Category: Crap For Brains

The Problem with California’s Proposed Training Requirement for Gun Purchases

The first bit of advice any new gun owner is likely to receive is that they should go out and seek training on how to handle their firearm safely. It’s not about tactical excellence or anything like that; it’s about making sure they don’t hurt themselves or someone else because they didn’t know what they were doing with the weapon in their hands. That’s avoidable, and we absolutely should continue to tell people to get proper training.

But, as with most things involving firearms, there’s a difference between good advice and the government deciding to mandate something.

There’s a bill under consideration in California that would mandate training prior to gun purchases.

Buying a gun in California could soon require more than passing a written test.

State lawmakers are advancing a bill, Senate Bill 948, that would require firearm buyers to complete a four-hour safety training course, including live-fire exercises at a shooting range.

California already has some of the strictest gun laws in the country. Before buying a firearm, gun owners must pass a written safety test to obtain a firearm safety certificate.

Luis Lopez, a new gun owner, said the proposed law would add another hurdle for people trying to legally purchase a firearm.

“There’s more fees. When you purchase ammo, every year it’s a little bit more, so I feel like they’re just making it a little bit more difficult,” Lopez said.

He said the four-hour training requirement feels unnecessary.

“Those four hours to take that is just a countermeasure, just to make it harder for people to own a gun,” Lopez said.

Supporters argue more training could help prevent accidents involving children and inexperienced gun owners. State Sen. Jesse Arreguin, who is spearheading the bill, said California has strong gun safety laws but does not currently require firearm training for buyers.

“We have some of the strongest firearm safety laws in California, but unlike other states, including Maryland and Hawaii, we don’t have any requirements on training,” Arreguin said.

It would also require gun owners moving into the state to undergo the training course, too.

Now, the original plan was an eight-hour course, which has now been reduced, but that’s not really germane in and of itself. No, what’s germane are the issues with any training mandate handed down by a governmental authority.

First, owning a firearm is a constitutionally protected right. In no other case is it considered acceptable to mandate training prior to people exercising a right protected in the Constitution. You don’t have to undergo training or testing to become a member of the press. The state does not get to mandate a particular training course in order to become a member of the clergy. You don’t have to take a class in California before you can register to vote or to hold a protest.

Nowhere else is a right limited to those who have completed a state-required course of instruction.

Plus, does anyone not see how this could be abused? Right now, the bill calls for a four-hour class. Originally, it required eight hours. That tells me that this is being discussed not as the amount of time needed to convey a particular set of information, but based on how much of an inconvenience they figure they can get away with.

Once the state has mandated training, it’s trivial to increase the length of time that training should take. Both four- and eight-hour classes are inconvenient enough, but it’s still something most people can manage. They might have to take a day off from work to attend the class, but there’s a way to make it work. No, you shouldn’t have to, but it’s still possible.

So then it becomes 16 hours, then 32 hours, then 40, then 80. Then they put a live fire qualification in, where you have to hit a particular score at a particular range, only to raise the score and move the range backward until you’re having to hit something stupidly high at a farther range than you’ll ever actually need, all so they can limit who can buy a gun.

They haven’t banned anything new, and your right to own a gun still exists in theory, but because it’s not realistic for you to meet the qualifications, it’s been essentially stripped in practice.

“But Hawaii and Maryland haven’t done that.”

No, they haven’t done it yet. They haven’t done it because they don’t think they could get away with it. The fact of the matter is that if there’s a training mandate on the books, and it’s acceptable to have it, then where would the line be drawn between an acceptable level of training and too much?

Plus, again, it’s not something we mandate for any other right protected by the Constitution, so why would it ever be acceptable here? Unless, of course, one wants to concede that the Second Amendment really is a second-class right.

Do that, though, and I’ll tell you to show your work that it was intended to be any such thing.

Echoes of Joe Biden: James Talarico Says Second Amendment ‘Not Absolute’

During an appearance on the Unity Over Division podcast, U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico (D) echoed Joe Biden by saying the Second Amendment is “not absolute.”

