Category: Safety

Debunking the gun-banners’ false constitutional-carry claims
Gov. DeSantis will likely sign the bill long before its July 1 effective date.

Nearly every anti-gun group in the country has descended upon Tallahassee to try to stop Florida from becoming the 26th state to allow residents and visitors to carry concealed firearms without a permission slip from the government.

It’s an important mission for the gun-ban industry, because once Gov. Ron DeSantis signs the bill — and he will — a majority of states will allow unlicensed or permitless carry. For pro-gun advocates, this would be a significant victory in the war to restore our Second Amendment rights, and the other team will do anything they can to prevent that from happening.

It’s important to point out that neither Florida’s HB 543 nor its companion bill, SB 150, are traditional constitutional-carry bills, since neither bill legalizes the open carry of arms. True constitutional carry allows gun owners to decide for themselves whether to carry arms openly or concealed. Despite Republican super-majorities in both the House and the Senate, and a governor who’s promised to sign “constitutional carry” legislation, open carry was not included in either bill. We still have not been told why, at least not officially.

In what has been called “smart bundling,” SB 150 also includes numerous school-safety provisions, such as expanding Florida’s School Guardian program, adding funds for hardening schools, providing additional money for gun-sniffing dogs, clarifying zero-tolerance policies and ensuring every law enforcement agency has an active-shooter policy. So, a vote against the bill can be seen as a vote against school safety.

Regardless of what the bill is called or its other offerings, the very thought of restoring more gun rights — especially in Florida — has brought the gun-banners out in droves. We’ve seen members of Everytown, Demanding Moms, Demanding Students, Giffords, Brady and Florida’s extremely anti-gun League of Women Voters all shuffle to the mic. Their testimony before House and Senate committees has been interesting, desperate and at times, comical. If the gun banners sent their A-team to Tallahassee and this is the best they can do, freedom will most certainly prevail.

It’s clear the gun-banners’ moves are well organized and orchestrated. Too many of their objections seemingly come from the same playbook. Keep in mind anti-gunners have phones, Skype and Zoom, too. They’re sharing information and ideas. Florida has become their latest battle template. They are throwing a lot of crap against the wall. That which sticks likely will be used in the next state they attempt to victimize.

Here are some of the lowlights of their testimony.

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Private Gun Carriers’ Self-Defense Against Public Shooters
The El Paso incident from a few days ago, the FBI 2021 statistics, and more.

I had written about this in past years, but I thought I’d update it to reflect the El Paso incident from last week. According to the El Paso Police Department (see also CNN [Andy Rose]), a confrontation between two groups of teenagers at a mall “escalated into a physical fight” and then into a 16-year-old fatally shooting a member of the other group and seriously wounding another member, as well as injuring a member of his own group. Then,

As soon as the shooting ended, the 16-year-old suspect began to run and was pointing the gun towards the direction of bystanders, including 32-year-old Emanuel Duran, a Licensed to Carry Holder. As the suspect ran towards Duran and bystanders, Duran drew his handgun and shot the suspect.

At that time, one off-duty El Paso Police Officer arrived at the area of the shooting and together with Duran rendered aid to the 16-year old suspect and the others that were injured. Investigators found that there were at least two other legally armed citizens in the area of where the shooting took place, but were not involved.

Now in this case, the suspect didn’t seem to have planned a mass shooting; he seems to have had a beef with the other teenagers. On the other hand, he appears to have been pointing his gun towards the bystanders, so it’s hard to know what would have happened. And something similar could easily have happened with an intended mass shooting as well; for an incident like that from last year, see this WCHS-TV story:

Police said a woman who was lawfully carrying a pistol shot and killed a man who began shooting at a crowd of people Wednesday night in Charleston.

Dennis Butler was killed after allegedly shooting at dozens of people attending a graduation party Wednesday …. No injuries were reported from those at the party.

Investigators said Butler was warned about speeding in the area with children present before he left. He later returned with an AR-15-style firearm and began firing into the crowd before he was shot and killed.

