Christian faith and capital punishment

I wrote this in 1999 on the occasion of Tennessee about to commit a convict to death for the first time since 1960. 

John 8:3‑11

3          The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group 
4          and said to Jesus, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. 
5          In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” 
6          They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him. But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. 
7          When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.” 
8          Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground. 
9          At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. 
10        Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” 
11        “No one, sir,” she said. “Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.”

 Robert Glen Coe is on death row at the Tennessee State Penitentiary, awaiting execution for the murder of eight-year-old Cary Ann Medlin of Greenfield. It was a particularly cold-blooded murder, and Coe was justly convicted of the crime.

Coe deserves to die for what he did.

Coe’s original execution date has come and gone. He is still alive due a temporary stay of execution during which his attorneys are asking for more reviews of his case.

Tennessee has not executed anyone since 1960. Several years later, the Supreme Court struck down all existing death sentences as unconstitutional. But in so doing, the court laid out conditions under which the death penalty would meet constitutional requirements. Subsequently all but a handful of states revised their criminal codes to meet these conditions, and executions resumed in 1977 with the firing squad death of Gary Gilmore in Utah. In 1979, Robert Coe brutally murdered Cary Ann Medlin.

The death penalty is one of the social issues which finds Christian people on all sides. Christian churches have wrestled with it throughout their history. As early as the second century, executioners, magistrates and judges could be denied the Lord’s Supper because of their part in state executions. In late medieval times Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote against harshness in judicial sentencing. Yet both Catholic and Protestant churches either carried out or condoned death penalties until modern times in America and elsewhere.

In the passage from the Gospel of John of the woman caught in the act of adultery, the teachers of the Law and the Pharisees who bring the woman to Jesus accurately state that the law of Moses requires her to be executed for her adultery. Leviticus 20:10 says, “If a man commits adultery with another man's wife – with the wife of his neighbor – both the adulterer and the adulteress must be put to death.” This code is repeated in Deuteronomy. Let us note that the Law required that both the woman and the man be executed, but the scribes and the Pharisees, all men, somehow avoided taking the guilty man into custody. (The double standard was no less alive then as now.) Even so, the woman was indeed guilty, having been caught in the act, and according to the Law she deserved to die. “What do you say?” the men asked Jesus.

Jesus signals he won’t accept the question on the terms it is offered by crouching to write on the ground with his finger. “When Jesus does speak, he speaks to the situation of the scribes and Pharisees as well as to the woman. . . . Jesus treats the woman and the scribes and Pharisees as theological equals, each as human beings to whom words about sin can be addressed” (NIB).

Jesus offers all of his listeners an opportunity to break from old ways of justice, determined by the power of condemnation and death, to enter a new society where grace can endure even when punishment is called for. This new society with its new standards is the Kingdom of God.

At its core, this story in John is not really about the woman or her sin. Nor is it primarily about the self-righteous certainty of the men who accused and convicted her. The story is about how Christ challenges both crimes and punishments that contradict what Christ stands for. Jesus was certainly not sympathetic to the sin of adultery. He pointed out elsewhere that only adultery justified divorce. Jesus did not try to excuse her adultery to the men. In fact, Jesus didn’t seem very concerned about the woman at all – his directed all his attention toward the men who wanted to take her life. Faced with this unmistakably severe transgression of the law, Jesus questioned the cut and dried, hard-hearted manner in which the authorities sought to impose justice. Perhaps Williams Shakespeare was thinking about Christ’s words when he wrote in The Merchant of Venice–

The quality of mercy is not strain'd, 
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest: 
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes. 
'T is mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes 
The throned monarch better than his crown; ... 
But mercy is above this sceptred sway, 
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings, 
It is an attribute to God himself; ... 
Though justice be thy plea, consider this, 
That in the course of justice none of us 
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy; 
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render 
The deeds of mercy. (Act iv, sc. 1.)

Jesus condoned neither the crime the woman committed nor the violence the men wish to do. He recognized that they were both gripped in the sinful cycles of their past. If both the men and the woman are to be freed, they must all renounce their former ways. Jesus final words are spoken to the woman but are also addressed to the men with stones. The woman did deserve to die according to the Law, but all her accusers finally realized they did not deserve to kill her.

Jesus challenged both the woman and the men to peer into their own souls and stare in brutal honesty at themselves. By doing so they all, actually, received a blessing from the Son of God – ‘I do not condemn you’ – followed by a command, “Go and sin no more.”

 There is no denying that the Law of Moses lists a large number of offenses for which death is prescribed. Exodus lists murder as one, but simple assault on one’s parents is also a capital offense. Then, a few verses later we discover, “Anyone who curses his father or mother must be put to death”  (Exod 21:17). And we are also informed, “Observe the Sabbath, because it is holy to you. Anyone who desecrates it must be put to death. . .” (Exod 31:14a). How many of us would like to plead for our lives against that charge?

As far as I know, Christian proponents of the death penalty cite only the Judaic Law to support their position, never the Gospels. Yet Jesus said that love is the heart of the Law, and that God is a God of life, not death. If there is any theological support for the death penalty to be derived from the testament of the Good News of Jesus Christ, I have yet to see it, and I have done a great deal of reading on this subject over the years because I used to support the death penalty. What turned me from supporter to opponent of the death penalty finally was realizing that the Law of Moses is not the ultimate revelation of the nature and character of God or of God’s will. God is most fully revealed in the person and work of Jesus Christ, whose fate was to be executed by the state. Luke twenty-three records that even as the Romans nailed him to the cross, Jesus prayed, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34).

Robert Glen Coe is no Jesus Christ, and American justice is more fair than Roman justice, but Christ’s prayer still calls us to reflect whether we really know what we are doing when we push the buttons that cause lethal chemicals to flow into the veins of a man strapped to a gurney.

 There is an organization called, “Murder Victims Families for Reconciliation.” Its executive director is Renny Cushing, whose father was murdered. These are Renny’s words:

“At about 10 o’clock at night, there was a knock on the front door. My mother was lying on the couch watching the Celtics playoff game. My father was at the kitchen table reading the newspaper, and he got up to answer the door. As he did, a couple of shotgun blasts rang out, ripped his chest apart, and he died in front of my mother. From that day, from that moment, I became the survivor of a homicide victim. And in the aftermath of that I had reason to contemplate – on numerous occasions and in some depth – how we deal as a society and individually in the aftermath of murder.”

We talk a lot about victims’ rights in the legal system. And we should, because for a long time the victim of crime was seen mostly as a witness to the crime rather than someone whose life has been shredded by violence. Relatives of murder victims feel emotions that others cannot comprehend. Bud Welch’s daughter, Julie, was killed by Timothy McVeigh in the Oklahoma City bombing in April 1995. Welch wrote:

      “All my life, I had always opposed the death penalty. My entire family has, even going back to my grandparents. Well, after Tim McVeigh bombed the Oklahoma City Federal Building, the rage, the revenge, the hate – you can’t think of enough adjectives to describe what I felt like. I did change my mind about the death penalty. After McVeigh and Nichols had been charged – I mean, fry them. We didn’t need a trial, a trial was simply a delay. That was my feeling, that was my emotion. You no doubt saw McVeigh or Nichols being rushed from an automobile to a building, bulletproof vests on, and the reason that the police do this is because people like me will kill them. The police presence around Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols was the very deterrent that kept me from being on death row in Oklahoma today. Because had I thought that if there was any opportunity to kill them, I would have done so.