Talarico said, “I believe in the Second Amendment just as much as I believe in the First. We have a right to bear arms to protect ourselves, our families. We have a right to own weapons for sport or for hunting. But like any freedom in the Bill of Rights, it’s not absolute.”

Breitbart News reported that on February 26, 2020, during a CNN Town Hall, Biden argued that the Second Amendment was not “absolute.”

He followed the Town Hall with a post to X in which he elaborated: “I taught constitutional law for a long time and here’s the deal: No amendment is absolute. There are limits.”

Talarico stressed what he believes are limits on other constitutionally protected rights as well. For example, he told Unity Over Division, “You have a freedom to assemble, to protest, but you need a permit.”

The First Amendment does not mention a need for a permit. Rather, the amendment says, “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people to peaceably assemble …”

Democrats on Capitol Hill Introduce Ban on Suppressors

Signaling the agenda should polarity shift in Washington in the coming months and years, a group of House Dems has debuted legislation to outlaw suppressors.

Dubbed the Help Empower Americans to Respond, or HEAR, Act, the proposal would “ban the importation, sale, manufacturing, transfer, and possession of gun silencers or suppressors.”

Saying “Silencers are not tools of self-defense,” HEAR Act sponsor U.S. Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman, a New Jersey Democrat, argues such devices “have no legal application,” and her proposal is part of “a common sense approach to firearms legislation.”

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We are neither surprised, not amused.

Ninth Circuit Rules Suppressors Are Not Second Amendment Arms

The Ninth Circuit just handed gun control lawyers another gift, and it came from exactly the kind of case Second Amendment advocates should dread.

In United States v. João Ricardo DeBorba, the court upheld a stack of federal gun convictions against a man who was unlawfully in the United States, had claimed U.S. citizenship on firearm-related paperwork, was subject to domestic violence no-contact orders, and was caught with firearms, ammunition, and an unregistered suppressor.

Bad cases still make law, and this one may do real damage. The most dangerous part of the ruling is not simply that DeBorba lost. Given the facts, that outcome was hardly surprising. The problem is that the Ninth Circuit went out of its way to say that suppressors, also called silencers, are not “arms” protected by the plain text of the Second Amendment.

The court treated suppressors as optional firearm accessories and said they are not covered because they are not necessary to the ordinary operation of a firearm. In other words, because a gun can technically fire without a suppressor, the court says a suppressor falls outside the Second Amendment.

A suppressor is not some decorative range toy. It protects hearing, reduces blast, improves communication, helps training, and makes shooting safer for the shooter and those nearby. Hunters use them. Instructors use them. Competitive shooters use them. Ordinary Americans use them. In much of the civilized world, suppressors are treated as basic safety equipment, not criminal contraband.

The Second Amendment does not protect only a stripped-down firearm in its most primitive form. It protects the right to keep and bear arms in a way that is useful, effective, and practical. Optics help a shooter hit what he is aiming at. Magazines feed the firearm. Lights help identify a threat. Suppressors help protect hearing and allow safer training and defensive use.

Constitutional attorney and AmmoLand contributor Mark W. Smith of The Four Boxes Diner hammered that point in his video breakdown of the decision. Smith argued that the court ignored the broader meaning of “arms” under Bruen, where an arm includes an instrument that facilitates armed self-defense. As Smith put it, the key is not whether an item is absolutely necessary, but whether it helps facilitate the protected right.

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Fearing Expanding Gun Rights, Anti-Gun Group Creates Absurd Concealed-Carry Policy

By Lee Williams

SAF Investigative Journalism Project

Times are good and possibly getting even better for those who value guns, gun rights and the Second Amendment.

The changes brought by President Donald Trump are simply stunning. In just one year we went from an ATF that targeted individual gun owners for imaginary crimes to one that’s focused on arresting real bad guys with illegal guns.

Constitutional Carry, known by the other side as permitless carry, is growing. Today, 29 states allow law-abiding adults to carry firearms without a state permit, and the number is expected to grow.

