another rerun from the Carter years
This is exactly how Ayatollah Khomeini answered questions when he first came to power. "Freedom of speech, human rights and women's rights will all be protected…in accordance with Islamic law". That means none of these rights will be protected. https://t.co/XvTzxy0TJc
— Karim Sadjadpour (@ksadjadpour) August 17, 2021
‘Stupid is as Stupid does’
Scoop: Investigation finds fired Tennessee vaccine official mailed dog muzzle to self.
A Tennessee investigation found evidence that the state’s fired vaccine chief, Michelle Fiscus, purchased a dog muzzle that she previously claimed someone had mailed in an attempt to intimidate her.
Why it matters: Fiscus, who denied sending herself the muzzle in a Monday tweet, has characterized her firing as a political move driven by Republican state officials after she shared a memo citing state law about whether adolescents can seek medical care, including a COVID vaccine, without their parents’ permission.
Details: The Tennessee Department of Safety & Homeland Security found through a subpoena that the Amazon package containing the muzzle traced back to a credit card in Fiscus’ name, according to an investigation report obtained by Axios.
The backdrop: Fiscus was fired amid criticism from Republican lawmakers who were upset about the health department’s efforts to convince teenagers to get the COVID-19 vaccine.
What they’re saying: In a statement distributed by her husband, Fiscus said she was not aware of the report until Axios shared it.
‘Fudd for Chipman’ Democrat Ploy to Manipulate Low-Information Gun Owners
“Guest view: David Chipman can unite us on Second Amendment issues,” an August 5 testimonial appearing in, among other outlets, the Montana Standard, declares. The author is Dave Stalling, a self-described “past president of the Montana Wildlife Federation, … gun owner, former Force Recon Marine and avid hunter who lives in Missoula.”
The only surprise is that such a piece hasn’t appeared earlier. Gun owners have long been subjected to sudden appearances of Democrat citizen disarmament enablers trying to pass themselves off as fellow “tribe” members when there is a political goal to be attained. In the last presidential election, two groups tried to make their mark, “Sportsmen and Sportswomen for Biden — a coalition of more than 50 prominent hunters and anglers from across the country, who have come together to endorse Joe Biden for President of the United States,” and the Giffords’-bankrolled Gun Owners for Safety.
Yeah, they’re Fudds for Biden. If you’re inclined to take offense at that word, hold on a second: It’s not a pejorative for all hunters and sport shooters – just the ones who throw their fellow gun owners under the bus and support citizen disarmament edicts that don’t impact their hobbies. But a Fudd is what Stalling proves himself to be, particularly when he accuses Donald Trump Jr. of lying when he says Montana Sen. Jon Tester is not “staunchly pro-Second Amendment.” He’s not.
Tester’s a prime example of a self-serving opportunist who recognized that he had to vote “pro-gun” in order to be elected in that state, and was allowed to get away with it by Democrat Party leadership because it served their purposes to have him advance the rest of the agenda. Revealingly, Tester showed his true nature when he voted to keep Post Offices “gun-free zones.” The last straw for NRA was Tester’s Supreme Court confirmation votes (for Kagan and Sotomayor, against Gorsuch and Kavanaugh) when they downgraded his one-time “A” to a “D.”
“As a gun owner, former ATF special agent, and internationally recognized gun safety expert, David Chipman is hardly ‘anti-Second Amendment,’” Stalling continues. “As a Montana citizen, gun owner, former Force Recon Marine, and hunter, I fully support Chipman’s nomination, and urge my fellow Montanans to do the same.”
“Hardly”? And “recognized” by who? As for being a gun owner, so is Dianne Feinstein – who was reported to have a concealed carry permit that you or I couldn’t get to save our lives –literally. What does that prove? With all the evidence of his personal penchant for infringements that’s been amassed to the contrary (just enter the search term “Chipman” in the AmmoLand search bar), you wonder what more the guy has to do.
BLUF:
If people are suspicious of Islam, Rizwan Wadan could fight that by confronting, rather than perpetuating, the perception that claims regarding Islam being peaceful are disingenuous and based on an incomplete reading of the relevant texts. Instead, he has produced yet another deceptive endeavor that is just going to create more of the “Islamophobia,” in the sense of suspicion of Islam, that he claims to be trying to stamp out.