“Instead of running from the threat, she engaged with the threat and saved several lives last night,” Charleston Police Department Chief of Detectives Tony Hazelett said.

According to WCHS-TV (Bob Aaron), Butler was a convicted felon, and was thus not legally allowed to own guns. In principle, perhaps he might still have been stopped by (say) a law requiring background checks, which would likely have stopped law-abiding sellers from selling him the gun; but it’s not clear whether someone with his criminal record would have much been stymied by that, as opposed to just buying a gun on the black market. Likewise, in El Paso, CNN reports that the gun used by the 16-year-old shooter was reported stolen.

I gathered some more examples from over the years here, and then followed up with data based on FBI reports of mass shootings in 2016 and 2017: legal civilian gun carriers tried to intervene in 6 out of 50 incidents, and apparently succeeded in 3 or 4 of them.

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Armed Defense- How Close is Too Close and How Soon is Too Soon?

When should we use our guns? We hear that question asked in every concealed carry class. That doesn’t mean we’re eager to shoot: if anything, it asks how long we can wait. There is more to this than meets the eye. Remember that most of the times when we use our firearm in armed defense we don’t press the trigger. We can cost lives if we use our firearms too early and if we present it too late. Are we so reluctant to present our firearm that we are waiting until we have no option but to shoot our attacker? Let’s look at a recent story of armed defense to see what happened and what might have happened differently.*

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The New York Times Has an Embarrassing Epiphany About ‘Gun-free Zones.’

We’ve all seen signs announcing a particular place is a “gun-free zone.” While these signs are supposed to reduce gun violence by informing would-be shooters that their firearms aren’t welcome on the site, the reality is that they are instead beacons alerting criminals to soft targets.

And it looks like the New York Times may have finally figured that out. After a murder took place in Times Square on Thursday night, the paper openly questioned why posted signs banning guns from the area didn’t stop the violence. “The shooting was the first since the creation of the expansive, signposted zone, the police said in a statement, and it immediately renewed questions about whether such a designation can truly protect the area,” the so-called paper of record reported.

“People feel emboldened to carry guns on the street,” said Tom Harris, a retired New York City police inspector and the president of the Times Square Alliance, told the Times. “A gun-free zone is not going to stop a criminal from carrying a gun.”

I have to admit I’m shocked that the New York Times acknowledged this. While I’d like to give them credit for that, the fact is the inefficacy of gun-free zones is something conservative media has been pointing out for years.

In fact, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the Pulse nightclub, Sandy Hook Elementary School, and Virginia Tech University were all targeted by mass shooters despite being gun-free zones — and that’s barely scratching the surface. According to a 2018 study by the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC), a whopping 97.8% of mass shootings over a 68-year period occurred in “gun-free zones.”

So, while it’s great that the New York Times finally has acknowledged that gun-free zones are useless, this epiphany is decades too late.

Why are “gun safety” activists opposed to teaching real gun safety?

Even though groups like Everytown and Moms Demand Action have tried to rebrand themselves as “gun safety advocates” and not anti-gun activists, their definition of “gun safety” boils down to “don’t own a gun.” When it comes to actual training and education, the gun prohibitionists tend to demand a host of mandates for would-be gun owners; requirements that seem less designed to improve safety and more to make it a difficult and burdensome process to exercise your right to keep and bear arms.

When it comes to educating kids about how to be safe and responsible around firearms, however, anti-gunners adopt a strident abstinence-based approach; don’t even mention firearms, and certainly don’t use programs like the NRA’s Eddie Eagle GunSafe program to teach younger kids that if they ever see a gun they should stop, don’t touch, run away, and tell a grown-up. Not because that’s bad advice, but because it’s coming from the NRA.

The anti-education ideology of the gun control lobby is on full display in Kansas, where lawmakers are debating a bill that would allow school districts to adopt a firearms safety and education curriculum for K-12 grades and self-proclaimed gun safety advocates are now demanding kids be kept intentionally ignorant, lest they be brainwashed into supporting the Second Amendment when they’re older.

