Indian tribes; some linked it to improper cultural appropriation, while others saw it as a distraction from serious issues facing Native Americans.

The debate over the tomahawk chop generated a significant amount of media coverage at the time. However, if considered a matter of “cultural appropriation,” it pales in comparison to an issue currently working its way through the United States Congress. This ill-advised legislation would facilitate creation of brand new tribes out of thin air, and grant them the same rights as existing tribes.

Typically, groups seeking to be recognized by the federal government as sovereign nations must go through a process at the Department of Interior during which their histories are reviewed and carefully examined. This process was established to ensure that legitimate tribes receive the proper recognition they deserve and are protected against groups making false claims.

Several bills currently before Congress would upend this system and create a fast lane for groups who don’t want to — or just can’t — demonstrate their legitimacy; criteria many are unable to meet. For example, one of the groups seeking recognition through Congress has claimed descendancy from several different tribes over the years but has never been able to get its own story straight.

The consequences of creating tribes without any factual or historic verification are significant for real tribal nations. When a group latches onto the identity of one or multiple tribes, it opens the door for government-sanctioned cultural appropriation. Even when it doesn’t, however, it has significant implications for existing tribes.

Each time a new tribe is officially recognized, it drains the budgets of both the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Indian Health Services. This has been especially problematic throughout the still-ongoing COVID pandemic, during which both agencies have experienced budget shortfalls.

Recognizing new tribes without the requisite historic vetting also causes tribes to lose their credibility and good name with the general public. Such shenanigans have the further practical effect of undercutting important relationships between tribal leadership and federal officials, even as it dilutes the very meaning of sovereignty altogether.

These are reasons why a coalition of 10 tribes recently wrote to the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs requesting that it “defer consideration of groups seeking federal acknowledgment to the Department of Interior’s Office of Federal Acknowledgment (OFA)” They clearly understand that if one inauthentic tribe succeeds in receiving recognition through Congress today, it could open the floodgates for others attempting to do the same thing tomorrow.

When I served in Congress, there was broad bipartisan support for the existing Department of the Interior process — a view based on a clear understanding that tribal recognition is not about mere symbolism, but about honoring, respecting, and protecting Native American tribes’ unique identities. This reflected the sentiment that, in order to prevent cultural appropriation and dilution of Native American culture, everyone would be better served to go through the well-established procedures administered by the OFA.

Unfortunately, this reality appears to have escaped some of today’s members of Congress, and if they move forward with their hurried and shortsighted approach to tribal recognition, it will present significant problems for existing tribal nations across the country.

History has already brought our nation’s tribes through more than sufficient travails and tribulations. The last thing they need now is for this appropriation-focused and short-sighted Congress to make their standards of living and rights as sovereign nations weaker rather than stronger.

Hopefully newer senators, including my own state’s recently elected Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, pay attention and will respect the established and well-founded procedures in place, rather than strike out on an ill-advised and short-sighted “new” model.

Bob Barr represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He served as the United States Attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990 and was an official with the CIA in the 1970s. He now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia and serves as head of Liberty Guard.

Daily Caller

Last week, President Biden delivered a prime time address to the nation on “Gun Violence in America.” The speech was long on drama, including several explicit references to God and a maudlin display of candles behind the presidential podium. The occasion was in fact serious, coming as it did just days after two mass murders committed by a pair of obviously deeply troubled young men with the blackest of evil in their hearts and minds; but the speech offered nothing of real value.

This failure to use the presidential bully pulpit to propose serious solutions to serious problems reflects a deliberate decision by Mr. Biden to not address the causes of recent mass homicides. Indeed, this has become the generational failure of Democrats to “do something” about what is now endemic violence in our culture.

Democrats’ myopic focus on gun control is itself a tacit recognition that it is far more difficult, costly and politically sensitive to tackle the root causes of such tragedies than it is to rail against “guns!”

Ah, yes — “root causes.”

Following her visit to Central America in the summer of 2021, Vice President Kamala Harris repeatedly lectured us to address the “root causes” of migration. Too bad Biden did not heed her advice when addressing “gun violence” last week.

Other than a passing reference in his June 2 speech to the “mental health” aspect of violence-prone individuals like the evildoers in Buffalo, Uvalde and other sites of mass shootings, President Biden failed to address any of the “root causes” of such tragedies. Even when he did refer briefly to “mental health,” it was as a “consequence” of gun violence rather than a cause of gun violence (which it is).

