INDIANAPOLIS – Last year was one of the bloodiest years in Indiana history as Indianapolis set yet another homicide record with 271 murders, while Evansville, Fort Wayne and South Bend all had deadly years. Perhaps, just perhaps ... it’s because Indiana is awash in guns. On Tuesday, the Indiana House voted 63-29 on HB1077 the “constitutional carry” bill that would abolish permits to carry handguns. According to National Instant Criminal Background Check System that was created by the 1998 Brady Act, these checks have increased steadily over the past three years after spiking during the 2016 election cycle. Indiana NICS firearms checks totaled 1,815,531 in 2021, down slightly from 1,935,587 in 2020. In 2019, there were 1,450,565 checks. These checks spiked to 1,436,725 in 2016 and 1,076,917 in 2015 when there was speculation that Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton was heavily favored over Donald Trump. Rumors were rampant that a third Clinton administration would herald new gun restrictions. While Indiana has a population of 6.8 million people, the NICS checks during these five years totaled 7.7 million.

INDIANAPOLIS - Back in 1976 I read a short newspaper story citing French demographer and scholar Emmanuel Todd who forecast the collapse of the Soviet Union. In his essay titled "The Final Fall," Todd deduced that the USSR suffered from stagnation, low birth rate and high infant mortality, rising suicides, alcoholism and worker discontent. At the time, I thought Todd's notion was crazy. The collapse of a nuclear super power? As a graduate of Indiana University's Russian and East European Institute, and working in Elkhart where a large Soviet dissident community had gathered in the 1980s, I attended seminars at IU and Notre Dame in which a number of scholars such as Prof. Robert F. Byrnes, Prof. Darrell Hammer, Prof. Robert Campbell of IU and Notre Dame Prof. George A. Brinkley Jr. believed that communism as we knew it was dying. "You cannot even find a glass of beer in Moscow," Prof. Byrnes said. Prof. Campbell added, "This society has to be rebuilt from the ground up. There's no way of getting out of this mess without any trouble. The question is: Can Gorbachev manage the trouble?" But in 1986, few scholars were predicting the Soviet collapse. That began to change two years later, when Prof. Brinkley described 1988 and 1989 as Soviet leader "Gorbachev's hump" following the fall of the Berlin Wall and poor harvests. Prof. Hammer observed in September of that year that "The Soviet Union ought to solve its economic problems before trying to reform politically.” In my Elkhart Truth article dated Nov. 5, 1989, I wrote, "In the light of astounding events that have taken place in 1988 and 1989, anything can happen. And it did. I watched CNN on Dec. 25, 1991, as the old Soviet hammer and sickle flag was lowered from the Kremlin after Gorbachev resigned. The USSR was kaput. Why tell this chapter today? Because there are now predictions that the same fate is in store for the United States of America.

INDIANAPOLIS - Becoming Indiana's attorney general is not, historically, a path to the governorship, or any other higher office. Yes, Democrat Attorney General Alonzo Smith served as an interim lieutenant governor from 1886-89, and Samuel Jackson was briefly in the U.S. Senate in 1944. In 1992, Attorney General Linley Pearson won the Republican gubernatorial nomination, but nearly quit before the convention ended in a dispute over composition of the ticket. In 2016, Attorney General Greg Zoeller lost a 9th Congressional District primary to mostly-unknown Trey Hollingsworth, formerly of Tennessee, who used family wealth to win the nomination and the seat. In the television age of Hoosier politics, Attorney Generals Edwin Steers, John Dillon, Ted Sendak, Pamela Carter, Jeff Modisett, Karen Freeman-Wilson and Steve Carter saw the office as the capstone of their political and legal careers, though the appointed Freeman-Wilson later became the mayor of Gary. Our governors during this modern era have been lieutenant governors, House speakers, state senators, congressmen, or wealthy businessmen. The notion of the state's top lawyer becoming a governor or U.S. senator began after Republican Attorney General Curtis Hill took office in 2017.

NOTRE DAME – In late June 2018, Democrat U.S. Sen. Joe Donnelly was cruising toward reelection and was on a conference call with Hoosier agriculture reporters when he learned that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy was retiring. "It was like I got hit in the head with a baseball bat," Donnelly told me. "I had been watching that like a hawk, because the way the Supreme Court operates, there’s a time when you really can’t resign after that point in the year, there are things you have to do to get ready for the next cycle. He had already hired clerks. By that time, you’re really in so deep you can’t leave. So, this was the final week when he could possibly consider; this was the end of the final week. I know how emotional Supreme Court nominations are." Donnelly ended up losing to Republican Mike Braun five months later, 51-45%, with the Republican carrying 84 counties. The Kennedy retirement and the volatile confirmation hearing of Judge Brett Kavanaugh a month before the election that included sketchy allegations that as a teenager he had sexually assaulted a girl completely roiled the Indiana Senate race. The Kavanaugh confirmation sequence was a determinative one that may have decided this race. It gave President Trump more reasons to come to stump for Braun, showing up a half a dozen campaign rallies. It certainly ignited the Republican base. And it put Donnelly in a bind, eventually opposing the Kavanaugh confirmation. This coming June, the U.S. Supreme Court's decision's in the Mississippi case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization has the potential to alter the political environment once again. Republican U.S. Sen. Todd Young is seeking a second term and will likely face Democrat Hammond Mayor Thomas McDermott Jr.