Here’s something you’ve all been waiting for: A Muslim filmmaker has produced a documentary hitting “Islamophobia.” Rizwan Wadan, who was part of the technical crew for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Churchill and The Favourite, has directed a documentary entitled Error In Terror about “Islamophobia,” and is now traveling around with it, spreading peace and tolerance. The only problem is that Error in Terror itself only reinforces why some people are suspicious of Islam in the first place and wary regarding its growth in Western countries.
The problem starts with the term itself. “Islamophobia” is a fraught word, because while it is thrown around all the time these days, few of those who use it to defame and smear others bother to explain what they mean by it. It is most commonly used for two quite distinct phenomena: vigilante crimes against innocent Muslims, which are never justified, and honest analysis of the motivating ideology of jihad terror, which is always necessary. Islamic advocacy groups and their leftist allies have been insisting for years that such analysis, too, constituted “Islamophobia,” and continue to try to drive such analysis outside the bounds of acceptable discourse by conflating it with those attacks on innocent Muslims.
Rizwan Wadan doesn’t appear to take any pains to explain what he means by the term, either. According to a report from Britain’s ITV News Saturday, Wadan is “a talented filmmaker who has worked on blockbusters including Star Wars and The Favourite,” and has now “produced a hard-hitting film which highlights terrorism and Islamophobia in the UK. It is part of his Error In Terror campaign, which he is bringing to different parts of the country to inspire communities and effect change.”
“Growing up as a Muslim, living in the UK,” Wadan explained, “I’ve seen our relationships within the communities deteriorate. And that’s kind of happened – from my perspective – through how Islam and Muslims have been perceived. A lot of that has come through our representation in films, in the news, in newspapers.”
Now come on, Rizwan. Honestly, when did you last see a negative portrayal of Muslims in films, in the news, or in newspapers, except in the case of jihad terror attacks in which the identity of the perpetrator was impossible to conceal? The international media goes to immense lengths to make sure that no one gets a negative view of Islam or Muslims.
One notorious example of this is the fact that in the British media, gangs of Muslims who sexually abused and exploited thousands of British girls for years were universally referred to as “Asians,” despite the protests of non-Muslim Asian groups and the fact, which some of the rapists openly confessed, that this activity was based on Islamic principles.
On Monday, Nicole Solas, a Rhode Island mom whose daughter will be going into kindergarten, was sued by chapters of the National Education Association (NEA) for submitting multiple requests to find out what her daughter was learning when it comes to lesson plans on concepts such as transgenderism and Critical Race Theory (CRT).
I just got served with a lawsuit from the teacher union NEARI. Throwing down the gauntlet, are we? Game on. pic.twitter.com/9WSpEO14Zy
— Nicole Solas (@Nicoletta0602) August 4, 2021
Don't worry, no new taxes on the middle class. /sarc
— Len Hubbard (@len_hubbard) August 4, 2021
The ‘epidemic’ is not that there are committees of vigilance roaming the streets – a blatant canard since, if true, would likely reduce crime – but that there are criminal street gangs roaming the streets of major metropolitan cities, shooting up each other’s members (as well as a lot of unintended targets) with the membership demographic causing the majority of this; black men, ages 14 to 35.
The ACLU Claims the Second Amendment Is Racist, But Gun Control Has the Real Record on Systemic Oppression
To date, black Americans are more likely than any other group to suffer the adverse impacts of gun control laws.
The ACLU fired shots on Twitter last month, claiming that the Second Amendment is “racist” alongside an article and podcast episode that posed the question “Do Black People Have the Right to Bear Arms?”
The article, written by Ines Santos, claimed that gun violence in America — which she labeled an “epidemic” caused by widespread “vigilante” firearm ownership — negatively impacts black people because of racially discriminatory policing. “What is absent in the intense debates on gun rights in America is the intrinsic anti-blackness of the unequal enforcement of gun laws,” she wrote.
