Category: Editorial O’ The Day

The reason behind the ‘Right to Bear Arms’

So, you think so called assault weapons and high capacity magazines should be outlawed?

Any person who thinks so, should first re-read and remember the Supreme Court’s opinion in District of Columbia et al., v. Dick Anthony Heller, 128 S. Ct. 2783. Then look at the news about the Ukraine/Russia war. Putin is a tyrant just like King George was when the Second Amendment was written into the Constitution, only worse. The 2008 Supreme Court of the United States’ opinion holds that “The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm/or traditional lawful purposes, such as self-defense…” 

The Second Amendment is not just about protecting ones self, home, or family against a bad guy who breaks in or threatens harm. The important points of the opinion centers around the Court’s language stating the reason for the holding of the case was the historical right citizens have to resist tyranny. The Court reviewed the history of old England where Stuart Kings disarmed their opponents of their right to keep arms, to suppress them. Following that example, King George III took the same measures in the colonies against opponents of the King’s rule.

“…[H}istory showed that the way tyrants had eliminated a militia consisting of all the able-bodied men was not by banning the militia but simply by taking away the peoples arms, enabling a select militia or standing army to suppress political opponents. This is what had occurred in England that prompted codification of the right to have arms in the English Bill of Rights. 

“{It} was understood across the political spectrum that the right helped secure the ideal of a citizen militia, which might be necessary lo oppose an oppressive military force if the constitutional order broke down.” 

One does not need to be a history buff to know that in colonial days, the average British soldier carried a muzzle loading flintlock gun. A colonist could be as well armed if needed, in order to fulfill the purpose of the Second Amendment as it was understood at the time. The Heller case affirms the same right in this United States of America under the Second Amendment.

If this purpose of the Second Amendment is understood in the “gun control” debate going on now, it is reasonable to conclude that the average American citizen may need to be about as well armed as the average military man if a tyrant is intent on oppression or conquering against us citizens or our country. What docs the average military man carry today? An assault weapon with a large magazine. Should not the average American citizen have the same right to carry an assault weapon with a large magazine in order to fairly confront an oppressive tyrant under the citizen’s constitutional right guaranteed by the Second Amendment?

I am sure many will scream “that will never happen!” “Americans don’t need assault weapons with large magazines for such a purpose!” So did the Ukrainian government so think, before Putin attacked! I understand that for many many generations in Ukraine personal firearms were outlawed. People did not even know how to hold or use firearms as a result. When attack by Putin was close the Ukrainian government apparently made wooden replica guns to teach people how to handle guns before handing out military weapons so they could help defend themselves and country. Ukraine citizens lined up for blocks to get a weapon to defend themselves, their families, property and country. And citizens did stand up to and are standing up to Putin. They did so just like the framers of the Second Amendment to our Constitution intended for us to be able to do if necessary.

You think Putin won’t attack the U.S.? Take away the Second Amendment or severely hamper it and you will soon find out. Yes, the mass shootings in our country are horrible beyond belief, especially against little children, and I agree everything that can be done to stop shootings should be done short of eliminating or severally hampering the Second Amendment more than it already is. But if you think nothing can be worse, go over and live in Ukraine for a while and I think you will see that it can be. Do you want to take a chance? I don’t.

Analysis: Guns Are Normal and Normal People Use Guns

As I hope to write regularly for The Reload, I thought my first contribution ought to say something about how I generally approach American gun culture, which bears on the fierce debates over guns taking place across the country.

I am a sociologist who has been studying American gun culture for the past decade. My approach to the topic differs considerably from most of my gun studies colleagues. Rather than focusing on crime, injury, and death with firearms, my work is based on the proposition that guns are normal and normal people use guns. This is not an article of faith or belief statement for me; rather, it is based on my empirical observations of guns and gun owners.

When I say guns are normal and normal people use guns, I mean it in two senses. First, guns and gun ownership are common, widespread, and typical. Second, guns and gun ownership are not inherently associated with deviance or abnormalities.

The normality of guns runs deep in human history. The use of projectile weapons is behaviorally normal for Homo sapiens as a species. Today’s widely owned civilian firearms are part of an unbroken thread of what Randy Miyan calls “the human-weapon relationship,” stretching back to rocks in the uniquely evolved hands of our prehistoric ancestors. As paleoanthropologist John Shea concludes, “Projectile weaponry is uniquely human and culturally universal. We are the only species that uses projectile weaponry, and no human society has ever abandoned its use.”

Although most societies today – consensually or not – give over to the state a monopoly on legitimate violence and hence the ability to restrict civilian ownership of projectile weaponry, the United States is an outlier in having a significant portion of the population insist upon their right to own firearms independent of the state, a right written into the U.S. Constitution and many state constitutions. In early American history, guns were widely owned by those who could legally do so. One reliable estimate found guns in 50 to 73 percent of male estates and even 6 to 38 percent of female estates. These rates compare favorably to other common items listed in male estates like swords or edged weapons (14% of inventories), Bibles (25%), or cash (30%).

Even as the nation has become more settled, more industrial, and more urbanized, levels of firearms ownership remain exceptionally high. Accounting for under-reporting of gun ownership in surveys, a reasonable estimate is that 40% of all American adults personally own a gun, over 100 million people. According to the Small Arms Survey, there are some 400,000,000 privately owned firearms in the United States. Actually, if the average gun owner owns 4 to 5 guns, then the actual number of civilian firearms could be closer to half a billion.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, shooting guns is also very normal in the United States. In 2017, the nonpartisan Pew Research Center asked, “Regardless of whether or not you own a gun, have you ever fired a gun?” Nearly three-quarters of respondents (72%) said YES. In population terms, nearly 180 million adults in America have fired a gun. Pew also asked, “Just your best guess, at what age did you FIRST fire a gun, whether you owned it or not.” 63% of respondents answered that they were under 18 years of age when they first shot a gun.

None of this denies that there are what Claude Werner calls serious mistakes and negative outcomes with guns. These range from unintentional discharges to mass public shootings. But huge denominators in terms of gun owners and guns owned means the absolute risk of accidental injury or death, homicide, or suicide is quite small.

I have previously illustrated this using conservative estimates of guns and gun ownership and broad estimates of negative outcomes (including accidental and intentional deaths and injuries as well as non-fatal criminal injuries and victimizations with firearms). I found that just 0.15% of guns and 0.79% of gun owners are involved in fatal or non-fatal injuries or victimizations involving firearms annually.

Looked at the other way around, 99.85% of guns and 99.21% of gun owners are NOT involved in fatal or non-fatal injuries or victimization involving firearms annually.

Of course, the normality of guns and gun owners is not just an academic question. It is reflected in the way many gun control activists and politicians approach guns. At a time when people use terms like “insane” and “addiction” — or worse — to characterize gun culture in America, it’s important to remember that guns are both commonly owned and generally non-problematic here.

Unfortunately, normality is unremarkable. It is not headline news. It is not of concern to social scientists. And yet it is my dominant experience of guns and gun owners.

