“‘No way to prevent this,’ says only nation where this ever happens” was The Onion’s headline Oct. 26.

Its editors have used the same headline over many dozens of stories since it first ran above an article on the Isla Vista mass-murder gun riot of 2014.

The godawful repetition, back yet again, adds up to a morbidly apt description of what one critic calls our country’s “reverberation of despair.”

I’ve mentioned The Onion’s hed before. I still know no better indictment of what ails us.

There will be people who say, because they always do, that it’s not the guns, it’s the mental illness — lots of the same people who say of homelessness that it’s not the lack of housing, it’s the mental illness.

To which I say, are we the only country in the world with crazy people?

Because in France this year, there have been zero mass shootings. Have you ever been to France? Suffice it to say that there are crazy people there.

The United Kingdom: zero mass shootings in 2023. I love the place so much I’ve been there six out of the last seven summers. Brits are as crackers as the rest of us. More so.

South Korea: zero mass shootings this year. And, look, I don’t want to indict half of an entire peninsula, with its artists, writers, designers and entrepreneurs who right now are in a cultural moment that is remaking the world. So let’s just say that plenty of Koreans in my experience are … personality-plus.

Germany: One mass shooting this year. Because, Germany.

In the United States, including Lewiston, there have been over 560 mass shootings this year, using the definition of four or more people killed or injured.

That isn’t just an order of magnitude difference from those other affluent countries in the world.

We’re not another country compared to them — we’re in another galaxy, a guns-blazing, insanity-epidemic one.

International firearms statistics are as slippery as that solution you use to keep the barrel of your Beretta shotgun blued, so that some Second Amendment professionals have enough time on their hands between clay-pigeon sessions to cook the numbers to show that per capita Americans really don’t shoot each other as much as it seems that we do.

That’s because they aren’t really talking about statistics on mass shootings — unloading on a bunch of fellow Americans out of sheer cussedness — but rather about gun deaths in a few crime-ridden Central American countries, or war-ridden central African ones.

But they can’t deny that we have a squillion times more mass shootings than anywhere else; that it’s getting worse, year by year — 273 in 2014 to 417 in 2019 to 647 in 2022.

And they ought not deny, though they will, that the real reason we have so many more mass shootings is the supply issue — more guns than people — and that the laws that are supposed to regulate crazy people’s access to said guns are either struck down or not enforced, as they weren’t when this Maine guy spent weeks in a mental hospital and then went out and bought an arsenal to add to the one he already had.

Local sheriff’s deputies knew about it, knew he was a walking mental breakdown who had talked about shooting up the place, and didn’t do anything.

What, America, will it take to find a way to prevent this?

Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com

It’s not that I thought she was my preferred candidate, at all. Butler has political positions that are not my own. Although labor unions did great things for working people in California, after youthful organizing right out of college she eventually became head of the SEIU in California, one of those unions that is forever pushing not just for appropriate pay and benefits for its members but for — this is an exaggeration, but still — a minimum wage of $50 or so, whatever the market would bear.

The market would not bear that.

No, it’s actually her all-around smarts, great career path into an HBCU and out of poverty in her native Mississippi and record of service that would have made Butler a formidable candidate.

Plus, looks and photo ops amount to more than a little when it comes to being elected to office, and from the minute she was named senator, Butler has looked positively senatorial.

So comfortable in her shoes after being raised by the governor from relative obscurity into high office. In a widely published photo of Butler sitting with Newsom and celebs such as George Clooney at a Los Angeles schools event, she looked like she’d been on a big public stage forever instead of for five minutes.

Related: Read more about Laphonza Butler

When Newsom made the appointment and disclosed that he’d done so without asking her for any commitment about whether she would run next year or not, I thought, uh-oh — once someone steps into such a seat of exalted power, it can be really hard for them to step down from it. And the power of incumbency, as with the power of good looks, is a great advantage.

So it was with great relief, to me at least, when Butler said she wouldn’t run, but rather, as she told Shawn Hubler in The New York Times,  that she intended to be “the loudest, proudest champion of California” in the remaining months of her term, but that she had realized “this is not the greatest use of my voice. … Just because you can win a campaign doesn’t always mean you should run a campaign.”