Santos went on to say that racism determined the Second Amendment’s inclusion in the Bill of Rights.
These are hefty charges worth examining. Let’s break down the claims made here and review the history.
The Mythological White Supremacist
Washington — We at The American Spectator call it “Kultursmog,” and it is the only kind of smog of which our friends on the left approve. Actually, they not only approve of Kultursmog, but they contribute to it. Kultursmog is that aspect of American culture that is utterly politicized, and it is politicized by the politics of the left. Its leading centers of pollution are Hollywood, California; New York City; Washington, D.C., and, increasingly, Silicon Valley. I had hoped that Silicon Valley, with its brave claims to libertarianism, might have escaped the pollutants of Kultursmog, but I was wrong. The lure of virtue flaunting proved too strong for the tycoons of Silicon Valley. Now they are taking it to outer space. Did you see that Jeff Bezos had hardly gotten his feet back on terra firma when he donated $100 million not to the Red Cross, not to the Little Sisters of the Poor, but to Van Jones, who is himself a leading smokestack of Kultursmog over at CNN.
Kultursmog is everywhere. It is in the books we read, the movies we attend, the songs we sing. It does not permeate our history, which is why the woke folk are so intent on tearing down our history, including statues of Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and even Frederick Douglass. Can Martin Luther King Jr. be next?
I have made a career of sounding the alarm against the propaganda of the left, and just the other day, I caught the left extruding their propaganda into the public arena. They were using the obituary pages of The New York Times to spread their malign message. Is there no place they will not defile with politics?
One of the left’s favorite myths is that America is abundant with white supremacists and practitioners of something called the alt-right. I know. I, too, once thought the alt-right was a roadside direction or an indication a detour was ahead, but apparently it has something to do with the politics of a distinctly extremist variety. Advocates of the alt-right apparently tend to congregate at rural gas stations, usually in the dark of night. That is about all I know about it, but the writers at The New York Times claim to be highly agitated over it.
A couple of weeks back, William Regnery II, a man who supposedly “bankrolled” what the Times called “some of the leading organizations and figures behind the rise of the alt-right and championed efforts to win adherents to a modernized notion of white supremacy,” bit the dust. And do you know how the hysterics at the Times handled his passing? They devoted an entire half-page to him, complete with a picture of him standing with some young adjunct who looked understandably uneasy. The young man was wearing an ill-fitting suit, and he might have been more comfortable was he armed, but he was not. The recently deceased Regnery and I might have met years ago at some Republican function, for he was active in the Barry Goldwater campaign of 1964. Or possibly, it was at a stamp collectors’ conference. I used to be an avid collector. At any rate, he is dead, and from the Times’s own information gathered for Regnery’s obit, it is clear that he never succeeded in any political endeavor, from his earliest Republican days to his days of aimless wanderings with fanatics.
Leftists are now so dumbed down – they have to have 280 characters written for them.–Seton Motley
BLUF:
Anti-gun researches will continue to use flawed methodology and bad data as long as a fawning media and gun control establishment continue to fuel any “research” with the “right” conclusion
The objective world mistrusts most gun policy research because it’s clear the objective is to produce an anti-gun outcome rather than honest analysis. Politicians and professional activists claim the mantle of evidence but will ignore any findings that threaten their anti-gun agenda.
Anti-gun politicians continue to advocate for policies that the very researchers they champion have contradicted, if not found to be ineffective. Researchers and activists cherry-pick data, but they also cherry-pick which findings to use – even from a single study. Can you imagine if the same low threshold for credibility was applied to pro-gun findings?
Let’s try an exercise. Vermont – one of the safest states in the nation, one that had Permitless Carry for centuries – enacted a magazine capacity restriction in 2018. Let’s look at the violent crime rate in Vermont and the U.S using data from the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer. The national violent crime rate decreased from 2018 to 2019 but the rate in Vermont increased – and even increased more than it had from 2017 to 2018.
The utter open hypocrisy of this Kabuki Theater is simply stunning.
For the entire length of the Trump presidency they were all adamant in their hate of all things Trump, calling his election illegitimate because it didn’t go their way. It again confirms that when they make an accusation, they’re projecting their own faults.
