Why they kill—The real solution to mass shootings

Everybody’s searching for answers in wake of the latest school shooting in Florida. The gun-grabbers not withstanding, I believe most people genuinely want to stop the shootings. We just have different ideas of how to get there. However, it’s becoming obvious that the debate is focused on the wrong thing.

Naturally, anytime there’s a shooting the emphasis is going to be on the gun. It’s funny how the object of the murder is never the issue when it’s not a gun. When there’s a stabbing, the target is never on the knife. When some crazy person runs people over in a vehicle, the focus is never on the vehicle. Let me demonstrate why the issue here should not be guns, then we’ll move on to the real problem.

There are over 300 million guns in America. Whether or not you like that fact, it’s still a fact. There are about 30,000 gun deaths a year. That includes homicide and suicide. That means that 0.01 percent of guns are used for evil. 

If you think the fact that America has more guns per capita than any country on Earth makes us the murder capital of the world, think again. Even though we have 101 guns for every 100 people (you read that correctly), we're only 99th for murders. Honduras has only about 6 guns per 100 people and they have the highest murder rate in the world.  Obviously, the problem is not the guns.

The path that led me to the epicenter of the problem is interesting. I knew all the facts that went into my epiphany. I had just never aligned them this way before. A friend of mine once joked on the radio while interviewing a hit songwriter that he knew all those words. Just not in that order. That’s sort of how I felt.

I don’t know if you know this, but back in 1975, the Supreme Court ruled that you could not be held in a mental institution against your will unless you were a danger to yourself or others. I had known that fact because it’s why the homeless population exploded in the ‘80s. The liberals blamed it on Reagan. Kenneth Donaldson sued his doctor and the mental hospital claiming he had been held against his will. He won.

I also knew that multiple victim shootings seemed to have exploded in the last couple of decades. I wanted to know when that acceleration began to see if I could draw any conclusions. Statisticians have an expression. “Correlation does not imply causation.” The homeless explosion is an example of that. Just because homelessness grew dramatically during the Reagan administration doesn’t mean Reagan had anything to do with it. However, correlation and causation are oftentimes related.

In order for this to be a fair comparison, I looked at the mass shootings in the 43 years prior to 1975 and the mass shootings in the 43 years after 1975, which would bring us up to 2018. I excluded gang killings for obvious reasons. I also excluded robberies and terrorist attacks. These aren’t motiveless crimes. This also doesn’t include U.S. territories nor does it include serial killers. We’re trying to figure out why crazies are randomly killing people in the United States of America.

Here’s what I learned in the course of my research. In the 43 years prior to 1975, there were 4 mass shootings resulting in 29 deaths. That's an average of about one per decade. In the 43 years after 1975, there were (get ready) 150 mass shootings resulting in 864 deaths. That's an average of 38 mass shootings every ten years. If that’s not startling enough, in the 43 years since 1975, there have only been 6 years when there wasn’t a mass shooting.

People want to point to the breakdown of the family unit or increased use of psychotropic drugs. They could certainly be contributing factors. Especially when it comes to psychotropic drugs. One has to wonder if, in the absence of being able to commit someone to a mental hospital, we over-medicate them instead. That's certainly a possibility. Everyone involved in these multiple-victim shootings was mentally unstable. It's distinctly possible that they were also on medication. Whether it was the mental illness or the medication that caused them to become violent is the age-old chicken or egg question. 

However, one would be hard-pressed to discount the Donaldson ruling in 1975 as a major turning point. There are simply too many dangerously mentally ill people roaming the streets. By the time they actually kill it's too late. That doesn't mean we need to start locking up anybody and everybody somebody deems crazy. However, in every one of these mass shootings there were danger signs in the killers that people simply chose to ignore. Or maybe they had no choice since our justice system now makes it extremely difficult to act. But act we must unless we want to continue the carnage.

Imagine if everyone who knew the Florida school killer was a threat had acted. Not only would 17 people still be alive but we could possibly help this disturbed person recover. Instead, we act as though it's someone else's problem. Until it becomes the nation's problem. Right now, mental competency hearings are usually held before someone goes on trial for murder. What a difference it would make if we had mental competency hearings before they kill. Can you imagine the Florida school shooter would've made it through a competency hearing and still been allowed to buy a gun based on all we know now? 

