Category: Crap For Brains

Well it appears that “Devout Catholic” Joe Biden has the same definition of sin as his former boss: “Being out of alignment with my values.”

‘Close To Sinful:’ Biden Floats Possibility Of Nation-Wide Transgender Law.

President Joe Biden appeared to criticize Ron DeSantis on his handling of transgender youth and floated the possibility of a nation-wide transgender law in an interview clip released Monday.

“What’s going on in Florida, is as my mother would say, ‘close to sinful.’ I mean, it’s just terrible what they’re doing,” Biden said while speaking with actor Kal Penn.

“It’s not like … a kid wakes up one morning and says, ‘you know, I decided that I want to become a man or I want to become a woman … I mean, what are they thinking about here? They’re human beings, they love, they have feelings, they have inclinations,” Biden continued. “It’s cruel.”

“And the way we do it is we make sure we pass legislation like we passed on same-sex marriage. You mess with that, you’re breaking the law and you’re going to be held accountable,” Biden added.

DeSantis has led an administration-wide effort to ban sex change treatments for minors. He has said doctors should be sued for performing sex changes on children and suspended a state attorney refusing to adhere to the child sex change ban.

DeSantis also requested public universities report how many students they treated for “gender dysphoria,” and in October, the Florida Board of Medicine voted to ban sex change surgeries and hormone therapy for children under 18.

Dylan Mulvaney, a man who identifies as a woman and has garnered attention on social media for using hyper-feminine stereotypes, asked Biden in October if he thinks states should “have the right” to ban “gender-affirming health care.”

“I don’t think any state or anybody should have the right to do that, as a moral question and a legal question,” Biden responded.

“I just think it’s wrong,” Biden added. “I feel very, very strongly that you should have every single solitary right, including, including use of your gender identity bathroom in public.”

Florida Agency for Health Care Administration Secretary Jason Weida told the Caller that “the ‘gender-affirming’ model pushed by the Biden Administration is decades behind other developed countries, including Sweden and most recently Norway.”

“What is ‘sinful’ is the establishment pushing harmful surgeries and treatment with long-term effects on minors with no accountability or transparency,” Weida said.

“Last year, the Agency conducted a thorough review of several services promoted by the Federal Government to treat gender dysphoria and found that these services – sex reassignment surgery, cross-sex hormones, and puberty blockers – are not consistent with widely accepted professional medical standards and are experimental and investigational with the potential for harmful long term affects,” he added.

Governor says she’s going to keep pushing on crime, gun bills

As Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham started her post-session news conference Saturday, she already knew the score.

Of the roughly 40 public safety bills introduced this year, the governor said she championed 10.

“We have about a handful up, and out of 40, it’s 10 [that passed], and not all of those would really constitute what I think are strong public safety measures,” she said.

“I know that is an area that you want me to say I’m disappointed,” Lujan Grisham added. “I’m motivated. I am very motivated to find additional ways to make sure that we really do everything in our power that makes our communities and cities in our state safe.”

The Legislature passed a gun storage law named after a 13-year-old Albuquerque boy authorities say was shot and killed by a fellow student who took his father’s gun to an Albuquerque middle school. Lawmakers also passed a bill that cracks down on organized retail crime and made it a fourth-degree felony to buy a gun for another person who is prohibited from owning a firearm.

But some of the governor’s biggest priorities went nowhere, including a ban on assault weapons; a bill to raise the age to 21 to buy or possess semi-automatic firearms, including assault weapons; and a 14-day waiting period to buy guns.

Other gun-related legislation — prohibiting firearms within 100 feet of polling places and updating the Unfair Trade Practices Act to lift restrictions on the filing of lawsuits against manufacturers or distributors — passed the Senate but didn’t get a hearing in the House, where they were likely to meet stiff opposition.

The governor also pushed for establishing a “rebuttable presumption” to keep repeat violent offenders awaiting trial off the streets instead of letting them be released pretrial. The bill was tabled in committee amid concerns it was unconstitutional.

Miranda Viscoli, co-president of New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence, said she was “extremely disappointed” the bill to impose a 14-day waiting period on gun sales didn’t get a hearing in either chamber. Of all the violence prevention bills proposed this year, that was the bill that would’ve made the biggest difference, she added.

“The studies we looked at say it’s a game-changer in terms of suicide and crimes of passion,” she said.

But Viscoli said she was grateful the Legislature passed House Bill 9, intended to keep guns out of the hands of children and teens. The governor signed it into law Tuesday.

“We’ve been working on getting that passed since 2017,” she said.

Rep. Pamelya Herndon, D-Albuquerque, who sponsored the legislation known as the Bennie Hargrove Act, called some of the other gun bills considered by the Legislature controversial, noting some are “going to take some time.”

Lujan Grisham, who was hammered over a crime wave plaguing New Mexico as she campaigned for a second term last year, vowed to keep “pushing the Legislature” to enact more measures, including funding to put an additional 1,000 police officers on the ground.

“The Legislature should expect me to look at that again because I know we need 1,000 officers,” she said.

Asked about her strategy to get her public safety priorities across the finish line, Lujan Grisham said she has to think about “creative solutions.”

“I’m going to keep trying,” she said.

“Just look at the stats. We’ve released some folks that should never have been released and have already reoffended in Albuquerque while we’ve all been in the legislative session,” she said, referring to efforts to pass a pretrial detention bill. “I find that to be intolerable. There are states who do it better, and I don’t know why we don’t just do exactly what those states are doing. I don’t need to recreate the wheel.”