So, it’s understandable that those who want to restrict and subvert the Second Amendment are getting desperate. In fact, they’re willing to try almost anything to restrict access to firearms while President Trump is in office. It’s as if they never even heard of New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen.

Enter the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions.

These egg-headed goons want to roll back the clock to the late 1980s. Their just-released “Public Carry Permitting: Model Policy Guide” is pretty much what some states offered decades ago. It’s laughable—a trip back in time. Nowadays, it’s likely too restrictive for even the bluest of blue states.

Of course, the Center begins their report with lies—absolute deception—about guns, gun owners and gun rights.

By citing previous data from their own inaccurate reporting, they specifically target Constitutional Carry. It’s a hard sell, obviously, but they need to make a case for returning to the decades-old permitting system. They even support “may issue” rather than “shall issue” laws, which Bruen effectively killed.

Their allegations against Constitutional Carry are incredibly skewed and are not based on data or any hard facts.

“There are several hypotheses for the increase in violence associated with deregulation of public carry. Some scholars have argued that deregulation leads to increased carrying of guns in public places, meaning that interpersonal conflicts may be more likely to turn violent. One 2025 paper sought to examine what factors could be driving increases in violent crime and found that states that deregulated public carry saw large increases in gun theft and decreases in the rate of law enforcement clearance of violent crime,” the report claims.

Any attempt to subvert the Second Amendment needs a lot more than “several hypotheses” and scholarly arguments.

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Not surprisingly

  Tim Walz’s Daughter Just As Dumb As Dad on Gun Control

Gov. Tim Walz was in a position to become vice president. I think I speak for most of us when I say that I’m glad he’s still governor of Minnesota. It’s not because he’s been stellar at his job there, mind you, as the Minneapolis day care scandal, and Walz’s reaction to it, amply illustrates that he sucks at it. It’s because it means he and Kamala Harris aren’t in charge in Washington.

Both were terrible on gun issues, despite Walz trying to portray himself as a macho man who could out shoot any of us. In fact, when he tried to act big and bad, he just embarassed himself.

When it comes to guns, though, it seems the apple doesn’t fall very far from the tree.

Hope Walz, the daughter of disgraced Minnesota governor and failed vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, called for gun control this week in the aftermath of another attempted assassination attempt on President Donald Trump.

“Gun control doesn’t just save Democrats’ lives. It also saves Republican lives,” she said in a TikTok video posted this week, apparently attempting to position herself as a leftist taking moral high ground.

“You’d think we’d be at a point now where we could call for some common sense legislation, but I don’t know. I don’t know,” she said sarcastically. “Also here to say that political violence is never ok. Duh. That’s the difference between us and them. It’s never ok.”

Walz continued, “But there’s something we can do about it: common sense gun legislation.”

She ultimately called on her audience to “do something about that for everybody’s “For everybody’s sake, yeah. Yeah. Happy Tuesday,” she added. “Feeling a little anxious today, but we’re going to get through it.”

Notably, this is the same “anxious” Walz who described Trump’s previous crackdown on crime in the nation’s capital as nothing more than “bitch baby, wussy, scaredy cat behavior.”

Fascinating, ain’t it?

Look, I agree that political violence isn’t OK. I’ll point out, though, that the left hasn’t exactly been showing any belief in that position. How many have been upset that Thomas Crooks missed, or that this guy didn’t get a shot at the president? How many celebrated the assassinations of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson and Charlie Kirk?

Yeah, don’t do the “That’s the difference between us and them” bit. It’s not going to fly.

But let’s talk about “common sense gun legislation” for a moment. We keep having people bring this up, including people with much higher profiles that Hope Walz, but have you noticed how absolutely no one gives us any real concrete suggestions that would have made a difference? Rep. Jamie Raskins suggested universal background checks, but with the would-be assassin getting his guns in California, he passed background checks. That’s ridiculous.

Beyond that, though, most people are just braying about how we need gun control, but no one seems to have anything real to propose. Maybe because they know that nothing they could propose would have done anything and they don’t want people like me to rip it apart for being moronic.

