Posse Incitatus

Keeping Up Appearances

In many ways, the Obama administration was like a financially broke, alcoholic wife abuser who drives a beautiful car, charms co-workers with his humor and charisma, and is loved by women because he's so handsome and such a nice guy.

Little do the suckers know that at home, he's a foul-mouthed drunk who curses at and strikes his wife as they fight over a swamp of credit card debt and wonder when the re-po man will come to claim their BMW.

President Obama's cult of worshippers went ga-ga when Obamacare was enacted. "Oh, he said he'd provide healthcare for everyone, and he did!" Never mind that "universal healthcare" meant throwing millions into the inadequate Medicaid program, that millions of families could not afford to pay $5,000 per year for a policy, plus a $4,000 annual deductible, and many people couldn't keep their healthcare plan or doctor as the administration's legion of liars had promised.

Or how about "ending" the war in Iraq: Just pull our troops out (DAMN the consequences!) and lay claim to being a peacemaker. ALL RIGHT!!! The Iraq War is over! That was the sentiment of Obama's pom-pom wavers in late 2011 as the troop withdrawal had nearly been completed. We all know who filled the vacuum: The vile Islamofascists of ISIS.

There are other examples, too, of the O-man seeking to satisfy the imagery and idealistic thinking of his supporters. But one in particular may be reasonably blamed for the Parkland, Fla., school shootings of Feb. 14 that killed 17 and wounded 14: the PROMISE program (Preventing Recidivism through Opportunities, Mentoring, Interventions, Support, and Education).

In 2014, the administration issued school guidelines that claimed minority students are "disproportionately impacted" by disciplinary actions such as suspensions and expulsions. This, the solons of the White House believed, constituted discrimination against minority and low-income students because many of these troubled individuals ended up being arrested and sent to prison a few years down the line. So that old, liberal bugaboo -- disparate impact -- played a role in preventing Nikolas Cruz from being arrested and prevented from harming others.

Despite behavioral problems caused by something we've addressed repeatedly in this blog -- broken, dysfunctional families and no father figure in the home -- kids under the program often face minimal consequences for misbehaving and being disruptive. Indeed, schools have financial incentives to go easy on the little hellions. While the program is not specifically intended for minorities (Cruz is white), it impacts them more than Caucasians  simply because there is a higher percentage of blacks and hispanics from lower economic households and single-parent homes. It's been well-documented that Cruz had been in a lot of trouble for years before his killing spree, and deputies had been to his house regarding domestic disturbances nearly two dozen times.

As Rush Limbaugh has pointed out innumerable times, liberals care a heck of a lot more about good intentions and pie-in-the-sky idealism than they do actual results. As long as your heart is in the right place, THAT is what counts. Never mind if people die and are wounded as a result. No wonder Michael Savage frequently calls liberalism a mental disorder.

 

Did Obama send the FBI after college basketball coaches because they broke his bracket?

The title of this post is only a little tongue in cheek.  The fact remains that while the FBI was studiously ignoring please from concerned citizens to stop a known lunatic from shooting up his school, they were continuing to focus on a much greater threat to the United States:

NCAA basketball.

Thanks to the tireless work of our diligent law enforcement experts, the NCAA was able to determine that Louisville was - get this - an NBA factory that paid to get its players.  The FBI provided the crucial missing evidence to get Louisville's 2013 banner taken away and the scandal also cost corner-cutting coach Rick Pitino his job.

All that for only 17 dead teenagers!  Quite the bargain.

Do I exaggerate?

I don't think so.  Investigative resources are finite.  The task of the leadership is therefore to prioritize among the competing claims for those resources.

For some strange reason, the FBI decided that the cozy relationship between athletic apparel makers, NBA talent scouts and big-time coaches comprised a criminal conspiracy to deprive the American people of good brackets come March.

One of those Americans was then-president Barack Obama.  He wasn't much interested in things like fleet readiness or the Chinese hacking into the Office of Personnel Management's files, but he was obsessed with March Madness.  Did one of the coaches under investigation break his brackets?

