Category: Deceit O’ The Day

CRICKET POWDER SHOWING UP IN YOUR FOOD

Crickets. Learn how to read ingredient labels.

Acheta domesticus may be on the label – it is Cricket. Some are hiding it by calling it “Acheta Protein” and promoting it as a great alternative to animal protein.

“Made with Cricket Protein Powder”
ALERT! If you have a shellfish allergy it is likely to cross react with cricket acheta protein causing a severe reaction. If you have an extreme allergy to shellfish and unknowingly eat cricket or aches, this could cause an adverse response—up to and including death—without immediate medical attention.

Hoppy Planet Foods’ “Chocolate Chirp Cookies”

Cheddar Cheese Puffs product from Actually Foods

Exo Protein bars.

Slowly, we are being led to believe that eating sustainably raised meat is bad.
There’s a big push to mass produce bugs for food. There’s a big push to get you to stop eating meat.

The world’s largest cricket farm is in Chiang Mai, Thailand. If the trend continues, expect that cricket providers will find cheaper ways to feed the crickets and mass produce them — while slick marketing teams try to make you feel guilty for enjoying Grassfed meat and free range chicken.

The FDA allows crickets to be used for and in food, under the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.

Consumer Lab tested two popular cricket powders: Entomo Farms and Exo. They found one heavily contaminated with arsenic, a carcinogen — 5x the inorganic arsenic found in the most contaminated rice.

Crickets concentrate the toxins from their food. If arsenic is in their food, it is in them.

Cricket flour, or cricket powder, is a made out of milled crickets, and whatever they were fed has concentrated in their little cricket bodies.

•••The lie: “higher in protein than animal protein” … You’d need to eat a bag of cricket powder, maybe 10 Tbs, to equal the protein you get from a 3 oz serving of free range meat.

Read labels!

The Hard “Nope”

It was a post at Bookroom Room that led me to jump aboard this particular train of thought – that most of us have certain concepts embedded in us so firmly that absolutely nothing will ever get us to violate them. As Bookworm put it, “Because as I’ve contended for years, every person has one absolute truth. It’s the one thing they know to their bones is true and the world must align with that truth … For my mother, who would have been a fashionista if she’d had the money, style and beauty were her truths. She sucked up all the lies about Barack and Michelle Obama until the media talking heads said that Michelle was the most beautiful, stylish first lady ever, above and beyond even Jackie Kennedy. That ran headlong into Mom’s truth and, after that, she never again believed what the media had to say about the Obamas.”

It’s a concept worth considering – our own truths, which we will stubbornly hold on to, refusing any threats or blandishments. It varies from person to person, of course. Some have only small and irrelevant truths, which are never seriously threatened, and there are those who have no real truths at all, save perhaps self-aggrandizement – but even so, for some keeping to their truth is a hard struggle, deciding to hold to that truth against everything – especially if they have status or a living to make, in denying that truth.

Sam Houston, as governor of Texas on the eve of the Civil War, refused to take an oath of allegiance to the Confederacy, required by a newly-passed law upon secession from the United States. Twice elected president of an independent Texas, and the general who had secured freedom from the Centralist dictator, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna nearly fifteen years before, Houston had labored mightily to secure annexation of Texas to the US. Secession from the Union must have nearly broken the old man’s heart. Most accounts have it that he paced the floor of his office for an entire night, considering whether he would take the oath … or not. He did not; he resigned all office and retired to his home in Huntsville, where he died several years later. When all was said and done, Houston was a believer in the Union, and devoted to Texas. When it came to secession and swearing an oath of fealty to the Confederates – a hard “nope” for the hero of San Jacinto.

My own personal biggest hard “nope” has to do with so-called anthropogenic global warming/global cooling/climate change concept alleged to be caused by human activity and industry. I don’t care how much the autistic Swedish teenager scowls at us all, or Al Gore flies from his many lavish mansions, to one important conference after another, to lecture us all about our carbon footprint.

Earth’s temperatures and conditions have swung wildly over millennia, without any help from human beings at all. Canada and the north-central US were once covered by a mile of ice. The Sahara desert was once a grassland interspersed with marshes, rivers and lakes. In Roman times, it was temperate enough in England to grow wine grapes, while around 1000 AD it was warm enough for subsistence farming in Greenland … and then the climate turned colder all across Europe, until the River Thames froze solid enough between the 14th and 18th centuries to host so-called Frost Fairs on the solid ice. Avenues of shops opened on the ice, racing events, puppet shows and all manner of entertainments took place. The massive explosion of an Indonesian volcano in early 1815, on the other hand, led to a so-called year without summer in the northern hemisphere in 1816. The climate of earth has changed drastically, without any human input over conditions – even before humans existed, so what the heck have gas stoves or gasoline engines – or even coal-fired power plants have to do with it?

I’ve got another couple of hard “nopes” – but anthropogenic climate change is just the main one at present. What are some other personal hard “nopes” among you all? Discuss as you wish.