Look, I actually do get her being anxious. Her dad is still governor of a state that’s the center of a lot of strife. People on both sides are antsy and the idea of someone going after her father doesn’t seem so farfetched as it should be. I sincerely don’t want to see that, and I know good and well that she doesn’t, so I’m not going to mock her anxiety here.

But I’ll also repeat that this guy gun his weapons in the most gun-controlled state in the nation, a state that has laws that would never fly anywhere else in the United States, so let’s not pretend this is the result of too few gun control laws. It’s not. It’s the result of leftist talking points and inflamatory rhetoric radicalizing someone to try and rid the nation of a tyrant who is nothing of the sort.

UNBELIEVEABLE: CNN Using Assassination Attempt to Call for More Gun Control

SAF Investigative Journalism Project

ANALYSIS: Just minutes after the third attempt to kill President Donald J. Trump, in addition to senior members of his staff, CNN’s Idiot-in-Chief Brian Stelter was calling for more gun control.

“As CNN anchor Victor Blackwell put it when I joined him on air this morning, ‘The people in that room were confronted with what schoolchildren and moviegoers and congregants and people at grocery stores have been confronted with, and that is the threat of gun violence.’” Stelter wrote in an analysis piece titled: “An extraordinary moment for America’s media elite is all too ordinary in America.”

Ah, the poor media elite felt confronted. Really? The bad guy didn’t even enter their room. Many media elites never even heard any gunshots.

Stelter quoted another CNN hack, Jim Sciutto, whose comments you can probably already imagine.

“One thing we know is that there will be a lot of discussion afterwards about security measures. (A discussion about) rhetoric, perhaps, as well. There won’t be any substantive discussion about access to weapons, right? There just won’t,” Sciutto reportedly said.

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Elitist Chicago Doc: Average Citizens Don’t Need Armed Self-Defense Because the Poor ‘Don’t Benefit’ From Guns

Dr. Anthony Douglas, the smug University of Chicago trauma resident and arrogant mastermind behind Illinois’ Responsibility in Firearms Legislation (RIFL) Act, stepped up in a legislative hearing last week and belched up a heaping helping of elitist bile blended with a soupçon clinical detachment: “I think poor people don’t benefit from owning firearms,” he pronounced.

What the little people need, the good doctor says, is more “education and resources.” Translation: more tax dollars funneled to “non-profits” with little to no return on the taxpayers’ investment.

Besides, the physician and gun-control researcher claims it isn’t good guys or gals with guns who stop evil predators…all evidence to the contrary. As such, it really should be harder for the poors to get their hands on firearms to defend themselves and their families.

His solution, then, is pricing guns out of reach of law-abiding, responsible citizens who lack bodyguards, private security details, or live in gated enclaves. In Murder City, USA—Chicago—where gang thugs roam free, that’s not social policy, that’s sadistic malpractice.

Was this clown high? Does he have a full punchcard at the local dispensary? Because this delusional drivel sounds like it was baked in a dorm room cloud of weed.

Let’s drag his elitist fantasy out into the reality that is Chicago, the city that’s been mercilessly documented by Wirepoints.org through FOIA records from the Chicago Police Department itself.

High-priority 911 calls—Priority Level 1 and 2, the ones defined as “imminent threat to life, bodily injury, or major property damage”—are the exact emergencies Chicagoans face every day: shots fired, person shot, assault in progress, armed robbery, domestic battery. In 2019, before the progressive crime wave fully metastasized, 19% of those urgent calls had “no officers available” for immediate response.

By 2021, Wirepoints found that number had exploded to 52%—406,829 high-priority incidents in which dispatchers literally had zero cops to send. In 2022 it hit roughly 60%.

Through all of 2023, 56% of high-priority calls—437,000 of them—sat in backlog with no units available. Even in 2024, through mid-May, getting a response was still a coin-flip 50%: 127,000 out of 256,000 urgent calls in which nobody came.

