ESSE SINE METU IN FACIE INIMICI TUI. TUENDAM INOPS ET FACERE NON MALI.
Category: Safety
And SloJoe (more probably some staff member) says he’ll sign it? What’s going on here? Was all this merely some ploy to give him a way to make like he’s a friend of hunters?
BELLEVUE, WA – Only hours after the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms blasted the Biden administration’s attempt to eliminate funding for school hunter education and archery programs, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed bipartisan legislation to prevent the cuts, and now the White House has confirmed President Biden will sign the Protecting Hunting Heritage and Education Act.
The bill passed the House 424-1 Tuesday. It was championed by members of both parties who recognized the administration had deliberately misinterpreted tenets of the 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act to cut funding for hunter safety, archery and other student programs.
“Joe Biden may be incapable of reading the writing on the wall,” said a jubilant CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb, “but there is no question the House and Senate members who almost unanimously passed this legislation do not suffer from the same foggy vision.”
Gottlieb offered kudos to lawmakers who acted swiftly this week to “nip this nonsense in the bud.” He called the administration’s attempt to cut this important funding “one more example of the Biden administration’s extremist sentiments toward any program even remotely connected to activities that may involve the lawful use of firearms. Only one vote was cast against the House version of the bill, by a Texas Democrat.
“This overwhelming action on Capitol Hill sends a clear message to the Biden White House that the administration’s anti-gun fanaticism has crossed the line when it threatens school programs that teach genuine safety and valuable conservation to our children,” Gottlieb said. “CCRKBA is proud to have played a part in this clear victory of common sense over crass extremism.”
The Senate version was introduced earlier this month by Senators John Cornyn (R-Texas), Krysten Sinema (I-Arizona) and Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina). A separate measure had been introduced by Montana Democrat Jon Tester. Congressman Mark Green (R-Tennessee) introduced the House version last month.
An act of mass violence hasn’t yet touched the Benjamin Logan Local School District.
Superintendent John Scheu is thankful for that.
But for years, every time news broke about yet another school shooting, Scheu faced a handful of “what if?” questions.
What if a school in this small, rural district about an hour northwest of Columbus, Ohio—where the closest police outpost is 10 miles away—was the next target of a shooting? What if Benjamin Logan students were the next to have to huddle in closets sending “I love you” texts to friends and family? What if Scheu’s community was the next to have to mourn the loss of beloved students and staff members?
“If it can happen in all of these other places, it could happen here,” he said.
So, Scheu and his district invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in security. They hired school resource officers who are stationed at each of the district’s three schools. Security cameras send live feeds to the local sheriff’s office. Staff are reminded often that exterior doors are not to be propped open or left unlocked for any reason.
There’s a new mental health clinic at one of the schools, staffed with counselors trained to help the district’s roughly 1,600 students and 225 staff members.
District leaders felt confident they’d done all they could to keep outside threats from entering their buildings.
But what if the threat came from someone already inside?
Students and teachers have lockdown drills, and, as has become commonplace in American schools, they know to pull down the shades and lock the classroom doors before hiding quietly from a threat. But, beyond that, there isn’t much they would be able to do but “wait and hope that help would come,” Scheu said.
Except, Scheu asked himself, what if there were staff members trained to intervene? What if a handful of teachers, aides, and others could quickly reach for a firearm if an active shooter were targeting students?
“When you’re talking about putting out an active shooter threat, it’s a matter of seconds, not a matter of minutes,” said Scheu, who has served as superintendent in the district since July 2020. “And it’s a matter of life and death.”
After a year of planning, the district’s first “Armed Response Team” was in place to start the 2023-24 school year, part of a growing trend in Ohio and elsewhere in which schools tap teachers and other employees to act as the first line of armed defense against an active shooter.
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.
Police on Monday encouraged licensed gun owners to carry their weapons to synagogues over the High Holiday period, as the security establishment registered a rise in terror alerts in the lead-up to the Yom Kippur fast day.
Police said in a statement that there has been a 15 percent increase in terror warnings compared to the two months before the holidays and that security forces were at a heightened alert level due to the threats.