Rep. Adam Schiff starts tearing up during the Jan 6 Select Committee hearing:
"If we deem elections illegitimate merely because they didn’t go our way rather than trying to do better the next time, then God help us." pic.twitter.com/BHQZHnfilT
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) July 27, 2021
When the ‘Fact-Checker’ gets it right back at them
PolitiFact Claims Joe Biden ‘Doesn’t Want to Ban Handguns,’ But Here Are His Actual Words.
Joe Biden has been pretty clear about his desire to ban handguns.
During his CNN town hall last week, Biden was asked, “So, how will you address gun violence, from a federal point of view, to actually bring about change and make our local cities safer?”
In his response, Biden told the woman who asked the question: “The idea you need a weapon that can have the ability to fire 20, 30, 40, 50, 120 shots from that weapon — whether it’s a — whether it’s a 9-millimeter pistol or whether it’s a rifle — is ridiculous. I’m continuing to push to eliminate the sale of those things…”
In response to the tweet from House Republicans declaring that Biden “says he wants to ban handguns,” PolitiFact claims “the clip doesn’t back up the GOP tweet, and the full transcript goes further to sink this claim.”
PolitiFact claims that the numbers cited by Biden “apply to assault-style firearms and high-capacity magazines. As recently as June, when Biden rolled out his strategy to bring down murders, he said he wants to ban both.”
“Experts disagree over what is or isn’t an assault weapon. States set different thresholds for what qualifies as a high-capacity magazine,” PolitiFact continued, before adding, “But regardless of the definition, neither term includes all handguns.”
Did anyone say Biden wants to ban all handguns? Nope. Yet, PolitiFact unwittingly admitted in its analysis that some handguns would be affected by Biden’s gun control proposal. So, does Biden want to ban handguns? He’s publicly indicated that he wants to ban some. There’s no doubt about that.
Yet, PolitiFact rated the claim that Biden wants to ban handguns as “False.” In fairness, they could have gotten away with rating the claim “Half True” because one could argue that the House GOP’s wording wasn’t clear, but they didn’t take Biden’s words out of context. They even showed the video of Biden’s response to the question. Biden may not have said he wanted to ban all handguns, but he clearly said he wants to ban some. Yet, PolitiFact disingenuously rated the claim false, which seems to imply that Biden never said he wanted to ban any handguns at all.
Democrats condemn Trump’s ‘Big Lie’ but keep telling ones even worse ones themselves
Did you know that black people are not going to be allowed to vote in America anymore? At least in states controlled by Republicans? Sounds a bit unlikely, but that’s a conclusion you might have come to if you took seriously what President Joe Biden said in Philadelphia Tuesday.
Biden decried Republicans’ proposed changes to election laws as “the 21st-century Jim Crow assault” that tries “to suppress and subvert the right to vote in fair and free elections, an assault on democracy.”
This is, to be polite, unhinged nonsense.
Biden is old enough to remember what real Jim Crow voter suppression was like. It meant zero black people voting in places like Mississippi. It meant threats and violence against black people who tried to register to vote. It meant unfair application of literacy tests and poll taxes.
Requiring voters to present photo ID is nothing like this: Large majorities think it’s reasonable.
The curriculum-writing team in a suburban St. Louis school district plotted with a critical race theory advocate on how to keep parents in the dark about their efforts to inject leftwing social justice advocacy into their classrooms, according to a video of their meeting leaked online.
The video, posted on rumble.com in early July, is alleged to be a condensed version of a September 2020 webinar that members of the Francis Howell School District’s curriculum-writing team participated in. The webinar was hosted by their equity consultant, LaGarrett J. King, an associate professor of social studies education at the University of Missouri. He was described on the call as a specialist in the study of “race, critical theories and knowledge.”
It’s unclear who edited the video, which appears to have been posted anonymously by someone with the online moniker “wokeatfhsd.”
During the webinar, King told the predominantly white team members that “This is not a safe space,” but rather a “racialized space,” because “In many ways a safe space is a space where white people tell us how not racist they are. And this is not that space.”