That’s not “delayed,” that’s “we have no police available to send to you.”

Wirepoints documented thousands of “assaults in progress,” “batteries in progress,” “person with a gun,” and “shots fired” calls where callers were told to shelter in place while the city’s response system collapsed. In some districts, entire shifts passed with zero proactive patrol time because every available cop was already buried in backlogs that stretched 30 minutes, an hour, sometimes as long as four hours. Chicago’s own inspector general has long since confirmed the department can’t even log arrival times for huge chunks of emergency calls.

So Dr. Douglas’s prescription isn’t compassion, it’s pure, venomous elitist contempt. He (allegedly) stares at blood-soaked gurneys every shift, but still demands that we disarm the victims instead of the criminals—or fix the catastrophic policies that left over half of emergency calls with “no units available.” He wants to tax gun makers into oblivion so that self-defense becomes a rich man’s luxury that only hypocrites like him can afford.

Spare us the sanctimonious impacted fecal matter, Doctor. The poor in Chicago aren’t sipping lattes in faculty lounges debating “resources.” They’re barricading their doors and praying they make it to and from work safely and survive day to day while the failed system in which you have so much faith leaves them twisting in the wind.

They have and need the same constitutional right to armed self-defense that you take for granted from the comfort of your bubble. In the real Chicago, where cops aren’t available to show up half the time, that arrogance and contempt leaves innocent people to be victimized and slaughtered.

The Center Square has the full testimony. Read it and seethe . . .

A proposed bill gun owners say will price lower income buyers out of the market continues to get attention at the Illinois state capitol.

Opponents of House Bill 3320 estimate the Responsibility in Firearms Legislation, or RIFL Act could tack on thousands of dollars in taxes to one firearm purchase, and that would price lower income people out of exercising their Second Amendment rights.

Advocates for the bill, like Dr. Anthony Douglas, said there’d be minimal added cost.

“I think poor people don’t benefit from owning firearms,” Douglas said during a House Gun Violence Prevention Task Force subject matter hearing of the bill Wednesday. “I think more people benefit from access to education, access to resources.”

State Rep. Patrick Windhorst, R-Harrisburg, said that’s an elitist opinion and people of lesser means want to be able to protect themselves.

“The Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States guarantees that to them,” Windhorst said. “And it’s really not our place to say, ‘well, we think you’re better off not having this thing,’ which is the tone of this committee.”

BLUF
The Second Amendment’s purpose is to ensure that people can meaningfully defend their natural and unalienable rights, including the right to life. No policymaker can claim to take this protection seriously while, in practice, proudly limiting victims to a 3-inch knife in a gunfight.

Gun Control Advocates to Victims: Just Bring a Knife to the Gunfight.

Last month, at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va., a gunman opened fire in a classroom full of ROTC cadets. He killed the ROTC instructor and injured two others before several cadets subdued him — with one cadet using a knife to stab him to death.

To rational people, the shooting clearly evidenced the combined failure of gun control and soft-on-crime policies to protect innocent victims. The perpetrator, who’d been convicted of terrorism charges in 2016, was supposed to be serving an 11-year prison sentence but had been released early under a drug treatment program for which he was supposed to be ineligible. He’d then simply ignored the state’s laws regarding gun possession by felons, background checks, and carrying guns on college campuses, all on his way to ignoring laws prohibiting murder and acts of terrorism.

The responses from many anti-gun public officials were telling: in their view, the attack on disarmed college students clearly evidenced a need to further restrict the right of innocent victims to keep and bear arms in self-defense —and suggested that armed self-defense isn’t that important in the first place.  After all, as one Virginia Democrat insinuated, if the cadets at Old Dominion could subdue their assailant without a gun, why can’t you?

All of it missed the point entirely.

Despite what gun control advocates would have you believe, the right to keep and bear arms plays a vital role in public safety. Americans use their firearms to defend themselves and others far more often than many people realize. Even the notoriously anti-gun Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has acknowledged that most studies on the issue find that between 500,000 and several million defensive gun uses occur every year in the United States. An extensive 2021 national survey conducted by a Georgetown professor further substantiated this reality, concluding that Americans used their firearms defensively an average of 1.2 million times a year.

