Category: Safety

Gun Banners Struggling To Find Relevance In A World Prepping For War

When all is said and done, the conflict in Ukraine, will have been responsible for putting more guns into civilian hands than Barack Obama and Joe Biden combined.

For the American gun-ban industry, these world events hit at a particularly difficult period of time. Make no mistake, they still get up every morning, have a cup of coffee, and then decide how best to strip you of your constitutional rights.

But nowadays, it’s not as easy for them to find someone who is willing to listen to their inane pleas. They’re desperate for an audience – any audience – so they have changed-up the way they message their anti-gun campaigns. They’ve resorted to quick-hits – single messages of short duration – so when one fizzles, they can quickly pivot to another, all to keep their donors mollified and their money flowing in.

Things were not always this way. Before the plague, Gabby Giffords or Shannon Watts had only to snap their fingers and they’d get the lead story for an entire news cycle. Michael Bloomberg actually wrote his own headlines. The Trace – the propaganda arm of his anti-gun empire – successfully embedded its paid anti-gun activists into newsrooms across the country. It was a major coup for the diminutive demagogue. His stooges in the mainstream media still haven’t realized how badly they were hoodwinked and used. But COVID, the lockdowns, and a series of violent riots across the country put an end to all of this.

When Americans saw their neighborhoods going up in flames, more than 5 million bought firearms and apparently a lot of ammunition.

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Yes, If America Is Ever Invaded, You Must Take Up Arms and Fight
When asked whether they’d flee or fight an invading force, far too many Millennials and Gen-Zers give the wrong answer.

As part of a recent survey of attitudes toward Russia’s execrable invasion of Ukraine, the polling firm Quinnipiac asked Americans whether they would stay and fight if the United States were invaded by Russia. The results make sobering — and often disgraceful — reading. Sixty-eight percent of Republicans said that they would “stay and fight,” with 25 percent indicating that they’d run away.

Among independents, those numbers are 57–36. Among Democrats, they’re in negative territory, at 40–52. Among 50- to 64-year-old men and women, the stay/leave numbers are 66/28. Among 18- to 34-year-olds, they are 45/48. Or, to put it another way: A majority of the prime-aged Americans whom the United States would need were such a crisis to arise imagine that they would flee if that crisis ever came.

For shame.

Lest the excuse-makers try to find nuance where none exists, let us note for the record that this is the most elemental question that a free man can ever be asked. There are no caveats or complexities here, and there is barely any politics, either. If the United States were to be invaded by Russia, America’s defense of itself could not plausibly be construed as “imperialism” or as “interventionism” or as a “foreign war” or “conflict of choice.” Nor could skeptics, à la Rupert Brooke, meaningfully complain that they were being asked to fight and die in a “corner of a foreign field.”

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BLUF:
Clearly, simply being armed doesn’t stop every threat to our national or personal security. It does, however, give us a fighting chance at survival, and in these perilous times I’d argue it’s more important than ever for us to protect, preserve, and strengthen our right to keep and bear arms. We might not have to worry much about a Russian invasion of U.S. soil, but unfortunately there are still plenty of homegrown madmen capable of committing atrocities against innocents, and an unarmed populace would only put more of us at risk..

The importance of armed deterrence for national and personal defense

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has led to some strange political sights here at home, including some Democrats cheering on a government handing out “assault weapons” to civilians, even as they try to criminalize ownership of modern sporting rifles here at home. Meanwhile, gun control activists are trying to shut down any comparison between Ukraine’s self-defense as a nation-state and the importance of the individual right of self-defense.

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Olight Ecommerce Technology Recalls Flashlights Due to Burn Hazard

Dear Olight M2R Pro & Warrior Mini Customers,

Although the M2R Pro and Warrior Mini have always been well loved, these models may be turned on inadvertently and overheat while stored in a holster or a consumer’s pocket, posing a burn hazard. Olight is now voluntarily recalling these products in the United States in cooperation with CPSC.

Hereby, we are calling you:

If you own one of these recalled flashlights, please immediately stop using it and contact Olight for store credit, or a replacement flashlight, or a full refund.

Olight will cover all shipping costs.

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BLUF:
Peter Ambler of Giffords Law Center is unhappy that gun rights advocates are pointing out evidence that further unravels his cause, so it’s not surprising that he thinks it’s “deeply irresponsible” to do so. In other words, he wants us to stop pouncing and seizing and hammering and exploiting and feasting and gloating.

Giffords’ Ambler to 2A Supporters: Stop pouncing on Ukraine!

The history and rationale behind the Second Amendment are clear-cut. The defense of self, family, community, and country is protected in the founding documents of several states, not just the U.S. Bill of Rights. In a constitutional republic with checks and balances, with power splintered and diffused among various levels of governments, an armed citizenry is the ultimate check and balance against enemies both foreign and domestic.

The United States is approaching its 250th anniversary. That the republic has lasted so long, contributed so much to human flourishing and prosperity, spread the ideas of liberty and justice around the world, doesn’t mean that we can take the status quo for granted and forget or distort what it took to get here. The rest of the world provides periodic reminders and warnings of what could happen if America abandons its founding principles. Ukraine is the warning du jour.

Our friends in the Gun Grab Lobby, however, aren’t drawing the same lessons from Ukraine. When faced with yet another example of why an armed citizenry is good, their response is to cry foul and ask us to not cite it.

