Category: Editorial O’ The Day

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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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.)

The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Milley.

It has been fascinating to follow the recent career of General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, an advisory body of military commanders that, by law, lies outside the chain of command.
It’s not clear Milley knows that.
Being a thoroughly modern major general, he seems to be more interested in blockading “white rage” than honing the fighting skills of our military.

So I was edified to see that Milley has put down some of his thoughts in a new Art of War. It is a very different sort of book from the Chinese classic by Sun Tzu.

It is not just that Sun Tzu was interested in winning wars and prevailing over the enemy. He also understood that his country had enemies and that it was important to be able to distinguish effectively between friends and enemies. “I will force the enemy to take our strength for weakness, and our weakness for strength,” he wrote in one famous passage, “and thus will turn his strength into weakness.”

Milley has turned that old-fashioned “binary” idea on its head—he deconstructed it, you might say, and implicitly showed how out of sync with our times poor old Sun Tzu is.

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Woke Florida College Students Chime in on How 9/11 Should Be Taught

Here’s yet another story demonstrating how concerned we should be for future generations. Campus Reform’s Ophelie Jacobson recently conducted a series of short interviews with students at the University of Florida, in which she asked how they believed 9/11 should be taught in the classrooms. The answers were predictable but still disturbing.

Students suggested that 9/11 lesson plans should keep “gruesome” facts out of the teaching, while also avoiding conversations about who was responsible for carrying out the attacks. One student said the curriculum should “avoid placing blame.”

Some of the students argued that professors should not discuss American exceptionalism while teaching about the terrorist attacks. One student insisted that “we don’t need more nationalism in this country…we need more healthcare.” She continued:

“I think they should focus on America’s faults, not how amazing we are and how we need to be superior because we’re not.”

One has to wonder how this particular person would enjoy living in Afghanistan or Somalia.

Another student chimed in, echoing the point that America should not be portrayed as the greatest nation. They said:

“In terms of propagating this idea that our nation is the best no matter what…I would agree that that should be avoided.”

American exceptionalism seemed to be a significant point of contention for these individuals. One of them claimed it is “rooted in a lot of colonist and imperialist notions of how we should treat other people.”

Another asserted that “it’s a dangerous mindset to teach young people that because I think that’s the reason why a lot of people grow up to be extremists and really nationalistic.”

This is the type of tripe that is being taught to students at many American universities. It is part and parcel of a mindset that insists we should focus almost exclusively on America’s faults instead of also acknowledging its strengths.

To these people, acknowledging the evil that led to the 9/11 terrorist attacks is not as important as people who engaged in bigotry against Muslim Americans after it occurred. It is also more politically expedient to focus on bigotry, because it allows them to promote their agenda, which involves demonizing America as much as possible. In the end, this is more about politics than anything else.

The Danger of Biden’s Fragile Ego

After the tragic terror attacks in Kabul today, we are now venturing into extremely dangerous political waters that require wisdom, discipline, and strength… three attributes that our current American president is woefully lacking.

Yes, Joe Biden is a weak, narcissistic man. And he knows it. This is the danger.

When weak men want to prove to the world (literally to the world in this case) that they are not the weak men we all see that they are, there is a danger that they will present some grand gesture of strength to overcompensate for their weakness.

In the case of Joe Biden, this grand gesture of strength will be at the expense of young Americans who wear the uniform of our military. The very real danger right now is that this president will try to prove his courage and strength by exploiting the courage and strength of our troops by putting them in even greater danger than they already are due to this president’s weakness.

Look at who Joe Biden is.

He is a weak man who likes to talk tough.

Remember when he tried to show how he’d take on Donald Trump as the Democratic Party’s candidate? He was in the midst of a crowded primary for the nomination, and he needed to project strength. So how does a guy like Joe Biden do that?

Former Vice President Joe Biden said he would “beat the hell out of” President Donald Trump if they were in high school over his crude comments about women.

“When a guy who ended up becoming our national leader said, ‘I can grab a woman anywhere and she likes it’ and then said, ‘I made a mistake,'” Biden said Tuesday of Trump, according to video of the remarks posted on Facebook by the University of Miami College Democrats.

“They asked me would I like to debate this gentleman, and I said no. I said, ‘If we were in high school, I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him,'” said Biden, getting laughter and applause from the crowd at the University of Miami.

Yeah… Biden’s the tough guy, so he threatens to take Trump behind the gym and “beat the hell out of” him. This is what weak men do. They bluster. And Biden is such an obvious weakling that we all laughed about it.

Think about some of the other bizarre moments in Biden’s recent past.

The infamous “Cornpop” rant. The entire bizarre, rambling story was meant to project what a tough guy he is.

In Biden’s telling, CornPop was a “bad dude” who “ran a bunch of bad boys”, was armed with a straight-razor and backed by other gang members. And he was threatening to “cut” the future vice-president.