The governor said she would continue to battle for modified pretrial detention, noting “everyone here knows I’m introducing that again. And again and again, and I might just try to change the Constitution so I can run again.”

Lujan Grisham said she was kidding but added she would continue to battle on crime legislation. And she made no apologies for her battle against guns, brushing off criticism she’s infringing on law-abiding citizens’ Second Amendment rights.

“I have not talked to a single policymaker, not one legislator, who’s interested in preventing responsible gun owners from accessing firearms,” she said.

“What we’re trying to address is that we have a gun violence issue and that guns … get into the hands of people who should not have them,” she said. “That … takes a scalpel, like figuring out where we got a problem and taking care of that particular problem.”

Observation O’ The Day

Kostas Moros
@MorosKostas
I don’t understand what the point is supposed to be here. Yes, bullets are very lethal, and will cause serious injury even when not fatal. Nobody disputes that. That is the point of firearms, we didn’t think we were buying paintball guns or something.

Also, this is another post by Giffords that shows they ultimately want to ban all guns even though they won’t admit it. Because these same horrific wounds would result from non-“assault weapons”, guns limited to ten rounds, etc.

 

With standard human corruption, these elitists delude themselves by believing that since they were just enough smarter than the average bear in one subject to wind up suuuuper rich, they must be as smart in everything else. Thus they walk themselves right into stupidity.

The rich are eating themselves
The oligarchs are playing a dangerous game by pouring trillions into woke causes.

Beware of plutocrats bearing gifts. The annual clown show at Davos epitomizes how today, the global elites have embraced an unholy trinity of ‘progressive’ doctrines: climate-change apocalypticism, a belief in systemic racism and racial ‘equity’, and radical gender ideology. The super-rich hope that by genuflecting to these causes, they can buy themselves political protection and fend off the activists lurking in the ranks of their own companies. Yet, in the long run, this could end up fuelling their demise.

The recent ‘Great Awokening’ of our elites reflects a long-standing shift among executives in terms of priorities and perspective. The capitalist class first arose out of the middle orders, and even from within the peasantry, as the industrial revolution, particularly in the Netherlands and Britain, challenged the autocracy of both the church and the monarchical state. These were often tough, ruthless entrepreneurs embodying values of hard work, thrift, family and faith.

But with the managerial revolution of the 1950s, the nature of executive elites changed. As sociologist Daniel Bell first identified half a century ago, business leaders were no longer upstarts and thus the natural opponents of state power. Instead, they reflected a new type of individualism, unmoored from religion and family, a worldview which transformed the foundations of middle-class culture. The goal of this new executive class, as Bell saw it, was not so much building great companies, but gaining accolades from their peers, the press and the public – a trend also set out in Alvin Toffler’s 1980 book, The Third Wave.

The rise of the socially conformist business executive was briefly obscured during the entrepreneurial boom of the 1980s, when Wall Street and tech leaders embraced Reaganite deregulation. The era of financier Mike Milken, Apple founder Steve Jobs, AMD founder Jerry Sanders and FedEx founder Frederick Smith seemed to reflect a resurgent ‘cowboy capitalism’. These entrepreneurs were too busy making money to care about controlling the lives of the common folk. So much so that in 2006, economist Carl Schramm argued that Joseph Schumpeter’s prediction of bureaucratic capitalist decline would be overcome by an ‘entrepreneurial America reborn’.

This era came crashing to an end with the 2008 financial crisis and the massive state bailouts of large banks. The banking sector became more concentrated, with the number of American banking institutions falling by a third between 2000 and 2020. By 2020, the five largest banks controlled over 45 per cent of all assets in the US, up from under 30 per cent 20 years earlier. Worldwide, the five largest investment banks now control roughly one-third of investment funds; the top 10 control an absolute majority. In Europe, such oligopolies are even more powerful, with the top three banks accounting for a majority of assets in most European countries.

It is the same story with the technology sector. Once the vaunted centre of grassroots entrepreneurialism, a lack of antitrust measures from both Republicans and Democrats has allowed technology companies to morph into quasi-monopolies. Google controls over 90 per cent of the search-engine market; Microsoft owns over 74 per cent of computer-operating-system software; Amazon has nearly half of the US online retail market share and a significant proportion of cloud computing; Google and Apple together account for 90 per cent of smartphone operating systems.

Such immense market power encourages executives not to take risks and innovate, but rather to consolidate their dominance by acquiring smaller competitors. Amazon, Meta and Google now account for two-thirds of all online-advertising revenues, which now represent the majority of all ad sales. These oligopolies also seem poised to dominate emerging technologies, from cloud services and underwater fibre-optic cables to AI.

Alongside this economic concentration, we see as well uniformity of viewpoints and growing control over the means of communication. Companies like Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple largely not only control the biggest platforms, but have also taken direct ownership of movie studios, newspapers and magazines. All these outlets, along with the AI models these firms produce, tend to reflect the worldview of the tech oligopoly.

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BLUF
….the only person Biden is trying to save with this rhetoric is himself.

Gun Control Is Joe Biden’s Safe Space
With more economic problems looming, the president returns to an old favorite.

When things are going poorly, Joe Biden usually heads out for another gun-control push, issuing executive orders, demanding more legislation, and repeating many of his most preposterous anecdotes and claims. Because Biden’s gun rhetoric offers little more than emotionalism, it doesn’t have to make much sense — which, of course, plays to his greatest strength.

During the spring and summer of 2022, when inflation kept hitting new 40-year highs, Biden gave one cynical speech on gun violence after the next. This week, as the banking system yawned under the weight of his reckless policies, Biden was in Monterey Park, where 11 people were murdered by a 72-year-old lunatic during last year’s Lunar New Year celebration, to demand Congress pass more laws.