INDIANAPOLIS – From my “lamestream media” perch things sure do look dicey and dangerous. There’s that 36-page coup d’etat Powerpoint titled “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 Jan” that President Trump’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows gave to the House Jan. 6 Committee. The Atlantic’s Barton Gellman writes that “Trump’s next coup has already begun.” According to Gellman, “If the plot succeeds, the ballots cast by American voters will not decide the presidency in 2024. Thousands of votes will be thrown away, or millions, to produce the required effect. The winner will be declared the loser. The loser will be certified president-elect.” Veteran GOP operative Steve Schmidt describes “the obvious edge of the abyss into which we are staring. A great crisis isn’t just at hand, it is underway. We are living through its early days.” NBC’s Meet The Press Daily observes: “Today prominent GOP candidates are running campaigns based on waving the bloody shirt of a stolen election. Sixty percent of the party’s voters believe the blood is real when it’s actually fake. Republicans in several states are trying their best to make sure those local officials who protected the election from false fraud claims won’t be there next time.”

BLOOMINGTON - An Economist/YouGov poll puts congressional approval at 19%, while 59% disapprove. Now why would that be? Perhaps it's because there hasn't been any meaningful immigration reform in almost four decades, which is why we have a humanitarian crisis at the southern border, American farmers can't find enough people to pick crops and there are tens of thousands of unfilled jobs across Indiana. Or, perhaps, it is now putting the nation on a path to default as Senate Republicans are not only refusing to vote to raise the debt ceiling (something it has routinely done since World War I), but are planning to use the filibuster to keep it from happening. “This is a unified Democrat government, engaging in a partisan reckless tax and spending spree," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is said to have told Treasury Sec. Janet Yellen. Ahhh, the filibuster. The Indiana Senate and 49 other state legislatures don't have this archaic tool. Neither does the East Chicago City Council, the Wakarusa Town Board or the Fort Wayne School Board. It would take 60 votes – 10 more than majority Democrats (along with Vice President Kamala Harris) – to break a filibuster. Enter U.S. Sen. Todd Young, the senior Republican from Indiana who is seeking a second term in 2022. Young said in a Senate floor speech on Wednesday, “Defaulting on our debts will start a spiral of economic turmoil. Interest rates would rise. The dollar would drop. Essential government workers might not get paid."

MICHIGAN CITY – As we head into a weekend commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, ponder this question: Did Osama bin Laden win? He was killed by U.S. Special Forces a decade ago, his remains dumped into the Indian Ocean. But when you consider what his goals were when he attacked New York and Washington, he has achieved much of what he wanted. When al-Qaeda attacked, the U.S. was the only “super power” on the world stage, coming a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Today, there is a growing school of thought that we have now fallen behind China. America spent $6.4 trillion on what President George W. Bush described as the “War on Terror,” according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project. This includes President Bush’s “Axis of Evil” State of the Union address in 2002 when he expanded the U.S. assault on al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan to Iraq, Iran and North Korea. The Iraq War costs are pegged at about $2 trillion (coming to about $8,000 per U.S. taxpayer). The Costs of War Project estimates the U.S. spent $2.2 trillion in Afghanistan, including $837 billion on “warfighting” and $145 billion on Afghan reconstruction, the development of its national security forces that quit after 11 days this summer, as well as counter-narcotic efforts. There were 2,352 U.S. military members who were killed in Afghanistan, and the 20,000 who were wounded. In the Iraq War, 4,431 U.S. soldiers were killed and 31,944 were wounded. These human costs are incalculable, defying any dollar amount on a spread sheet.

MICHIGAN CITY – The people don't always get it right. From slavery, to the right of women and minorities to vote, from the way we've treated our mentally ill, to Jim Crow laws and school segregation, it took "leaders" to cut through prevailing opinion, gossip and innuendo, and forge evolving visionary policy creating a more perfect union. When it comes to the COVID-19 pandemic - the most lethal health sequence in Indiana history which has claimed more than 14,000 lives - the General Assembly moved at the behest of some of the people to crimp the power of our governor. Instead of waiting for this pandemic to end, comprehensively study responses and results, and then make policy changes, the General Assembly passed laws and overrode vetoes by Gov. Eric Holcomb to send public health mandates and restrictions into the hands of local units of government like county commissioners and school boards. So, how's that going? nHalf the Indiana population is fully vaccinated, leaving the other half exposed, and now the "end of the tunnel" forecasted by Gov. Eric Holcomb last March is now in its fourth surge, on course to surpass those of last fall and winter. It was wholly avoidable. According to state health officials, four of Indiana's 10 hospital districts are now above 100% of Intensive Care Unit beds occupied. According to the University of Washington's very credible health metrics evaluation site, another 6,000 Hoosiers will die between now and Dec. 1, with the daily death toll reaching 130 by mid-October. Our ICU nurses are overwhelmed and burned out, which is exacerbating a shortage of medical personnel. After shifts where they are the last human a doomed COVID patient sees, these ICU nurses drive past bars, restaurants and stadiums filled with unmasked people.