If we know one thing about Barack Obama it is that his pettiness knows no bounds.  We also know that FBI Director Jim Comey would do whatever was asked of him to curry favor with his boss.  The Secretary of State is auctioning off uranium for Russian donations to her foundation?  No problem.

Classified documents on an unsecure, unauthorized private server?  We'll fix that!  Comey's ethics were entirely situational.

I'm sure one might argue that some of the bigger basketball payments ran afoul of tax law, but that's where the IRS is supposed to come in.

Of course they were too busy harassing conservatives and stonewalling the resulting investigation, so they simply had no people to spare.

To put it another way - if he was willing to break the law to send the IRS to attack his opponents, why wouldn't he use the FBI to target teams he didn't like? 

And if the price was a few more dead bodies, why that would just make the case for gun control, wouldn't it?  I mean, it's not like his Justice Dept. covered selling guns to Mexican drug cartels, right?

 

The Paradox of Big Government

Truncated dramatically, much of the propaganda foisted upon young, naive college students in the hallowed halls of academia boils down to Mussolini-style fascism. It is collectivist, statist, and socialist in nature.

"That's right, I SAID IT!" as Mark Levin barks after uttering a controversial or potentially inflammatory statement. While the left has, for decades, tried to equate American conservatives with Nazism, fascism, Hitler and Mussolini, the truth is that progressives and their agenda are almost exactly parallel to what the Nazis believed in.

Demonizing capitalists, favoring abortion on demand, advocating government healthcare, being anti-semetic, mocking Christianity and putting love of animals and the environment on a much higher pedestal than individual rights, the 2018 progressive chumps are doing Adolf Hitler's work. Yet many of them are simply ignorant dupes who don't know any better. It is a common occurrence that intelligent people remain ignorant because they are young, have not studied history and/or have been manipulated by teachers (professors) with a one-sided agenda. Make no mistake, I am not insulting or questioning the IQ or intellectual capabilities of today's millennials. But a high IQ and tremendous potential, if not used properly, are like the V-8 Hemi hooked up to a poorly designed transmission and a jerry-built drive train: It is hindered.

So what we have are tens of millions of people who have big faith in big government. They think a centralized government can be all-wise, all-knowing, benevolent. Now, we have seen plenty of examples where bloated government has let the people down, including with Obamacare and the Veterans Administration. But what really sticks out like a sore thumb is the failures of the FBI and intelligence community in general, not just with recent incidents such as the Parkland, Fla., school shootings, but going back decades.

The CIA, FBI and other agencies have failed time and time again to protect America and Americans. The Pearl Harbor Attack, Bay of Pigs, Iranian revolution, and collapse of the Soviet Union were some of the spectacular intelligence failures that occurred many years ago. But in more recent years we've had 9/11, alleged weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the Fort Hood shootings, the Boston Marathon bombing, and a series of mass shootings: San Bernardino, Calif.; the Pulse nightclub in Orlando; the black church in Charleston, S.C.,; the Sutherland Springs, Texas, church; the Parkland, Fla., high school, and other failures such as the Central Intelligence Agency letting Edward Snowden put top secret information from the National Security Agency on a flash drive, copy it and leak it to the world. (The malfeasance of local law enforcement officials in Parkland is a topic for another day, but it probably has more to do with PC sentiments and incompetence than unwieldy size and scope.)

In a nutshell, our federal government is an utter basket case when it comes to protecting us, and it seems the bigger it gets, and the more legislation that's passed, the worse things become. In some cases, it's simply the "one hand doesn't know what the other hand is doing" phenomenon common in large, disorganized entities. Sometimes, it involves incompetence or competing egos refusing to share information with each other. And often, as airline passengers will attest, law abiding citizens are demeaned with an anal regimen of inspections, procedures and pat-downs.

In the case of the FBI at Fort Hood, a crippling political correctness caused the deaths of 13 people and the woundings of 32 others. Officials knew for many months that Maj. Nidal Hasan was frequenting jihadist websites, communicating with Islamofascists overseas, and making threatening or menacing statements to fellow soldiers. Yet they chose to stand pat. (The uber-PC climate encouraged by the Obama administration undoubtedly had a lot to do with that.)

