Category: Editorial O’ The Day

California-Style Gun Control: Does Not Work as Advertised

California has a well-earned reputation as one of the most anti-gun jurisdictions in the United States, with its state and local codes crammed with virtually every cockamamie scheme to suppress firearm ownership conceived within the last 50 years. The state’s current governor, Gavin Newsom, is not only determined to cement this reputation statewide, he’s trying to bring California-style gun control to the country at large by promoting an ill-conceived amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would impose draconian gun control coast to coast. But actual data shows California holds another dubious distinction that puts a lie to the efficacy of its highly-touted “gun safety laws”:

…it is the state with the highest number of mass murders committed with firearms.

Yet highly-publicized mass shootings play an outsized role in influencing gun control policy in the U.S. because they create the (grossly distorted and exaggerated) impression that ordinary, law-abiding people are at a high risk of being killed with a firearm at the places where they learn, work, and play. They also receive breathless media coverage that seeks to exploit the public’s grief, fear, and outrage over these events to give impetus to hastily-pushed gun control, before details inevitably emerge that show these measures would have been useless in stopping the crime. Where this manipulation prevails, however, it results in overreaching policies that intrude on Second Amendment rights with virtually no effect on either “mass shootings” or the more anonymous forms of firearm-related deaths.

California is a case in point, as revealed by data compiled on the website Statista.com.

The Statista survey looked at data between 1982 and October 2023 concerning episodes of a single attack with a firearm in a public place that resulted in four or more fatalities between 1982 and 2012 or in three fatalities from 2013 onward (definitions that track a database compiled by MotherJones.com).

Those figures show that California had by far the most such incidents during the survey period, at 26.

This is as much as the combined amount of the next two states with the highest totals, Florida and Texas. It is also more than the combined total of the 20 states with the lowest frequency of such events (excluding states with no such incidents at all).

It is true that California is the most populous (38.9 million) of the U.S. states, so it is not necessarily the deadliest state for mass shootings per capita. But the strongly pro-gun states of Florida (22.6 million) and Texas (30+ million) have a combined population that exceeds that of California by some 13.7 million people. Thus, whatever California thinks it is doing with regard to countering mass public murder committed with firearms, it is working no better at a population level than what is occurring in two of the most gun-friendly states of the Union.

None of this is to diminish the fact that any firearm-related murder is a terrible event, no matter where or how it is committed.

But along with gun control, Gavin Newsom also likes to promote what he insists is a “science-based” approach to “public health.” In that vein, any honest assessment of California’s notoriously strict gun control regime has to acknowledge that the numbers don’t add up to success when it comes to preventing “mass shootings.”

Consequences

So, looking at the actions of pro-Hamas demonstrators on university campuses and in the streets of major blue-tinged cities over the last few weeks, we really don’t have to ask as Dorothy Thompson did, in mid-1941 – who goes Nazi? College students suckled on the sour teat of DIE-addled academicians with delusions of intellectual grandeur, for a certainty, and recent immigrants who have brought their unfortunate old habits of hate with them.

Still, when it comes to that first group, it has been amazing and disheartening to observe that sheltered twentysomethings driven to hair-trigger meltdown by the alleged presence of misogyny, the faintest hint of racism, and microaggressions so tiny as to be invisible to the naked eye have enthusiastically aligned themselves with genocidal Jew haters from Gaza. Students and academics didn’t even pause for a split second, before cheering on indiscriminate random slaughter, torture, repeated rape so violent that it left pelvic bones broken, burning families alive in their own homes, looting and hostage-taking.

While those educated in the most prestigious universities and colleges in our fair nation may not grasp the obvious double-standard, a fair number of the rest of us see it all very plainly. Indiscriminate and brutal slaughter of civilians by armed bullies is bad, m’kay? The Geneva Convention, that much-violated set of rules governing the conduct of war operations, frowns on it, for all that only a few nations conducting warfare lately have ever observed them. I am also certain that I am not the only one of the post-WWII generation who had those few brave individuals who sheltered European Jews, or helped them escape from the Nazis’ “Final Solution” held up to me as the epitome of moral courage in a dark time.

So, it emerges that has been considerable blow-back to the poisonous Jew-hate on display after the October 7th Pogrom – students and individual bigots being doxed, fired, or having offers of post-graduate employment rescinded, counter-protests in front of their houses, anonymous death threats (so alleged), and the threat of an internet mob harassing them. My heart bleeds for them… well, no, it doesn’t. Not a bit of it – all this has been established as the accepted treatment for conservatives, or the unwary innocent caught by the progressive cancel culture mob. Let it all unfold in the manner established by the progressive mob.

Larry Correia
(slightly edited as I don’t see profane language as being a necessity).

For all the people on social media crying about Israelis blowing up innocents this week, yep, that sucks, but why do terrorists hide behind civilians?
You. That’s it. You make it an effective tactic for them.

I see people saying that anything that harms innocents should be a war crime. Congratulations. You just ensured that’s the tactic every evil bastard out there will use from now on. Hiding under a church or school or hospital becomes a get out of jail free card.

Go do terrorist stuff. Then hide behind your kids. Kids die. Wait for the world to freak out and pressure the people you murdered to give up and leave you alone. Do more terrorist stuff to them again tomorrow.

Your naivete about the nature of evil ensures that hiding behind civilians is a winning tactic for them. You get sad for their human shields, governments then cave, the evil doers get to live to rape and murder again tomorrow.

There is nothing nice or kind or merciful about war. It’s miserable. Innocent people suffer and die. And it’s been part of human nature forever and will never ever stop, regardless of how hard you virtue signal your angst on Twitter.