Wow. If serving in the (perhaps formerly) greatest deliberative body in the world isn’t the best use of her voice, this is someone with very high ambitions indeed.

“I know it’s surprising — folks don’t traditionally see people who have power let it go, but this is a moment where I’ve had to mind my own truth and hold it in my own heart,” she said.

Formidable, as I say.

But the ongoing contest between three members of Congress — Barbara Lee, Katie Porter and Adam Schiff — and I suppose you could throw Steve Garvey and a former L.A. newscaster into that mix, has already been shaping up to be a good one. A  real barn-burner, in fact. They’ve been out on the campaign trail for months, and they’ve been raising money toward this end for years. My relief at Butler’s decision has certainly got nothing on theirs.

As I’ve said before in this space, I’m voting for Adam Schiff to be the next junior senator from the great state of California. Since God was in short pants, he’s been my own representative in the California Senate and then in the United States House of Representatives, and he’s been a fantastic one. He’s going to be a great U.S. senator, for the rest of his career.

I’m just glad he doesn’t have to face off against a tough-to-beat incumbent in order to get there.

Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com

Also in recent weeks, COVID vaccine pioneers Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for their brilliant work in the lab that led to the development of anti-coronavirus vaccines swiftly administered to billions of people around the world, bringing an end to the worst part of the pandemic that we would still be in the throes of without their genius.

Let’s see, who should I celebrate here, the rich-kid whack job with the oddly circa-1963 skinny ties and permanent hoarse voice on the hustings, or the two selfless scientists whose dogged efforts saved the world’s collective bacon?

I think I’ll let the science speak.

Remember when COVID first began its killer path around the world, mowing down whole swaths of the population, from infants to mostly old folks, from Italian villages to nursing homes in the Bronx? When the concept of creating a vaccine against the disease was first broached, the common wisdom was that the problem at hand was that it would take years to develop and test them.

Whereas in fact, in a matter of months, both Moderna and Pfizer BioNTech vaccines were developed and made available, and they worked — not necessarily preventing getting COVID, which many of us did, but dramatically reducing the disease’s severity, so that when vaccinated people such as your columnist got it, we basically had the sniffles for a couple of days rather than dying in the ICU, our lungs filled up with liquid.

Reading the news stories about the new Nobelists many of us learned the real reason behind the dichotomy: Scientists such as Karikó and Weissman actually drew on decades of painstaking work they had quietly been doing to chemically tweak so-called messenger RNA in our bodies in order to create the supposedly “instant” versions of the two major vaccines.

The pair began to work together as far back as 1998, when they were fighting for access to a photocopy machine at the University of Pennsylvania. They discovered a shared interest in what was thought to be the eccentric notion that mRNA could be used to develop a vaccine against HIV and AIDS.

“The mRNA was delicate, so much so that when it was introduced to cells, the cells instantly destroyed it. Grant reviewers were not impressed,” The New York Times reported.

But Karikó, who long languished as an adjunct professor unable to get funding, and Weissman persevered. They overcame the initial problems. And in so doing they “fundamentally changed our understanding of how mRNA interacts with our immune system,” according to the Nobel panel, and “contributed to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times.”

Whereas RFK Jr.? His new book scoffs at the Nobelists’ work that eliminated so much misery because the COVID vaccines are indeed new and “experimental” and can contain aluminum and mercury like the childhood vaccines he has made his bones railing against. I’ll side with getting the sniffles rather than dying a horrible unvaxed death, Bobby.

Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.

Just 10 years later, that percentage has dropped to half, a new survey shows.

Since the early 2010s, the number of students on college and university campuses in our country has dropped by 2.5 million people.

Some of that is demographics.

But that’s akin to losing the city of Los Angeles from the shady groves of academe in the United States.

And it’s a pity.

College can be for getting ahead. Certainly my young Glendale friend graduating from Stanford next year in computer science and already enrolled in the graduate program in the same desirable discipline — that’s a get-ahead move. But I am not here to argue for the obvious reasons to go to college.

