Two news-aggregation pieces from Liberty Headlines (follow the links in the Headlines themselves).
Even Liberal Data-Crunchers Say Gun Control Doesn’t Work
(Quin Hillyer, Liberty Headlines) As can be expected in the wake of any mass shooting, the American debate over gun rights has heated to and maybe beyond the boiling point in the days since Sunday night’s mass murder in Las Vegas.
One difference this time, though, is that a very recent example of a man using his gun rights to stop a mass murder is serving as a catalyst for other crime victims to tell their own stories of how their guns saved rather than squandered lives. Another is support, from an unexpected source, for the idea that gun control laws are counterproductive.
For the first example, as reported here at Liberty Headlines, it was just two weeks ago that a church usher used his own permitted firearm to hold at bay a Sudanese immigrant who was attempting mass murder in a Tennessee Church of Christ. Police described 22-year-old usher Robert Engle as “extraordinarily brave” for his actions in stopping the murderer….
[Later in the piece]
What was not expected was the liberal Washington Post running a column by a statistician who wrote that she began her gun studies convinced that “gun control was the answer,” but whose research “told me otherwise.”
Here’s what writer Leah Libresco reported (emphasis added):
“My colleagues and I at FiveThirtyEight spent three months analyzing all 33,000 lives ended by guns each year in the United States, and I wound up frustrated in a whole new way. We looked at what interventions might have saved those people, and the case for the policies I’d lobbied for crumbled when I examined the evidence. ….
U.S. Treasure fails to recover wasted TARP funds
(Quin Hillyer, Liberty Headlines) Continuing a multi-year battle to save misspent taxpayer dollars, Republican U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa on Tuesday demanded to know why the U.S. Treasury has recovered so little of the money wasted by federal officials from a housing program gone awry.
Grassley long has championed the causes of federal whistleblowers and departmental Inspectors General (IGs). In this case, the Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), which was created during the housing/financial crisis late last decade, had unearthed large levels of wrongful spending in the Hardest Hit Fund (HHF), a kitty meant to directly help homeowners hurt during the crisis.
The IG found that $11 million had been spent not to help victims but instead “wasted on restaurant meals, employee gifts and a $500 per month company Mercedes.” Despite the report, the Treasury has recovered only $113,592 of the $11 million – just barely over 1 percent of the mal-spent funds….