Moriah Day, executive director of the Kansas State Rifle Association, said the state affiliate of the NRA requested reintroduction of the bill because establishing a unified curriculum for firearm education in public schools was “the only way to counteract the dangerous perspective many young people have from learning about firearms only through violent and careless examples on display across pop culture.”

He said the NRA approach was pragmatic because it acknowledged firearms were part of preparation for dangers of everyday life in the way advice was shared about the being safe while swimming, using electrical outlets or around fire hazards.

Johnson County resident Ephren Taylor III also addressed the Senate committee, but pointed to research indicating the Eddie Eagle program was “absolutely ineffective.” He said lobbying for firearm training in Kansas public schools was part of a campaign to build support for the NRA.

“Let’s be honest,” Taylor said. “We know why we’re choosing the NRA’s program. It’s not about gun safety. It’s about promoting the NRA to young kids so when they grow up they say, ‘Oh, Eddie Eagle. I remember him.’ You want to indoctrinate young kids into loyal NRA supporters.”

Under the Senate bill, the state Board of Education would be compelled to establish curriculum guidelines for firearm safety training conforming to programs offered by the NRA and Department of Wildlife and Parks. A local school board would make the final decision about whether to offer students instruction in gun safety.

If adopted in the 2023 legislative session, the statute would take effect July 1 and the new firearm programs could begin this fall. The Senate bill would require nearly 500,000 students in Kansas schools be afforded an opportunity to study how to responsibly deal with a gun. The anticipated annual cost of the program to the state would be $70,000.

Under the bill, students in kindergarten through grade five would exclusively have access to the NRA’s trademarked Eddie Eagle program. Students in grades six through eight would be in either the Eddie Eagle curriculum or the hunter safety program of the Department of Wildlife and Parks. The state parks department’s Hunter Education In Our Schools Program would be exclusive in grades nine through 12.

The head of the Kansas branch of the National Education Association also objects to the plan, insisting that when it comes to gun safety education schools are not the proper environment, and that any such efforts “ought to be operated outside the school day and outside school buildings.”

Given that the national NEA continues lobbying for all kinds of gun control, including bans on so-called assault weapons and criminalizing firearm transfers without a federal background check, I’m pretty sure that the Kansas chapter would object to any program that doesn’t paint gun ownership in a negative light; even something that completely avoids the political debate over gun control in favor of providing simple tips that can keep kids safe. Though school districts would have to opt-in to providing these programs, even that’s too much for the teacher’s union. If the anti-gunners had their way, the only “gun safety” lessons taught in school would be the talking points of Everytown, March for Our Lives, Brady, and the like shared by educators in their classrooms.

It looks like SB 116 will soon be headed to the Senate floor, and I expect that it will pass with wide margins. So far Democrat Gov. Laura Kelly hasn’t indicated whether she’ll sign the bill if it gets to her desk, however, so a veto-proof majority may be needed if lawmakers want to help school districts provide a real education on firearms safety when kids head back to class in the fall.

By now, we’ve heard this. Attested by people who have relatives who attend MSU, all the buildings are ‘gun free zones’, even for those with carry permits.
As always, that sure seems to work, doesn’t it?

Michigan State Shooter Found Dead.

(UPDATED 12:05 AM EDT, 2/14/23: According to multiple sources, the suspected shooter shot himself in the head as police approached. CPR was being performed but the shooter had no pulse. Sources added that a handgun was recovered.)

 

ORIGINAL STORY:

A shooting at Michigan State University gripped the news cycle on Monday evening. Reports of two separate shootings on campus broke (one at a residence hall and another in a gym), apparently carried out by the same person. Currently, at least one person is dead while five have been hospitalized.

Hours after the shootings, police held a press conference and officially released a description of the suspect. Shortly after that, the MSU Police Department released pictures as well.

