Does buying a gun make you safer, or simply more aware of danger? A sociologist’s argument about American gun ownership raises some worthwhile questions.

The post When Fear Sells More Guns appeared first on The Truth About Guns.

Pew Research reports what any precinct captain could have told you for the price of a beer: affordability, not abstraction, is what voters carry into the ballot box this fall.

Gas, groceries, rent—the three horsemen of kitchen-table economics—are top of mind for voters this midterm season.

The Trump administration, to its credit, has noticed. It has struck an oil arrangement with Venezuela, announced a drug-pricing initiative, lifted tariffs on beef imports, and taken up other such measures besides. Reasonable people can debate their merits. What is less reasonable is the question put to this writer, with wearying regularity, by television hosts and reporters alike: When will we see results?

The question is understandable. It is also a category error, one that reveals more about the assumptions of those asking it than about the policies in question. It presumes that an economy is a machine with a dial, that a lever pulled in Washington in September produces an outcome in November, calibrated and on schedule, the way a thermostat produces heat.

An economy is not a machine. It’s more like an ecosystem: vast, adaptive, and complex. No official, however well-briefed, can specify in advance precisely when a policy will bite, whether it will bite as intended, or what else, unbidden, will be biting at the same time.

There are limits to what any mind, or any committee of minds, however intelligent, can know about a system built from the choices of hundreds of millions of people.

Consider how much lies outside anyone’s control. The Iran conflict could escalate or subside, and either would move oil markets before any economist in D.C. could issue a statement about it. Shipping lanes reroute, or get struck again, depending on decisions made by people whose names appear in no American briefing book. Cattle herds do not grow in a fiscal quarter; they rebuild over years, one calf at a time, and the rebuilding can be undone overnight by a screwworm outbreak that no analyst saw coming and no policy could have prevented.

Time lags stretch on, indifferent to election calendars. And effects surface in the last place anyone looked: e.g., ranchers, mid-rebuild, upset about cheaper beef imports.

The political trouble here is real, and worth stating plainly. A president can order a border closed. A governor can order the National Guard into a city. Neither can order prices down, and if either somehow could, the ordering could produce shortages, black markets, and other miseries considerably worse than the prices being complained about.

An economy of our size and intricacy cannot be tuned to a November deadline. What it can be given, however, is room: barriers removed, rules simplified, supply allowed to do what supply does when it is not obstructed. That is a policy of patience, which is precisely the kind of policy a two-year election cycle punishes.

What can honestly be said is this: look back.

Whatever discomfort households feel now, measure it against 2022, when annual inflation ran at roughly 8% and hit 9.1% (year over year) that June—the worst reading in four decades—while the national average for a gallon of gas that same month touched $5.01.

Today’s national average sits closer to $4.10.

The distance between those two figures is not nothing. You might say that it’s the distance between a genuine emergency and a genuine grievance, and that conflating the two serves no one but those who benefit from public panic.

That distance would narrow considerably, and the pain would deepen, if policymakers were to embrace wage, price, and rent controls as remedies for high costs. These proposals rest on a familiar premise: that government can improve economic outcomes by determining what workers, landlords, and businesses may charge. The history of such interventions suggests otherwise.

Among the clearest historical examples is Venezuela, once the wealthiest nation in Latin America. Its experience offers a cautionary illustration of what can happen when government attempts to substitute administrative judgments for the information conveyed by prices and markets.

Which returns us to the trouble: Beneath “when will it work” predictions lies a deeper and more flattering assumption: that somewhere in Washington sits a mind, or a model, capable of holding the whole of a $28 trillion economy in view and adjusting it like a recipe.

No such mind exists, and pretending otherwise is the beginning of every policy failure worth remembering. The honest posture toward an economy this large is not mastery but humility, a recognition that the most any government can do is clear away what it has needlessly piled in the road and then wait, as the rest of us must, to see what an unmanaged multitude of free people choose to build.

The new class of Democrat candidates are "full-tilt socialists" who want to do away with "rugged individualism," Rep. Jim Jordan said on Breitbart News Daily.

The post Exclusive – Rep. Jim Jordan: These Democrats Are ‘Full-Tilt Socialists’ Who Want to Do Away with ‘Rugged Individualism’ appeared first on Breitbart.

Friday on FNC's "Hannity," long-time legal commentator Nancy Grace said that Kevin Reddington should have been held in contempt of court for his antics following the Lindsay Clancy mistrial announcement in Plymouth, MA.

The post Nancy Grace: Lindsay Clancy Defense Attorney ‘Should Have Been Held in Contempt’ appeared first on Breitbart.

New York socialist congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier (D) is continuing to advocate for socialism, a leftist system that is threatening the United States.

The post WATCH — New York Democrat Candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier: ‘I’m Very Excited’ to ‘Build Black Socialism’ appeared first on Breitbart.