    “For about the next eight months, I struggled with the thought of what’s going to happen to [McVeigh and Nichols], how am I going to get some peace. [The death penalty] sounded so wonderful to me at the time. I thought about that over the next eight months. I also remembered the statement that Julie had made to me driving across Iowa one time in her junior year. We heard a newscast on the radio about an execution that had happened in Texas the night before. Julie’s response to that was, “Dad, all they’re doing is teaching hate to their children in Texas.” I didn’t think a lot of it at the time, but I remembered her saying that. Then after she was killed, and after I got past [the] initial period, this kept echoing in my mind. I had this anguish about what was going to happen. The trials hadn’t even begun yet, and I went to asking myself, once they’re tried and executed, what then? How’s that going to help me? It isn’t going to bring Julie back. I asked that question for a period of two weeks probably. I realized that its all about revenge and hate. And revenge and hate is why Julie and 167 others are dead today. After I was able to get that revenge and hate out of my system, I made a statement to an Associated Press reporter one day that I did not believe in the death penalty.”

Renny Cushing wrote that survivors of homicide victims want three basic things.

1.    They want to know the truth, how it happened that somebody that they loved could be taken from them. They need to know the truth just to help them get back some control over their lives.

2.    The second thing they want is justice. With murder, said Cushing, the only real justice possible would be to exchange the life of the murdered person with the life of the murderer. But no exchange is possible because we can’t bring the murder victim back, no matter what we do to the killer. So we have to do the best we can to secure justice. One of the ways to do that is to restore the sense of security that’s been lost by families and society by the murder. And that means killers need to be separated from society. Both the surviving families and society need the security of doing that, to hold offenders accountable.

3.    The third thing survivors want is healing. Healing is not an event. The death penalty focuses upon a single event, raising the expectation that if you simply extinguish the life of someone who took a life, the execution itself will be a healing event. It’s a mistake, says Cushing, that if you just kill the killer it will all be better, and you’ll feel better, and you can just go on. The reality is, though, that healing is a process that goes on all the time. It is part of the burden that homicide survivors come to grips with, that healing is a process that will go on for the rest of their lives.

Cushing wrote, “I came to realize that those who were affected by his killing were not just [my] family, not just the people in the community. It also involved the families of the people who killed my father. The idea that I would be healed, that any murder victim would be healed, by inflicting pain upon the family of a murderer” is not true. Grief is not a zero-sum game. “My pain doesn’t get eased by inflicting pain on [them].” The death penalty just creates more victims. “One thing with the death penalty, there’s a kind of finality. When we kill people who kill our loved ones, we forever preclude the opportunity for those of us who want to figure out how to have an interactive forgiveness. The existence of the death penalty in and of itself becomes a barrier to victim healing. I don’t want to live in a society where, in the aftermath of murder, policy prevents people from healing.”

In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus said, “You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt 5:38, 44). Gandhi put it this way: “An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.”

 In the movie Saving Private Ryan, set in World War Two, Tom Hanks plays Captain Miller, who is assigned the mission of finding Private Ryan to take him out of battle because all three of Ryan’s brothers have been killed in action. With a squad of men, Captain Miller sets forth. Before they find Ryan, two of Miller’s men are killed. One of Miller’s men rebels because he can’t make the math come out right – two of his friends dead before they even find this one faceless Ryan. He demands Captain Miller tell him why Ryan is so important to him.

Miller’s answer surprises them all. “I don’t know Ryan,” Captain Miller says. “I don’t care anything about him. I just want to go home. And if finding this Ryan makes that happen sooner rather than later, well then, that’s my mission.” With that Captain Miller walks to the body of their medic, who was killed shortly before, to pull it into a newly-dug grave. After a few moments the others join in to help. There is no more dissension. They will save Private Ryan, not for Ryan’s good, but for their own.

I don’t know Robert Coe. I don’t care anything about him. I have practically no sympathy for him. I won’t even try to argue that he does not deserve to die. I oppose his execution not for his sake but for mine. My call as a Christian disciple is to reduce violence, not condone more death. To the powers and principalities that seek to take life for life, I say, “Not in my name nor in the name of the Lord I serve.”

Some night soon Robert Coe will be strapped onto a gurney and wheeled into the death chamber. There will be a group of selected witnesses there, of course, but you and I will be there, too, because we are the ones who finally make our laws. We will be there, and in each hand we are holding stones to throw at him. I pray that we will someday soon reach the spiritual maturity of the scribes and Pharisees whom Jesus faced down, so we can drop our stones like they did. Perhaps we will finally realize that although Robert Coe may well deserve to die, none of us deserves to kill him.

 _____________________

Statements by Renny Cushing and Bud Welch are found at http://www.mvfr.org. I have minimally edited them for length and clarity for hearing.

Over the edge of evil

Serving Democrat politicians want laws to allow the deliberate, pre-meditated killing of infants outside the womb. How else to explain the words of Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, who openly ...

endorsed infanticide and tried to make it sound as harmless as he could. When asked by a radio host if he supported Virginia legislator Kathy Tran’s proposed law to permit abortion while a woman was in labor, Northam replied:

This is why decisions such as this should be made by providers, physicians, and the mothers and fathers that are involved. When we talk about third-trimester abortions, these are done with the consent of the mother, with the consent of physicians, more than one physician by the way, and it’s done in cases where there may be severe deformities, there may be a fetus which is non-viable. So in this particular example, if the mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen, the infant would be delivered, the infant would be kept comfortable, the infant would be resuscitated if this is what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physician and the mother. (italics added)

Here is the video:


Please note that Northam thinks this is perfectly okay because, after all, "The infant would be kept comfortable" right up until it is destroyed. Maybe the SS should have taken that tack at Auschwitz because, "We will be nice to you right up until we brutally kill you" can't possibly be wrong.

The Federalist points out that the bill being discussed here was presented by Virginia Delegate Kathy Tran, who said this during a subcommittee hearing:

“How late in the third trimester could a physician perform an abortion if he indicated it would impair the mental health of the woman?” [subcommittee chairman Todd] Gilbert asked.

“Through the third trimester,” responded Tran. “The third trimester goes all the way up to 40 weeks.”

“Where it’s obvious that a woman is about to give birth, that she has physical signs that she is about to give birth, would that still be a point at which she could request an abortion if she was so certified?” Gilbert asked.

“She’s dilating,” he continued, using the term for a woman’s cervix naturally opening to allow a baby to exit his mother during birth. “I’m asking if your bill allows that.”

“My bill would allow that, yes,” she said.

Which is to say, Tran wants the law to allow the mother to tell the doctor to kill the being-born or newborn (Northam: "the infant would be delivered") infant. While Northam said that more than one physician needs to be consulted, Tran insisted that only one be permitted for the go-ahead.