In every way, except perhaps as a political cudgel to browbeat a few GOP senators into endorsing some of his gun control proposals, the president’s speech was an opportunity lost. This, of course, is no surprise considering that gun control has served as the Democrat default response to virtually every such tragedy going back at least to Columbine in 1999.

Aside from the glaring failure (or refusal) to address any of the issues that gave rise to the perpetrators of these two most recent gun violence tragedies, Biden’s speech was a rehash of the time-worn wish list of the gun-control agenda hawked for years by the movement’s activists: banning “assault rifles” and “high capacity magazines,” expanding background checks and enacting a national “red flag” law.

Predictably, Biden promised that his proposals were “not about taking away anyone’s guns.” Within seconds, however, he proposed to do just that – take away the most popular rifle in the country, owned by some 20 million Americans. One has to admire the president’s ability to contradict himself expressly, facilely, and quickly without skipping a beat.

Then, as if he has suddenly discovered a new law of physics, Biden declared that the Second Amendment “is not absolute.” Of course, no one in any position of leadership or credibility in the firearms community has maintained otherwise. Yet, having discovered this new principle, the president employed it to focus the power of his office on what are demonstrably irrelevant factors for addressing the elements of mass shootings in our culture, and as a shield to avoid actually doing so.

Nowhere in his speech, for example, did the president even touch on two extremely important factors that were at play in the Uvalde school shooting – “hardening” schools to minimize the chances of being victim to such horror and improving police training.

Federal grants for these critical areas could help, perhaps dramatically, to avoid such tragedies. Sadly, there appears to be little interest within the Democrat Party for funding school safety programs or improving local police training on how to handle a school shooting. The Party’s interests lie elsewhere.

It is telling that Biden’s gun violence speech came just one day after his administration proudly announced a multi-billion dollar student loan forgiveness program. This juxtaposition clearly reflects the priorities of today’s Democrat Party – pampering students after they graduate and are of voting age is more important than the safety of students still in schools.

Bob Barr represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He served as the United States Attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990 and was an official with the CIA in the 1970s. He now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia and serves as head of Liberty Guard.

Townhall

Many, perhaps most Americans are familiar with the Second Amendment to our Constitution — if not the precise phrasing, at least the key operative language confirming the “right to keep and bear arms.” Debates rage over the extent of that individual “right,” especially in the wake of a mass murder involving a firearm. These debates will continue, regardless of their relevance to particular situations, and usually obscuring rather than revealing solutions to the actual criminal activities.

What little substantive consideration of the Second Amendment may arise in debates about whether its language “allows” an individual to possess a particular firearm or caliber of ammunition, may even touch on the history of the Amendment.

An historic defense of the Second Amendment might even note that one of the very first armed confrontations between the American Colonies and British “Red Coats,” at Lexington and Concord in April 1775, transpired because the British were attempting to prevent the colonial citizens from accessing their stores of rifles and gunpowder. As presented in depth by noted firearms experts such as David Kopel, denying access to these tools for resistance to British rule became a primary goal of the Crown in the two years leading to the Declaration of Independence.

All this is important in constructing an historically sound argument in defense of why the Second Amendment’s language appears in the Bill of Rights. But the critical factor, which reveals why the Amendment is as relevant and important today as in 1791 when it was ratified, comes in answer to the following inquiry: “Where does responsibility ultimately lie for protection of an individual’s life and their rights?”

If the answer to that fundamental question is that such responsibility lies with the government and not the individual, then there would not be – would not have been – any reason to incorporate the individual right to keep and bear a firearm in the Constitution. But the guarantee of such right is there, and it is there for a reason.

Our Founders, based on personal experience and on a profound understanding of human nature and of governments, knew that it is the individual who bears ultimate responsibility for the protection of their person and of their rights as persons in a free society.

This is a fact of human nature, but it also reflects the reality that, no matter how big and powerful a government may become, it cannot and can never protect every person at all times, much less all of their rights as human beings. This is why the Second Amendment appears in our Constitution; as protective of the fundamental right of self-defense and self-preservation.

The ratification of the Second Amendment in 1791 is hardly the last word reflecting this principle.

In recent years, federal courts, including no less an authority than the Supreme Court of the United States, have held that the government, and specifically, the police, bear no legal responsibility to protect individuals against violent acts. Law enforcement can investigate such violence and may have authority to constrain criminal behavior depending on the circumstances and location (such as at government facilities), but protecting individuals is not and never has been the responsibility of the government.