Ukraine crisis emerges as talking point in U.S. gun debate

By Barbara Goldberg and Brendan O’brien

NEW YORK, March 1 (Reuters) – Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, gun rights advocates in the United States have sought to use the crisis to bolster their position on the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment to keep and bear arms, injecting a new element into the heated debate.

Arguments linking the invasion to gun rights have cropped up this week across social media, in a post by the National Rifle Association and during a legislative vote in the Georgia statehouse.

“What is happening in Ukraine proves the wisdom of our founding fathers in drafting the Second Amendment,” the NRA said in a blog post on Monday, pointing to Ukrainians who have armed themselves to defend their country.

Is a newly discovered fossil a talking point in the evolution “debate” or is it yet another piece of evidence supporting evolution? Ukraine is not a mere talking point despite how the headline downplays it as one.

Anti-gun violence advocates, however, point to increasing fire-arms deaths in the United States and say tighter regulations and fewer guns are what is needed.

Peter Ambler, executive director of Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, said it was “deeply irresponsible” for gun rights advocates to tie their “more guns everywhere” advocacy to the Ukraine crisis.

“The tyrannical actions of Vladimir Putin don’t erase the fact that 45,000 Americans died from gun violence in 2020, nor do they erase the urgent need for commonsense, popular gun violence prevention policies like background checks and funding for community violence intervention programs,” Ambler told Reuters.

“Anti-gun violence advocates,” better described as Anti-Second Amendment activists or gun control supporters, want fewer guns in the hands of the citizenry. A good question to ask them would be, “Can you define fewer?” We all know the answer to that, and it’s no mystery that the question was not asked by the reporters.

Peter Ambler of Giffords Law Center is unhappy that gun rights advocates are pointing out evidence that further unravels his cause, so it’s not surprising that he thinks it’s “deeply irresponsible” to do so. In other words, he wants us to stop pouncing and seizing and hammering and exploiting and feasting and gloating.

Seasoned readers and Second Amendment advocates know this already, but new readers may not, so I will also point out that the 45,000 “gun violence deaths” that Ambler is citing is vastly inflated using suicides, which are the bulk of firearm mortalities. That would be like calling suicide by hanging “rope violence” and suicide by jumping “bridge violence” or “gravity violence.” Ambler’s suggested background checks and community violence intervention programs won’t do anything to address the bulk of those mortalities.

Ukraine was among the arguments wielded by Republicans to win a 34-22 vote in the Georgia state Senate on a concealed carry bill that split down party lines on Monday.

“I would be willing to bet you today that 99 percent of the people of Ukraine would give anything that they have to have a Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms,” Lindsey Tippins, a Republican state Senator, said in asking his fellow legislators to back the bill.

It’s unfortunate that it was a party-line vote, but thanks to the “arguments wielded,” the end-result is a win for our natural right of self-defense. Three cheers for pouncing on Ukraine!

The Right To Bear Arms Is Still a Check on Tyranny
Ukrainians have taken to the streets with arms to defend their country and their freedom.

Ukrainians have taken to the streets with arms to defend their country and their freedom. They’ve prepared Molotov cocktails as makeshift bombs.

The threat of tyranny isn’t only present in the third world. In the United States, critics of the Second Amendment have claimed that in modern warfare, small-time weapons are useless as a check on the power of standing armies.

“Well, the tree of liberty has not been watered with the blood of patriots,” President Joe Biden said in remarks delivered at the White House on June 23, 2021. “What’s happened is that there have never been, if you want to, think you need to have weapons to take on the government, you need F-15s and maybe some nuclear weapons.”

But now Biden is sending small arms to “Ukraine’s front-line defenders,” and it turns out that weapons of all sorts can help fight off even a nuclear power.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy tweeted he’ll give weapons “to anyone who wants to defend the country.” Ukraine is the only European nation where firearms are not regulated by statute. Even in peacetime, Ukrainians were allowed to carry non–fully automatic rifles and shotguns as long as they were stored when not in use.

“And folks, ban assault weapons with high-capacity magazines that hold up to a hundred rounds,” Biden said at his 2022 State of the Union address. “You think the deer are wearing Kevlar vests?”

No, but unfortunately, hunting isn’t the only purpose of a gun. The horrific war in Ukraine reminds us that the right to bear arms is still a check on tyranny.

The article is out of date on current events, but the point is these anti-self defense politards shot themselves in the foot when trying make a saint out of a thug backfired on them. Another of their deceits is conflating and insinuating all homicides as criminal to pump the numbers, when a homicide is simply defined as one person killing another, and includes those determined to be justifiable.

Stand your ground laws proliferate after Trayvon spotlight

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — The “stand your ground” self defense law had been in effect in Florida for more than six years when it became part of the national vocabulary with the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012. When the 17-year-old was fatally shot, Florida was still one of the few states with the law that removes the duty to retreat before using deadly force in the face of danger.

Now, upwards of 30 states have some form of the law and recent research indicates they are associated with more deaths — as many as 700 additional firearm killings each year, according to a study published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The study found a national increase of up to 11% in homicide rates per month between 1999 and 2017 in those states with stand your ground laws. The largest increases, between 16% and 33%, were in southern states including Alabama, Florida, Georgia and Louisiana, the study found.

States colored in red or orange below have some form of Stand Your Ground law.

“These findings suggest that adoption of (stand your ground) laws across the U.S. was associated with increases in violent deaths, deaths that could potentially have been avoided,” the study’s authors concluded.