Let's get the dangerously mentally ill off the streets before they kill. That is where our efforts should be concentrated.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

A 'Universal Basic Income' will trap people in poverty

The town of Stockton, California is trying an experiment. They’re giving every low-income resident a “universal basic income” of $500 per month. There’s no catch, no obligation. Mayor Michael Tubbs believes it’s a way to end poverty. I’m betting right here and now that he’s wrong.

The Economic Security Project is contributing $1 million so they can gather data to see if this really works. What they’ll find is Stockton will become a magnet for people who don’t want to work. Bums are what we used to call them before the PC police drove that word from our lexicon. But bums are what they’ll see.

From the Los Angeles Times

The irony is some Silicon Valley tech moguls are pushing the UBI. This in the competitive world where meritocracy is how one gets ahead. Innovation and hard work drive the valley. Why would they think giving anyone a UBI would be the answer? Guilt. These people have gotten so rich so fast that they feel guilty about it. They believe that “giving back” means welfare. That’s exactly what people who are stuck in poverty don’t need.

How many times have you seen a guy standing at the off ramp with a sign claiming he’ll work for food? And how many times have you seen a motorist offer him work? Never. They give them money. The person rarely buys food with it. He or she uses the money to buy whatever substance that’s pushed them to the side of the road in the first place. They had it right with their sign. If they actually worked for food they wouldn’t be on the street. But most aren’t willing to work. That’s the problem. And offering someone a UBI will only exacerbate the problem.

Los Angeles’ homeless population has exploded in recent years. Why? Because they’ve made themselves a magnet for the homeless. The county of Los Angeles now spends over $1 billion a year managing homelessness. One of the brilliant ideas they’ve come up with is tiny homes for the homeless. I’m not kidding. There’s an organization called My Tiny House Project LA. They build cracker box houses for the homeless. Right now they’re mad at the city for not providing enough space to put these ridiculous little dog houses. They actually think that solves the problem.

I know this may sound counter-intuitive, but homeless people aren’t homeless because they don’t have homes. They’re homeless because they don’t have jobs. There are myriad reasons why they don’t have jobs. Until we get at that problem we’ll never solve homelessness. 

Many of these people are mentally ill. You can thank a judge back during the Carter era for turning them out on the streets. The rest mostly have substance abuse problems. Putting them in a tiny house is not going to solve either of those problems.

For the mentally ill we need to get them mental health care. And not just a diagnosis and a thirty-day supply of Xanax and put them back on the streets. Many of these people need to be institutionalized. Until we change the laws and overrule that court back in the ‘70s they will continue to roam the streets without proper mental health care.

As for the addicts, there’s only one solution and that is to get off the drugs or alcohol. That’s only going to happen when that person decides they’ve hit rock bottom and they want the help. Until then, giving them a UBI is only going to prolong their misery.

Stockton, unfortunately, will judge their success by how many people they suck into the government system.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

FISA memo blows the lid off liberal corruption

Well, what an interesting turn of events. The whole “Trump colluded with the Russians” brouhaha has boomeranged. The hunters have become the hunted. And is it not interesting how frantic the Democrats were in keeping a lid on the FISA memo? This is what I call the cheating girlfriend syndrome. (Sorry, ladies. Feel free to substitute cheating boyfriend. It’s just that I’ve never dated a boy. How last century of me.)

The cheating girlfriend syndrome goes as follows. Your girlfriend is super suspicious. Every girl you even glance at has her giving you the third degree. How do you know her? I don’t. Why were you looking at her? I was just looking around. She happened to be in my line of sight. Are you sleeping with her? No.

Andrew McCabe

The reason she’s asking so many questions is because she’s the one sleeping around.

The Democrats have been accusing President Trump of colluding with the Russians for 18 months now. There’s been not one shred of evidence to back it up. Now the story is beginning to take shape. They were colluding with the Russians. Let me explain.

We now know that Hillary Clinton paid for the Trump dossier by, in essence, laundering money through her attorney to Fusion GPS. We also know that Christopher Steele, the former British agent who authored the dossier, got his info from who? The Russians. It’s hard to know who was zooming who, but somebody was lying. It could’ve been Steele making it all up, or it could’ve been the Russians feeding him a line of baloney. One thing seems certain. Hillary must’ve known it was a load of bovine scatology or she would’ve used the dirt in one of the presidential debates. Instead, she feed it to gullible media folks and politicians like John McCain. Anybody who hated Trump.

