News Miner 12

Notes on armed defense, school performance, and more.

Welcome to this “News Miner.” This one is short, mainly because I’m behind. June was brutally busy for me, and I’m starting off July with Covid. Now I have to spend some serious time on another project (details to come). Happy Fourth of July!

Good Guys with Guns

Recently Complete Colorado published my column, “Yes, good guys with a gun can stop crime.” I begin:

Notice a double standard among many gun-restriction advocates. If a proposed gun restriction might conceivably stop someone from carrying out a crime, that’s good enough, even if it has no statistically detectable impact on crime and regardless of how it impacts peaceable gun owners. But if a “good guy (or gal) with a gun” ever fails to stop a crime, then that proves armed self-defense is worthless.

I then go through a New York Times article on the topic, discuss “gun-free zones,” give some examples of when good people with a gun stopped a mass shooter, and discuss efforts to arm teachers and other school staff who wish to be armed.

Read the entire piece.

Colorado School Performance

Recently Complete Colorado published my column on the performance of Colorado students on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The pre-pandemic results?

Overall, only 40% of fourth-grade students “performed at or above proficient” levels in reading, while 44% performed that well in math. Only 71% “performed at or above basic” level in reading, while 80% performed that well in math. . . .

If 71% to 80% strikes you as pretty good, bear in mind that these numbers mean that Colorado schools are largely failing at least a fifth of the students tested. I think it’s safe to say that students who cannot meet basic standards for this test are functionally illiterate or nearly so, at least in English.

Read the entire piece.

Quick Takes

Price Controls: Reporter Jennifer Brown serves as cheer-leader for Colorado’s “price gouging” law. See my article from 2020 as to why that law is stupid and wrong. If we want less-expensive housing, we need to stop government from forcibly restricting the supply of housing. That’s the underlying problem.

Primaries: For the most part, less-crazy candidates beat more-crazy candidates in Colorado’s Republican big-ticket primaries. (The exception is Lauren Boebert won.)

Olathe: Come for the corn, stay for the . . . crypto mining?

Red Flag: “Petitions for protection orders have been filed in 20 of the 37 sanctuary counties, often by the very sheriffs who had previously denounced the law,” reports Kaiser Health News.

Birds: Freddie, Denver’s bisexual flamingo, is 52 years old!

Electric: "Nuclear engineers at the Colorado School of Mines and the University of Colorado working at federal facilities" to build small nuclear power plants,” reports the Denver Post. Jake Fogleman argues small nuclear plants are the way to go.

Ice Cream: The Aurora Sentinel reports, “For more than 60 years, the warm streets of Aurora have been uninviting to the ice cream trucks of the greater Denver area, turned away by laws that prohibit them from operating in the city. That will likely change this summer, as the Aurora City Council voted unanimously on first reading to lift a circa-1957 ban on treat trucks.”