I’m here to argue for being an English major. For joining a fraternity, if that’s your thing. For writing poems, bad or good. For playing on an intramural basketball team — hey, they’ve got a 6-foot-and-under league.

Whether you hold down a job and go to Cal State Fullerton or L.A. or Northridge at night or head back East to some idyllic Swarthmore or Bard, go to college, kids. Send your kids to college, parents.

The four years of college in America form the most beautiful transition into adulthood ever created by a culture. You get out of the familial nest, but you’re not thrown right into the gray-suited career before you get to know the world, or yourself. Your head is unformed at 18 when we go off to school; if it’s not exactly fully formed at 21 when you leave campus, it’s screwed on a lot tighter.

I know that a lot of the parental reluctance is based on the fact that most professors and the institutions they serve are culturally and politically liberal. So what? Many insurance agents and money managers I know are culturally and politically conservative. Doesn’t mean they don’t give such as me excellent service. Their chosen professions require a proper conservatism, and thank God for that. Don’t give your 401(k) to a Trotskyite to manage, I always say.

OK, I’ve never said that. But it’s the kind of proposition you’d throw out late in the lounge on the floor of your freshman dormitory after your third beer in what newspaper columns always call a bull session although I don’t think anyone ever involved in one calls it that.

It’s just free time for free expression the likes of which a kid can never get at home. It’s going to bed when you want to and facing the music if there’s an early class, but that’s your call. It’s learning time management, ‘cause  Mom’s not there asking if you’ve done your homework. Sometimes you won’t have done your homework. Sometimes you’ll fail, because profs are kinda sick like that, for a bunch of libs. They’ll work you like you’ve never been worked.

After you’ve got your bearings, kid, take classes in things you’re really bad at. Don’t just stick to your comfort zone. I took Acting 1A, Drawing 1A and a carpentry class building sets for massive student productions. I was just terrible at all of them. Though I never missed a minute of class, my art prof called me out into the hallway halfway through the quarter and said he was worried about my grade. “Wait — I’m taking this class pass-fail!” I told him. “I’m not getting worse than a C-, am I?” I was not. He was so kind to look out for my GPA and graduate school prospects.

Hone your craft. Find your art. Mess about like you’ll never mess about again. And if you lean right, you know what you can say to your commie profs? “I disagree. You want to talk about it?”

And they do. That’s what they get paid for, to be in college forever. The lucky stiffs.

Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com

Their capo dei capi or capo di tutti i capi and what have you simply rule the roost there, in this Delaware. Mobsters on the order of Lucky Luciano. They live on Shakedown Street. Trying to get the capital city renamed Corleone. Out of respect. Gangsters of the old school.

So when you want to find out about the Mob, where you gonna go? Fox News, right? So I went to Fox News.

Bingo. There it was. None other than Sammy “The Bull” Gravano, explaining it all for us. And who would know better? Sammy was second in command of the Gambino Crime Family, after all, in a little burg called New York, which knows from its crime families.

“Is politics the Mafia, but in cheaper suits than you guys wore?” Fox host Jimmy Failla asked The Bull in a televised interview.

“I would take that as an insult,” The Bull said. “The Mafia is nothing like politics. We’re not on their level. We’re a different organization. Politics don’t give a damn about anybody. They’re robbing the public. They’re hurting people. Open borders. The cities are falling apart. There’s no comparison to what these scumbags are doing to what we did.”

“I would commend that. Because obviously in the Mafia women and children were off limits whereas what’s going on in politics, doesn’t really have a regard for anybody, does it?” Failla asked.

“No. And they weren’t off limits. They were people that we protected. They were people in our neighborhood. We loved people in our neighborhood. We never hurt people in our neighborhood … We’re like Boy Scouts compared to them,” The Bull replied.

“What do you think of the idea of the Bidens being a crime family?” Failla asked.

Because, right, naturally, the comparison, as we are saying, is apt. Crime families should be compared to crime families.

