The April 26th shooting death of sixteen people at an overseas high school occurred in a country known for its strict gun-control laws. The tragedy is another reminder of the paralyzing uselessness of such controls and the mindset that seeds them. Fighting the darkest amongst us by infringing on the liberties of the brightest is an ignorant, and frankly scary, response to violence. Germany’s gun laws might be a model for admiration by control advocates, were it not for the fact that the laws hinder only honest gun users. A gun license application in Germany requires more than a background check. An applicant must prove his need for, and trustworthiness with, the piece—in addition to enduring a waiting period. The process places the honest, responsible citizen under a criminal lamplight, which still fails to detect some criminal intentions (including Friday’s attack). While the screening frustrates many sportsmen and would-be self-defenders into reconsidering their plans, criminals easily bypass the process via the hassle-free black market.
As reported to Edward L. Hudgins: Dear President George W. Bush and Senator Edward Kennedy, My teacher in social studies told us to write
As the United States pursues its war in Afghanistan, the national and the international press have focused attention on the civilian
What President Bush has called the first war of the twenty-first century has much in common with the great wars of the century just past...
Two millennia before the World Trade Center soared over the New York skyline, another creation of commerce served the same purpose of peace
The terrorist attacks of September 11 showed us good and evil, heroism and villainy. There were people who stared death in the face and, set
When articles are written about Ayn Rand's influence, almost invariably they mention Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.
July/August 2001 -- Students at Harvard and activists throughout the country have been fighting lately for a so-called "living wage" of
BOOK REVIEW: Mean Genes: From Sex to Money to Food, Taming Our Primal Instincts. By Terry Burnham and Jay Phelan. (New York: Perseus Book
Awakening on the morning of September 11, 2001, we Americans were proud, happy, and confident. We knew ourselves to be the only Superpower—
Most of us still find it impossible to grasp the destruction of the World Trade Center. It was real, we saw it, but it does not belong in...
John Rawls's A Theory of Justice, which was published thirty years ago, has been the most influential work of political philosophy in the
While Ayn Rand did consider homosexuality to be immoral, this was only her personal view. The morality of homosexuality is not a philosophic
May 2001 -- Last September, then-candidate George W. Bush promised "an orderly and timely withdrawal" of American ground forces from the Balkans. By contrast, defenders of the Clinton Balkan policy maintain that the United States must keep forces on the ground to demonstrate leadership. The administration's choice thus takes on a more-than-ordinary significance because the decision will constitute either an implicit criticism or an implicit endorsement of the way the Clinton administration conducted foreign policy. On both strategic and symbolic grounds, President Bush should bring the troops home. Strategically, their presence is not warranted. Symbolically, the Bush administration needs to signal a dramatic change in America's way of doing business in the world: a return to principled action in foreign policy and to the national interest as the overriding principle.
February 2001 -- "There is no right to do wrong." So said Alan Keyes used to say during his presidential campaign. Apparently, he either did not grasp or did not care that freedom implies the right to do wrong, inasmuch as a person permitted no option but to walk the straight and narrow does not walk this path freely. Of course, libertarians know well the truth of that observation, but today it demands a rider: Freedom exists only when the right to do wrong is more than nominal. With public funds, administrative regulations, and liability law seeping into every corner of our lives, true freedom exists only if the right to do wrong is not abrogated by the oblique controls these tools allow.
Some years ago, I wrote that we had reached a moment in history when self-esteem, which had always been a supremely important psychological
Objectivism holds that in order to obtain knowledge, man must use an objective process of thought. The essence of objective thought is....
Many believe that animals have the right to be free from harm by people. In particular, they believe that animals should not be harmed in fo
Why have Objectivists written so little about manners? I am inclined to believe it is because they have accepted the common view of manners
The April 26th shooting death of sixteen people at an overseas high school occurred in a country known for its strict gun-control laws. The tragedy is another reminder of the paralyzing uselessness of such controls and the mindset that seeds them. Fighting the darkest amongst us by infringing on the liberties of the brightest is an ignorant, and frankly scary, response to violence. Germany’s gun laws might be a model for admiration by control advocates, were it not for the fact that the laws hinder only honest gun users. A gun license application in Germany requires more than a background check. An applicant must prove his need for, and trustworthiness with, the piece—in addition to enduring a waiting period. The process places the honest, responsible citizen under a criminal lamplight, which still fails to detect some criminal intentions (including Friday’s attack). While the screening frustrates many sportsmen and would-be self-defenders into reconsidering their plans, criminals easily bypass the process via the hassle-free black market.