It was also fed to the FBI. That’s where it gets interesting. They used it to obtain FISA warrants to spy on Trump and his campaign. Surely they knew it was bogus. Either that or we have the Keystone Cops in charge at the Bureau. If they didn’t tell the FISA court that their warrant requests were based, at least in part, on the Trump dossier, of which they couldn’t confirm the contents, then we’re only left with one theory. They were crooked instead of incompetent.

If they used their vast power to spy on a political campaign then Watergate looks like jaywalking by comparison. If they also used their vast power to try and unseat a sitting president then we have treason. I don’t use that term lightly. It was an attempted coup d’état. 

As I’ve written here before, I’m sure those involved convinced themselves and each other that it was the best thing for the country. Changing governments by illegal means is never good for this country. Some tinhorn dictatorship? Sure. But we have a civilized and proven way of transferring power that’s worked for over 200 years. It’s called the vote. Problem is the vote didn’t go their way. Too bad. The vote didn’t go my way in 2008 or 2012. Heck, it didn’t go my way in 1992 or 1996. It would never dawn on me that fabricating a story of collusion with a foreign government would be the proper course of action.

The question is where do we go from here? There needs to be a top-down purging of hostile elements in our intelligence community. I don’t mean everybody who voted for Hillary. I mean everybody who thinks the end justifies the means in removing Donald Trump from office.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

Why the Schumer Shutdown backfired

We all know how the government shutdowns usually go. Democrats demand something unreasonable. Republicans awkwardly try to push their agenda forward. The left-wing media act as the PR firm for the Democrats. The Republicans get blamed. The government shutdown is over. Not this time.

What was different? Several things. First of all, trying to tie the DACA demands to a continuing resolution to keep the government functioning was transparent. DACA doesn’t expire until March 5. There was no need to throw it in the mix of a spending bill. Times past, however, the Democrats would’ve gotten away with it. They didn’t this time.

One of the reasons is the brilliant framing of the argument by President Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget. Mick Mulvaney so cleverly labeled this particular government shutdown ‘The Schumer Shutdown.’ The alliteration was irresistible to even the left-wing media who picked up the phrase and ran with it.

There was also President Trump himself. Nancy Pelosi cackled that the president had nothing to do with the negotiations. He had everything to do with them. Speaker Paul Ryan said as much himself. He said they were passing a bill that Trump would sign. In reality, the person who had nothing to do with the negotiations was Pelosi.

After the Schumer Shutdown took hold in the minds of the American people it was simply a matter of time. The longer the government stayed closed, the worse it became for the Democrats. They were stunned. They’ve never lost one of these. No matter the outcome, they were always able to pin it on the Republicans. This time they couldn’t.

Had we had any other president it might have been business as usual. If Trump knows one thing it’s how to negotiate. What the Democrats failed to recognize is he doesn’t have to have DACA. To Trump, it’s a bargaining chip. To the Democrats it’s everything. What they don’t know is they already have it.

The one thing the Senate Republicans did screw up was pushing the continuing budget resolution down the road only three weeks. That pushes it up near the deadline for DACA and Democrats will surely try to tie the two together again. That’s why having Trump involved is so important.

Remember where this whole Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals thing started. It was a ploy by President Obama to put a different face on illegal immigration. He could find some girl who was dragged over here at six months old who spoke perfect English and was the valedictorian of her school. That was supposed to erase the image of the tattooed MS-13 gang member who was butchering people in the streets for kicks.

The DACA folks (and they’re not kids any longer) were never in danger of being deported. Think about it. The only person who could’ve deported them was Obama. And he issued an order to protect them. From whom? Himself? No, it was all a publicity stunt to get the American people to believe they were in imminent danger of being deported. The Democrats have told that lie so long they now believe it.

So, Trump wants the wall. He wants an end to chain migration. He wants an end to the lottery visa. In order to get it he’s willing to give the Democrats something they already have. As I’ve said, it’s like selling New York the Brooklyn Bridge. They already own it.

The cards have already been dealt to give Trump what he wants. The House and Senate Republicans have to just not screw it up.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

Trump's comment about 'sh**hole countries' was correct

We’ve had some time to digest the furor over President Trump’s alleged comments about certain countries as “sh*%holes.” Now it’s time to learn from the experience.

