I never wanted a gun. There are days when I forget I have it, locked up in a smart safe under a pile of clothes in a dresser. I still take it out to the range about once a month, but I spend more time looking at its disassembled parts on the cleaning table — the harmless viscera of the killing machine — than aiming it at the target. At home, if I pick it up, I just hold its slick black body in my hand, fingers wrapped around the grip. It doesn’t feel as heavy as I thought a gun would be — 20 ounces. The weight of a Bible. Or, perhaps, of two human hearts. I put it back in the safe, cover the safe with jeans. But I can’t hide the unease I feel — or is it shame? — about living with a gun in America.
South Dakota Lawmakers Push To Protect Gun Owners’ Rights.
While gun owners in many states face a legislature hostile to their rights, pro-freedom lawmakers in South Dakota are pushing to protect gun owners’ rights in the Mount Rushmore State.
In the past week, lawmakers have passed two pro-gun bills—House Bill 1035 and Senate Bill 39—and the measures now go to Republican Gov. Kristi Noem for her consideration.
House Bill 1035, introduced by Rep. Kevin Jensen, extends the renewal period for those holding enhanced carry permits. The enhanced permit is an optional permit that allows approved permit holders the ability to present the permit to a retailer when purchasing a firearm, in lieu of undergoing a background check through NICS.
According to the bill’s language: “A person who holds an enhanced permit to carry a concealed pistol may renew the permit through the sheriff of the county in which the person resides. The period for renewal begins 12 months before the permit expires and ends 30 days after the permit expires.”
Previously, enhanced carry permit holders couldn’t begin the renewal process until 180 days before the permit’s expiration date.
Senate Bill 39, introduced by state Sen. Michael Rohl, would, if signed by the governor, place restrictions on homeowners’ associations (HOAs) regarding their regulation of firearms.
According to the measure’s language: “A homeowner’s association may not include or enforce a provision in a governing document that prohibits, restricts or has the effect of prohibiting or restricting the lawful possession, transportation or storing a firearm, any part of a firearm, or firearm ammunition, or discharge of a firearm.”
Sen. Rohl says the bill would help residents who live under homeowner associations better protect themselves.
“A sign doesn’t keep out bad guys with guns,” Sen. Rohl said. “We want good guys with guns.”
Both measures are likely to be signed by Gov. Noem, who is a strong Second Amendment supporter. In fact, at last year’s NRA Annual Meetings, Noem, who spoke at the convention, signed an executive order on stage blocking state agencies from contracting with large banks that discriminate against firearm-related industries.
“It’s not just the media and big government that are attacking our rights,” Noem said at the time. “Now we’ve seen banking institutions go after industries that they disagree with. None have been more impacted than those who support the Second Amendment. Well, not on my watch: I won’t stand for it—not in South Dakota.”
Actually it’s a ‘power’ as people have rights.
Former Arizona AG: States have constitutional right to self-defense
Former Republican Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich again on Tuesday argued the constitutional authority given to states for self-defense.
Brnovich testified at a U.S. House Judiciary Committee hearing addressing the issue after being the first and only state attorney general to issue a formal legal opinion that defines an invasion and lays out the constitutional authority of states’ self-defense.
Other testimony was presented by representatives of the Texas Attorney General’s Office, the Immigration Reform Law Institute and the ACLU.
January 31, 2024
5th Chicago CCL Holder Defends Themselves In a Week
The CCL holder involved in this morning’s shooting is the fifth person in the Chicago area to defend themselves in the past week.
Here are the five incidents that I know of.
- 1/22/2024 Teen shot by a customer during an attempted restaurant robbery
- 1/26/2024 In Chicago Ridge, offenders got into a gunfight with 2 CCL holders they were following
- 1/28/2024 CCL holder calls 911 and says someone is threatening him with a knife
- 1/28/2024: CCL holder gets into a shootout with men who stole his SUV
- 1/30/2024: This morning, men attempted to rob a CCL holder, and they lost
How many officer-involved shootings have occurred in the past week? Zero that I can find.