Feminist Naomi Wolf takes the red pill and takes the first tentative steps on the path to see reality

BLUF
Without the brilliantly-conceived and clearly-worded Second Amendment, without the deterrent to state and transnational violence of responsible, lawful, careful and defensive firearms ownership in the United States of America, it is clear that nothing at all will save our citizens from the current fates of the people of China, Australia and Canada; including the children; who are facing — unarmed, defenseless as their parents sadly are — even worse fates, perhaps, still ahead.

Rethinking the Second Amendment

I wrote this essay some weeks ago, but I kept waiting to publish it til tragic mass shootings were no longer in the news. But that day looks as if it will never come, so I am publishing it anyway, with grief and mourning for those lost to gun violence, as we must nonetheless have this difficult conversation.

The last thing keeping us free in America, as the lights go off all over Europe- and Australia, and Canada – is, yes, we must face this fact, the Second Amendment.

I can’t believe I am writing those words. But here we are and I stand by them.

I am a child of the peace movement. A daughter of the Left, of a dashingly-bearded proto-Beatnik poet, my late dad, and of a Summer of Love activist/cultural anthropologist, my lovely mom. We are a lineage of anti-war, longhaired folks who believe in talking things out.

By the time I was growing up in California in the 1960s and 1970s, weapons were supposed to have become passe. When I played at friends’ houses in our neighborhood in San Francisco, there were posters on the walls: “War is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things.” Protesters had iconically placed daisies in the rifle barrels of unhip-looking National Guardsmen.

We were obviously supposed to side with the daisies.

Weapons were archaic, benighted — tacky. A general peace was surely to prevail, in the dawning Age of Aquarius.

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No, Raising the Age of Gun Ownership Won’t Stop School Shootings

America is still reeling after the unspeakably tragic mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas that left 19 children dead. In the aftermath, we’re all understandably looking for answers. Yet many top Democrats are rallying around one gun control proposal that’s actually a false solution.

Their idea is simple: Raise the age to buy a gun to 21. Most school shooters are teenagers, the argument goes, and you can’t drink alcohol until age 21, so why can you buy an AR-15?

This idea is gaining training on the Left, with many Democratic politicians, progressive commentators, and even the White House throwing its weight behind the proposal.

But there are a few big reasons why this proposal is unrealistic, impractical, and ultimately unlikely to accomplish anything.

First, any law uniformly raising the age to buy a gun to 21 would face immediate constitutional challenges, and likely be stuck down as a violation of the Second Amendment. You don’t have to take my word for it: A federal appeals court just recently struck down a California law raising the age to purchase semiautomatic weapons to 21 as unconstitutional for exactly this reason, calling it a “severe burden on the core Second Amendment right of self-defense in the home.”

Think about it like this: Whether you like it or not, the Supreme Court has ruled that Americans have a constitutional right to bear arms, which differentiates this right from something like drinking alcohol. Unfortunately, the Constitution does not guarantee you the right to drink a Brewski with the boys.

And the age of legal adulthood is still 18. (Whether it should be is another question). It would obviously be unlawful and absurd to pass legislation saying that the constitutional right to free speech, for example, only kicks in at age 21. (although it would save us some headaches). As long as we consider 18-year-olds legal adults, we cannot legally or morally justify stripping them of their constitutional right to self-defense.

Any bill attempting to do so is likely doomed, especially with the current conservative Supreme Court. And any legislative solution to the rise in school shootings that won’t hold up in court isn’t a “solution” at all.

Yet even if these proposals did somehow survive constitutional scrutiny, I still don’t think raising the age to buy a gun would meaningfully reduce school shootings. Any 18, 19, or 20-year-old so disturbed that they decide to kill elementary school children is almost certainly going to be determined enough to circumvent an age limit, which, frankly, wouldn’t be that hard to do. Do high schoolers really struggle to get their hands on alcohol, after all?

It wouldn’t be particularly difficult for a determined killer to simply have someone purchase a firearm for them (like every teenager in America has done for booze). Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened in the Columbine shootings. The killers were both under 18, yet simply had someone older buy the guns they used. In many other school shootings, the killers stole the guns from an older family member.

In short, raising the age to buy a gun to 21 would not help us meaningfully reduce the frequency of these atrocities, though it would strip millions of law-abiding young adults of their right to self-defense. This isn’t just a hypothetical disadvantage; according to the Institute for Medicine, guns are used in self-defense approximately 500,000 to 3 million times per year in the U.S.

Like everything, gun control has trade-offs. By leaving law-abiding people defenseless, it can also create its own victims.

What’s more, the misguided focus on age-based gun control pulls the national attention away from more promising solutions, like reforming the way the mass media covers mass shootings. Mass shooters crave the infamy that’s granted to them by our if-it-bleeds-it-leads coverage of these atrocities, and the status quo encourages copycats—so much so that experts estimate that if we stopped plastering the names and faces of these villains and instead focused coverage on the victims, we could reduce mass shootings by up to 33 percent.

It bears repeating: We could potentially reduce mass shootings by up to one-third with simple media reforms. Unlike far-fetched and legally dubious gun control proposals, this kind of reform wouldn’t face such monumental political and constitutional hurdles.

Those who insist on trying to raise the age to buy a gun to 21 are almost certainly coming from a good place. But in reality, their efforts are worse than useless.

Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is Policy Correspondent at the Foundation for Economic Education and co-founder of BASEDPolitics.

Liberals Want the Government to Save Us from Guns, Conservatives Want Guns to Save Us from the Government

Guns aren’t going away. Yes, school shootings are horrific, we all agree. Liberals who whine that “conservatives love guns more than children” are stupid, entitled cucks who have never been punched in the face for their shooting off their mouths. They jump and scream on cue when tragedy strikes but they are nothing more than useful idiots for the REAL reason the far left wants to take away our guns.

FACT-O-RAMA! Liberals are fighting for the right to kill a kicking, heart-beating baby minutes before it’s born but are happy to stand on a pile of dead kids to take away guns from law-abiding Americans.

We Need More Gun Laws!

Your liberal sister-in-law is all over Facebook with this nonsense, but guess what?  New York is as red as Lavrenti Beria’s lucky underpants, and its stringent laws couldn’t stop the left-leaning Buffalo shooter from blazing up a grocery store full of black people.

Stalin would smile at Chicago’s stifling gun laws, but that doesn’t keep the Windy City denizens from perforating each other every time the thermometer hits 88 degrees.

FACT-O-RAMA! Memorial Day Weekend kicks off Chicago’s summer “Festival of Lead.” Check out heyjackass.com for real-time updates of the carnage. As of this writing, Chicago has seen 1,165 of its citizens ventilated this year so far. Let’s check back Tuesday morning to see how many Chicagoans gained 10 grams of weight over the weekend.

Liberals look to politicians to “save” them from the very Constitutional amendment written to protect them. This is a level of stupidity not seen since the introduction of Ayds weight loss candy, which hit the U.S. at roughly the same time as the AIDS virus got to America–and a young Dr. Fauci screwed that up too.

 

We Need More Gun Training!

I’m all for gun training for sane, law-abiding gun owners, but training is a bad idea for murderous nutters who want to annihilate innocent people. When someone buys a gun to slaughter kids, the last thing you want is to teach him how to do it better.