Obviously, it’s all meant to be a distraction. But it also needs to be debunked.

Here is CBS News giving the White House the lead it was looking for:

President Biden issued an executive order on Tuesday that aims to increase the number of background checks to buy guns, promote better and more secure firearms storage and ensure U.S. law enforcement agencies are getting the most out of a bipartisan gun control law enacted last summer.

Biden’s executive order will direct U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland to increase background checks by “cracking down on gun sellers who don’t perform them when required.” This is already the law, and there’s no evidence of any widespread problem with licensed gun sellers circumventing checks to illegally sell firearms to criminals.

Even if gun dealers were a bunch of disreputable characters, it makes little sense for them to risk their businesses when a healthy market for legal guns exists. But it is true that occasionally, as happened with the Charleston Church shooter, law enforcement doesn’t do its job. So maybe Biden should sign an executive order demanding the FBI try harder.

The attorney general is free to crack down on criminals whenever he pleases. Biden’s executive orders feed the false perception that more background checks would lead to less violence. Biden admits in his speech that goal of his new EO is “moving us as close as we can to universal background checks without new legislation.”

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Biden’s Plan To Unilaterally Expand Background Checks for Gun Buyers Is Legally and Logically Dubious
The president wants to redefine federally licensed gun dealers in service of an ineffective anti-crime strategy.

President Joe Biden on Tuesday issued an executive order that the White House says will move federal regulation of gun sales “as close to universal background checks as possible without additional legislation.” The order relies on a legally contentious redefinition of who qualifies as a gun “dealer” and therefore must obtain a federal license and comply with related rules, including customer background checks.

Federal law defines a gun dealer as someone who is “engaged in the business of selling firearms,” which until last year was defined as “devot[ing] time, attention, and labor to dealing in firearms as a regular course of trade or business with the principal objective of livelihood and profit through the repetitive purchase and resale of firearms.” The 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act excised “with the principal objective of livelihood and profit” and replaced it with “to predominantly earn a profit.”

As the Congressional Research Service explains, that change was “intended to require persons who buy and resell firearms repetitively for profit to be licensed federally as gun dealers, even if they do not do so with ‘the principal objective of livelihood.'” According to the amendment’s supporters, “there was confusion” about whether the definition of “engaged in the business” covered “individuals who bought and resold firearms repetitively for profit, but possibly not as the principal source of their livelihood.” The statutory definition still explicitly excludes “a person who makes occasional sales, exchanges, or purchases of firearms for the enhancement of a personal collection or for a hobby, or who sells all or part of his personal collection of firearms.”

Biden’s order does not say exactly how he intends to expand the number of people who are classified as dealers. Instead it instructs Attorney General Merrick Garland, whose department includes the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), to “clarify the definition of who is engaged in the business of dealing in firearms.” Garland may do that through “rulemaking, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law.”

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BACKDOOR UNIVERSAL BACKGROUND CHECKS INCOMING

Despite GOA Warnings, Republicans Helped the Biden Administration Implement Backdoor UBCs

President Biden just announced that he would be mandating backdoor UBCs or “as close to universal background checks as possible without additional legislation.”[i] His claimed “authority” comes from Section 12002 of the Cornyn-Murphy Compromise.[ii] According to the White House:

Specifically, the President is directing the Attorney General to move the U.S. as close to universal background checks as possible without additional legislation by clarifying, as appropriate, the statutory definition of who is “engaged in the business” of dealing in firearms, as updated by the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act.[iii]

Unfortunately, Gun Owners of America has been expecting this since the passage of the unconstitutional compromise on gun rights known as Cornyn-Murphy, or the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. GOA warned:

Expanding the definition of FFLs (Federal Firearms Licenses) could require anyone who sells more than one gun to do so through an FFL, resulting in a backdoor mechanism for universal background registration checks—just as the Obama Administration attempted.[iv]

Nevertheless, Congress, including 15 Senate GOP, rushed to “compromise” our gun rights away with hastily-written, secretly-negotiated legislation.[v]

Senator Cornyn’s Definition of “Engaged in the Business” Led Directly to Backdoor Universal Background Checks

Prior to Senate Republicans’ compromise, the legal definition of a Federal Firearms License (FFL) Gun Dealer read as follows:[vi]

The term “dealer” means (A) any person engaged in the business of selling firearms at wholesale or retail, (B) any person engaged in the business[vii] of repairing firearms or of making or fitting special barrels, stocks, or trigger mechanisms to firearms, or (C) any person who is a pawnbroker.

Anyone “engaged in the business” must have a license to deal in firearms, but law-abiding citizen’s private transfers were not included in this 53-year-old definition. The definition of a Federal Firearms License (FFL) was a critical boundary between the mandatory background checks performed during commercial gun sales and law-abiding private transfers and sales that take place daily in more than half of the United States. But Cornyn-Murphy added this foolish clarification, which the Biden Administration now proposes to weaponize:

The term `to predominantly earn a profit’ means that the intent underlying the sale or disposition of firearms is predominantly one of obtaining pecuniary gain, as opposed to other intents, such as improving or liquidating a personal firearms collection

Not only that, but this asinine definition even “Provided, That proof of profit shall not be required” for a violation—making President Biden’s backdoor Universal Background Check scheme even easier! Expanding the statutory definition of FFLs (Federal Firearms Licenses) allowed the Biden Administration a strong excuse to vastly expand federal regulations and require anyone who sells more than one gun to do so through an FFL, resulting in a backdoor mechanism for universal background registration checks—just as the Obama Administration attempted.[viii]

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Remember: ‘Feminists’ did this to themselves
(Makes you wonder who women’s real enemies are)

It’s the End of Women’s Colleges as We Know It, and You Know Why.Cartoon Guy Laughing And Pointing Stock Photo - Image: 31869170

Wellesley College, an all-women’s school that has long prided itself as a place for “women who will make a difference in the world,” has truly lost the plot.  Currently, the school’s policy is that students who were “assigned female at birth who identify as men are not eligible for admission,” but students who were “assigned male at birth who identify as women are eligible for admission.”