I’m meeting with a Chicago business owner tomorrow to view security camera footage that shows the police arriving just as the offenders take off.
They got away and committed multiple robberies on the same night, including another one of his stores.
Given that last year saw a significant number of shootings in self-defense in major cities, the question is whether this pattern will continue in 2024.
Most reporters are very sympathetic to gun-control agendas and will skew or lie outright about facts to promote them.
— Dennis Cauchon
How the second amendment is treated as a second class right by California Democrats.
You clearly want more innocent children to die if you don’t pass more gun-control. You can try and dress it up, but that is the basic marketing pitch for gun-control. You have to ignore the millions of violent crimes we stop and the lives we save each year for that emotional appeal to have a prayer of making sense.
What is passing strange is that the lawyers for the state of California are trying to sell a similar sales pitch to the 9th Circuit Court.
This story started last year when the US Supreme court confirmed that ordinary citizens have the right to bear arms in public. More to the point, governments violate our rights when they infringed on our right to bear arms. In reply to that federal ruling, anti-rights states like California discovered a new cause. Urged on by the campaign donations of anti-gun billionaires, the legislature made a surprising discovery. The places where trained, investigated, and licensed citizens had been carrying guns for decades were suddenly discovered to be “sensitive” places. Who knew?
California’s SB2 made almost every public place and commercial location into a new “gun-free” zone. In theory, we understand places like a jail, a prison, and a secure courtroom to be a sensitive place. We are legally prohibited from carrying a personal firearm in those rooms. The state is responsible for our physical safety in those areas because we have been disarmed as we passed through the security check point.
Now bear with me a moment as I show you a few of the places that California turned into disarmed-good-guy zones.
California said that hospitals, nursing homes, medical offices, and urgent care facilities are gun-free zones. So are their parking lots. That means honest citizens like you can’t go armed to the business that shares a parking lot with the doc-in-a-box-urgent-care office. I am positive that there isn’t a cop guarding every urgent care office. What you might not know is that people are often attacked in hospitals and their parking lots. Criminals like to rob weak people as they cross the parking lot while carrying plastic bags filled with drugs.
I know there isn’t a policeman or sheriff’s deputy at every bus, train, and ferry terminal. There isn’t a cop at every restaurant chain where you can buy a beer. There isn’t a security fence and a magnetometer screening portal at every concert or public gathering. There certainly isn’t much security at every school and playground. None of that matters and the California legislature said that honest citizens should be disarmed even though they were trained, vetted, and licensed to carry.
But its for the children! Don’t you care about them?
Unfortunately, those facts don’t matter to the California legislature. They want you disarmed anyway, and the legislators won’t be blamed for the rising rate of crime. To be fair to the Democrat legislators, those facts probably don’t matter to a majority of judges on the 9th circuit court either. I’m sorry, but these are the consequences we warned you about before the last election.
Right now, the California “gun-free” zone law is enjoined while the case is appealed. Here is the full list of prohibited places where honest citizens are disarmed.
South Carolina Senate to Vote on Making State the 28th for Constitutional Carry
The South Carolina Senate is expected to vote later this week whether the Palmetto State will become the 28th constitutional carry state.
The legislation is House Bill 3594. The NRA-ILA noted the legislation was passed by the South Carolina House last year and sent to the Senate to be taken up in early 2024.
On February 2, 2023, Breitbart News reported that South Carolina State Rep. Bobby Cox (R-Greenville) put forward H.3594 to secure constitutional carry in the state.
On February 23, 2023, NRA-ILA pointed out the South Carolina House passed Cox’s legislation.
HB 3594 is now before the state Senate and it was debated on the state Senate floor last week. It is expected that “debate will continue on Tuesday, with a vote expected to take place on or before Thursday, February 1st.”
