Safety – Page 25 – MILESFORTIS

ARE YOU PREPARED?
BE READY FOR THESE FIVE CATEGORIES

Where’s the danger? Those who carry a weapon in public are constantly asking this question. We’re always in what Jeff Cooper popularized as Condition Yellow. No threat has been recognized, but we’re actively alert for anything that might come up. Once a potential threat has been identified, we move to Condition Orange and begin planning for an attack. We evaluate the threat, the availability of cover and concealment, look for other threats and evaluate the overall environment in case we need to use lethal force. Condition Orange is a critical stage because you’ve identified the threat and must prepare. I propose some threats are already known to us, but most are not adequately prepared to respond.

Threats come in many forms. We can’t always know where they will come from. When we do, however, we’re always better off if we have already prepared rather than waiting until it is staring us in the eyes. A prepared response is always better than an improvised one. This is especially true when the threat is deadly. Massad Ayoob has an oft-repeated phrase for this: “Know where the threats are most likely to come from and have a proven strategy prepared to counter it.” You can’t prepare for everything, so you’ve got to prioritize.

Learning the most common instances where lethal force was used can give you valuable information about where your focus should be. I was listening to the Armed Attorneys (YouTube) discussing this recently. According to them, civilian uses of force cases (as opposed to law enforcement) overwhelmingly come in five categories:

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What the Media Can’t – Or Won’t – Tell Us About Armed Self Defense.

Don’t confuse the news with the truth. The corporate news media is in the business of delivering eyes and ears to their advertisers. That is how they earn their money. The assignment editors, reporters and the copyeditors are not against honesty and proportion, but cash comes first. That means they are biased in their reporting. They must ignore the common but important stories in order to leave room for the shock and outrage that keeps us watching and listening. I study armed defense. Ordinary citizens like us defend ourselves, our family, and innocent strangers every day. You wouldn’t know that from watching the news. This is why the corporate media does such a bad job of reporting.

To be fair, we have our own biases. Most of us think that armed defense looks like something from a John Wick movie or from the Matrix. That couldn’t be further from the truth. I have to describe what ordinary people do because most of us are not even familiar with the terms.

John Wick

Armed defense is when the intended victim of a violent crime uses a firearm to deter or stop the criminal.

That includes something as simple as grandma shouting for an intruder to go away because she has a gun and that she called the police. The police might not classify it as a defensive gun use, but grandma thinks it was. She thinks the home-invasion robber changed his plans because she had her firearm. The criminal thinks grandma’s gun was important too.

Armed defense is when an armed mom is crossing the parking lot late at night. She tells her kids to get back in the car, she turns toward three young men, and puts her her hand into her purse. She yells “Stop!” and the three young men change direction. They get back into their car and drive away.

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Will Phobias About AR-15s Keep Schools From Adopting This Innovative Product?

Time is of the essence in mass public shootings. Civilians and police stop a lot of mass murders by carrying handguns, but sometimes you need a larger round than is available in a traditional handgun. It often simply isn’t practical to carry around a rifle. And school staff might not have time to run to a locker to retrieve the needed gun.

Andrew Pollack, whose 18-year-old daughter, Meadow, died in the 2018 Parkland school mass murder that left 17 people dead, is fighting to give school districts the tools they need. Byrna, a company that makes innovative self-defense tools, has donated eight backpacks containing collapsible AR-15s to Pollack’s “Meadows Movement” nonprofit. These guns fire .223 caliber rifle rounds and are more powerful than traditional handguns.

On January 4th, Pollack will give the backpacks to the Bradford County Sheriff’s Office for use by school resource officers (SROs) and Will Hartley, superintendent of Bradford County Schools.

“The folding rifle is easy to carry throughout the day for a school resource officer inside the bulletproof backpack,” Pollack said. “The seconds to get minutes lost retrieving a rifle from a locker vs. pulling the bulletproof backpack into a vest and having the rifle on hand equates to the number of lives that could have been saved.”

The school superintendent echoes his comments. “I wish more people could have it,” Hartley notes. “Because if someone comes on your campus and they have a long gun, we need to be able to meet their force with the same kind of force.”

Bradford County Schools is smart enough to have multiple layers of protection. Even when school resource officers are in the right place at the right time, they have a tough job. Uniformed guards may as well be holding neon signs saying, “Shoot me first.” Attackers know that once they kill the sheriff’s deputy, they have free rein to go after everybody else.

To prevent that, the Bradford County schools are part of Florida’s Guardian Program. As in nineteen other states, teachers and staff are trained to use guns to protect people. But their guns are concealed. Permit holders make guards’ very difficult job easier. If an attacker tries to kill a school resource officer, he reveals his position and makes himself a target to someone with a concealed handgun. As with concealed handgun permit holders generally, the whole point is that the attacker doesn’t know who else he needs to worry about.

Instead of a sign in front of these schools saying “Gun Free School Zone,” they are replaced with signs warning: “Please be aware that certain staff members at Bradford County Schools can be legally armed and may use whatever force is necessary to protect our students.”

But, unfortunately, there are plenty of schools around the country that haven’t learned the lessons that Bradford County has. And these backpacks, with their built-in bullet-resistant vests and ARs will help protect school resource officers from surprise attacks from behind them and will give them more potent firepower if they get into a firefight with attackers. In literally just a couple of seconds, the bullet-resistant vest can also be put on their front side.

Technically these guns are called AR-pistols rather than AR-15s, but the difference in terms is entirely arbitrary and results from nonsensical government regulations on how to define a rifle. Instead of a stock, an AR-15 pistol usually has a tube, but the two guns are functionally identical.