Conservatives know liberals are too dense programmed to realize gun confiscation and an unarmed population will lead us into two deadly traps:

1) We will be easy pickings for criminals who will NOT give up their weapons. Liberals aren’t even allowed to mention the wildly out of control crime problem ripping up our large cities lest they be seen as “racist.” Better to sacrifice their kids to the crime wave than admit there IS a crime wave.

2) We will be easy pickings for the commies currently running the Democrat party. THAT is the reason the left wants our guns. If you think Joe Biden cares about dead kids please show me a picture of him in Waukesha, WI, after black supremacist Darrell Brooks mowed down almost 70 white people, many of them children.

REMINDER-O-RAMA! Politicians swear to uphold the Constitution. That includes the 2nd Amendment. Those attempting to vaporize the 2nd Amendment are therefore enemies of the state and need to be imprisoned.

Sure, Biden will likely go to Uvalde, TX. It’s a shame it took 19 dead kids to actually get the cabbage-in-chief to the border. But don’t believe the old man’s rhetoric about guns. He doesn’t care about dead kids; he wants you vulnerable.

Biden is a dinosaur in a tar pit. He pretends he hasn’t spewed a lifetime of racism from the same lips he used when sucking up to career segregationists like West Virginia’s favorite klan klown, Sen. Byrd. Gropey Joe knows the Democrat Party has been taken over by pinkos and toes the line to keep his head off the chopping block, or his wife “Dr.” Jill knows the score and does what it takes to keep AOC and her commie squad from sending Joe to the cornfield.

Unlike the pink-haired, gender-free toilet people on the left, conservatives fight to keep children alive from the moment of conception and beyond. The bolshie harpies fight to dismantle a fetus minutes before its birthday, then have the audacity to pretend they care about kids when a crazy train shoots up a school. I’d invite them to bite me but I don’t want a scorching case of monkeypox.

My favorite mouth feces that flies out of lefty lips is this, “Conservatives only care about a baby before it’s born. They don’t care what happens after that!” I invite these dolts to search the words “Catholic adoption agencies.” Now search “Antifa adoption.” Checkmate, prags.

I know it can be hard for conservatives who value life and guns to wade through a spate of mass shootings. The lefty politicians and news outlets do that on purpose. For me, the answer is simple: more guns. I find it maniacal that progressives can watch unarmed people get massacred and think, “We need fewer firearms.” What they somehow seem to miss is that EVERY mass shooter is stopped by good guys with guns.

FACT-O-RAMA! Making schools “gun-free zones” is arguably the dumbest thing to come out of Washington D.C. since Nancy Pelosi. You know where mass shootings NEVER take place? Gun ranges, because madmen know that they are FULL OF GUNS.

A man in Las Vegas tried to steal a gun from a gun store. Guess what happened? He got shot by a lot of guns.

The mainstream news is happy to bring you tragic stories of schizos slaughtering innocent people but no one cares to mention how many people stop crimes with firearms.

Memorial Day Weekend is here. Let’s remember those who have died fighting defending the same Constitution the Democrat party is looking to chop up into convenient (for them) bite-sized morsels, leaving out the most important part, the 2nd Amendment, which was intended to stop them from doing just that.

BLUF:
It’s time for the U.S. to quit the Programme of Action. And while we’re at it, we should quit the U.N. ammo group and make it clear that, no matter what the U.N. does about bullets, we won’t try to apply its foolish ideas here.

UN Gun Control Program Runs Amok Again

More than two decades ago, the United Nations created a program to curb the trafficking of small arms. It’s done nothing but fire blanks. So now, the U.N. wants to control bullets.

In 2001, the United Nations started the Programme of Action to Prevent, Combat, and Eradicate the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All Its Aspects. Its next meeting will be held in New York from June 27 to July 1.

The Programme isn’t a treaty. It’s a political gathering that’s meant to encourage voluntary cooperation. It meets every other year to produce an outcome document that’s politically (but not legally) binding.

It’s supposed to work by unanimous consent.

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The Programme has achieved very little, if anything. That’s not just my view. The U.N. secretary-general said so in 2008. New Zealand said so in 2012. Its supporters said it was “firing blanks” in 2014. In 2018, the Red Cross said that governments in the Programme talk a lot, but do nothing.

In practice, that suits most of the U.N. fine: All the nations get credit for participating in the Programme while actually doing nothing, while the Programme focuses on peripheral issues, such as 3D-printed guns.

This year, the rumor is that the Programme’s president wants it to focus on banning toy guns. (No more water pistols for your kids, says the U.N.)

If the nations in the Programme genuinely wanted to help control the illicit trade in small arms, it could in theory be modestly useful.

For example, it could seek to eliminate the “Chinese exemption,” under which Beijing is exempt from the requirement to put serial numbers on its firearms, which makes Chinese guns difficult to trace.

But instead, the Programme focuses on irrelevant distractions—and on breaking its own promises.

In 2018, the Programme broke its rule of unanimity to approve an outcome document that added ammo over U.S. protests. The Programme wasn’t supposed to include ammunition. And adding it serves no useful purpose.

The idea of putting numbers on, and trying to trace, individual rounds of ammunition is nonsensical. The resulting database would have trillions of entries.

Most of the Programme’s member nations can’t and don’t even meet their existing commitments. But that didn’t stop the United Nations from adding ammo.

The U.S. does most of the work of running traces on firearms, providing expertise, and giving aid to upgrade foreign recordkeeping through the Programme.

But if the U.S. is going to do most of the work and simultaneously going to have the Programme’s rules broken against it, there’s no reason for us to continue to participate in it.

There are now more good reasons than ever to quit. When the Programme voted to include ammo in 2018, it lined itself up with a U.N. working group. That group’s report came out late last year, and it’s a bureaucrat’s fantasy.

It calls for the negotiation of “a set of political commitments” to “concentrate on through-life ammunition management.” In other words, an entirely new Programme of Action, focused just on ammo.

“Through-life” ammo management may sound innocuous, but isn’t. Here’s what it means, in the U.N.’s own words:

States would reduce security risks by encouraging ammunition producers, where feasible, practicable and consistent with national legislation, to maintain effective accounting and record-keeping systems that permit the retrieval (by serial, batch, or lot number) of detailed sales and transfer records. Ideally, such records should be digital, easily retrievable, and held for as long as feasible.

Translation: The U.N. wants manufacturers of ammo to number their bullets. Then the U.N. wants to track where and to whom every bullet in the world is sold or sent. The U.N. also wants to track who sells to whom. And it wants all those records digitized, easily accessed, and kept forever.

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Editorial O’ The Day

YES, IT’S STILL THE ECONOMY, STUPID:
President Galantamine tried his best to remember James Carville‘s infamous (and successful) 1992 Clinton talking point. But the poor man kept getting confused about whether inflation was a good thing (“It’s our strength” he babbled) before his handlers and a supplicant press corp glossed it over.