There are currently 27 constitutional carry states in the Union. Those are: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
How an Escalation in Drone Warfare Cost Three U.S. Servicemen Their Lives
Sometimes you’ve got to hand it to the bad guys for being so murderously clever in ways few could imagine. Or worse, in ways that a few forward-thinkers did imagine but that those in power didn’t take seriously.
One of those just happened in Jordan over the weekend, as I’m sure you already know, when Iran’s proxies in Syria used a drone to kill three U.S. servicemen in neighboring Jordan and injure at least 34 more. But Sunday’s attack wasn’t just another run-of-the-mill kamikaze drone strike — the kind we’ve seen more than 150 of on our forces in the region since Hamas launched its terror invasion of southern Israel on October 7.
This one was far more clever, exposing a weakness in our defenses and a failure in our imaginations — and not for the first time.
American Army Air Corps pilot and airpower pioneer Billy Mitchell died almost six years before Imperial Japan’s naval aviators crippled our battleship fleet at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, but he predicted exactly such a scenario decades in advance. In 1910 he warned, “That increasing friction between Japan and the U.S. will take place in the future there can be little doubt, and that this will lead to war sooner or later seems quite certain,” and that Japan would initiate hostilities with an aerial bombardment of ships at anchor in Pearl Harbor.
Our top brass and political leaders dismissed the Japanese with racist notions about how they “were supposedly physiologically incapable of being good aviators because they lacked a sense of balance and their eyes were not right.” Navy leadership also insisted that it would be impossible for Japanese carriers to sneak up on us.
Oops.
Flash forward to 1994 and Tom Clancy’s latest techno-thriller, “Debt of Honor.” The book’s unlikely plot centered on a group of Japanese businessmen who, like the Imperial military in the 1930s, co-opted the government for their own ends. In this case, crippling the U.S. military in the Pacific to establish an all-new Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. At the end, with the cabal defeated, one desperate Japanese ultranationalist steals a grounded JAL airliner and crashes it into the Capitol Building while Congress is fêting our victorious president, killing nearly everyone present.
Not even Clancy had imagination enough to predict such an act committed with multiple planes, each full of terrified civilians. But no one in Washington made any preparations at all, even for the all-too-realistic scenario Clancy wrote about seven years before 9/11.
While not a failure of imagination on anything like the scale of Pearl Harbor or 9/11, Iran’s proxies showed real imagination in plotting their Sunday attack. A Defense Department official, speaking anonymously, told Politico today that the Syrian militiamen saw “an opportunity” in our defenses and “exploited” it.
They flew their drone into Tower 22 undetected by tailgating one of our own drones returning from a surveillance mission. It then struck the living quarters at Tower 22, resulting in those terrible casualties.
“Check your six” is a reminder to look behind you and see if there’s a bad guy sneaking up. We either didn’t think to do that, or the drone operator was unable to do that, and the results were deadly.
The British used to rule a quarter of the world. https://t.co/PWaBDtcQBQ
— Toshiro Grendel (@ToshiroGrendel) January 29, 2024
Global Warming: Observations vs. Climate Models.
SUMMARY
Warming of the global climate system over the past half-century has averaged 43 percent less than that produced by computerized climate models used to promote changes in energy policy. In the United States during summer, the observed warming is much weaker than that produced by all 36 climate models surveyed here. While the cause of this relatively benign warming could theoretically be entirely due to humanity’s production of carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel burning, this claim cannot be demonstrated through science. At least some of the measured warming could be natural. Contrary to media reports and environmental organizations’ press releases, global warming offers no justification for carbon-based regulation.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
The observed rate of global warming over the past 50 years has been weaker than that predicted by almost all computerized climate models.
Climate models that guide energy policy do not even conserve energy, a necessary condition for any physically based model of the climate system.
Public policy should be based on climate observations—which are rather unremarkable—rather than climate models that exaggerate climate impacts.
