Category: Crap For Brains

Actually, It Is ‘Blah, Blah, Blah’

One pernicious development of these parlous times has been the rise of various cults that ape the trappings of Christianity while being fundamentally and unalterably opposed to its moral tenets. Case in point, the Marxist Suicide Cult masquerading as heroic do-gooderism that goes by the name of “climate change,” by which these solipsistic lunatics mean “man-made climate change.”

The argument that the climate is changing is prima facie false, because there is no argument. The climate is always changing. An hour in any major art gallery immediately illustrates that. Start with the Dutch paintings from the Little Ice Age, such as Brueghel’s Hunters in the Snow from 1565 if you doubt me. Note also that the old city of Alexandria, in Egypt, which was founded by the Macedonian Greek Alexander the Great c. 331 B.C., and once ruled over by Cleopatra, is now under water. Man had nothing to do with either.

All gone now.

In fact, to say that puny human beings can affect the climate is arrogance of the highest order when one considers the size of the Sun and the vastness of even our little solar system at the edge of the Milky Way galaxy. “An ant in the afterbirth,” as Mr. Dolarhyde famously put it.

In the roughly five thousand years of recorded human history, there has been one period in which we have had a real taste of our climate’s potential for moodiness, beginning around the start of the fourteenth century and lasting for hundreds of years. During this epoch, often known as the Little Ice Age, temperatures dropped by as much as two degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit…. This was also the period between the end of the Middle Ages and the birth of the modern world.

The effects of the Little Ice Age were global in scale. In China, then as now the most populous country in the world, the Ming dynasty fell in 1644, undermined by, among other things, erratic harvests. In Europe, rivers and lakes and harbors froze, leading to phenomena such as the “frost fairs” on the River Thames—fairgrounds that spread across the river’s London tideway, which went from being a freakish rarity to a semi-regular event. (Virginia Woolf set a scene in “Orlando” at one.) Birds iced up and fell from the sky; men and women died of hypothermia; the King of France’s beard froze solid while he slept… in 1588, the Spanish Armada was destroyed by an unprecedented Arctic hurricane, and a factor in the Great Fire of London, in 1666, was the ultra-dry summer that succeeded the previous, bitter winter.

And then a warming trend began, continuing into our day: high culture flourished, science advanced along with the arts, and a longer growing season helped fuel a rise in population. This, of course, is not good enough for the ninnies, hysterics and bed-wetters who are convinced We’re All Going to Die if we don’t immediately reverse these civilizational advances (which, remarkably, seemed to have passed the entire southern hemisphere by), tear down our offending infrastructure, cease having babies (but import other people’s babies), reduce our mobility, and ban everything that “pollutes” our precious air and water, even at the cost of a grotesque and unnecessary reduction in living standards: 1565, here we come again!

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Analysis: A Legal Template for Upholding AR-15 Bans is Emerging

A federal judge upheld Delaware’s “assault weapons” ban this week using reasoning likely to resonate with other courts inclined to reach the same outcome.

On Monday, Federal District Judge Richard G. Andrews, an Obama appointee, found the state’s ban on AR-15s, AK-47s, and similar firearms–along with its ban on magazines that hold more than 17 rounds–is constitutional. He did so despite finding the guns were “in common” use for lawful purposes.

“[I] conclude that the prohibited LCMs, like the prohibited assault long guns, are in common use for self-defense and therefore ‘presumptively protect[ed]’ by the Second Amendment,” Judge Andrews ruled in Delaware State Sportsmen’s Association v. Delaware Department of Safety and Homeland Security.

That probably left a lot of people doing a double-take. But Judge Andrews came to his conclusion after arguing AR-15s and the like weren’t common during the founding era and represented a technological advancement that is responsible for a uniquely modern problem: mass shootings. Because of this, he argued Bruen allowed him to look for historical analogues that show a history of regulation instituted for the same purpose and using the same means.
He ruled there was such a tradition.

“I find that the LCM and assault long gun prohibitions of HB 450 and SS 1 for SB 6 are consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation,” he wrote. “Plaintiffs have therefore failed to demonstrate a likelihood of success on the merits of their Second Amendment claim.”
He pointed to the proliferation of late 19th Century Bowie knife and Billy club bans, plus later machinegun bans, as evidence governments have previously banned the sale of weapons they believe are associated with especially dangerous criminal behavior. He further argued banning a subset of weapons was a relatively minor burden and one that was similar to his historical examples.

“[B]oth sets of regulations impose a ‘comparable burden,” he wrote. “Indeed, the burden that the challenged regulations impose is slight.”
Judge Andrews isn’t the only, or even the first, one to use this concept to save a ban. District Judge Karin Immergut, a Trump appointee, denied an attempt to block Oregon’s magazine limit under the same basic framework. While she went further and said she didn’t need to do a Bruen analysis at all because ammunition magazines aren’t protected by the plain text of the Second Amendment, she did the analysis anyway, and it came out along the same lines as Judge Andrews’ argument.