King said “the first thing we have to understand is that our social studies and our history curriculum is political and racist,” and “there is no such thing as neutral history.” He then asked the team members to question whether they are developing black history curriculums through the historical lens of the oppressor. “We have made those who have oppressed people, the oppressor, we have humanized them,” he said.
The nation’s founding “means nothing to black people,” he said, calling history “psychologically violent” but one-sided. He also seemed to justify violence in the name of racial justice.
“All of our wars was about freedom, violence,” King said. “But yet, when black people say, ‘Hey … we need to take over, man. We need to burn this place down, we need to do this, we need to do that.’ ‘Oh no, you should do non-violence to achieve freedom.’ It’s silly. It’s prejudice.”
During a question-and-answer portion of the webinar, teachers and staff on the call questioned how they could reframe their classes to look at history and social studies through a more racialized social justice lens without rankling parents in the “highly conservative” community, which one teacher described as “the middle of Trump country.” King agreed that teachers could do away with verbiage like “white privilege,” while still getting the progressive message across to students.
“Kids are way more open,” she said, “but then they go home and they tell their parents, and then their parents get upset. I don’t advertise to my students when I’m teaching U.S. history that sometimes I would consider myself the anti-U.S. history teacher.”
Another white teacher said because they teach in a conservative county, “Sometimes I think we have deferred to letting that stop progress. We let noise keep progress from moving forward.”
In a paper he co-authored in 2018, King acknowledged that critical theory was developed in the 1920s by German thinkers who “sought to extend Marxist theory into the changing social, political, and economic landscape of the twentieth century by talking about how culture and ideology encourage and sustain social inequality.” In order to “remain true to critical pedagogy,” the authors wrote, “teachers should work to identify questions that are important to students’ lives and that encourage them to reflect on the ways that they are either privileged or oppressed by social dynamics.”
This is called ‘grandstanding’. When the PolyTicians want to appear to be for something, but when the metal meets the meat, they really aren’t.
Louisiana Senate fails to override governor’s veto
Constitutional carry won’t become law there for a while. While both houses passed it with “veto-proof” majorities, several senators switched sides.
Below The Radar: The PISTOL Act
A while back, we discussed the difference between the ideal and the achievable. It is a conundrum that many Second Amendment supporters have, whether it is legislation or candidates. Our enemies often have the same problem, so we can take some small comfort.
Just as Dianne Feinstein has introduced a fallback measure to the semiauto ban she really wants, the same approach is being taken with regards to the Biden-Harris regime’s attack on AR-15-type pistols (among others). We have discussed the Home Defense and Competitive Shooting Act on multiple occasions, and it is the ideal solution to address that attack.
In this case, removing short-barreled rifles from the purview of the National Firearms Act may not be possible at the present time. In fact, to be very blunt, seeing the Home Defense and Competitive Shooting Act become law in this Congress is a pipe dream, given who controls the committees and subcommittees.
This is not to say it’s a bad idea – introducing legislation and tracking the cosponsors is a good way to gauge what sort of support there is for efforts to restore our rights. That makes having a fall-back option a good idea. Enter HR 3823, the PISTOL Act.
What this bill, introduced by Representative Bob Good (R-VA), does is to maintain the status quo by stating that firearms like the AR-15 pistols with a stabilizing brace may not be placed under the National Firearms Act. This would end the present threat for the short term – provided that anti-Second Amendment extremists don’t increase their numbers in Congress.
On the one hand, if the PISTOL Act were to be passed into law (say as an amendment to the appropriate appropriations bill), it may make it more difficult to pass the Home Defense and Competitive Shooting Act in the future. But given the realities that surround passing legislation, even taking a majority in the future won’t make passing the Home Defense and Competitive Shooting Act a given.
For one thing, the same filibuster that currently is preventing anti-Second Amendment extremists from packing the court and ramming through extreme legislation will be wielded by the likes of Chuck Schumer, Chris Murphy, Dianne Feinstein, and other anti-Second Amendment extremists to block pro-Second Amendment legislation. It cuts both ways, and before Second Amendment supporters contemplate nuking the filibuster to pass such improvements, remember that Harry Reid’s use of the “nuclear option” for nominations backfired to the tune of Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett on SCOTUS.