Advocates for the laws, especially the National Rifle Association, have argued they act as a crime deterrent by ensuring a person can protect themselves and others against a would-be assailant.

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Are Ukraine’s armed citizens making a difference?

One of the go-to arguments of gun control advocates who try to portray our Second Amendment as an outdated anachronism is that armed citizens just wouldn’t stand a chance against the might of a modern military force bristling with tanks, missiles, and even nuclear weapons (looking at you, Eric Swalwell).

The armed citizens of Ukraine, however, are helping to put that argument to rest. So far the nation has defied expectations and has continued to to resist the Russian invasion, repelling many of the attacks against the country’s biggest cities, and the country’s Territorial Defense Force, which includes many individuals who were simply private citizens a couple of weeks ago, is having an impact, according to Ukrainian officials.

“In the city itself, the territorial defense detachments are working quite effectively,” Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to the Ukrainian presidential chief of staff, said in a statement Saturday morning. “It turned out that people are coming out, defending their homes. It wasn’t expected by analysts of the Russian General Staff.”

I don’t think it was expected even for some of those who’ve shown up to volunteer, many of whom may never have thought about defending their country with a gun until last week but who are now heading down to their nearest recruitment center.

Men from their 20s to late 50s, from a range of backgrounds, showed up. Igor, 37, an economist for an online retailing company, who didn’t want his last name published for safety reasons, stood in line for his gun. He spoke at barely a whisper and his lips trembled. The dull thud of bombs or artillery could be heard in the distance.

“I never served in the army or with the police or anything,” he said. He said he hoped to be able to figure it out. He was worried, he said. “But people who are really afraid are sitting at home. They aren’t out here now.”

“Everybody in our country needs to defend — women, girls, everybody,” said Denis Matash, 33, the manager of Milk, a Kyiv nightclub, standing in line with about 50 other men at the recruitment center. “I don’t think they understand where they came,” he said of the Russians. “Look at what is happening here.”

Grigory Mamchur, 40, who works as a male strip dancer at the Milk nightclub, part of the now shuttered but once booming nightlife scene in Kyiv, was also in line for a Kalashnikov.

“There wasn’t even anything to think about,” Mr. Mamchur said. “We will defend the country however we can. This could be our last chance.”

The Territorial Defense Force and the private citizens who are taking up arms against their country’s invaders can’t thwart the Russian military on their own, but they can and have made life hell for Russian troops. In addition, the massive mobilization of civilian volunteers serves as a psychological boost for Ukrainians and is helping to obliterate the argument made by Vladimir Putin that the Ukrainian campaign is about “liberating” a grateful populace from their democratically-elected overlords.

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BLUF:
I have a fairly good imagination and we can imagine all kinds of problems that might exist with armed school staff. Before our imagination runs wild, consider that we already have several thousand man-years of experience with armed staff in schools. We wouldn’t notice that because concealed firearms are concealed. I have been in the training classes with school staff who volunteered to go armed on campus. The teachers and SROs talked to me after class. They were exactly the levelheaded people we want protecting our children. They would stop a bullet with their body to protect their kids.

Now we’ve given them a chance to save our children and a chance to go home alive. The greatest threat our children face is a politician and a journalist who can tell a biased story and leave the kids unprotected. That is another story for another time, but we have more challenges to face.

Why They Murder Our Kids, and How to Stop the Next School Attack

Life tests our character and we are both the ant and grasshopper from Aesop’s fable. We both prepare and we procrastinate. We face a similar choice when it comes to protecting our children at school. Some of us planned and prepared ahead of time to protect our children, and some of us put that off for another day. What is worse is that some unprepared adults will blame the next mass murder at school on the citizens who took steps to protect their children from harm. Fortunately for all of us we know how to stop mass murder in our schools. That wasn’t always true. Defending our children at school was both a discovery and an invention. I’ve studied school safety for the last decade and this is some of what we’ve learned.

Mass murder is designed to shocks us, yet most of us ignore why these murderers kill our kids. Fewer of us act to take away the murderer’s motivation. Only a few of us work to put an effective defense in our schools. Mass murder strikes at all of our hearts, but a dedicated handful of people worked for years to make our children safer. It was hard work. It remains hard work.

Comparing mass murder to a natural disaster, it is easier to write detailed fire codes and seismic requirements for our schools than to admit that some people who look like us will deliberately hurt our children. Mass murder makes us feel helpless. We have to look evil in the face and not flinch. The good news is that we know exactly what to do to stop the next mass murderer in his tracks.

Murder is an ancient problem. We have laws against taking an innocent life but those laws are ineffective against someone who doesn’t care if they get killed. In the past, killing innocent victims was usually motivated by politics and religion and resulted in terrorists attacks. Planning your own suicide to include the death of a number of unrelated innocent parties is relatively new. We had to make a new name for it. This celebrity-murder was spawned by the news media that turned the murderer into an overnight sensation.

As peculiar as celebrity-murder sounds, we’ve seen similar behavior. We saw teenagers kill themselves so that they would be talked about on the local television news and in local newspapers. Teen suicides would cluster as one depressed teen wanted the attention given to the previous suicide. These troubled kids would rather be dead than live with the feeling of being ignored. We learned to keep these teens alive by not mentioning the name or showing the picture of the teenager who took his own life.

We reduced teen celebrity-suicide when we denied the teenagers the notoriety they were dying to get.