That Warren Burger Quote Gun Grabbers Love Is Ahistorical — Not To Mention Sort Of Fake

Idon’t know how many times people have dropped this alleged quote from the late “conservative” Justice Warren Burger into my social media feeds:

The gun lobby’s interpretation of the Second Amendment is one of the greatest pieces of fraud — I repeat the word ‘fraud’ — on the American People by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime. The real purpose of the Second Amendment was to ensure that state armies — the militia — would be maintained for the defense of the state. The very language of the Second Amendment refutes any argument that it was intended to guarantee every citizen an unfettered right to any kind of weapon he or she desires.

If you find yourself in a debate over the Second Amendment, sooner or later someone is going to let you know that Burger believed an individual right to gun ownership was one of the “greatest pieces of fraud” perpetrated on the American people. Burger’s line is ubiquitous—it can be found in The New Yorker, Slate, Politico, NPR, every major newspaper, and in every anti-gun columnist’s pieces.

The first problem with the popular online iteration of the quote is that it’s actually cobbled together from three separate sources to give it more impact. Don’t get me wrong: Burger is mistaken in all instances, but he is mistaken in different contexts.

The second problem is that the quote often reads as if Burger—the “conservative” who voted with the majority in Roe v. Wade—offered this argument as a member of the Supreme Court. No high-court decision has ever defined the Second Amendment as anything but an individual right. And Burger never uttered a word about the Second Amendment while sitting on the court. For that matter, he never rendered a gun decision on any court, nor ever wrote a legal paper on the issue. And it shows.

Then again, the “collective right” theory was only a recent invention of revisionist historians and anti-gun activists when Burger adopted it. It’s also a tough one to sell to anyone who cares about history. Nearly every intellectual, political, and military leader of the founding generation, from John Adams to Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Franklin to George Mason to Samuel Adams to George Washington to Patrick Henry to James Madison and so on, is on the record defending the individual’s right to bear arms. There is not a single record of anyone in that era challenging the notion.

Anyway, the part of the quote about the gun lobby is taken from a 1991 PBS interview in which Burger erroneously argues that the 18th-century conception of “well regulated” was the same as the contemporary one. The notion that the state, much less the federal government, would be empowered to “regulate” what kind of weapons you owned would have been alien to a person in 1789. “Well regulated” simply means a well-pulled-together militia, rather than a rabble.

Burger maintains that the real purpose of the Second Amendment was to ensure that state armies would defend state populations. This is an ungrammatical and ahistorical reading of the amendment. Sure, there was a debate over standing armies and control of the militias. But, as the late Justice Antonin Scalia pointed out in Heller, “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed” is the operative clause in the Second Amendment. The “well regulated Militia” part is the prefatory clause.

It makes zero sense to read the prefatory clause as a nullification or even limitation of the operative clause. It is tantamount to arguing that because the First Amendment says Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, it’s not an individual right to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

The Second Amendment explicitly mentions “the right of the people” — people who generally used their own weapons as militiamen — just as it does elsewhere in the Bill of Rights when protecting individual rights. Many colonies enshrined the individual right to bear arms in their constitutions before the Bill of Rights was even written, most of them in much more explicit terms. No state defined it as a collective right. Some Federalists argued that special protections in the Bill of Rights were unnecessary because there were so many guns in private hands that it was unimaginable any tyrannical army could ever be more powerful than the public.

The other two parts of the quote are lifted from different passages in a column Burger wrote for the Associated Press. Here the former justice expands on his idea that guns should be regulated like cars.

“[A]lthough there is not a word or hint in the Constitution about automobiles or motorcycles,” Burger says, “no one would seriously argue that a state cannot regulate the use of motor vehicles by imposing licensing restrictions and speed limits based on factors of driver’s age, health condition, and driving record, and by recording every purchase and change of ownership.”

It is because automobiles and motorcycles — or transportation as an ideal — are not explicitly protected by the Constitution that you can heavily regulate those things. The better analogy would be due process or speech rights. (Although Burger wasn’t a great fan of the First Amendment, either.)

Besides all that, Burger should have known that Americans, even in 1991, did not have “unfettered” access to “machine guns.” In 1986, the Firearm Owners’ Protection Act law made ownership of fully automatic weapons pretty rare.

Burger also should have known that the Gun Control Act of 1968 established the first federal age limits for buying guns. Today there are tens of thousands of laws regulating gun ownership in the United States. That is not “unfettered” by any definition.

In fact, it doesn’t seem like Burger knew very much about the topic at all.

Teaching us to Hate Guns and Despise Gun Owners

We all know how to sell something. We also know how to discredit an idea or action. All we have to do is ignore its benefits and inflate its costs. Are those lies exactly? A comedian can lie to us, but we don’t go to a comedy club to hear the truth. Here is how the mainstream media and anti-rights politicians teach us to hate guns and to despise gun owners.. and yes, they lie about it.

Tell half the truth about armed defense. The easiest way for the media and gun-prohibition-politicians to blame gun owners is to show us the harm that criminals do with guns and to ignore the lives saved when honest citizens use their firearms. The mainstream media tells us about the horrific murderer who used a gun. The news ignores the common events of armed defense that happen every day. It is hard to overstate this since the media bias isn’t a few percent, but over a thousand-fold. That level of distortion is commonly called a lie.