First, the president denies using that particular term. That may make this whole discussion moot if it were ever possible to prove it either way. Several lawmakers back up his account. The usual Trump detractors have feigned outrage over the mere use of the language when they’ve called him far worse. This was a private conversation in the Oval Office about a pressing issue in this country. Immigration—both legal and illegal—is something that needs to be tackled. Having participants in the debate go tattletale to the Washington Post is counterproductive to solving the problem. They sound like little babies who are only concerned about scoring political points and not really doing anything constructive.

But let’s concentrate on the terminology itself. We all know what the president is alleged to have said. Is it true? Without question it is. Haiti, for example, has a poverty rate near sixty percent. It certainly qualifies for what might henceforth be a new informal State Department designation. According to the UN, of the twenty poorest nations on earth, fourteen are in Africa.

Exhibit A in Trump's immigration argument

Critics of the president’s choice of words immediately called it—and him—racist. These are basically the same type of people who’ve stood idly by for generations ignoring the conditions in these very countries. If they haven’t ignored them they’ve applied liberal solutions that have only made matters worse. They blame “colonialism” for the plight of these countries. Most were subjects of either the French or the British. That argument doesn’t hold water. Hong Kong was a former possession of the British Empire. So was Canada. And you may remember a little possession of the British by the name of the United States of America.

The widespread poverty in these now-designated “sh*%holes” is due largely to the tin-horn dictatorships or communist regimes that followed their independence. The liberal solution is to redistribute resources from the countries that have figured this out to the countries who haven’t. Naturally, those resources are bottled up by the same despots who’ve made sure the rest of their country remains poor.

That’s not what the meeting in the Oval Office was about. It was about immigrants from these countries. President Trump’s contention is we shouldn’t be importing people who are prone to either be criminals or wards of the state or both. And he’s exactly right. Immigration to this country should be like a job interview. A State Department official should look across the desk at the applicant and ask him or her what they can contribute to this great country of ours. That doesn’t mean they have to be doctors. It means they need to be able to add something positive when they arrive, not drag the country down.

Yes, there are exceptions for refugees, but as we’ve seen with the recent El Salvadoran flap, some refugees come and never go home. These folks came to escape an earthquake in 2001 and they’re still here.

Check out Roy Beck’s gum ball illustration from Numbers USA on YouTube some time. You’ll understand that we can’t possibly take in everyone who wants to come here. Nor should we. Many of these people should remain in their own countries to bring pressure to bear on the sinister forces that keep them in poverty.

Donald Trump, in his crude but effective style, has finally brought the issue to the fore. We can either call it racist or address it.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

The real story of Fusion GPS is beginning to emerge

I’ve never bought this notion that the Russians hacked the DNC servers. To me, the story carries about as much weight as the Trump dossier. As we dig deeper into this bizarre story, we find the two are indubitably intertwined. 

The now-debunked dossier accuses Russian businessman Aleksej Gubarev of hacking into the DNC computers. Gubarev is suing BuzzFeed News for publishing the dossier. In such a lawsuit, the defense is allowed to provide documentation to defend itself. Surely Gubarev wouldn’t be suing if the civil lawsuit risked exposing him to criminal charges.

Fusion GPS, the company Hillary Clinton hired to compile the dossier, is suing to try and stop a subpoena from Gubarev’s lawyers seeking everything they have related to the dossier. Think about this for a moment. If the dossier were really legit there’s no way Fusion would be suing to stop documentation that would confirm its legitimacy. Quite the contrary. They would be providing all the evidence they have to the press to make their case against Trump.

The most powerful argument against the veracity of the Russian hacking story is the fact that no U.S. intelligence agency has ever inspected the DNC servers. Is that not incredible? James Comey said they were taking the word of a company called CrowdStrike. CrowdStrike is company that protects clients from data breaches. The mission statement on their website states, “We don’t have a mission statement—we are on a mission to protect our customers from breaches.” Their most high-profile client was the DNC. It’s unlikely they would be bragging that their only mission is to stop data breaches when they couldn’t stop the data breach at the DNC. In fact, it’s unlikely they would still be in business if that were really the case.