Pollack so believes in Byrna’s products that he is now their chief public safety officer.

It will be a shame if school districts’ phobias about AR-15s prevent them from taking advantage of this innovative product.

Dr. Lott Testifies Before House Committee
(Gives 3 Basic Facts Everyone Should Know!)

Dr. John Lott Jr., president of the nonprofit Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC), testified before the House Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security last week for a hearing dedicated to “Examining Uvalde: The Search for Bipartisan Solutions to Gun Violence.”

Dr. Lott delivered a lot of information but he began with three basic facts that everyone should know about gun-related violence in America.

Here they are:

1, Over 92% of violent crimes in America do not involve firearms. The U.S. Department of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey for 2020 shows 4,558,150 rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults, and the FBI reports 21,570 murders. Of those, firearms were involved in 350,460 rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults. Adding those numbers up, 7.9% of violent crimes were committed with firearms.

2, While the US media doesn’t give much, if any, coverage to mass public shootings in other countries, mass public shootings per capita are relatively low in the United States compared to the rest of the world. Over the 20 years from 1998 to 2017, the US had less than 1.13% of the world’s share of mass public shooters and 1.77% of its mass public shooting murders. That’s much less than the US’s 4.6% share of the world population. Since 2000, there have been nine mass public school shootings in the US. Germany had only three over that period and Finland had only one, but the United States has four times the population of Germany and sixty times that of Finland. Russia has had four such massacres, but we have 2.3 times its population. On a per capita basis, all three countries have a similar or higher rate compared to that of the US.

3, Like many other mass public shooters, the Buffalo shooter targeted defenseless people. He even wrote in his manifesto: “Attacking in a weapon-restricted area may decrease the chance of civilian backlash. Schools, courts, or areas where CCW are outlawed or prohibited may be good areas of attack. Areas where CCW permits are low may also fit in this category. Areas with strict gun laws are also great places of attack.” The national media refuses to report other explicit statements by attackers explaining why they pick the targets they do. Nor do they report the fact that 94% of mass public shootings occur in places where civilians are banned from having firearms.

If you’ll remember, the ‘joke’ name for Chicago for years has been ‘Chiraq’.
Plus I’m shocked that this unpolitically correct statistic is in the article:
“Black and Hispanic men represented 96% of those who were fatally shot, and 97% of those injured in a shooting…”

Seem Bill Whittle was right: “Maybe it’s the people holding the guns.”

Risk of death by gun violence is higher for men in some U.S. areas than in wartime.

In some parts of the United States, young men face a higher risk of dying from gun violence than if they’d gone to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, a new study reports.

Young men living in certain high-violence ZIP codes in Chicago and Philadelphia run a greater risk of firearm death than military personnel who served in recent U.S. wars, according to findings published online Dec. 22 in JAMA Network Open.

Young men in Chicago’s most violent ZIP code were more than three times as likely to experience gun-related death compared to soldiers sent to Afghanistan, the researchers found, while those in Philadelphia’s most violent area were nearly twice as likely to be shot to death.

In all ZIP codes studied, young men from minority groups overwhelmingly bear the risk of firearm-related death, the findings showed.

“These results are an urgent wake-up call for understanding, appreciating and responding to the risks and attendant traumas faced by this demographic of young men,” said study leader Brandon del Pozo, an assistant professor of medicine at Brown University’s Warren Alpert Medical School in Providence, R.I.

His team examined shooting data from 2020 and 2021 in four large U.S. cities — Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and Philadelphia.

The investigators zeroed in on shootings involving nearly 130,000 men between 18 and 29 years of age. They grouped them by ZIP code so U.S. Census data could be used to examine demographics in those neighborhoods.

The researchers also compared the cities’ gun violence data with combat-related deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan — from 2001 to 2014 for Afghanistan and 2003 to 2009 in Iraq.

While young men in Chicago and Philadelphia had a much greater risk of firearm death, those in the most violent parts of Los Angeles and New York had a 70% to 91% lower risk than U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, the researchers said.

“We often hear opposing claims about gun violence that fall along partisan lines: One is that big cities are war zones that require a severe crackdown on crime, and the other is that our fears about homicides are greatly exaggerated and don’t require drastic action,” del Pozo said in a university news release.

“We wanted to use data to explore these claims — and it turns out both are wrong,” he continued. “While most city residents are relatively safe from gun violence, the risks are more severe than war for some demographics.”

Black and Hispanic men represented 96% of those who were fatally shot, and 97% of those injured in a shooting, according to the report.

The study authors noted that exposure to combat has been associated with post-traumatic stress disorder and higher rates of homelessness, alcohol use, mental illness and substance use.

“Our findings — which show that young men in some of the communities we studied were subject to annual firearm homicide and violent injury rates in excess of 3.0% and as high as 5.8% — lend support to the hypothesis that beyond the deaths and injuries of firearm violence, ongoing exposure to these violent events and their risks are a significant contributor to other health problems and risk behaviors in many U.S. communities,” the research team concluded.

The health risks are likely even higher for city dwellers because they have a lifetime “tour of duty,” as opposed to a typical year-long posting to a war zone, del Pozo added.

“The findings suggest that urban health strategies should prioritize violence reduction and take a trauma-informed approach to addressing the health needs of these communities,” he said.

Why aren’t stalked women ever told to get a gun for self-defense?
Murder rates decline when people carry concealed handguns

Authorities say Ewen Dewitt murdered 40-year-old Julie Minogue with an ax this month in her Milford, Connecticut, home. Two of her children were home when the murder occurred. Mr. Dewitt, an ex-boyfriend, had been stalking her.