So, in reality, Wellesley hasn’t truly been an all-women’s college since 2015, when it last updated its policy to accept applications from biological males who identify as women. But even that policy allowing biological men to attend wasn’t woke enough for the student body, which, on Tuesday, voted in support of a non-binding resolution to allow “trans men and nonbinary people who were assigned male at birth” to be admitted as students.

In addition to advocating for the admission of “nonbinary” and transgender students, the referendum also proposed implementing gender-inclusive language in the college’s communication. This would involve replacing so-called gendered terms such as “women” with gender-neutral alternatives like “students” or “alumni.”

According to a report from The Wellesley News, “The purpose behind a ballot question is to demonstrate how much support it garners among the student body. If a ballot question gains enough support from the student body, it could influence decisions the College Board of Trustees makes.”

But even if you believed that Wellesley was still an all-women’s college when it allowed males “identifying” as women, how can it continue to claim to be such when it will allow women who identify as men, or so-called “nonbinary” students, to attend? If the school abides by radical leftist gender ideology, trans men are men, and if they are men, you can’t claim to be an all-women’s school, can you? On top of that, if the school does allow “trans men” to attend, then why not just drop all pretense of being a single-sex school and allow biological men who don’t identify as transgender to apply to the school? If you’re going to allow men who “identify” as women, and women who “identify” as men to apply, why not include men who don’t suffer from gender dysphoria?

Women’s colleges have a long and rich history of providing education and opportunities for women, who were once excluded from higher education institutions. Sadly, there are only a small number left in the United States, and thanks to the transgender cult, I suspect it won’t be long before all women’s colleges are gone.

Federal Court Issues Flawed Decision Striking Down Missouri Gun Sanctuary Law
The ruling has significant shortcomings and may be overruled on appeal. The Biden Administration’s position in this litigation is wrong for much the same reasons as the Trump Administration was wrong to target immigration sanctuaries.

On Tuesday, federal district court Judge Brian Wimes issued an important ruling striking down Missouri’s Second Amendment Protection Act (SAPA). SAPA is a “gun sanctuary” law that restricts state and law-enforcement cooperation with efforts to enforce federal gun control laws.

Gun sanctuary laws enacted by red states are in large part modeled on immigration sanctuary laws enacted by numerous blue states and localities, in order to limit state cooperation with enforcement of federal immigration laws. During the Trump Administration, the federal government lost numerous lawsuits challenging the legality of immigration sanctuaries (I went over those cases in detail in a Texas Law Review article, and a piece for the Washington Post). Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and several red states have decided to imitate the blue states’ success. Courts—including both liberal and conservative judges—were right to rule in favor of immigration sanctuaries, and Judge Wimes should have applied the same principles in the gun context, as well.

Judge Wimes correctly recognizes that “Missouri cannot be compelled to assist in the enforcement of federal regulations within the state.” Longstanding Supreme Court precedent holds that the federal government cannot “commandeer” state officials to help enforce federal law. That precedent played a key role in the Trump Administration’s defeats in various immigration sanctuary cases, most notably in the California “sanctuary state” case, which is closely analogous to the Missouri gun litigation. Judge Wimes could have saved himself a lot of time and effort by simply applying the same logic here.

Instead, the court concludes that SAPA violates the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution (which mandates that constitutionally authorized federal law is supreme over state law) because the Missouri law goes beyond merely refusing to help the feds and actually “regulate[s] federal law enforcement” and  “interfere[s] with its operations.” But, in reality, SAPA does no such thing. Its provisions merely impose constraints on state and local officials. To the extent that may not be true, Judge Wimes should have struck down applications of the law to federal officials, while leaving intact the constraints it imposes on state ones.

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The most ridiculous “I’m a gun owner, but” ever?

The gun prohibition lobby loves to claim that the vast majority of gun owners support their “reasonable” infringements on an inherent individual right, to the point that they even create their own astroturf groups like “Gun Owners for Safety” and the now-defunct American Hunters and Shooters Association.

The whole point of these outfits is to advance that narrative, and one of the most common tactics is the “I’m a gun owner, but” argument. You’ve seen it countless times. “I’m a gun owner, but I support ‘commonsense measures’ like”:

  • making it a criminal offense to possess commonly-owned firearms and magazines
  • prohibiting lawful concealed carry almost everywhere in public
  • making it more expensive to purchase, possess, and even train with a firearm
  • holding firearms manufacturers liable for the actions of violent criminals

I’m reasonably sure that attorney and columnist Mario Nicolais would be in favor of each and every one of those things, because his own “I’m a gun owner, but” narrative goes much further. Writing at the Colorado Sun, Nicolais says he’s a gun owner, but he wants the state to tell him to turn ’em in.

As I have written, the Colorado Republican Party is dead. While I am sure the ghosts of 2013 recall elections still haunt some Democrats, the fear of the next child dead from a gunshot wound should scare them more. They are not going to lose their majorities in the next decade, if ever. They may even solidify them if they take even more direct action.