Instead of calling the police, Biden met CornPop and his cronies head on, having armed himself with a 6ft chain. After a standoff, CornPop backed down.

Do you see? Biden, the skinny white guy, confronted the bad dude who ran with a bad gang, and he made the scary black dude back down. Forget the inherent racist tropes built into Biden’s yarn, the whole point is to project an image of Biden as the tough guy.

He does this all the time.

Remember when a voter in Michigan confronted him during the campaign? Biden’s response was to tell the voter he was “full of sh**” and called him “a horse’s ass.”

How about when he called a voter a “damn liar” and challenged him to a push-up contest?

Time and time again throughout his career, Biden has defaulted to the faux tough-guy stance with over-the-top gritted teeth and threats of physical violence against a political foe to prove his point. It’s become a joke, but only because we all know what a buffoon he is and how his tough-guy posturing doesn’t square with his legacy as a weak man who will do what he is told and has never really shown personal strength in standing for anything.

This reflex to talk tough and threaten others is a revealing insight into the man’s psyche and his instincts when backed into a corner. When his weakness is exposed, he reacts with over-the-top tough-guy language and threats of violence. It’s how he always chooses to prove he’s strong.

This is who Joe Biden is and always has been.

The only difference is that now he has the constitutionally granted powers of Commander-in-Chief to use our military to back up his empty threats and to project the strength that he doesn’t have.

We must be wary of this.

America will instinctively and reflexively want to rally around any show of strength and retaliation that is framed as a response to these terror attacks. We must be wary that the response to these terrorists is about our dead Marines and the safety and security of Americans still in Afghanistan and not an egotistical reflex of a weak man who is backed into a political corner of his own making.

Weakness begets weakness, and poor decisions beget more poor decisions. Biden has always stood for one thing and one thing only: His own narcissistic political advancement. Until now, it was pathetic and pitiable. Now, it’s deadly.

We Have No President

Diplomacy was back. Leadership was back. The adults were back in the White House. That’s what we were sold. That’s what we were told. Liberal reporters basked in the afterglow. The political class breathed a sigh of relief. And the honeymoon commenced. Everything Joe did had an aura of being “historic.” The man got ice cream and this media establishment would go bananas. And then, reality hit. They forgot about our longest war in Afghanistan which was unraveling. And Joe’s inability to get a handle on the crisis shows that the White House has truly become the Home of the Merciful Rest. We have no leader.

Joe Biden still has not owned this crisis. He has yet to say, ‘I screwed up.’ He keeps saying the buck stops with me. Sure, that is until the images of desperate Afghans trying to get inside the airport at Kabul are blasted on the television sets. Then, it rapidly becomes ‘it’s Trump’s fault’ which is a talking point that his people tried to peddle but didn’t stick. It’s simply too pathetic to even repeat. What’s more disturbing is how this administration thought it was fine to simply ignore the collapse of Afghanistan. Maybe the liberal media wouldn’t cover it. It explains why Joe thought he could remain on vacation at Camp David. It’s why Jen Psaki tried to take the week off. It was only after EVERYONE slammed them that they poured their pina coladas out and returned to work. Yes, some serious adulting here—true profiles in leadership here.

The chaos in Kabul was simply too great to ignore. This is our longest war. We have operational infrastructure here—and it all went to crap rapidly. The thing is we knew this was going to happen. Did anyone really think the Afghan government whose credibility arguably died in 2009 when Hamid Karzai stuffed ballot boxes and committed widespread voter fraud, would last? The Taliban were going to make massive gains. We knew this. Days after Biden’s July 8 remarks where he said the Afghan government would remain and that this wouldn’t be like Saigon 1975, the State Department sent a memo painting a much different picture. It was obviously ignored.

Joe was so obsessed with leaving on August 31 that he didn’t have a plan to get 15,000 American citizens out of the country before then. It’s obvious. We’re scrambling. And we’re not doing anything to expand our perimeter or venture out to get our citizens out of harm’s way. We’re trusting the Taliban to behave. We’re trusting terrorists to behave. The adults are back in the White House, they said.

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Afghanistan and the Cost of Having a ‘Normal’ President.

Consider this a letter of congratulations. I address it to Democrats everywhere who told us that Joe Biden would return the United States to a state of normality.

I address it also to those, many putative Republicans as well as Democrats, who fought tooth-and-nail against Donald Trump because—well, because he was not a “normal” politician.

Donald Trump issued mean tweets. He made fun of the media, often singling out reporters by name.

He was bombastic (more bombastic than President Joe Biden?).

He lied (again, did he lie more often than Biden?).

No thoughtful person believed there was anything to the fabricated gossip about Russian collusion in determining the 2016 election—which does not, of course, mean that that tissue of grotesque lies was not believed and assiduously circulated by many Big Names in the media.