“You know, I’ve been listening to what’s going on with him, and I understand the RICO law, and the Biden family is an exact replica of the RICO law, ‘cause that’s what they did. You talk about gangsters and different kinds of crimes, but they sold out the entire country. … That’s organized crime to a degree that is really disgusting. I wouldn’t mind if someone stole a little bit here, didn’t pay taxes there. But they’re definitely a crime family,” The Bull said.

“And no one would know better than you,” Failla said.

Really? No one knows better than Sammy, the made man turned state’s witness, the ex-con?

Because here’s where this whole crime family thing falls apart.

La Cosa Nostra — big family, right? Lotsa mobsters, lotsa stealing, lotsa killing.

Whereas the Bidens? Big Irish family, sure. But they have one thug — Hunter. One of the sons. And one thug a crime family does not make.

Months of investigations by President Joe Biden’s political opponents, the GOP majority in the House of Representatives, have failed to come up with any indication that Dad, as opposed to clearly ne’er-do-well Son, is mobbed up.

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Kentucky, was so sure of his conviction that Hunter’s employment by Ukrainian companies was ridiculous when he had no experience that should land him such a job that he literally used the Fox talking point: “Biden Crime Family.”

So he and House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, called in Hunter’s former business partner, Devon Archer, as what they felt would be a star witness. It was a closed-door hearing — yet Comer released the transcript.

“Oops!” as Bill Press reports in The Hill. “There’s only one problem. Either Comer and Jordan weren’t listening to Archer’s testimony or they didn’t read the transcript before releasing it. Because the transcript shows that not only did Archer provide no evidence of illegal actions by Joe or Hunter, he directly contradicted five claims the two chairmen had been making against them.

“One. Joe Biden never discussed business matters on the phone with Hunter. Yes, Archer admitted, Hunter Biden did get his father on the phone ‘some 20 times’ during meetings with officials of Burisma, the energy company on which both Hunter and Archer sat as board members. But there was no discussion of business. ‘It was, you know,’ Archer said, ‘just general niceties and, you know, conversation in general about the geography, and the weather, whatever it may be.’

“Two. Joe Biden never altered U.S. policy to help Hunter’s business deals. ‘I have no basis to know if he altered policy to benefit his son,’ Archer testified. ‘I have no knowledge.’

“Three. Hunter Biden never expressly promised that his father could deliver anything. Yes, Archer testified, Hunter made sure everyone knew who his father was, he put him on phone calls, he sold the Biden family ‘brand,’ but he never ‘overtly’ told business associates he could or would use his father’s influence for any specific purpose.”

Hunter Biden is clearly a drifter, a grifter, a sleazeball — a former drug addict, and a bad painter to boot.

What an embarrassment of a son for a president of the United States to have.

But in this ongoing effort to impeach the current president because their president was twice impeached, there is so far no there there. No evidence of influence-peddling. No indication that Joe Biden himself — or any other Biden other than Hunter in this big family — made out like a bandit.

He’s no genius. He’s a bit on the older side. He ought to step down and let someone younger run for president.

But the boss of bosses of the Biden Crime Family? There hasn’t been a shred of evidence to indicate he’s that, or that he’s committed any high crimes or misdemeanors worthy of impeachment.

If Republicans in Congress produce any evidence that he has, we’ll get together over a glass of red in a little cafe in Sicily, and we’ll talk. I’ll be taking the seat facing the door.

Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com

But when a series of advisers close to a man who wants to be president develops a Presidential Transition Project that would radically reduce press access to the White House, you won’t be excused for thinking, “Oh, he’s just doing that to make America great again.”

Because the proper thing to think is quite clear: He’s got something, perhaps lots of things, to hide.

The concept is the brainchild of the increasingly loony Heritage Foundation, which used to be the sober redoubt of a bunch of Reaganauts and now has fully, exclusively come aboard the Trump Train.

Its Project 2025, a working paper — actually, more of a coffee-table book, apparently — designed to create a template for a new authoritarian second administration for Donald Trump, with a motto along the lines of, “This time, we really mean it, man!,” Heritage and some allies suggest the new administration should “reexamine” the tradition of providing work space for the press corps at the White House.