The April 26th shooting death of sixteen people at an overseas high school occurred in a country known for its strict gun-control laws. The tragedy is another reminder of the paralyzing uselessness of such controls and the mindset that seeds them. Fighting the darkest amongst us by infringing on the liberties of the brightest is an ignorant, and frankly scary, response to violence. Germany’s gun laws might be a model for admiration by control advocates, were it not for the fact that the laws hinder only honest gun users. A gun license application in Germany requires more than a background check. An applicant must prove his need for, and trustworthiness with, the piece—in addition to enduring a waiting period. The process places the honest, responsible citizen under a criminal lamplight, which still fails to detect some criminal intentions (including Friday’s attack). While the screening frustrates many sportsmen and would-be self-defenders into reconsidering their plans, criminals easily bypass the process via the hassle-free black market.
As reported to Edward L. Hudgins: Dear President George W. Bush and Senator Edward Kennedy, My teacher in social studies told us to write
As the United States pursues its war in Afghanistan, the national and the international press have focused attention on the civilian
What President Bush has called the first war of the twenty-first century has much in common with the great wars of the century just past...
Two millennia before the World Trade Center soared over the New York skyline, another creation of commerce served the same purpose of peace
The terrorist attacks of September 11 showed us good and evil, heroism and villainy. There were people who stared death in the face and, set
When articles are written about Ayn Rand's influence, almost invariably they mention Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.
July/August 2001 -- Students at Harvard and activists throughout the country have been fighting lately for a so-called "living wage" of
BOOK REVIEW: Mean Genes: From Sex to Money to Food, Taming Our Primal Instincts. By Terry Burnham and Jay Phelan. (New York: Perseus Book
Awakening on the morning of September 11, 2001, we Americans were proud, happy, and confident. We knew ourselves to be the only Superpower—
Most of us still find it impossible to grasp the destruction of the World Trade Center. It was real, we saw it, but it does not belong in...
John Rawls's A Theory of Justice, which was published thirty years ago, has been the most influential work of political philosophy in the
While Ayn Rand did consider homosexuality to be immoral, this was only her personal view. The morality of homosexuality is not a philosophic
May 2001 -- Last September, then-candidate George W. Bush promised "an orderly and timely withdrawal" of American ground forces from the Balkans. By contrast, defenders of the Clinton Balkan policy maintain that the United States must keep forces on the ground to demonstrate leadership. The administration's choice thus takes on a more-than-ordinary significance because the decision will constitute either an implicit criticism or an implicit endorsement of the way the Clinton administration conducted foreign policy. On both strategic and symbolic grounds, President Bush should bring the troops home. Strategically, their presence is not warranted. Symbolically, the Bush administration needs to signal a dramatic change in America's way of doing business in the world: a return to principled action in foreign policy and to the national interest as the overriding principle.
February 2001 -- "There is no right to do wrong." So said Alan Keyes used to say during his presidential campaign. Apparently, he either did not grasp or did not care that freedom implies the right to do wrong, inasmuch as a person permitted no option but to walk the straight and narrow does not walk this path freely. Of course, libertarians know well the truth of that observation, but today it demands a rider: Freedom exists only when the right to do wrong is more than nominal. With public funds, administrative regulations, and liability law seeping into every corner of our lives, true freedom exists only if the right to do wrong is not abrogated by the oblique controls these tools allow.
Some years ago, I wrote that we had reached a moment in history when self-esteem, which had always been a supremely important psychological
Objectivism holds that in order to obtain knowledge, man must use an objective process of thought. The essence of objective thought is....
Many believe that animals have the right to be free from harm by people. In particular, they believe that animals should not be harmed in fo
Why have Objectivists written so little about manners? I am inclined to believe it is because they have accepted the common view of manners