Category: Scratch a Lib-Find a Moron

Bill to bar giving guns to certain mental health patients stalls until 2026

A bill that would criminalize knowingly giving firearms to someone who recently received inpatient mental health treatment was pushed to 2026 on Wednesday  amid questions about its language.

Rep. Shaundelle Brooks, a Hermitage Democrat, named the bill “Akilah’s Law” in honor of her son Akilah Dasilva, who was killed in a mass shooting at a Nashville Waffle House in 2018.

The shooter, Travis Reinking of Morton, Illinois, had a history of schizophrenia and delusions. Prior to the shooting, Illinois State Police had revoked his firearm owner identification card, forcing him to surrender his guns to his father. His father then returned the guns to Reinking, breaking Illinois state law.

Tennessee bars giving firearms to juveniles or intoxicated people, but not those who have been committed for mental health evaluation.

Brooks said her bill intends to bring Tennessee in line with the Illinois law that prohibits someone from giving or selling a firearm to a person who has been a patient in a mental health institution within five years.

Brooks’ bill passed the House Criminal Justice Subcommittee in late March, but questions over the bill’s scope and language arose in the Senate Judiciary Committee on April 8. 

Sen. Paul Rose, a Southwest Tennessee Republican, asked for clarity on what the bill defines as a “mental health institution” and what it means to be “admitted.” Rose questioned whether a person who makes routine visits to a mental health provider for medication would be considered a patient of a mental health institution under the bill’s definition.

The bill’s Senate sponsor, Memphis Democrat Raumesh Akbari, said she did not believe the bill would apply in that case.

Elliot Pinsly, president and CEO of the Behavioral Health Foundation, said the way the legislation is written could have a “chilling effect on people’s willingness to seek mental health treatment in Tennessee.” Pinsly, a licensed clinical social worker, founded the policy-focused nonprofit in 2020.

“The actual bill makes it a crime punishable by up to one year imprisonment to sell, give or otherwise transfer a firearm to a person who has received just about any kind of mental health care or addiction treatment in the past five years, voluntary or involuntary, outpatient or inpatient,” Pinsly said.

Facing uncertainty on the outcome of a committee vote, Akbari chose to move the bill to the general subcommittee, essentially putting it on ice until it can be resurrected in 2026.

“I look forward to Representative Brooks continuing to move this through the House … I will be working with all members on this committee so that we can reach a solution so we can really protect folks in Tennessee,” Akbari said.

The New York Times’ Latest Anti-Gun News Story

Print journalism is pretty simple, really. At least it used to be. For decades there were basically two types of stories, news and opinion. Reporters wrote news stories. Columnists and a few others wrote opinion pieces.

But in recent years we’ve seen another type of journalism rise in prominence, the anti-gun story, which masquerades as a regular news piece but is chock-full of opinion and false claims. When reporters fill their anti-gun stories with their opinions their editors do nothing, because they often share their staffer’s opinions.

During my 20 years as a newspaperman, I would call out the authors of anti-gun stories whenever I saw them, but my criticisms were usually never addressed, even though we have a constitutional right to keep and bear arms.

Nowadays, journalists talk constantly about the accuracy of their reporting. However, when they write anti-gun stories, the normal journalism standards are gone, and the editing is a complete joke. The size of the newspaper also makes a difference. Smaller newspapers are generally more accurate when writing about guns than the big ones.

Case in point: The New York Times.

On Monday, the Times published what is perhaps the most anti-gun news story seen in quite a while. It was written by reporter Glenn Thrush, who started at the newspaper in 2017 and claimed in his bio that his most “fulfilling assignment” was writing obituaries, which is odd. Writing about the recently departed is far from fulfilling.

Thrush’s story was titled “Trump Administration to Roll Back Array of Gun Control Measures.” The array was described as a reversal of the strict gun control rules Joe Biden ordered “to stem the flood of unregulated semiautomatic handguns and rifles.”

If you look closely at Thrush’s story, you will find factual errors and anti-gun hyperbole in nearly every paragraph. For example, Thrush wrote that gun dealers stripped of the Federal Firearm Licenses by Biden’s crazy zero-tolerance policy were “found to have repeatedly violated federal laws and regulations.”

This is far from the truth.

Biden’s insane policy stripped hundreds of gun dealers of their FFL’s solely because of extremely minor clerical errors. It is estimated to have increased the FFL revocation rate by 700 percent. Thrush never mentioned that, or that the ATF occasionally sent its poorly trained SWAT team to the gun dealers’ homes, or that the dealers were handcuffed and laying on their stomachs during their conversations with the ATF. In one case, the alleged suspect never got the chance to respond to any of the federal allegations, because ATF’s SWAT team shot and killed him in his own home before they had a chance to talk.