I’ve noted elsewhere that for all the sippy cups banging on the highchairs of America’s elite, Roe is simply not the high-salience issue that will re-elect Biden. Not when business news sites (even those run by Biden-friendly corporations) point out that as of right now:

“As of March, close to two-thirds, or 64%, of the U.S. population was living paycheck to paycheck, just shy of the high of 65% in 2020, according to a LendingClub report. “The number of people living paycheck to paycheck today is reminiscent of the early days of the pandemic and it has become the dominant lifestyle across income brackets,” said Anuj Nayar, LendingClub’s financial health officer.”

Yet, Democrats are still struggling to understand the importance of bread-on-the-table issues and keep whistling past that graveyard. One outfit, interviewing Democratic officials nervous about “electability,” said that:

“On Monday night, several left-leaning congressional candidates joined an emergency organizing call with activists reeling from a draft Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade.”

When real America can’t pay its grocery bills, put gas in the car, or buy eyeglasses for their kids, all the screeching — and I do mean screeching — by Elizabeth Warren will not overcome Carville’s time-tested truth.

—-Charles Glasser

What the left gets wrong about ‘ghost guns’

The spike in crime has nothing to do with firearms enthusiasts building guns in their garages and home workshops.

Citing the need to curtail rising crime rates, President Joe Biden recently announced a final rule by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). The chief objects of the president’s wrath are so-called “ghost guns” — a made-up, pejorative term that anti-gun leftists use to refer to homemade firearms.

These guns have been legal and unregulated since the time of the Pilgrims. But long before the president’s announcement, Pennsylvania Democrats were already pushing six “ghost gun” bills that would make privately made firearms illegal.

In the announcement of these regulations, Vice President Kamala Harris said that “ghost guns pose an especially grave threat to the safety of our communities.” That claim is demonstrably false.

According to the Department of Justice, privately made firearms were found at 692 homicide or attempted homicide crime scenes over a six-year period. That means that, at worst, out of more than 16,000 yearly murders, homemade guns are used in around 115 homicides per year. That’s far fewer murders than many common items that are easily found around one’s house — such as knives (1,476), hammers or blunt objects (397), or fists and feet (600).

So why isn’t the Biden administration trying to regulate those objects?

The answer is that this president is not as interested in protecting public safety as much as he wants to implement a radical gun control regime. The new ATF rule could incarcerate gun owners for committing nonviolent, highly technical violations of complex and unconstitutional laws while doing nothing about the rising number of crimes committed by real criminals.

For two years, the anti-gun left has looked the other way while rioters destroyed cities, attacked civilians, and assaulted law enforcement officers. The president’s allies in leftist cities — including Philadelphia — began releasing criminals early from jail and defunding the police where they were needed the most.

Predictably, the murder rate, which had been on a downward trend for over 20 years, spiked. In fact, 12 Democratic-controlled cities from Philadelphia to Portland, Ore., broke homicide records last year. These are 12 cities where leaders have coddled criminals, yet inexplicably, did everything possible to discourage law-abiding individuals who merely wish to exercise their Second Amendment-protected rights. Philadelphia was no exception.

The spike in crime across our country is the result of the failed leadership and the social policies of left-wing radicals. It has nothing to do with firearms enthusiasts building guns in their garages and home workshops.

The anti-gun left may try to demonize these firearms by referring to them as “ghost guns.” But the fact remains that hundreds of thousands of honest gun owners today are making their own legal guns — and virtually none of these guns will be used in any crime.

The White House claims that serializing firearms is necessary to stop criminals, but in reality, there is no evidence that registering firearms — or stamping them with serial numbers — prevents crime. Virtually every gun used in a crime already has a serial number.

So why has Joe Biden declared war on legal gun owners? In a word: control.

Serialization is not designed to stop criminals. It’s intended to register the law-abiding, which history shows is the first step toward confiscation. And if you don’t think confiscation could ever occur in this country, just recall Beto O’Rourke yelling: “Hell, yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47!”

The double standards by the anti-gun left are breathtaking. Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro was at the Rose Garden ceremony, applauding the president’s restrictions on homemade firearms. Never mind that Shapiro’s office has been accused of illegally transferring a homemade gun to a television journalist preparing a story on the issue without conducting a background check; that would violate both state and federal law. Shapiro has denied any wrongdoing and claimed that the allegation was “ludicrous on its face.” The transfer was made to facilitate an NBC News report on a local supplier of P80 kits.

With the anti-gun left, we constantly see “rules for thee but not for me.” The Biden administration openly admitted that he ordered this “ghost gun” regulation because he “was having trouble getting [gun control] passed in the Congress.” That is lawless and anti-constitutional behavior. The president is not a king who can issue decrees on a whim.

In our system of government, Congress makes the laws. Gun Owners of America will be working with pro-gun representatives and senators to overrule this unconstitutional decree.

U.S. president Gerald Ford told Congress in 1974: “A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.” That goes for rights too.

Canada Shows Why It’s Called ‘American Exceptionalism’

It’s shocking to me that some people are surprised by how the situation with the Freedom Convoy went down. It was never going to end well, the odds of them winning were as long as a summer day for a very simple reason: Canada is not the United States.

That may seem obvious, and in the easiest way, it is. But in the way that matters most, it’s probably not that clear.

We have a tendency to think things that simply are not true, like the Iraqi people yearned to be free and democratic when in reality they simply wanted Saddam dead so they could return to settling ancient tribal scores. They had no idea what “freedom” meant, and the concept of individual liberty never occurred to them. It went over like introducing Sharia Law to San Francisco would.

One thing to notice about the coverage of the Canadian Freedom Convoy is how the American media, particularly from conservative outlets, didn’t reflect the will of Canadians. You’d think Justin Trudeau going full totalitarian, turning into a little Fidel Castro (like father, like son – look it up), would bring about a collapse in his popularity, but it hasn’t. Most Canadians were upset he didn’t act sooner.

Canada is not like the United States. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms grants Canadians various rights that, if you don’t think about it, are similar in a lot of ways to the rights we enjoy here. But there’s a major difference.

Our Constitution grants exactly zero rights to anyone, it acknowledges the rights with which we were born and denies the federal government the ability to infringe upon them. The Canadian Charter gives citizens certain rights, explicitly. If a government can grant rights, there is no justification for them not being able to take them away, temporarily or permanently.

When Trudeau invoked emergency powers, US conservatives recoiled in horror. Canadians did not.

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Seven Great Truths [to emerge from the truckers’ protest]

Robert Gore:

The truckers’ rallying cry—Freedom!—inspires the many and thrusts greatness on a few.

Justin Trudeau and his globalist ilk are an unimpressive lot. Trudeau’s interminable Wikipedia profile is over 8000 words and has 324 references. Never has so much been said about so little except, perhaps, in other globalist profiles. Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, was, like Trudeau, one of Klaus Schwab’s Young Global Leaders, a finishing school for the Davos set.

Trudeau’s resumé lists bachelors’ degrees in literature and education, and studies but no degrees in engineering and environmental geography. He was a substitute and then a permanent teacher in secondary schools. Wikipedia says he gave his father, Pierre, prime minister from 1980 to 1984, a nice eulogy. He started a winter sports safety fund after his brother was killed in an avalanche, portrayed a distant relative in a CBC miniseries, started the Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Toronto, fought a zinc mine in the Northwest Territories, and was master of ceremonies at an award show and a political rally. (That comprehensive summation took three sentences and 105 words.)