In the past few days, following the Parkland shootings, CNN and MSNBC have had a field day playing up protests and gun control demands by young, naive activists, including some who are Parkland students and were at the school when the shootings occurred. Incredibly, these folks think that passing more laws (in effect, making government larger and more intrusive), will make them safer. Sooner or later, you'd think it would occur to them that in the case of government effectiveness, bigger does not mean better.

 What we will observe in the coming months and years is the battle between reality and propaganda, the latter emboldened by idealism, emotion and imagery. It goes without saying, the news media will embrace the latter, and be too dense to realize the former.

The blood on the NRA's hands

Probably the most consistent tactic of the cultural left is projection.  This is where they accuse their enemies of the sins they themselves commit.

The ongoing attempt to smear the National Rifle Association seems to fall into this category.

The NRA is both a lobbying group and also a social organization.  It provides safety instruction to thousands of people from all walks of life.  I have benefited from this training, as have my children.

It is worth noting that no nominally "gun safety" organizations do this.  I have yet to see a Brady Center course on how to teach your children gun safety.  That's because they don't actually believe in gun safety.  Every time someone dies from a firearm, they use it as an excuse to ban them.

I find it telling that their new line of attack is that the blood of the victims is somehow the NRA's fault.

This allows them to ignore the colossal and repeated failures of law enforcement to do its core job of protecting lives.

The latest news reports just get worse regarding the Parkland shooting.  We already knew that the school's assigned police officer took no action to protect and defend the students.  Now we know that when reinforcements arrived, they too decided to let the killer have more time to complete his grisly task, opting to hide behind their cars rather than engage him.

If anyone besides the shooter is responsible for this atrocity, it is the Broward County Sheriff Department, which has covered itself in the stink of utter failure.

The timeline before the attack indicates multiple incidents where the shooter should have been arrested.  He committed violent assaults, sometimes with firearms.  The Broward constabulary bent over backwards not to do anything about this, which meant the killer get to keep his firearms.

The entire idea behind restricting the ownership of firearms is based on the notion that the restriction will be enforced.

Public records already show the shooter had committed multiple felonies, thus forfeiting his right to own firearms.

And the police did nothing about it.

If people wonder why the NRA persists with its statement that only "good guys with a gun" stop shooting it's because - yet again - law enforcement has failed and - yet again - it wants to face zero consequences for doing so.

There is no blood on the NRA's hands.  It has never endorsed the proposition that violent criminals should have firearms.  It has never advocated letting the police ignore their duty and allowing threats of violence go unanswered.  It has in fact strongly opposed these policies.

The blood of this atrocity is on the hands of the actual killer - and the people who violated their sworn duty to protect the community.

The fact that the sheriff had the gall to appear on television and call for additional gun laws knowing that his own deputies failed to enforce the ones we already have is utterly despicable.

So are the ghouls who use this failure as an excuse to push their pet agenda.

I wonder how these people can even look at themselves in the mirror.  Do they even cast a reflection?

Robert Mueller's Ham Sandwich

I'm a few days late with this, but better late than never. Sometimes, work and other responsibilities preclude regular blogging. Here's what's on my mind: Some things need to be said about Special Counsel Robert Mueller's absurd indictment of 13 Russians as part of his never-ending, ever-expanding investigation of President Donald Trump and his allies.

First, as others have noted, the indictment of 13 Russians as part of Mueller's witch hunt is a lesson in futility -- an idiotic joke. Does anyone really think the Russians will extradite them? If so, I've got a beautiful bridge in Brooklyn that I'll sell you for $100. Mueller must thing the majority of Americans are blithering idiots.