Thrush was not kind to Attorney General Pam Bondi or her plan to use the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division to investigate the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department to determine whether it is “engaging in a pattern or practice of depriving ordinary, law-abiding Californians of their Second Amendment rights.”

Even though this task is clearly covered by federal law, Thrush claimed that Bondi was “repurposing an investigative unit that had been used to expose racial discrimination and police violence by local enforcement agencies.”

Bondi’s decision didn’t involve any repurposing. The federal laws that govern the Civil Rights Division are very clear, unlike Biden’s ATF rules.

The author spoke to the executive director of Giffords, who falsely claimed Trump gave his seal of approval to “reckless dealers who are willing to sell guns to traffickers and criminals.” Over the years I have met more than a few gun dealers, but no one willing to sell arms to anyone with a criminal record. That this actually made it into a New York Times story is incredibly damning.

Thrush also claimed that the ATF took “an abrupt U-turn” from the schemes of Biden and ATF’s former director to “stem the flood of unregulated semiautomatic handguns and rifles that have contributed to mass shootings and exacerbated the violent crime wave that peaked after the coronavirus pandemic.”

A flood of unregulated handguns and rifles?

Remember that the next time you fill out an ATF Form 4473.

Manhattan DA calls on 3D printing companies to deter creation of ghost guns

With crimes involving ghost guns on the rise, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg, Jr., is calling on a 3D printer manufacturer to put more safeguards in place to prevent the spread of 3D-printed guns and gun parts.

Bragg penned a letter to Shenzhen Creality 3D Technology Co., Ltd. (Creality), which produces 3D printers available to individual consumers, to install their printers with an available 3D-printing software program that detects the shapes of common gun parts and blocks their printing. Bragg also called on Creality to take down any online blueprints, also known as CAD files, from its cloud platform, and to ban the creation of illicit weapons in the company’s user agreement.

The letter comes after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to uphold federal regulations, which the DA’s office filed an amicus brief in support of last summer, requiring ghost gun parts to have serial numbers and compelling background checks for prospective buyers of ghost gun home-assembly kits.
“We are calling on companies that sell 3D-printers to work with us to stem the flow of dangerous weapons into our communities by implementing targeted, commonsense fixes. Too often, gun violence tragically takes innocent lives and tears at the fabric of our communities. Over the past several years, the number of illegal, 3D-printed firearms and ghost guns has increased significantly. We have an aggressive and holistic approach to combatting gun violence alongside our law enforcement partners but we cannot do it alone. We are hopeful that we can partner with these companies and make a meaningful impact on public safety,” said District Attorney Bragg.

Creality printers have been previously seized during searches by law enforcement in New York City, including recent cases; the DA’s office cites the cases against Luigi Mangione and Robert Guerrero, which are still in progress, as well as Cory Davis and Cliffie Thomspon, both of whom plead guilty to manufacturing ghost guns.

Since 2020, the DA’s Office has been cracking down on use and possession of ghost guns and illegal firearms, creating the Ghost Gun Initiative with the NYPD. Between 2021 and 2024, homicides decreased by 20%, and shootings decreased by 45% in Manhattan.

In 2023, Bragg introduced legislation to close loopholes in New York’s gun laws to make manufacturing 3D-printed and ghost guns and gun parts a felony. The legislation would also make it a misdemeanor to share, sell or distribute files containing blueprints for 3D-printed firearms components.

Bragg will be sending similar letters to other leading consumer brands of 3D printers in the coming weeks. Click here to read the full letter.

Tim Walz Figures Out What’s Wrong with the Democrats

Imagine hitting yourself over the head with a mallet and giving yourself a terrific headache, and then saying, “Wow, I’ve got such a headache! I know what will fix it! I’ll hit myself on the head with this mallet!” That’s the state of the Democrat Party these days, and particularly of failed second banana Tim Walz, who recommended in a recent speech not that Democrats reject the woke idiocy that has led them straight into a ditch, but that they embrace even more of it. Why, Tim, you’re an absolute genius! That’ll fix everything!

Walz, the unmanly man’s idea of a man’s man, was captured on a video that started circulating widely on Thursday repeating the familiar Democrat mantra: “… that our strength is our diversity! We’ve been talking about this for years, as a country of immigrants. And we let them define the issue on immigration!”

That’s true, Timmy: Democrats have indeed been relentlessly repeating the phrase “Diversity is Our Strength” for years on end, with all the fervor of those who recognize the truth in Goebbels’ adage that a big lie, repeated often enough, starts to be believed.