Because of what? Again, apparently because the scribes and their broadcast brethren are ipso facto not loyal enough to the Florida man who wants revenge for his 2020 election loss.

But the press hasn’t been loyal, at all, to any president with the exception perhaps of John Kennedy, who was just so good-looking that the whole nation was in his thrall.

Does Project 2025 think newspapers, magazines, TV and radio reporters will get more loyal if they get kicked out of their tiny cubicles on Pennsylvania Avenue and are forced to pound away on their laptops at the Starbucks down the street? Or sitting under a tree in the park in Lafayette Circle? What’s the petty point?

Most administrations try to cultivate the press, members of which are actually surprisingly amenable to cultivation, especially if a free beer and a burger are involved. They know how to use the ink-stained wretches by promising access, and by serving as Machiavellian anonymous sources for stories aimed at undercutting bureaucratic rivals.

You can’t let a hundred flowers bloom if you take away the little, nourishing compost heap near the Rose Garden.

The “reexamine” of a place for the press at the heart of the executive branch is but a tiny footnote in the grand scheme that is Project 2025,

Now, personally, the idea of losing that number, or a much higher number, of hidebound Washington bureaucrats does not exactly make tears well up in me. It’s not a bad idea, in principle.

But Heritage’s idea of who to replace them with — and replaced they would be — is the kind of stuff that would make you long for some boring deep-stater with a cushy do-nothing job.

Their notion after the ousting is to replace them with Trump backers more than happy to simply implement the autocrat’s wishes.

Give me despotism by boring gray men any day than despotism by lackeys of the taller, fatter Napoleon.

And give me a tiny desk when I get transferred to the D.C. bureau. Bring me a burger, and a beer, and we’ll talk.

Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com

They don’t just recycle; they have to wear a T-shirt knocking you for not recycling. They don’t just fight against racial inequities; they have to change their social-media profile pictures to reflect the latest battle.

Of course, another way of looking at VS is that some progressives are more about posturing than about actually taking action.

Which is precisely why citizen groups and electeds proposing policies requiring parents to be told if their child identifies as transgender on school campuses are doing nothing more and nothing less than virtue signaling.

The difference being, there actually is a problem in the world when, say, plastics don’t get recycled and end up in the belly of a fish. There actually is a problem with racism in this country, and when you don’t acknowledge it and counter it, people get shot dead in a Dollar Store because of the color of their skin.

Whereas parents so clueless, so out of touch with their children and the issues they are dealing with, that they would be shocked if the Johnny they thought was macho slips on a skirt as soon as he hits campus?

Doesn’t happen. Or, rather, doesn’t happen a whole lot. And when it does, boy howdy, is that one on the parents for being so disinterested in their children’s lives that they would be a) surprised at the news or b) so in denial about the fact that for a tiny percentage of the population, gender is a fluid thing, and that it may not be the one they were “assigned at birth.”

I thought the whole point of the conservative movement’s attitude about public education is that California needs to get back to reading, ‘riting and ‘rithmetic and ditch the focus on hot-button social issues of the day.

Then why — other than banning books — has its focus suddenly changed to requiring schools to out transgender students to their parents?

One Chino Valley school board member, seeing her odd focus on something other than education slapped down by a California court, moaned to a reporter in a text, “We spent months bringing together a policy that allows parents to be involved in the upbringing in their child’s life.”

Who’s disallowing parental involvement simply by not forcing teachers to call Mommy if her little cheerleader is actually a bit more butch than Mommy had imagined? Teacher’s job is to teach, not to tattle about something that is none of her business.

But, fearful folks, I also get it. This is so new to us. All of us. I have close friends whose teens, one of whom I had known since birth, came out as trans, initially to everyone’s consternation. Another close friend, who happens to be gay, a therapist and a parent, is flummoxed by quick moves toward hormones and surgery. “Why not just be queer, like me?” she laments.

The answer is that, like it or not, every generation is a consternation to the previous one. Let today’s non-binary kids talk to their parents when they’re ready to, not when some school board rule says that they must.

Larry Wilson is a member of the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com

It’s not physically addictive and can’t kill you in an overdose.

