Category: Uncategorized

Stolen Guns from L.A. Trains Make Mockery of ‘Commonsense’ Laws

U.S.A. – -(Ammoland.com)- “Guns are among the items that have been stolen from cargo containers on railroad tracks in Lincoln Heights,” The Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday.

“People were … breaking into these containers and stealing firearms, tens of firearms,” Los Angeles Police Chief Michel Moore said. “That gave us the great concern as a source again of further violence in the city as people were capitalizing on the transport of these containers with having little or no policing or security services there.”

“LAPD Deputy Chief Al Labrada, who commands the Central Bureau, which includes the Lincoln Heights railroad tracks, said the department has recovered ‘numerous guns’ from people who said the weapons were taken from boxcars in the area,” the report adds. That means they’ve only recovered the tip of the iceberg and unknown quantities of guns have been added to the criminal underworld’s black-market inventory and on their way to “the streets.”

So much for background checks, waiting periods, “may issue” permits, “red flag laws,” and the host of other infringements that have “earned” California a Giffords “A”-grade for “strongest gun laws in the United States.” I’ll even bet none of the stolen firearms were “ghost guns.”

The story actually raises more questions than it answers. First and foremost: Who shipped the guns and where were they being sent?

Were they commercial shipments going from dealers to FFLs/gun stores for the “civilian” market? Or were they being sent to police and government agencies? If the latter, are we talking about firearms reserved for law enforcement and denied to average citizens in the name of “commonsense gun safety” now being in predators’ hands?

The manifests should answer those questions, but either way, what is the likelihood that the thieves just stumbled upon the shipments by happenstance? Conversely, what is the likelihood that organized criminal enterprises have inside sources that told them just where to look?

And is this a first or has it happened before? How many times?

Meanwhile, Gavin Newsom is out there doing photo ops pretending he’s doing clean-up work, and apologizing for offending “progressive” sympathies by referring to L.A. as a  “third-world country” and referring to the scumbag thieves as “gangs.”

Priorities, you know.

And, of course, here was the kicker:

“I don’t think anyone particularly cares about who to blame…”

We know who is to blame for setting up the conditions that have devolved the Golden State from what was once a mecca for freedom and prosperity into a third-world, crime-infested hellhole, with poop on the street in major cities and enough voters getting their cut out of “our Democracy” to keep the political grift mills rolling. And in this case, noting who’s “in charge,” expect blame, and plenty of it, to be placed on guns, with any violence committed with the newly-stolen firearms used to “justify” further infringements on the right of the people to keep and bear arms.

If it turns out the shipments were for the commercial market, look for money-grabbing lawsuits “to hold the industry accountable,” and legislation to require cost-prohibitive new “security” measures, which will ultimately be passed on to consumers through even higher prices.

Meanwhile, Chief Moore “said the LAPD is working with the Department of Transportation on physical improvements to the Lincoln Heights site that would deter would-be rail burglars.”

With a governor afraid to call a gang a gang and a Soros prosecutor whose agenda is to spread and embed the cultural Marxism, don’t look for such “deterrence” to be the kind that would set a quick example discouraging would-be looters from even trying.

Instead, look for:

“In response to these thefts, Union Pacific increased the number of special agents, drones, specialized fencing and trespass detection systems. Thursday’s cleanup effort signaled the support Union Pacific is receiving from its community partners to continue to invest the necessary resources to move forward.”

Because that’s worked so well at the border. Just ask Gavin Newsom, offering California “sanctuary” to any immigration lawbreaker who asks.

Same Fear, Different States- Constitutional Carry and Letting Our Neighbors Go Armed.

It is more dangerous when honest men and women face criminals barehanded, and safer when the good guys are armed. That isn’t hard to understand. It is easy to calculate the additional lives we’d save each year if a state allows honest people to carry guns in public. I can explain it in a minute. I will, but the real mystery is why we’re still talking about fantasy-problems while violent criminals are killing our neighbors. We’re acting as if our bad dreams were more real than the bodies with chalk marks around them. Part of that problem is political. Politicians appeal to our fantasies and we’re suckers for that. Politicians also suck-up to anti-gun billionaires to get campaign contributions. Ultimately, voters like us are the problem when we hide behind sound-bite solutions. Back in the real world, disarming our neighbors costs lives.

When you take even the shallowest look at violence then you notice that an armed attacker usually overpowers an unarmed victim. Criminals may break the laws but they are not stupid. They choose the tools that work. To quote one thug, ‘Guns and knives make people so generous.’