It’s likely other courts will adopt this framework as well.
Other courts, namely the Ninth and Fourth Circuits, have previously shown they don’t believe AR-15s or similar guns should be sold to civilians. The old two-step balancing test of the pre-Bruen era was explicitly about whether the argued public safety impact of banning the guns was enough to overcome the infringement on the right of Americans to have them. Any court that upheld an “assault weapons” ban before 2022 essentially said “yes.”

So, given the opportunity to review the law again, it’s fair to think they may want to find a way to reach the same conclusion. That’s especially true if the path to that answer appears to at least plausibly fit within the Supreme Court’s new test.

Of course, Judge Andrews’ reasoning has some serious flaws. For one, it seems to be making the same mistake in the eyes of the Court that the two-step test did: going one step too far.

Reading Heller, McDonald, and Bruen provides the impression that any class of firearms considered to be in “common use” for lawful purposes, such as self-defense, is inherently protected by the Second Amendment and can’t be banned by the government.

“The traditional militia was formed from a pool of men bringing arms ‘in common use at the time’ for lawful purposes like self-defense,” The Court  wrote in Heller.

“Indeed, that is precisely the way in which the Second Amendment’s operative clause furthers the purpose announced in its preface. We therefore read Miller to say only that the Second Amendment does not protect those weapons not typically possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes, such as short-barreled shotguns. That accords with the historical understanding of the scope of the right[…].”

That Judge Andrews finds AR-15s and the other banned guns in common use for the purpose of self-defense and then proceeds on to further analysis is unlikely to be what The Court had in mind. It seems relatively clear SCOTUS doesn’t believe it is possible to ban any gun that is in common use for lawful purposes. So, the detour into comparing modern “assault weapons” bans to 19th Century Bowie knife or Billy club bans will likely be unpersuasive should it ever make its way up to The High Court.

It also suffers from the lack of a limiting principle. Judge Andrews argues that the self-loading, semi-automatic technology found in AR-15s and the other banned guns didn’t become popular until after the Civil War. And their adoption led to the rise of mass shootings (never mind that semi-automatics were becoming common about 100 years before the onset of modern mass shootings).

But there’s nothing in Judge Andrews’ line of reasoning that wouldn’t prevent the same argument from being applied to all semi-automatic firearms or an ammunition magazine of essentially any size. That includes semi-automatic handguns, which the Supreme Court has already ruled can’t be banned.

Still, even if the prospects for success on appeal to the Supreme Court are dim for this argument upholding AR bans, it will likely proliferate in some of the most important circuits because it at least attempts to follow the Bruen steps while still maintaining the bans. And, even if the weaknesses are as serious as they appear, pointing them out will only matter if the Supreme Court actually takes up a case involving them. After all, the two-step test The Court excoriated in Bruen was the defacto review standard on gun cases for a decade because of SCOTUS inaction.

Whatever ends up happening, expect to see Judge Andrews’ legal reasoning pop up anytime a gun or magazine ban is upheld.

Blast from the past: Anti-gunners recycle talking points from the 80s in response to Florida permitless carry

In 1986, Florida passed “shall issue” concealed carry legislation, kicking off a decades-long trend across the country that has continued to this day. At the time, Florida’s adoption of shall-issue language was a very big deal and a huge change to the “may issue” status quo, and gun control advocates did their best to drum up the public’s fears; predicting “Wild West shootouts” over parking spaces and a descent into a dystopian hellscape. As the NYTimes breathlessly reported in 1987 as the “shall issue” law took effect:

Only Florida has a law ”in which a license to carry a concealed gun is given by the state,” said Sarah Brady, vice-chairman of Handgun Control Inc., a Washington-based lobbying group. ”We believe that this kind of decision should be made on a local level where people know one another rather than applying to a state office.”

Attorney General Robert A. Butterworth noted this month that the law, passed overwhelmingly by the Legislature in the spring, ”has left the area of unconcealed manual possession of a firearms totally unregulated.”

This gap has created ”the possibility of openly armed youth gangs hanging around street corners and gunmen parading through a shopping mall,” the Attorney General wrote in a letter urging that the law be amended in the current special legislative session.…

”It was about time for Florida to have such a law,” said Richard M. Manning, a National Rifle Association official who pushed for the legislation.

He is counting the days until the law goes into effect Thursday. So too is Mrs. Brady and other gun control supporters, and they are worried about what will happen in Florida. Widepread weapons possession ”is not the best way to handle the increase of violence,” said Mrs. Brady, whose husband, James S. Brady, the White House press secretary, was shot in an assassination attempt against President Reagan. ”We are the only civilized nation in the world without a good gun law and we are the most violent in the West.”

A funny thing happened after “shall issue” went into effect: crime dropped, and not just by a little bit. Between 1987 and 2019, Florida’s violent crime and homicide rates declined by more than 50%, and the state now has around 2.5-million active concealed carry licenses.

But in the wake of the Florida legislature sending a permitless carry bill to Gov. Ron DeSantis, anti-gunners are dusting off their old arguments and once again deploying them in a campaign of fearmongering. Here’s a portion of Miami Herald columnist Fabiola Santiago’s hyperbolic response to the passage of HB 543 headlined “Permitless carry and gun sanctuary cities. Visit Florida at your own risk – it’s a blast!”