In reality, a society that worships diversity is on its way to fragmentation and dissolution. On this as with so many issues, the left has deliberately confused the issue. If you say you don’t believe that diversity is our strength, you’ll be accused of being a racist, a white supremacist, a neo-Nazi who wants to eliminate all minorities. Theodore Roosevelt enunciated  the truth:

There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all.

This is just as true of the man who puts “native” before the hyphen as of the man who puts German or Irish or English or French before the hyphen. Americanism is a matter of the spirit and of the soul.

Our allegiance must be purely to the United States. We must unsparingly condemn any man who holds any other allegiance.

But if he is heartily and singly loyal to this Republic, then no matter where he was born, he is just as good an American as anyone else.

The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans, or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality than with the other citizens of the American Republic.

The men who do not become Americans and nothing else are hyphenated Americans; and there ought to be no room for them in this country.

The man who calls himself an American citizen and who yet shows by his actions that he is primarily the citizen of a foreign land, plays a thoroughly mischievous part in the life of our body politic.

He has no place here; and the sooner he returns to the land to which he feels his real heart-allegiance, the better it will be for every good American.

Theodore Roosevelt
Address to the Knights of Columbus
New York City- October 12th, 1915

The Balkanization (a word that in itself testifies to the dangers of the idolatry of diversity) of the U.S. appears to be just what the far left wants, as it will justify their destruction of constitutional freedoms and use of authoritarian measures to keep order. If Walz wanted the Democrats to recapture the American electorate, he could at least show some glancing awareness of the reasons why so many Americans oppose open borders and mass migration. Instead, he just repeated the same old mantra.

Walz continued: “We let them define the issue on DNI — DEI. And we let them define what woke is. We got ourselves in this mess because we weren’t bold enough to stand up and say, ‘You’re damn right we’re proud of these policies. We’re gonna put ‘em in, and we’re gonna execute ‘em.” Gee, I don’t know, Tim. Many things can be said about the ill-starred Harris/Walz campaign, but no one can honestly say that it was timid or reticent about its support for DEI and mass migration, despite paying some disingenuous lip service to the idea of controlling the border.

Electing the Harris/Walz ticket, the New York Times opined in Aug. 2024, “It’s a chance to bolster a bedrock liberal belief: that diversity benefits society overall.” The Times added that “Republicans have slammed Harris as a D.E.I. candidate, tossing around the acronym for diversity, equity and inclusion to insinuate that she didn’t earn her place. But overwhelmingly, one of the reasons Democrats are excited about her is that she’s highly qualified and also happens to be a woman of color. They recognize that she represents all that is good about D.E.I., that it isn’t about the granting of privilege but the dismantling of it.”

And now Tim Walz is saying that the Democrats weren’t insistent enough about their being in favor of wokeness, DEI, and mass migration?
The American electorate knew that very well, Timbo, and rejected it in massive numbers.
Yet Walz and his fellow Democrat apparatchiks appear determined to pick up the same old mallet and hit themselves over the head with it again. Why not, Tim? Maybe it’ll cure your headache this time!

Latest Anti-Gun Talking Points Seem to Have Dropped, And They’re Shockingly Stupid

Every so often, you’ll see a lot of different accounts suddenly start making identical or nearly identical posts, raising the same points that often aren’t even that impressive. This is usually a case of someone sending them to certain political influencers and then repeating them verbatim. No thought went into this on the part of the influencer, of course, but someone out there thought it was a zinger.

Over the weekend, a new one dropped, apparently, and it’s all that you could have hoped for.

And, of course, there are indications that Tristan here wasn’t the only one who got the memo.

It’s possible this whole thing is just some kind of organic growth, to be sure, but it doesn’t really matter where it originated. It’s ridiculous.

The firebombing and shooting up of Tesla dealerships are domestic terrorism, which involves political motivations, so those are inherently going to be treated differently while being investigated.

But let’s think about how we’re “protecting” Teslas.

Teslas have something called “sentry mode” that monitors the vehicle’s surroundings are records if someone approaches. That’s how we have so many videos of Teslas being keyed or otherwise vandalized.

A lot of this vandalism is probably not even investigated because it’s such a petty crime. If an identity comes up, the cops might go and ask a few questions, but this is probably not very high up on their list of priorities, particularly in cities with high crime. Frankly, I get it.

Now, let’s think about what we do with our school children.

I don’t know about Tristan or Jo, but I personally want every teacher so inclined to have a gun to help protect those kids. I want school resource officers in every school as well, just to help protect those school children.