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Two Researchers Suggest ‘New Firearms Tax Design’ To Combat ‘Gun Violence’

By Dave Workman

Writing at ProMarket, two researchers have declared it’s time for “alternative tax regimes to replace” federal excise taxes on handguns and long guns—which generate revenues to fund federal wildlife restoration programs—and doubling the taxes to “produce meaningful gains to society through a reduction in violence.”

Liberty Park Press reached out to authors Luis Armona and Adam Rosenberg, but did not recieve replies.

However, the National Shooting Sports Foundation noted that one year ago, an Op-Ed published on the NSSF website took Armona and Rosenberg to task for also pushing a gun tax proposal, leading off with this blistering observation: “Leave it to the ‘scholars’ at Harvard Kennedy School to come up with a scheme that combines the arrogance of the ‘intellectual elite,’ increasing taxes, administering gun confiscation plans and – again – purposefully conflating “public health” policies for crime control for the latest pie-in-the-sky gun control plan.”

This was back on April 4, 2025. Writer Salam Fatohi observed about their alternative tax scheme, “They just need to tax the snot out of them.”

In their new article, Armona and Rosenberg acknowledge “we know surprisingly little about how these markets operate, including how consumers make choices between the thousands of firearms available to them, how much they value these weapons, and how suppliers set prices or react to taxes. Without this information, it is impossible to know whether a tax of, say, 50%, 10%, or 0% is the “right level” to raise federal funds and reduce gun-related crimes, or what the effects of these taxes would be.”

Nowhere do they explain how y would mitigate the loss of federal aid funds for wildlife to the states, which have amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars since the Pittman-Robertson fund was enacted in 1937. Under this dedicated fund program, which is strongly supported by industry and sportsmen’s organizations, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service provides annual apportionments to the states for wildlife-related programs, which include range development and hunter education.

While the researchers push the argument that violent crime is a public health issue, NSSF’s Fatohi noted last year, “…crime isn’t a public health crisis, as much as gun control advocates want to profess it is. Crime is a law enforcement issue. There is no prescription that prevents people who have no respect for life or law to make them not want to harm their victims. There’s no pill to cure that ill-minded intent.”

He reminded readers that “Criminals, typically, don’t legally buy guns. That means they wouldn’t pay the tax. The Department of Justice (DOJ) Bureau of Justice Statistics own reports show that 90 percent of criminals convicted of crimes involving a firearm admit they obtained those firearms through illicit means. In other words, those criminals stole those firearms or bought them on the black market.”

Mark Oliva, managing director of Public Affairs for NSSF, called this new tax suggestion “a non-starter.”

He says the proposal pushes the premise “that law-abiding gun owners must subsidize (and pay an illegal poll tax) for the crimes committed by criminals.”

“I’m not aware of a tax on library cards to combat illiteracy,” Oliva said via email. “Or a tax on voting to combat election interference. The ‘right tax’ comment tells you everything. Criminals aren’t paying the tax when they illegally obtain guns. That would be forced on you and I.”

Whether the idea is a non-starter or may gain some traction, it underscores how wide the gap between common sense and nonsense, critics would argue. The gap is growing wider, and at stake is a funding mechanism which has served the nation’s wildlife programs for generations.

Maine: Federal Appeals Court Upholds 3-Day Waiting Period Law For Firearm Purchases

A federal appeals court has ruled that Maine’s law requiring a three-day waiting period between firearm purchases and taking possession of a gun to be constitutional.

On April 3, a three-judge panel of the Boston-based 1st Circuit Court of Appeals reversed last year’s decision by Maine’s chief federal judge that blocked enforcement of the law on Second Amendment grounds. In a nutshell, the circuit court ruled that the law is a “burden on, but not an infringement of, the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.”

In what seems to be strained logic, the court ruled that the law regulates conduct before a person keeps and bears arms, thus not infringing upon actually keeping and bearing arms.