We can trace the growth celebrity-murders back to the attacks in Dunblane, Scotland and then to Port Arthur, Australia. It was 1999 when we saw celebrity-murder jump to the US with the attack at the high school in Columbine, Colorado. Old investigative reports found over 80 copycat attempts following the attack at Columbine. I’m sure the number of copycats is far higher by now.

If you doubt that celebrity-murder is real, then remember how the media idolized the two terrorists who set off a pressure-cooker bomb at the 2013 Boston Marathon. The media gave the murders a public relations campaign worth tens-of-millions-of-dollars. In response, thousands of attentions-starved teens wondered what they would have to do so it would be their face on the news.

The solution to stop celebrity-murder should be as easy as repeating what we did to radically reduce teen celebrity-suicide. What makes the solution harder is that few politicians will scold the press and hold them accountable for sensationalizing the mass murderer. The politician depends on the news media for campaign coverage.. and the press feeds the politician’s ego. I think that is why so few politicians will promote legislation to punish the news media when the press creates celebrity murderers.

Given our flawed political and media climate, we might think that the situation is hopeless if we want to stop someone who wants to kill others and then kill themselves. Threatening the murderer with punishment certainly doesn’t work. That means increased criminal penalties are ineffective. The murderers will study and plan for years. That means that mandatory waiting periods for firearms don’t work either. We’ve seen these murderers kill their family members to get a gun. We’ve seen mass murderers lie to school counselors and psychiatrists, so the murderer is not looking for help with their personal problems. That limits the therapeutic model of stopping mass murderers. In fact, many of the murderers feel superior to the rest of us because of their skill in deception and in manipulating others. A firearms background check looks backwards, and mass murder is simply not a long-term career choice.

We discovered the solution to stop mass murders in schools almost by accident, but the discovery wasn’t simple. Fortunately, we had lots of people looking for a solution. The obvious place to turn for expertise at protecting our children was to ask the people who carried guns at school every day as part of their job. The process of discovery started when we asked school resource officers what they could do to stop mass murder in our schools.

There is a strong strain of professionalism in law enforcement when it comes to learning from the experience of other agencies. Administrators studied what worked and what failed. Someone asked the organization that studied school resource officers to see if an SRO could stop a mass murderer. The answer offered a ray of hope.

Yes, the SRO is an effective deterrent. Unfortunately, he is in uniform so he is easily identified. All the attacker had to do was wait for the SRO to go to lunch or until the SRO was at the opposite end of campus. The multiple attackers at Columbine, Colorado drove the single uniformed officer off campus with their gunfire. These researchers determined that time was the critical factor in stopping an attack. Whatever solution would stop the attacker had to be inside the building before the first shot was fired. Every other solution took too long and left too many of our children dead or injured.

After the attack in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, we had tens-of-thousands of school boards and school principals calling their local sheriff or their police chief. They asked for armed officers in every school. Time is so critical that the school officials wanted an armed officer in every building.

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Poll: Majority Feels Safer ‘Knowing There’s A Gun In The House’

Contrary to what the gun prohibition lobby would have America believe, a new Rasmussen survey released Friday shows that a majority of American adults who say someone in the house owns a firearm (61%) “feel safer knowing there’s a gun in the house.” majority feels safer with gun

Rasmussen learned that 36 percent of poll respondents admit they or someone in their household owns a gun. In recent years, anecdotal evidence suggests that gun owners refuse to acknowledge they have a gun in the home, as they are either worried about social stigma or simply believe it’s nobody’s business.

The survey of 1,000 U.S. American Adults was conducted on February 17 and 20, 2022, by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence, the veteran polling company said.

According to Rasmussen, “Of those who live in gun-owning households, majorities of both men (62%) and women (59%) say they feel safer knowing there’s a gun in the house.” The survey also revealed, “More whites (42%) than blacks (30%) or other minorities (28%) say they or someone in their household owns a gun.”

According to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, in 2020 and 2021, millions of Americans purchased firearms for the first time.

As one might expect, gun ownership falls mainly along political lines. Rasmussen’s survey found “Republicans (44%) are significantly more likely than Democrats or those unaffiliated with either major party (both 34%) to say they or someone in their household owns a gun.” The poll also revealed, “More men (42%) than women (32%) say they live in gun-owning households. However, a majority (58%) of men under 40 say they live in homes without firearms.”

And here’s something startling: “Entrepreneurs are more likely to live in gun-owning households than either government employees or private-sector workers.”

Over the past several days, Headlines from southeast Europe provide more reason for Americans to appreciate their Second Amendment rights. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has resulted in the Ukrainian government reportedly handing out firearms to citizens to mount a defense against Vladimir Putin’s army. In the United States, such a situation would hardly be necessary thanks to the Second Amendment protection of the right to keep and bear arms.

CCRKBA: ‘UKRAINE CRISIS UNDERSCORES IMPORTANCE OF SECOND AMENDMENT’

BELLEVUE, WA – The overnight invasion of Ukraine by Russian troops underscores the importance of the Second Amendment to the defense of freedom in the United States, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms said today.

“While we’ve seen reports that the Ukraine Parliament (Verkhovna Rada) has voted to ease restrictions allowing civilians to carry arms outside their homes,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb, “in our country this has been the constitutional law of the land since our nation was founded. The right of the people to keep and bear arms has protected this country since the beginning, and what is happening right now in Ukraine should be a lesson to all of those who push for citizen disarmament and a ban on private gun ownership how perilous that would be.”