 

Unfortunately, some used the immediate aftermath of the tragedy as a way to spread false information in an attempt to paint the shooter as some kind of right-wing white supremacist. I won’t link those posts, which went viral within an hour of the first shots fired, so as to not further defame the guy who is being targeted by them. Pictures of three men walking down the street were also being spread to suggest there were three shooters. That was also false.

The shooter, who is described as a short, black male with red tennis shoes, is still at large and is assumed to be armed and dangerous. RedState will provide further information as it comes in.

UPDATE:

The death toll has now risen to three.

 

Mississippi Senate passes bill allowing teachers to be armed

Legislation that would allow public and private school teachers in the Magnolia State to be armed has passed the Mississippi Senate.

On Wednesday, Senate Bill 2079, authored by Senator Angela Hill, R-Picayune, passed after receiving 39 yea votes and 13 nay votes.

The bill would establish a School Safety Guardian Training Program, which would be administered by Mississippi Homeland Security under the umbrella of the Mississippi Department of Public Safety (DPS).

Governing bodies of school systems throughout the state would have the autonomy to determine whether or not they will participate in the program. Authorities within participating school districts would either approve or deny permission for a volunteer school employee to be involved in the program.

“If a school wants to put together an armed educator team to work with law enforcement and to be trained to basically assist in the time of an active shooter or some unfortunate situation, the framework is now in place once we get this bill through the House,” Senator Hill said on The Gallo Show.

To participate in the program, one must possess an enhanced or concealed carry permit prior to applying.

According to DPS Commissioner Sean Tindell, once qualified, those participating in the program go through a two-to-three-week training session where they are educated on tactics related to gun safety and proper interaction with the police if a crisis happened to occur.

“They would learn self-defense tactics. They would learn firearm tactics. They would learn communication with law enforcement,” Tindell said on MidDays with Gerard Gibert. “If we’re going to have teachers in schools with a firearm, they’re going to have the proper training and an interaction plan with law enforcement.”

Training would be conducted at the Mississippi Law Enforcement Officer Training Academy in Pearl and led by multiple law enforcement agencies in collaboration with one another.

AR-15s are Mindbogglingly Safe
“Assault Weapon” homicides are so rare you need graphs to comprehend it.

It is taken as an obvious given by approximately half of the United States that we are in a massive epidemic of AR-15 homicides, and that something must be done about it. This given is not only completely false, the level of falseness of it is almost incomprehensible. Let’s try and understand exactly how false it is by using simple arithmetic.

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Elitist snobs from New York always think the land between the coasts is populated by nothing but hicks and cows

As the Wyoming Legislature considers several bills that would make it easier to carry firearms in public spaces, there’s evidence that those practices make things worse, a gun control advocate said.

“We’ve seen things like guns routinely being left in bathrooms on campuses,” Andy Pelosi told Cowboy State Daily.

As executive director of The Campaign to Keep Guns off Campus, which is based in New York State, Pelosi was answering what he claims are flawed arguments from Wyoming concealed-carry advocates who have said that the loosening of concealed carry restrictions in other states hasn’t caused problems.

Causes More Problem Than It Solves?

Allowing firearms on college campuses has led to problems and even some tragedies, Pelosi said. That has included more suicides or perpetrators using firearms to force sexual assaults.

He cited some studies his group has compiled from reports of gun-related incidents on campuses, including Colorado State University. Concealed carry is allowed at CSU.

It generally isn’t allowed on the University of Wyoming Campus. Students or staff may carry at UW only if they’ve obtained a special permit from university police for some pressing reason, such as being stalked.

Some of the incidents in Colorado that Keep Guns off Campus cites include student gunshot suicides in 2008 and 2017 and an accidental shooting on the CU-Denver campus in 2012.

And in 2017 at Fort Collins Community College, “A 26-year-old female student pulled a loaded gun on her professor after he confronted her about cheating,” according to one of the studies cited.

Overall, allowing guns on campuses and other previously gun-free public spaces isn’t shown to diminish crime, but instead increases the number of incidents such as suicides, threats and accidental shootings, Pelosi said.