“We agree with the Attorney General’s view that laws regulating the purchase or acquisition of firearms do not target conduct covered by the Second Amendment’s ‘plain text,’” the court wrote in the case Beckwith v. Frey. “The Amendment’s plain text guarantees an individual’s ability to keep and bear arms, which means to have a carry guns. The Act does not address this conduct. Rather, the Act imposes a limitation in some circumstances on when a person can acquire a firearm after the person purchased it. The act thus regulates conduct that occurs before a person keeps or carries a gun.”

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Anti-Gunner Offers Cartoonish Version of U.S. History to Demand Civilian Disarmament

At one of the two No Kings protests held in Richmond, Virginia this past weekend, one of the speakers urged attendees to go out and buy a gun and exercise their Second Amendment rights. There was no call to violence in his statement, just a call to arms.

I’m not sure how well that comment went over with those in attendance, but I’m pretty sure that if California writer Matt Stone had been in the audience he would have turned tomato-faced with rage. In a diatribe for the Davis Vanguard, Stone has taken aim at “the gun,’ which, in his mind, has primarily (and perhaps only) been a tool of oppression for hundreds of years.

To understand the American obsession with firearms, you have to strip away the nostalgia and look at the ledger. The gun was the specific technology required to seize a continent and build an economy. It was the instrument that turned “uninhabited” land into private property and human beings into chattel.

The Second Amendment was not drafted in a vacuum of philosophical abstraction. It was drafted to protect the state militias, whose primary function, explicitly cited in the text, was to execute the “Law of the Union” and suppress “Insurrections.” In the language of the time, that meant one thing: killing Native Americans to clear the land and terrorizing enslaved Africans to keep the labor force in check.

I could devote this entire post to debunking just this paragraph, but I’ll settle for the Cliff’s Notes version since there’s so much more stupidity to cover. Chattel slavery existed long before the musket ever came into existence, and the African slavers who were the source of the millions of souls trapped in bondage weren’t dependent on firearms.

The Second Amendment was drafted, in part, to ensure that militias, which were comprised of every able-bodied male from young adulthood to old age, would not be destroyed by an act of Congress, but it was also meant to ensure that the people’s right to keep and bear arms outside of those militia purposes would not be infringed. Stone is simply off his rocker when he claims that “insurrections” only meant targeting Native Americans and “terrorizing” slaves. Even if Stone had referred to putting down slave revolts (which did fall under “insurrections”), it’s just flat out false to say those were the only “insurrections” in the colonies where the militia was used to stop the disorder.

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Another Day Ending in Y: JAMA Publishes Still More Anti-Gun Agitprop Presented as ‘Research.’

No one who truly values their Second Amendment rights should be worried that University of Michigan psychiatry professor Brian M. Hicks, PhD, is gaining fame and making money by passing off anti-gun propaganda as legitimate research, right? After all, it’s a free country. Professor Hicks can make a dollar and a name for himself however he sees fit, can’t he?

If the good professor twists some questionable data and bizarre opinions together and then calls it all legitimate research, that shouldn’t matter, should it? 

Now, if a peer-reviewed medical journal founded in 1883, which is published 48 times a year and read by physicians across the country and around the globe, takes Professor Hicks’ scribbles and calls them actual research without labeling his work as opinion or anti-gun agitprop, that’s not a problem either, is it? 

Wrong. 

The Journal of the American Medical Association — JAMA for short — has published more than a few of Professor Hicks’ tall tales and has never once labeled them accurately. Rather than calling them opinion pieces, JAMA publishes his work as legitimate research. Obviously, they’ve never investigated the good professor or even looked at his social media to insure fairness and accuracy. 

Well, friends, we have.  

There’s little doubt that the good professor is publishing anti-gun rubbish, which JAMA then passes off to its readers as legitimate research. That alone is a massive red flag, or at least it should be. 