I believe the whole Russia hacking story was a cover-up for the real story that this was an inside job from a disgruntled Bernie Sanders supporter. The fact that the dossier that supposedly uncovered the Russian breach has now been largely discredited adds credence to that theory. In fact, there’s no evidence at all that the Russians hacked the DNC other than what we’re being told by CrowdStrike, a company founded and run by Hillary supporters.

What’s even scarier is the FBI may have used the Trump dossier to obtain a FISA warrant to spy on Carter Page, a man described as a Trump advisor. If the dossier is what FBI agent Peter Strzok described as an “insurance policy” in case Trump got elected president, we have a disturbing conspiracy that goes way beyond campaign dirty tricks.

And if the Russians didn’t really hack into the DNC servers is there even a Trump/Russian collusion story to investigate? No. The breached servers is the pretense used by the FBI and now the Mueller team to investigate Russian collusion. Otherwise, they have nothing. That means that the entire affair is predicated on information taken from a piece of paid-for campaign propaganda from Hillary Clinton that is demonstrably false.

Strzok was the point man on the Trump dossier at the FBI. He was also the guy who facilitated Hillary being let off the hook for the illegal computer server scandal. And he was the man who entrapped Michael Flynn. He’s also a fierce political partisan who had such animus against Donald Trump that he just might do anything to bring him down. And he conveniently found himself in a position on the Mueller team to do just that. But only if we take the basic premise of hacking as fact. Which we can’t.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

We could use some global warming about now

The new year came in like a lion. The average temperature in the contiguous 48 states was eleven degrees. Over 85 percent of the country was below freezing. Nearly a third was below zero. For much of the U.S. east of the Rocky Mountains, temperatures were about 30 degrees below normal. Omaha, Nebraska hit minus 20, breaking a 130-year-old record. Other records were shattered all across the nation. Now, I understand that weather is not climate, but this whole global warming narrative is becoming more and more ridiculous.

From KING5.com

The U.K.’s Metro newspaper announced with glee that a mini Ice Age could hit by 2030 and “save us from global warming.” Save us from global warming? How many folks would love a little global warming about now? According to Science Daily, the cold kills about 20 times more people than the heat. Think about that for a moment. If we really care about saving lives then these climate change zealots should be praying for global warming. Oh, that’s right. They don’t pray. Well, maybe to a graven image of Al Gore.

It’s funny how the Branch Algorians are nowhere to be found when the temperatures hit single digits. Yes, there are a few die-hards braving the cold and the wind to preach the gospel of Al. The Guardian claimed 2017 was the hottest year on record without an El Niño. Of course, when you dig down you learn they’re using surface temperature data that we now know is not only highly inaccurate due to human error but has been purposely manipulated by NOAA and other so-called scientific institutions.

But authors of a study defend NOAA’s fudging of temperature data. “Stations have moved to different locations over the past 150 years, most more than once,” they write. “They have changed instruments from mercury thermometers to electronic sensors, and have changed the time they take temperature measurements from afternoon to morning. Cities have grown up around stations, and some weather stations are not ideally located. All of these issues introduce inconsistencies into the temperature record.”

Isn’t this exactly what those of us who argue against using surface temperatures have been saying for years? Surface temperatures are too unreliable to be used as a true picture of climate. Yet this study argues that NOAA should not only use them but manipulate them as they see fit. NOAA, like many U.S. agencies, has been infiltrated by global warming zealots. We’re witnessing a scattering of so-called scientists and policymakers from the EPA now that President Trump is demanding hard science rather than hysteria.

The hard science is the satellite temperature data. We’ve been measuring surface and ocean temperature via satellites since 1979. What it shows is virtually no warming since 1979.

KING5-TV in Seattle greeted readers of their webpage with this headline: “Yes, it’s freezing. But climate change is still real.” They seemed to be trying to convince themselves more than their readers. They dragged out a Miami meteorologist who claimed the rest of the world was warmer than usual “with the warmest readings in the poles.” So, I checked the temperature for the poles. Minus 28 Celsius at the North Pole. The average for January is minus 24. At the South Pole, as of this writing, it was minus 29 Celsius. The average for January is minus 31.

The KING5 piece warns that climate is “the average weather conditions that prevail” at any given location. Agreed. Then if satellite data show we haven’t warmed globally in 40 years then the science is settled. Stay warm. 

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.