The Associated Students of the University of Wyoming opposes allowing concealed carry on campus, the group’s representative, Caitlin Heddins, told legislators during a recent discussion of one of the firearms-related bills.

Still A Good Idea, Some Say

However, advocates for the bills – House Bill 105 and Senate File 135 – argue that it violates the Second Amendment rights of Wyoming residents to not allow concealed carry into government buildings, government meetings and the like.

They contend that gun-free zones simply create “soft targets” for mass shooters or others with ill intent.

New ‘Capitol Carry’ Bills 

A pair of new bills introduced to the Wyoming Senate on Monday would help allow concealed carry in the Wyoming Capitol building, where civilians are now prohibited from having firearms.

Senate File 149 would create an “enhanced concealed carry permit.” The current Wyoming concealed permitting process does not require applicants to take any actual firearms handling or live-fire training. Instead, they take only classroom or online courses.

Under the bill, those regular concealed carry permits would still be available. But for people wishing to take it to another level, enhanced concealed carry permit training would entail hands-on firearms safety courses, as well as live-fire training and qualification sessions.

Under Senate File 150, people who had obtained the enhanced concealed carry permits would be allowed to concealed carry their firearms in the Capitol.

Poll: Majority of Americans Oppose ‘Assault Weapons’ Ban

Bans on AR-15s and similar firearms have continued to fall out of favor with the American public.

51 percent of Americans now oppose adopting a national “assault weapons” sales ban, according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll released Monday. That’s a ten-point jump in opposition since the question was last asked in 2019. Only 47 percent said they support the policy. That represents the second-lowest level of support measured since the poll began in 1995.

Those who strongly opposed a nationwide ban also outpaced those who strongly supported it for the first time since 2015.

The results are just the latest to confirm a decreased appetite for the ban. At least three separate polls conducted in 2022 documented a decline in support for the policy, even in the immediate aftermath of the Uvalde school shooting.

The latest results arrive just one day before President Biden (D.) is slated to give his State of the Union Address, where he is likely to reiterate his support for an assault weapon ban. Biden has made an assault weapon ban one of his signature gun policy goals, and he routinely calls for Congress to pass a ban after every prominent shooting–a request his party delivered on in the House last year but not the Senate.

The polling results suggest the public is increasingly turning a deaf ear to those calls.

Pollster David Langer said the decline in support for the gun ban was “broadly based across groups” but could only speculate as to what was driving the drop in support.

“It would take a study focused in more detail on the issue to assess its reasons, but other studies provide clues,” he said in a statement. “In a Pew Research Center poll last year, the public divided on whether or not making it harder to get guns would reduce mass shootings.”

Beyond public opinion souring on the bans, the court system has also started to cast doubt on their constitutionality after the Supreme Court’s decision in 2022’s New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen. The High Court vacated a federal decision upholding Maryland’s assault weapons ban shortly after that ruling and sent it back down to the lower courts to be relitigated under the new standard it set. Since then, federal judges have blocked two local assault weapon bans in Colorado, and a state court blocked Illinois’ new ban.

However, that hasn’t stopped lawmakers in blue states from continuing to push for the bans. Illinois joined Delaware in passing the first statewide assault weapons bans in several decades when it adopted its version last year. Lawmakers are also considering new bans in Washington, Rhode Island, Colorado, and New Mexico this year.

Langer Research Associates conducted the ABC News/Washington Post poll by cell phone from January 27-February 1. It sampled 1,003 adults with a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points.

FACT CHECK: Gavin Newsom Says ‘Permitless Carry Does Not Make You Safer’

CLAIM: In the lead-up to his February 1 push for more gun control, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) claimed, “Permitless carry does not make you safer.”

VERDICT: Partly False.

On June 7, 2017, Breitbart News relayed FBI data published by the NRA that showed two of the earliest permitless carry states, hereafter called constitutional carry states, were Alaska and Arizona. And both states saw their handgun murders decline when their concealed carry permit requirements were abolished.