Second, the indictments have a lot to do with social media activity, rather than direct efforts to influence the election (hacking into voting machines or data bases, for example). No one really knows how much influence social media campaigns had on the election of Donald Trump in 2016. But one thing is for sure: Both the Hillary Clinton campaign and Trump's operation tried to leverage social media. And both undoubtedly used "bots" (automated software "robots") as force multipliers to get their message out and hammer the opponent. Only the naive and gullible accept without skepticism all of the stats about how many "likes" or followers a Twitter personality or account has. Often, many of the "followers" are phony, computer-generated bots. That's something analytics won't tell you. It's also something the brain-dead mainstream media isn't intelligent enough to realize.

The truth is, Mueller's investigation is floundering. Indeed, if the evidence against Team Trump was the slam dunk the MSNBC kooks think it is, Mueller would have leveled heavy charges against major players by now. Instead, he's settled for lame plea agreements against bit players like George Papadopoulos and Michael Flynn, as well as obsession with the likes of Carter Page. The Paul Manafort charges are another wild goose chase that demonstrate Mueller's team has gone far afield in its zeal.

And here's a bit of Beltway karma for you: It seems the new judge in charge of sentencing Flynn, Emmet G. Sullivan, doesn't mess around. He's ordered Mueller's team to release to Flynn's lawyers any exculpatory evidence that they have so far withheld. Sullivan, it appears, does not take kindly to less than candid prosecutors. He presided over the case of former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, who was wrongfully convicted of corruption. Sullivan set aside Stevens' conviction when he learned the prosecution had unethically and illegally withheld exculpatory evidence. So, as much as this might make Joe & Mika gag with horror, Flynn might walk. Wouldn't that be something!

Finally, a couple of noteworthy comments from the Russian indictment that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announced on Feb. 16: He said "there is no allegation in this indictment that any American was a knowing participant in this illegal activity. There is no allegation in the indictment that the charged conduct altered the outcome of the 2016 election."

In the coming months, look for Mueller and his team of Trump haters to grow increasingly desperate, but to reveal their partisan rage and thus undermine their credibility and public support for their efforts. One thing the leftists are not very good at is realizing how much they are despised and how ridiculous they look. It's gonna get uglier before it gets better. Still, I am looking forward to the popcorn and entertainment.

Why Dems shouldn't push Trump on gun control

To the surprise of virtually no one, President Trump has called for a review of regulations regarding bump stocks. 

His statement on signing the executive order was fascinating.  In vintage Trump style, he made a point of emphasizing that the Obama administration had found them to be legal.

He was therefore technically taking a harder stance on gun control than Saint Obama.

I've noted before that bump fire is stupid.

It renders otherwise safe weapons uncontrollable, presenting a danger to shooters and those near them.

Of course the gun control fanatics will stop at nothing to achieve their irrational and counter-productive goal of a disarmed populace.  They're using their usual blend of lies and emotional blackmail to advance their unholy cause.

They should, however, be careful in this.  It is an open secret in the gun community that violations of federal purchase laws are rarely prosecuted.   Were the Justice Dept. to order a major crackdown on this and highlight jurisdictions where local law enforcement isn't doing its share, a number of Democrat-ruled jurisdictions will be shown to be actively looking the other way regarding firearms laws.

As with the bump stock issue, Trump can also (quite properly) highlight how it was the Obama administration that chose to ignore these lawbreakers, putting countless innocent citizens at risk.

A new inquiry into Fast and Furious might also prove embarrassing for Obama's rapidly tarnishing legacy.

All of this information is already known to those who follow the issue closely.  It is not known by the larger public.

The president can swiftly change this, and in the process turn the Dems' own words against them.

Oh, and he might also talk about how strict gun control is useless without some kind of border protection.

Like a wall or something - which of course the Dems will staunchly refuse to fund.

Donald Trump has a knack for making his opponents destroy themselves.  This could get very interesting.

 

The Seditious Deep State

I needn't rehash the mischief caused by Obama holdovers in the Department of Justice, FBI and CIA. As times goes on, more and more of that will come to light, and the abuses of the Obama aministration will become more apparent.