I do not know words nearly harsh enough to condemn the overt, public murderousness of today's progressivism. And on the same day that Gov. Northam, considered a rising star in the Democrat party, said that just-born babies should be killed on the mother's whim, the extraordinary hypocrisy of his party was on full display by Sen. Sherrod Brown, D.-Ohio, who said, talking about President Trump,

"Real populists don’t engage in hate speech and don’t rip babies from families at the border."

But the law already allows babies to be literally ripped - as in ripped apart - inside the womb and now Democrats want to allow living, delivered infants to be ripped from life itself.

I used to listen attentively to by left-of-center friends and ministerial colleagues on the matter of public policy, even though I hardly ever found that I could agree with their positions. But I did try to understand their point of view and how they justified it, whether on secular or biblical bases.

That door is now slammed shut. After Tran/Northam/Brown, There is no "understanding" possible that stays on this side of insanity. From now on, I absolutely refuse to tolerate any lecturing by a "progressive" on the subject of morality on any issue, and this is now my number one reason why.

That abortion, inc., in America today is openly racist does not matter to its advocates, whose most vocal and public members are white women. Why do I say that? because according to the Guttmacher Institute (2014 data), of women who had an abortion,

Thirty-nine percent were white, 28% were black, 25% were Hispanic, 6% were Asian or Pacific Islander, and 3% were of some other race or ethnicity. ...

... three-fourths of abortion patients were low income—49% living at less than the federal poverty level, and 26% living at 100–199% of the poverty level.

Which means that minority infants were killed in the womb far out of proportion to the share of those demographics in the general population. Same with income levels - the "low income" demographic described as obtaining three-fourths of abortions are minorities to a very high degree.

In New York City, for example, more black babies are killed in the womb than are born alive, according to the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene Office of Vital Statistics.

But progressives won't talk about that because shut up.

Doctor Anthony Levantino performed 1,400 abortions until he abandoned that practice. Here is part of his testimony to Congress on how second-trimester abortions are done. For third-trimester abortions, the baby is chemically killed in the womb and two or three days later the mother's body ejects the dead infant through the birth canal, usually with inducing drugs' assistance.

When someone demands that a woman must have "the right to choose," remember that this is what that choice means:


As Lincoln said about slavery, "If this is not wrong, then nothing is wrong." But "wrong" is far too wimpy a word to describe this. This is over the edge of evil.

No, rocks are not the same as rifles

As a retired US Army combat officer (I began seminary three weeks after I retired), I am disturbed by what the military's commander in chief said about use of force by the military when the "caravan" arrives at our southern border.

The president's quote, as I have heard it several times in news reports, is:

They want to throw rocks at our military, our military fights back. I told them to consider it a rifle. When they throw rocks like what they did to the Mexican military and police, I say: Consider it a rifle.

Fortunately and thankfully, we do not have a politician as secretary of defense but a retired four-star general who knows that what the president said is total idiocy. Secretary Mattis just can't say so publicly.

As someone who both wrote and received operations orders for combat operations, here is what the troops will be told. Every OPORD, as we called them, has a section entitled Rules of Engagement, or ROE (although for non-warfare operations it is usually referred to as RUF - Rules of Use of Force).

The staff proponent for ROE or RUF is the staff judge advocate, or chief military lawyer for whatever authority is issuing the order. It is the SJA's responsibility to ensure that the ROE accord with relevant federal laws (of which there are many even for overseas, active warfare), while also protecting the lives and safety of our own troops. Willful violation of the RUF is a chargeable offense.

I cannot imagine any RUF for this deployment that fails to include the following:

1. Prohibition on use of any force that extends across the border, into Mexico.

2. Prohibition of use of deadly force except actually to protect life or injury of the troops or border patrol. Does this mean that US troops (for the very few that may be near the caravan) will be authorized to shoot someone throwing rocks at them? Yes, it may mean that because thrown rocks can be grievously injuring or even lethal, but even so, troops cannot violate No. 1, above, and deadly force would have to be in extremis.

But I have no crystal ball and I hope no one gets harmed no matter who they are. No matter what one advocates I hope we can agree to unite in prayer for the grace of God to descend upon all concerned.

About FBI Investigations

Updated Sept. 30.

This is a non-partisan essay about the status of the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh (BK henceforth), focusing narrowly upon the renewed FBI investigation.

I am writing this because I have some familiarity with such investigations. I was investigated a number of times during my military career regarding security clearances (the checks for top secret were extremely thorough) and regarding my clearances for nuclear-weapons operations. The FBI did not do them because DOD had the assets to do them itself. But the procedures are are same.

Logo of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, somewhat stylized

I checked this essay in draft with special agents of US Army Criminal Investigation Command (CID), where I served as my final assignment in the Army. I was not an investigator, however, which is why I ran this through federal law-enforcement agents who actually performed such investigations.

These investigations are usually known as "vetting" or "background" investigations. For most non-DOD civil service, they are carried out by the Office of Personnel Management and frequently then by contracted private companies. However, the FBI conducts them for White House appointees and usually for certain Senate or House staff members.

Key point: Key fact: Background investigations are NOT criminal investigations. The FBI receives and reports information relative to the subject's fitness for office or clearance or whatever reason it was requested. That is all it does.

Hence, the FBI collects information and provides a report with statements and summaries and provides it to the requester, in Kavanaugh's case, the White House. An retired special agent who conducted such investigations told me,

An FBI BI [background investigation] is conducted by fully qualified [active] and retired criminal investigators who have many years experience conducting investigations. It is the investigator's job to identify disqualifying information and immediately report that information to BICS, the FBI unit responsible for BIs. They then make the determination on what action takes place next. 

This agent went on to explain that the vast majority of BI investigations are conducted by retired special agents, although, "BIs of people holding or nominated for certain very high positions are conducted by active FBI agents." Also, the BI is not a rubber-stamp operation; it is substantive and inquiring. Having endured them myself, I can attest they are not casual or "by the numbers" at all. However, the final decision of qualification or disqualification does not rest with the FBI. It is the responsibility of the requesting agency.

In this case, Senator Diane Feinstein sent a copy of Christine Ford's letter to the FBI. The FBI took the proper step of turning it over to the White House for their consideration regarding Kavanaugh's nomination. Job done, as far as the FBI is concerned.

That is why this renewed FBI "investigation" is (at best) misguided. There is no investigation left for the FBI to do, and people who think there is do not understand how such investigations are conducted and what happens at the end.

In background investigations, all the FBI does is take statements. It does not grill witnesses, it does not pick statements apart and try to find "the truth" or "what really happened." The FBI, one of the world's premier detective agencies, actually does not do any detective work in background investigations. It simply takes statements and passes them on to the requesting agency for their review and assessment. As Joe Biden said in 1991, the FBI does not draw conclusions in these investigations. The FBI report at the end of this week will not say, "Ford is lying" or "Kavanaugh is lying." Neither will it say, "Kavanaugh did what Ford alleges" nor "Kavanaugh did not do what Ford alleges."