Licensed gun owners were urged “to carry their gun in these times.”
The police statement said the number of alerts will likely rise further in the lead-up to Yom Kippur, which begins on Sunday evening.
“Therefore, we call on worshipers who have licensed gun to bring them to prayers. In addition, we call on the public in general to be aware and report any unusual incident in real-time to the police 100 hotline,” the statement read.
Police also said they were monitoring a concerning rise in Palestinian online incitement to carry out attacks.
Monday saw an attempted stabbing near Jerusalem and three separate shooting attacks against Israeli forces in the West Bank, the military said.
On the eve of Rosh Hashanah, an explosive device went off in Tel Aviv’s Yarkon Park in the early hours of the morning. There were no injuries. Two suspects were later arrested on suspicion of involvement.
In the lead-up to Rosh Hashanah, police made the unprecedented move of ensuring there was someone armed in every synagogue in Jerusalem due to the heightened terror threat.
Gun control in Israel has traditionally been relatively strict, with licenses generally only granted to those who can show a need for extra security in their line of work or daily life. Citizens in nearly all cases can own a single gun and only 50 bullets at a given time.
But far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, an advocate of relaxing the laws, has moved forward with easing ownership regulations, claiming having more licensed gun carriers could help combat waves of terror attacks and criminal gun violence that police and security forces have struggled to contain.
Critics have warned that increasing the number of firearms comes with significant risks, including suicides, violence against women, road rage incidents, and murders. According to data from the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, of the 32 women murdered with firearms between 2019 and 2021, nine were killed by people with licensed guns.
The High Holidays run through the first week of October, until the end of the Sukkot holiday.
In opening statements Monday, lawyers for two people suing over Oregon’s new gun laws said Ballot Measure 114′s provisions are the “most significant threat to [the right to bear arms] Oregonians have faced in nearly 165 years.”
“This case is not about public health, public safety or public concern,” plaintiffs’ attorney Tony Aiello told Judge Robert Rascio. “This is about individual rights. This is about the individual right to self defense and the right to bear arms to secure that right.”
Aiello said plaintiffs in the state trial plan to show that Measure 114, approved by voters last year, effectively limits Oregonians to owning only antique firearms. He said Measure 114 regulates firearms that were plentiful prior to 1859, the year Article I, Section 27 of the Oregon constitution — the section protecting the right to bear arms — was ratified.
The new laws would ban high capacity magazines holding more than 10 rounds of ammunition, require a completed background check to buy or transfer a firearm and require a person to take training and receive a permit to purchase a firearm. Raschio, an Oregon Circuit Court judge based in Harney County, blocked the new laws from taking effect in December pending this week’s trial.
In their opening statement, lawyers defending the new rules for the Oregon Department of Justice said the court must determine if large capacity magazines are considered “arms” under the state constitution, and thus protected, a question they said had already been resolved by the Oregon State Court of Appeals.
Over and over again, we’re told we need more gun laws because of the actions of people who are anything but law-abiding.
We shouldn’t have so-called assault weapons because some people have misused them. Never mind that these same people would have used whatever they could get their hands on to kill just as many people. No, those who actually obey the law should be punished for the actions of evil people.
But the truth is that people who don’t care about obeying the rules will simply break whatever rules they want.
Rochester Police say they found six loaded guns inside a building on North Clinton Avenue early Saturday morning. Officers say there was gunfire inside that building while it was operating an unlicensed bar.
RPD first responded to the property on North Clinton Avenue near Rauber Street around 11:30 p.m. on Friday after getting complaints about an after-hours party. Officers say they heard loud music and saw multiple illegally parked cars.…
Three hours later, RPD returned to the building after getting reports of shot fired. Officers saw people running and found multiple guns, along with a large quantity of narcotics, inside the building. No one was hit by the gunfire.
Among the firearms was an AR-style pistol and several other handguns.
Now, let’s look at this case for a moment. We’ve got everything from parking violations and loud music to an unlicensed bar to illegal guns and drugs.
I mean, if I didn’t know any better, I’d swear these weren’t law-abiding citizens here.
