It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of anything he was never reasoned into.
–Jonathan Swift
Category: Quote O’ The Day
No law ever written has stopped any robber, rapist or killer, like cold blue steel in the hands of their last intended victim.
— W. Emerson Wright
BLUF
“The numbers indicate if we didn’t have gun-free zones, we would have more people stopping these attacks,”
Over 60% of ‘active shooters’ stopped by ‘good guy with a gun’
A large percentage of “active shooter” incidents are thwarted by armed citizens who sometimes don’t even fire their weapons, but those cases are no longer counted under President Joe Biden’s pro-gun control policies.
According to just-released data from the Crime Prevention Research Center, 41% of active shooting incidents were stopped by armed civilians.
Outside of so-called gun-free zones, which bar the legal carrying of firearms, over 63% of active shooting cases were ended by an armed civilian, according to the center.
The new data from John R. Lott Jr., the former Justice Department senior adviser for research and statistics, are his latest to challenge undercounting and bias in government reports on shootings and back up efforts by Second Amendment and police groups to encourage people to carry firearms.
If you have 10,000 regulations, you destroy all respect for the law.
—Winston Churchill
“Smart” guns and “safety” locks aren’t meant to protect children. They’re meant to kill gun owners.
—VICTOR MILAN
When liberty is taken away by force, it can be restored by force. When it is relinquished voluntarily by default, it can never be recovered.
— Dorothy Thompson
They want us disarmed?
There Can Be No Negotiating on the Right to Arms — with Hate Groups or with Anyone
“Senate Majority Leader @SenSchumer is negotiating with the NRA to pass his priority bill – the SAFE Act, a cannabis banking legislation – with Section 10 added as a sweetener for the NRA-backed Senate Republicans,” Newtown Action Alliance tweeted (x’ed?) Monday. “We appreciate @SenJackReed working to modify the bill to ensure that regulators can warn banks about risky customers – like gun retailers. Congress should not be negotiating with the NRA, a terrorist group that is pushing its any guns to anyone everywhere agenda. Guns are the #1 killer of our children & gun deaths have increased 50% since the Sandy Hook shooting tragedy.”
That’s a lot of vitriol-drenched lies to unpack. Let’s start with NRA’s interest, which is passage of the Fair Access to Banking Act to protect against “banks, credit card companies, and other financial service providers [setting] terms of service that openly discriminate against lawful firearm-related commerce.” Gun owners who recall the days of Operation Chokepoint recall the offensive excesses – from financial ostracism of FFLs and the pejorative conflation equating them with purveyors of “Ponzi schemes” and “racist materials” to the ridiculous revelation that ATF’s banker was stiffing porn stars – pun intended. (Note: Those last two links go to the Internet Archive and may take a bit to load).
Democrat gun-grabber Jack Reed’s interest is in imposing Operation Chokepoint on steroids, this time by mandating Department of Precrime “snitchware” via “Merchant Category Codes” developed by a “progressive” bank affiliated with a leftist union that “rakes in millions from Dem campaigns, liberal orgs,” and has organized rallies and marched in solidarity with communists.
Suddenly motives are seeming less and less about “gun safety” and more and more about totalitarian citizen disarmament. So, let’s look at the last part of Newtown Action Alliance’s missive.
Congress should just impose such edicts and not include the largest lobby group representing millions of gun-owning citizens in its deliberations…? Leave them with no voice in what’s going to happen to their property — and to them if they don’t comply…?
The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.
— Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet
Careful scientists know to acknowledge uncertainty in the findings and conclusions of their papers. But in one leading journal, the frequency of hedging words such as “might” and “probably” has fallen by about 40% over the past 2 decades, a study finds.
If this trend holds across the scientific literature, it suggests a worrisome rise of unreliable, exaggerated claims, some observers say. Hedging and avoiding overconfidence “are vital to communicating what one’s data can actually say and what it merely implies,” says Melissa Wheeler, a social psychologist at the Swinburne University of Technology who was not involved in the study. “If academic writing becomes more about the rhetoric … it will become more difficult for readers to decipher what is groundbreaking and truly novel.”
The new analysis, one of the largest of its kind, examined more than 2600 research articles published from 1997 to 2021 in Science, which the team chose because it publishes articles from multiple disciplines. (Science’s news team is independent from the editorial side.) The team searched the papers for about 50 terms such as “could,” “appear to,” “approximately,” and “seem.” The frequency of these hedging words dropped from 115.8 instances per 10,000 words in 1997 to 67.42 per 10,000 words in 2021.
A gun is like a book. Possession, use, and purchase is a specific enumerated right. You should be able to be purchase them anyway, anytime, and anywhere. That is my goal. Get used to it.
-Joe Huffman
The inability to understand the right to defend yourself, a right that existed long before The Constitution was written, is a disease, a disorder that cannot be solved by talking to people. We have to act assuming they will never understand.
@LafayetteLucian
Without freedom there will be no firearms among the people.
Without firearms among the people there will not long be freedom.
Certainly there are examples of countries where the people remain
relatively free after the people have been disarmed,
but there are no examples of a totalitarian state being created or
existing where the people have personal arms.
— Neal Knox
Hypocrickets – That silence that ensues when the media hypocritically won’t cover something that doesn’t fit The Narrative™.–Kevin Baker
Quote O’ The Day
A Principal source of errors and injustice, are false ideas of utility.
For example, that legislator has false ideas of utility, who considers particular more than general convenience; who had rather command the sentiments of mankind, than excite them, and dares say to reason, “Be thou a slave;” who would sacrifice a thousand real advantages, to the fear of an imaginary or trifling inconvenience; who would deprive men of the use of fire, for fear of being burnt, and of water, for fear of being drowned; and who knows of no means of preventing evil but by destroying it.