The date showed Alaska’s handgun murder rate “declined after the state enacted [constitutional carry] in 2003.” Moreover, in the 14 years between the abolition of the permit requirement and 2017 “handgun murders…declined as a percentage of the total number of murders.”

A drop in handgun murders also took place in Arizona after that state abolished its concealed carry permit requirement in 2010.

More recently, the Maine Wire noted that crime fell in Maine after the state abolished its concealed carry permit requirement in 2015.

FBI data shows violent crime beginning a decline in 2016 that continued through 2020.

There are currently 25 states with constitutional carry. When there were only 13–Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, North Dakota, West Virginia, and Wyoming–the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) showed that data from the 13 states showed overall murder numbers fell from 4.49 to 4.31 post-constitutional carry enactment, and that violent crime fell from 331.5 to 318.2.

But murder levels can vary for a variety of reasons, and CPRC’s John Lott explains some of the numerous factors that are often at play:

Firearm homicide is not a good measure of the effect of Constitutional Carry laws because murders can be committed with other weapons as well as by hands and fists. Also, gun homicide data include justifiable homicides, including homicides by police in the line of duty. Justifiable homicides are benefits, not costs, and they might understandably increase when more citizens are allowed to defend themselves with guns. The FBI murder rate has neither of these problems and is a better test of the effect of constitutional carry laws. Nevertheless, my analysis finds that Constitutional Carry laws do not increase firearm homicide.

It should also be noted that Lott points out that constitutional carry helps to make the poor safer, by making self-defense affordable.

Lott adds:

Constitutional Carry will make it easier for poor people, who are the most likely victims of violent crime, to be able to defend themselves and their families. Costs matter; just compare the numbers in neighboring states, Illinois and Indiana. In Illinois, the total cost of getting a five-year permit is $450; there is no license fee in Indiana. While only 4% of Illinoisans have a concealed handgun permit, 22% of adults in Indiana already have one, the second-highest number of permits per capita.

Newsom’s claim is partly false.

When and How We Should Teach Our Children About Armed Defense

I write about armed defense every week. We’ve covered many stories where young men and women defended themselves or their family. We’ve talked around the issue of teenagers and guns, but let’s look at it directly. When should we teach our children about firearms? The obvious answer is to teach your children when it is the safest thing to do. There are risks on both sides. Fortunately, we make similar decisions about our children’s education all the time. This article isn’t the last work on any of the issues, but I hope it is a good starting place.

As a responsible parent, we have to teach our children what to do if they see an unsecured firearm. We have to choose when and how to tell our children that we have firearms in our home. We have to establish the rules about when our children are allowed to touch our guns. As they grow older, we have to teach our children to be responsible around firearms. Later, we have to teach them when and how to use a firearm as part of our family’s safety plan. Those are a few of the milestones, but there are lessons in between. Other parents have been there before.

What is new is that many families who have a gun today did not grow up with guns and are entering the firearms culture for the first time. We’ve lived with guns for several centuries so there are many well worn paths. To take some of the emotional heat out of the issue, this isn’t an all or nothing proposition. The alternatives are not ignorance about firearms or having our 15-year olds carrying concealed in public. Teaching and learning about firearms comes in a number of small steps on the way to self-defense. You’ve done things like this with your children already.

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Analysis: Whole Community Effort Needed to Combat Mass Shootings

A new U.S. Secret Service report adds to a growing body of research documenting common behavior patterns among mass attackers. It also highlights the potential for community intervention, both broadly and on a small scale, to make a real difference.

The National Threat Assessment Center’s (NTAC) report published Wednesday analyzed 173 “mass attacks”—defined as incidents in which three or more people, not including the attacker, were harmed in public or semi-public places—between 2016 and 2020. The report uncovered many patterns linking various attackers to one extent or another, but what most perpetrators had in common was striking.

More than three-quarters of the individuals who committed mass attacks exhibited concerning behaviors or shared alarming communications before carrying them out. Nearly two-thirds exhibited behaviors or shared communications that were so concerning “they should have been met with an immediate response,” according to the researchers. Roughly 60 percent of the attackers exhibited behavior that caused others to fear for the safety of the attacker, themselves, or the broader public.