Minnesotans are "embarrassed" by the fraud running rampant in their state, Minnesota Republican Senate candidate Michele Tafoya said during an appearance on Breitbart News Daily.

The post Exclusive — GOP Senate Candidate Michele Tafoya: Minnesotans Are ‘Embarrassed’ by Rampant Fraud appeared first on Breitbart.

U.S. — As news broke that the murder trial of Lindsay Clancy would end in a mistrial, Heaven released a statement reminding everyone that justice is still ultimately in the hands of God.

TUSCALOOSA, AL — After putting on a superb performance in the season opener, young college football star Davis Mack began worrying that he could wind up in the NFL Draft and be forced to take a massive pay cut.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — American voters overwhelmingly passed a federal ballot initiative yesterday ordering the removal of Massachusetts from the United States.

The U.S. Department of State is unambiguously stating that the Chinese Communist Party is committing genocide.

On Aug. 27, this writer sent some questions to the State Department Office of Press Operations through its online portal for media inquiries. One of these questions was: “Has the State Department concluded that China is continuing to engage in genocide in 2026?”

On Sept. 1, a State Department spokesperson provided a written answer via email: “The United States determined the CCP is committing genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and members of other ethnic and religious groups in Xinjiang.”

On Jan. 19, 2021, the last full day of President Donald Trump’s first term, then-Secretary of State Michael Pompeo, as this column has noted before, issued a written statement that was headlined “Determination of the Secretary of State on Atrocities in Xinjiang.”

“The United States of America has led the world in holding the perpetrators of the most heinous human rights abuses accountable,” Pompeo said in this statement.

“We do so because it is right,” he said.

“[A]fter careful examination of the available facts,” said Pompeo, “I have determined that the PRC [People’s Republic of China], under the direction and control of the CCP, has committed genocide against the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang. I believe this genocide is ongoing, and that we are witnessing the systematic attempt to destroy Uyghurs by the Chinese party-state.”

In this statement—issued more than five years ago—Pompeo called for this to stop.

“The United States,” he said, “calls upon the PRC immediately to release all arbitrarily detained persons and abolish its system of internment, detention camps, house arrest and forced labor; cease coercive population control measures, including forced sterilizations, forced abortion, forced birth control, and the removal of children from their families; end all torture and abuse in places of detention; end the persecution of Uyghurs and other members of religious and ethnic minority groups in Xinjiang and elsewhere in China, and afford Uyghurs and other persecuted minorities the freedom to travel and emigrate.”

Since Pompeo made this statement, each of the State Department’s five annual reports on human rights practices in China (covering calendar years 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024) has stated that China is committing genocide.

“Genocide and crimes against humanity occurred during the year in China against predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and members of other ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang,” said the first sentence of the 2024 report.

The State Department has not yet released its human rights report on China that will cover calendar year 2025. “The Department is actively working on the Human Rights Report covering global conditions in 2025 and expects to publish it later this year,” a State Department spokesperson informed this writer.

The department’s report covering 2024 described the CCP’s actions in Xinjiang.

“Government targeting of ethnic and religious minorities in Xinjiang with intensified coercive population control measures resulted in plummeting birth rates in Xinjiang after 2018 when authorities increased coercive population control measures, including forced abortions, forced sterilizations, involuntary intrauterine device insertions, and pregnancy checks occurring at detention centers in the region and targeting minority groups, primarily Uyghurs and ethnic Kazakhs,” said the report.

The report also said that “[s]ignificant human rights issues” in China included “credible reports of: arbitrary or unlawful killings; disappearances; torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment; involuntary or coercive medical or psychological practices; arbitrary arrest and detention by the government including, since 2017, of more than one million Uyghurs and members of other predominantly Muslim minority groups in extrajudicial internment camps [and] prisons.”

Former President Joe Biden, as this column has noted before, met with CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping three times during his four-year term. But there is no evidence that Biden ever confronted Xi on the genocide that Xi’s regime has been perpetrating—and that Biden’s State Department cited in its annual human rights reports.

Trump, thus far, has had seven meetings with Xi. The latest was in May, when he traveled to Beijing accompanied by a number of major American business leaders, as this column has noted before. These included, among others, then-Apple CEO Tim Cook, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg, Citi CEO Jane Fraser, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon, Meta President Dina Powell McCormick, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

The genocide being perpetrated by Xi’s regime was not an issue at this summit. In a Truth Social posting made as the group departed for Beijing, Trump said, “I will be asking President Xi, a Leader of extraordinary distinction, to ‘open up’ China so that these brilliant people can work their magic, and help bring the People’s Republic to an even higher level! In fact, I promise, that when we are together, which will be in a matter of hours, I will make that my very first request.”

Xi is now scheduled to meet with Trump at the White House on Sept. 24. The first thing Trump should tell Xi at that meeting is that if China does not immediately cease engaging in genocide, the United States will cease engaging in trade with China.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.