This is a state where people aren’t required to register guns like they do cars or house alarms. There’s no paperwork, no background check involved when gifting or privately selling guns. Only in gun shop and gun show sales do buyers undergo basic scrutiny.

And now, not even first-time gun users will be required to learn how to use a gun, online or in a gun range, to carry a concealed gun around the rest of us.

Their new right puts the rest of us at greater risk of dying as a result of their incompetence.

The permitless carry bill, CS/HB543, now heads to Gov. DeSantis, a fan of even worse, open-carry. He will be all too giddy to sign it into law. He was the bill’s chief proponent, although, hypocritically so — the governor doesn’t want guns at his events.

Remember, he got caught asking the city of Tampa to ban firearms at his election party — and to take the blame for it so he didn’t have to?

DeSantis had nothing to worry about.

“Historic NRA Win: Constitutional Carry Passes in Florida,” the organization boasted in a press release sent, in its own words, “moments” after the vote. They’ll shower DeSantis with funds for his likely presidential run.

But for the safety at major events — like spring break in South Beach — the new law foreshadows new trouble.

Although there’s talk that it could be possible to fence in an event, call it a private party and prohibit guns — like at DeSantis’ election event — “the gun law passed by the Legislature allowing concealed weapons with no permit or training will make 2024 in South Beach a nightmare,” said Stuart Blumberg, a 77-year resident of Miami Beach and founder of the Greater Miami and the Beaches Hotel Association.

Agreed, said Michael Grieco, a former Miami Beach commissioner and ex-state Rep. , a criminal defense attorney who carries a concealed weapon: “It’s just going to exacerbate the problem. I’m a Democrat and gun-owner, and this bill passed scares the crap out of me. As a father who drives his kid to school every week,” he said, pausing, “now anyone can just go buy a gun with only some nonsensical, lighthearted background check.”

Umm, that was the case before HB 543 was approved by lawmakers.
The bill doesn’t make any changes to the purchase or sale of firearms. It simply states that those Floridians who would be eligible to obtain a concealed carry license can carry a concealed firearm without the need for a government-issued permission slip. All those prohibited from possessing or carrying a firearm today will still be forbidden from doing so when the law takes effect on July 1st.

To opponents of Florida’s permitless carry bill, it’s the 1980s all over again. But while Florida was at the forefront of the “shall issue” movement almost 40 years ago, it’s far from an early adopter of permitless carry. When DeSantis signs HB 543 into law, Florida will join 25 other states in recognizing the right to bear arms without paying hundreds of dollars in fees and costs to do so. None of the doom-and-gloom predictions from anti-gunners have come to pass in those states, and not one has seen fit to repeal its permitless carry law after deciding it was a mistake.

In fact, I’ve got a story that should put Fabiola’s fears to rest. It comes from the constitutional carry state of Ohio; specifically the city of Toledo, which has not had a firearm-involved homicide since early February, when a 15-year-old boy was shot and killed inside his home. In fact, as of March 31st Toledo has only reported six homicides this year, well below where the city was at this point in 2021 and 2022, before constitutional carry took effect. The true number is likely even lower; one incident involved a man shot and killed by Toledo police, another fatal shooting is probably going to be ruled a justifiable homicide given that it was a burglar who was shot, while the family of the 15-year-old says he was the victim of an accidental shooting and not an intentional act of violence.

I’m not exclusively crediting constitutional carry for the plunge in homicides. Crime is complicated, and there are undoubtably a number of factors at work. But it’s clear that permitless carry, by itself, does not lead to an automatic rise in shootings or gun-involved murders any more than “shall-issue” concealed carry led to more crime in Florida in the decades after it was enshrined into law. Most violent criminals aren’t legally walking around with guns to begin with, so the new law will be of little note or use to them. What’s most important is that law enforcement sticks to the tactics and strategies that are most effective in reducing violent crime; focusing on the most violent and prolific offenders instead of casting a wide net of gun control laws over the general public.

The current doomcasting over Florida’s permitless carry law is nothing more than a rehash of decades-old arguments that have been proven false time and time again. The attempts to scare the pants off the public will only intensify between now and July 1st, but gun owners should keep calm and look forward to the day when they can carry on their person without having to get a permission slip from the state beforehand.

Yes, his opponent is a carpet bagging RINO, but still, Pennsylvanians knew exactly what they were voting for.

Fetterman Does First Post-Depression Interview and Raises a Multitude of Questions

John Fetterman has finally been released from the hospital after suffering from a reported bout of severe depression. The Pennsylvania senator has long been at the center of controversy surrounding his ailing health, largely centering on the massive stroke he had prior to the 2022 election.

Since then, Fetterman has deteriorated in ways that would have led to immediate calls for his resignation were he not a member of the Democratic Party. He can’t speak properly, he can’t understand others properly, and he relies on a closed captioning device to communicate.