What it will say is that these persons say this, these persons say that, and these persons say the other thing. The FBI will not determine who is telling the truth or not. What it will do is present the White House yet again with a sheaf of papers of statements and walk away. Only is there is a truly serious allegation related to the FBI does it get further review inside the FBI, as one the special agents explained to me. But the "serious allegation" is already out there, so what's left?

I will leave the last word on the investigation to retired Special Agent Johnny T., who told me,

I did FBI Backgrounds for FBI for 16-17 yrs and you're absolutely correct.... FBI would have nothing to investigate plus no Federal Crime....

Again: This is not a criminal investigation. Ford has never made any criminal complaint to any law enforcement agency. If she really does want an investigation, all she has to do is contact the police department of the Maryland municipality concerned and swear the complaint.

As a matter of criminal law, the FBI has no jurisdiction anyway because the allegations do not fall under federal purview. If there is a statutory violation, it is of the laws of law of Maryland. The FBI investigates only offenses against federal laws and does not itself decide whether to prosecute. That is the decision of the US Attorney's office. As one agent told me, with no statutory federal violation at hand, the chance of a US attorney directing a FBI criminal investigation is extremely remote for this (or any other incident). No one from the Maryland attorney general's office has even identified what Maryland law(s) might have been violated, but then, they wouldn't do so because Ford has not made a criminal complaint to them.

Bottom line: There is literally nothing else for the FBI to do here. This week-long renewed "investigation" is starting now because the US Senate is so dysfunctional that it hopes the FBI will pull it out of a hole that it dug itself.

Here is then-Senator Joe Biden in 1991, referring to calls for an FBI investigation of claims made by Anita Hill against SCOTUS nominee Clarence Thomas.

Just War and Syria Strikes

Can we frighten this man into killing
people only conventionally?

United States armed forces, under President Trump's orders, conducted a missile attack against a Syrian airfield on March 6.

This attack was against a nation that, while reprehensible under the Assad regime, was at peace with the United States. But we bombed it absent any aggression by Syria against the United States, or even a threat of it.

I am framing my assessment in the context of Just War Theory (JWT henceforth), a theological inquiry in Christianity going back at least to Saint Augustine, 354-430. It's most robust treatment was by St. Thomas Aquinas, 1225-1274, whose exposition was so thorough that it still forms the basis of modern theory. I have written over the years quite a bit about JWT in different contexts.

Today my main points are that going to war justly requires that at least these questions to be answered in the affirmative, below.

1. Is there just cause for the war?

2. Is the war authorized by proper authority?

3. Is it wise, as far as we can discern, to wage the war?

4. Is there a just objective to waging war?

First, though, there is the question whether the cruise-missile strikes against Sharyat airfield the evening of March 6 constituted "war," or were they military violence of a kind other than war. I think the answer is straightforward, for here the key point is not what President Trump wanted to do (frighten Assad) but the means he used to do it. And the means were exclusively military and violent.

Throughout history, to attack another country with military forces has been seen unambiguously as an act of war. Just imagine that the evening of Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese government messaged President Roosevelt that the air raid against Pearl Harbor should not be construed as as act of war, but only as a warning to the US not to inhibit Japan's imperial plans in the Far East. "We are prepared to do more," Japan might have said, if the United States did not comply. What do you think Roosevelt's response would have been?

And that leads to a second key point: Though President Trump initiated the violence, he does not get to call it war or not-war. Bashar Assad does. To expect that Assad sees the strikes as anything other than war is fantasy thinking.

This doesn't mean that Assad won't be cowed away from using chemical weapons again. My point is that no matter how the strikes are spun by the administration or others, they opened an actual war against Syria. The war may be brief, it may not. Syria might respond, it might not. But war it is. And we must remember that it takes both sides to end a war. The United States unilaterally began it, but we cannot unilaterally end it. This war will not be ended until Assad either says so or is removed from power. And even then his successor may choose to continue it.

Is there just cause for war?

Just Cause of war is the fundamental question, of course. I remember reading a (probably apocryphal) story of a South Seas island native chieftain who after a large battle between the US Marines and the Japanese in World War 2 asked the American commander who was going to eat the vast quantities of flesh of the slain soldiers.

The Marine general explained that neither the Japanese nor Americans killed people for food.

"What barbarians you are!" the chief replied, "To kill for no good reason!"

Historically, Western thought on war has held that war cannot be separated from larger concerns of nations, and in fact is one part of national relationships. "Politics is the womb in which war develops," said Prussian officer and theorist Carl von Clausewitz. More famous is his observation that, "War is not an independent phenomenon, but the continuation of politics by different means."

JWT has generally held that the political just cause for war is pretty narrowly expressed: either to defend one's own nation from actual or imminent attack, or to protect innocent third parties from lethal aggression or oppression. Some years after the American Civil War, Union General William T. Sherman put it simply: "The only just aim of war is a more just peace," which is a political goal. Absent a political orientation, warfare becomes just what the South Seas chieftain said, an exercise in pointless killing.

Not all JWT theorists agree that a nation may strike pre-emptively even in the case of clearly imminent attack, but since no one in the Trump administration claims that Syria poses any kind of military threat to the US, I'll not address the self-defense tenet here, especially since in his remarks following the missile strike, President Trump never invoked it at all. (In fact, when President Obama was contemplating similar strikes in 2013, he said specifically that the United States did not face an imminent threat.)

Absent self defense, then, the question then becomes one of protection of the innocent. Is that the case here?  Undeniably, victims of March 4's sarin attack against Idlib Province, held by opponents of the Assad regime, were innocent. After all, of the 85-plus people who died and scores more injured, many were children. So it would seem that a prima facie case can be made that the cruise-missile attacks against Sharyat airfield were justified on the basis.

However, the question is then begged whether chemical weapons are so unique that American warmaking on their users is justifiable for that reason alone. The Syrian civil war has already taken the lives of 400,000 people, perhaps as many as 500,000, of whom many thousands were children and countless thousands more were adult non-combatants. Neither President Obama nor President Trump ever invoked the prospect of military strikes against Syrian government forces for that reason.

So what, exactly, makes Tuesday's chemical attack so uniquely objectionable? It cannot be the number of victims, which in war's sanguinary calculus was rather small compared to other attacks by Syrian forces on civilian targets. Nor can it truly be that children were killed, even though President Trump did cite that specifically. Children have been killed all along.

It would seem, then, this administration like the prior one, maintains that the use of chemical weapons by itself was the reason for the cruise missiles to be launched. Is that a just cause of war against Syria?

If the answer is no, then war making against Syria cannot justly be done on that basis alone.

If the answer is yes, as the administration clearly claims it is, we move to closely-related inquiry of JWT - the war we wage must be justly conducted to achieve a just objective, which Trump says is the cessation of chemical weapons.

Here is the sticking point as I see it. By focusing exclusively on chemical casualties, Trump has written off a half-million or so violently killed by other means. Trump spoke not a syllable indicating he would take active steps to end that slaughter. But Trump did call for a political settlement -- as did Obama, as have many other states, ad infinitum and ad nauseum.