His featherweight resumé screams politics and government as an ultimate career. He’s a Canadian Barack Obama. See the fawning Wikipedia entry for thousands of words on his ascent up the political ladder. In 2015 he was elected Prime Minister, a position he holds to this day, but perhaps not much longer.

Ottawa, Washington, London, Paris, Berlin, and Brussels are filled with globalist politicians, functionaries, and toadies who differ from Trudeau only superficially. Power, their “right” to tell and force others how to live, is really a self-bestowed entitlement. They are the insiders, and outsiders are ignored or deplored. Whatever differences they have among themselves, they close ranks when fellow insiders are under attack. The Wikipedia profile mentions several Trudeau scandals, including blackface photos, that might have ended the career of an outsider politician, but from which he survived.

Once in a while something cuts through the muck of modern life with diamond-cutter precision and finality, yielding a moment of clarity. The juxtaposition of two images creates just such a moment. The one: thousands of Canadians braving the the bitter cold to cheer and succor 18-wheelers and their drivers rolling towards Ottawa. The other: the empty chair of an empty-suit prime minister who absented himself rather than face what his arrogant totalitarianism had wrought.

Revolutions dawn when an appreciable number of the ruled realize their rulers are intellectual and moral inferiors.

“Much More Than Trump,” Robert Gore, March 3, 2016

Justin Trudeau has done more to usher in that dawn than any other globalist. His invective and cowardice have rendered him contemptible in the eyes of millions of Canadians and others around the world despite the best efforts of the kept media to protect him. That he and his ilk are intellectual and moral inferiors is the first great truth to emerge from the truckers’ protest.

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Protecting Second Amendment rights from Washington

SOUTH DAKOTA GOVERNOR KRISTI NOEM:

The Constitution is specific when it comes to our right to defend ourselves. The words boldly declare, “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

The fact that I will defend that right is an important distinction between myself and politicians like President Joe Biden , who said from the White House in April of last year that, with regard to the Second Amendment, “no amendment, no amendment to the Constitution is absolute.” These are the words of a politician with plans to chip away at the Bill of Rights.

The Biden gun-grabbing agenda includes bans on certain firearms, gun buyback programs, lawsuits targeting gun manufacturers, and restrictions on private firearm transfers that fundamentally end gun shows. I am 100% against federal politicians restricting gun rights because I stand with our founders who wrote this country’s founding documents.

The Constitution recognizes an existing natural right of all people to be free from government oppression. It also allows personal protection through the right to keep and bear arms. I have stood strong to protect the rights of my people here in South Dakota. Those on the extreme Left have opposed my thoughtful approach to COVID-19 and condemned my refusal to infringe on the freedoms of our citizens. I kept our state open and did not impose unconstitutional mandates. This battle for our right to bear arms will require the same fortitude and determination.

Our outdoor heritage and hunting culture are popular in my state of South Dakota, yet they’re not so popular with politicians from states such as New York, California, and Delaware. Unlike so many other politicians, I am an actual hunter. My Grandma Dorris taught me how to hunt birds when I was a young girl, and my father was the one who took me big-game hunting. Our family has made so many memories enjoying and exercising our Second Amendment rights. I have never lost that love for the outdoors and hunting, and I have passed it on to my children. Hopefully soon, I will also enjoy this pastime with my brand new granddaughter, Miss Addie. Hunting is an important part of gun rights, yet we must never forget that these rights were protected in our Constitution for another reason, too. Our founders wisely included this language to also guard against tyranny, like we experienced from Great Britain at the founding of this great nation.

Politicians should be judged by their actions. The first bill I signed into law here in South Dakota was constitutional carry. A previous governor had vetoed it, but I wanted the people of South Dakota to know I would protect their Second Amendment rights. Earlier this month, I announced at my State of the State address that I am eliminating all fees associated with permits and federal background checks for gun sales. It won’t cost a penny to exercise your Second Amendment rights in South Dakota.

I recently received the “Courage Under Fire” award from the Safari Club International . I was honored when CEO Laird Hamberlin spoke on my behalf at the event and said, “No governor has fought more to protect our hunting traditions, and we cannot wait to recognize Gov. Noem as we celebrate SCI’s 50 Years of Freedom.” He cited my record for respecting “the rights of her people by trusting them to use personal responsibility to make the best decisions for themselves, their loved ones, and, in turn, their communities.” He thanked me by saying I have been “a leader in promoting hunting, public access, and conservation across her state.” I cite this because it is an award that should be shared with the people of South Dakota who are standing strong against oppressive ideas coming from Washington, D.C.

Conservatives in this country need only look to the states for leaders who have fiercely fought to protect their rights in the past. We will continue to protect Second Amendment rights, even if Democrats have total control of the executive and legislative branches of the federal government. As governor of South Dakota, I have proven I will stand strong against any attempt by Biden or a woke Congress to take away fundamental rights from South Dakotans. And I am ready to defend our constitutional right to bear arms once again and always.

Kristi Noem is the governor of South Dakota.

I Was Anti-Gun And A Pregnant Mother When Home Invaders Broke Into My House

(SOFREP invites reader submissions for publication. Today we offer you this harrowing story from one of our members named Marcie who writes about how a home invasion while she was pregnant and home alone with her other child changed her entire worldview when it came to gun ownership.)

Few people would look at me now and think that, but yes, I used to believe that guns were a danger to society.

The media likes to show us gun violence all the time, with the insinuation that it’s the gun, not the person, who did the crime. Rarely do they show you examples of guns being used in self-defense. Most people who promote gun control live in quiet neighborhoods where residents see guns as almost alien.

But if you have ever lived in a dangerous place, then you know the importance of guns. That’s what happened to me when I moved to Tolleson, Arizona, two years ago.

I moved there to live with my husband, who is a firefighter. After moving, my husband needed to leave town for training. So I was left home alone, pregnant with our child. I didn’t mind too much, as I thought it would be a little staycation. I couldn’t go anywhere, anyway, since our clunker of a car was in the shop.

In hindsight, I should have known that no car being at our home for an extended period made the wrong people think that both of us were gone. Sure enough, that happened. When two thieves broke into my home through the kitchen door, it happened so suddenly that I had no plan of action. My heart racing, I ran into the bathroom where I thought it was safe and took out my phone.

I frantically started to call 911. However, my phone could not get through to a responder. The bathroom was a dead zone for phone service where I lived. However, my phone was connected to my WiFi. I contacted my sister on Facebook, and she managed to call 911.

As I waited for the police to come, my heart continued to race. What if the police did not respond in time? There are many cases of the police taking too long to respond to a situation that requires immediate action, as many factors can delay response time.

As I heard the thieves rustling around the house, I wondered what they would do. Steal my TV or jewelry? That was replaceable. However, what if they found me and did something horrifying to my unborn child and me?

All these worries soon subsided, luckily, as the police did arrive in only a few minutes. After seeing the police approach my door, the thieves immediately ran away, their pockets empty. One bystander told me the thieves were armed as I was filing a report. Once again, those thoughts about what the thieves could have done to me immediately raced to my head.