It’s good to be a Democrat, though, and the press has been rushing to cover for him since day one. That continued on Friday with an interview with CBS News that did nothing but raise a multitude of questions.

For starters, is this guy a US senator or not? I’m not trying to downplay his condition. Quite the contrary, but the Senate is not a place to battle depression, much less serious health issues that leave one unable to communicate. The question at hand isn’t how brave Fetterman supposedly is. It’s whether he can do his job, and he obviously can’t. That should be the top issue for every single person who interviews him. Instead, they lavish him with praise while helping him hide his actual condition. It’s dystopian.

Past that, a lot of people noticed where Fetterman’s eyes were going during the interview. Not only is reading the questions on some kind of monitor just off-screen (which CBS News is careful to not show), but he’s pretty clearly also reading his answers. His eyes stay glued to the screen the entire time, with only passing glances at the interviewer herself.

There were also 11 different editing cuts in the 45-second clip that CBS News released. Let me say that again. There were 11 cuts in under a minute.

Those edits weren’t just made for promotional purposes. They were cuts all made during a single question. Why? Because Fetterman takes time to read his monitor and often loses his train of thought. CBS News, instead of being honest with its audience, is trying to hide that fact.

Does that sound like something an honest press would do? If this were a Republican, would they be bending over backward to cover up just how bad things are? We all know the answer to that. Fetterman is not fit to be a US senator. It was easy for anyone to see during the campaign, and he’s even worse off now. Truly, there is nothing the Democratic Party won’t do to hold onto power.

Ultra-ultra crap-for-brains o’ the day

Op-ed claims Founding Fathers would want gun control

I’m a big believer in the Constitution, including the Bill of Rights. It’s why I’m a Second Amendment advocate. The way I see it, our Founding Fathers put together a document that did a pretty good job of limiting the government and securing our rights.

Too bad it’s ignored, such as the push for gun control.

But with frightening regularity, there comes someone who seems to act like they held a séance with the Founding Fathers and knows that their past words in support of the Second Amendment and the right to keep and bear arms would go out the window.

People such as this:

The tragic shootings in Nashville, with children and staff at the Covenant School being killed, demands action from Congress. But so many times we have seen Congress do nothing after gun violence.

If America’s Founding Fathers could have traveled in time to today, they would be horrified to see these mass shootings in our schools and communities. They would also be shocked that the Congress has done so little to stop these tragedies.

The Founding Fathers, if they could have foreseen the terror of today, would surely have revised the Second Amendment. They would urge us to implement gun control today.

There must be some limitations on the right to bear arms of the Second Amendment. There must be gun control including banning assault weapons. As the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia once wrote “Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited.”

First, while I respect the late Justice Scalia, he wasn’t a Founding Father. Injecting his comment, one often taken drastically out of context, isn’t making the case.

The author here, like so many others, claims the Founding Fathers wouldn’t have supported the right they literally fought and bled for if they could see the bad things happening today.

Yet they offer no evidence for such a claim. Nothing in their writings of the time suggested they were in favor of forfeiting the right to keep and bear arms simply because people could do bad things.

In fact, that claim flies directly in the face of something one of our Founding Fathers said explicitly. Thomas Jefferson said, “I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery.” That tells me that yes, he’d look at what we see today, and while he would mourn those lost lives, there’s little reason to believe he’d suddenly want to restrict people’s rights.

The Buckeye Firearms Association has a very handy list of other pro-gun quotes from our Founding Fathers, none of which suggest even a hint of support for the idea of gun control.

See, what the author has done is convince himself of a fiction, that the Founding Fathers are whatever he wants to believe them to be. Further, since so many of us look to them for guidance on matters of policy, he somehow hopes he’ll suddenly be the one to trick us into supporting gun control.

That’s really not how it works. You can’t just say, “They’d support me,” then just expect people to shrug and accept it.

Let’s also remember that in the time of the founding, private parties owned artillery and equipped their own private warships–letters of marque were a thing, after all–which could lay waste to people in numbers even the much vilified AR-15 couldn’t.

If they were willing to trust the American people with that, then just why would you assume they’d suddenly support gun control? The fact that you just really, really want them to isn’t enough.

Yet this is what passes for reasoning, apparently.

Missouri bill to ban federal “red flag” laws, funding killed by Republican senator

JEFFERSON CITY — A Missouri bill that would ban federal funds and programs from being used in the state to enforce “red flag” gunmeasures was killed by a committee Wednesday.

Republican Sen. Bill Eigel of Weldon Spring filed the legislation, Senate Bill 10, in response to a recent plan from the U.S. Department of Justice to distribute dollars to states to administer “red flag” laws and other crisis intervention programs related to gun violence.

But the legislation failed to pass out of committee after a Republican joined Democrats in voting it down, citing a school shooting in Nashville this week that killed three students and three adults.

Sen. Lincoln Hough, a Springfield Republican, joined the two Democrats on the committee to vote against the legislation. Three other Republicans — Sens. Rick Brattin, Rusty Black and Mike Bernskoetter — voted in favor of the bill, but did not reach the majority of votes required. The fourth Republican on the committee, Sen. Mike Cierpiot, did not vote.

