The Patriot Post® · Thursday Short Cuts

Insight: “No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.” —Edmund Burke (1729-1797)

For the record: “There reportedly are more than 300 million privately owned guns floating around the USA. If just 1 percent of those guns were used to kill someone every year, there would be 3 million gun homicides in the United States. In 2014, according to the FBI, there were 8,124 gun homicides. It’s still way too many, and most of them are in cities or states with strict gun laws. But if my calculator is correct, that means 0.00002708 per cent of the guns in America were used in 2014 to kill someone and .99998 percent were not. I don’t know how many knives and sharp objects there are in the United States, but in 2014 about 1,561 of them were used to murder someone. Is an executive action on knife control next on the president’s emotional bucket list? Clubs and hammers? Didn’t Cain kill Abel with a rock?” —Michael Reagan

Non Compos Mentis: “Our permissive gun laws are a manifestation of racism, an evil that, in other contexts, most gun-control advocates see as a fundamental threat to American society. … If we fail to oppose with equal passion and vigor the relentless political pressure of (mostly white) gun advocates, we force a large number of black citizens to live with the constant threat of gun violence. We’re in effect letting the Second Amendment trump the Fourteenth Amendment, implicitly preferring the right of gun ownership to the right of black people to live free from fear.” —Notre Dame professor Gary Gutting in a New York Times op-ed (Oddly enough, gun control started out as a way to prevent blacks from owning firearms.)

We do too: “I regret it every day.” —Joe Biden reminiscing on his decision to forgo another White House run

Dezinformatsia: “Hillary doesn’t want to be a socialist. … That title would kill her in the general, I assume, she’s thinking. And it’s probably not at all true. I think she is a centrist Democrat in my own thinking.” —Chris Matthews

Clinton’s war on women: “I was 35 years old when Bill Clinton, Ark. Attorney General raped me and Hillary tried to silence me. I am now 73… it never goes away.” —Juanita Broaddrick

And last… “Gun control people don’t need townhalls where they explain their views. They need introspection on why they’ve been failing for decades.” —Frank Fleming