That means getting assault-style guns off the streets. It means cracking down hard on handguns. It means going after ghost guns and criminals who resort to violence.

I happen to be a gun owner. But I have also run through a Las Vegas casino afraid of an active shooter, texted with my wife as she hid huddled inside a classroom as a gunman walked outside, and paid attention as an officer married to a high school friend has recovered after being shot in the neck by an assailant.

I would hand over my gun if the legislature took action.

Why wait for the legislature to do something? If Mario Nicolais doesn’t want to own a gun, no one is stopping him from selling it or even melting it down to turn into a garden trowel or something like that.

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Gun Registration is for Confiscation

Quote of the Day

If we had gun registration, if we were able to track purchases, they have a technology that every bullet could be stamped like a fingerprint, if we had an ATF that wasn’t defunded, we would be able to enforce gun laws more effectively and we would be able to solve gun crimes more effectively.

Jon Stewart
March 3, 2023
Jon Stewart Brutally Confronts Republican Lawmaker Over Gun Deaths

“If”.

The object of the first two “if” statements is false and will continue to be false for a long time in the future, if not for a century or more. And I can see a plausible future where the ATF is, at least, not just underfunded, from Stewarts view, but stripped of the letter ‘A’ in its name.

And how many crimes have been solved using gun registration in Hawaii or Canada?* The numbers I have heard have been zero and one. So, what color is the sky in Stewarts universe?

Or, a better question, what is the nature of his evil intent? The only reason for gun registration is confiscation.

However the best question is, will he continue to waste oxygen on this and related topics after judges strike down any law that hint at registration. We already have a gun serial number law struck down. How does Stewart think registration is possible with no serial numbers?

* Gun Violence Research, GVPedia, claims it is MYTH: Firearm registries never helped solve a crime. But it is very telling they dance around the question without ever answering it affirmatively:

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MSU professor illustrates problem with gun control advocates

The state of Michigan was likely to adopt gun control either this year or next regardless of any other factor. The shooting at Michigan State University, however, simply provided a handy pretext for anti-gun voices to rally around.

A prime example is one professor who issued his own call for gun control recently.

Marco Díaz-Muñoz, an assistant professor at Michigan State University whose classroom was attacked by a gunman, encouraged Michigan lawmakers Thursday to do the “right thing” and the “humane thing” by enacting new gun control measures.

Díaz-Muñoz, 64, was teaching a class in Berkey Hall about Cuban cultural identity on Feb. 13 when the gunman opened fire, killing two students. For the entirety of the evening, the mass shooting on the university campus in East Lansing left three students dead and wounded five others.

It was the darkest event of Díaz-Muñoz’s life, he told members of the Michigan Senate’s Civil Rights, Judiciary, and Public Safety Committee.

“Before the tragic events at MSU, I was already a supporter of sensible gun control laws,” Díaz-Muñoz said. “However, my experience that night has strongly solidified my belief that gun control laws are an absolute necessity to stop the senseless killings that occur on a daily basis in this country.”

First, I have to ask, how many people think a college professor at a major university teaching “cultural identity” didn’t support gun control before the shooting happened? Show of hands.

Yeah, kind of what I thought.

Of course, he kind of admits that when he says it “solidified” his belief, but anyway, that’s not what I want to talk about anyway.

See, Díaz-Muñoz’s comments are predicated on something that gun control advocates have seemingly been basing all their rhetoric on for years.

It’s like they actually think we agree that gun control works.

There’s nothing in Díaz-Muñoz’s comments that suggests that he’s trying to convince anyone that regulation is the right course of action. Instead, it looks as if, in his mind, the matter is already settled.

Look, “everybody knows” is a terrible way to argue in favor of something. It’s a pretty good Leonard Cohen song, but a terrible way to argue.

Now, Díaz-Muñoz is just one example, but he’s far from the first.

Anti-gunners love to stomp and scream that we need to pass gun control, and that failing to do so will result in “senseless killings” and such, but there’s no real argument there. There’s nothing to convince those of us who disagree to change our minds.

Unless, of course, they actually think we believe gun control works and are refusing to embrace it because of other reasons.

And even if I thought gun control worked, I’d likely still oppose it because our rights cannot be set aside so easily.

Yet I don’t think it works. Quite the contrary, actually, I’ve seen ample evidence to believe it doesn’t. But the arguments never seem to address this. For many of them, it’s a foregone conclusion, a universal truth, that gun control stops mass shootings.

Never you mind about the two in California just days apart. Don’t talk about how it failed to stop either them or the Buffalo killer, as just a couple of examples. No, those are irrelevant and you shouldn’t fret about those cases.

Instead, you should just…what? Take their word? Take the word of seriously flawed and biased studies?

Well, we don’t. We’re unconvinced, and when Díaz-Muñoz simply demand that we capitulate and give up our rights for their peace of mind, well, we’re even less convinced.

But this is what the gun control side’s arguments typically are. They’re people stomping and screaming like spoiled children because we won’t do what they tell us to, and about the only reason I can find for them to do such is because they think their position is so self-evident that they don’t need to defend it.

They’re quite wrong.

Biden is living in a little fantasy world where he believes his wish is law.

Biden takes fire after vowing to ‘ban assault weapons’

President Joe Biden pledged in a speech late Wednesday to ban “assault weapons,” but critics were quick to push back.

Biden made the statement during his remarks at the House Democratic Caucus Issues Conference.