And yet, for generations, weed has been federally declared a Schedule I drug, just like heroin and LSD — which isn’t addictive and can’t produce lethal overdoses, either — a subject for another day. (As is the efficacy of treating opiates as a legal rather than medical issue, but — baby steps.)

But the good news is that, after a study instigated by President Joe Biden, his administration’s Department of Health and Human Services last week recommended that the Drug Enforcement Administration significantly lower restrictions on marijuana, saying it wants pot moved from Schedule I to Schedule III under the CSA. Politico called it “potentially the biggest change in federal drug policy in decades.”

So two cheers for democracy and all that. Because the HHS did not advise that reefer be entirely removed from the Controlled Substances Act, as it should be.

But after all these years of absurd, dangerous, life-wrecking prohibition, the feds are finally on the right course.

Californians might shrug at the move, as marijuana has been legal here for years now, and we can walk into corner shops — so long as a city’s pols have been properly paid off — that are, just like liquor stores, by turns scuzzy or fancy, and have some tattooed youngster in a white lab coat sell some very pricey, highly taxed sinsemilla that at least has the advantage of being tested to show it was grown organically, and thus not filled with pesticides like that ‘70s-era paraquat.

But the demotion to Schedule III still does offer significant advantages to the retail-sales situation even in states that have already legalized the devil weed within their own borders.

That’s because the federal criminalization of marijuana has continued to make it very difficult for retailers even in states where pot is legal to be able to engage in normal banking and to accept credit cards for purchase.

Not only that — as Politico reports, “But because cannabis businesses are not federally legal, they are subject to a federal tax code that prohibits narcotics traffickers from taking typical tax exemptions for business expenses like salaries and benefits. That code does not apply to Schedule III, so if the DEA approved HHS’ recommendation, cannabis businesses around the country would immediately be paying much less in federal taxes.”

“It’s giant,” said Charlie Bachtell, CEO of Cresco Labs, one of the country’s largest cannabis companies, told Politico in an interview. “I think you would see a healthier cannabis industry a year from now.”

There would also be a significant side effect that would help in the academic study of how marijuana affects health, which has long been hindered by a weird federal regulation: researchers have for decades only been able to obtain cannabis from a single pot farm at the University of Mississippi. The stuff they grow there has scant resemblance to the high-THC marijuana California consumers can legally buy.

So it’s all good, right? “President Biden is effectively declaring an end to Nixon’s failed war on cannabis and placing the nation on a trajectory to end prohibition,” Edward Conklin, executive director of the US Cannabis Council, said in a statement.

Well, no. The move would go nowhere toward addressing the erasure of past criminal records of Americans wrongly imprisoned over many decades for mere marijuana possession, cultivation and sales, which has disproportionately affected so many Black, Brown and poor people. That needs to change.

Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.

Of course, in general, you could ask the same question of most liberals. Except sort of turned around. When did liberals start being such warmongers? Because in recent decades, most liberals were crazy for the warmongering, all around the globe, as were the conservatives, in heartbreakingly long wrongheaded wars, especially in the Middle East, all as wrong in their separate ways as was America’s awful war in Vietnam.

Blessings upon the actual pacifists, few but mighty.

For most of the rest of us, there are wars and there are wars. None are a happy occasion. Over 99% don’t merit anything in the way of United States involvement.

For the pragmatist, some do.

An unprovoked war by a Russian dictator aimed at wrongly taking back an independent part of the old Soviet empire would be one of those.

Right now, and in almost any foreseeable future, helping to counter the invasion of Ukraine at the hand of Vladimir Putin does not involve sending U.S. troops. Most of us pragmatists have never even considered the idea.

But it does involve sending money, equipment, armor and facilitating the use of U.S.-made aircraft. It does involve U.S. advice — ever-mindful of the slippery slope that started with American “advisers” being sent to Vietnam beginning in the late 1950s, a slope that led to hundreds of thousands of our soldiers sliding down it, soon enough.

Most moderate and liberal Americans, strongly believing that starting a major war in Europe is tantamount to starting a war on us, are for the current level of U.S. support for Kyiv, and a bit more.

