More On Iowa Campus Police Not Yet Being Allowed to Carry Guns.

David Yepsen usually strikes me as a fairly mild mannered guy, but he just can't seem to restrain himself in discussing the opposition and delays in letting campus police carrying guns at Iowa's public universities. Yepsen surely understands the issues of deterrence and incapacitation:

Just when I was worried about finding new entertainment once the caucuses clear out of here in January, along comes the Board of Regents and the Des Moines School Board.

The regents act like the guys in charge of traffic control at a Tom Harkin steak fry.

They're a joke. This time, it's over the important security issue of whether to arm campus cops. The officers have asked for years to carry firearms. Most other college security officers do. The security chiefs at the universities want their officers to carry firearms, too.

But not in Iowa. We don't have mass shootings like they did at Virginia Tech. (Well, not very often anyway.)

It took that tragedy in Virginia to wake up everyone else. Now, the three state university presidents in Iowa are recommending campus peace officers at their schools be armed. That ought to be the end of it. The CEOs of the institutions have spoken. . . .

Another viewpoint is seen here:

Steinke said the regents feel they need more information before such a plan could be approved. According to Steinke, regents feel they need additional information on the type of ammunition the officers would use, the certification that they would be required to complete prior to carrying weapons and whether there would be background checks and psychological profiles of the officers carrying weapons. . . . .

Clearly, those are legitimate concerns. Equally clearly, they are concerns that can be addressed in a matter of days - certainly not weeks or months - by reviewing the existing policies of Iowa's existing law enforcement agencies and the Iowa Law Enforcement Academy.

Another Review of Freedomnomics

If you read "Freakonomics," Then you had better read "Freedomnomics: Why The Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don't" by John R. Lott, Jr. You owe it to yourself and to anyone you recommended "Freakonomics" to.

Talk on Friday at 2:50 PM in St. Louis

EAGLE COUNCIL XXXVI, Hilton St. Louis Frontenac Hotel, 1335 South Lindbergh Bl., St. Louis, MO 63131, (314) 993-1100. I will be speaking from 2:50 to 3:30 PM at the Hotel. Sorry, for traveling and giving talks so much this week.

Columbus, Georgia sees big increase in gun ownership with rise in crime

Spate of recent crimes in city has increased local gun purchases

"nursing student and mother of two, she long resisted her husband Mike's request that she buy a handgun for protection. But after reading about Columbus' 24th homicide this year, she conceded.

"I was trying to explain to him, 'No no I'm supposed to be in the heal, help field,' " Wendy Laney said. "That's kind of a contradiction there. But he said, 'Well, you know if it comes to you or somebody else...,' and I said, 'Yeah, you've got a point.' " . . .

More Talks today

At noon I will be speaking at Lewis & Clark Law School.
At 4 PM I will be speaking at Willamette Law School.

Both talks will be about information in Freedomnomics.

The Soviet Union lost more soilders fighting for other people's liberty than the US?

From the Washington Post:

the claim

"You know, you look back over our history, and it doesn't take you long to realize that our people have shed more blood for other people's liberty than any other combination of nations in the history of the world.''

-- Fred D. Thompson, stump speech in Des Moines, Sept. 7

THE FACTS

A grandiose claim that is hard to justify no matter how you define "other people's liberty." Let's begin by looking at U.S. casualties in foreign wars. (Domestic conflicts such as the Revolutionary War and the Civil War are excluded.)

U.S.
Conflict Casualties


Spanish American War 2,446
World War I 116,516
World War II 405,399
Korean War 36,574
Vietnam War 58,209
Persian Gulf War 382
Wars in Afghanistan,
Iraq (as of yesterday) 4,217


Total 623,288
SOURCES: Congressional Research Service, Defense Department

The number of overall U.S. military casualties, while high, is still relatively low in comparison to those of its World War I and World War II allies. In World War II alone, the Soviet Union suffered at least 8 million casualties, or more than 10 times the number of U.S. casualties for all wars combined. According to Winston Churchill, the Red Army "tore the guts out of the Nazi war machine." It can be argued that Soviet troops were primarily fighting to free their homeland from Nazi occupation. After fighting its way to Berlin, the Soviet Union imposed its own dictatorship over Eastern Europe. Even so, Soviet sacrifices contributed greatly to the liberation of Western Europe from Nazi domination. Soviet forces died for their own country and their own tyrannical government, but they also spilled blood on behalf of their Western allies. . . .

Is this really serious? Suppose that the Americans have encountered more difficulty from the Germans on D-day and the Soviets had been able to go further West. Does the Post believe that people living in that additional area would have been free?

University of Iowa Regents slowly making progress towards arming campus police

The progress is slow, but hopefully it will be done next month.

Council Bluffs, Ia. - The Iowa Board of Regents has delayed a decision on arming campus police until at least October.

The board seemed poised Tuesday to vote on whether to change its 40-year policy prohibiting campus police from regularly carrying firearms. Several regents, including David Miles, Bob Downer and Jack Evans, said they were ready to vote in favor of arming campus police.