“I know I make some of you uncomfortable, but that little state above me, in Delaware, is one of the — has the highest rate — one of the highest rates of gun ownership,” Biden said. “But guess what? We’re going to ban assault weapons again come hell or high water.”

Biden also called out “high-capacity magazines.” Those comments sparked pushback from critics who pointed to their Second Amendment protections.

“The loss of life is a tragedy whenever it occurs,” U.SS. Rep. Bob Good, R-Va., told The Center Square in response to Biden’s comments. “At the same time, the Second Amendment is not subject to interpretation by bureaucrats in Washington and cannot be taken away by Congress. Rather than confiscating firearms from law-abiding Americans, our priorities should be to protect and equip our police and crack down on violent crime.”

Biden has taken a series of executive actions pushing the boundaries of his Constitutional authority, such as the eviction moratorium and COVID mandates, leading to legal challenges and rulings pushing back on Biden’s agenda.

The U.S. Supreme Court has recently bolstered gun rights. Last summer, the high court struck down a New York gun law that required residents to prove they had “proper cause” to receive a permit to carry a firearm outside the home.

As The Center Square previously reported, the court ruled 6-3 with Chief Justice John Roberts writing the opinion. Roberts wrote that the court “recognized that the Second and Fourteenth Amendments protect the right of an ordinary, law-abiding citizen to possess a handgun in the home for self-defense.”

Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and Chris Murphy, D-Conn., in January introduced the “Assault Weapons Ban,” which would “ban the sale, transfer, manufacture and importation of military-style assault weapons and high-capacity magazines and other high-capacity ammunition feeding devices.”

“It’s time we stand up to the gun lobby and remove these weapons of war from our streets, or at the very least keep them out of the hands of young people,” Feinstein said in a statement.

A companion bill has support from more than 200 Democrats but has not passed either Chamber this Congress.

“President Biden didn’t have the votes in Congress to get this ineffective and patently unconstitutional measure passed even when Democrats controlled the House,” Amy Swearer, Heritage senior legal fellow, told The Center Square. “He certainly doesn’t have the votes now, when the most recent polls show support for this type of law is lower now than it was in previous years. Unless the president plans on stripping Americans’ Second Amendment rights via executive fiat (a real ‘come hell, high water, or constitutional crisis’ scenario), then it’s difficult to see this as anything more than the President once again blowing smoke on behalf of Gun Control, Inc.”

Texas lawmaker tries emotional blackmail to push gun control

The state of Texas has been rocked to its core by the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde. There’s no mystery why a lot of people are upset.

However, most lawmakers in the state aren’t suddenly shifting with the currents like a windsock at the airport. They’re holding firm to what they think is the right way forward.

That’s a problem for anti-gun lawmakers in the state, though, and some will say anything they can to try and force their colleagues to change their minds.

With the Lone Star State suffering mass shootings with what some call “numbing regularity”, Democratic lawmakers are proposing what they see as “common sense” measures to reduce the number of gun deaths.

“This has to stop. We have to stop the bleeding,” said Houston State Senator Carol Alvarado.…

Among the control measures – increasing the age from 18 to 21 for the purchase of semi-automatic rifles, a “Red-Flag” law to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally unstable, a 72-hour “cooling off” period after buying a firearm, and a mandatory background check for all gun sales.

“The fact that we are sitting here and have the ability to do something to help their grieving and to help stop the mass shooting and we don’t do anything, that’s on us,” said Alvarado.

That is absolutely disgusting.

First, let’s understand that this whole line of “reasoning,” if we can even call it that, is predicated in part on the assumption that everyone actually thinks gun control works, particularly these bills, they’re just not going along with it for whatever reason.

I assure Mrs. Alvarado, we do not.

Yet what bothers me most is this whole guilt trip he engaged in to try and pressure his colleagues. The parents are grieving and they can somehow help simply by forfeiting people’s rights?

Holy crap, that is both the worst argument I’ve ever seen and the most vile.

It’s an attempt at emotional blackmail. “How dare you! You could have eased their suffering if you weren’t such a cold, heartless bastard!”

Again, it’s disgusting.

Imagine the outrage if a lawmaker pushing an anti-abortion bill used a similar talking point. “These parents here lost their daughter when she died after having an abortion. The fact that we are sitting here and have the ability to do something to help their grieving and we won’t do anything, that’s on us.”

There would probably be rioting in the streets over the comment, yet for those who want to see gun control and would lose their minds at my hypothetical example, how is it any different? How?

No, Alvarado made her comment and no one will hold her accountable for it. Even if there was no counterpoint to provide, it wouldn’t somehow make his comments accurate or forgivable.

We do not give up our rights to appease someone’s grieving. We may sympathize with their loss, as we should, but that doesn’t give anyone license to run rampant over our right to keep and bear arms.

And emotional blackmail won’t change that.

I’ll take “Because They’re Stupid” for $500, Alex

Why Gun-Control Activists Can’t Have Intelligent Discussions

David Hogg, co-founder of the March for Our Lives gun-control group, recently tweeted what he thinks the Second Amendment means.

“After reading about the history of the second amend and talking with a lot of hist & law professors- I believe the second amendment has been intentionally misinterpreted. It was never meant as an individual right it was created to protect state militias like the national guard,” read Hogg’s tweet.

That legal theory he is parroting has been debunked by historians, by many legal scholars and by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s majority opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) clearly said, “The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home.”

What Hogg tweeted next further demonstrated his ignorance.

“It says well regulated militia for a reason. The ‘shall not be infringed’ part means the federal government is not allowed to forcibly disarm state militias. I’m not alone in this interpretation. Over 100 years of jurisprudence back me up on this,” read Hogg’s follow-up tweet.