The laws of this nature, are those which forbid to wear arms, disarming those only who are not disposed to commit the crime which the laws mean to prevent.
Can it be supposed, that those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws of humanity, and the most important of the code, will respect the less considerable and arbitrary injunctions, the violation of which is so easy, and of so little comparative importance?
Does not the execution of this law deprive the subject of that personal liberty, so dear to mankind and to the wise legislator; and does it not subject the innocent to all the disagreeable circumstances that should only fall on the guilty?
It certainly makes the situation of the assaulted worse, and of the assailants better, and rather encourages than prevents murder, as it requires less courage to attack armed than unarmed persons.
— Cesare Beccaria in “On Crimes and Punishment” 1764
New York State recently cited Colonial laws to disarm ‘dissidents’ while attempting to justify their post-Bruen gun control legislation.
They are saying the quiet part out loud.
-Firearms Policy Coalition
Kabuki Theater
Rep. Don Beyer (So nice when they provide pictures for PID)
Democrats demand 1,000% excise tax on ‘assault weapons,’ high-capacity magazines
Democrats failed to move the same idea when they controlled the House last year
More than two dozen House Democrats put forward legislation Friday that would slap “assault weapons” and high-capacity magazines with a 1,000% excise tax, a change that would raise the price of a $500 weapon to $5,000 in a bid to reduce access to guns across the country.
Rep. Don Beyer, D-Va., and 24 other House Democrats introduced the legislation Friday. It’s the second time Democrats have put forward the idea.
Beyer and 37 Democrats proposed the same idea last year when Democrats controlled the House, but it never moved.
The text of Beyer’s new bill was not out as of the weekend, and it was unclear if any changes were made from his 2022 version. His bill from last year imposed the tax on any magazine or related device that can accept more than 10 rounds of ammunition.
The same 1,000% tax would be imposed on any “semiautomatic assault weapon,” which last year’s bill defined as a semiautomatic rifle or pistol with a fixed magazine of 10 rounds or more or that have other various features.
Under that rule, a weapon that normally costs $2,000 would force customers to pay more than $20,000, a change Beyer argued last year could help “curb the epidemic of gun violence.”
“Congress must take action to stem the flood of weapons of war into American communities, which have taken a terrible toll in Uvalde, Buffalo, Tulsa and too many other places,” Beyer said then. “Again and again assault weapons designed for use on the battlefield have been used in mass shootings at schools, grocery stores, hospitals, churches, synagogues, malls, theaters, bars and so on.”
The National Rifle Association has argued gun control advocates invented the term “assault weapon” to “deliberately confuse the public and advance the political cause of gun control.” The NRA says the term “assault rifle” applies only to automatic weapons, while gun control advocates are looking to put controls on semi-automatic weapons.
Fully automatic weapons discharge rounds continuously while the trigger is pulled, and the NRA has said these weapons are used by the U.S. armed services but are not easily obtained by the public, unlike semi-automatic weapons that fire just a single round.
Beyer’s new bill was introduced a day after more than 100 Democrats told House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., they are “disappointed” that House GOP leaders haven’t moved any legislation this year to curb gun ownership in America.
“As Members of the Gun Violence Prevention Task Force, we call on you to schedule votes on gun violence prevention legislation as soon as possible this year,” they wrote in a public letter to McCarthy.
“Gun violence is the leading cause of death of children in America since 2020. Last year, 1,686 children were killed and another 4,485 were injured by gun violence,” the letter added. “Despite this preventable carnage, the House has yet to vote on even one gun violence prevention bill.”
“You cannot truly call yourself peaceful unless you are capable of great violence. If you are not capable of violence, you are not peaceful, you are harmless”
–Stefan Grant
“Remember this, live by it, die for it if necessary: that our patriotism is medieval, outworn, obsolete; that the modern patriotism, the true patriotism, the only rational patriotism, is loyalty to the Nation all the time, loyalty to the Government when it deserves it.”
– Mark Twain
“The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”
(Federalist No. 47)
Quote O’ The Day
That the leftist echo chamber in unison is doing everything it can to discredit the movie, the actor, the man who started the group by rescuing children and the group that rescues children should tell you something. They are over the target and laying down truth bombs right and left. The sound of leftist heads exploding…it’s a beautiful thing.
–Sheila Stokes
THE SOUND OF LEFTIST HEADS EXPLODING
One week ago a girlfriend, Christie and I went to go see the movie “The Sound of Freedom”. It really was quite an amazing movie. The story centers on two little children from Honduras, and how they came to be in the clutches of sex traffickers and their rescuer, Tim Ballard, a former Homeland Security officer. This was a long time ago, back when the government fought crime. Tim is now the person behind “Operation Underground Railroad” The movie covers Tim’s change in life mission, from taking down pedophiles to finding the children exploited by them.
A noble movie, right? I mean it’s true, not all of it, there were some creative liberties taken, and some characters were blurred, but many of the main ones are very much real and the names given to them in the movie are close enough that if you know them, you’d know who the were. O.U.R. really is rescuing children and I guess you could call it their mission statement is “G-d’s children are not for sale”.
What has been baffling is the media response to this! Shocking really. I mean how many times have we heard from the left that the latest gun control measure meant to take rights away from law abiding citizens, many of them parents, is “for the children”. I’m still not clear on how limiting parents ability to defend their children is to the benefit of the children but I’m not a brain rotted leftist, so there ya go.