It was at that point I realized I needed to arm myself. Since then, I have never left home without a pistol. I have to protect myself, my husband, and our two-year-old daughter. Chances are, you have someone you want to save. I recommend arming yourself as well with an easy-to-access pistol.

Speaking of pistol, what’s my favorite? As a woman, I wanted something easily concealable that I could fire at a moment’s notice. I wanted something powerful yet easy to use for a more petite frame.

Upon research, I chose the SIG Sauer P365. This 9mm pistol is a little under 6 inches wide and slightly above 4 inches tall, making it perfect for concealing. Despite its small frame, it holds ten rounds and packs quite a wallop. Any woman can use it to even the odds if a thief enters their home. With its small trigger, it doesn’t matter how small you are. You can fight back.

That’s my story. Since having a gun, I’ve felt safer, and I’ve found a new hobby to enjoy. If you’ve been interested in owning a firearm, now is the time to do so. I hope this article helped you learn where I’m coming from when advocating for guns.

It’s loonnggg, but still, RTWT
Warning, there is some amount of foul language used.

FISKING ANTON – BY IAN BRUENE

== BREAKING NEWS: Journalist maintains high word-to-knowledge ratio! More at 11… ==

A couple weeks ago an article was posted by a certain Michael Anton which contains one true and interesting point, drenched in enough manure to solve the coming phosphate supply issues before they ever get started. I meant for this to go up much sooner, but was busy and then caught Xi’s Death Rot.

Let’s dive straight in:

Regime propaganda is so ubiquitous that even if, like me, you make no effort to seek it out and even take steps to avoid it, you can’t help but notice that our masters have fastened onto a new narrative: the coming “civil war.”

This was the crux of all the maudlin, dishonest January 6 retrospectives, of several “think pieces,” and at least three new books: America is facing a second civil war and it will be started by the Right.

These first two paragraphs are the true and interesting part. The Enemy does indeed want a war, and wants us to fire the first shot to provide them with their casus belli.

But this is not new. Anyone who lived through or has read history of the 80s and 90s remembers the hysteria which was stirred up about “right wing militias”, where every policy and action seemed tuned perfectly to piss off the barely stable loose cannons on the right which the Enemy was *sure* existed in large numbers.

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Quote O’ The Day:
Many in our ruling class see what’s happened in Hong Kong as a role model. They need to be made to regret their choice.

BLUF:
In the final days of 2021, the Ruling Class limped to the finish line, personified by its confused, irritable and frail figurehead—the president of the United States.

It is stuck between its lust for power and its imperative to strangle its political opposition on the one hand, and its desire to survive—with the American people rejecting its reign at the ballot box in 2021, and threatening an even greater rejection in 2022—on the other hand.

Let us resolve in this new year to make the Ruling Class’ worst fear a reality—to punish it for the suffering it has inflicted on our republic.

2021: The Year of the Ruling Class’s Crackdown on Dissent.

The year 2020 was the year of the lockdown, when the Ruling Class arbitrarily, capriciously and selectively suspended the natural rights bedrock upon which American life—indeed, life itself—relies.

The year 2021 closes as the year of the crackdown, when the Ruling Class weaponized its powers to crush dissenters from its Wokeist-Scientist orthodoxy in arguably the most far-reaching, brazen and lawless assault on Americans by the state and its private-sector adjuncts in our nation’s history.

This was the year that the campus became the country. Those engaging in speech that ran afoul of the Ruling Class’ party line were treated as physical dangers to the homeland, demanding the full force of the public and private sectors to deter, punish and subdue them.

Every free-thinking individual became a potential Donald Trump, liable to be ostracized, harassed and punished for daring to cross the regime in a society-wide Russiagate.

January 6, for which the scope of the Ruling Class’ own role is still unfolding, served as the bridge from Trump to his tens of millions of supporters that the conquering Ruling Class trod over, as foretold in its wake.

A national strategy for countering “domestic terrorism,” associated homeland security threat bulletins and official DOJ/FBI policy directives made crushing dissent an official state objective.

Civil society’s commanding heights worked hand in glove with the regime, for it is part and parcel of it. Censorship, algorithmic suppression, deplatforming, cancelation, social media mobs, sackings, subpoenas, show trials, surveillance—these became part of the daily drumbeat, desensitizing us to what we would usually recognize as both abnormal and un-American.

Periodic purges of social media accounts now look quaint. Today, everyday Americans may not only easily lose their ability to communicate in the digital public square, but also to bank, to work or to raise a family in peace should they engage in an ever-shifting list of thoughtcrimes—or even refuse to get a jab of an experimental drug.

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The Establishment Wants to Crush You Uppity Peasants

Some guy named Jared Schmeck recently mocked the senile old pervert who is masquerading as our president by getting His Crustiness to affirm “Let’s go, Brandon!” This humiliation of the regime figurehead, piled upon the myriad other humiliations he has brought upon himself – failing to pass infrastructure, Afghanistan, putting the “can” in “Vatican” – is intolerable to the establishment. This uppitiness must be stopped.

And it’s even less tolerable because “Let’s Go, Brandon” is a manifestation of the class warfare that increasingly characterizes American society. It’s the cry of the working class, bold and joyous, utterly uncontrollable. It has energy and cheer, while the pathetic moaning of the ruling caste’s spokescreatures is rote, boring, and bereft of any power. The regime-approved memes our elite’s minions repeat on cable and in social media are the chant of serfs.

So, the garbage regime and it’s ridiculous legacy media minions must try to stifle this rebellion. They especially hate that this in no Astroturf meme passed around on some media server list after being decreed from on high. LGB is infinitely more dangerous. It’s an organic response that is not pushed or guided, but that evolved totally outside the approved channels. They hate it because it is not theirs, and because they cannot direct it or tame it. So they try to squelch it. But it will come back even stronger. And worse, we’ll be laughing at them as we repeat it.

The most hilarious part is when the ruling caste’s Renfields leverage “rules” and “norms” against disrespecting the dementite-in-chief, expressing shock and horror that Jared the Pleb did not abase himself before Hunter’s daddy sufficiently. You might wonder when the respect the president rule came into effect, but that glaring hypocrisy is intentional. They want you to know that you must play by rules that they are free to ignore. It solidifies your status as second-class citizens.

You must know your place, and they intend to teach it to you. First, they reported that Jared says his crack was “a joke,” as if to paint him as backtracking and trying to excuse what he should be proud of. They want to paint him as broken and repentant, as if participating in some Red Guard self-criticism session or a modern university race/gender seminar. But it’s an obvious lie. Yeah, smart media people, he literally meant Biden was to perform a challenging act of love upon himself. The thing we need to understand is that our enemies are just not very good at their jobs. And you can make it even more difficult for them. Here’s a rule, people – the media will bend whatever you say to serve their narrative so, if you choose to speak to the legacy media at all, it should be a nonstop string of profanity that is utterly exploitable.

Second, we get the blue checks announcing that “free speech does not mean freedom from consequences.” That’s precisely what it means, though. They are against free speech, and you must squash their fascism into their faces at every opportunity. They will still try to get this guy fired or arrested or whatever. Remember, they are communists. They would murder him if they could – luckily, their lack of guns and upper body strength prevents that.