Russian troops crossed the Ukraine border overnight, and world leaders are now scrambling to respond. The action is being universally condemned throughout the western world, but only in the United States is there good cause to appreciate the fact that average private citizens enjoy a constitutional protection to be armed.

“Our Second Amendment was enshrined in the Bill of Rights by men who had just fought a war for independence,” Gottlieb observed. “They returned to their homes from battlefields, not from some deer hunting camp. The right to keep and bear arms has never been about shooting ducks, but about protecting our right as citizens of the greatest nation on earth to defend our homes and families immediately against the kind of international outrage now unfolding in eastern Europe.

“The gun prohibition lobby would have America become vulnerable to such aggression as we are now seeing on television screens from coast to coast,” he continued. “This isn’t some action movie Americans are watching, this is real life, and it vividly illustrates why so many of us fight day and night to protect and defend our Second Amendment rights.

“Our thoughts and prayers are with the good citizens of Ukraine,” Gottlieb stated. “We can only hope that gun prohibitionists, or at least their supporters in the establishment media, learn something from this tragedy. To live in peace, one must always be prepared to defend it.”

Mere calls to end violence little more than theater

In most towns across the nation, you’ll find a community theater. There, locals will perform various shows that might have originated on Broadway but now find themselves on Main Street.

My wife spend an awful lot of her time volunteering and performing at one such theater here. I’ve taken a few trips across the boards myself over the years. I’m not going to insult theater folks in the least. Some of my favorite people are theater people.

But there’s a type of performative theater I keep seeing, and that’s those who basically use their performance to look like activism. I’m talking about people who do things like this.

Survivors, anti-gun violence groups and community leaders gathered Wednesday to tell Indianapolis to put the guns down.

Many of them live with the trauma of gun violence daily.

“Enough is enough,” said Deandra Dycus. “When are we going to get tired of seeing the daily news reports? A good doctor or a bad shooter is why my son survived when a stray bullet flew through the window and pierced him in the back of the head.”

They’re telling people to put their guns down.

Honestly, can anyone point me to a single person who heard such a call and thought, “Oh, crap! I didn’t realize me shooting up the city was a problem. My bad!” anywhere? Anywhere at all.

Now, I get that Dycus lost his son to such violence. He’s probably just looking for some way to prevent anyone else from going through what he did. But not everyone who gets involved in such “calls” has that excuse.

Then there are those who take their theater a few steps further, such as this gentleman from Michigan.

A 76-year-old community activist is crawling from Battle Creek to Kalamazoo to call for an end to gun violence.

Bobby Holley set out on the 23-mile trek Monday morning. Inching along the wet and icy road with pads strapped to his hands and knees, he said he’s crawling for a cause.

“To get attention to the issues,” he said. “If I walked, that wouldn’t get no attention… (Instead) I’m a person crawling, begging on his hands and knees to stop the violence.”

He wants to “get attention to the issues?”

I’m sorry, but is anyone unaware of the problem of so-called gun violence? Anyone? Seriously, no one is sitting there watching the news and thinking, “Holy crap! You mean people kill other people? And they use guns a lot of the time? I had no idea!”

It’s not happening.

Holley likely means well, and at least part of his crawling is to get attention on unsolved murders–something everyone knows exists but rarely thinks about–but he’s still just performing.

Something I’ve noticed through the years is that the people who make a big thing of their activism are rarely the people actually on the ground doing work. That’s because being on the ground, in the streets, trying to change things is hard work and you don’t have time for virtue-signaling nonsense.

But who gets the headlines? Who gets calls for media interviews? It’s self-aggrandizement in more cases than not, and the media eats it up.

BLUF:
I’ve met too many like Howard, (Howard’s eyes scare me. They’re pitch-black and utterly lifeless. When one looks into them, one strives to detect a spark of life, of humanity, of the person inside the body… but it’s not there)
and I take their threat very seriously.  It’s one reason I carry a gun, because I know they’re out there.  For every one behind bars, I’d guesstimate there are at least two or three on the street.

“The 1 % of the population accountable for 63 % of all violent crime convictions”

That’s the title of an article about Swedish research into violent crime in that country.  In the light of our discussion yesterday about violent crime in Washington D.C. and other US cities, I found its conclusions very interesting.  Here’s the abstract (i.e. executive summary) from the article.  Bold, underlined text is my emphasis.

Purpose

Population-based studies on violent crime and background factors may provide an understanding of the relationships between susceptibility factors and crime. We aimed to determine the distribution of violent crime convictions in the Swedish population 1973–2004 and to identify criminal, academic, parental, and psychiatric risk factors for persistence in violent crime.

Method

The nationwide multi-generation register was used with many other linked nationwide registers to select participants. All individuals born in 1958–1980 (2,393,765 individuals) were included. Persistent violent offenders (those with a lifetime history of three or more violent crime convictions) were compared with individuals having one or two such convictions, and to matched non-offenders. Independent variables were gender, age of first conviction for a violent crime, nonviolent crime convictions, and diagnoses for major mental disorders, personality disorders, and substance use disorders.

Results

A total of 93,642 individuals (3.9 %) had at least one violent conviction. The distribution of convictions was highly skewed; 24,342 persistent violent offenders (1.0 % of the total population) accounted for 63.2 % of all convictions. Persistence in violence was associated with male sex, personality disorder, violent crime conviction before age 19, drug-related offenses, nonviolent criminality, substance use disorder, and major mental disorder.