But how about the IRS?  Did this deeply loathed and feared agency clean up its act after the execrable Lois Lerner was allowed to go off into the sunset with her golden parachute, leaving behind her untold people and organizations who got the shaft, shelled out big money to fight for their cause, and finally were vindicated after being put through the progressive wringer? Hardly. Let's take a look at what's been going on at this Soviet-like branch of government.

First, a little background: In 1980, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) was established as part of the Office of Management  and Budget (OMB). One of its key responsibilities is to review draft regulations submitted by various agencies and departments to ensure they are reasonable and carry out the legislative intent behind them.

Well, as the Wall Street Journal's Kimberly Strassel reports, in 1983 the Treasury Department signed a memorandum with OMB that largely exempted the IRS from submitting its rules to White House review via OIRA. Under this arrangement, IRS bureaucrats have felt free to impose their own policy judgements and enforce legislation capriciously (Obamacare is a prime example).

Just a week after passage of the GOP tax cut/reform bill in December, the IRS rushed out guidance declaring that most taxpayers could not deduct prepaid 2018 property taxes on their 2017 returns, which many homeowners attempted, since beginning in 2018 there will be a cap on the deductibility of property taxes. This was a unilateral decision by the IRS -- sans White House input.

According to Strassel, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch in 2016 sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew to, among other things, insist the IRS start complying with the Administrative Procedures Act, the Congressional Review Act, and the Regulatory Flexibility Act. But the IRS, rife with bitter, anti-Trump bureaucrats, stubbornly refuses to comply.

Wrote Strassel:

"....Additionally, Sens. Ron Johnson and James Lankford —both of the Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs — have recently written both to the IRS, demanding it explain its continuing impudence, and to OIRA Administrator Neomi Rao, recommending she tear up that 1983 memo and subject the IRS to regulatory review....."

And here's what's really discouraging: The Department of Treasury is headed up by a Trump appointee, Steve Mnuchin. Treasury is pushing back with a variety of excuses: Its economists aren't up to the job of performing cost-benefit analyses, the reviews are too time-consuming for a limited staff, White House demands for review amount to plain old political pressure....

Both Mnuchin and Rao of OIRA are Trump appointees. Have both been tainted by the miserable swamp around them? Quite possibly. But I would wager that even if both "cracked the whip," they would have a hard time getting their implacably anti-Trump troops in line.

Given that Donald Trump faces 90 percent negative coverage from the mainstream news media, and both Hollywood and academia have joined the pile-on, he has done remarkably well in his first year. But the deeply embedded leftists in the bureaucracy -- those who believe in a strong, dominant central government and whose livelihood depends on such -- are like a cancer on reform efforts. Now, please indulge me as I pivot to a couple of other quick metaphors before wrapping up.

This is kind of like an IT technician trying to sort out the virus problem and learning that this goes far beyond malware or deliberately introduced malicious code:  There could be actual hardware components, down to tiny microchips -- that are corrupted.

Rooting out the true "resistance" -- i.e., the corrupt apparatchiks who despise individual rights and accountability and have nothing but contempt for Trump and his supporters -- is truly a daunting task. But so was defeating Hillary Clinton and her well-oiled machine with the media, Hollywood, academia and federal bureaucracy all on her side. The freedom loving, constitution-respecting Americans who elected Donald Trump must turn up the heat big time on our elected officials to begin the fumigation of our bloated federal bureaucracy.

 

 

Fake tough guy Kevin Williamson offers his usual terrible advice

I see that National Review's Kevin Williamson has taken a break from wishing the white working class would just die off to offer his advice on dealing with the FBI's failure to stop the Florida shooter:  Fire the director.

It's the usual terrible advice wrapped in fake tough-guy bluster.

Williamson specializes in this bullshit posing.  Remember, this someone who considered himself a hero for snatching a woman's cell phone and smashing it during a stage performance. 

Yeah, he's a regular Audie Murphy.

All the Quisling Never Trumpers are like that, thumping their chests about their brave stand against straw men while they come up with the "conservative case" for doing whatever liberals want them to do.