“I’m scared he’s going to kill me,” she told the police. In 2019, she had a protective order issued. Just a week before she was killed, a judge had granted her a full no-contact restraining order.

The case clearly illustrates the limits of protective orders when the stalker is intent on murdering the victim. Suppose the murderer is already facing the possibility of life imprisonment without parole for first-degree murder. How will an additional five years in prison and a $5,000 fine deter such murders?

It is an important problem. Reportedly, 76% of women murdered by someone who had been an intimate partner were stalked.

Violence prevention advocates for women have a long list of changes they recommend. These changes require women to uproot their lives.

Dangerous amounts of heavy metals found in many dark chocolate bars
White House’s Karine Jean-Pierre is proof of ‘Peter Principle’ incompetence
Among the advice: Women should change jobs, their travel routes, the time of day they leave home or work, move in with a friend or family member, change the locks on their home, or do their shopping and other chores with friends or relatives.

A few recommend that women practice martial arts such as judo, jujitsu, karate or boxing.

But the most obvious answer is missing from these lists: Women should get a concealed handgun permit and a firearm.

Men are typically much stronger than women, particularly in the upper body. Unfortunately, real life isn’t like the movies, where one woman can knock out and overpower several well-trained men. Even well-trained women often struggle to defend themselves against larger and stronger men. Men also tend to be faster runners.

A gun represents a much bigger change in a woman’s ability to defend herself. Men can readily hurt women without a gun, and if a woman is already in physical contact with the attacker so that he can take away their gun, they are already in trouble.

The peer-reviewed research by one of us shows that murder rates decline when people carry concealed handguns, whether they are a man or a woman. But a woman carrying a concealed handgun reduces the murder rate for women by about three to four times more than a man doing the same.

And this message is getting across to women. Between 2012 and 2022, in states that provide data by sex, permits for concealed handguns increased 115% more quickly among women than among men. The percentage of women who say that gun ownership protects people from crime has also been growing faster than their male counterparts.

Connecticut and other states could make it much easier for stalked women to defend themselves. Even after taking the required training and applying for a permit, it “generally takes eight weeks to obtain” a permit. And that’s an optimistic estimate by the Connecticut Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection. The Connecticut Citizens Defense League has had to file a lawsuit against three cities where the process regularly takes a year or more.

But even two months may be much too long for a threatened woman. Even women who have proved to a court that they are facing serious threats must wait to get a permit. One solution would be to allow women with court orders of protection to carry a concealed handgun while they are waiting for a permit to be issued.

Many single women with children may also find it difficult to pay $140 for a permit plus added fees for fingerprinting and training.

Connecticut’s concealed handgun permit cost is already almost three times higher than the average in other states. Despite this, 11.3% of adults in Connecticut have a concealed handgun permit — the 12th-highest state. And as crime in Connecticut has soared, the permit-possessing population has increased by 55,000 since 2019. Only 26% of permit holders in Connecticut are women, significantly less than in other states.

The high cost of permits disarms the very people who most need protection, including minorities who live in high-crime urban areas.

Police are important. Protective orders can help. But if we are going to be serious about protecting women like Julie Minogue, we have to let them protect themselves.

More women buying guns to defend themselves: “The world is changing”

Calera, Alabama — At a gun range in the heart of Alabama, Gracie Barhill is getting acquainted with her month-old Smith & Wesson 9 millimeter.

“I’m young. I’m a girl,” she said. “I never know when a threat is going to come.”

The 19-year-old is taking a self-defense firearms course, “Girls, Guns and Gear,” that’s designed for women who are wary of threats.

“It’s absolutely undeniable, the world is changing and they want to be ahead of it,” said Scott Recchio, a firearms instructor at the range.

Last year, one-third of all first-time gun buyers in the U.S. were women, according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation. The trade association said there’s been a 77% rise in female gun ownership from 2005 to 2020.

Emma Boutwell, who is also taking the women-only class, said she had never handled a gun until recently.

“I need to know how to defend myself as well,” Boutwell said.

Gun instructor Beverly Alldredge teaches the women marksmanship, gun safety and situational awareness.

Alldredge said that instructing women is different than men because “women listen better than men do.”

“Women are just quicker just to hear and take in what they are being told and applying that,” she said.

Among Black women, the firearm homicide rate has more than tripled since 2010, according to one study. Today, nearly 30% of new women gun owners are Black, according to the 2021 National Firearms Survey.

Nikkita Gordon, who owns the women’s clothing line Cute and Cocky, which is designed to hide a gun fashionably, said she has self-defense plans for both indoor and outdoor scenarios.

“I think most women, specifically women of color, should have these plans,” she said.

How to stop another Uvalde Massacre and Other Mass Public Shootings from Occurring

How-to-stop-another-Uvalde-Massacre-from-Occurring-4

Observations:
“generalized estimating equation estimates”
Translation (even with the statistical word salad definition) it still comes to: There’s actually no way to figure this out, so I’ll make my SWAG look good on paper

John Lott (more guns/less crime) was right, but they couldn’t let that be confirmed, so they kept torturing the statistics hoping for something different, but the best they could come up with was that gun sales don’t have any effect on crime rates.

Legal Firearm Sales at State Level and Rates of Violent Crime, Property Crime, and Homicides

Journal of Surgical Research, Volume 281, January 2023, Pages 143-154

Abstract

Introduction

The effects of firearm sales and legislation on crime and violence are intensely debated, with multiple studies yielding differing results. We hypothesized that increased lawful firearm sales would not be associated with the rates of crime and homicide when studied using a robust statistical method.