Take a look at Professor Hicks’ latest work, which was published on St. Patrick’s Day: “Prevalence of Thoughts of Shooting Others Among US Adults.” As Hicks wrote . . .

This study’s findings suggest that a small but nontrivial percentage of people in the US think about shooting others.

He used a host of previously published works to form this opinion, which included data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (which has its own anti-gun history). 

Hicks, of course, included in his article a call for more gun control laws, as he does in all of his anti-gun writings. 

Prevention efforts are needed to address gun violence risk among those with and without access to firearms. … Resolving the risk of gun violence will require understanding nuanced contextual, social, and psychological influences and the difficult work of building bridges across many stakeholders.

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BLUF
I would only add it’s time to treat the mental illness like we used to and not play into and reinforce the delusions. We’re costing lives playing this game. It needs to stop. And perhaps we should be looking at treating transgenderism itself as a mental illness, again. The indicators are clearly there.

Trans Shooters: The Patterns Are Well Established.

Here we go again, I note this morning with a sad shake of the head. Our Catherine Salgado’s piece on the Rhode Island hockey game shooter reports that he identifies as “transgender.”

The lesson that comes from encouraging mentally ill people to indulge their insanity and to express violent hatred against those who do not affirm their illness is written in the blood of children killed at the high school hockey game.

Remember my column on the case of George Zinn? He’s the one who jumped up, claiming that he was the one who shot Charlie Kirk, not Tyler Robinson? Both Zinn and Robinson shared at least one trait: mental Illness, which includes sexual deviancy. Remember, I’ve already written about Zinn, in which I quoted a New York Post article:

The elderly man who falsely claimed he shot Charlie Kirk to create mass confusion during the conservative influencer’s assassination cried out in court as he was sentenced to prison for keeping “graphic” sexual photos of children.

George Zinn, 71, pleaded guilty to two counts of sexual exploitation of a minor on Thursday after police discovered the vile photos on his cellphone when he was detained at Utah Valley University on Sept. 10, according to the Salt Lake Tribune.

He also pleaded no contest to an obstruction of justice charge.

Then, too, there’s the case of Robinson himself, who was romantically involved with Lance Twiggs, himself another victim of transgenderism, and who, according to contacts within his family, “hates conservatives and Christians,” and who, according to other sources, influenced Robinson’s politics in the year they had been dating.

Then there’s the mass shooting last August at Annunciation Catholic Church and Catholic School in Minnesota. The shooter? Robert “Robin” Westman, who shot some 19 people, including 14 children, two fatally, before pointing the gun at himself. His manifesto told us the story: “I am tired of being trans, I wish I never brainwashed myself.”

Next on this bloody hit parade is Audrey “Aiden” Hale, who in March 2023 entered the Covenant school in Nashville, killing three young students and three staff members before being shot and killed by police.

Then, we have the case of Anderson Lee Aldrich, who on Nov. 19, 2022, killed five people and injured 40 at Club Q, in Colorado Springs, an LGBTQ nightclub. He’s serving a life sentence.

There’s more, of course, but I think the pattern is pretty firmly established. Part of that pattern is the knee-jerk response of blaming conservatives and Christians for the attacks. It doesn’t need to make sense; it just needs to be repeated, often and loudly.

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The Perversity of Citing The Black Codes To Defend Gun-Control Laws.

Neal Katyal and Justice Jackson were placed in the uncomfortable spot of having to explain why racist legislation to disarm the freedman was actually relevant.

One of the most bizarre aspects of modern Second Amendment litigation is how supporters of gun control are forced to favorably cite Jim Crow laws. In all other contexts, these sort of anti-canonical statutes would be untouchable. Yet, when it comes to guns, all the usual rules go out the window. In Wolford v. Lopez, one of the leading authorities for Hawaii’s law is an 1865 Louisiana statute. Neal Katyal described it as a “dead ringer” for the Hawaii statute.

During the oral argument, Justice Gorsuch was incredulous that Hawaii was relying on this shameful precedent. He asked Wolford’s counsel if it was appropriate to rely on such a law to inform the nation’s traditions.

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