Conclusions

The majority of violent crimes are perpetrated by a small number of persistent violent offenders, typically males, characterized by early onset of violent criminality, substance abuse, personality disorders, and nonviolent criminality.

There’s much more at the link.  Highly recommended reading for those in the field of crime prevention, investigation and prosecution.

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Grabbing Guns Won’t Reduce Urban Violence
Firearm seizures are ineffective, and gun possession arrests are frequently unjust

If you want to reduce gun violence, New York City Mayor Eric Adams thinks, you need to go after guns. His plan relies heavily on disrupting gun trafficking, seizing guns, and arresting people for illegal gun possession.

This strategy is unlikely to work. Worse, the focus on gun possession arrests, if it fails to distinguish between people who pose a real threat to public safety and people who carry guns for self-protection, will compound the injustice of systematically denying city dwellers their Second Amendment rights.

“It is estimated that as many as 2 million illegal guns were in circulation in New York City in 1993,” the Justice Department reports. Last year, the New York City Police Department seized about 6,000 guns; even at that unusually high rate, three decades of seizures would not have made much of a difference.

Given that reality, attempts to disrupt the supply of guns are not a very promising approach either. For crime guns in New York, the average time between initial sale and confiscation is nearly 12 years.

Philadelphia, like New York, has recently seen sharp increases in homicides. But law enforcement officials in that city are rightly skeptical that gun seizures or supply-side measures are an effective way to tackle the problem.

Between 1999 and 2020, according to a January report from a committee that includes local police officials and Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, nearly 13 million guns were legally sold in Pennsylvania, an average of more than 1,600 a day. Meanwhile, Pennsylvania law enforcement agencies seized an average of 22 guns per day.

“With so many guns available,” Krasner says in the report, “a law enforcement strategy prioritizing seizing guns locally does little to reduce the supply of guns.” And if that strategy “entails increasing numbers of car and pedestrian stops,” he warns, it “has the potential to be counterproductive by alienating the very communities that it is designed to help.”

As in New York, the Philadelphia report notes, “most guns used and/or recovered are those purchased a long time ago, indicating that attempts to limit the future supply of guns now will not impact the current gun violence crisis.” The report’s analysis of 100 shootings confirms other research finding that criminals typically obtain guns through illegal transfers or theft, sources that would not be affected by new restrictions on sales, such as expanded background checks.

Data from Baltimore, another city where homicides have risen in recent years, likewise cast doubt on the effectiveness of Adams’ strategy. Based on 31 years of homicide and gun-seizure data, a Battleground Baltimore report published last week concludes that “seizing ‘illegal’ guns does not reduce violent crime, although gun seizures and gun possession arrests remain metrics frequently cited by police.”

Arresting people for illegal gun possession is not just ineffective; it is frequently unjust. Krasner says gun possession arrests “must be targeted to distinguish between drivers of gun violence who possess firearms illegally and otherwise law-abiding people who are not involved in gun violence.”

When “people do not feel protected by the police,” Krasner notes, they may “view the risk of being caught by police with an illegal gun as outweighed by the risk of being caught on the street without one.” Before he was elected, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg expressed a similar concern.

“We need to recognize that not every person charged with possessing an illegal gun in New York City is a driver of violence,” Bragg said on his campaign website. “My dad had an illegal gun not because he liked guns or because he was ‘dangerous’; he had a gun because of crime in the neighborhood.”

Bragg has since retreated from that stance, echoing Adams’ determination to vigorously prosecute people who carry guns without the government’s permission. But law enforcement agencies cannot redeem their failure to protect public safety by locking up people who respond to that failure by exercising the constitutional right to armed self-defense.

Seattle PD having trouble hiring new officers

Politicians often can’t really afford to be far-sighted. Their constituents want immediate results, not the promise of better days down the road.

Yet officials can be far too short-sighted for their own good. Seattle, for example, was another of a handful of cities that cut funding to their police department not all that long ago.

Violent crime reached a 14-year high in Seattle last year as the city’s police department deals with a staffing shortage that is straining its ability to protect the community.

Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell said during his state of the city address this week that there is funding to hire 125 new officers this year and put more resources on the street.

“The depleted staffing we see today does not allow us to react to emergencies and crime with the response times our residents deserve,” Harrell said Tuesday.

“It does not allow us to staff the specialty teams we need for issues like domestic violence or DUI or financial crimes targeting the elderly,” he said. “It does not allow us to conduct the thorough investigations we expect to make sustainable change.”

Twenty officers left the force in January, 171 officers exited last year, and 186 officers separated from the force in 2020 amid the push to defund the police, according to KOMO. Only 137 officers have been hired in that time span.

In other words, Seattle treated officers like crap, demonized them, and then are absolutely and completely shocked that they can’t hire officers.

Yep. The whole thing is an absolute mystery. Not a soul could have seen this one coming, now could they?

I mean, other than every person with a functional brain, that is.

Look, cops are people. Not only does that mean some will be good and some will be bad, it also means they want to be appreciated for what they do and know they’re supported by their leadership.

Additionally, when you’ve demonized them in the press, you can’t really expect applicants to flock to fill the void. It’s just not going to work that way.

“You know, the media and the city have been treating police like crap. I just can’t wait to get me some of that!” said no one ever.