See, one of the problems with gun control is that it only impacts the law-abiding. It only controls those who are willing to accept that control.
Criminals, however, don’t.
For one thing, they don’t think they’ll get caught. The police showed up at this illegal bar earlier in the evening and were told that this was just a birthday party. When they left, the guy figured he was golden and probably felt pretty cocky.
He’d been breaking the law under the cops’ noses and got away with it.
I won’t say that people who break one or two laws will break any law. No, most people have a line somewhere that they won’t cross. It would be silly to say that someone who speeds will commit murder, after all.
But those who are willing to take a life aren’t necessarily going to quibble about speeding.
When it comes to gun control, those who are law-abiding are the only ones who will follow gun control laws, just like it’s the law-abiding who don’t run illegal bars out of their homes or tend to partake in illegal drugs as a general rule.
The biggest problem, though, is getting some other parties to understand it. They continue to push the idea that somehow you can control criminal behavior with just a few more laws despite ample evidence to the contrary.
The truth is that many simply choose to believe the laws will work because it makes them feel better about the laws they’re pushing for.
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.
September 17, 2023. After extensive discussions with ANJRPC, the State of New Jersey has issued revised carry training requirements addressing nearly all gun owner objections and concerns. The newly revised requirements eliminated any demonstration of tactical maneuvers, eliminated a demonstration of shooting proficiency at 25 yards, significantly extended the compliance date for current permit holders to requalify, and eliminated inappropriate content from the use of force instructional materials.
Click HERE,HERE, HERE and HEREto see the newly updated training requirements, which were negotiated by ANJRPC attorney Dan Schmutter, with input from attorney Evan Nappen.
Specifically, New Jersey eliminated any testing requirements for kneeling, one handed shooting, timed fire, and retention drills. Additionally, New Jersey has completely eliminated any demonstration of shooting proficiency at 25 yards, instead requiring shooting from 3, 5, 7, 10, and 15 yards. Also, New Jersey has extended the deadline for current permit holders to requalify from October 1, 2023 to December 31, 2023. New Jersey also eliminated from the “use of force” instructional materials content unrelated to right to carry, including provisions related to citizen’s arrest and use of handcuffs.
This development represents another extremely significant moment for New Jersey gun owners. The State of New Jersey has, for the second time this summer, explicitly taken steps to limit the harsh unintended consequences of erroneous rules for gun owners. It is a testimony to the newly found influence gun owners have attained in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Bruen, and ANJRPC is pleased to have been able to deliver this result.
If you want to contribute to the carry-killer lawsuit click here to make a donation.
If you are not already subscribed to these free email alerts, click here to sign up — there will be critical updates and alerts coming in the near future.
Texas lawmakers quietly passed a sweeping mandate for school safety measures, including a requirement to post an armed security officer at every school and provide mental health training for certain district employees.
Texas House Bill 3, which was signed into law June 14 by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, went into effect on Sept. 1, and comes in the wake of the horrific Uvalde school shooting that killed 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in May 2022.
In the bill, each school district campus is required to armed security guard which includes: a school district peace officer; a school resource officer; a commissioned peace officer employee; a school marshal; or a school district employee who has completed school safety training and carries a handgun on their person on school premises.
Snake oil. Can only detect an exposed firearm. And then, all the service does is call/text people. Sure it may save a small amount of time, after the crim decides to go kinetic, but as even the service says, it’s not perfect, or fool proof.
Gun violence has been declared a public health emergency in New Mexico following the death of an 11-year-old boy.
New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham made the announcement following the death of a young boy in a shooting on a highway. Albuquerque Police Chief Harold Medina confirmed in a press briefing that a boy was killed and a second woman was taken to hospital in critical condition. They were attacked while traveling westbound on Avenida Cesar Chavez near University Boulevard. Neither of the victims have been named.
Declaring a public health emergency, Lujan Grisham shared a statement lamenting the death of the boy and the earlier unrelated killing of a five-year-old girl in the area. “Today, I join the family of an 11-year-old boy in mourning his violent death yesterday. And I mourn the loss of a 5-year-old girl murdered in her bed last month,” the statement read.