“Hogg mentions ‘jurisprudence,’ but it seems he does not really understand the term. When contemplating the philosophy of law in the United States as it relates to the Second Amendment, the longest held view of what it protects is an individual right; a view that goes back more than 230 years. There are countless quotes from our Founders—many of whom were deeply involved in the process of writing, debating, and ratifying the Second Amendment—referring to the right of individuals to possess firearms. Even those quotes that mention a ‘militia’ do so in the context of it being comprised of individual citizens who are expected to supply their own arms,” reported the NRA Institute for Legislative Action (ILA).

NRA-ILA also cited several other cases in their analysis, before summing up Hogg by saying, “Ultimately, David Hogg is simply another anti-gun activist, and like most others, he is prone to making false claims about a subject for which he has little understanding.”

This militia argument has been so thoroughly debunked that it is disappointing, brain-numbing and counterproductive to have to again refute it, but such is the anti-intellectualism of today’s gun-control movement; unfortunately, this includes, in this case, David Hogg, a student who Time says is now “studying the history of conservative political movements” at Harvard. Given these tweets, he isn’t getting much of an education.

MARINES DITCH FAMOUS SCOUT SNIPER PROGRAM

The Marine Corps is dismantling its iconic Scout Sniper platoons – a facet of each infantry battalion for generations – and is doing away with the coveted 0317 Military Occupational Specialty.

The product of a grueling training pipeline that yields field-ready precision marksmen qualified on the M40, M110, and M107 series rifles, the Marine Scout Sniper program is facing permanent disbandment as a result of a shifting focus in the country’s amphibious warfare service.

A leaked Feb. 21 unclassified message from Lt. Gen. D. J. Furness, the deputy commandant for plans, policies, and operations, detailed that the current 18-member Scout Sniper Platoons assigned to the Corps’ infantry battalions will quickly transition to 26-member Scout platoons – in other words, cutting the snipers in favor of a unit that would provide more “continuous all-weather information gathering.”

Spots in the Scout Sniper Basic Course will be zeroed out in the coming fiscal year while a nascent sniper capability will be continued in the Corps’ Reconnaissance and Marine Special Operations units under a new Military Occupational Specialty – 0322 MOS (Reconnaissance Sniper) – via a revamped, shorter training program.

The problem with that is, as these groups typically operate detached from standard infantry units, the highly specialized skill will in effect vanish at the battalion level, which will be left to get by with the current designated marksmen already at the company level. Under current doctrine, DMs typically only have a three-week course under their belt and train to engage targets out to 500 meters, rather than the much longer ranges that Scout Snipers train to achieve.

The USMC Scout Sniper Association is urging the Commandant of the Marine Corps to reconsider what the group terms an “ill-advised” policy decision that will gut the program that has been tweaked and perfected over the past 80 years.

“This announcement by the Deputy Commandant, Plans, Policy, and Operations on Tuesday is the result of misguided assumptions and decades of neglect of the community of men who are Scout Snipers,” said the Association.

“It’s unlikely that any officer who commanded and employed Scout Snipers in combat agrees that removing a sniper capability from the infantry battalion makes sense. Replacing an 18-man Scout Sniper Platoon with a 26-man Scout Platoon will not solve the ‘all weather information gathering’ problem. Retaining the skill set and the combat capability of Scout Snipers by offering a viable career path to Scout Snipers and providing them with more engaged leadership might.”

The shift away from having dedicated sniper platoons in each infantry battalion comes as the number of battalions themselves is dwindling.

The Corps’ three active-duty divisions would field a total of 27 infantry battalions between them if they were at full strength, but that hasn’t been the case for a long time. Long reduced to just 24 battalions all told, in 2020 the current commandant unveiled a plan to case the colors of three additional infantry battalions and the 8th Marine Regiment to make room to form a new Marine Littoral Regiment, the latter optimized to leapfrog rapidly across islands and coastal spaces with a smaller footprint when compared to the current force.

The result is a Corps with just 21 active-duty infantry battalions, shortly, in addition to cuts in tiltrotor, attack, and heavy-lift aviation squadrons and disbanding of all of the branch’s tank battalions.

That Warren Burger Quote Gun Grabbers Love Is Ahistorical — Not To Mention Sort Of Fake

Idon’t know how many times people have dropped this alleged quote from the late “conservative” Justice Warren Burger into my social media feeds:

The gun lobby’s interpretation of the Second Amendment is one of the greatest pieces of fraud — I repeat the word ‘fraud’ — on the American People by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime. The real purpose of the Second Amendment was to ensure that state armies — the militia — would be maintained for the defense of the state. The very language of the Second Amendment refutes any argument that it was intended to guarantee every citizen an unfettered right to any kind of weapon he or she desires.

If you find yourself in a debate over the Second Amendment, sooner or later someone is going to let you know that Burger believed an individual right to gun ownership was one of the “greatest pieces of fraud” perpetrated on the American people. Burger’s line is ubiquitous—it can be found in The New Yorker, Slate, Politico, NPR, every major newspaper, and in every anti-gun columnist’s pieces.

The first problem with the popular online iteration of the quote is that it’s actually cobbled together from three separate sources to give it more impact. Don’t get me wrong: Burger is mistaken in all instances, but he is mistaken in different contexts.

The second problem is that the quote often reads as if Burger—the “conservative” who voted with the majority in Roe v. Wade—offered this argument as a member of the Supreme Court. No high-court decision has ever defined the Second Amendment as anything but an individual right. And Burger never uttered a word about the Second Amendment while sitting on the court. For that matter, he never rendered a gun decision on any court, nor ever wrote a legal paper on the issue. And it shows.