In point of fact, firing the current director will no nothing to dig out the rot within the organization.  Not only will it be ineffective, it will make things worse, since the new leadership would have to start from scratch while the guilty parties would have that much more time to burrow in and cover their asses.

The FBI has been corrupted over many years, starting with its handover of background files to the Clinton White House.  It may be arguably easier to simply disband the organization and start over.

No, the easy thing to demand Trump do something stupid and preen while doing it.

Which is pretty much par for the course for the Quisling Never Trumpers.

The new common culture cuts both ways

The alternate title for this post would be a riff on Kurt Schlichter's "Liberals May Regret Their New Rules" theme, but the actual inspiration was this post by Andrew Klavan.

Before getting into quotes, I will first provide some original content.

My generation is probably the youngest one that can still remember what used to be called "decency."  There were things that people simply didn't say.

My grandparents didn't smoke, drink or swear - limitations that seem quaint today but were still common in my youth.  A political candidate who had an extra-marital affair was immediately disqualified from holding office, which is why those that did took great pains to keep it secret.

No one wrote these rules out, it was just understood that certain things were off limits.

In my youth, those limits were under assault by smarty-pants liberals who liked to poke fun at them.  There's nothing inherently wrong with that of course - people have made fun on societal conventions since they had societal conventions, but the difference was that this was all mean-spirited humor.  Liberals viewed the conventions as stupid and wrong, and wanted sweep them away. 

As this process unfolded, the defenders of the old values tried to resist, but they were hampered by their adherence to those values.  To refer back to a personal example, my grandparents believed it was deeply wrong to insult people.  Because of this, they put themselves at a disadvantage against those for whom insult and ridicule were the the go-to weapons.

This was a major factor in the degeneration of their church, the United Methodists.  Despite the howlings of the progressives, the old-timers didn't hate gay people, and they recoiled from repeated insult and abuse.  Their opponents exploited this advantage and so the Methodists effectively purged the people who were once the pillars of their faith.

The same dynamic was in play in the broader society.  Gangsta rap, increasingly pornographic-style sex scenes in movies, ultra-violence being glorified for its own sake, and the common theme that conventional values were worthless hypocrisy made a remorseless advance across the cultural landscape.

In 1988, Gary Hart's political career was destroyed by the revelation of an affair.  By 1992, Bill Clinton was able to survive the scandal by saying it was in the past.  By 1998, he was able to survive an affair consummated in the Oval Office by arguing that personal character no longer mattered.

This progression was essentially how we got President Trump.

After decades of losing and watching their values get trashed, the cultural conservatives came to understand that adhering to the rules of decency was a sucker's game.   We learned that our grandparents tactics were self-defeating.

To be clear, most conservative people never changed their views on appropriate tactics.  The change came because the old generation passed away and the new generation grew up with the rules as they saw them.

A Christian conservative born in 1925 would never in a million years have voted for Trump, but one born in 1980 can do so with glee.

As Klavan puts it:

The left wants us to reel in shock that Donald Trump chased women or praised Russian strong men? Who was it who defended the infidelities and possible rapes of Bill Clinton? Who was it who turned a blind eye to Barack Obama consorting with terrorists and hate-mongers like Farrakhan?

That last passage reminds me of the time the Obama White House hosted a rapper whose album featured a dead judge.  The future Quisling Never Trumpers clicked their tongues, but the rest of us took note that this was now the new normal.  Obama had just formally endorsed making fun of dead judges.

I mention this specific example because one can't help but notice how much of the progressive agenda and The Resistance is being advanced by judicial overreach.  Should (God forbid) an activist judge get the same treatment meted out to the GOP Congress at baseball practice, I'm sure that album photo will get prominent placement in right-wing media and that the left will completely ignore it.

I was interested to see that my co-blogger's post got linked by Fark and - as one would expect - the two comments they left consisted of a personal insult and a pathetic straw man.  Such is the intellectual rigor of our opponents.  (Our resident troll - as usual - offered a link rather than coming up with an original argument on his own.)