Letting aggressor barbarians hit you but get away just ensures that they’ll do the same tomorrow. Every nation in history has understood this.
It isn’t about being mean. It is about being punitive. There aren’t diplomatic solutions with barbarians who are willing to go house to house, raping people to death. That ship has sailed.

The people who got hit are going to respond. We would. In fact, we did. Did we do it smartly? Nope. We did a lot of pointless things for the next 20 years, but on 9-11 we didn’t care what any other country had to say, and anybody who talked to us about “proportional response” got told where to go and how to get there. This is the same thing, but approximately 30 times worse adjusted for relative population size. So they’re going to do what they’re going to do, in the hope that they can stop it from happening again.

Will it work? Beats me. This is complicated and anybody who pretends it isn’t is trying to sell you something. But what I do know is that if you reward the enemy and give them what they want for hiding behind human shields, that just ensures they are going to do it more. Because when you’re evil, life is cheap, even your own kid’s lives, and everybody is expendable to get what you want.
So when Hamas hides under a school, they’re doing it for you.

Victor Davis Hanson

Israel vs. a Death Cult

Here are three critical considerations that must be understood about the current Israel-Hamas conflict. It is a sort of half-war. It consists of a military trying to defeat an organized clique of passive-aggressive, media-obsessed tribal murderers.

It is not really a war. This ‘war’ did not begin with a military assault. It is nothing like the Six-Day and Yom Kippur Wars, or indeed most other conflicts. It broke out with a surprise assault by between 1,500 and 2,500 gunmen of the Hamas death squads.

During peace and on a holiday, they entered Israel in a long-planned hit operation to murder civilians and take captives, focusing specifically on butchering the most vulnerable—the elderly, women, children, and infants—and in the most grotesque fashion imaginable.

Their desire was to be as savagely pre-civilizational as possible—the more macabre the manner of murder, the more fertile their sophistry that they were reduced to such repulsive blood lust by their worse “oppressors”. It would be as though gruesome Mafia hitmen had claimed they were forced to become animal-like due to even worse systemic anti-Italian bias. Even the Mexican cartels do not claim they are led to behead because of the injustice of the Mexican government.

By preplanned design, women were raped, and children and infants were burned alive, bound and executed, and (yes) beheaded. The dead were often mutilated. Some 1,400 Israelis were butchered, the vast majority civilians. Some 3,500-4,500 were wounded.

Hamas never planned to stage a preemptive war against the Israeli military. Its only agenda was to send killers to unprotected villages to murder the unarmed as they slept—in the manner of Nazi Einsatzgruppen and other mobile death squads on the Eastern Front. Almost immediately they counted on using hostages, human shields, and the media to avoid any accounting from the IDF.

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Second Amendment matters in a time of crisis
The importance of good guys with guns

Hamas attacked as Israelis were wrapping up the seven-day Jewish festival of Sukkot on Oct. 7. As many as 1,200 Israelis and some Americans were murdered, thousands wounded, and hundreds more taken hostage. Hamas terrorists went into civilian areas and attacked defenseless people who were walking down the street or shopping in stores.

A Sept. 20 Jerusalem Post headline prophetically warned: “Israelis should carry guns on Yom Kippur, police say.” But as of 2022, only 148,000 Israelis carried permitted guns in public for protection — just 3% of the adult Jewish population. Twenty years earlier, more than 10% of adult Jews in Israel had permits.

Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid called the recent police statement dangerous. He echoed sentiments common among Democrats in the United States: “Calling the citizens of Israel to come with weapons to the synagogue on Yom Kippur is not a security policy. It is dangerous populism.”

Concealed carry is much more widespread in the United States than in Israel. In 2022, 8.5% of American adults had permits. Outside of the restrictive states of California and New York, about 10.2% of adults had permits. And these numbers don’t even account for the fact that there are now 27 constitutional carry states where it isn’t necessary to have a permit to carry.

California, with one of the lowest concealed handgun permit rates and the strictest gun control laws in the country, shouldn’t hold itself out as a model for the rest of the country to follow. The periods after 2000, 2010 and 2020 show a consistent pattern: California’s per capita rate of public shootings is always much greater than in the rest of the country.

On Sunday Oct. 8, the day after the attack, Israel radically changed its policy on who could carry guns publicly. “Today, I directed the Firearms Licensing Division to go on an emergency operation in order to allow as many citizens as possible to arm themselves. The plan will take effect within 24 hours,” Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir posted on X.

In response to terrorist attacks for decades, Israel put more police and military to protect people, but they found that no matter how much money they spent, they couldn’t cover all the possible targets.

Before Israel began letting civilians carry handguns in the 1970s, terrorists committed attacks in Israel almost entirely with machine guns. Afterward, terrorists usually used bombs.

The reason was simple: Armed citizens can quickly immobilize a gun-wielding attacker, but no one can respond to a bomber once the bomb explodes. Still, armed citizens have occasionally succeeded in preventing bombings.

Like their Israeli counterparts, American police recognize their own limitations.

“A deputy in uniform has an extremely difficult job in stopping these attacks,” said Sarasota County, Florida, Sheriff Kurt Hoffman. “These terrorists have huge strategic advantages in determining the time and place of attacks. They can wait for a deputy to leave the area or pick an undefended location. Even when police or deputies are in the right place at the right time, those in uniform who can readily identify as guards may as well be holding up neon signs saying, ‘Shoot me first.’ My deputies know that we cannot be everywhere.”

Police1, the largest private organization for law enforcement officers, surveyed its 749,000 members and found that 86% of them believed that casualties from mass public school shootings could be reduced or “avoided altogether” if citizens had carried permitted concealed handguns in public places. An incredible 94% of mass public shootings occur in places where civilians are banned from having guns.