But this simply means that at best the war will continue with conventional violence only, and unnumbered thousands more will die -- unless truly decisive military steps are taken to remove Assad from power and enforce a ceasefire. Absolutely no nation is contemplating that -- which makes the claim that the deaths of this week's 85 persons are uniquely offensive simply hollow and morally unsustainable.

Let's look at the the JWT tenet of proportionality. The doctrine of proportionality is simply stated that the means of conducting the war must be proportionate to the goal for which the war is waged. Another way of looking at it is that while the just ends desired do not justify any means to attain them, they absolutely justify some means. The tenet of proportionality, then, is to assess what the justified means are, then employ those means and not the unjustified ones.

Which leads directly to the question: what exactly is the goal here? The president, secretary of state and others, in multiple remarks and interviews, have announced four key things:

A. There is no intention of effecting regime change in Syria by military means.

B. The strikes are to punish Assad's regime for using chemical weapons.

C. The strikes are intended to deter Assad from using such weapons in the future.

D. It is more urgent than ever that a political solution to the conflict be obtained.

Are these just objectives of war? If so, it is apparently just to "punish" Assad for using chemical weapons, and to deter him from using them again, but not just to remove him from power. Why? (I will note that these are identical objectives to those of President Obama in 2013.)

In fact, is punishment itself a just aim of war? This tends to slide the war into a legal enforcement mode, which indeed the president has more or less confirmed in his denunciation of Assad's use of chemical weapons. But that only makes us confront a key question: why is it just to punish Assad but leave him in power - when it was his criminal exercise of power that is at the heart of the violation?

The question of means

"Without killing," wrote Clausewitz, "there is no war." Conducting war is a matter of intentional lethality. In the proposed war against Syria, then, this is the question of means: What constitutes a level of violence inflicted upon the Assad regime that is effective deterrence against using WMDs by the regime again or, in future years, deters other bad actors in the region?

The centering question of the doctrine of proportionality is deciding the violence necessary to achieve the war's objectives while not using excessive violence to do so. To employ too little violence is as disproportionate as to employ too much. It is unjust to wage war ineffectively even for a just cause.

Hence, planning for such strikes necessarily involved a massive amount of guess work on what level of lethality and destruction needed to be inflicted upon Syria to ensure the Assad regime never orders the use of chemical weapons again. But that is a heavily psychological calculation for which a high-confidence answer is practically impossible!

The reason is that we do not know the calculations Assad used to to order the chem-weapons attack in the first place. What was going through his mind when he gave the order? We don't know, although in 2013 the Obama administration said it had intercepted some messages that gave some clues. Even if the Trump administration has such messages, they are almost certainly originated mostly by subordinates and oriented toward action rather than rationale, and are many levels removed from what Assad was thinking, Since making him fearful of re-use is a stated goal of the president, our own calculations' margin of uncertainty is bound to be very vast.

As for deterring leaders of other nations, namely Iran and North Korea, assessing what example to make of Syria to deter them is like entering a dark room blindfolded, in the dead of night in a dense fog, to look for a black cat that may not even be there. Does anyone really expect that the Iranian or North Korean governments will abandon their goal of attaining nuclear capability just because the United States mounted a very limited missile strike against Syria, even if the president has promised would be repeated if he sees fit?

All of these things mean that the proportionality calculus has no answer. It is like a math question to solve the value of X in which both the variables and constants are also unknown. We do not know how much death and destruction to inflict upon Assad-Syria to persuade the regime to refrain from using a single class of weapons in the future, and have no realistic prospect that we even can know. And this is a problem cubed for deterrence of other national regimes.

So the question: Even stipulating that the use of chemical weapons is a just cause for the proposed war, can the war be justly waged when we have no way of assessing, within reasonable margins of error, what waging it will require to achieve its stated goals?

When I was assigned to the Pentagon during the planning for Operation Desert Storm, the first ground war against Iraq in 1991, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Carl Vuono emphasized that in our planning we needed to remember two simple concepts: "Hope is not a method and wishes are not plans." Good advice now, too. To which I add: launching missiles is not a strategy.

This is not a strategy. It may be a means to achieve a strategy. Or it may not. 

But is there a strategy?

ABC News Radio reported March 8 of the aftermath of a meeting between the Senate's leaders and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph Dunford on the previous day:

“We don’t have the benefit of a larger strategy, for the same reason that I think the previous administration had difficulty coming up with a strategy, because it’s very, very complicated,” Sen. John Cornyn, the second-highest ranking Republican in the Senate, said Friday after a meeting with the Chair of Joint Chiefs of Staff. 

The Hill adds,

Senators left a closed-door briefing Friday saying the Trump administration did not lay out a comprehensive plan for Syria. 

Cornyn added that there were “discussions” about the legal authority being used in Syria and whether the administration’s main target is President Bashar Assad government's or the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

“We ... need a strategy to figure out what is our goals in Syria,” he said. “Is our goal just to defeat ISIS or is our goal to change the regime, and if there is policy to change the regime what comes next?”

There is presently no answer to that question.

My conclusion: The Trump administration has no strategic objectives evidenced by the missile strikes. "No chemical weapons" is not a strategic goal because it leaves untouched and undeterred almost all of Assad's total offensive capability and gives assent to the war's continuation, even escalation, by conventional means and offers no remotely significant protection of the innocent from lethal attack.

There is no just cause for this war if we use the terms and conditions that President Trump himself has set.

2. Is the war authorized by proper authority?

The US Constitution clearly grants to Congress, and only to Congress, the authority to "declare war." However, the Constitution does not define just what constitutes a declaration. As then-Senator Joe Biden accurately explained in 2001, the Congress has declared war when the Congress thinks it has. Hence, he said, an Authorization for the Use of Military Force meets Constitutional muster as a declaration of war.

I happen to be a professor of Constitutional law. I'm the guy that drafted the Use of Force proposal that we passed. It was in conflict between the President and the House. I was the guy who finally drafted what we did pass. Under the Constitution, there is simply no distinction ... Louis Fisher(?) and others can tell you, there is no distinction between a formal declaration of war, and an authorization of use of force. There is none for Constitutional purposes. None whatsoever. 

Constitutional lawyers over the decades have held that varying kinds of enabling acts, such as monetary appropriations for military action, have also amounted to Constitutional satisfaction and, at least, consent of the Congress to action ordered by the president, in whom the Constitution grants authority to conduct warfare.

Neither of these conditions pertained to the missile strikes. The president did not even bring into consultation the senior leaders of either chamber of Congress before the strikes took place. Even stipulating that bombing Assad's forces may be justified under humanitarian concerns, what the Guardian [newspaper] is conflating is the difference between moral justification of war and legal basis for it. They are not the same.

Under classic just war theory, both just cause and rightful authority are required. In Syria today there may be just cause for Western intervention, but so far there has been no rightful authority for it.  Since the dawn of the American republic, the Congress and the presidents have generally agreed that the president may order US forces into combat against another nation, solely on his own authority, if and only if there is:

1. Imminent danger of attack from the other power, so imminent that time taken for Congressional deliberations would hinder defense against it, or,

2. To protect actual threat against US citizens abroad, or to rescue them from actual danger.  

Neither of these were the case in Syria. Therefore, no matter the moral justification of them, the missile strikes failed the test of rightful authority. This is the president wielding military power not in a representative-democratic manner,  but in a monarchist manner.