This is why the right of each law abiding person to possess a firearm is so vital and why it is as important today as it was when our government was formed. Human nature and the nature of government do not fundamentally change over time. Criminal acts and downright evil existed in 1791 just as in today’s era, whether in Columbine, Uvalde, Buffalo, or anywhere else in this vast and otherwise beautiful land we call America.

When the chips are down, and when that evil we hope never to have to confront presents itself, each one of us becomes the “last best hope” for ourselves, our children, and our God-given rights. That hope will be snuffed out if we ever permit the Left to repeal the Second Amendment to our Constitution.

Bob Barr represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He served as the United States Attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990 and was an official with the CIA in the 1970s. He now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia and serves as head of Liberty Guard.

Daily Caller

The 2022 National Rifle Association of America (NRA) convention took place this past weekend in Houston, Texas. I was there as both an attendee and as a member of the association’s Board of Directors. Over the course of three days, as tens of thousands of people wandered through the exhibit hall and meeting rooms, I once again witnessed the NRA for what it is — an organization comprised of millions of men and women from all walks of life who believe in and cherish our country, our history and the American people.

The NRA was founded 151 years ago, and remains to this day an organization focused on protecting the Second Amendment to our Constitution. Notwithstanding that focus, its members and the men and women who direct its affairs, understand and support the entire Bill of Rights, including the right of the protestors who congregated outside the convention hall in Houston to level baseless and ridiculous charges against them.

The men and women of the NRA also understand human nature, perhaps better than do those who protest them, or at least more honestly than those detractors. NRA members know that despite the basic goodness of the American people, and the fact that the vast majority of them are law-abiding and cherish life, there are exceptions — people who commit wrong, unlawful and sometimes truly evil acts. The difference (or at least one of many differences) between these NRA members and those who accuse them of complicity in the actions of last week’s mass murderer in Uvalde, Texas, is that the association’s members do not blame other, unrelated individuals or entities for the evil acts of one such person.

While the direct and continuing focus of the NRA is protection of the Second Amendment, its members do not check their common sense or reasoning ability at the door when they sign up. They know, both instinctively and from history, that the sins of one are not the sins of all. They do not, for example, suddenly upon sending in their NRA dues, come to believe that, simply because members of the ACLU advocate for the constitutional rights of criminals, each and every member of and donor to that civil liberties organization is culpable if a person nonetheless commits a criminal act. NRA members know also that every donor to a candidate for political office is not himself or herself guilty of every bad act that might have been engaged in by that candidate.

Guilt by association, however, has become one of the many troubling, if not defining characteristics of public discourse in today’s society, along with an intolerance for differing viewpoints. For the Left, this has come to manifest itself in willful blindness to both the reasons why individuals commit horrific acts such as a mass murder of innocent victims, and to possible steps that could be taken to guard against recurrences.

Far easier is it to blame a visible organization such as the NRA, which advocates for the freedom to possess a firearm (not a mandate but a freedom), than it is to tackle the deeper and more complex issues that have come to trouble the minds of so many young people in society to the extent they lose all sense of humanity, reason, compassion, and self-worth.

Importantly also, the vast majority of NRA members are active politically, and seek to exercise that responsibility and privilege to elect men and women who, unlike protestors yelling slogans and untruths, understand and will use their power as elected officials to finally implement actual solutions to address the problem of youth alienation and endemic mental instability in contemporary American society.

Simply because so many of those public officials, on both sides of the political divide, have thus far failed to actually implement programs or appropriate funds to address these deep-rooted problems, does not diminish the need to continue to press their implementation. And surely it does not justify demonizing organizations and individuals who see in the Second Amendment a way to protect individuals and families and not as a justification to commit criminal acts.

Bob Barr represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He served as the United States Attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990 and was an official with the CIA in the 1970s. He now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia and serves as head of Liberty Guard.

Townhall

Since my days as a student at USC (the real USC – the University of Southern California), I have been a die-hard fan of college football. I love to watch the competition, skill, and heart that players, teams, and coaches put into this truly all-American sport. But the sport I love is changing, and not for the better.

In this, I agree with Clemson coach Dabo Swinney, who recently levelled a modest criticism of those changes, saying, “I’m not against NIL at all, what I am against is anything that devalues education — that’s what I’m against.” For this and similar comments, the coach was pilloried as regressive, racist, and hypocritical, and attacked personally for his strong Christian faith and trademark Southern drawl.