And 77% of Police1 members supported “arming teachers and/or school administrators who volunteer to carry at their school.” No other policy to protect children and school staff received such widespread support.

When a life-threatening crisis strikes, there might not be time for police to arrive. Amid such a massive assault by Hamas, it was simply impossible for the Israeli police and military to protect all civilians.

Unfortunately, some lessons are learned the hard way. If only more Israelis had been armed at the time of the attack, more of them would be alive today.

Victor Davis Hanson

A 50th Anniversary War?

Why did Hamas stage a long-planned, carefully executed and multifaceted attack on Israeli towns, soldiers, and civilians—one designed to instill terror by executing noncombatants, taking hostages, and desecrating the bodies of the dead?

And how were the killers able to enter Israeli proper in enough numbers to kill what could be hundreds and perhaps eventually wound what could be thousands?

a) Ostensibly, radical Palestinians wanted to stop any rumored rapprochement between the Gulf monarchies—the traditional source of much of their cash—and Israel, by forcing the issue of Arab solidarity in times of “war”, especially through waging a gruesome attack aimed at civilians and encompassing executions and hostage taking. Iran likely was the driving force to prompt the war—given its greatest fear is a Sunni Arab-Israeli rapprochement.

b) Arab forces have had only success against Israel through surprise attacks during Israeli holidays, as in the Yom Kippur War (i.e., was it any accident that the present attack began 50-years almost to the day after the October 6, 1973 beginning of the Yom Kippur War?). And so they struck again this Saturday during Simchat Torah, coming at the end of a weeklong Jewish celebration of Sukkot—in hopes that others will join in as happened in 1973. (So much for the Arab warnings not for Westerners to conduct war during Ramadan).

c) Hamas may have reckoned that recent Israeli turmoil and mass leftist street protests over proposed reforms of the Israeli Supreme Court had led to permanent internal divisions and thus a climate of domestic distraction if not an erosion of deterrence.

But, more importantly, in a larger sense the Biden administration has contributed both to the notion that Hamas was a legitimate Middle East player, and to the perception that the U.S. was backing away from its traditional support for Israel—to the delight of Hamas—based on the following inexplicable policies:

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Will Gov. Newsom ever realize California’s gun laws must follow the Second Amendment?

By The Editorial Board | opinion@scng.com |
How many times will it take for Gov. Gavin Newsom, Attorney General Rob Bonta and others to realize California’s gun laws must follow the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America?

On Sept. 22, their attempt to limit rifle and pistol magazines to 10 bullets again was shot down by Judge Roger Benitez of the Southern District of the U.S. District Court, part of the Ninth Circuit. The ban derived from Proposition 63 in 2016.

The case is Miller v. Bonta. On June 5, 2021 Benitez originally ruled the ban unconstitutional. Sixteen days later a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit stayed the ruling, leaving the law in place. Matters changed after the U.S. Supreme Court strongly affirmed Second Amendment protections in its June 23, 2022 decision, NYSRPA v. Bruen. The top court also ordered the Miller case heard again by Benitez.

In his new Miller case decision, Benitez held, “Based on the text, history, and tradition of the Second Amendment, this law is clearly unconstitutional … There is no American tradition of limiting ammunition capacity and the 10-round limit has no historical pedigree and it is arbitrary and capricious. It is extreme.”

He noted there is no federal ban on such magazines. And state bans are not uniform and “arbitrary.”

He cited several cases of self-defense where small magazines were inadequate in fighting off criminals. In Kentucky, an intruder came in blasting at a family. One daughter was killed and the father wounded three times as he returned fire with 11 rounds from one gun and eight from a second, failing to hit the assailant, who later was arrested.

Benitez also noted 81 million Americans own up to 456 million firearms. And that criminals don’t follow gun laws.

Benitez performed a “masterful job at the molecular level” of picking apart “every argument put forth by the state of California” and other states to limit the Second Amendment, Sam Paredes told us; he’s the executive director of Gun Owners of California, which filed an amicus brief in the case.

Bonta, who we endorsed for re-election last year, filed an appeal. He said, “We will continue to fight for our authority to keep Californians safe from weapon enhancements designed to cause mass casualties.” Newsom said, “It’s time to wake up. Unless we enshrine a Right to Safety in the Constitution, we are at the mercy of ideologues like Judge Benitez.”

That was a reference to Newsom’s proposed 28th Amendment that, among other things, would ban so-called “assault weapons,” which really are just cosmetically mean-looking rifles.

Ironically, that’s a tacit admission the restrictions he favors currently are unconstitutional.

Earlier this month Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico tried banning open carry of legal guns. She was rebuffed in court and even by such liberal Democrats as Rep. Ted Lieu of Los Angeles, who reminded her, ““No state in the union can suspend the federal Constitution. There is no such thing as a state public health emergency exception to the U.S. Constitution.”

Gun rights are here to stay. Newsom and Bonta need to end their assaults on Californians’ right to defend themselves.

An Assault on Bill of Rights

The people of New Mexico — and, we fear, the people of the United States — owe Albuquerque Police Chief Harold Medina a real debt of gratitude.

Medina has stated unequivocally that his department will not enforce an unconstitutional “emergency order” by Michelle Lujan Grisham, the governor of New Mexico, to suspend the right of her constituents to lawfully carry firearms.

The governor’s order is in response to a spate of shootings in New Mexico’s largest city.

“A child is murdered, the perpetrator is still on the loose, and what does the governor do? She … targets law-abiding citizens with an unconstitutional gun order,” state Sen. Greg Baca, the ranking Republican in New Mexico’s state Senate, told the Associated Press.