There was and is no threat to the United States or to the Syrian people that is so immediately imminent that no time dare be spent in Congressional deliberation to authorize the strikes. If there is, the president should explain why, with 400,000-plus already dead, a few more days of deliberation is unwarranted.

My conclusion: The "proper authority" test was not met.

3. Is it wise, as far as we can discern, to wage the war?

With the failure of the first two criteria, it is hard to see how this war is being waged wisely so far. That the risk of confrontation with Russia has risen, perhaps sharply, seems incontrovertible. However, this question is really one of consequences as cannot be well answered except retrospectively.

My conclusions: Although I do not think the strikes were wise, based on their failure of proportionality (mainly meaning that Assad, not concrete and dirt, should have been the target), I'll keep an open mind. It may turn out to have been better than ill-advised. We will just have to wait and see.

4. Is there a just objective to waging war? 

Well, not yet. See all of the above. But to the point: the deaths and suffering inflicted by chemical weapons have been and are such a tiny part of the overall deaths and suffering inflicted that merely ending their use is not in itself a just objective of waging war against Assad's Syria.

Final thought

One thing the chemical and missile attacks have done is illustrate that the status quo - unending war that is effectively a proxy war between the Western powers one one side and Russia and Iran on the other - cannot be maintained for long. Eventually, Trump and his administration will be faced with doing something other than simply keeping their hand in. The United States will face the hard choice in Syria of going big or going home.

That is exactly is the reason that Congressional and public debate must be entered into sooner rather than later. Going to war against Assad-Syria may be the right thing to do (or maybe the least-bad option) but President Trump initiated it the wrong way politically, strategically, and tactically.

Related:

Secretary of State John Kerry insisted in June 2013 that US warplanes should begin bombing Assad-regime targets right away. But he said that US bombings would be "unbelievably small" in their scope and effects. Not only would such intervention fail the Just War test, it also failed the test of the rigidly secular concept of Realpolitik.

The key note from that day: Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey made it clear that a few runs on target would do no good, that if the bombing was not be be merely symbolic, it would require a sustained, large effort of no short duration.

What has changed since then? Nothing. Except now there are Russian boots on the ground in Syria, which certainly does not simplify things.

Update: "The Grim Logic Behind Syria’s Chemical Weapons Attack"

Churches, taxation, and the Johnson Amendment

President Trump recently said he wanted to revoke the Johnson Amendment, under which churches and other religious organizations may gain tax-exempt status as long as they remain apolitical. This arrangement dates only to 1954 and the issue has come up before. I wrote this post about it in 2004, reposted here. 

Some debate has come up recently about legal restrictions on political activities by churches. For example, I linked, without comment, to Paul Greenberg's recent op-ed in which he claimed,

Now a Baptist minister in little ol' Springdale, Ark., has been accused of crossing the line. How did he get into trouble? Well, it seems that over the years a vague and mischievous distinction has been drawn between politics and partisan politics in the law — that is, churches may address political issues but not explicitly endorse a party or its candidate if they want to keep their tax-exempt status.

La Shawn Barber writes that a "group of conservative Christians" is "sending spies into liberal churches to find out if they advocate a particular politician while preaching in the pulpit." And if they do, "the group has said it will report that church to the Internal Revenue Service, which could revoke their tax-exempt status." La Shawn inexplicably seems to think this is a good thing. 

 

Both Greenberg and Barber misunderstand what the real situation is. They both think, erroneously, that the government's granting of tax-exempt status depends on preachers never being involved in partisan politics. 

 

I became deeply involved in Tennessee's political process as part of a formally-organized United Methodist group campaigning to defeat a ballot measure allowing a state-sponsored lottery in 2002 (we failed). I did a lot of research about what the IRS code actually has to say about this issue. So here's the deal. 

 

Partisan politics deals with the election of a particular candidate or slate of candidates for elective office. Issue politics deal with ballot matters, such as the lottery issue in Tennessee, that don't elect a candidate to an office. 

 

A common belief is that the latter are permitted to churches and the former are forbidden. No so. Remember that the only issue here is a church's tax exempt status, and as far as the IRS is concerned, there is no difference between a church's partisan political activities and its issue activities. 

 

The issue, you should be unsurprised to learn, is money, not speech (or not speech per se ). Overtly political organizations are not tax-exempt. Charitable organizations can apply for and receive tax exemption under Section 501(c)(3) of the IRS code. This exemption means the organization or church does not pay a corporate income tax on funds it earns or receives to do the charitable work. Likewise, it is much easier for churches to furnish donors with the certifications the IRS requires them to have in order to deduct their donations from their personal income taxes. 

 

The reason a church's political activities are related to tax code is to prevent a purely political organization from chartering itself as a religious organization, gaining tax exemption, and then doing nothing but campaigning, perhaps dressed up with some religious language now and then. Think about it: if your business could describe itself as a "charitable organization" and so gain tax exemption, why wouldn't it do so? 

 

If it were that simple, the DNC and the RNC and MicroSoft and General Motors would all call themselves churches or charities, file for 501(c)(3) and merrily oppress the working class even more! 
  Section 504 of the IRS code says that exempted organizations can lose their 501(c)(3) status by “carrying on propaganda” or attempting in influence legislation or elections. But the IRS has never described clearly (surprise) how it may decide that a church is doing so. The test seems to be (I say seems because with the IRS little is ever certain) how much money the exempted organization is spending on political activities. If a "substantial part" (the IRS's expression) of the organization's activities "consists of carrying on propaganda, or otherwise attempting, to influence legislation," then tax-exempt-status can be either denied or revoked. 

 

But - and there is always a "but" with the tax code - there is an expenditure ceiling for political activities in effect, below which political propagandizing is quite okay. Good luck trying to determine what the ceiling is. 

 

The point is that while churches do give up some measure of political influence to accept tax exemption, it is not what people think. The IRS doesn't care how political a preacher's sermon is; its concern seems to be how much money the church spends on political activities rather than religious and charitable ones. 

 

And again, the issue is also whether churches are "attempting to influence" legislation or other political matters (by extension). Problem is, as Servant News explains,

The Internal Revenue Service enforces Code sections at its own discretion—sometimes doing nothing for decades, then slowly beginning to enforce them. From 1956 through the 1960’s, very few churches lost their 501(c)(3) status for any reason. A landmark case occurred in Christian Echoes National Ministry, Inc. v. United States, 470 F.2d 849 (10th Cir. 1972); cert. denied, 414 U.S. 864 (1973). This description comes from the IRS web site (www.irs.gov/pub/irs-tege/topic-p.pdf), an article entitled “Lobbying issues”:

Christian Echoes National Ministry published articles and produced radio and television broadcasts that urged recipients to become involved in politics and to write to their representatives in Congress to urge that they support prayer in public schools and oppose foreign aid. The organization argued that attempts to influence legislation would occur only if legislation were actually pending. The Tenth Circuit concluded that the regulation properly interpreted the statute, and that the organization was engaged in attempting to influence legislation, even if legislation was not pending.

