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2018-03-01 13:36 by Karl Denninger
in Editorial , 581 references Ignore this thread
Why? Go Look In The Mirror. *
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Why did Parkland happen?

Because the law is not enforced; the shooter had been reported multiple times for acts that were plenty to arrest him, have him declared mentally incompetent or both.  He could not have shot up anything if in prison or a mental institution.

Why does medical care cost ten times what it does in other nations?

Because the law is not enforced; it is a felony to attempt to restrain trade, create or maintain monopolies, and price-fix.  The health care industry does all three on a daily basis.  You would not need "health insurance" for anything other than catastrophic events, Medicare and Medicaid would not be bankrupting the government and state and local pensions wouldn't be either if the law was enforced and those engaged in same were rotting in prison cells.

Why do we have an opiod epidemic?

Because the law is not enforced; it is a crime to knowingly divert or ship these drugs for other than legitimate uses, and when you ship enough pills into a town of 1,000 to give every single person there multiple doses a day it is clear they are not being used legitimately.  Yet not one pill manufacturing executive has faced indictment for what is clearly criminal behavior.

Why did an illegal invader shoot a young woman in California?

Because the law is not enforced.  He had been deported before, we let him come back in and California in particular gave him sanctuary.  In fact every single illegal invader here committed a criminal act as their first act on our soil.  Were the law to be enforced none of these crimes would have occurred.  There is an existing system to stop 90%+ of illegal invader employment, E-Verify.  Our government has refused to demand that all employers use it, under penalty of imprisonment.

Why did a man shoot 26 people in a Church in Texas?

Because the law is not enforced.  He had been court-martialed for assaulting his wife and child in New Mexico and served a 12 month sentence for same, plus a "bad conduct" discharge.  Under the Lautenberg Amendment this disqualified him from buying or owning firearms and yet nobody in the military went to prison for failing to enter his conviction into the system.

There is no law you can pass that will address any sort of violence nor any other sort of criminal conduct if it is not enforced.

There are over 50,000 gun laws alone on the books between federal, state and local legislation.  Nearly all of them, other than those directly dealing with the interstate trade in firearms, are blatantly unconstitutional.  Yet not only do we keep wanting to pass more laws we won't enforce the ones we already have, specifically when it comes to violent individuals that have been repeatedly reported or even those who have served criminal sentences.

At the same time you're robbed out of more than three trillion a year by the medical system for the exact same reason.  Laws that have existed for more than 100 years are routinely ignored by these companies because there is no risk to them in doing so.  At no time does anyone ever go to prison for outrageous violations of these laws.

A number of years ago a drug company was criminally prosecuted for off-label marketing of certain drugs to teens and children, for which there was no evidence of safety or efficacy.  It was later shown that they actually tampered with a scientific study to try to cover that up.  The scientific facts are that these drugs not only don't work in young people they actually make the risk of suicide go up instead of down and there is a small but non-zero risk of them causing homicidal rage attacks.  These drugs are implicated in many school and other "rage style" attacks, most of which are perpetrated by young people and in fact there is a warning in the prescribing information on these drugs related to this risk.  Yet not one person has gone to prison for the activities of those drug companies or for prescribing them to kids which arguably has resulted in virtually all mass-shootings of this type and what's worse is that we still allow doctors to hand these damn pills out like fucking candy to children, adolescents and young adults despite knowing they are both ineffective and unsafe.

Who's responsible for all this?

You are.  We all are.  Instead of taking the pop-up spokesman of the day out behind the woodshed when some tragedy happens and refusing to play along with that political game we fawn over them while "supporting" politicians and other "important" people who speechify and demand new laws and "action."

We never demand that the people responsible for their negligent or intentional inaction, or even worse, their complicit and blatantly illegal conduct before the fact that allows these events to occur or even potentiates them go straight to prison.

We also fail to demand that those who rob us out of more than $3 trillion dollars a year collectively, or about one dollar in six that is spent in the economy, go to prison.

Instead, we all play pity party when bad things happen and then mewl out the by-now standard: Please sir, just the tip this time and may I have a stick for my teeth first?