The fact is, the PISTOL Act may be a suitable incremental measure in lieu of passing the Home Defense and Competitive Shooting Act, and Second Amendment supporters should contact their Senators and Representative and polite urge them to support this legislation. However, it is no substitute for defeating anti-Second Amendment extremists at the ballot box at the federal, state, and local levels.
BLUF:
While anti-gun Democrats like Carolyn Maloney will use this GAO report to push for more gun control laws, what the study tells me is that a) we’ve got much bigger issues that are driving up healthcare costs and b) banning or tightly regulating items doesn’t solve the problem. Even if the right to keep and bear arms wasn’t protected by the Constitution, gun control wouldn’t be the best answer to bring down the rate of violent crime and firearm-related injuries, but the Second Amendment makes the idea a non-starter. Want to reduce gun-related injuries? Reduce the number of violent criminals, and leave the 100-million responsible gun owners alone.
The Fuzzy Math Behind The GAO’s New Report On The Cost Of “Gun Violence”
Democrats have a new talking point in their continued push for new federal gun control laws – restricting the rights of Americans doesn’t just save lives, but money too. A new report from the Government Accountability Office claims that that the United States spends $1-billion per year on hospital costs related to “gun violence,” and anti-gun politicians are already pointing to the new report as a reason to pass more anti-gun legislation.
The nonpartisan GAO found gun violence accounts for about 30,000 hospital stays and about 50,000 emergency room visits annually. More than 15 percent of firearm injury survivors are also readmitted at least once after initial treatment, costing an additional $8,000 to $11,000 per patient. Because the majority of victims are poor, the burden largely falls on safety-net programs like Medicaid, including covering some of the care for the uninsured.
The report, the first of its kind from the watchdog agency, is based available data on caring for people who suffer non-fatal gun injuries each year. It’s expected to fuel Democrats’ calls for expanded background checks amid a stalemate on gun control legislation.
“Congress must do whatever it takes — including abolishing the filibuster if necessary—to address this public health crisis,” said New York Rep. Carolyn Maloney, chair of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, who led the coalition requesting the GAO study.
Do you get the feeling that Maloney was going to use this report to call for an end to the filibuster no matter what it said? This report is a means to an end, and the end result that Maloney and her fellow Democrats are aiming for is the end of the filibuster and the establishment of one-party rule; from enacting sweeping gun bans with 51 votes to packing the Supreme Court full of anti-gun justices that will uphold every new infringement on the Second Amendment approved by Congress.
“…outrage over the hypocrisy of allowing border crossers by land but not those who are seeking asylum for real reasons by sea.” ?
This is easy to understand. Mexicans in California tend to vote Demoncrap while Cubans in south Florida tend to vote Republican.
‘Outrageous:’ Mayorkas Blasted for Vowing to Reject Asylum-seeking Haitians, Cubans.
Funny how that goes! pic.twitter.com/lzJUhCa2fM
— Jon Levine (@LevineJonathan) July 14, 2021
“Allow me to be clear: if you take to the sea, you will not come to the United States,” Mayorkas said.
The warning comes as Cuban authorities are cracking down on demonstrators after massive protests erupted in the country over the weekend. At least 100 people are missing or have been arrested so far. In Haiti, the nation has been rocked by turmoil after President Jovenel Moise was assassinated last week.
Mayorkas fled Cuba with his parents in 1960 after Fidel Castro’s communist takeover of the country, a point he spoke about when President Biden nominated him to lead DHS.
“When I was very young, the United States provided my family and me a place of refuge,” Mayorkas tweeted. “Now, I have been nominated to be the DHS Secretary and oversee the protection of all Americans and those who flee persecution in search of a better life for themselves and their loved ones.”
But on Tuesday, Mayorkas said those attempting to make it to the U.S. by sea will be stopped by the Coast Guard and returned to their countries.
“If individuals make, establish a well-founded fear of persecution or torture, they are referred to third countries for resettlement,” Mayorkas said, reports CBS News. “They will not enter the United States.”