There are Christian ministries that do the same things today, and, for whatever reason, have not had the 501(c)(3) status removed. Nevertheless, this case did establish that obtaining section 501(c)(3) status is a privilege for which churches trade their constitutional rights Quoting from the Court opinion of Christian Echoes v. United States:

In light of the fact that tax exemption is a privilege, a matter of grace rather than right, we hold that the limitations contained in section 501(c)(3) withholding exemption from nonprofit corporations do not deprive Christian Echoes of its constitutionally guaranteed right of freedom of speech.

To show the arbitrariness of enforcement of section 501(c)(3), we include the following from the Charities and Non-Profits article from the IRS web site: www.irs.gov/charities/article/0,,id=96099,00.html, [bolding ours]:

An IRC Section 501(c)(3) organization may not engage in carrying on propaganda, or otherwise attempting, to influence legislation as a substantial part of its activities. Whether an organization has attempted to influence legislation as a substantial part of its activities is determined based upon all relevant facts and circumstances. However, most IRC Section 501(c)(3) organizations may use Form 5768, Election/Revocation of Election by an Eligible Section 501(c)(3) Organization to Make Expenditures to Influence Legislation, to make an election under IRC Section 501(h) to be subject to an objectively measured expenditure test with respect to lobbying activities rather than the less precise “substantial activity” test.

Churches do not have the option to use form 5768 (which is a paperwork nightmare anyway), so they are evaluated by the “less precise ‘substantial activity test’” that is “based upon all relevant facts and circumstances”—in other words, the IRS has no openly available standard that it must follow and can therefore do whatever it wants. There may be a more codified procedure in the future, or there may not be. It may be more or less restrictive. The IRS has free reign, since all 501(c)(3) status churches have already agreed that no substantial part of their activity will be “carrying on propaganda” (propagating information) about anything.

Yeah, that's clear. My overall point, though, is that the IRS is full of auditors, not speech critics, and when its auditors want to determine what a church is "substantially" doing, it will follow the money trail. 

 

There are nonpolitical things that can cause a church to lose its tax exemption. I knew of one church that leased land to a communications company for towers and relay stations. The IRS considered this - rightly - a commercial enterprise. Because the lease payments amounted to a majority of the church's income (it was a small church) the IRS said that the church had become a for-profit business, and yanked the exemption. 

 

My very large church in Virginia operated a bookstore inside the building. It didn't have to pay taxes on the profit because there was no exterior entrance to the bookstore. But if a church runs a bookstore with an exterior entrance, it has to pay taxes on the profit. That's how complex this issue can be. 

 

Church's that want to become deeply involved in politics may do so, but they have to be willing to be taxed just like any political organization. That means the congregants' tithes won't be tax deductible on personal income tax returns, too. Guess how many churches want to be political so much they'll accept a 30-50 percent reduction in offerings? Not mine, buddy.

A post-San Bernadino primer, part 1

I am writing this post to link on the clergy and clergy-related United Methodist Facebook pages, where, since the terrorist attack in San Bernadino, Calif., this week, the "fur has been flying" over what positions the denomination holds on violence and what positions United Methodists should stake out. 

This is a long series of posts because so many of my colleagues in ministry and others are making claims that seem to be cued more from politicians than actual law and facts about firearms. So first is a definition of terms, then a look at the laws regarding firearms purchases and transfers, then whether, as many of my colleagues have claimed, that we need simply to follow the UM Book of Resolutions and nothing much more. 

Terms

Advocates for stricter gun control laws should at least know how to talk accurately about guns. The day after the San. B. attack,

California Democratic Rep. Loretta Sanchez claimed that multiautomatic round weapons are easily available, even though not in California.

My first career was as a US Army combat-arms officer. I was qualified expert on a wide range of weapons from pistol to rifle to machine gun and anti-tank weapon. Never in my life have I heard of a "multiautomatic round weapon." All rifles and pistols fall into one, and only one, of the following categories:

1. Single shot: the gun must be manually reloaded after every shot. Single shot pistols are rare are and are mostly collector's items these days. Single shot rifles are either very specialized military sniper rifles or ordinary hunting rifles. Because they have a very slow rate of fire, they are pretty much useless for other purposes than these. 

Bolt-action, single shot rifle

The only exception I might make is the famous Winchester rifle design, which is manually reloaded from a tubular magazine, below and parallel to the barrel, by cycling a lever. Well-practiced shooters can fire these fairly rapidly, but their ammunition capacity is quite low and they are very slow to reload, so as mayhem guns they are not much suitable. That's why you never read news reports of them being used for criminal purposes.

Winchester Model 1894

 2. Semi-automatic: This means that each trigger pull fires only one round (bullet), then the gun reloads itself but will not fire again until the trigger is pulled again. That is, the reloading is automatic, but the firing is manual for every shot, hence, semi-automatic, not fully automatic. The simplest way to look at it this: if the gun is ready to fire again after firing a shot, so that all the shooter has to do is pull the trigger another time, then the gun may be termed as semi-automatic. 

Every magazine-fed pistol is semi-auto and in typical usage, when the media report that a criminal used a semi-auto pistol, a magazine-fed pistol is what they mean. For revolvers, some are semi-auto because those types are mechanically made ready to fire again after every shot (until ammo is exhausted). Some are not semi-auto, though, and are single shot guns because the shooter has to manually make the gun ready to shoot again after each shot. Here is the difference:

Revolvers are either Single Action or Double Action and the majority of revolvers being sold today are both. Single Action (SA) means that the shooter must manually cock the firing level to the rear for each shot. Revolvers that are Single Action Only (SAO) are therefore single-shot pistols, not semi-auto. However, Double Action revolvers do not require manually cocking the lever: load the gun, pull the trigger and it shoots. These revolvers are called Double Action Only (DAO).

The majority of revolvers are SA/DA, which means the level must be cocked for the first round, but not for subsequent rounds. These may be (I emphasize may) more useful for self defense, but the trigger control for subsequent rounds is usually not easy and they are difficult to shoot accurately in a hurry. Their real hazard is not only missing the target more often than a SAO revolver, but that to holster the gun after firing the shooter has to remember to "decock" it so it is no longer ready to fire immediately - a real safety issue. 

Magazine fed pistols, such as the Walther PPK pictured below, are almost all SA/DA or DAO. In DA mode, mag-fed pistols are much easier to fire than DA revolvers because the trigger pull is doing much less mechanical work. DAO mag-fed pistols and revolvers typically do not have an exposed hammer or lever. The Walther below is a SA/DA pistol.