“These are disgusting acts of violence that have no place in our communities. As a mother and grandmother, I cannot fathom the depth of these losses, and their effects will be felt by families, friends and communities forever.”
She said new measures need to be brought in to end gun violence in the state and called for a meeting to determine what steps can be taken to reduce harm caused by guns. Lujan Grisham continued: “The time for standard measures has passed. Today I am declaring gun violence a public health emergency in New Mexico.”
The executive order signed by Lujan Grisham stated the “rate of gun deaths in New Mexico” had increased by 43 percent from 2009 to 2018, compared to an 18 percent increase nationwide. It also said guns are the leading cause of death for children and teenagers in the state.
In her comments, the governor urged New Mexicans to take action against gun violence, saying: “To my fellow citizens: get loud. Step up. Demand change: from your neighbors, from your friends, from your communities, from your elected leaders. Enough is enough.”
Lujan Grisham’s actions were met with derision from New Mexico House Republican Minority Leader Ryan Lane, who accused her of politicizing the death to “push her anti-gun agenda.” Lane said in a statement: “The Democrat’s policies have created and exacerbated the crime crisis that is literally killing New Mexicans daily. It is unacceptable that it has taken this long to notice the number of everyday New Mexicans that are being affected by criminal violence.”
Newsweek has contacted Gov. Lujan Grisham via an email form on her website for comment.
___________________________________________
You know, concealed means concealed, but as I don’t live in NM……
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham on Friday issued an emergency public health order that suspends the open and permitted concealed carry of firearms in Albuquerque for 30 days in the midst of a spate of gun violence.
The Democratic governor said she is expecting legal challenges but felt compelled to act in response to gun deaths, including the fatal shooting of an 11-year-old boy outside a minor league baseball stadium this week.
The firearms suspension is tied to a threshold for violent crime rates that only the Albuquerque area currently meets. Police are exempt from the temporary ban on carrying firearms.
Lujan Grisham said the restrictions “are going to pose incredible challenges for me as a governor and as a state.”
“I welcome the debate and fight about how to make New Mexicans safer,” she said at a news conference, flanked by leading law enforcement officials, including the district attorney for the Albuquerque area.
Gun ownership is stepping in to help bridge a safety gap in New Mexico’s vast Indian country, according to gun experts in the state.
“No one is coming to save you” is a motto among Native Americans in New Mexico, according to Joe Talachy, a Pueblo of Pojoaque tribal officer who owns one of the few Native-founded gun stores in the U.S.
Talachy joined law enforcement in 2005, before serving as lieutenant governor and then governor of the Pojoaque Pueblo, notching a total of 11 years in tribal leadership. Now, he’s back in law enforcement and opened Indigenous Arms 1680 Ltd. Co., where locals have flocked to arm themselves against the unforeseeable and sign up for gun safety classes.
“People are starting to say, ‘Look, I used to see guns as being scary,’ and all this. But they’re looking at self-defense now as a necessity. Given the current circumstances and the instability going on, people are starting to understand that they need to defend themselves. For Native American people, our men and women – I’ve trained plenty of them – they’ve decided to take their own self-defense into their hands as well,” Talachy told Fox News Digital in a phone interview.
As Americans in just about every large city endure a crime wave, some of those cities have all but given up fighting crime and given the bad guys free rein over the city. Businesses are getting out of those big cities in record numbers because of rampant theft and Soros-backed prosecutors who will not charge criminals. In one city, crime has gotten so out of hand that if you get robbed, well, don’t call 911. File a report, and they’ll get back to you.
Even if you are cautious & follow all the safety advice, you may still become the unfortunate victim of a robbery. Do you know what your next steps should be? Make a police report & provide as much information as possible so we can recover your property quickly and safely. pic.twitter.com/79Cv0RI099
Austin, Texas, is a blue island in a fairly red state. As a result of liberal Democrat leadership that embraced the “defund the police” movement, Austin police are severely short-staffed and are asking anyone who gets robbed near an ATM to call the non-emergency 311 number instead of 911. Robbery victims also have the option of making an online police report of the incident. Austin Police took to X to inform residents what they should do if they are robbed, saying:
“Even if you are cautious & follow all the safety advice, you may still become the unfortunate victim of a robbery. Do you know what your next steps should be? Make a police report & provide as much information as possible so we can recover your property quickly and safely.”