The Big Lie On Gun Study Funding
For years, we were told the reason there wasn’t more research done on “gun violence” is because they legally couldn’t. See, the law stated that federal dollars couldn’t be used to advocate for gun control, and the CDC decided that meant they couldn’t conduct research on gun violence, probably because they knew what their intentions were and how that would influence results, so they just skipped the research.
And then they blamed it on a law that didn’t actually prevent research.
However, some people bought into that lie. Some still are.
So, when an op-ed tries to play the middle ground yet still repeated this Big Lie, there’s no reason to take the authors seriously.
Murder in the U.S. has become political once again, an issue for both the left and the right. But the U.S. can’t afford to bicker on this.
The nation is ranked in the global murder rate index worse than Pakistan, Sudan and Angola. Homicides in American cities rose an estimated 30% in 2020 and were up another 24% early this year. Los Angeles reported last week that shootings had spiked by half this year.
Fortunately, with decades of empirical data about what works and what doesn’t, we now know how to prevent murder. It turns out that both the liberals and the conservatives were on to something.
There are two broad ideological camps in this political quagmire: the law-and-order camp that supports more policing and tougher law enforcement and abhors gun control, and the criminal justice reform and Black Lives Matter camp that demands safety from police violence and racism and wants guns off the streets.
Republicans vilify Democrats as soft on crime. And Democrats face an internal rift between progressives who demand an end to violent and unfair policing, and those worried that such a focus would not help in the face of growing violent crime. In his response so far, President Biden has walked a fine line: emphasizing that states can use the $350 billion in COVID-19 relief funds to bolster local police departments, but also calling for better enforcement of gun control laws.
So far, so good.
But it’s later when things really go off the rails.
Preventing murder also requires a serious discussion about guns. As one study summarizes it: “More Guns, More Crime.” Pro-gun politicians seem to have known this all along, why else would they have blocked federal funding for research about the relationship between firearms and homicide for 25 years?
Enough already. End the murder politics. Dueling soundbites will lead to a rerun of the 1990s, when Democrats postured to look tough on crime to win elections. We know how that story ended: Then-Sen. Biden wrote a crime bill that ballooned the American prison population without reducing crime.
This time we know better, and we should do better. If we burst out of the ideological bubbles, the U.S. can build an evidence-based strategy to end the killing.
How can we end the politics and burst out of ideological bubbles when the authors are perpetuating one of the biggest political lies in the gun control debate?
Federal funding for research was never blocked. As noted previously, it prevented federal money from being spent to advocate for gun control. The CDC decided that meant they couldn’t research guns, likely because they had preconceived notions of what they would find and were bound and determined to find it.
Gun research continued, some of it funded with federal money, but this was open and honest research that found what it found and reported it as they saw it.
Yet when you uncritically claim that the research was blocked for 25 years, you’re ignoring the actual facts. You’re perpetuating a lie that was popular with anti-gunners and the media, though I repeat myself, yet had no basis in reality. If you can get such a basic fact wrong, why should anyone take anything else said at face value?
Besides, at the end of the day, the discussion on gun control is about more than reducing crime. If that’s all it was about, the debate would look very different. No, in part it’s about restricting the constitutionally protected rights of law-abiding Americans to keep and bear arms. The rights of individuals need to be protected first and foremost.
It’s not just a political question. It’s a question of civil liberties.
Then again, if the op-ed writers couldn’t even look past the Big Lie on gun research, why would I expect them to really understand what the gun debate is about?
News that a left-wing author’s anti-White “picture book” is being read or assigned in public schools in a dozen states helps make the case that the “secular religion” of critical race theory is a violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy argued Tuesday.
Ramaswamy, founder of Roivent Sciences, told “America Reports” that it is very troubling to see school districts across the country highlight Anastasia Higginbotham’s “Not My Idea” in young childhood curriculum..
Scholar Christopher Rufo published a list of school districts in Pennsylvania, California, Illinois, Washington, Massachusetts, Arkansas, Montana, Oregon, Indiana, Ohio, New Jersey and Maine that reportedly either recommend the reading to students or instruct teachers to read aloud.