“Kurt, that is crazy talk! You are crazy.”

Those who doubt the drooling, fussy fury of our enemies and their desire to see us enslaved or dead should spend a little time on social media. Besides their hatred for Jared, look at their COVID death wishes for those refusing to wear a face thong or take the medicine that does not work as advertised. If they find out this Jared guy is unvaccinated, they may literally explode and splash those around them with pus and bile.

Remember, this is all part of their plan for soft tyranny. At the moment, they do not have the power to make you do anything. They must instead convince you to make yourself comply. By showing Jared Schmeck being harassed and harangued by the sex pest enablers at CNN and elsewhere, they hope to scare you into silence. They hope to make you choose to conform and obey.

Here’s the other tiresome part – the Conservative, Inc., crew decrying Jared Schmeck’s disrespect to a buffoon who deserves none. This is all class solidarity, folks. LGB did not spring up among the supine sissies who make up the GOP establishment. It came from the base, and they hate the base. Like the Tea Party, like Trump, they did not create it and they cannot control it, so they hate it. LGB demonstrates a contempt for the institutions, institutions that these people hope to run themselves. They like the system, people. “Brandon” is about burning the whole sorry system down; the pseudo-conservative timeservers are just about changing the management to put themselves in charge.

So, we get lots of pearl clutching about how those uncouth rubes shockingly refuse to observe the rules and norms that apply only to those uncouth rubes. They need to know their place, which is holding trays in the background wearing masks as their betters dine and sip ungagged.

Let’s go, Brandon!

America’s Christmas Present Is All the Democrats’ Dreams Dying

I love the smell of Joe Manchin in the morning … it smells like … victory.

If you survey the charred ruins of the progressives’ hopes and dreams, you will need to have a heart of stone not to burst into hysterical laughter at their pain. They were so close, so very close, and their heart’s desire was ripped from them by a senator from a sane state who had zero desire to commit ritual, political suicide to please the brother-curious likes of Ilhan Omar.

Cue the gif of a team of Joes carrying a coffin to that catchy EDM song. Savor. Taste their pain. Biden is broken, Schumer is humiliated, the “moderate” House Dems who Mistress Pelosi commanded to vote for this abortion are doomed in 2022, and somewhere, the Murder Turtle is smiling.

It’s absolutely perfect. And the best part is, while we patriots are full of Christmas cheer, this humiliating debacle is going to make this the Democrats’ worst Kwanzaa ever.

They got really mad at Manchin – who is no conservative – and called him a “liar” because he did exactly what he said he would do for six months. Only Democrats could consider someone else dishonest for refusing to conform to their pipe dreams. The fact is that the Democrats, starting with President Asterisk, thought that Manchin would cave if they just sent enough goons to shout slogans at his houseboat. Manchin is no sissy. These weasels are so used to pseudo-men who have never been in a fistfight that they think the whole world is full of low-T wusses who will fold the second some non-binary mutant starts literally shaking.

In the wake of this circus, you had a bunch of Hollywood liberals raging for the machine in puny frustration. Bette Midler, the quintessential Democrat constituent – an aging, lonely woman filled with bile because no man wants her – had this to say about West Virginians: “What #JoeManchin, who represents a population smaller than Brooklyn, has done to the rest of America, who wants to move forward, not backward, like his state, is horrible.  He sold us out.  He wants us all to be just like his state, West Virginia. Poor, illiterate and strung out.”

Except those hillbillies broke you, Bette, which says what about you?

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Progressives are ready to edit the Constitution. Are conservatives ready to answer?

Should we rewrite the First and Second Amendments? In a contribution to a Boston Globe series on “editing the Constitution,” law professor Mary Anne Franks of the University of Miami proposes replacing the first two items in the Bill of Rights with more qualified versions. You can catch Franks’ drift from the subtitle of her book: The Cult of the Constitution: Our Deadly Devotion to Guns and Free Speech.

“As legal texts go, neither of the two amendments is a model of clarity or precision,” Franks wrote at the Globe. But her rewrites don’t improve the situation. The core idea is to make the amendments more consistent with promoting the general welfare, as promised in the Constitution’s preamble. But Americans have traditionally — and rightly — believed strong protections for individual rights themselves promote the general welfare. Franks’ versions offer much too little in that regard.

Her edit of the First Amendment would on its face sharply curtail freedom of speech, affirming “the right to freedom of expression, association, peaceful assembly, and petition of the government for redress of grievance” but making them “subject to responsibility for abuses.” All “conflicts of such rights shall be resolved in accordance with the principle of equality and dignity of all person,” she says.

Who will determine the nature of these abuses, enforce that responsibility, and resolve the conflicts? What does “the principle of equality and dignity” mean in practice? After complaining of imprecision, Franks doesn’t say. Her proposal sounds rife for abuse by a government that won’t always be run by people who share her political preferences.

Her Second Amendment is tweaked to get rid of all the icky stuff about guns and militias. Instead, self-defense is rooted in bodily autonomy, which is fair enough. But Franks would also give the government the right to take “reasonable measures to protect the health and safety of the public as a whole.” More than a year into the pandemic, we can safely say there is no real consensus on what that means. And adding abortion to the Second Amendment, as she also does, may be the only possible way to make our most controversial amendment even more contentious.

Nobody would ratify these complex reboots of the first two amendments. Yet liberals are increasingly openly hostile to the limitations the basic structure of the Constitution imposes on their political agenda, as Franks’ piece and most of the Globe‘s other articles in this section demonstrate anew. Conservatives had better answer.

Don’t fear constitutional carry: it makes sense and promotes safer communities

By Sen. Kim Ward

It’s always the same predictions of doom and bloodshed from gun-control activists. They warn us of pending disaster if Pennsylvania becomes the 22nd state to adopt so-called constitutional carry rules that would allow law-abiding adults who legally own a handgun to conceal-carry it without a permit. Thirty-four states, including Pennsylvania, already allow open carry without a permit.

We heard the same predictions when states first adopted right-to-carry laws, which now exist in 43 states. None of the dire predictions came true after states adopted Constitutional carry. Not even one of these states has seen the need to reverse the laws. Indeed, none have even held a legislative hearing, let alone a vote, on undoing these laws.

A Constitutional carry bill passed both the Pennsylvania House and Senate with bi-partisan support. Regrettably, for law-abiding Pennsylvanians, Governor Wolf has already promised to veto it. The bill would only make two small changes to state laws, which is already a right-to-carry state. It would allow people to start carrying more quickly and for slightly less cost.

The fact remains, business and private property owners still have the right to exclude handguns. Prohibitions on carrying in sensitive places and regarding the misuse of guns are unchanged. Pennsylvanians are still required to pass a background check to buy a handgun.

The most significant change from constitutional carry is how quickly people can carry a gun if the need arises. Sheriff departments in Pennsylvania try to issue concealed handgun permits within 45 days after someone has met the requirements. If a woman is being stalked or threatened, she won’t have to wait for a license. The threat may be over well before the 45 days are met.