Police also reminded those making a report to tell them the date and time of their ATM withdrawal. So, while being robbed, possibly at gunpoint, might seem like kind of an emergency to you, Austin Police have informed citizens that they don’t have enough manpower for it to be an emergency to them.
Thomas Villarreal is the President of the Austin Police Association. He places the blame for the crime wave in the Texas state capital squarely at the feet of a seemingly uncaring city council, stating, “We just continue to have a city council that doesn’t show its police officers that [it] cares about them.”
During a recent appearance on “Fox & Friends,” Villarreal had this to say about his city’s law enforcement predicament,
We’re a growing city, a city that should be up around 2,000 officers and growing right now. I’ve got about 1,475 officers in our police department and, you know, we’re moving in the wrong direction. There’s less and less and less resources to go out and do the job. I’ve got detectives who are pulled away from their caseload to just help answer 911 calls because we just don’t have the resources to adequately police the city.
Here at RedState, we have been covering the rampant crime wave affecting Austin and other Democrat-run cities. Not only are their policing policies, post-George Floyd, affecting individual residents, but they are also affecting businesses. Business owners say they do not feel safe, and the lack of police presence or response also drives away customers. One business owner said it took ten days to get a police report, and at the same time, business owners are being asked not to have weapons for their protection in their business. Since the Black Lives Matter protests following the death of George Floyd in 2020, and as Austin’s homicide rate has climbed, 911 callers are often put on hold for up to half an hour.
In addition to what Thomas Villarreal sees as an uncaring city council, Austin Mayor Kirk Watson also does not appear to have any sense of urgency when it comes to crime in his city. Up until recently, Austin police had a partnership with the Texas Department of Safety, which Watson praised and stated that crime had gone down as a result. But just two days later, Watson announced the end of the Austin police/Texas Department of Safety alliance, stating that it did not reflect “Austin’s values.” No word from the mayor on whether being robbed and having no police available to handle the situation constitutes an “Austin value.” Just last month, Austin Police Chief Joseph Chacon resigned after ongoing conflicts with the city council over staffing and increasingly smaller police budgets.
So, for the foreseeable future, if you get robbed in Austin at an ATM, you’d better just call it into 311 and wait your turn. Makes you wonder what the next thing to be called a “non-emergency” will be.
When criminals can’t tell who’s armed, and it’s extremely easy to carry concealed, they tend to be less criminal.
“We find that the effect of right-to-carry laws on murder is negative but not significantly different from zero in the year of adoption. However, the effect becomes negative and statistically significant in the following years.
This suggests that it takes time for people to get permits and start carrying guns, and that it takes time for the effects of this to be felt on crime rates.”
Anti-gun people spend a lot of time telling others how afraid of being shot they are for themselves and “the children”. In other words, they spend a lot of time thinking about dying by gunshot. They project that fear onto gun people saying, “What are you so afraid of that you need a gun?”
That is markedly different than my thought patterns. I think about protecting myself and other innocent people by being proficient with a gun. I almost never have a fear of being a victim of a criminal attack.
Antigun people think about dying by gun. Gun people think about protecting life by gun.
When the young paste-eaters at Michael Bloomberg’s anti-gun propaganda factory, known as the Trace, team up with the stodgy window-lickers at the Gun Violence Archive to produce a story about the utility of the AR-15 platform as a modern self-defense tool, it’s hard not to get too excited.
It’s like watching two freight trains headed toward each other on the same track. You know the results are going to be cataclysmic. None of these halfwits have ever heard a shot fired, much less one fired in anger, or especially one fired to good effect. They know less about what makes a reliable home defense weapon than I do about man-buns, skinny jeans, or avocado toast.