Methods

National and state rates of crime and homicide during 1999-2015 were obtained from the United States Department of Justice and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. National Instant Criminal Background Check System background checks were used as a surrogate for lawful firearm sales. A general multiple linear regression model using log event rates was used to assess the effect of firearm sales on crime and homicide rates. Additional modeling was then performed on a state basis using an autoregressive correlation structure with generalized estimating equation estimates for standard errors to adjust for the interdependence of variables year to year within a particular state.

Results

Nationally, all crime rates except the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention–designated firearm homicides decreased as firearm sales increased over the study period. Using a naive national model, increases in firearm sales were associated with significant decreases in multiple crime categories. However, a more robust analysis using generalized estimating equation estimates on state-level data demonstrated increases in firearms sales were not associated with changes in any crime variables examined.

Conclusions

Robust analysis does not identify an association between increased lawful firearm sales and rates of crime or homicide.

Based on this, it is unclear if efforts to limit lawful firearm sales would have any effect on rates of crime, homicide, or injuries from violence committed with firearms.

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Is There Anything We can do to Stop Mass Murderers in the United States?

That question comes to mind since President Biden recently claimed we need to massively disarm honest US citizens in order to stop mass-murderers. Instead of accepting the President’s words at face value, I looked at what the experts say. There are many questions we might ask and lots of facts we can consider. We do many things today to stop violence in the US. There is more we could do, and this is what I found;

We stop several thousand violent events every day.
The United States is about average in its rate of mass murder.
We stop more than half of the attempted mass murderers who attack where honest citizens are allowed to go armed.
Most mass murderers go through a predictable process, and we ignored warning signs time after time.
We should stop making the murderers into overnight celebrities, but that is hard to do.

A Walmart employee murdered several of his co-workers in Virginia. That happened a few weeks ago. President Biden then commented that,

“[T]he idea we still allow semi automatic weapons to be purchased is sick. It’s just sick. It has no, no social redeeming value. Zero. None. Not a single, solitary rationale for it except profit for the gun manufacturers.”

The president’s comment sounds bizarre given what we know. We know that more than 5,000 ordinary US citizens use a firearm to protect themselves from a serious threat every day. Stopping that much assault, robbery, rape and murder every day sounds like an immense socially redeeming value to me. The president obviously disagrees.

That level of armed defense shouldn’t come as news. We’ve seen similar reports for the last few decades. The data is broadly consistent, including a report from the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention that was commissioned by the Obama Administration.

All of us are biased, but we have good reason to be. We think that what we see in the news gives us a representative picture of what is happening in the world overall. It feels that way to us, but in truth there is a lot of news that goes unreported by our local news stations. Our news media covers a mass murder in the US for days but they only cover a mass murder that happened in another country for a few minutes. That distorts our thinking about where violence happens.

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Who In the US Is Objectively Racist? The Left. As the Data Show Definitively.

Joe Biden and the Democrats keep gunning for your guns. Research like this is a major part of their argument. What it shows–definitively–is that it isn’t guns. It’s a particular social pathology enabled by a social psychosis that reached epidemic proportions in 2020. The data are irrefutable.

One graphic tells the tale:

The increase in gun homicides documented in the Emory University study is attributable almost exclusively to one factor: a nearly 60 percent increase in homicide fatalities among black men. Not over a period of many years–but in a little over one year.

And what year was that? 2020. And what happened in 2020? The death of George Floyd, and the subsequent revelation that black lives especially matter.

Yes, but not in the way intended. Not by a long shot. That death and revelation brought in its train myriad consequences. Defund the police. The war on cash bail and the release of numerous criminals. The demoralization of police, who were instructed explicitly and implicitly that arresting black male offenders was a career risk, and the subsequent surrender of the streets to the thugs. And on and on. (The release of many from jail because of COVID didn’t help either.)

This is as close to a natural experiment as can exist in social science. An exogenous shock–the death of one man–leads to a tectonic shift in law enforcement, especially with regards to a particular demographic. The result?: a hyperbolic increase in homicide rates in that demographic. (I note that the previous uptick observable in the chart in 2014 corresponds to the proto-Floyd event, the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, which was the catalyst for Black Lives Matter.)

This is as close to a definitive proof of causation as is possible in observational social science.

This is not complicated. We sowed. We reaped. There is no other plausible explanation for the data.

It is sickly ironic–and mainly sick–that so many black lives have been sacrificed on the altar of Black Lives Matter.

But it gave an opportunity for Nancy Pelosi and the like to demonstrate their superiority over us plebs by taking a knee wearing kente cloth, so it was all for the best, right?

The whole ugly spectacle makes me literally nauseous. (And yes, I literally know what it means to say “literally.”) Hell is not hot enough to torture properly all those preening better-thans who have cost more black lives in a couple of years than the KKK did in its entire, horrid, sordid history (which dates to 1866).

But you are the problem you see. You and your icky guns.

No, the real problem is the social psychosis that is modern American leftism, which obsesses over race, and in the name of helping one race is directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of that race.

So tell me: who are objectively the racists here? (See Orwell on “objectively pro-Fascist” if you don’t catch my point.)

If this does not make you incandescent with anger, some serious self-reflection is definitely in order. Unless you are a leftist, in which case that is something of which you are constitutionally incapable.