Then again, the “collective right” theory was only a recent invention of revisionist historians and anti-gun activists when Burger adopted it. It’s also a tough one to sell to anyone who cares about history. Nearly every intellectual, political, and military leader of the founding generation, from John Adams to Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Franklin to George Mason to Samuel Adams to George Washington to Patrick Henry to James Madison and so on, is on the record defending the individual’s right to bear arms. There is not a single record of anyone in that era challenging the notion.

Anyway, the part of the quote about the gun lobby is taken from a 1991 PBS interview in which Burger erroneously argues that the 18th-century conception of “well regulated” was the same as the contemporary one. The notion that the state, much less the federal government, would be empowered to “regulate” what kind of weapons you owned would have been alien to a person in 1789. “Well regulated” simply means a well-pulled-together militia, rather than a rabble.

Burger maintains that the real purpose of the Second Amendment was to ensure that state armies would defend state populations. This is an ungrammatical and ahistorical reading of the amendment. Sure, there was a debate over standing armies and control of the militias. But, as the late Justice Antonin Scalia pointed out in Heller, “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed” is the operative clause in the Second Amendment. The “well regulated Militia” part is the prefatory clause.

It makes zero sense to read the prefatory clause as a nullification or even limitation of the operative clause. It is tantamount to arguing that because the First Amendment says Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, it’s not an individual right to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

The Second Amendment explicitly mentions “the right of the people” — people who generally used their own weapons as militiamen — just as it does elsewhere in the Bill of Rights when protecting individual rights. Many colonies enshrined the individual right to bear arms in their constitutions before the Bill of Rights was even written, most of them in much more explicit terms. No state defined it as a collective right. Some Federalists argued that special protections in the Bill of Rights were unnecessary because there were so many guns in private hands that it was unimaginable any tyrannical army could ever be more powerful than the public.

The other two parts of the quote are lifted from different passages in a column Burger wrote for the Associated Press. Here the former justice expands on his idea that guns should be regulated like cars.

“[A]lthough there is not a word or hint in the Constitution about automobiles or motorcycles,” Burger says, “no one would seriously argue that a state cannot regulate the use of motor vehicles by imposing licensing restrictions and speed limits based on factors of driver’s age, health condition, and driving record, and by recording every purchase and change of ownership.”

It is because automobiles and motorcycles — or transportation as an ideal — are not explicitly protected by the Constitution that you can heavily regulate those things. The better analogy would be due process or speech rights. (Although Burger wasn’t a great fan of the First Amendment, either.)

Besides all that, Burger should have known that Americans, even in 1991, did not have “unfettered” access to “machine guns.” In 1986, the Firearm Owners’ Protection Act law made ownership of fully automatic weapons pretty rare.

Burger also should have known that the Gun Control Act of 1968 established the first federal age limits for buying guns. Today there are tens of thousands of laws regulating gun ownership in the United States. That is not “unfettered” by any definition.

In fact, it doesn’t seem like Burger knew very much about the topic at all.

Seems? Nay it is. I know not ‘seems’.

Op-ed writer seems to misunderstand data on guns

One reason I cannot be accused of living in a pro-gun echo chamber is that I have to ready a lot of anti-gun op-eds in the course of my work here. I know all the arguments they’re going to make and where they’re coming from because I read their words on a daily basis.

But when it comes to guns, many just don’t understand the topic as well as they’d like to think.

They regurgitate talking points and used biased data from gun control groups and pretend that they’re well-versed on the topic.

However, a writer with the Philadelphia Tribune took the discussion of gun control in a bizarre direction.

While new gun control laws such as strengthening background checks for gun buyers and raising the age to purchase a firearm to 21 are needed, it would be misleading to suggest new gun laws alone will reduce gun violence.

That’s because most gun crimes are committed by those who illegally possess guns, according to a study of inmates in federal and state prisons, conducted by Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research.

Since most violent crimes are not committed by legal gun owners and there is little chance of significant new gun laws passing anytime soon in the state Legislature or Congress, local officials must focus on cracking down on illegal gun possession.

More effective policing, vigorous prosecution and stricter sentencing of violent criminals using illegally obtained weapons will be needed to reduce crime.

The last three paragraphs look pretty sensible. The author is right, for example, that most criminals possess their firearms illegally. He’s right that there’s little chance new gun laws will pass anytime soon. While I’m not sure that increased enforcement of current gun laws will produce the results he desires, I can at least accept that’s a potentially viable path.

By his own words, though, lawful gun owners aren’t the problem, so why should we pass more gun control laws in the first place?

Even if we dismiss the fact that this is a constitutionally protected right we’re talking about here, just what reason would we have to restrict who can buy guns by age even further than we already do or increase background checks?

Perhaps the author is concerned about the 647 “mass shootings” reported by Gun Violence Archive. If so, he should be aware that most of those were criminals shooting people in the first place, not 19-year-olds buying AR-15s and shooting up schools. Gun Violence Archive doesn’t differentiate between gang warfare and active shooters killing everyone in a crowded movie theater, for example, so the vast majority of those shootings aren’t what people think of when they hear the term “mass shooting.”

Either way, the author is somehow failing to comprehend the information clearly in front of him.

Honestly, I’m amazed he finished the piece, what with the cognitive dissonance that had to be tearing at him. Or, maybe he just didn’t understand it enough to feel such a thing.

Either way, he discredits his own claim that more gun control laws should be passed and it sure looks like he knows it.