We have debunked the Trace and the Gun Violence Archive so often it’s getting old. The kids at the Trace masquerade as legitimate journalists when, in fact, they’re nothing more than highly paid anti-gun activists. The GVA purports to track gun crimes and maintain a list of mass shootings, but their data is collected from media, and even social media sources, and their stats are so inflated they’d have you believe a mass shooting occurs nearly every time someone draws from a holster. When the two anti-gun nonprofits combine for a story, it’s bound to be something as bereft of facts as it is poorly written, and to that standard their most recent collaboration does not disappoint.
The story was written by one of the Trace’s senior fabulists, Jennifer Mascia, who is “currently the lead writer of the Ask The Trace series and tracks news developments on the gun beat.” Mascia has also led the Trace’s hilarious we’re journalists, not activists, propaganda campaign on social media.
Mascia claims her story was a response to a reader’s question: “Many gun owners claim to buy assault-style rifles for defense. So how many documented cases are out there where someone actually defended themselves with an assault-style rifle?”
Mascia reportedly searched the GVA’s data for “assault weapon,” which she said the GVA defines as “AR-15, AK-47, and all variants defined by law enforcement.” Of course, there’s no mention of whether the weapons were capable of select-fire and, therefore, actual assault weapons. She started with 190 incidents, which she whittled down for various reasons. The results: “That left 51 incidents over a nine-and-a-half-year span in which legal gun owners brandished or used an AR-style rifle to defend life or property. That averages out to around five per year.”
To be clear, I trust Mascia’s findings about as much as I trust the GVA data that produced the results. The whole story is GIGO – garbage in, garbage out.
It is noteworthy that the firearms “expert” whom Mascia found to further beclown herself – who wrote in a CNN story that the AR is the last gun he’d recommend for self-defense – is none other than former Washington D.C. police officer Michael Fanone. He’s the officer who cried a lot before the January 6 Commission – the one with the beard who cried a lot, if that helps jog your memory.
“I’m more familiar with the gun than most people: I own one. And one thing I know for sure is that this weapon doesn’t belong in the hands of the average civilian,” Fanone wrote of the AR platform in the CNN story.
The network must have liked the cut of his jib. Fanone is now a CNN contributor and hawking a new book: “Hold the Line: The Insurrection and One Cop’s Battle for America’s Soul.” (Nancy Pelosi highly recommended it.)
Since he’s so afraid of the AR platform, I can’t help but wonder what weapon Fanone, or for that matter, Mascia, would recommend for home defense. If I had to guess, it probably has two barrels, a wooden stock and exposed hammers.
I’m somewhat familiar with the AR myself, which is why I trust it to defend my hearth and home. It’s light, accurate, and deadly, which is exactly the point, and something we should stop making allowances for.
Despite the exhortations of Bloomberg’s activists or crybaby ex-cops, an AR-15 is exactly what I want when The Bad Man comes a-calling.
BLUF
“The numbers indicate if we didn’t have gun-free zones, we would have more people stopping these attacks,”
A large percentage of “active shooter” incidents are thwarted by armed citizens who sometimes don’t even fire their weapons, but those cases are no longer counted under President Joe Biden’s pro-gun control policies.
According to just-released data from the Crime Prevention Research Center, 41% of active shooting incidents were stopped by armed civilians.
Outside of so-called gun-free zones, which bar the legal carrying of firearms, over 63% of active shooting cases were ended by an armed civilian, according to the center.
The new data from John R. Lott Jr., the former Justice Department senior adviser for research and statistics, are his latest to challenge undercounting and bias in government reports on shootings and back up efforts by Second Amendment and police groups to encourage people to carry firearms.
When the young paste-eaters at Michael Bloomberg’s anti-gun propaganda factory, known as the Trace, team up with the stodgy window-lickers at the Gun Violence Archive to produce a story about the utility of the AR platform as a modern self-defense tool, it’s hard not to get too excited.
It’s like watching two freight trains headed toward each other on the same track. You know the results are going to be cataclysmic. None of these halfwits have ever heard a shot fired, much less one fired in anger, or especially one fired to good effect. They know less about what makes a reliable home-defense weapon than I do about man-buns, skinny jeans or avocado toast.