The gun control bills are flying in Santa Fe as anti-2A lawmakers are racing to enact a flurry of new restrictions on residents; a sweeping semi-auto ban, prohibiting gun sales to adults younger than 21, and enacting a new 14 business-day waiting period on all firearms transfers that would be the longest in the nation. Unlike last session, where similar bills were bottled up in committee or voted down altogether, Democrats this year seem willing to go along with virtually every restriction demanded by Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, even as they tacitly admit that their bills are going to run into trouble in the courts if they’re enacted into law.
When State Sen. Joe Cervantes was questioned about that potential 14 business-day waiting period during a meeting of the Senate Health and Public Affairs Committee over the weekend, the anti-gun lawmaker studiously avoided answering a query from a colleague about whether that waiting period comports with the national tradition of gun ownership in the United States. Instead, he proclaimed that the Supreme Court is going to overrule its own decision in Bruen in just a few months, making any potential conflict with the “text, history, and tradition” test laid out in that case utterly moot.
“It’s an absurd ruling. And it’s an absurd ruling that will not stand, I believe, for the next six months because the Supreme Court will reverse itself and recognize the absurdity of Clarence Thomas’s opinion.
Now, that sounds pretty arrogant of me, a Las Cruces street lawyer, to say that the Supreme Court wrote an absurd opinion, but I’m going to stand by that. And I’ll give you an example: Clarence Thomas, with the majority, held that any restrictions on guns had to be based on historic traditions, yet we as a country do not allow guns in this capitol.
Some of you may disagree with that, but there’s no historical tradition about not allowing guns in government buildings.
Cervantes went on to say that there’s no historic tradition banning fully automatic firearms or rocket-propelled grenades or prohibiting the mentally ill or convicted felons from possessing firearms, arguing that the Court will have no choice but to reverse itself when it issues its decision in Rahimi, which deals with the federal prohibition on gun ownership for those subject to a domestic violence restraining order.
If Anyone Needs to Explain Why They Need Guns, It’s the EPA
We don’t talk a lot about the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, all that much. For the most part, they don’t get into guns or gun politics. There’s no reason for us to talk about them here, even if they are managing to do a lot of stupid stuff in general.
But, it seems, that the EPA isn’t completely out of the discussion on guns.
You see, while there are many who lament the Bruen decision because we no longer have to justify why we want to carry, some rather bizarre federal agencies, including the EPA, have been spending a lot of money on guns.
Topline: The Environmental Protection Agency isn’t traditionally associated with ranged weaponry, but the federal government has spent almost $620,000 since 2018 to buy guns, ammunition, and more for EPA employees.
Key facts: Auditors at OpenTheBooks.com found that between 2018 and 2022, the EPA spent close to $400,000 of federal funds just on ammunition. That came after the EPA purchased 500,000 rounds of ammo and 600 guns from 2010-2017.
Over $100,000 went to buying armor for EPA employees. Funds were also used for “optical sighting and ranging equipment,” for “night vision equipment” and “security vehicles.”
Background: The EPA has a Criminal Enforcement Program, which had a budget of more than $70 million in 2023. Its goals include “protecting communities with environmental justice concerns” and curbing illegal sales of pesticides.
The EPA also has its own Office of Homeland Security, which provides “systemic preparation” for climate and environment related threats. Its budget was nearly $90 million last year.
Those divisions include 259 employees with job titles of “Criminal Investigation” or some similar variation. Those employees collectively earned almost $32 million in salary last year, with 217 of them making six figures.
Now, I don’t have an issue with a federal regulatory agency having investigators in and of itself. Whether I like regulations or not, the current status quo is violating those regulations constitutes a crime, so it makes sense for the regulators to have investigators.
But we’re talking $620,000 spent in firearms and ammo for 259 employees. That’s nearly $2,400 spent per investigator, and to be frank, I’m not sure any of them actually need to be armed.
See, the EPA is a regulatory agency, not a law enforcement agency. If they find an arrest is needed, they should be able to call the local FBI field office and get them to go in. The FBI, of course, has plenty of guns already.