Robbers sometimes threaten to shoot us even when they don’t have a gun. Criminals only use guns in one-seventh of violent crimes. Unfortunately, violent criminals wait until they have an advantage in strength, in number, or in surprise. Rather than struggle with the insoluble problem of knowing if the robber’s threat is real, the real solution is for good men and women to go armed.

We don’t need clever calculation to know how many lives are saved when the victims are armed. We know that about 1.7 million legal gun owners use a firearm in self-defense each year. We know how many people live in each state and already have their carry permits. We know the rate of violent crime in each state, and we learned that about 30 percent of adults will carry concealed if the carry permit is optional. We even know how often people with their carry permits actually go armed in public. We know what happens because we asked, and because 21 states already have a form of permit-optional concealed carry.

In most states, we’re talking about saving thousands of lives a year. We can argue about the clearest way to explain the answer, but the calculations only take junior-high-school math.

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For a long time friend

San Jose Mayor: Yes, the Constitution Even Applies to Your “Kingdom”

The mayor of San Jose must have the same ailment as Governor Newsom because he, too, thinks his position grants him authority far beyond his legal scope.  While Newsom has bestowed upon himself kingly emergency “COVID” powers, Mayor Sam Liccardo thinks he can singlehandedly circumvent the Constitution.  How clever of him to require all gun owners in his city to carry liability insurance!  How very progressive.

He may think he’s first at bat in trying to force this policy, but he’s not.  The idea’s been around a while and it’s not been successful for the simple reason that it’s dumb as a box of rocks.  Not only is it an unworkable scheme (impossible to underwrite) – but it’s unconstitutional as well.

Requiring someone to carry liability insurance for participating in a Constitutionally guaranteed right such as the 2nd Amendment is no different than steamrolling the 1st Amendment by mandating the media carry such insurance.  At times, does not the written word result in extraordinary damages? Hasn’t the media fanned the flame of violence, leading to loss of livelihoods, property and yes, even lives?  Yet, to require the media to carry liability insurance is patently absurd – just as it would be for requiring the same of the ordinary American citizen who owns a gun or two.  Even though much of what the media turns out these days is nothing short of garbage, they are justly covered by our Constitution. This is one of the key reasons America is America and what differentiates us from the rest of the world – we have enumerated rights that are protected – fake news or otherwise.

In an op ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, David B. Rivkin Jr. And Andrew M. Grossman get right to the heart of this particular matter:

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All of those new Virginia gun control laws didn’t stop homicides from hitting highest level in decades. Should be some kind of clue there.

Homicides in Virginia hit highest levels in two decades

Virginia’s murder rate climbed to its highest level since the late 1990s last year, according to crime statistics released by the Virginia State Police this week.

Police reported 537 homicides in 2020, up from 455 in 2019, bringing the rate per 100,000 residents to just over six — a number last seen in 1998 as the crime wave that peaked earlier in the decade began to taper off, according to FBI reports.

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[Wyoming Legislature] Committee revives controversial gun bill in surprise vote

The Joint Agriculture Committee Tuesday revived a controversial gun rights bill on a split-second, unannounced vote moments before the committee adjourned in a move lambasted by critics for its lack of transparency.

The bill, last session’s Senate File 81 – Second Amendment Preservation Act, would prevent agents of the state from enforcing any federal law or regulation that restricts a citizen’s right to carry firearms. A heavily amended version of the legislation passed the Senate by an overwhelming margin in March, but died without a hearing in the House when it failed to meet a key procedural deadline.

Tuesday’s measure passed on a 7-4 vote.

Freshman Rep. Robert Wharff (R-Evanston) told committee members Tuesday he believed if the bill had been assigned to the Agriculture Committee during the session, it would have advanced to the floor, where he said he believed it had the votes to pass. The Joint Agriculture Committee is considered by many the Legislature’s most conservative committee, and has colloquially been known over the years as the “Guns and Ag” committee, according to committee member and former gun rights lobbyist Sen. Anthony Bouchard (R-Cheyenne).

Nullification bills like the Second Amendment Preservation Act have become popular with many Republican-led state legislatures in recent months as they prepare for anticipated federal gun restrictions. Despite previous court rulings that have found similar laws in states like Kansas to be unconstitutional, more than a dozen state legislatures have considered some form of nullification legislation, with Missouri passing a version in its most recent legislative session.

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A Federal Judge Denied NRA’s Bid For Bankruptcy. What Happens Next?