Just to clarify.
This requirement isn’t for concealed carry. It’s to simply BUY a firearm.
I think this monstrosity isn’t going to make it through the court system, but it does illuminate just how mindless a lot of people are, which isn’t a new thing, as the Framers recognized the malady even back then when they demanded a Bill of Rights.

Measure 114’s live fire training component leaves trainers in limbo

While Oregon’s new voter-approved gun control measure is getting worked out in the courts, there remains uncertainty among local gun shops and firearms instructors in Central Oregon.

Sharon Preston, owner of Ladies of Lead in Redmond — and an instructor who specializes in self-defense training for women — says there are a lot of questions that still have not been answered about the implementation of Measure 114.

Preston says business has been through the roof. But she says she’s had to stop firearm sales, not knowing what is next with the measure. But she says selling guns is only part of what she does.

“Selling guns is a very small portion of my business. I do it as an added value to my clients, so it’s educational based gun sales. But my main focus is always going to be in training,” said Preston.
She’s been forced to find alternatives as 114 is in limbo.

“I’ve heard too many stories in this store from women, locally. The brutality and violence they have been through, survived through. They want a tool that will allow them to live their lives large again, and they’re not going to be able to get on. That’s why I’m switching to crossbows, pepper ball guns, tasers, knives,” Preston said.

Preston’s biggest concern with the measure lies in the required live fire training — meant to prove shooting proficiency. As of now, she says no guidelines have been spelled out as to how the state will facilitate the training courses. And no one knows who will be authorized by the state to lead those courses.

And there are other unanswered questions.

“They don’t know how many rounds we have to shoot, at what distance we have to shoot, at what target we have to shoot. They don’t know what firearm we can use. So there’s so many questions out there,” said Preston.

The next hearing on Measure 114 will be held Tuesday at Circuit Court in Harney County. Those who support the measure will be able to argue against the temporary hold set in place by Judge Robert Raschio.

New study by frustrated anti-gun researcher doesn’t tell the whole story

by Lee Williams

More than 1 million Americans were killed by firearms from 1990 to 2021, and firearm deaths increased markedly during the pandemic, according to a study published Tuesday by the Journal of the American Medical Association network titled: “Trends and Disparities in Firearm Fatalities in the United States, 1990-2021.”

Firearm deaths reached their lowest point in 2004, and then increased more than 45% by 2021 — a 28-year high — the study claims. Black males were most at risk for homicide, and white males over 70 had the highest suicide rates.

The authors analyzed data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and used “key statistics” from the anti-gun group Brady United.

Despite its flaws, such as a reliance on biased statistics and a lack of causal factors, the report has been embraced by the legacy media and has proliferated across the internet.

The authors’ conclusion was rather simple: “This study found marked disparities in firearm fatality rates by demographic group, which increased over the past decade. These findings suggest that public health approaches to reduce firearm violence should consider underlying demographic and geographic trends and differences by intent.”

The study’s lead author, Dr. Eric W. Fleegler of Harvard Medical School’s Department of Pediatrics, has written numerous anti-gun studies and editorials. Gun-rights experts were quick to point out there was a lot missing from his most recent work.

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Quote O’ The Day
The eight-point boost in favorability between now and then could be the result of people in those states recognizing that living under a shall-issue carry regime is not an apocalyptic scenario but, rather, business as usual as it had been in most of the country.

Analysis: The Popularity of the Bruen Decision Should Not Come as a Surprise

You wouldn’t know it from the reaction of political leaders in states affected by the decision, but the Supreme Court’s holding in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen is very popular among the American public. That’s because a decades-long cultural shift towards concealed carry had already succeeded well before the justices ever took up the case.

A Marquette University law school poll released this week found 64 percent of Americans have a favorable opinion of the Supreme Court’s holding that the “Second Amendment protects the right to possess a gun outside the home.” By contrast, 35 percent say they oppose the decision, with only 16 percent saying they’re strongly opposed.

That such a substantial majority gave a warm reception to the concept of public concealed carry rights should not come as a shock. For nearly all of the country, the Court did little more than affirm the status quo.

When the decision was handed down, three-quarters of the population lived in a state where law-abiding adults faced only limited barriers to carrying a concealed firearm for self-defense. They could do so in 25 of those states without even needing to obtain a government-issued permit.

A tandem of shifting cultural practices and state legislation made that possible. Beginning in 1987 with Florida’s adoption of “shall-issue” concealed carry permitting, where state officials can’t subjectively deny permit applications, a revolution in liberalized gun carry laws began to sweep the country.

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The Elites’ War On Food

A few months back, stories of “suspicious” fires at food-production plants raged across the media. The narrative said the sites were being sabotaged to disrupt the food supply. And it was most likely wrong. But that doesn’t mean there is no effort on the part of Western elites to put the peasants on a strict diet.

Most by now have seen reports that Dutch officials are closing as many as 3,000 farms in the Netherlands, the world’s second-largest exporter of agricultural products by value even though it’s only slightly larger than Maryland, to comply with crackpot European Union carbon dioxide emissions rules. It’s possible that eventually more than 11,000 farms will be shut down, and 17,600 forced to sharply cut their livestock numbers.

On our side of the Atlantic, the malefactors are also busy. Just the News is reporting that the Environmental Protection Agency is quietly quadrupling the regulatory cost of carbon emissions in a new war on fossil fuels, which is, of course, also a war on the food supply.

“If you think about the fact that they would impose this damage factor, let’s say on farmers, because it applies to fertilizer,” Louisiana Solicitor General Liz Murill said on the John Solomon Reports podcast. “Fertilizer emits nitrous oxide. So fertilizer is a big contributor. If every family farmer now is going to have to pay more to obtain fertilizer to fertilize crops that feed us, well, what’s that going to do to the price of food?”