In fact, his recent statement merely clarified remarks made a month before, in which he warned against “tampering .  .  .  and manipulating young people” as a part of the NCAA’s “name/image/likeness” (NIL) endorsement program, which allows collegiate athletes to make money from their on-field talents. Once again, it was a modest critique, and in hindsight, Swinney’s comments were clearly prescient.

Thus is the vindication of Dabo Swinney, and all the collegiate sports fans who are witnessing their beloved sports crumble away.

To say college athletics have gone off the rails is an understatement. Even supporters of the NIL system would be hard-pressed to disagree with the “Wild West” scenario predicted by coaches like Swinney.

Education? Only in-between meetings with the agent, and only if the athlete cannot go pro in three years. Some schools do better than others with graduating players, but education, at least in the cash-cow sports of football and basketball, is only an afterthought – if that.

We are on the playing field created by a governing body that ignored the writing on the wall for years until June 2021, when the Supreme Court ruled in a 9-0 decision that the NCAA’s long-standing prohibition on athletes receiving benefits violated anti-trust laws. Overnight, college athletics stepped into a new world, which the NCAA was predictably unprepared to handle.

The debate about paying players should have hardly caught the NCAA by surprise, especially as an explosion of media coverage money over the last few decades has raised the stakes to new and obscene levels. In 2020, for example, the Southeastern Conference signed a 10-year, $3 billion deal with ESPN. New facilities at schools, designed to attract the best recruits, cost well over $100 million to build. Alabama football coach Nick Saban made nearly $10 million – just last year.

Clearly, there was a “money” problem in need of fixing, but the NCAA’s dithering until activists were calling them “slavers,” while state legislatures began stepping-in and anti-trust lawsuits worked their way up to the highest court in the land, did not leave it in any position for implementing clear and correct solutions.

The interim NIL guidelines issued by the NCAA days after the ruling were vague, and punted legal guidance to state or institutional bodies to decide. “The current environment – both legal and legislative – prevents us from providing a more permanent solution and the level of detail student-athletes deserve,” went the cop-out. Just this month, a year later, the NCAA has done little more, issuing a weak update to its interim rules,  that tries and fails to put the genie back into the bottle.

In today’s ultra-sensitive “woke” world, it is no wonder why activists might think the disparity of riches (and the racial composition of the groups to which those riches were, or were not, shared) was, perhaps, a bad look. For fans too, it became increasingly difficult to stomach millionaire coaches getting multi-million-dollar payouts for poor performance, when players suffered far worse punishments for incidents completely unrelated to on-field play.

Is today’s new paradigm where the “best interests” of players is measured only in the value of an NIL deal, any better? It is doubtful, but that is where the NCAA’s somnambulance has left us.

Like the NBA and the NFL before it, another once beloved American sport is now fading. When fall football seasons starts again, I still will be watching, but no longer with the excitement and pride of years past, and with so many commercial announcements inserted into each televised game, it has become increasingly difficult to follow the flow of the game itself.

Bob Barr represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He served as the United States Attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990 and was an official with the CIA in the 1970s. He now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia and serves as head of Liberty Guard.

Daily Caller

The New York Court of Appeals soon may decide whether “Happy,” a 50-something-year-old elephant in the Bronx Zoo, possesses human rights.

While this may appear on its face to be a preposterous proposition, it is one being considered seriously by the highest court in the state of New York.

The case in favor of granting human rights to non-human animals is being pressed by the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) via a habeas corpus petition, the ancient and constitutionally enshrined principle that an individual has a fundamental right to force the government to prove it has a legal right to detain that person.

The question as to whether animals possess or should be granted “rights,” has been a topic of debate going back at least to the mid-18th century in England. Only recently, with the 2007 establishment of NhRP (originally called the Center for the Expansion of Fundamental Rights), has the issue gained legal traction in the United States.

Not surprisingly, these earlier lawsuits filed by NhRP were docketed in New York state courts on behalf of chimpanzees Tommy, Kiko, Hercules and Leo. While these habeas corpus petitions were not granted by the New York court at the time, as with many fringe legal theories, if advocates press their theories consistently and patiently, the odds for a favorable result increases. Hence, the current case on behalf of Happy the elephant.

It is easy to dismiss the legal theory that non-human animals should be recognized as having human legal rights. The consequences of permitting such a principle to advance and take hold even to a limited extent in our judicial system, however, are profound. The Maryland-based, animal-rights non-profit The Humane League, for example, lists the following among the animal “rights” it hopes one day to be legally recognized: the right not to be used for human food, the right not to be hunted by humans and the right not to be bred by humans.