The NRA’s attempt to file bankruptcy and reorganize in the state of Texas has been denied by a federal judge in the Lone Star State, who issued a ruling on Tuesday afternoon that the Second Amendment organization’s move was not “filed in good faith both because it was filed to gain an unfair litigation advantage and because it was filed to avoid a state regulatory scheme.”

The judge’s decision means that New York Attorney General Letitia James’ attempt to dissolve the organization can continue in New York, where the National Rifle Association has been chartered since 1871.

The NRA was quick to release a statement following the judge’s decision, in which the organization vowed to “continue to fight on all fronts in the interests of its mission and its members.” Here’s the text of the full statement.

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Yes, Biden Is Swindling Americans: White House Staffer Lets the Cat Out of the Bag

The myth of the “moderate” Joe Biden stubbornly refuses to die — partially because the Democrats and the legacy media are working overtime to keep it breathing. From day one, Biden has aimed to erase his predecessor’s legacy, rejected Republican efforts to pass clean bills on COVID-19 and infrastructure, and inflamed the culture war on abortion, transgenderism, and race. He even called Georgia’s new election integrity bill “Jim Crow on steroids.”

Yet, somehow, Democrats and the legacy media continue to twist the limits of deception by branding this firebrand a “moderate.” This weekend, a White House staffer confessed that this is a key part of Biden’s strategy.

“[A]t his hundred-day mark, Biden is the most liberal president we’ve had — and the public thinks he’s a moderate,” an unnamed White House staffer told New York Magazine. “That’s a winning strategy to me. They’re willing to accept that you’re gonna write this piece as long as they know that swing voters in Colorado aren’t gonna read it.”

This gobsmacking admission comes nine paragraphs into Olivia Nuzzi’s article about “How the White House Polices Language in Washington.” Nuzzi’s piece focuses on how the Biden White House responded to the president’s recent gaffe in which he admitted there was a “crisis” on the southern border in contradiction to his administration’s messaging that there was no “crisis” on the border.

Nuzzi noted that the word “crisis” “suggests spiraling, breakdowns in the system, and the people who work for the new president happen to love systems.”

This is the return to normalcy: The professionals are back in the building — hyper-sensitive and type A — and Washington sure feels tense. “We are just not going to get pulled down in the muck of right-wing-driven arguments about word choice,” Psaki said. Semantics debates, she added, keeping with the swamp imagery, are a form of “crocodile wrestling.”

Yet the Biden administration does focus on word choice, intently. Conservatives have merely raised complaints about the White House’s intentional strategies.

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 Defounding America.

************

But, though the traders and Tea Partiers didn’t quite understand it, the federal government long ago had turned from the shield of individual liberty into a vast engine of redistribution. That transformation could occur because the Framers’ Constitution was body-snatched by the doctrine of the “living constitution,” which—as Woodrow Wilson first formulated it—saw the Supreme Court sitting as a permanent Constitutional Convention, making up laws as it went along, heedless of the 1787 scheme’s checks. Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal used Wilson’s doctrine as a license to remake America’s economy and society. Once the Supreme Court buckled to FDR’s threat to pack it and started voting his way, the justices allowed an utterly foreign governmental structure to devour the Framers’ republic from within, until it broke out of the shell as something altogether different.

Not that FDR was entirely frank about his transformative enterprise. Where Wilson had dismissed the Framers as obsolete relics in a Darwinian age, Roosevelt claimed to extend their great work even as he undid it. In his second inaugural address of 1937, he hailed the 150th anniversary of the Constitutional Convention, which had “created a strong government with powers of united action sufficient then and now to solve problems utterly beyond individual or local solution”—a wildly false characterization. Chastened by America’s near-loss in the Revolution, the Framers sought to create a government strong enough to protect national and individual independence but not so strong that, given mankind’s inherent power-hunger, it could become what they called an “elective despotism.” So they limited that power to such clearly enumerated tasks as raising an army, a navy, and taxes; coining and borrowing money; and regulating foreign and interstate commerce. All other matters they emphatically left to “individual or local solution.”

They certainly didn’t mean to put the whole U.S. economy under federal regulation. But as FDR later admitted, when he took the oath to defend the Constitution just before delivering the 1937 address, he had wanted to shout, “Yes, but it’s the Constitution as I understand it.” The New Deal’s main thrust, after all, was precisely to take total control of the economy, under the ruse of federal power to regulate interstate……

BLUF:
Share of Americans who favor stricter gun laws has declined since 2019

Amid a Series of Mass Shootings in the U.S., Gun Policy Remains Deeply Divisive
Declining support among Republicans for ban on assault-style weapons, national gun registry

Link to PDF

In an era marked by deep divisions between Republicans and Democrats, few issues are as politically polarizing as gun policy. While a few specific policy proposals continue to garner bipartisan support, the partisan divisions on other proposals – and even on whether gun violence is a serious national problem – have grown wider over the last few years.