“I don’t know what her thought process was that she suddenly thought she could trample the Second Amendment,” state Rep. Stefani Lord told KOAT Channel 7 of Albuquerque at a protest against the governor’s order.

The move by Grisham is excessive. It violates the Bill of Rights and it is exactly the sort of escalation that Americans who defend the Second Amendment fear and warn their friends, neighbors and family about when other measures to curtail gun owners’ rights are debated.

Even proponents of gun control, including activist David Hogg and U.S. Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., recognizes that Grisham’s order tramples Constitutional rights.

“I support gun safety laws,” Lieu said on social media, according to a Fox News report. “However, this order from the Governor of New Mexico violates the U.S. Constitution. No state in the union can suspend the federal Constitution.”

We appreciate the congressman speaking out against this violation of the Second Amendment just as we appreciate the police chief’s recognition that his department has no authority to join the governor in violating the Constitution. We hope the rebukes and reprimands are swift and severe enough that this infringement does not spread from the Land of Enchantment to our other 49 states.

Can There be Good News About Public Violence?

Some of us are afraid of bad news. Most of us know someone who is afraid of going to the doctor because they don’t want to make hard decisions about their health. The great news is that most medical conditions can be treated. That emotional reaction is also common when we consider public violence. It is particularly accurate about how we feel about mass-murder.

Many of us feel both compelled to watch the news about public violence, while at the same time we want to turn away and pretend it doesn’t happen. Let me bring you good news. We learned how to stop mass-murder in several ways. We’ve done it, so we are talking about actual practice rather than mere theory. The first thing we have to do is get past the fantasy of Hollywood violence and talk about what really happens.

I’m going to go back to the medical model for a moment. I’ve had friends who oscillated between denial and helplessness. They feel that there can’t be a problem, or that the problem is intractable so why bother. They become hopeless and vulnerable to people who sell quack cures. I won’t do that to you. I’ve studied public violence for a decade, and there is real hope to stop mass-murderers. For a moment, let’s set aside both fantasy and our fears.

Part of us knows that what we see from Hollywood isn’t real. Yes, we might be caught up in the story. At the same time, part of our mind knows that hundreds of people don’t suddenly explode in a flash of flame and get thrown backwards when someone waves a gun around. The truth is that mass-murder is hard, and ordinary citizens stop mass-murderers most of the time. That is fairly obvious if we’re willing to look at it for a minute. Again, I promise it will only be a minute. It turns out that you have lived through the critical experiment many times.

Remember one of the times you walked into a group of your friends and shouted hello. Your friends look at you. One of them points their finger at you and you point back at them and wave. You do that a number of times as more of your friends recognize you.

Then you see a friend of to the side that you missed. You wave and smile to see someone you didn’t notice at first. There is a feeling of an unexpected, pleasant surprise. We didn’t see them at first because we were concentrating on someone else in the group. We thought we saw everyone, but we really didn’t. A friend we didn’t see slaps us on the shoulder and asks how we’ve been. We were looking at the group so we never noticed our friend come up behind us.

Hold that experience in mind for a minute. I could ask you all kinds of questions about your friends and we’d find out that you didn’t really see them at all. How were they sitting? Who was talking to whom? How were they dressed, and what were they doing with their hands when you said hello? We are not a camera, and we imagine that we see more than we really do.

We don’t see everything. As soon as we look at one thing,
we become blind to the rest of the world around us.

(The hard part starts now, but it won’t be long.)

That common experience explains why we kill mass murderers time after time. To put it in simple terms, they don’t see us and we shoot them. Maybe they die right there, and maybe they are only wounded. Being shot at makes the attacker feel deeply vulnerable. Usually, they run away. This wasn’t the violence they had imagined and they usually take their own life.

(The gruesome part is over so you can breathe again.)

There are other perceptual and tactical factors at work, but I’m not trying to make better murderers. The fact is that mass-murderers are vulnerable.

Where ordinary citizens were allowed to be armed, we stopped attempted mass-murderers almost two-thirds of the time. That also had a drastic effect on the number of people who were injured or killed. Ordinary citizens like you saved over a thousand lives. Again, the reasons might not be obvious to everyone.

It is clear that stopping the murderer means that more innocent people aren’t getting shot. It also means we can move the people who were injured to safety and we can quickly start life-saving treatment by stopping the bleeding. EMTs get to the injured victims faster because the scene is safe. There are fewer victims to treat, so each victim gets more attention, and the victims are in better condition when EMTs first reach them.

That is what happens time after time. On average, we’ve done that about every 18 days for the last 8 years. None of that happens while we wait another 15 minutes for the police to arrive.

It turns out that the murderer wasn’t so deadly because he had some Hollywood super weapon. Mass-murderers hunt us in “gun-free” zones. The murderer was deadly because he could kill at will without someone to stop him.

Millions of us go armed every day, but we obeyed the rules and left our guns outside.
The mass-murderer didn’t.

I’m sure that some of you can see the answers already.
  • The personal solution is easy. Make sure that someone can shoot back.
  • The public solution is time tested. We’ve done it for the last decade, and we’ve never had a school attacked where they had a public program of armed school staff.
  • The legal solution is simple. Make property owners responsible when they disarm the people who obey the law. If you stop me from protecting my family, then you become responsible for their safety.
  • The media solution is easy as well. Most mass-murderers kill innocent people so the mass-media will show us their face, their name, and their manifesto. Stop giving mass-murderers a multi-million-dollar publicity campaign.
  • All that might sound simple, but the political solution is harder. We have to ignore quack cures that have failed in the past.