What bothers me is that people want folks like you and me to have to justify why we “need” guns, but thinks nothing of federal agencies buying firearms left and right.
As the above-linked post notes, other agencies are also stocking up on guns including the Social Security Administration and the Department of Labor. This isn’t new, though, since we’ve known for more than a decade about the Department of Education having had a SWAT Team.
The truth of the matter is that I want justification why every agency in the federal government seems to have guns purchased with our tax dollars. It’s not because I disbelieve in guns, but because every penny the federal government spends comes out of our pockets. They need to justify every dime, in my book, especially as so many federal agencies try to infringe on our right to have firearms.
Remember that the ATF started as a tax collection agency and morphed over time into federal law enforcement. If we don’t start demanding answers for this waste, we’re likely to see it happen elsewhere.
And the EPA is just one example.
After all, I’m not sure I want to trust guns to an agency that thought a mud puddle counted as “navigable waters” in any way, shape, or form.
January 30, 2024
Solid good report from Dad’s MOHS surgery on the basal cell carcinoma. He’s got a line of sutures about 3 inches long on the top of his head that looks like someone took a machete to him, but he says he’s feeling fine.
What did I mention just last week?
BLUF
Now, we’re all subjects. Last week, four fearful women and a spectacularly weak man, hiding behind their robes of office in a Court whose only constitutionally mandated member is the Chief Justice — leaving the rest to be self-aggrandized — refused to protect the nation without a word of explanation. Message: obey.
Perhaps they’ve forgotten the opening words of the Declaration: “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another…” If so, what happens next is on them.
The Cold Civil War Gets Warmer
More than a decade ago, somewhere in the pages of National Review Online and writing under the name of my alter-ego, David Kahane, I coined the term, the Cold Civil War, and amplified the subject in my book, Rules for Radical Conservatives.
Despite all the evidence of the past several decades, you still have not grasped one simple fact: that, just about a century after the last one ended, we engaged in a great civil war, one that will determine the kind of country we and our descendants shall henceforth live in for at least the next hundred years — and, one hopes, a thousand. Since there hasn’t been any shooting, so far, some call the struggle we are now involved in the “culture wars,” but I have another, better name for it: the Cold Civil War.
Hasn’t been any shooting so far. But with his recent rejection of federal authority, Texas governor Greg Abbott may have turned up the heat. Just as the South did during the first Civil War, Texas — supported by fully half the states now — has effectively nullified a Supreme Court order via the simple expedient of ignoring it. In this Abbott recalls another southern president, Andrew Jackson, who (perhaps apocryphally) in the case of Worcester v. Georgia (1832), said, “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.”
Or, to paraphrase Stalin, how many divisions does John Roberts have? The Court’s authority derives from the will and the respect of the governed. But when an institution turns rogue, and refuses to act in defense of the nation in the face of clear and present danger, all bets are off.
It’s notable that all four of the women on the Court — at least two too many, but a potent indicator of the continuing feminization of the Republic — flocked together, with Roberts the deciding vote. By now, conservatives are used to getting stabbed in the back from this enduring legacy of the Bush II administration, right up there with the Patriot Act and the Department of Homeland Security/TSA. Bush may be gone — and not all that gone, when you think about it — but the evil he did lives on:
Three former U.S. presidents – Republican George W. Bush and Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama – have banded together behind a new group aimed at supporting refugees from Afghanistan settling in the United States following the recent American withdrawal ending 20 years of war. The former leaders and their wives will serve as part of Welcome.US, a coalition of advocacy groups, U.S. businesses and other leaders.
Just what we need, another “advocacy group,” as if the U.S. government itself hasn’t already been transformed into one under these three presidents and their love child, Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. But here we are, in the middle of the biggest mass invasion in American history, a tidal wave of largely penurious humanity, unvetted, unchecked, of unknown health status, many of them without passports or any form of identification, criminals upon crossing our borders, and none of them bearing any loyalty to the country — and until recently, no one raised a hand to stop it.