Often these concerning behaviors manifested in the form of expressed threats, actively making plans to carry out an attack, more minor acts of violence, or harassing behaviors.

For anyone who has spent time following the news coverage of these all-too-frequent incidents, the study results likely won’t come as much of a surprise. Time after time, it seems reports come out of the woodwork only after an incident has already transpired, revealing troubling details from an attacker’s past that, in hindsight, should have made it all too clear what was bound to happen.

But this new report makes clear that such perception is more than just anecdotal. The data bears it out. Mass attackers do, in fact, routinely exhibit a pattern of troubling behaviors that are generally identifiable by others, whether it’s family members, friends, classmates, employers, coworkers, or law enforcement.

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No Second Amendment Would Render Us Powerless

America is on a razor’s edge. Three mass shootings within 48 hours have the usual liberal suspects exploiting the carnage to push gun control.

President Biden and his acolytes keep babbling the same platitude that is as smug as it is irrelevant. After a tragic shooting, Democrats keep bleating about how no hunter needs a semi-automatic weapon to kill deer.

This snide commentary shows a complete ignorance of the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution. The Second Amendment right of individuals to own guns has absolutely nothing to do with hunting. The right to own guns “shall not be infringed” by the government because that very government is why individuals own such guns.

The Second Amendment is part of the Bill of Rights, a charter of negative liberties that protects Americans from their own government. If the government were to ever turn inward and try to commit genocide, they would face resistance from armed citizens.

The issue is not whether America’s government would ever turn inward. What matters is that without the Second Amendment, they easily could. With the Second Amendment, their task is much more difficult.

The dark reality is that the American government only exists under a threat of death to that government. This is a collective truth, not a call to rebellion. Every one of our legal 325 million citizens can remember that they individually say and do matters. If not liberty, then death.

Our First Amendment allowing us to challenge ideas and people exists only because of our Second Amendment. As Yale law professor Akhil Reed Amar stated, “The framers recognized that self-government requires the people’s access to bullets as well as ballots.”

This is no antiquated concept in modern America. We have approximately 77.49 million adult gun owners. 2020 reflected the highest number of firearm sales in history, with 39,695,315 background checks for the sale of firearms and explosives. Americans own over 436.4M million guns . These are comforting facts.

Your individual conversations, vote and money matter as much as anyone else’s, all backed by the threat of the government’s demise. That is part of America’s shadow, never to be forgotten.

The United States, Mexico and Guatemala are the only three countries in the world that currently have a constitutional right to own a gun. Six other countries had a constitutional right to bear arms but repealed those laws.

America is the only country with a right to keep and bear arms without constitutional restrictions. Our Second Amendment is rare and exceptionally good.

This is why leftists remain set on trying to limit guns. Only then can Americans be fully controlled. That is not our way nor our agreement.

Every regime of death began by removing guns. The philosophy of the power of owning guns and knowing why we have them is at its essence as important as the guns themselves.

Our Second Amendment backing our First Amendment right to call out hypocrisies and lies is America’s own nuclear balance. Our government points its warheads at us. We in an act of detente point back ours collectively.

There is an inherent understanding, even in places led by tyrants: that those who go too far and try to implement tyranny in America, will one day see their power usurped, and their reign ended. This is detente for our people, not a darker position of violence. We must never forget the shadow side of our Second Amendment and its darker threat of death as a real tool for maintaining the balance of power in America.

God forbid we ever need to even think about using our arms, as citizens, against government. The Second Amendment thus still remains as a a useful reminder to those who lead us, why the Amendment was crafted in the first place – by our Founders.

Guns Don’t Kill People . . . People Kill People

Three recent mass shooting incidents in California have “gun violence” in the news again.  And most assuredly loud calls for banning guns will also be heard.

Tragedies like these three incidents make me think about a line from the 1953 film “Shane.” In the movie the lead character Shane famously remarks to Marian Starrett, ‘A gun is just a tool, Marian.  It’s no better or worse than the man using it.’