I told you there was good news.

Your God-Given Rights vs. Their Power-Driven Rules

The Tool Who Governs New Mexico Has Handed Patriots a Potent New Tool

I want to thank the versatile governor of New Mexico, whose name I don’t care about, for being a communist and a fascist all at once. Now that may seem strange, coming from somebody who actually believes in freedom and actually defended it for 27 years, but I want you to hear me out. She may be an aspiring dictator and a mid-wit Karen brimming over with Xanax wishes and Chardonnay dreams, but she’s providing us with a valuable opportunity that we should take full advantage of. She has decreed that the constitutional right to keep and bear arms must yield to what she unilaterally decided is a “public health emergency.” Cool. Now, I’ve got some decrees of our own.

I’ve long said that there are three ways things can go. Option One is a free society where there are norms and rules that we all abide by and our Constitutional rights are protected and everybody has a right to participate in their own governance. This is my favorite option. It’s the one that I grew up in back when America was a free country and not a pronoun-fixated banana republic. Option Two is an authoritarian dictatorship where guys like me are in charge. Not my first choice, but I can live with it. Finally, Option Three is a communist dictatorship, and then it’s basically break out the rifles, boys. I was never good at kneeling, and at my age, my knees just won’t tolerate it any better than my attitude will.

Well, Governor Paula Pot has made it clear that Option One is now off the table, so I guess we have to go with Option Two – ironically, during the week of the 50th anniversary of Augusto Pinochet overthrowing the communist dictator of Chile. Now, I think it’s a bad idea and I’m still pushing for Option One, but it’s pretty clear that freedom no longer an option. So Option Two it is.

Let’s start decreeing stuff, Republicans!

The first thing red states need to decree is a ban on the teaching, advocacy, or practice of socialism in any of its putrid forms. Those who care nothing about the children will immediately pipe up about the alleged right to speak freely, but they refuse to acknowledge the harm this poisonous ideology does. Harm trumps rights, as colleges and the regime media have taught us. And boy, is socialism harmful. It’s violence – literally. Marxism is responsible for over 100 million deaths in the last century. That’s more deaths than net neutrality, Republican Medicare cuts, and dead-naming combined!

From the killing fields of Russia and Ukraine, to those of Red China and Cambodia, Marxism is murder. We must prioritize safety, for the children, and there is no safe space when an ideology of death like socialism is able to be articulated and advocated in public. Free speech is nice, I guess, but it is officially known that no right is absolute. Socialism is clearly hate speech, which is totally a thing in our Constitution, according to sources and experts who you can watch on MSNBC anytime you want – well, not after we ban socialism! Because socialism is hate speech, not only can we ban it, but we must ban it as the public health menace that it is.

And when we retake the White House, it won’t just be red governors doing it. As a nation, we will be able to scratch “Destroying Socialism” off our to-do list. It will be totally illegal and we can get right on enforcing the ban with the reconstituted FBI, the reformed Department of Justice, and the United States Army helicopter corps.

The next public health decree? No trans insanity! We’ve got a public health crisis where children are being mutilated with chemicals and scalpels to conform their God-given bodies to the delusions of their Chardonnay-sodden Munchhausen mommies. This must stop. I know it’s weird that I have to say it, but castrating a boy so he can more effectively pretend to be a girl causes harm. And it is unsafe. And therefore it should be subject to being banned by a decree issued by a caring chief executive. And if you disagree, you clearly don’t care about the children – wait, that’s actually not sarcasm.

But why stop at kids? The decree should include outlawing mutilation as a treatment for mental illness in adults as well. I know that there are some well-meaning libertarianish folks out there who buy the idea that after age 18, we as a society have no interest in what you do to yourself. Well, we don’t let people walk into a hospital and say “Chop off my arm” because they feel like it, and what’s good for the arm is good for the penis.

If you want to cut up your body because you think you’re the other gender, you have a mental problem and not a physical one that can be cured by some quack surgeon slicing you into pieces. Some people will say this isn’t tolerant, and that’s fine with me. We tried tolerance, and we ended up with men dressed like Charo twerking their be-thonged butts in the faces of our kindergartners.

The next decree should address a massive public health crisis among children, because it’s always about the children, who are failing to learn and be educated in unionized schools. That’s public healthish, right? Clearly, teachers unions must be outlawed, and those running them prosecuted and punished for the lasting harm they have inflicted on a generation of kids. Now, some might argue that this is the kind of policy that should go through the normal legislative process, but I beg to differ. It’s a public health emergency when children are failing to learn to read and write because I said so, and if you disagree that’s violence, and if you oppose this common sense measure, you clearly hate the children. There’s blood on your hands. You should be deplatformed. You’re also racist and probably a transphobe or something.

Remember, we must protect Our Democracy, which is why those in power – us – must be able to rule by decree. Now these decrees may represent an expansive reading of “public health emergency,” but that’s OK. As currently understood, laws should be read expansively if that’s what’s required to, say, get the result a politicized prosecutor wants. Once again, it’s not the paradigm that I support – I think this is all a terrible idea – but it is the operative New Rule, and I know that because I see a governor of a miserable desert state issuing decrees that the Second Amendment is no longer in effect, and I watch a senile, corrupt, desiccated old pervert’s Department of Justice (sic) being sicced on a man who will very likely be his opponent in the next presidential election.

Again, I don’t like any of this, but you know what I like even less? Taking this crap without hitting back. Leftist jerks, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – I told you so.

Someone, I fail to recall who, said today that he could see Biden pardoning Hunter, then resign as POTUS. I think it only possible after Harris has been replaced as VPOTUS, which, to be frank, has been talked about quite a lot lately anyway.

