| Morning Jolt – December 18, 2012 By Jim Geraghty Here's your Tuesday Morning Jolt. Enjoy! Jim Great Scott! Flanked by U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham and U.S. Senator Jim DeMint -- as well as U.S. Representatives Joe Wilson, Trey Gowdy, Mick Mulvaney, (S.C., 05) and U.S. Representative-elect Tom Rice, Governor Nikki Haley announced that Representative Tim Scott would be the state's next senator as Scott's mother, Frances Scott, looked on. Video of the announcement can be seen here. Governor Haley said, "What we looked for in a new senator is a fighter -- someone with courage and leadership for our state and nation at a time when we need it most, and someone who understands South Carolina's issues and knows her people. That's what we found in Tim Scott. It's a great honor for me to appoint Tim as our next U.S. senator. . . . Tim Scott has proven himself time after time. His life story is a great South Carolina story, filled with the difficulties and the successes that are familiar to so many of our citizens." "I am deeply honored to accept Governor Nikki Haley's appointment as United States Senator," said Representative Scott. "As much as there is honor in such an occasion, I am even more humbled at the confidence she has shown in me, and at the task that is now before me. Representing the entire state of South Carolina and all of its citizens is a sacred duty. I look to the Lord's grace to give me the strength and wisdom to fulfill that duty in a way that reflects well on our state and our country." Glenn Reynolds: "So with Tim Scott's appointment, the GOP has the nation's only black senator and both of its two Latino governors. Kinda busts the racial narrative, doesn't it?" Not only that, but he was appointed to the position by the country's second Indian-American governor; both of the ones we have are not only Republicans, but Southern conservative Republicans. The editors of the Wall Street Journal notice: "Mr. Scott's appointment requires him to stand for a special election in 2014, though he has a record as a House conservative in sync with Palmetto State values and emerged with the Tea Party. It's also worth noting that the movement deplored by liberals as retrogressive has done more than anything in years to increase diversity in politics—and not merely of thought. Think Marco Rubio of Florida, Ted Cruz of Texas, Susana Martinez of New Mexico, Brian Sandoval of Nevada, Ms. Haley herself. The best news is that Senator-designate Scott's story isn't about racial grievance and preference. It's a measure of personal achievement, political conviction and the opportunities available in modern American politics." And guess who could be making a comeback in the House race to replace Scott? Former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford is mulling a congressional comeback, with sources saying he might join the special election contest for Rep. Tim Scott's soon-to-be-vacant House seat. Sanford is "studying" a run for the Charleston-area, GOP-leaning 1st District, which he occupied in the 1990s, said one South Carolina source. The seat will soon be vacant because Republican Gov. Nikki R. Haley on Monday selected freshman Republican Scott to succeed Sen. Jim DeMint, who is resigning in January, just two years into his second term.
Sanford has about $124,000 in his old federal campaign account. I can think of no better candidate to lead Congress in strengthening relations between the U.S. and Argentina. Senator Daniel Inouye, RIP USA Today: "Democrat Daniel Inouye, the U.S. Senate's most senior member and a Medal of Honor recipient for his bravery during World War II, has died. He was 88. He died of respiratory complications and had been at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center since earlier this month. His office said his last word was "Aloha," the traditional Hawaiian word for 'hello' and 'goodbye.'" In Hawaii, Inouye's replacement will be appointed by Governor Neil Abercrombie. Under state law, the governor's appointee must be of the same political party as that of the vacating senator; the governor makes an appointment by selecting from a list of three prospective appointees submitted by the state party. Inouye was reelected in 2010, so the Hawaii elections will work a bit like the setup in South Carolina with Senator Jim DeMint's departure: A special Senate election will be held in 2014 where the appointee may choose to run; whoever wins that election will serve another two years and face reelection for a full six-year term in 2016. Still Struggling to Find Some Way to Prevent Another Newtown I figured some of my Second Amendment supporting friends wouldn't agree with my comments yesterday, suggesting that it may be time to examine a ban on high-capacity magazines (which I erroneously referred to as clips a few times). Most were pretty respectful, although the first response came from a reader who argued that the Newtown massacre had somehow been organized by the Obama administration to advance an agenda of disarming American citizens. Sigh. Some noted that there are already quite a few high-capacity magazines out on the market, so banning the manufacture and sale would only stop adding to the ones currently in circulation. A national effort to seize and destroy all existing ones is pretty unthinkable and impossible to enforce. The question is whether a ban on additional manufacture or sales would make it sufficiently more difficult for the next aspiring mass murderer to obtain one. I'll bring some humility to this debate and say that I don't know and I'm not sure we can know. Others asked what the purpose is of banning high-capacity magazines if a gunman can still obtain two or more guns. In these horrific circumstances, one of the few limits on the gunman's ability to kill is how many rounds he can fire until he is forced to pause to reload. My argument is that without high-capacity magazines, that pause comes quicker. Those five or seven or nine or more extra shots fired could, and probably would, make a difference in the number of victims. It was argued that the primary effect of a ban on new high-capacity magazines would be to make the existing ones more expensive. Yes, but that too can be a deterrent, particularly to the high-school or early-20s aged males who seem to be the primary perpetrators of these attacks. Perhaps we want the next aspiring mass murderer deterred by an inability to afford one. Any proposed change of law that is spurred by the massacre must weigh the benefits to society and the costs as precisely as possible, and that goes well beyond any gun proposals. As mentioned yesterday, if we determine that the problem stems from insufficient monitoring of people deemed by others to be mentally unstable, we have to contemplate whether we want state, local, or the federal government able to review our mental-health records. Perhaps if you've never seen a therapist, a psychologist, or a psychiatrist, that doesn't sound so bad, but it would amount to shattering doctor-patient confidentiality, a concept that goes back to the Hippocratic Oath. Those in the mental-health profession are supposed to warn authorities if their patients indicate that they are going to harm themselves or others. The "let's ramp up our public mental-health efforts" talk amounts to letting the government decide when it needs to intervene, instead of the psychiatric professionals. If you think troubled people are reluctant to get help in the current cultural environment, just wait until after people start getting involuntarily committed because of what the government found in their psychiatrists' notes and records. I'm extremely skeptical of the notion that violent video games are a leading cause of mass shootings, although some people I respect greatly disagree with me. The simplest summary of my argument would be that if 99.999 percent of a product's users don't go on shooting sprees, it can't really be called the spree's "cause" -- a conclusion that can be applied to firearms to video games to television and movies to medication . . . or, admittedly, high-capacity magazines. Even if we presume that a ban on violent video games could be considered constitutional and not an abridgement of First Amendment rights, a ban would infringe upon the lives of about a million non-spree-shooters to inhibit the actions of one potential spree shooter. It's interesting to hear this discussion periodically shift to criminals' access to guns, since I don't think what spurred this discussion really falls into the category of crime as we traditionally think of it. Few Americans live in fear of garden-variety criminals anymore (at least compared to a generation ago). Criminals may be scum, but most of them don't set out to kill their victims in the course of their muggings, home invasions, drug deals, etc. The vast majority of them are greedy and brutal, but they're not demonic enough to set out to slaughter kindergarteners. What we're dealing with after Columbine and Virginia Tech and Aurora and Newtown are perhaps better thought of as one-man terror groups. The parallels to suicide bombers are a bit eerie, when one thinks about it; they're young males with few if any close, loving connections to other people; they have a message they want to send to the world; they often leave manifestos and literal messages to be found after their passing; and they kill as many others as they can in the process of killing themselves. ADDENDUM: I think Exurban Jon speaks for us all: "I really should attract a better class of trolls." To read more, visit www.nationalreview.com Save 75% . . . 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