Today, just over half of Americans (53%) say gun laws should be stricter than they currently are, a view held by 81% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents but just 20% of Republicans and Republican leaners. Similarly, while nearly three-quarters of Democrats (73%) say making it harder to legally obtain guns would lead to fewer mass shootings, only 20% of Republicans say this, with most (65%) saying this would have no effect.

The new national survey by Pew Research Center, conducted from April 5-11, 2021 among 5,109 adults, finds that 73% of Democrats consider gun violence to be a very big problem for the country today, compared with just 18% of Republicans who say the same. The current partisan gap on this question is 11-percentage-points wider than in 2018 and 19 points wider than in 2016.

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Actually, I don’t care all that much for political kabuki theater, no matter the party, but this is just one more indication that Joe isn’t all there.

What Happened to Joe Biden’s State of the Union Address?

Have you been wondering what happened to Joe Biden’s State of the Union address?

Generally, the State of the Union address is delivered in late January to early February.

So, again, we go back to that question: where’s Biden’s speech?

What’s sort of interesting about this question is that Joe Biden himself apparently indicated to reporters that it would be in February, that he wanted to talk about COVID relief, according to Axios.

Some media seem to have had it tentatively scheduled for Feb. 23, as you can see from these screenshots.

Check the dates:

 

 

BLM even had an event scheduled, based on that tentative scheduling.

 

One would think the AP and PBS had some reason to pick that date and not just pull it out of the air.

But when questioned, Jen Psaki said there were no plans for Biden to address the joint session this month and that despite what Biden had said and the tentative scheduling some media had, she claimed it “was never planned to be in February.”

Fox News’ Chad Pergram reported that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) says there won’t be an address until the COVID deal is done. In other words, Biden is giving up the opportunity to talk about the virus and the bill until after it’s passed? Alrighty, now.

Politico is now suggesting that it might be March, which as they observed would be the latest in “decades.”

As we previously reported, Biden hasn’t even had a solo press conference with the media yet. By this time, both Barack Obama and Donald Trump had done solo pressers. When Jen Psaki was asked about that earlier this week, she refused to give the media a date as to when he would be doing one, but said he would do it at some point in the future. Not exactly what you would call leadership in a time of pandemic.

The rest of the article?
Boilerplate Blah Blah Blather, not worth the time to copypasta.
Read it if you want, but that one line under the link pretty much says it all.
More meetings than action? Acknowledgment that his campaign promises to use Executive Orders for gun control was fraudulent propaganda. There is very little he can do as President to exert control on the domestic side of the equation and they all know it.

Biden considers regulating ‘ghost guns,’ other executive actions to curb gun violence
The president’s movement on guns has, so far, been more meetings than action.

The number now is Eighteen (18)

Montana Governor Greg Gianforte Signs Permitless Carry Legislation Into Law

HELENA — Gov. Greg Gianforte signed a major ‘constitutional carry’ bill Thursday that will let Montanans carry concealed firearms in public settings including banks and bars without a permit, in addition to limiting university system officials’ ability to restrict firearm possession on college campuses.

The measure, House Bill 102, has been described by proponents as a way to enhance Montanans’ Second Amendment rights and promote public safety by making it easier for law-abiding citizens to defend themselves from criminals. Opponents have argued that making it easier for Montanans to keep guns close at hand won’t necessarily promote public safety.

“Our Second Amendment is very clear: The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed,” Gianforte said at a bill signing ceremony Thursday afternoon. “Every law-abiding Montanan should be able to defend themselves and their loved ones.”

The measure allows concealed firearm possession without a permit by default in most places in the state, with exceptions including secure law enforcement facilities, federal buildings, courtrooms, and K-12 schools. Property owners and tenants would have the ability to expressly prohibit firearm possession in private homes and businesses.

Additionally, the measure forbids the state university system from restricting firearm possession on campuses beyond requiring gun owners to have safety training akin to a hunter’s education course and safety measures such as requiring that firearms be transported in cases and stored with gun locks. The university system will also be allowed to forbid gun possession by students who have been formally disciplined for substance abuse or “interpersonal violence,” and prohibit possession by attendees at football games and other events that are supervised by armed security guards.

The university system provisions of the new law take effect June 1. Its other provisions are effective immediately.

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