To make matters worse, last year police in Philly, Montgomery, Allegheny, and at least five Pennsylvania other counties stopped issuing concealed handgun permits during coronavirus outbreak. And some were still slow to issue permits at the beginning of this year.

Philadelphia also regularly revokes permits for such trivial reasons as notifications to the sheriff’s office by the permit holder that he is moving to another address in the city, parking tickets, if someone burglarizes your home, and a host of other, similar reasons.

And it will save Pennsylvanians the cost of obtaining their license. These costs matter; just compare the numbers in neighboring states, Illinois, and Indiana. In Illinois, a five-year permit costs $450, there is no license fee in Indiana. While only 4% of Illinoisans have a concealed handgun permit, 22% of adults in Indiana already have one, the second-highest number of permits per capita.
More importantly, the people who benefit from carrying are those who are the most likely victims of violent crime, overwhelmingly who live in high crime urban areas. They are also the ones who are most sensitive to all the fees required to get a permit. In Illinois, wealthy white males who live in the suburbs are overwhelmingly the ones who get permits. In Indiana, there are many more permits issued to people living in urban, heavily minority zip codes.

Gun control advocates claimed there would be blood in the streets when then-Gov. Bob Casey signed Pennsylvania’s concealed carry law in 1989. That didn’t’t happen. The fact that several dozen peer-reviewed academic studies show there’s no evidence of any uptick in gun crimes linked to concealed carry laws, and most show violent crime declines. Research also shows that murder rates fall even more when states move to Constitutional Carry laws.

When Police asked its 450,000 law enforcement members about the effects of private gun ownership, 76% of officers answered that legally armed citizens are either very or extremely important in reducing crime.
Today, there are over 21.5 million concealed handgun permit holders nationwide. Permit holders nationwide are incredibly law-abiding. Police officers are extremely rarely convicted of firearms-related violations, but it still happens at a rate twelve times more often than for permit holders. In the 19 states with comprehensive permit revocation data, the average revocation rate is one-tenth of one percent. Usually, permit revocations occur because someone moved or died or forgot to bring their permit while carrying.

Gun control advocates keep trying to take advantage of people’s fears of the unknown and claim that bad things will happen when people are allowed to defend themselves and their families. But Pennsylvanians don’t have to guess about what will happen with Constitutional carry. Twenty-one states are proof that Constitutional carry is common sense.

Senator Kim Ward is Majority Leader of the Pennsylvania Senate and represents the 39th district in Westmoreland County. John R. Lott, Jr. is the president of the Crime Prevention Research Center.

BLUF:
Stand strong and militant. We do not recognize any duty to not be anywhere because it inconveniences the military wing of the Democrat Party, and we do not recognize any duty to not legally pack heat in doing so. We do not recognize a duty to suck up to petty administrators and flunkies. And we’ll swear about that desiccated old freak if we feel like it. The GOP better get on board or we’ll toss it off the train.

Kyle Rittenhouse and the Red-Pilling of America

You know, a few more rampages by inept alleged “white supremacists” like Kyle Rittenhouse – he only managed to shoot white criminals! – and everybody is going to be thoroughly awakened to the reality of the leftist scam. The trial that followed the Kenosha Kid’s act of social hygiene constituted only one tab in the big bottle of scarlet pills America’s been force-fed lately. Others include being confronted at work with mandates for vaxes that don’t act as advertised, as well as being inundated with racist CRT garbage, and having one’s kids come home from school with creepy porno crap that makes you wonder if they hit up the Lincoln Project lending library.

There are more pills going on than in Hunter’s medicine cabinet.

Why the festival of figurative pharmaceuticals? Because the left got out over its skis. It went too far, too fast, and now normal folks who just want to live their lives and usually show no interest in political/cultural controversies are showing up at school board meetings asking why the hell their kids are accusing them of slavery. Combined with a crusty old pervert in the White House who is causing economic inflation and international humiliation, and the left is in trouble. Deep trouble. See, the truth is getting out despite the media’s lies. Its pet political party is looking at being demolished next November. But instead of slowing down and taking stock, the Marxists are doubling down on failure knowing they only have their micro-majorities for a year. This genius strategy got them Glenn Youngkin and will get them many more based pols who are many times more hardcore.

It is only going to get worse for them, which means it is only going to get better for America.

Remember, leftism only succeeds when surrounded by a fog of lies. When the fog lifts, people reject it. And the media pumped out all the fog it could.

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Standing firm on the Second Amendment

The right of American citizens to keep and bear arms is guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, and those who choose to lawfully exercise this right should be at liberty to do so.

Firearms play an important role in daily life for many West Virginians. The beautiful Mountain State is home to many who use their guns to hunt, for sport or to protect their homes.

No matter the reason an individual has for owning a firearm, the laws of the land — in no uncertain terms — state they may do so.

Perhaps one of the most important phrases in the Constitution with regards to gun ownership is the very clear provision that this right “shall not be infringed.”

Someone needs to highlight those four words for the current presidential administration, one that stands poised to restrict lawful gun ownership like no U.S. President has done before.

The Biden Administration has already urged enactment of new “red flag” laws, which can allow the confiscation of firearms without due process, and proposed broadening the definition of short-barreled rifles and adding even more burdensome background checks to those already in place.

Our office led a 20-state coalition in urging the U.S. Supreme Court to review a lower court ruling that allowed federal regulators – without congressional action — to outlaw bump stocks, a popular, legal rifle accessory that aids gun owners with limited hand mobility.

Criminalizing ownership of legally purchased bump stocks would result in more than 500,000 of these devices being destroyed or surrendered by their owners. The new regulation allows the Biden Administration to impose serious fines and imprisonment for anyone possessing such a firearm accessory.

Our office is also leading a 20-state coalition in pushing back against another onerous proposal by the Biden Administration, one that greatly expands the authority of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and expands the definition of a receiver, the already heavily regulated part of a firearm that houses its firing mechanism.

Myself and other state attorneys general argue that President Biden’s new rule could put many parts manufacturers out of business and that it improperly grants bureaucrats at the ATF unconstitutional and unrestrained discretion over which parts are subject to regulation and criminalization.

We have also urged the U.S. Supreme Court, in concert with 24 state attorneys general, to push back against a court ruling that would permit states to outlaw ammunition magazines that are currently legal in more than half the nation, including West Virginia.

Our office fervently fights to protect the Second Amendment rights of responsible gun owners. We have expanded our concealed carry reciprocity agreements with numerous states, allowing West Virginians with concealed handgun licenses to lawfully cross state lines with their firearms.

Gun violence and the senseless death attributed to it should pain all Americans. However, the malevolent acts of a select few should never be a catalyst for stripping law-abiding masses of their Constitutional rights, especially their right to self-defense and to bear arms.

I will not allow the far left to run roughshod over our citizens’ gun rights. If President Biden follows through on his overbroad and far-reaching proposals, we will take swift legal action.

We must tell President Biden we want no part of his proposed gun grab and stand firm on defending the Constitutional rights of our citizens to help West Virginia reach her full potential.

(Patrick Morrisey is the Attorney General of West Virginia.)