“I think it’s a little disheartening, quite frankly, to even be having this sort of conversation given what happened two days in Nashville,” Hough said prior to the vote. “But I’m more than happy to go ahead and have a vote right now.”

Bernskoetter, the chairman of the committee, responded that “I told (Eigle) I would have a vote on it and I’m having a vote on it.”

Eigel has said the legislation “builds on” a 2021 law that nullified federal gun statutes in Missouri, which is currently facing litigation and has been decried by members of law enforcement.

“The federal government, the Biden administration, is trying very hard to try to use federal dollars to be sent into the state of Missouri to incentivize the creation of these red flag databases,” he said at a hearing in February.

In a Twitter post Wednesday after the vote, Eigel alleged that Hough and Cierpiot had “coordinated and vote to derail” the bill, calling it a “dark day for supporters of (the Second Amendment).”

Wednesday’s vote marks the second consecutive session Hough has joined with Democrats in committee to vote down legislation relating to guns. He and another Republican voted with Democrats last year to kill legislation that would have expanded legal immunity for those who shoot and kill someone in self-defense. That bill was dubbed the “Make Murder Legal Act” by an association of county prosecutors.

Karine Jean-Pierre Responds to Question About Gun Confiscation With an Alarming Answer

When faced with a relatively easy question about President Joe Biden’s position on gun confiscation policies, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre wouldn’t give a straight answer.

Invoking repeatedly failed candidate Robert Francis O’Rourke’s 2019 presidential debate promise that “hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47,” a reporter asked Jean-Pierre, “Does the president support not just banning the sale and manufacture of semi-automatic weapons but further than that, confiscation?”

It’s a straightforward question: Does President Biden think legally owned firearms should be confiscated by the federal government? But Jean-Pierre wouldn’t say “yes” or “no” in what should be an easy answer.

Instead, Jean-Pierre ignored the question and retreated to the usual Democrat talking points about “weapons of war” that “should not be on the streets across the country in our communities, they should not be in schools, they should not be in grocery stores, they should not be in churches — that’s what the president believes.”

Jean-Pierre went on to claim Biden “has done more than any other president the first two years” to address what Democrats say is a crisis of “weapons of war” in America. “Now it’s time for Congress to do the work,” Jean-Pierre said. “And he’s happy to sign, once that happens, he’s happy to sign that legislation that says, ‘ok we’re going to remove assault weapons, we’re going to have an assault weapons ban.'”

Even though Karine Jean-Pierre wouldn’t say whether Biden supports gun confiscation for “assault weapons,” President Biden’s record on the subject is not a winning one, nor is Democrats’ obsession with eradicating “assault weapons” — a purposefully non-specific term usually paired with other buzzwords such as “military style” — a policy goal that’s been shown to limit instances of violence in which the perpetrator uses a firearm.

As we at Townhall have repeatedly noted, Biden’s frequent claim that the “assault weapons” ban he worked on as a U.S. senator was effective just doesn’t pass muster. Biden and his administration’s claim that it’s possible to get the specter of “assault weapons” off America’s streets is one this administration employs frequently while attempting to take advantage of tragedies. “But according to data provided by the Department of Justice, the ban cannot be credited with reducing violence or mass shootings,” Katie noted after Biden repeated the claim last May. Here’s what the DOJ found:

A 2004 Department of Justice funded study from the University of Pennsylvania Center of Criminology concluded the ban cannot be credited with a decrease in violence carried out with firearms. The report is titled “An Updated Assessment of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban: Impacts on Gun Markets and Gun Violence, 1994-2003.”

“We cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation’s recent drop in gun violence. And, indeed, there has been no discernible reduction in the lethality and injuriousness of gun violence, based on indicators like the percentage of gun crimes resulting in death or the share of gunfire incidents resulting in injury,” the summary of the report on the study’s findings states. “The ban’s impact on gun violence is likely to be small at best, and perhaps too small for reliable measurement. AWs [assault weapons] were used in no more than 8% of gun crimes even before the ban.”

If banning “assault weapons” didn’t reduce gun violence, nor reduce the lethality of gun violence, then passing a new ban or going as far as confiscating such firearms — something Karine Jean-Pierre wouldn’t rule out this week — won’t make a difference either and will only further infringe on the rights of Americans.

Federal District Judge Wimes Creates Novel Excuses to Rule 2A Protection Act Unconstitutional

U.S.A. –-(AmmoLand.com)-— On March 6, 2023, federal Judge Brian C. Wimes ruled the Missouri Second Amendment Protection Act was unconstitutional, claiming the Act violates the Supremacy clause of the US Constitution, invalidates federal law, and violates the doctrine of “intergovernmental immunity”.

The Federal court system has long held states cannot be compelled to use their resources to enforce federal laws. States are not required to explain why they do not wish to use those resources to enforce federal laws. They have the power to refuse to do so. To hold otherwise is to collapse the power-sharing between states and the federal government into a monolithic entity controlled by the federal government. This doctrine is known as the anti-commandeering doctrine.