Are these mere coincidences, entirely unrelated, isolated events?

Could be. But …

U.S. farmers are convinced that “government meddling threatens their livelihoods and the nation’s food security.”
“Unrealistic green-energy policies in Europe – and the Biden administration’s hostility to U.S. energy production – are worsening energy shortages,” writes James Meigs in City Journal “With energy prices soaring, food production and distribution will suffer.”
Global skunks are promoting bugs as an alternative to the foods we enjoy, which is an implicit way of saying “you can eat insects, as unpalatable as they are, or you can go hungry – it’s almost time to choose.”
The White House has added agricultural land to the federal Conservation Reserve Program, encouraging farmers to leave their land fallow. It’s part, says essayist John Mac Ghlionn, writing in the Washington Times, “of a broader, government-wide push to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. Interestingly, the Biden administration’s goal is very similar to the Dutch government’s goal.”
Canadian boy Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has proposed rules that will “decimate Canadian farming.”
“Even as food shortages intensify, governments, including the Biden administration, are cracking down harder on agricultural production,” the Epoch Times reports. “While the attacks on agriculture and related industries look different in different nations, many experts say it’s a coordinated global policy being promoted by the U.N., the World Economic Forum (WEF), the European Union, and other international forces determined to transform civilization.”
“The Biden administration has engaged in an omni-directional assault on our food production system,” says the Heartland Institute.

As it turns out, all this is happening at the same time “the number of people affected by hunger has more than doubled in the past three years”, according to the United Nations, as “almost a million people are living in famine conditions, with starvation and death a daily reality.”

Which must tickle the innards of the coat-and-tie savages at the World Economic Forum, a truly vile organization that has made no secret of its concerns over a growing global population, and issued a warning earlier this year that “degrowth,” the shrinking rather than growing of economies, “might mean people in rich countries changing their diets, living in smaller houses and driving and traveling less.”

If only the WEF were some fringe group that had no influence. But it’s not – it’s a well-funded syndicate with an axis of powerful followers.

Is it possible, as unthinkable, conspiratorial and overwrought as it sounds, that the elites want to thin the global population through man-made famine? Groups do exist, and have for decades, for the sole objective of reversing the world’s population growth. They have been treated by politicians and the media as well-meaning organizations that have a valid point.

So far, they’ve done no damage. However, they’re now in a strong position to move beyond their rhetoric. Strong ties with like-minded thinkers that have money and a heavyweight political punch makes them dangerous.

DON’T BELIEVE GIVING UP RIGHTS PROVIDES SECURITY

New York Time columnist David Brooks is reminding America why they shouldn’t put faith in opinion writers pontificating from their metropolitan ivory towers.

Brooks recently said America would be a much safer country if Americans would simply give up their freedoms and become more like Europe. If America wouldn’t hold onto the individual right to keep and bear arms spelled out in the Second Amendment, and affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court, he argues it would be a much safer place.

In his estimation, giving up the ability for self-defense and defense of loved ones would make crime just go away.

“That would take a gigantic culture shift in this country. A revamping of the way we think about privacy, a revamping of the way we think about the role government plays in protecting the common good,” Brooks said during a segment on PBS’ “Newshour.” “I think it would be something. I think it would be good not only to head off shootings, but good to live in a society where we cared more intimately about each other. And I would be willing to give up certain privacies for that to happen.”

That’s certainly out of the mainstream of how the rest of America views lawful firearm ownership. There were over 21 million background checks for the sale of a firearm in 2020, the most ever in a single year. Last year, Americans submitted to 18.5 million background checks. In 2022, background check figures are headed for the third strongest year on record. During the week up to and including Black Friday, the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) tallied over 711,000 background checks, with over 192,000 on Black Friday alone. That was the third busiest day for FBI’s NICS ever.

The Plan: Give Up

Just how would America achieve this utopia that Brooks imagines? Just give up, he said. Give up your rights. Give up your freedoms. Submit to an Orwellian state that provides you with all your needs. He admits this wouldn’t be easy.

“But for many Americans that would just be a massive cultural shift to regard our community and regard our common good in more frankly a European style,” Brooks explained. “I think it would benefit our society in a whole range of areas, but it’s hard to see that kind of culture change to a society that’s been pretty individualistic for a long, long time.”

America broke away from European-style rule for a reason. The Founding Fathers rejected the British crown’s demands to give up guns then. Based on background checks for gun sales, America continues to reject calls for strict gun control. A recent Gallup poll found that support for more gun control dropped nine points from 66 percent to 57 percent in an October survey.

Failed Disarmament

The argument that individuals should surrender their gun rights has been tried elsewhere with predictable results. Gun owners that complied with gun seizures find themselves unable to protect themselves while criminals that ignore the law are empowered. A recent report from ABC News in Australia showed that criminals find it easier now to obtain illicit firearms than before the multiple amnesty periods when government officials collected firearms from Australians. New Zealand instituted their own gun confiscation program and crime spiked. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern ushered in Draconian gun control, including confiscation, and the country and crime hit new peaks.

The only ones left with guns were the criminals. That’s a lesson that Canada’s grappling with now as Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is eyeing his own gun confiscation scheme and banning the transfer of any handguns. Some Canadian provinces are rejecting the heavy-handed measures. Sadly, history is replete with examples of regimes that took away its citizens firearms only to become tyrannical and turn their citizens into defenseless subjects. Those that fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them. Our Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence expressed their fear of a tyrannical government and enshrined our right to keep and bear arms for self defense in the Bill of Rights for a reason.