So what’s the deal with the conservative lack of support for Ukraine, and the growing props to Putin, including by some presidential candidates?

A new poll of the 26% of registered Republicans who can reliably be called simply “right wing”: they watch Fox News and Newsmax, and describe themselves as politically “very conservative” — shows that just 19% of them support providing additional support to Ukraine.

Candidate Nikki Haley holds many positions that are just vicious and inane. But the best part of the Wednesday GOP debate was when she called out Vivek Ramaswamy, a Putin enabler, for “choosing a murderer” over pro-American Ukraine.

“Putin has said … once Russia takes Ukraine, Poland and the Baltics are next,” she said. “That’s a world war. We’re trying to prevent war. Look at what Putin did today. He killed Prigozhin. When I was at the U.N., the Russian ambassador suddenly died. This guy is a murderer. And you are choosing a murderer over a pro-American country.”

A former president who didn’t show at the debate and the guy in distant second place in the polls also are Kremlin-appeasers. What gives? Reds bad, nouveau Czarists good?

Or is it just the conservative dislike for everything Europe in general, barring a few statist leaders in the former Soviet bloc, ignoring the strength of conservative movements in Italy, France and Spain and the longtime dominance of the literal Conservative Party in Britain?

Obviously there were anti-interventionist conservative American politicians in the past. Charles Lindbergh was a Republican, and led the “America First” opposition to fighting in World War II to save Europe.

It was a lousy bunch, but they caved after Pearl Harbor. What will it take to get right-wing Republicans today to support freedom in Europe?

Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.

The thing that they are supposedly saying is often wrong, but he can tout one conspiracy theory or another by claiming it as simply the common wisdom. “A lot of people are saying they had spies in my campaign,” he said of Democratic operatives back in 2018, and yet never turned anyone up who filled that bill. But if they had, “it would make any political event, ever, look like small potatoes.”

Uh-huh.

And I really, really dislike most any dictum at all issuing from the Chinese government, a mendacious dictatorship built on thought control the likes of which a former president with totalitarian tendencies can only dream.

So it hurts that a painful joke the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs made last year hits so close to home.

“Many people are saying,” the ministry said in a release, “it is easier to buy a gun than baby formula in the U.S.”

I had seen that quote before, but it doubly hit home when I read the statistics surrounding it in a recent op-ed piece in The New York Times by David Wallace-Wells.

Headlined “Why Is America Such a Deadly Place?,” the column begins with the shattering news that the land of the free, home of the brave is suffering an unprecedented plunge in relative life expectancy in recent years, after many previous decades of improvement.

Our numbers used to be in the pack with “our wealthy peers” around the globe, he writes.

Now, American life expectancy is below those in Kosovo, Albania, Sri Lanka and Algeria — though it is still just ahead of Panama, Turkey and Lebanon.

Drug overdose deaths and ill health in our big nation’s vast poverty belts are big parts of the grim statistics. In 2020, the last year numbers were available, for instance, there were about 5,800 drug overdose deaths in the European Union, population 440 million. In the U.S., population 330 million in 2022, the number was 107,000.

But for someone like me, who finds our dangerously commonplace gun ownership incomprehensible and the result of a deliberate misreading of the Second Amendment, the real gut punch is in the numbers that show how we are simply shooting our friends, enemies, family members and selves to death.

Wallace-Wells shows how our average life expectancy is just getting murdered: “there are 22 times as many gun-related homicides in the United States as in the countries of the European Union,” he writes. “Between 2019 and 2021, total U.S. gun deaths — including suicides and accidents — grew 23 percent, to 48,830 such deaths in 2021.” About 7,000 European Union residents a year die at the barrel of a gun. Some 15% of their gun deaths are homicides; 43% of ours are.

And I realize that, er, many people own guns because it makes them feel safer, conveniently ignoring the tragic statistics showing that having guns in the house is much more likely to end up in a shot loved one than a shot bad guy.

The numbers just make me mourn for the missing countrymen who should still be here. Can someone run for president with the campaign slogan: “Make Americans live again”?

Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.