Regent Ruth Harkin then proposed development of a comprehensive security policy that would include the arming issue. Regent Craig Lang seconded her motion, which was approved, and the board then voted 7-1 to create a provision in that policy allowing campus police officers to carry firearms in the regular course of duties.

The new policy would need to be approved at a future meeting. That could occur as soon as October. . . .

Thanks to Chris Jens for sending me this link.

NRA's political donations small compared to MoveOn.Org

WASHINGTON — Here's a pop quiz on money in politics: Who gives more money to federal candidates, the National Rifle Association or MoveOn.org?

Answer: MoveOn.

And it isn't even close.

In the last two election cycles, MoveOn.org Political Action Committee spent more than $58 million in pro-Democrat political advocacy, according to Federal Election Commission records.

In just the 2006 election cycle, MoveOn.org spent $27 million in advocacy to elect a Democratic majority in Congress and used its formidable fund-raising clout to propel numerous Democratic challengers to House and Senate victories. By comparison, the NRA PAC donated $11 million in 2006.

"They give away and raise about three times as much as the National Rifle Association," said Massie Ritsch, communications director for the Center for Responsive Politics. "A tremendous amount of money, especially when you consider how quickly they came on the scene."

Thanks to Robert Aldridge for sending me this.

More on Teacher Trying to Take a Gun on School Property for Protection

Ashland, Ore. - In court documents, she's known as "Jane Doe." Innocuous enough, but the woman behind that pseudonym pushes one of the nation's hottest political buttons: guns and school safety.

What Ms. Doe wants to do is take her Glock 9-mm pistol to the high school in Medford, Ore., where she teaches.

She's licensed to carry a concealed weapon and she has what many supporters say is a legitimate reason for being armed: a restraining order against her ex-husband based on threats he's allegedly made against her and her children.

But district policy prohibits anyone except a law-enforcement officer from bringing a weapon onto campus. When word got out that she had a concealed-carry permit, administrators reminded her of that policy. There's the political rub: According to state law, "any element relating to firearms and components thereof, including ammunition, is vested solely in the Legislative Assembly."

Backed by gun-rights groups, Doe intends to challenge the school district in state court this week. Meanwhile throughout the country, lawmakers are filing bills that would make it legal for adult school employees to carry firearms, in some cases providing special weapons safety training for those who want to be part of their school's security force in addition to their classroom teaching duties. . . . .

Thanks for Will Brink and Scott A. Davis for sending me similar links on this story

NRA might endorse Giuliani?

I definitely have no deep insight into how the NRA operates, but given all my post on Giuliani's positions on gun control I question this claim.

Rudy Giuliani, an ardent gun-control advocate as mayor, will address the National Rifle Association on Friday.

The GOP White House hopeful, who backed the federal assault-weapons ban in 1994 over the objections of the NRA, has changed his position as a presidential candidate. He now says he supports the Second Amendment and believes gun laws should be addressed by the states.

It is possible that the NRA would endorse Giuliani.

Appearance on Lars Larson Radio Show

I will be on the Lars Larson radio show at 6:20 PM today.

Talk on Thursday night to the New York Young Republican Club

Union League Club, located at 38 East 37th Street, on Thursday, September 20, 2007, beginning at 7PM. . . . .

Older Men-Younger Women Romances Good for Longevity of Human Race

Younger women being attracted to older men is biologically based:

Older men who shack up with much younger women keep the Grim Reaper at bay for the human population and extend our species' lifespan, new research claims. . . .

As relationships seem to be less motivated to produce children over time, there might be a correlation with a reduction in the average age between men and women. I wonder whether there is empirical evidence that men search for other mates when the women that they are with are no longer able to have children.

What is not noted if that the same would hold for females. Older females should reproduce and marry (whatever) male age group. This might actually have a larger effect on longevity because, say, by 40, a lot of women cannot have babies because of either bad eggs and/or because of health problems. So the women capable of having babies post-40 are the ones with healthier genes (and genes for longeivity).

Does it occur that the reason that women marry older men is because EVEN THOUGH the women are more attracted to younger men, the older men might have more wealth/higher income and are more likely to be stable emotionally? So the 24-year old woman in the U.S. who marries a 28-year-old man rather than a 20-year-old is likely to be able to start have babies earlier. It is not particularly impressive that he made it all the way to age 28 even though it makes some slight difference in weeding out the ones who committed suicide or died in a car crash at 21.

Also, demographics force many women to marry older men. There is just a tremendous surplus of women to men in the very highest age-groups, and those men like to pick the relatively younger (old) women, who also will take care of them when they age and die.

New Op-ed on Why the Press Likes Campaign Finance Regulations

LAST week saw an outcry over the unfairness and content of MoveOn.org's New York Times ad belittling Gen. David Petraeus as "General Betray Us." But the episode also illustrates a much more fundamental problem with campaign-finance regulations - the advantage that these laws give to the institutional press over ordinary citizens. It's time to admit the unenforceability and hidden favoritism of campaign-finance regulations. . . .