We have debunked the Trace and the Gun Violence Archive so often it’s getting old. The kids at the Trace masquerade as legitimate journalists when in fact they’re nothing more than highly paid anti-gun activists. The GVA purports to track gun crimes and maintain a list of mass shootings, but their data is collected from media and even social media sources, and their stats are so inflated they’d have you believe a mass shooting occurs nearly every time someone draws from a holster. When the two anti-gun nonprofits combine for a story, it’s bound to be something as bereft of facts as it is poorly written, and to that standard their most recent collaboration does not disappoint.
The story was written by one of the Trace’s senior fabulists, Jennifer Mascia, who is “currently the lead writer of the Ask the Trace series and tracks news developments on the gun beat.” Mascia has also led the Trace’s hilarious we’re journalists, not activists, propaganda campaign on social media.
Mascia claims her story was a response to a reader’s question: “Many gun owners claim to buy assault-style rifles for defense. So how many documented cases are out there where someone actually defended themselves with an assault-style rifle?”
Mascia reportedly searched the GVA’s data for “assault weapon,” which she said the GVA defines as “AR-15, AK-47, and all variants defined by law enforcement.” Of course, there’s no mention whether the weapons were capable of select-fire and therefore actual assault weapons. She started with 190 incidents, which she whittled down for various reasons. The results: “That left 51 incidents over a nine-and-a-half-year span in which legal gun owners brandished or used an AR-style rifle to defend life or property. That averages out to around five per year.”
To be clear, I trust Mascia’s findings about as much as I trust the GVA data that produced the results. The whole story is GIGO — garbage in, garbage out.
It is noteworthy that the firearms “expert” whom Mascia found to further beclown herself — who wrote in a CNN story that the AR is the last gun he’d recommend for self-defense — is none other than former Washington D.C. police officer Michael Fanone. He’s the officer who cried a lot before the January 6 Commission — the one with the beard who cried a lot, if that helps jog your memory.
“I’m more familiar with the gun than most people: I own one. And one thing I know for sure is that this weapon doesn’t belong in the hands of the average civilian,” Fanone wrote of the AR platform in the CNN story.
The network must have liked the cut of his jib. Fanone is now a CNN contributor and hawking a new book: “Hold the Line: The Insurrection and One Cop’s Battle for America’s Soul.” (Nancy Pelosi highly recommended it.)
Since he’s so afraid of the AR platform, I can’t help but wonder what weapon Fanone, or for that matter, Mascia, would recommend for home defense. If I had to guess, it probably has two barrels, a wooden stock and exposed hammers.
I’m somewhat familiar with the AR myself, which is why I trust it to defend my hearth and home. It’s light, accurate and deadly, which is exactly the point, and something we should stop making allowances for.
Despite the exhortations of Bloomberg’s activists or crybaby ex-cops, an AR is exactly what I want when The Bad Man comes a-calling.
The “deterrent value” of law enforcement is at an all-time low!
Less than half of crimes of violence in the USA are never “solved.” Of the ones that are “solved” or “cleared,” few arrests and successful prosecutions ever result.
Less than twenty percent of property crimes are ever “solved.”
Owing to the foregoing, the majority of felonies, even forcible felonies, are never reported (what’s the point?) and thus never show up on any statistics. Thus, as dismal as the crime statistics we actually have, real figures are vastly worse!
Low arrest rates are a direct result of “passionless policing” by critically under-staffed, non-supported police departments, combined with unenthusiastic prosecution by liberal, pro-criminal prosecutors, as well as mayors and city council members.
Accordingly, among VCAs (violent criminal actors) in most metro areas, there is scant risk associated with physically victimizing others, at least risk represented by law enforcement. The real risk to VCAs (particularly drug traffickers) is from the violence visited upon them by other VCAs during territorial disputes.
And, of course, there is always the risk of running into an armed “victim,” as frightened Americans continue to buy guns at increasing rates every month.
There is scant reason to believe that the violent crime situation in this country will improve under the current Administration.
As citizens, our personal safety depends almost exclusively upon ourselves. We are no longer “protected” by police in the way we used to be, and may never be again!