Perhaps one of the most important consequences of granting non-human animals human rights, would be the very real possibility of stopping the use of laboratory animals in research to cure and prevent diseases in humans.

As with many liberal ideas that take hold in our country, they come to us from our erstwhile parent, the United Kingdom, and animal rights legislation would be no exception. An “Animal Welfare (Sentience)” bill recently passed in the British Parliament. The legislation covers not only farm animals and other vertebrae as “sentient” beings possessing rights, but also crabs, lobsters, prawns and octopuses. It also would establish the “Animal Sentience Committee” — a bureaucracy charged with enforcing the new-found rights; a familiar and time-honored process here in the United States as well.

These legal and — in the U.K. and a number of other countries — legislative moves go dramatically further than existing U.S. laws protecting animals against mistreatment.

Animal cruelty laws already protect nonhuman animals by making mistreatment of animals a criminal offense in every one of our 50 states. A number of well-known and respected non-profit groups, most notably the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), founded in 1866, provide significant private sector muscle in aid of those laws.

Still, the drive to enlist the judicial branch to recognize that animals have and should be accorded human rights continues apace, gaining the support of far-left politicians such as Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and former New York City mayor Bill de Blasio.

Where all this will end up remains a mystery, but considering the “progress” attained thus far by animal rights organizations led by NhRP, and with the obvious willingness (if not preference) by the Biden administration to defer many policy decisions to international forums (such as the WHO), there is cause for real concern.

One of the criteria the NhRP cites in its case supporting human rights for its “client,” Happy the elephant, is that she “passed” a “self-awareness” test by “repeatedly touching a white ‘X’ on her forehead in a mirror.”

In the minds of these animal rights extremists, it would easily follow that the next step would be to declare Happy the elephant capable of placing an “X” on a voting machine touch screen.

Bob Barr represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He served as the United States Attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990 and was an official with the CIA in the 1970s. He now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia and serves as head of Liberty Guard.

Townhall

Why would an 18-year-old, with a full life ahead of him, feel so broken and jaded by the world that he feels his only option is to pick up a gun and kill people? This is a question few Democrats, including President Joe Biden, will ask.

After all, issuing statements denouncing “weapons of war” (which has nothing to do with anything) and calling for yet more “gun control,” are far easier than seriously probing why so many young men are turning to internet-fueled hate mongers as a way to fill the emptiness in their lives.

Still the Left stubbornly clings to the notion that gun-control and other federal legislative efforts will solve the deep-rooted cultural problems giving rise to the rash of mass shootings in recent years. Their willful blindness will force all of us to likely endure repeats of last Saturday’s tragic event at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York.

It is not as if there are no clues in plain sight to help us unravel the factors predicating many of these mass murders.

One common theme, for example, at least as among recent mass shootings, including that in Buffalo, and in Charleston (2015), San Diego (2019), and Christchurch (2019), is that the killers were denizens of the dark corners of the online world. This begs the question, “why?” Why does the hateful violence in online commentary fill a void left empty by social institutions that in years past provided moral anchors to young people?

Probing a bit deeper reveals more clues.

In today’s risk-averse culture, children and their parents are warned, in some cases actually punished, for allowing their children to engage in unsupervised outdoor play. Fretting, often to the point of paranoia, about “pedophiles” and “sex trafficking” has reached the point where even stopping to watch children at play has come to be  viewed with suspicion.

In public schools, children are cautioned constantly to be careful, fearful, and suspicious of everything and everyone (even to the point of facing discipline for using a “wrong” pronoun about a fellow student). Gone are the days when public education was considered part of a comprehensive and positive socialization process directed toward a productive and hope-filled future. Constant “active shooter” drills reinforce those fears.

Many public schools fill white students’ minds with debilitating self-loathing because they are “inherently racists.”

“Climate change” teaches them they likely will grow to adulthood in a doomed world.

Being taught concepts of “gender fluidity” and “not knowing who you are” can render this fear-filled world virtually unintelligible to youngsters.

Then we are surprised when some turn to the internet and lash out in violence.

Outside of the classroom, there are few if any group activities that teach and reinforce communal social skills. Religious attendance is on the decline and continues to wither under constant attack from the Left. Boy Scouts and other traditional social groups are similarly attacked by liberals as “toxic.”

Youth sports increasingly are being ruined by parents, whose lack of self-control leads them to abuse coaches and officials verbally and physically; behavior that does not go unnoticed by the kids.