While this is true, it’s only true up to a point.  Guns are tools but they are not ordinary tools.  They were invented as weapons of war.  But they do  serve necessary and useful purposes as well.  Guns are used for hunting and other sport. They are also used for self-defense.

Guns

A number of television shows depict the reliance people here in the U.S.  have on hunting as a means of providing food.   The biathlon, in the Winter Olympics, and target and skeet shooting (clay pigeon shooting), are also  popular sports among gun enthusiasts.  And as the Heritage Foundation points out:

“According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, almost every major study on defensive gun use has found that Americans use their firearms defensively between 500,000 and 3 million times each year.”

Case in point: On July 17, 2022 a man lawfully carrying a firearm shot and killed an “an assailant suspected of fatally shooting three people and injuring two others in an Indiana mall on Sunday evening.”  The incident took place at the Greenwood Park Mall just outside Indianapolis.  Greenwood Police Chief Jim Ison called the man a “hero.”

And this brings us back to Shane’s point – a gun is no better or worse than the man (or woman) using it.  So let’s not get emotional or delusional about guns.  As the adage says, “Guns don’t kill people.  People kill people.”

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Another problem with Gun Violence Archive’s numbers

Supporters of gun control love to use Gun Violence Archive as an authoritative source on the number of shootings we have in this country. The number of mass shootings as compiled by the site–a number that doesn’t reflect what most people think of as a mass shooting, it should be remembered–is presented uncritically by the media.

It happens all the time, and in the wake of two shootings in California, it’s happening yet again. While we know plenty about those two shootings and will likely learn more as we go forward, proponents of gun control site Gun Violence Archive’s total number of mass shootings to show it’s more than those two incidents.

Take this editorial as just one example.

History is full of horrific events in which we shake our heads and ask, “How did that happen? What were they thinking?”

The Holocaust and slavery are two prime examples.

It begs the question of what is transpiring today that will be regarded by future generations as deplorable. That historians will record with the hope that they will never be repeated.

Climate change, yes. And then there is gun violence.

California has had three mass shootings in the last four days. Seven people were killed and one injured in Half Moon Bay on Monday. One person was killed and six injured at an East Oakland gas station later that evening. Eleven people were killed and nine injured in Monterey Park on Saturday.

We are not even at the end of the first month of 2023. Yet the Monterey Park and Half Moon Bay shootings bring the number of mass shootings (in which four or more people were killed or injured) to 39 this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive. That follows the 647 mass shootings recorded in 2022 and 690 mass shootings in 2021.

Of course, what follows is the true-to-form call for gun control we typically see from many editorial boards.

Now, in the wake of two deadly mass shootings, I sort of get it. However, they’re not just holding those two incidents up as why we somehow need gun control. They’re holding Gun Violence Archive’s numbers up as well.

And yet, what do we know about any of those shootings?

Well, we know three or more people were injured at those shootings–the low standard the site uses to categorize something as a mass shooting in the first place, which includes gang warfare, drivebys, and so on–but little else.

If we’re going to have a conversation about how we need gun control, about how certain guns shouldn’t be allowed in private hands, or how certain people should be legally barred from buying guns, shouldn’t we also need to know about any of those hundreds upon hundreds of so-called mass shootings?

I ask because I know statistically where most of those weapons came from, and it’s not from lawful gun sales.

How can you say that the gun laws are insufficient when so few of these hundreds of “mass shootings” were carried out with a lawfully-obtained firearm in the first place?

See, Gun Violence Archive is a favorite among the media and anti-gun set (but I repeat myself), yet it only shows part of the picture. To cite their numbers without important context on where those guns were obtained amounts to little more than trying to view a masterpiece by only looking at one single bit with a microscope.

It’s not a full picture by any stretch.

And it matters because while actual mass shootings make headlines, the real violence problem in our country happens in our inner cities. They get counted by Gun Violence Archive to try and push gun control when all the gun laws in the world aren’t going to help.