Just my opinion, but be prepared to see Cali goobernor Newsom in the news more and more.

All the other ‘smith degrees offered by schools are 2 year associates

Oklahoma school to offer nation’s first bachelor’s in gunsmithing

State officials could have a new weapon in their arsenal as they try to lure gun and ammunition manufacturers to Oklahoma.

Murray State College leaders say the school’s gunsmithing program could become a huge economic development driver thanks to a $10 million legislative investment that will allow the college to offer the nation’s first bachelor’s degree in gunsmithing.

With backing from the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education, campus officials approached lawmakers in the spring with a pitch that expanding the school’s gunsmithing program to offer four-year degrees could turn Oklahoma into a hub for gun businesses and manufacturing.

“The idea was this is an investment in an industry that can locate in our state, and regionally, we have the ability distribution-wise to become a powerhouse in this,” Murray State College President Tim Faltyn said in an interview.

Although the funding measure passed overwhelmingly, some lawmakers questioned the new investment in a college that’s located in the district of House Speaker Charles McCall, R-Atoka.

‘Major shift toward embracing modern technology’

Murray State College has offered a gunsmithing program since 1979. Annually, the school admits 30 students to its two-year degree program at its Tishomingo campus.

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I respect your second amendment.    
[leaves out the ‘but’ like they always do]

I also respect understanding ways our society works. We need to reform background checks, we need better ID scanning systems to ensure the guns don’t go into the wrong hands.

I’ll protect the American people at all cost, that starts with-
Preventing mass shootings, you don’t need an AK-47 to hunt, defend yourself or your home. You could simply defend yourself with a simple firearm.

I as your president of the United States of America, have no rights to interfere with your private life but I will protect Americans.

Respecting the Second Amendment should stand without further contradicted commentary.

Our society possesses a level of violence, and neither existing nor new gun laws will lead us to a utopian state where laws alone rectify criminal or violent actions.

Background checks have demonstrated limited effectiveness, given the rise in gun-related crimes since their introduction. Numerous mass shooters acquired firearms by providing false information on their 4473 forms (background check applications) and passing due to insufficient government scrutiny of buyers’ backgrounds.

Additionally, some potential mass shooters who harbor intentions of carrying out mass violence might lack a criminal record or documented mental health issues to identify during background checks.

Everyday criminals affiliated with gangs have no concerns about passing a background check to acquire firearms, which they then use for activities such as targeting rival gangs or engaging in various criminal acts.

Criminals frequently steal firearms or obtain them through straw purchases. The access to firearms for individuals should be a straightforward and uncomplicated procedure, without unnecessary restrictions on where they can carry those arms.

Imposing gun restrictions inadvertently empowers criminals while penalizing law-abiding citizens.

To the Knife

Not exactly sure of where I read this distillation of Walter Russell Meade’s definition of the Jacksonian attitude to conflict – possibly at Ace of Spates HQ, or maybe Bayou Renaissance Man, but the phrase stuck with me as soon as I read it. Basically, the average middle-to-working class Jacksonian American who just wants seriously to be left alone has only two settings when it comes to threatened conflict: “Can’t we just work out a way to settle this?” and “War to the knife and no quarter.”

There is no dial setting, which can be moved up or down; there is only “off” and “on.” And it takes a hell of a lot of provocation to flip that switch from ‘off’ to ‘on’. I cannot help wondering of late how close that flip is, with regard to racial aggression – what with feral black hoodlums making certain cities and neighborhoods basically unlivable for all – black, white, Asian, whatever. Making public transportation a thing to avoid unless totally desperate – you know, like the New York City subway system. With teachers of color feeling free to display their vicious racism on social media. With the crushing hand of DEI in the corporate and academic worlds, with the blatant twisting of American history by the never-to-be-sufficiently-condemned 1619 Project, the national establishment media (and local affiliates) turning themselves into triple-pretzel knots trying to paper over the stats of which race is actually committing the out-of-proportion to their representation in the overall population numbers of robbery, rape and murder… even just all-hands brawls in fast-food restaurants and amusement venues. Read in the media headlines of a senseless shooting, a mass looting of a neighborhood corner store or a punch-out in a Waffle House or McDonalds? Yeah, we know with a high degree of accuracy the color of those involved, once we scroll past the headline, and say to ourselves, “Yep – about what I thought.”

I should add, for the benefit of progressives snorkeling through the pool of conservative bloggers and commentors in this corner of the internet searching for risible tidbits which can be construed as ‘the-most-raaaaacist-evah!’ to tantalize the woke mob with fresh meat; this soon-to-be-end-of-patience does most definitely not apply to those friends, co-workers, fellow parishioners, and neighbors who happen to be of that year-round dark tan color, but are alike in devotion to the principles of fair play, good manners, rewards based on ability, and the guiding precepts of our Constitution. Such fellow good citizens are not the problem. Trust me – we know the difference. It is that unholy and dysfunctional unity that we are close to being out of all toleration for; black urban criminality, the community leaders who give them cover and space, and the intellectuals who spin all kinds of airy justification for it in the media, in college lecture halls and in mandatory corporate and government DIE classes.

I don’t know where or when the precipitating incident will come, or even if there will be just one single event that galvanizes a response. In my opinion, it will be a cluster of independently-occurring events or small incidents: the pair of Sikh employee/owners beating the snot out of a serial robber in Stockton, California, the dentist who got internet-mobbed for allegedly hosting a back yard party mocking Juneteenth and has since filed a defamation lawsuit … small feathers in the wind.