If someone hurts a school child, they’re hunted by every law enforcement agency with relevant jurisdiction–and the others would love to hunt that party but generally can’t unless the suspect crosses into their jurisdiction.

But let’s go back to protecting schools for a moment, though. Note where I stand on that protection. Many of you agree with either part or all of what I laid out.

Do you know who doesn’t?

That’s right, people like Tristan and Jo, that’s who.

When the subject of armed teachers–hell, even the subject of metal detectors at the door–people like those two lose their minds. They fight such things tooth and nail, screaming about how it creates the wrong environment and how everything will be awful. They rage against school resource officers, screaming about the “school to prison pipeline” and oppose those left and right as well.

Pretty much everything that might actually protect school kids gets shut down by the same people.

And then they have the nerve to push this kind of talking point? It’s insulting, infuriating, and absolutely idiotic.

We know what they want. They’re trying to leverage this into justifying gun control. They think this is a dunk on gun rights.

And it’s even dumber than the talking point on its own because of that.

Keep right on talking Chuck…….

For A Party Of ‘Joy,’ Democrats Are Awfully Miserable

In the months leading up to the 2024 election, Democrats had convinced themselves that they’d settled on the perfect campaign message. Not content with simply slandering their chief political rival as a Hitler-loving Nazi to distract from their disastrous policies, they arbitrarily declared themselves the party of “joy.”

“Forget the bad economy and border invasion, we’re all about the good vibes!” — or so went your typical Kamala Harris campaign appearance.

If it wasn’t obvious already (it should’ve been), it’s clear to any casual observer that tagline was nothing more than a facade.

Since Donald Trump’s return to the White House, Democrats have come down with a strong case of misery. No matter the policy or how much success it might reap for the American people, Democrats have treated nearly every action the president has taken as if it’s a world-ending crisis.

Case in point: Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.

On Wednesday, Harris’ weird vice presidential pick threw a hissy fit before local media, in which he dramatically bemoaned Trump’s efforts to dismantle the Department of Education and return the issue to the states where it belongs. In his incoherent screed, Walz fearmongered that laying off agency employees would harm children’s learning and produce devastating consequences for America’s educators.


But the Minnesota governor’s tantrum is a microcosm of the blind rage displayed by Democrats since Trump’s comeback.

Earlier this week, a Massachusetts Democrat had a meltdown at a House subcommittee hearing after his Republican colleague correctly referred to Rep. Tim “Sarah” McBride, D-Del. — a trans-identifying man — as “Mr. McBride.” The childish display came a week after another House Democrat got kicked out of Trump’s address to Congress for repeatedly interrupting the president’s speech.

These actions don’t even include those undertaken by the party’s unhinged base, whose behavior has been equally — if not more — despicable.

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Democratic Rep. Raul Grijalva dead at 77. “Grijalva, D-Ariz., died of lung cancer-related issues on Thursday

Krugman is a perfect reverse economic barometer. He’s always been wrong

Smug Krugman Says Trump Won Because Low-Income Voters Lack ‘Sophisticated Views’ on Economics

So here’s the thing. If PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) is serious about combatting widespread public opinion that the tax-supported “news service” is a haven for elitist leftists (which is exactly what it is), trotting out the ever-smug economist, Paul Krugman isn’t the best way to go about showing it.

During a taped interview with PBS economics reporter Paul Solman, which the outlet aired on Thursday, Krugman was his usual pathetic, self-centered self throughout.

Incidentally, the former New York Time columnist has been on a years’-long crusade to find a social media app that would take down Elon Musk’s X (formerly, Twitter), and has insisted for years that President Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election win over Democrat Hillary Clinton was “rigged.”

Solman kicked off the festivities.

For just short of 25 years, Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman was a New York Times columnist. He began the column in the Clinton years. Krugman left The Times just before Donald Trump was inaugurated. I asked him what has changed in 25 years.

Krugman said that back in the day, he was “extremely optimistic.” But today? (emphasis, mine)

When I began writing the column, people were extremely optimistic. I was hired basically to talk about all the good news and maybe funny stuff that was happening in this glorious late 1990s economic boom. And it’s been a very troubled world since then.

[…]

Most voters have very little idea of policy. I mean, you look at the polling, ask people, do you approve of Obamacare, and it’s still pretty negative. And you ask, do you approve of the Affordable Care Act, and it’s very positive. So that’s telling you something about what voters understand about policy.

I’m unaware that most voters see the Affordable Care Act very positively, but let’s move on—with Krugman continuing to, let’s call it, “twist the truth”:

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