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SURPRISE, SURPRISE, ANOTHER LIBERAL PROGRAM DOESN'T
WORK IN YET ANOTHER PLACE
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One-year results of the confiscation
of 640,381 personal firearms in Australia:
OBSERVABLE FACTS AFTER 12 MONTHS OF DATA:
Australia-wide, homicides are up 3.2%.
Australia-wide, assaults are up 8.6%.
Australia-wide, armed-robberies are up 44%. (yes,
FORTY-FOUR PERCENT)
In the state of Victoria, homicides-with-firearms
are up 300%!
There has been a dramatic increase in break-ins
and assaults on the elderly
At the time of the ban, the Prime Minister said,
"self-defense is not a reason for owning a
firearm." Like all leftists, he insisted that
the police would take of that.
Check with any social science faculty at any college
or university, and you will find at least 90% of
them will insist that the Prime Minister is right.
We pay them to be our experts, you know.
In 1996, the head of the Australian gun registration
bureau had testified that gun control "has
not prevented or solved a single crime," and
called for the abolition of his agency and his job.
They ignored him and listened to the "intellectuals."
As always, what the "intellectuals" recommended
was a disaster. (Please see November 21, 1998 article,
"It Doesn't Work!!!.")
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WHY IS THE
AIR FORCE IN UNIFORM?
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One of the most profitable results
of secession is going to be the fact that we will
be able to reexamine all of the mistakes the United
States takes for granted. In our new political system,
we will be free to improve on all of them. I discussed
some of these improvements earlier (See March 6
article, "How Tomorrow's
Confederacy Will Deal With Tomorrow's Problems."
)
At least one such major improvement occurred when
we seceded last time. The Confederate Constitution
contained great advances over that of the United
States. Improvements happen when you get a fresh
start. This is an excellent answer to use when people
talk about the DANGERS of a new nation. One should
reply by talking about the IMPROVEMENTS a new start
can provide.
The United States has great difficulty finding enough
volunteers for its armed services. But a new country
might be able to avoid this difficulty by being
free of the POLITICAL restrictions that our present
armed services have inherited over the years.
Under the Reagan Administration, I was a Special
Assistant to the Director of the Office of Personnel
Management. Under the Civil Service Reform Act of
1978, the OPM Director replaced the entire Civil
Service Commission.
He is responsible to the president for the Federal
civil service.
In Reagan's time, the civil service included about
1.4 million white-collar personnel and about 800,000
blue-collar personnel. Very roughly half of these
civilian employees worked for the Department of
Defense. I discovered that civilian workers could
do many jobs better than uniformed personnel. Unfortunately
for our national defense, the division between civilian
and uniformed personnel is determined by politics,
rather than by our real defense needs.
Under the present set-up, it is the lobbies, not
military needs, that determine the number of uniformed
personnel in each service. The former members of
each armed service constitute a powerful lobby.
Military advisors, who are drawn equally from each
force, also have enormous influence on decisions.
The result of this is that each of the major armed
forces must, because of all that lobbying, be given
about the same amount of funding. By the same token,
each force must have about the same number of people
in uniform.
But in the real world, is this rational? In a changing
world, does it makes sense for each armed service
to be about the same size, with very much the same
number of uniformed personnel? It is for POLITICAL
reasons that the number of uniformed personnel in
the Air Force must be about the same as the number
of uniformed personnel in the Army and in the Navy.
But if you think about it, this makes no sense.
The basic function of the Army is to put enlisted
men into combat, as well as officers. In the Air
Force, almost none of the enlisted personnel go
into combat. Their jobs are technical. They keep
the planes flying, and it is only the flying portion
of the officer corps that goes into combat.
In other words, everyone in the Army should be young
and physically fit for combat. No one should be
allowed to enlist in the Army unless he is young
and fit. But the job of most people in the Air Force
is entirely different.
Think of it this way: If you were a combat pilot,
who would you prefer to have taking care of your
plane? Would you like to have your plane serviced
by a twenty-year-old who got a quick crash course
in airplanes and is physically fit for combat? Or
would you rather that the person taking care of
your aircraft be a forty-year-old man who is very
experienced? The young man in uniform is a LOT more
expensive than the forty-year-old mechanic. There
are lifelong benefits provided to everyone who has
served in uniform. There is the cost of recruiting
and training a new fit young man every time the
last one's four-year enlistment runs out.
And there is another difficulty involved in putting
so many Air Force personnel in uniform. Every person
who enlists in the Air Force is a person who would
have been able to enlist in the Army or the Navy
or the Marines. A young person usually decides to
join the service and then picks the branch he will
serve in. If we cut back on the number of Air Force
personnel in uniform, almost all of the Air Force
recruits would be available for service in the other
branches. The shortage of volunteers would be reduced,
and it may even disappear.
Exactly how many Air Force uniformed
personnel should be replaced by non-uniformed personnel?
Granted that I am supposed to be an expert in everything,
but even I would need a little time to study that
question. But the general point I am making is obvious
when it is stated without the lobbyists watching.
The simple fact is that the mission of each armed
force is different, so it doesn't make sense for
each of them to have almost the same number of personnel
in uniform.
Already, each of America's armed forces has hundreds
of thousands of uniformed personnel and hundreds
of thousands of civilian employees. All I am saying
is that the proportion of each should change according
to each service's particular mission.
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