Meet the Company Trying to Control Your Mind

There’s a group of people who control what you are allowed to see — the news you read, the videos you watch, the posts you engage with.

You haven’t heard of them. You don’t know their names, but they determine, through methods both direct and indirect, whether you are allowed to be exposed to particular messages. Their decisions can bankrupt companies, silence voices and fundamentally shift cultural norms. Who are these people and how do they do this?

Well, at the top level you have a network of global elites who have created a universal framework full of guidelines and ratings designed to enforce “approved” narratives and punish disapproved ones. It sounds like a conspiracy theory, except it isn’t a secret and we’re not guessing.

First, you have the World Economic Forum, the WEF, and their platform for shaping the future of media, entertainment and culture. Second, you have the World Federation of Advertisers, the WFA, who represent mega-corporations that control 90% of global advertising dollars. WFA members are a who’s who of global business and include some of our recent wokeified favorites like Bud Light’s parent company Anheuser-Busch InBev, Hershey, Procter & Gamble, Lego and Disney.

There is barely a billionaire Fortune 500 CEO, heavyweight philanthropist, government or woke nonprofit that isn’t associated with the WEF or the WFA.

In 2019, the WFA established the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, or GARM. Within months, the WEF adopted GARM as part of its platform for shaping the future of media, entertainment and culture. GARM is a cross-industry alliance that brings these mega-corporations — the advertisers — together with Big Tech companies like Meta, who owns Facebook and Instagram; Google-owned YouTube; the CCP’s TikTok; and even Snapchat and Pinterest.

This unholy alliance created something they call the Brand Safety Floor & Suitability Framework. Think of Brand Safety as a dog whistle for censorship. They say it themselves: The Brand Safety Floor means, “Content not appropriate for any advertising support.” In other words, if you publish content that violates these guidelines, you will be blacklisted from 90% of the advertising revenue in the marketplace.

So, what have these global elites decided to put in their censorship framework? They started with things we can all universally agree on, like preventing the distribution of child pornography or the advocacy of graphic terrorist activity. But they don’t draw the line at what is objectively criminal, abusive or dangerous. They continue expanding the guidelines to include far more subjective parameters.

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Comment O’ The Day

I don’t trust information about studies unless a link is given to read the study or a title of the study is given so that it can be found. Behind this study is Cynthia Miller-Idriss. She’s the same person who claims “Physical fitness has always been central to the far right.”

Everytown

Our new study with @splcenter found that young people with easier access to guns tended to hold stronger beliefs that the government is restricting our freedoms and that the Second Amendment gives citizens the right to overthrow the government.

Moros Kostas

You guys are really telling on yourselves with this one. Gun rights bother you at least in part because they promote small government views.

Government, almost by definition, DOES restrict our freedoms. Those polled aren’t wrong in the least for seeing it that way. The constant struggle is keeping this necessary evil contained to the minimum required for a functioning society.

Orgs like Everytown are part of a broad spectrum of authoritarian social engineers. They want people to be docile, preferably stuffed into cities, owning nothing, and restricted to a narrow overton window of acceptable opinions and lifestyles. The Chinese social credit system is their model.

Guns are a threat to this (as is free speech, which is why that is also a target for them). Not even really guns themselves, but the individualist ideas they can awaken simply by accepting the natural right to bear arms. Because once you accept the natural rights framework, the Bloombergian government dystopia they want is unacceptable.

Notice how the very same people who want to ban guns also tend to want social media to censor more speech, want the government to tax everything they declare undesirable, want to punish thought crimes with a widening net of “hate speech” restrictions that shutter the overton window, and constantly find new things they want banned.

This is also why they insist on federal gun laws. They know Boise or Manchester are doing just fine with minimal gun control laws, which drives them insane. It proves the problem in their violent cities is their own fault, and not due to gun rights. The authoritarians can’t allow such counterexamples to exist.

Control, control, control. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Also, if people polled really said the 2A grants the right to overthrow govt, that’s nonsense. But I wonder if what they meant (these are young laypeople, after all) was that the 2A exists in part as a failsafe against a govt that has gone tyrannical. Because that is absolutely correct.

 

Our society’s ‘top brains’ have gone mad — and dysfunctional politics is the result

“Suppose we got it all wrong and the real crazies are the TV people in nice suits and $300 haircuts?”
That’s an observation by Richard Fernandez on Twitter, and he has a good point.

There’s a lot of craziness in the air these days.
But for the most part it seems to be flowing from the top down, not bubbling up from the bottom.

It wasn’t farmers and factory workers who came up with the idiotic COVID responses — nor was it they who originated the more or less criminal idea of conducting “gain of function” research on making dangerous viruses more dangerous.

It wasn’t shopkeepers and bus drivers who thought the way to deal with burgeoning urban crime was to get rid of police and release criminals without bail.

It hasn’t been landscapers and auto mechanics championing the notion that a child in the single-digit age range can make a lifetime choice about his or her genitalia or maintaining that even criticizing that idea is itself a species of “violence.”

Ordinary Americans haven’t been claiming the way to promote free speech is to censor people or the way to end racism is to classify everyone by race and consequently treat them differently.

It’s not the working class that wants to “save the planet” by blocking traffic, starting forest fires or banning pickup trucks or gas stoves (though private jets remain surprisingly free from criticism).

All these crazy ideas and more are the product of our allegedly educated and intelligent overclass, the experts, policymakers and media types who in theory represent the thinking part, the brains, of our society. But there’s something wrong with these people — the “brains” of our society are basically crazy. Crazy is when you believe and do things that obviously don’t make sense or fit with the facts.