Turning back to Klavan's quote, the long-suppressed photo of Barack Obama grinning with Louis Farrakhan carries particular import in our tempestuous times.  Within hours of the school shooting (which the FBI could have stopped, but didn't), the mainstream press was speculating that a white nationalist did the dirty need.  Law enforcement subsequently said there's no evidence of this, but progressives got their smear out there, so mission accomplished.

The problem for them is that the cry of "racism" has lost its power and again, this is not because conservatives became suddenly bigoted but because the left has been showing their own bigotry non-stop for the last decade. 

The younger generation has come of age steeped in anti-white rhetoric and at the same time knows that black nationalism is treated as a positive good.  Another cultural more has been destroyed.

Great job, progressives.

I miss the old culture - the campy conventions where people used euphemisms and clever insults rather than dropping f-bombs all over the place.  The movies were better, the music was better and society was better.

Back then, people of goodwill across the political spectrum were working towards racial reconciliation.  Don't tell me the 80s were a nightmare of segregation and bigotry when the three most popular people were Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jackson and Bill Cosby.

Despite a more diverse population, race relations are now the worst I've ever seen, and that's because the left made it okay to hate.  They thought that exception only applied to them, but the common culture cuts both ways.

Schlichter is right - liberals are going to hate the world they created.

 

Laws are pointless if they aren't enforced

One way of examining an event is to explore a counterfactual case - that is to say, looking at what didn't happen.

In an alternate reality, there would be a minor local news item about a mentally ill Florida man who made terrorist threats on the internet, was reported to the FBI who in turn notified local law enforcement.  The guy was a known troublemaker and with this additional input, they finally obtained a warrant from a judge to have him taken into custody.

If that had happened, the pain in our fallen world would be a little less.

But it didn't happen, and the reason it didn't happen is that the FBI didn't take any action.  Local law enforcement's attitude seemed to be an exasperated shrug and the politicians have zero interest in mental health law reform because it is a complex issue and it is hard for them to strike morally preening poses while vilifying their enemies.

Plus, it offers insufficient opportunities for graft.

We have the most incompetent political class in my lifetime and the repeated failure of lawmakers to do anything about the problem of "known wolves" is a key indicator of that incompetence.

Another is the failure of law enforcement itself.  The FBI has revealed itself to be a completely corrupt organization.  Its culture is one where solving crime takes a back seat to political intrigue.  The RUSSIA fiasco is only the latest and most revealing example of their decadence and ineptitude, but there are countless examples of them dropping the ball, from the Boston Marathon bombing to serving as Whitey Bulger's muscle.

There is also the Fast and Furious scandal, which produced zero criminal action despite thousands of weapons being illegally sold to known criminals.  I wish to underline this particular point:  not only were no criminals rounded up as a result of the sales, no officials were held responsible when people were killed with the illegally sold weapons.  It is a culture of total impunity.

Similarly, the FBI was well aware of the terrorist attack on Pam Gellar's Mohammed cartoon show and arguably had a part in provoking it, but once again they did nothing to stop it, not even warning local law enforcement to be vigilant.

They clearly don't care if people get killed.

The lesson from all of this is that passing more laws will do nothing because not only won't they be enforced, no one will be punished for not enforcing them.  We will have a situation where everything is technically illegal but only the politically vulnerable are targeted.  This is why Black Lives Matter above all things should be vehemently against gun control.

If you believe there is a racist culture in law enforcement, why would you want the police to have even more power?  Does anyone seriously think that the first wave of house-to-house searches for guns will take place in Upper East Side Manhattan, Beverly Hills or Palm Springs?  I think you'll see them in Chicago, Detroit and other minority-majority areas - the same places where carnage is commonplace and the media is completely silent about it.

Giving the state even more power when it can't manage to effectively use the power it has is madness.  I suppose it's emotionally satisfying to say "DO SOMETHING!!!" but the thing that needs to be done is logically review where the gaps in our mental health laws are as well as demanding full accountability from law enforcement as to why they routinely refuse to act on information about a fully preventable crime.

That's hard, which is why progressives would rather preen and call people they don't like names.