Brooks is wrong to think that ridding ourselves of rights and lawful gun ownership would reduce crime. The answer to rampant crime is more law enforcement. The changes needed to safeguard America’s communities don’t begin with turning our backs on freedoms. It starts with holding elected officials in The White House, Congress, state capitols and district attorneys responsible for not enforcing the law and failing to hold criminals accountable.

Brooks’ notion is a devil’s bargain. Americans know it. Surrendering freedom has never resulted in anything less than creating a society of victims.

BARR: ‘Run, Hide, and Fight’ Makes As Much Sense As Duct Tape To Stop Terrorism

Following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and the anthrax scare shortly thereafter, the federal government urged Americans to prepare for possible future attacks by, among other things, sealing the windows of their homes with plastic sheeting and duct tape.

More recently, in the aftermath of violent incidents involving armed criminals targeting “soft” targets such as students in schools, shoppers in malls, or worshipers in churches, Uncle Sam has pressed two similarly unhelpful strategies: “run, hide, fight” and gun control.

Neither of these strategies, which Washington has repeatedly promoted, has prevented or even minimized deaths or injuries caused by criminals targeting students, shoppers, co-workers, or church goers. Still, as Sonny and Cher declared in their 1967 hit, “the beat goes on.”

As with other advice proffered by federal agencies — whether about what car to drive or foods to eat — the pointers about responding to active shooter incidents is not only unhelpful, but counterproductive. This has been demonstrated repeatedly in cases where individuals chose to confront armed perpetrators rather than run away from them, and in so doing saved lives.

Whether it was the armed and trained church security parishioner at the West Freeway Church in White Settlement, Texas in December 2019, the armed and trained young man at the Greenwood Park Mall in Greenwood, Indiana last July, or the individual at the Club Q in Colorado Springs, Colorado earlier this month, taking action against armed criminals bent on murdering innocent victims is a strategy far superior to one that advocates running and hiding.

Even when a passive response plan appears to make sense, as when a murderous gunman barged into the elementary school in Uvalde, Texas this past summer and began murdering children, things can go tragically awry (in that case, police themselves hid and failed to fight).

Notwithstanding the many actual incidents in which individuals’ actions confronting shooters saved lives, government publications continue to downplay taking the initiative to confront an active shooter. The Department of Homeland Security’s publication, “Active Shooter, How to Respond” admonishes readers that any “attempt to take the shooter down” should be considered only “as a last resort.” In other words, wait until everything else fails before confronting the shooter. Common sense alone suggests that such a point comes only after precious time and lives have been lost.

Clearly, confronting an “active shooter” carries risk. Riley Howell was mortally wounded when, in May 2019, he rushed a perpetrator who had entered his classroom at the University of North Carolina and started firing a pistol at students. By all accounts, Howell’s heroic sacrifice saved numerous lives.

Do the potential benefits of confronting a criminal shooter outweigh the risks? Ask the 240 parishioners at the West Freeway Church of Christ who were saved as a result of the quick, defensive response by church security members to an active shooter armed with a shotgun. Pose that question to the many dozens of people attending the Club Q on November 19th who did not become victims, thanks to the two club patrons who chose not to run and hide, but quickly tackled the shooter and subdued him with his own firearm.

The Biden administration’s knee-jerk response to any active shooter criminal act, regardless of circumstances, is “GUN CONTROL!” Sometimes, that refrain becomes almost comical in its detachment from the real world.

For example, following the Club Q murders and another by a disgruntled Walmart employee in a company breakroom in Chesapeake, Virginia the same week, President Biden demanded a ban on all “semiautomatic firearms.” Such an absurdly broad strategy would mean outlawing every Glock or Colt Model 1911 handgun, along with hundreds of other models of semiautomatic handguns and rifles owned lawfully by millions of citizens, and that are sold every business day in the United States.

Biden’s statement illustrates the degree to which his administration and its supporters remain ignorant of firearms, firearms owners, and the value of a citizenry that has lawful access to firearms for defensive purposes.

The gun-control shibboleth urged by the Left as the solution to every mass shooting incident, coupled with the government’s “run, hide, and fight” strategy for dealing with an active shooter, make as much sense as advocating duct tape and plastic sheeting as a way to thwart acts of terrorism.

How to Stop School Shootings

My heart sinks every time I see breaking-news graphics announce another school shooting. It’s like a gut-punch — the lost lives, the suffering of the wounded, the horrors the First Responders must encounter, and the families that will never again be whole.

The blame and blood-dancing usually start before the bodies are even recovered. The talking heads call to ban or further regulate firearms, magazines or accessories in common usage, as if the contents of my gun safe located thousands of miles from the crime scene somehow played a role in the killings.

Politicians will gleefully announce new infringements, none of which could have prevented the mass murder, but that is never their intent. They were eagerly awaiting another opportunity to do something that will score points with their base and their donors, as well as disarm law-abiding Americans.

Keep in mind that more than three-times as many people die each year from excessive alcohol use than from firearms, yet no one is calling to ban bourbon or vodka, because the booze-ban industry died on Dec. 5, 1933, while the gun-ban industry sputters on. Their misguided efforts have no chance of ever stopping mass murders because they are solely fixated on banning an inanimate object, while ignoring the person pulling the trigger and those who help facilitate the crime.

In my humble opinion, if we truly want to stop school shootings we should harden the staff, not just the buildings, and we should focus on the other bad actors, too, not just the trigger-pullers. It’s time to start holding parents, law enforcement and the legacy media strictly accountable — criminally, morally and very publicly — for aiding and abetting these preventable deaths.