Judge Wimes appears to be nullifying the anti-commandeering doctrine by claiming Missouri must use state resources to investigate and prosecute federal law. Refusing to do so, Judge Wimes claims, is “obstructing” federal law enforcement, which is somehow a violation of the supremacy clause and intergovernmental immunity.

From the opinion:

SAPA is an unconstitutional “interposit[ion]” against federal law and is designed to be just that. Id. Section 1.410(5) states the Missouri General Assembly’s declaration that the Supremacy Clause “does not extend to various federal statutes, executive orders, administrative orders, court orders, rules, regulations, or other actions that collect data or restrict or prohibit the manufacture, ownership, or use of firearms, firearm accessories, or ammunition exclusively within the borders of Missouri . . . .” Mo. Rev. Stat. § 1.410(5). However, the Missouri General Assembly’s assertion that the Supremacy Clause does not extend to acts of Congress does not make it so. To the contrary, 15 “[t]he law of congress is paramount; it cannot be nullified by direct act of any state, nor the scope and effect of its provisions set at naught indirectly.” Anderson, 135 U.S. at 490.

SAPA does not prevent agents of the federal government from investigating, arresting, prosecuting or convicting residents of Missouri who violate federal law. It prevents agents of the state and local governments from assisting federal agents in doing so. Judge Wimes claims the anti-commandeering doctrine does not apply by quoting reasons in SAPA for the purpose of the law. But the purpose of state law has not generally been an issue in anti-commandeering doctrine.  The Constitutionality of laws is based on what the law does, not what the law claims the purposes of the law are.

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Poor Huffpo.

Heller, McDonald and Bruen are Affecting How State Legislatures View Pending Gun Control Legislation.

[Heller and McDonald] allowed opponents to wage new battles against longstanding gun laws. When District Judge Roger Benitez overturned California’s 34-year-old assault weapons ban two years ago, he pointed to Heller, saying that under the decision, “it is obvious that the California assault weapon ban is unconstitutional.”

Because the Heller ruling applied to guns in common use, the sheer volume of semi-automatic rifles in America protects them under the Second Amendment, according to Mark Oliva, a spokesperson for the National Shooting Sports Federation.

“There are currently 24.4 million of these rifles in circulation today,” Oliva said. “To put that into context for you, there are more of these rifles in circulation today than there are F-150s on the road.” …

Eight more states have laws similar to California’s assault weapons ban that could be affected if the Supreme Court ultimately weighs in.

The expectation that these laws may be doomed is already complicating the politics of passing new ones like them.

In New Mexico, Democratic Gov. Michelle Luján Grisham has repeatedly urged the legislature to send her an assault weapons ban to sign this session, but lawmakers tabled the effort — partly over concerns that it wouldn’t withstand scrutiny in federal court.

“There’s absolutely no point to passing new laws which federal courts will strike down and which are clearly going to be deemed unconstitutional,” state Sen. Joseph Cervantes, a Democrat, tweeted last month.

With those lawsuits still playing out, the future of gun policy remains in flux. But that legal panorama makes it hard to imagine clear lanes for reform in the near future.

“We’re in a very difficult spot with that Bruen ruling,” said Miranda Viscoli, co-president of New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence. “Even though it was only about concealed carry, it’s just made everybody afraid who wants to pass common sense gun violence prevention legislation.”

— Roque Planas and Paul Blumenthal in How the Courts Are Strangling Gun Reform

Nashville shooting: White House presses GOP on assault-style weapons ban

President Joe Biden is seeking to put pressure on congressional Republicans to pass an assault weapons ban after three children and three adults were killed during a school shooting in Nashville, Tennessee.

“He wants Congress to act because enough is enough,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters Monday. “How many more children have to be murdered before Republicans in Congress will step up and act to pass the assault weapons ban?”

Schools should be “safe spaces for our kids to grow and learn and for our educators to teach,” Jean-Pierre said, adding Biden had been briefed on the situation and that the White House is coordinating with the Justice Department and local officials. She defended Biden’s gun-related executive orders and the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which incentivized states to introduce so-called red flag laws.

“I don’t have the data” on the effectiveness of Biden’s unilateral action, the press secretary said.

Biden will address the shooting at a small-business event Monday afternoon, she added.

Six people are dead, as well as the shooter, after a 28-year-old woman opened fire with two assault-type rifles and a handgun Monday morning at the Covenant School, a private Christian school in Nashville.

This is what happens when pronouns are a higher priority than logistics

U.S. Weapons Stockpile Disaster Limiting Our Ability To Deter China In Taiwan
It’s so bad now, even the New York Times is reporting about it.

In late January we reported that U.S. military weapons stockpiles were so low that various commentators were describing the shortages as “uncomfortably low,” “insufficient,” “precarious,” and “dangerous” due to the large quantities of these weapons we had given free of charge to Ukraine: U.S. Weapons Stockpiles “Uncomfortably Low” Due To Arms Shipments to Ukraine:

To date, the U.S. military has provided a “staggering” amount of military hardware and munitions to Ukraine in its defense against Russia’s invasion, amounting to more than $27 billion. This U.S. support has included over 1 million rounds of 155 mm howitzer ammunition. It has also included 8,500 Javelin anti-tank missiles, 32,000 anti-tank missiles of other types, 5,200 Excalibur precision 155 mm howitzer rounds, and 1,600 Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, among many other weapons systems and munitions.