This is of Seattle’s own making, much like what’s going on in San Francisco right now. You can’t demonize the police then be surprised when things don’t go well in the aftermath.

I get that they shouldn’t be lionized and shielded from liability for their mistakes, but there’s a middle ground that most people can understand and respect between those two extremes. Most people want that middle ground, even.

Unfortunately, public officials are too short-sighted to see that appeasing a mob one day might come back to bite them in the backside in the not-so-distant future.

So, here we are. Seattle can’t get enough police officers and seems genuinely confused as to why. Frankly, were it not for good people who are going to get hurt, I’d just sit here and laugh at them.

TPTB want the ‘unwashed’ disarmed because we’re a long term threat to their controller dreams. They’re not ignorant of history where the pitchforks, rope & torches have often come out in response to their tyranny.

Is the Gun Dangerous, or is it the Criminal?

The world is fascinatingly complex yet important truths are often simple. We shouldn’t take that too far since most simple answers are also wrong or incomplete. That tension helps make life so interesting as we try to understand the world around us. For example, we saw violent crime increase in the last few years. Should we try to keep violent criminals away from guns, or should we try to keep violent criminals away from us? Is the tool dangerous or is the person dangerous? Let’s look at both ideas and see if there are any simple answers to be found.

When we look for simple solutions we see that criminals use guns to commit violence. That sounds like the case is closed but there is more evidence to uncover. If we keep looking then we find that innocent victims also use firearms to stop violence. That means the answers are not black and white but shades of gray.

When we look at all firearms we see that a vanishingly small fraction of the guns owned by civilians were used in violent crime each year (1 in 1400). Now we look deeper and find out that honest citizens used a firearm for self-defense over 1.6 million times a year. That is more people than live in New Hampshire or Hawaii. Each year, more people use a firearm for self-defense than the population of Wyoming and Vermont combined. Armed defense is common.

Proportions matter when we’re looking at shades of gray. We use a firearm for self-defense six times more often than a firearm is used in violent crime (5.98). Good guys with guns save lives. That is both simple and true.

Is safety that simple?

Despite the facts that guns overwhelmingly stop crime, New York State legislators passed a law to lets the public sue gun manufacturers because criminals used a “dangerous” gun that the manufacturers released into the public. That obviously misses the target of reducing crime. Either those New York lawmakers missed the facts or they didn’t care about honest citizens who defend themselves. Politics is obviously complex.

When we look at how criminals behaved, we see that most violent crimes (85%) didn’t involve a firearm at all. Said another way, if we would magically disarm everyone, that wouldn’t hamper the vast majority of violent criminals. Instead of reducing crime, disarming the innocent victims makes it easier for the criminals and would lead to more violence.

Young men commit most violent crimes. Young men are stronger than old men, and far stronger and faster than most women. Disarming women and the elderly makes them much more vulnerable to violent criminals.

Few of us want that. Disarming the good guys hurts honest citizens who want to protect their family. That isn’t an abstract theory, but common practice as we use a gun for self-defense over a million times a year.

Let’s step away from the soundbites. Look at human nature instead and think of the people you know. Some of the people you know are completely trustworthy while others are not. Some resist any temptation while others can’t be trusted with a penny. We are not all the same. When it comes to violence, some of us are a danger to others and most of us are not. It is the person who is a danger to others rather than the tools they use. Again, that is both simple and true.

Violent criminals are not like us. Most of us will never commit a violent crime, yet we know that a few people will victimize others. Most murders are committed by a few hitmen in drug gangs. 64 percent of felons who served time for a violent crime were re-arrested. 41 percent of violent criminals were later re-convicted of subsequent crimes. 34 percent of them were re-incarcerated. Some people practice a life of violent crime.

Shades of gray matter and a violent criminal is 500 times more likely to re-offend than a firearm is likely to be used in a violent crime.

In contrast, firearms manufacturers built a product that we overwhelmingly use to save lives in armed defense. If we’re looking for people who increase the risks for all of us, then let’s sue New York politicians, judges, and prosecutors who put dangerous recidivist-criminals back on our streets. Now that will save lives

New firearm owners shaking up gun culture and American politics

HARRISBURG — Richard Reisinger, of New Bloomfield in Perry County, leaned in as David Walker of Savage Guns, a Massachusetts-based firearm company, showed him how to work a new innovation that allows the owner to adjust a gun for right- or left-handed users.

“I have grandchildren; some of them are left-handed, some are right-handed, so now if you purchase a gun, all you have to do is place this on the handle and it accommodates either, so you buy one gun and multiple kids can shoot it,” Mr. Reisinger said, admiring the practicality of the design.

“It is really nice.”

Mr. Reisinger — who was visiting the Savage booth at the Great American Outdoor Show at the Pennsylvania Farm Show complex recently — said he comes from a long line of hunters, a tradition he now enjoys with his grandchildren.

“I do a lot of whitetail hunting at the moment — but with grandchildren, I’ll take them out to hunt pretty much anything that they’re interested in. I love coming to the outdoors show because I get to see, and touch, and feel a lot of different firearms that I might be interested in down the road,” he explained.

Mr. Reisinger — like dozens of other people interviewed that day — said gun ownership is about a lot of things: “Putting food on the table and providing for my family, self-protection and the motor and dexterity skills it sharpens when you go target practicing. You meet more and more new gun owners all of the time; most of them said they bought their first gun for those exact same reasons … they found all of it personally empowering.”