It’s important to have an intellectual class.
Exactly how important is open to question — in his recent book “How Innovation Works,” Matt Ridley argues that most 19th- and 20th-century innovations actually came from tradespeople and industry, not academics doing abstract research — but important enough.
The COVID lockdown scolds killed people — but they still have no shame

There are dangers to an intelligentsia, though.
Communism and Nazism started as intellectual movements; so did such fads as eugenics and lobotomies.
The Tuskegee Experiment wasn’t the product of racist Klansmen but of the curiosity of credentialed public-health experts.

In a 1999 essay, Neal Stephenson wrote that “during this century, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it. In places like Russia and Germany, the common people agreed to loosen their grip on traditional folkways, mores, and religion, and let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abattoir. Those wordy intellectuals used to be merely tedious; now they seem kind of dangerous as well.”

It’s gotten worse.

Ideas can be dangerous; playing with them can be like gain-of-function research with viruses — if they escape into the general environment, disaster can ensue.

Guardrails like custom, religion and moral traditions made such disasters less likely, but we have spent basically my entire lifetime weakening those guardrails.
At the same time, our ruling class has become less diverse and more prone to groupthink.

A century ago, the people running our government, our economy, our academy and our media were varied.
Now they’re all members of the same class, educated usually at the same elite institutions, incestuously intermarried and driven by class solidarity.

As J.D. Tuccille recently wrote regarding the press’ supine attitude toward government censorship, today’s journalists “love Big Brother”: “Prominent reporters and powerful officials know each other, share attitudes, and trust each other.”

Agriculturalists know that in a monoculture, diseases spread rapidly because the entire crop is identical.
In a social and intellectual monoculture, groupthink ensures that bad ideas spread the same way.
This is especially so because our ruling class has substituted reputation for achievement.

One can be a successful CEO if the company does badly, so long as it pursues the right political goals.
Journalists, bureaucrats and political operatives routinely fail upward because they play to their peers.
The result is that any crazy idea can flourish if it’s stylish. And it’s gotten more dangerous, probably because social media allow so much self-herding behavior by elites.

Dissent is instantly ostracized before it even has a chance to be considered.

A decade ago, the crazy ideas I listed earlier would have been seen as beyond the pale of civilized political discussion. Now they’re all endorsed by leading American institutions.
That’s the hallmark of dysfunctional politics, and dysfunctional politics is what we have.

Issums gonna cry somoa?

Under Emotional Stress (someone hand me a tissue) - Imgflip

Oreste D’Arconte: All is lost on the gun fight

I don’t like to think like this, or write about it. I believe I am far from being a pessimist, and I can see the humor and humanness in everything. But deep down I am a realist, and thus I must accept a sad and heartbreaking truth: We will not end gun violence in our lifetimes. And by that I mean the lifetimes of everyone alive today.

Yes, we could stop manufacturing guns, except for military and police firearms but, again, what will that change? There are already millions of guns stashed away in American homes. And you can’t confiscate all of them.

Plus the smuggling of guns and ammo into our country is unstoppable. Period. Guns, unfortunately, are here to stay.

Maybe we could vet potential gun owners better, but that’s a hopeless tactic. Anyone who wants to can get their hands on a gun and bullets.

Abolish the Second Amendment? That would make no difference. And the answer surely is not for everyone to go out and buy themselves a gun.

Sure, I can wear my new orange shirt, the official color to protest gun violence, as often as I want, but it’s a symbolism that will change nothing.

You can shed a tear now or later for all the poor American souls who will be murdered by guns in the years and decades ahead. The greed, malfeasance, maliciousness and just pure wrongheadedness that got us to this point is not going to change anytime soon.

Instead, you may need to resign yourself to the idea that someone you know, someone you love, or even yourself, may be shot by a stranger. Even if you rarely leave your home — except, maybe, to pick up your newspaper on the lawn in the morning — you can become a victim. Unfortunately, that’s the world we live in.

The Supreme Court will soon hear a case brought by a violent gun owner that will challenge federal law that bars Americans subject to restraining orders from owning guns. Guess which way that will go.

Maybe it’s better if we all just try not to think about it. I hate it, but I can’t …

Foreigners frequently voice their dissatisfaction with America due to the value placed on the Second Amendment by Americans. While foreign opinions on the rights held by Americans are irrelevant, I still wish to address this matter.

Foreign perceptions of the Second Amendment and American gun culture are largely influenced by both American national media and their respective country’s media. These individuals are fed a narrative-driven propaganda that shapes their perspective. The notion that gun owners prioritize the right to bear arms over the safety of children is an absurd viewpoint.

Both gun owners and non-gun owners share a common goal of prioritizing the safety of our children. However, our approaches to securing schools differ. I support the implementation of armed security measures, secured buildings with metal detectors, automatic timed locked doors, and one-way exit and entrance systems. The measures I propose do not have to resemble a prison, despite being a common objection raised by supporters of gun control and many individuals from foreign countries. It is worth noting that various locations, including certain schools, have already implemented similar security measures.

Everyday gun violence often stems from gang-related activities involving career criminals. The failure of our justice system to effectively keep these individuals incarcerated is often attributed to a lack of community cooperation, driven by fear of retaliation from the gangs in question. This perpetuates a harmful cycle of violence that gun laws cannot address. Shootings will simply be substituted by another manifestation of violence.

In conclusion, our right to bear arms is a fundamental cornerstone that has shaped the foundation of America. I understand that individuals from foreign countries who are not acquainted with the concept of gun ownership as a fundamental right may find it difficult to comprehend. However, it’s challenging for those who hold irrational perspectives to comprehend to see beyond their emotions.

-Carl