[T]he Heritage Foundation’s Center for National Defense concludes that “[t]he fact that only a few months of fighting in Ukraine consumed such a large percentage of U.S. Stingers and Javelins suggests that the DOD’s plans, and the stockpiles that result from them, are insufficient.” Even the Washington Post has conceded the seriousness of the situation, noting that “[s]tocks of many key weapons and munitions are near exhaustion,” and citing a…CSIS report that concludes that “the U.S. defense industrial base is in pretty poor shape right now [and] we don’t make it past four or five days in a war game before we run out of precision missiles.” The National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA) describes the state of U.S. weapons stockpiles as “precarious.”

The U.S. Naval Institute describes them as “dangerous” due to their low inventory levels. Even a U.S. Department of Defense official quoted by the Wall Street Journal admitted that munitions stockpiles are “uncomfortably low” in that they are “not at the level we would like to go into combat.” This official explained that the only reason the issue isn’t “critical” is because “the U.S. isn’t engaged in any major military conflict” at the moment.

The key problem, of course, as we reported, is that the administration’s official position is that, in the words of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army General Mark Milley, “we will continue to support [Ukraine] all the way” and “[w]e will be there for as long as it takes to keep Ukraine free,” despite the obvious impact of such support on U.S. weapons’ stockpile levels.

And one of the side issues, although of critical seriousness, is that this arms largesse to Ukraine severely impacts our ability to come to Taiwan’s aid in case of an invasion by China, as we reported:

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The demoncraps don’t like the idea that their houses of indoctrination may have some oversight by parents.

‘Parents Bill of Rights’ wins zero votes from Dems who attack it as ‘fascism,’ ‘extreme’ attack on schools
The bill is the GOP’s response to growing anger about lack of access to school information across the nation

The House voted to pass the Parents Bill of Rights Act on Friday over objections from Democrats who argued the bill is aimed at promoting “fascism” and “extreme” views of Republicans by making it easier for parents to ban books and out LBGTQ+ students.

The GOP bill is a response to growing anger across the country about access to information on everything from school curricula to safety and mask policies to the prevalence of gender ideology and critical race theory in the classroom. Parents’ anger over these issues at school board meetings led to an effort by the Biden administration’s Justice Department to examine the “disturbing trend” of violent threats against school officials.

House Republicans reacted by approving the Parents Bill of Rights Act, which would require school districts to give parents access to curriculum and reading lists and would require schools to inform parents if school staff begin encouraging or promoting their child’s gender transition.

The bill passed narrowly in a 213-208 vote that saw just a handful of Republicans vote against it, along with every Democrat.

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ChatGPT a Perfect Example of Garbage In, Garbage Out on Guns

“The owner of Insider and Politico tells journalists: AI is coming for your jobs,” CNN Business reported Wednesday. Mathias Döpfner, CEO of publisher Axel Springer, “predicts that AI will soon be able to aggregate information much better than humans.”

“Döpfner’s warnings come three months after Open AI opened up access to ChatGPT, an AI-powered chatbot,” the report notes. “The bot is capable of providing lengthy, thoughtful responses to questions, and can write full essays, responses in job applications and journalistic articles.”

“Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates believes ChatGPT, a chatbot that gives strikingly human-like responses to user queries, is as significant as the invention of the internet,” Reuters reported in February. “Until now, artificial intelligence could read and write, but could not understand the content,” Gates told Handelsblatt, a German business newspaper. “This will change our world.”

That seems to be a thing with him. With the environment, with Covid,  with guns…

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Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before

It is a fitting coincidence that the announcement of Greta Thunberg’s honorary doctorate in theology came the same week as a new report from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns that the world has less than a decade to stop “catastrophic climate change” by halting the use of fossil fuels.

You can be forgiven for having a sense of déjà vu all over again, since we have been getting “less than a decade to stop climate change” warnings for more than 30 years. Only someone who has assimilated climate catastrophism as a fanatical religion could fail to be embarrassed by this record of hysteria and goal-post shifting, which makes St. Greta of Thunberg’s theology degree ironically fitting.

Yet the new IPCC report is not a report at all. It is merely a 36-page “Summary for Policy Makers” (SPM in the climate trade) ahead of a new “synthesis report” that will merely repackage the last complete three-volume IPCC climate change assessment from 2021. The new synthesis report, which will likely run a thousand pages or more, is “coming soon,” according to the IPCC’s website.

In other words, the new “synthesis report” is not new at all, but is produced to keep climate agitation at a full boil. The SPM is released ahead of main report to generate headlines, which will then be repeated, Groundhog Day-style, when the full report is released later. The new SPM did the trick: the New York Times‘s chief stenographer for the climate cult, Brad Plumer, produced a breathless story that can be written now by ChatGPT, declaring that “Earth is likely to cross a critical threshold for global warming within the next decade.” This whole well-worn exercise is the climate cult equivalent of a perpetual motion machine.