Home life as well feeds this increasingly unpleasant world in which young minds and bodies grow. The environment in many homes mirrors a political environment reflective of what goes on in the very halls of the U.S. Congress, where each side’s views and advocates are seen as completely destructive of the others. Civil and substantive discourse has been supplanted by name-calling and vulgarity.

In myriad ways, we have created a culture that celebrates doom, obsesses over literal and figurative “death,” and reinforces social isolation because it is “safer.” Yet, we throw our hands up in despair when a vulnerable young person, already predisposed by the world around him to violence, no longer values the lives of others, or his own.

Mass shootings have become a mirror to a deeply broken society, and no amount of blaming “guns” or “hate speech” can repair the fissures. Nonetheless, for Democrats repeatedly doing just that, spares them from accepting any complicity for the damage caused by their legal, political, and personal efforts to weaken the institutions that once helped shape children and young adults into happy, compassionate, and functional members of society.

The Left’s continued refusal to see anything of themselves and the policies they champion in that dark mirror, all but guarantees future tragedies.

Bob Barr represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He served as the United States Attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990 and was an official with the CIA in the 1970s. He now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia and serves as head of Liberty Guard.

Daily Caller

On two successive Saturdays in May, we were witness to the heights of heroic sportsmanship and the depths of human depravity. From the Kentucky Derby in Louisville, Kentucky, on May 7 to the mass murder at the Tops Friendly Supermarket in Buffalo, New York, exactly one week later, we saw the best and the absolute worst that can happen in 21st century America.

At 80 to 1 — the longest of long shots — a horse named Rich Strike ridden with masterful precision by unheralded Jockey Sonny Leon won the Race for the Roses in a way that every underdog dreams of.

A mere seven days later, a heretofore unknown 18-year-old loner, Payton Gendron, allegedly walked into a nondescript supermarket intent on methodically murdering as many innocent victims as he could manage before the police stopped him. The alleged shooter was festooned in black tactical gear – a favorite of many white supremacists eager to display their false bravado to those around them – along with a video camera mounted on his head so those on the streaming service Twitch could watch his cowardly actions.

It took jockey Sonny Leon just two minutes to enthrall the sporting world with what a determined rider astride an eager three-year old colt can do when they set their minds to it.

It took the alleged Buffalo murderer four minutes longer – about six minutes – to shoot 13 innocent shoppers and one brave security guard. Ten of those people died as a result of merely being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Sonny Leon was born in Venezuela in 1990, making him 32 years old at the running of the 148th Kentucky Derby. Although a jockey for several years, his name had not graced the winner’s column for a major horse race until his shocking victory at Churchill Downs. He was, before May 7, merely one of hundreds of jockeys vying for those accolades. He achieved his fame the right way, by biding his time (and the horse’s energy) and weaving a course through the dense pack of 19 other horses until he could gain the inside rail advantage for the final burst.

In what has become disturbingly familiar to citizens of the United States and to those of other countries (New Zealand among them), young, single, white male loners go on shooting rampages as a way to display their sick personality to other, perhaps like-minded sociopaths.

Factors at play in Leon’s Kentucky Derby victory are straight forward and clear – a man trained in his chosen profession who engages that training in an appropriate time, place, and manner, and achieves well-earned kudos for succeeding. His is an example to be admired, nurtured and followed by others in whatever career path they might pursue.

The much darker path evidenced by the mass murder in a Buffalo supermarket appears far more complex, yet depressingly familiar to experts who study the ways in which hatred and narcissism can meld into a toxic maelstrom, fueled at least in part by use of the internet to study and spread such bile (in this case, apparent racial hatred), particularly among lonely young men unattached to family, religion or other positive societal anchors.

Americans in all walks of life grieve for the victims of last Saturday’s mass murder. However, if we are to engage in a serious quest for ways to prevent its replication, we must ask — and not be afraid to answer — the hard questions about why so many young men are alienated and prone to drastic violence in ways essentially unknown to earlier generations of Americans.

America is a land of unbounded success for those who seek it in the right way, as Sonny Leon did; and those achievements properly should be heralded and emulated. America also is a society with the freedom to engage in extreme criminal behavior for that small minority of individuals so inclined; and their nefarious deeds, and the environments which spawned and nurtured them, must be openly and uniformly condemned, and dismantled; if not, we will be forced to endure further heart-breaking episodes.

Bob Barr represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He served as the United States Attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990 and was an official with the CIA in the 1970s. He now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia and serves as head of Liberty Guard.