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Handgun owners carrying daily in US doubled in 4 years; self-protection cited as main reason: study.

Twice the number of Americans were carrying handguns daily in 2019 compared to 2015, according to a new study published this month.

Around 6,000 gun owners carried handguns every day in 2019, up from 3,000 in 2015, according to a study from the American Journal of Public Health published on Nov. 16.

The number of respondents to the online survey who said they had carried a gun in the last month also nearly doubled from 9 million to 16 million in 2015.

The study focuses

solely on owners carrying a handgun on their person, not in their car.

Twice the number of Americans were carrying handguns daily in 2019 compared to 2015, according to a new study published this month.
The upward trend found in the study comes as states loosen restrictions for carrying a handgun and more gun owners cite protection as a top concern.

A U.S. Supreme Court case last June also overturned strict gun carrying laws in New York.

The authors wrote, “This ruling could further catalyze the loosening of firearm-carrying regulations in different parts of the country at a time when, as our study indicates, trends in handgun carrying already point to more US adults carrying loaded handguns in public places, including without a permit when a permit is required.”

The study authors said a June U.S. Supreme Court ruling overturning restrictive gun-carrying laws in New York could “catalyze the loosening of firearm-carrying regulations in different parts of the country.”

The study’s lead authors were Ali Rowhani-Rahbar, an epidemiology professor at the University of Washington; Amy Gallagher of the University of Washington; Deborah Azrael of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center; and Matthew Miller from Northeastern University, and the Harvard Injury Control Research Center.

The authors added, “Little is known about the frequency and features of firearm carrying among adult handgun owners in the United States. In fact, over the past 30 years, only a few peer-reviewed national surveys, conducted in 1994, 1995, 1996, and 2015, have provided even the most basic information about firearm carrying frequency.”

In 1994, the percentage of gun owners who said their main reason for having a firearm was protection was 46%, by 2015 it went up to 64% and spiked to 73% by 2019. In 2021, it was 83%.

Only one state allowed permit less handgun carry in 1990 but by 2021 it had increased to 21 states, according to the study.

Instead of Asking How to Stop Mass Shootings, Left Targets Social Conservatives

This week, another evil mass shooter unleashed horror at a gay club in Colorado Springs, killing five and wounding another 25. The shooter—whose name I refuse to mention in order to disincentivize future shooters, who seek notoriety—was clearly mentally ill: Just last year, he reportedly threatened his mother with a bomb, resulting in his arrest.

Yet Colorado’s red flag law, which could have deprived the shooter of legal access to weaponry, was not invoked by either police or relatives. The Colorado Springs massacre, then, is yet another example of a perpetrator with more red flags than a bullfighting convention, and no one in authority willing to take action to do anything about him.

Yet the national conversation, as it so often does, now has been directed away from the question at hand—how to prevent mass shootings—and toward broader politics. Instead of seeking methodologies that might be effective in finding and stopping deranged individuals seeking murder without curbing rights and liberties for hundreds of millions of people, our political and media leaders have decided to blame Americans who oppose same-sex marriage, drag queen story hour, and “family friendly” drag shows. Disagreement with the radical leftist social agenda amounts to incitement to violence, they argue.

Thus, NBC News senior reporter Brandy Zadrozny said, “There is a pipeline. It starts from some smaller accounts online like Libs of Tiktok, it moves to the right-wing blogosphere, and then it ends up on Tucker Carlson or ends up out of a right-wing politician’s mouth, and it is a really dangerous cycle that does have real-world consequences.”

Michelle Goldberg of The New York Times wrote that “it seems hard to separate [these murders] from a nationwide campaign of anti-LGBTQ incitement. … They’ve been screaming that drag events … are part of a monstrous plot to prey on children. They don’t get to duck responsibility if a sick man with a gun took them seriously.”

Brian Broome wrote in The Washington Post that the shooting could not be “blamed on mental illness.” No, he stated, “It’s right-wing rhetoric that sparks these nightmares. … The bottomless list of homophobes and transphobes on the right don’t need to throw the rock and then hide their hands. Instead, they use someone else’s hands entirely.”

The Left’s attempt to lay responsibility for violence at the feet of anyone who opposes the transgressive social agenda doesn’t stop with blame—it extends to calls for full-scale censorship.

“We’re living in an environment that’s driven by two things,” averred Sarah Kate Ellis, CEO of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. “Politicians who are using us to bolster their careers by creating division and hate, and number two is social media platforms that are monetizing hate, and especially against marginalized communities. They’re—they’re choosing profits over hate, and it’s killing, literally killing our community.”

Social media, the logic goes, ought to shut down or demonetize any video disagreeing with the GLAAD agenda.

This is cynical politics at its worst. It’s also nothing new. The Left routinely cites violent incidents as reason to crack down on free speech with which they disagree.

As the inimitably imbecilic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-Instagram, tweeted: “After Trump elevated anti-immigrant & anti-Latino rhetoric, we had the deadliest anti-Latino shooting in modern history. After anti-Asian hate w/ COVID, Atlanta. Tree of Life. Emanuel AME. Buffalo. And now after an anti-LGBT+ campaign, Colorado Springs. Connect the dots, @GOP.”

Yes, according to AOC, virtually every major mass shooting of the past seven years is the result of her political opponents—none of whom has called for violence. But in the world of the Left, disagreement is violence merely waiting to be unleashed. Which is why censorship, they believe, is the only way to achieve a more peaceful world.