Colt Police Service revolver, a semi-automatic pistol

James Bond's Walther PPK, a semi-automatic pistol

Semi-auto rifles are one of the following designs:

1. Magazine fed: Most military-design rifles are magazine fed. A magazine is a container, holding various numbers of rounds, that attaches underneath the firing chamber. When the trigger is pulled, the firing assembly recoils to the rear of the chamber and the fired case is ejected. When the assembly returns forward, it strips the top round off the magazine and inserts it into the breech and the gun is ready to fire. The trigger must be pulled again to shoot one, and only one, more shot, then the whole process may be repeated until the magazine is empty. A semi-auto rifle or pistol fires one and only time per trigger pull, but the gun reloads itself after each shot.

The infamous Russian AK-47 rifle, a magazine fed rifle and the most produced rifle ever.

2. Clip: The term "clip" should not be used to mean magazine. A clip is an old military design that was used for both single shot, bolt-action Army rifles (The M1903) and the World War 2 M1 Garand semi-auto. 

WW2-era M1 Garand rifle shoring ammunition clip being inserted.

There have been tubular-magazine, semi-auto rifles designed, but they are obsolete and no longer made these days. 

3. Automatic or fully-automatic: This simply means that when the trigger is depressed, the gun will keep firing until the trigger is released or the ammunition is exhausted. Military machine guns are the best example, such as the US Army M60 machine gun illustrated below. 

The M60E3 military machine gun, a belt-fed, full-automatic weapon

There have been full-auto pistols produced but the concept was abandoned because recoil makes such firing wholly impractical. The Army's famous M16 series rifle and its successor, the M4, have a selector switch the enables either semi-auto or full-auto firing. However, modern US military automatic rifles restrict full-auto firing to three rounds at a time because after three, recoil almost always throws the point of aim well off the target.

It has been illegal since 1934 for private citizens to own full-automatic firearms without extensive background checks, police-department prior approval and expensive federal licensing (National Firearms Act of 1934). However, any automatic gun manufactured after 19 May, 1986, may not be owned by private citizens unless they are licensed dealers. But even they cannot transfer or sell it to anyone except police, the military or a manufacturer licensed to make automatic guns, and the dealer must surrender possession of the firearm if he gives up his license (all of which which makes the whole drill rather pointless for a dealer). 

Final term for today: 

"Assault rifle"

In 1993, when the Congress first moved to ban such things, I was serving in the Pentagon. I had never heard the term "assault rifle" before so I looked it up in the official DOD dictionary of military terms (yes, there is such a thing). Know what? It wasn't there. 

"Assault rifle" is a political term and has no other context. What it really means is "looks scary." 

So let's take a look at "assault weapons." I mean literally take a look:

Under the previous ban on assault rifles (1994-2004), this rifle meets the legal definition of an assault rifle:

And this does not:

Yet functionally they are exactly the same. Each is a .22-caliber, semiautomatic, magazine-fed rifle made by Mossberg. The top is the Model 715 and the bottom is Model 702. The barrels, bolt and magazine wells for each are identical to the other. The ammunition and effective range for both are identical. The 715 is illustrated with a 25-round magazine that also fits without modification into the 702 at bottom, like this:

What is the difference, then, between the two guns? None that affects the function:

• I guess the 715 looks scarier than the 702. 
• The 715 is about $150 more (suckers!) 
• The 715 has a carrying handle, but that's a matter of convenience to haul it around and has nothing to do with its lethality. 
• Identical scopes may be fitted to each. 
• The 715 has a "quad-rail fore-end," extending around the barrel from the breech to the front sight. Various accessories may be mounted on the rails, such as a flashlight or laser sight. This may, under some conditions, marginally improve the 715's accuracy over the 702, but not much, and has nothing to do with making the rifle itself deadlier when fired. 
• The stock on the 715 is adjustable in length, but not by much. It is not a folding stock.

There is no difference between them that affects function, mechanical rate of fire, range, ammunition or lethality. Post San B., one side of the political aisle (including the president just today) has said the 715 should be banned but not the 702.

But what about banning "high-capacity" magazines? The 702's included magazine holds 10 rounds. Let's compute times for each gun to shoot 100 rounds. The triggers for both (being identical) can easily be pulled five times per second. Actual trigger-pulling time for each rifle to 100 rounds is therefore 20 seconds (okay, technically 19.8, but we'll round off). 

It takes a shooter three seconds to swap out magazines in a hurry. To shoot 100 rounds with the 715 requires three magazine swaps, or nine seconds of changeout time. Shooting 100 rounds with the 702 requires nine changeouts, or 27 seconds, 18 seconds more. 

Total shooting times:

• 715 - 29 seconds
• 702 - 47 seconds

Now, in a gunfight, 18 seconds can be a long time, but you're only getting them three seconds at a time. I don't say they don't matter, but I do say they don't matter as much as gun controllers think. The so-called "high-capacity" magazine ban is eyewash. And there are literally millions of 10-plus capacity mags already "in the wild," so to speak. What would the administration do about them?

Finally, the inefficacy of the 1994 "assault rifle" ban is well illustrated by this:

This was a banned "assault weapon:"

This was a permitted rifle that was not an "assault weapon:"

Can you tell the difference? 

Update: A word about how ammunition is classified.

Um, no.

Ammunition for pistols and rifles is classified according to the diameter of the bullet. It unit of measure is either in millimeters or as a decimal of an inch. For example, 9mm ammo or .45-caliber ammo. But, CNN not withstanding, they are not both at the same time, and a decimal mark never precedes the millimetric number. So there is no .9mm round nor a .22mm long rifle round.Those would be 9mm and .22, respectively.

However (because nothing should be truly simple, right?), there is a pistol round called .380 ACP caliber. (ACP simply stands for Automatic Colt Pistol). This caliber is also known as a "9mm short," having the dimensions of 9 X 17 mm. But "9mm" by itself means a round 9 X 19mm, referred to as the 9mm parabellum or 9mm Luger.

To make things even more confusing, the .380 is not actually a .38-caliber round. It and the 9mm parabellum are exactly .355 inch in diameter. So is the .357 magnum round. And both the .38 ACP and the .38 Super rounds are .356 inch in diameter. The round that actually is .357 inch in diameter is called the .38 Long Colt. Does any of this make sense? Actually, no.

Update: Reason very cogently makes the case that imprecision of language and terms infects the entire debate, but frankly only on one side. And it makes me wonder whether that's on purpose. Reason makes the same point I did, that "assault weapon" is nothing but a political term:

Contrary to what [New York Times columnist Gail] Collins et al. seem to think, the "assault weapon" category has no reality independent of legislation. 

Correct. See here: "Obama Wants to Ban 'Assault Weapons' but Does Not Know What They Are"

Update: When you've lost the Los Angeles Times ... . Why banning assault rifles won't reduce gun violence

The only thing unique about assault rifles is their menacing name and look.

The problem starts with the term itself. The “assault weapons” for sale in the U.S. now aren't really weapons of war. ...

As a matter of functionality, these guns are just like other rifles. They're more powerful than some handguns and rifles, and less powerful than others.

Related: "AFTER SAN BERNARDINO Support for Assault Weapons Ban Reaches 20-Year Low"

... just 44 percent of Americans now support an assault weapons ban, the lowest number in the 20 years that the NYT poll has asked the question. In 2011, 63 percent of Americans supported such a ban.