Nor did it insulate Trump from being compared to virtually every tyrant in history (“literally Hitler,” remember?).

There is now a lot of hand-wringing about the performance of Joe Biden. I’ll give you a little then vs. now in a moment.

First, I want to raise the question of whether the people who helped put Joe Biden in office should have their hand-wringing licenses suspended.

There are several putatively conservative outlets—those that deserve Bill Kristol’s “elevated conservative” seal of approval—who worked overtime to disparage Trump.

They bought wholesale into the Jan.-6-riot-is-an-insurrection-threatening-“our-democracy” meme.

That is all looking as rancid as the Russian collusion delusion, but I haven’t heard any apologies.

Instead, we are treated to high-minded (by which I do not mean “intelligent”) analysis of Biden’s faults, blunders, mistakes.

I do wonder whether such people, who helped put Biden in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue deserve to be heard on the question of his liabilities.

I offer that for future consideration: should those who helped put Biden in office now deserve a hearing when they are complaining about his performance?

I confess that I do not listen to them.

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Did Iowa’s new gun law kill background checks?
In a surprise to no one who’s paying attention, doomsayers in the Democratic Party were wrong

As Iowa lawmakers debated a gun rights bill this past legislative session, critics issued some dire warnings. Without requiring Iowans to get government permission to buy and carry firearms, they said, the state would devolve into lawlessness.

Under consideration was a proposal to modernize Iowa’s gun permit system, making permits to carry or acquire guns optional.

“This bill bans or kills background checks in this state, there’s no doubt about it,” state Rep. Beth Wessel-Kroeschell, D-Ames, said on the Iowa House floor this spring.

The Legislature passed the bill — known as “constitutional carry” or “permitless carry” — along party lines and it took effect July 1. Iowans now may purchase and carry weapons without a permission slip from the state.

In a surprise to no one who’s paying attention, the doomsayers in the Democratic Party were wrong. Weeks after the law went into effect, it turns out the government still is running a lot of background checks on Iowa gun buyers.

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A Ministry of Fear Rules America.

Back in 1943, the British novelist Graham Greene published “The Ministry of Fear,” a thriller set in World War II London involving mercy killings, exploding suitcases, seances, Luftwaffe air raids, outright murder, insane asylums and undercover Nazi spies. It was successfully made into a movie the following year starring Ray Milland as the troubled protagonist, and directed by Fritz Lang, himself a refugee from Hitler.

Both novel and film capture the paranoid atmosphere during that troubled time, with danger lurking even in something as innocent as a cake. Whom or what can you trust? As the world falls apart, and the future is shrouded in threat and mystery, society devolves into a dog-eat-dog struggle for survival, in which neither the old verities nor the old pieties obtain any longer.

Welcome to America, 2021. In just a few short months since the mysterious elevation of Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., inexplicably elected the 46th president of the United States, our country has undergone a stunning rapid devolution from a confident, economic powerhouse to a shabby debtor nation afraid of its own shadow.

The American Ministry of Fear, however, is not located in the Chancellery of the National Socialist German Workers Party in Berlin, but in every petty federal, state, and local bureaucracy, doctor’s office, TV news station, big-city newspaper, college and university in the country.

From the start of the COVID-19 manufactured panic, these agents of influence have waged a relentless war on the American psyche. And now, despite their miniscule majorities in Congress, they rule with an iron fist that brooks no demurral.

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Just to point out, if and when a ‘real’ vaccine – not this experimental genetic potion that’s never before been authorized for use in humans– passes the standard FDA approval regimen and is available, I’ll consider getting the shot. Until then, all this hypocritical and hyperbolic going on serves to confirm nothing more than the similar line about global warming: “When the elites start personally acting like it’s a real emergency, I’ll think about considering as such.”

BLUF:
The establishment has squandered its credibility, which is why its demand that everyone take the shot is getting shriller and the attempts to force people more punitive. Imagine if they had been honest from the beginning. Imagine if they had been held accountable. But to do that, you have to imagine having a ruling class that doesn’t suck. And that’s more imagination than anyone can muster.

Imagine If They Hadn’t Lied to Us for the Last 18 Months

Everybody wrap something around your face again even though they said you wouldn’t need to if you got vaxxed! But they didn’t lie – no, apparently a bunch of people – and not just those evil white nationalist-Christian-gun-Jesus-flag people – are refusing to get the vaccine, and the reason is that they are moral defectives somehow in thrall to Tucker Carlson’s Svengali-like powers of persuasion. You see, the people who won’t get it are stupid people who hate science because they refuse to trust the people who have spent the last year-and-a-half lying to them.

I don’t blame those folks a bit.

Let’s try a thought experiment. Let’s imagine our ruling class was not as utterly corrupt, dishonest, incompetent and downright stupid as it manifestly is. I know that’s hard, but go with me.

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