This is a truth that conflicts with our culture’s misconceptions about who “the American gun owner” really is and what his or her motivations are for enjoying firearms. If you turn on the national news or log onto social media, you’re likely to find lawful gun owners portrayed as cultish, backwoods white males who have a gluttonous appetite for violence.

Gun owners see themselves quite differently — and their demographics and motivations don’t fit neatly into the stereotypes.

Despite the millions spent in digital advertisements by gun control advocates like former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the appeal of gun ownership is only increasing. Of all the firearms sold last year, 30% — 5.4 million purchases — went to new gun owners, according to a retailer survey conducted by the National Shooting Sports Foundation.

A new interest in self-sufficiency, caused by collapses in our supply chain, has also led to an explosion in applications for hunting licenses.

According to Stateline, a Pew Trust initiative, many states across the country saw a dramatic rise in both men and women taking a hunter safety class for the first time — with states like Michigan seeing a 67% hike in new hunting license buyers in 2021 compared with 2019, including a 15% increase in female hunters.

People who would never have considered owning a gun were now curious about hunting to provide for their families — and about target practice to learn how to defend themselves and their homes.

Continue reading “”

FYI; All data pulled from massshootingtracker.site which freely and openly admit their definition of ‘mass shooting’ isn’t what the FBI uses for its Uniform Crime Report (and which just happens to increases the number of incidents)

Here are a few tidbits according to the data provided for 2021:

California has the 3rd highest number of mass shootings (54 by their definition).

New York was 5th with 41.

Both have had magazines and AR bans for 28 and 9 years respectively.

Inversely Alaska, Idaho, New Hampshire, and South Dakota have had only 1 mass shooting with no such gun control laws.

Hrmmm. I think I see the possibility of a pattern emerging. It’s like gun control doesn’t just not work, it makes the problem worse!

¡Grupos de Autodefensas para mi!

‘We’re scared’: People worry about shooting spikes in Spokane, turn to self defense for protection

SPOKANE, Wash. — Shootings are up in Spokane. It’s been a trend for years, and people and police are trying to get a handle on the issue.

So far this year, there have been 21 shootings, according to Spokane Police.

Here’s a breakdown of the rise in shootings over the years:

  • 2018: 36 shootings
  • 2019: 52 shootings
  • 2020: 94 shootings
  • 2021: 152 shootings

There were 10 shootings in just this past week police are still investigating. One of those happened at Gordon and Division where the victim fired back at someone who shot bullets into his living room, narrowly missing the family inside. Since that shooting, neighbors say they’re organizing a crime watch team to fight the issue. The man shot at says he won’t leave his home without a gun again.

Another drive-by shooting in East Spokane on East 5th Avenue and South Fiske Avenue has one mom ready to move out for good.

“We’re scared,” said Jamie Anderson. She has a son who says hasn’t slept well since the last shooting. “We’re trying to move out of this area and into a better area.”

The shooting spikes across the city are something police are worried about.

“It certainly is a troubling one that we want to try and get a handle on get under control,” said Nick Briggs, a Corporal with the Spokane Police.

He adds this rise in gun violence is a national trend, but they are concerned about the local increase and are working to find the people committing the shootings.

Gun shop owners say people are handling their own safety instead.

“They have to take their own precautions and do what they feel is necessary to keep their families safe,” said Jeremy Ball. He’s the owner of Sharp Shooting Indoor Range & Gun Shop.

He says his gun sales haven’t gone down since the start of the pandemic. High sales are the “new normal.” Last year, the nation saw the second highest amount of guns sold on record. At Ball’s shop, he says he seeing more first time gun owners buying small compact guns they can keep on them.

“We’re still seeing lots and lots of sales in small compact guns that people are using as carry weapons,” he said.

Anderson says she owns a gun but even that isn’t giving her the protection she wants.

“If a stray bullet comes through my door, we can’t stop that or it comes through my wall, we can’t stop that,” she said.

Police say people need to be careful with self defense. It’s a complicated issue if you don’t know the rights you can use to stay safe.

“It gets to be a very convoluted and complex legal analysis in terms of what somebody can and can’t do,” Briggs said.

What Briggs said you should do is report any information about these crimes and others to police as they work to keep Spokane safe. They also added in relation to other cities similar in size, the city still has a relatively low crime rate. Major Crimes and the Spokane Regional Safe Streets Task Force are actively investigating these recent shootings.

Letters to the Editor: You don’t have to shoot someone to use a gun defensively

To the editor: Dr. Steven J. Sainsbury pushes the absurd claim there are only 2,000 defensive gun uses per year. (“Thinking of buying a gun for self-defense? Don’t do it,” Opinion, Jan. 31)

The claim overwhelmingly relies on counting defensive gun uses reported in news articles, but that is a dramatic undercount because the vast majority of successful self-defense cases don’t make the news. Ninety-five percent of defensive gun uses involve merely brandishing a gun, and less than 1% involve the attacker being killed or wounded.

But most news stories only report on cases where attackers are killed and brandishings are ignored.

Seventeen national surveys find an average of 2 million defensive gun uses per year. The U.S. Department of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey puts it at around 100,000. Both show the 2,000 claim to be ridiculous.

Finally, the article labels me as a “gun rights advocate,” not a researcher who has held academic positions at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Chicago, Stanford and Yale. I have also been a senior advisor for research at the U.S. Department of Justice.

John R. Lott Jr., Missoula, Mt.