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Anti-gunners need to face reality on gun manufacturer

The firearm community consists of two primary groups: The gun owners and the gun manufacturers and sellers. The firearm industry provides the goods and services we all need in order to enjoy our Second Amendment rights.
Going after gun owners is, typically, a losing strategy for anti-gunners. It doesn’t take much to show that gun owners are law-abiding folks and that if we were all dangerous, with over 400 million guns in private hands, violent crime would be much worse.
So, they’ve long gone after gun stores, but they haven’t exactly left gun manufacturers alone.
In fact, a recent op-ed tries to blame them for a whole lot.
We often talk about where and how weapons are purchased — but rarely where and how they are manufactured. These realities challenge the conventional way we talk about guns in terms of a “culture war” between red and blue states.
For example, the blue states of Massachusetts and Connecticut have some of the strictest regulations on firearms carrying and possession. But they are also major sites of gun manufacturing in this country. The weapons used in the 2018 Parkland shooting, for example, were manufactured by Smith and Wesson, a gun manufacturer based in Massachusetts.
The deeper and bigger point is that the U.S. is the world’s principal supplier of weapons.
The U.S. weapons industry makes both heavy weapons like military aircraft, bombs, and missiles, and small arms like rifles and handguns. As of 2021, over 40 percent of the world’s exported arms came from the United States — many of them manufactured in deep blue states.
Blue states with strict gun laws often suffer gun violence when weapons are trafficked in from red states with looser gun laws. Similarly, many countries surrounding the U.S. with high rates of gun violence, like Mexico, obtain guns both legally and illegally from this country.
With no system to effectively control and track who ends up with those guns, these weapons are often obtained by military units or police that have committed human rights abuses or who work with criminal groups.
In other words, literally every sin ever committed with a gun rests on the gun manufacturers’ heads.
However, I’m going to clue the writers–there are two of them, so they’re clearly twice as ignorant–on a few facts about how gun distribution works in this country.
First, let’s talk about domestic gun sales.
The gun manufacturer builds a given firearm and then sells it. It’s true that, in theory, anyone can buy that gun and have it shipped to pretty much any city in the nation…to a point.
The weapon needs to first be legal in that state, for one thing. An AR-15 that’s legal in Georgia isn’t legal in Massachusetts, so local laws need to be obeyed.
Second, that gun must go to someone with the proper licensing. Since most people don’t have an FFL, they are generally shipped to a gun store, which then conducts all the required background checks and whatnot. As such, the gun manufacturer can ship it out trusting that everything required will be done.
Yet after it leaves the store, they have absolutely no control over what happens. That customer could have the gun stolen or he could just hand it off to someone else. They have no say.
Then the writers talk about atrocities abroad as if companies like Colt are to blame.
Except, those companies can’t just export guns because someone cut them a check. Due to federal law, weapons exports must be approved by the State Department. Again, Colt can’t ship a bunch of M-4s somewhere just because they want to. They need government approval to do so lawfully.
Once they’re sent, the gun manufacturers are, once again, powerless to do anything about what happens with those weapons.
See, our intrepid authors are convinced that these gun makers are the scum of the Earth, but they can’t seem to grok that they’re ruled by numerous regulations other industries simply don’t have to deal with. They couldn’t be the merchants of death they’re painted as even if they wanted.
Frankly, these two should be embarrassed by what they wrote and the publication that printed it should be embarrassed as well. What we have here is a screed dictated by ignorance with a few links thrown it to make it look like they did their research.
They should actually try doing some next time.

You will be made to conform……….

California Hospital Refuses Transplant Surgery for Unvaccinated Woman With End-Stage Kidney Disease.

SAN DIEGO, Calif.—Even on a good day, Linda Garinger of Ramona, California, thinks about dying.

Since she went on kidney dialysis two years ago, she’s had a heart attack and a cardiac episode associated with her thrice-weekly treatments.

Her energy is low as her other vital organs slowly fail. Her blood pressure is out of control—hovering at around 200 systolic over “100-something”diastolic whenever she undergoes dialysis.

Garinger feels it’s only a matter of time before her next heart attack, which could prove fatal unless she gets a new kidney.

“The dialysis is very stressful on me. My vision is going. My hair is falling out. I’ve got skin cancer,” said Garinger, 68. “They said it’s from the dialysis not filtering out all the bad stuff.

“My biggest fear is I’ll have a heart attack during dialysis. I’m just going downhill right now.”

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Shot: defund the police
Chaser: I am begging for more police

Liberals are never, ever held to account.

San Francisco District Supervisor Hillary Ronen is “begging” for more police officers in the Mission District. Crime is out of control, and the city absolutely has to do something about it.

It’s a disaster! Somebody do something!

You have to sympathize with her and her constituents. Sure sounds like things are really bad out there. I wonder how any city could allow such a degradation in its policing capability?

Hillary Ronen is the one to ask. She led the fight to defund the police, after all.

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