We can test that right now. See if you can remember a time when the news told you about a murderer who used a gun. Of course you can, but do you remember when the news media showed you an example of armed defense where the good guys and good gals stopped the attacker and saved lives? That happens more than 4,600 times a day and yet you can’t remember seeing more than one or two news stories about it. It is easy to blame guns and gun owners for murder and robbery when the mainstream news media hides half the story.

Misrepresent gang activity as firearms accidents. If you look, you will find more and more stories of young men engaging in violent crime. We now see 12-year-olds as part of armed carjacking gangs. It is easy to assume that when a 11, 12, or a 13 year old gets shot that it was a firearms accident. That might be true in a small rural town but 12 year olds are part of violent gangs in our failed cities.

It is certainly true that many youngsters are shot as innocent bystanders but that isn’t a “firearms accident” at all. We have to make the clear distinction between a firearm accident and involuntary manslaughter. The great news is that both the number and the rate of real firearms accidents have been falling for years. Firearms education prevented accidents.

Mix suicides in with homicides. The largest fraction of gun-related deaths are from suicide. Long ago we passed laws that made suicide illegal. Notice that someone who is willing to take their own life is not concerned with breaking the law. We passed “red flag” laws that take firearms from gun owners. We took their guns but we didn’t offer them mental health counseling. We’ve also seen some states impose mandatory waiting periods of 3 to 14 days before you can pick up the gun you bought.

The claim is that mandatory waiting periods will reduce the rate of suicide. We are told that we might impulsively use the next gun we buy to commit suicide, but you would not use the firearms you already have in your home. You read that correctly and waiting periods for existing gun owners don’t make sense.

Suicide is a real problem that deserves more than an imaginary answer. The number of suicides rises and falls each year, but we have not found clear evidence that gun-control laws reduced the rate of suicide. I have seen the large and sustained effort that firearms manufacturers, ammunition manufacturers, gun shops, and individual gun owners have put into mental health counseling for gun-owners in crises. They helped establish and fund programs like Walk-the-talk America and Hold My Guns.

Confuse gun owners with criminals. We don’t see the rate of crime drop after states impose gun-control laws. The reason is obvious since honest people obey gun laws but criminals are the ones who commit crimes. Unlike us, criminals don’t use gun shops to get their guns. Criminals get their guns the same place they get their drugs. They buy them on the street from other criminals.

The news media tells us that making it harder for honest citizens to get guns will somehow change the way criminals behave. That is magic rather than reason, but the media tells us that honest gun owners are to blame for what criminals do with guns.

Blame gun owners for mass-murderers. Honest gun owners are blamed each time a mad-man commits murder in a “gun-free zone” where the victims are disarmed by law. We were told that we need to have mandatory background checks to stop mass murderers. We were not supposed to look at that statement too closely since mass-murder is pretty much a one-and-done career. When we looked, we found that some mass murderers did have a criminal record that should have disqualified them from having a gun. That prohibition scheme doesn’t work when prosecutors don’t prosecute criminals.

What surprised us is that the crazy mass-murderers actually told us why they wanted to kill. We’ve read their journals and their manifestos. They want to be famous and will kill to get what they want. The news media is all too eager.

We were not told that 49-out-of-50 mass murders occur in gun free zones. We’re not shown that honest gun owners stopped 104 attempted mass-murders in the last seven years. Where we were allowed to go armed, we stopped more than half of the attempted mass-murders in the last few years. If that comes as a surprise to you then you know that the mainstream media has been lying to you. Armed citizens are the cure rather than the disease that caused public-violence and celebrity-murders.

Call out gun owners as an emotional threat. We’ve seen politicians question our right to defend ourselves. The news media and anti-rights activists demean not only guns and gun owners but the people who tolerate them.

We’ve talked about facts, but we haven’t talked about feelings very much. There is a reason for all this animosity directed at gun owners.

Gun owners are guilty of wrongthink. Questioning the effectiveness of gun-control laws undercuts the utopian fantasy of gun-control. We think we are discussing facts but we are actually shattering their dreams. We are considered a threat since we ask ordinary people to question the utopian vision of gun-control.

It is comforting to think that getting rid of guns would get rid of violence. Some politicians and activists are strongly attached to that fairy tale. Unless we shout our support for gun-control, we are considered a threat since we make the utopians feel insecure.

How dare you put your safety and the safety of your family ahead of my comforting fantasy! 

We talked about facts, but if you want to make someone uncomfortable then question their dreams. That explains the vitriol thrown at ordinary citizens who want to protect themselves.

Facts matter to those who are influenced by facts. Dreams matter to those who live in dreams. I will not call my virtue a vice simply to make other people comfortable. Life is too precious for that. I have dreams of the future too, and so do you.

How Biden and Fetterman Crushed My Faith in Doctors.

On Thursday, White House physician Kevin O’Connor declared that Joe Biden, following his physical, his first since November 2021, remains a “healthy, vigorous 80-year-old male who is fit to successfully execute the duties of the presidency,”

I may not be a doctor, but I must question the White House physician’s judgment. Has he seen Biden in action recently? The stumbling of words, the visible confusion? Biden’s cognitive health has been questionable for years now, and, I’m sorry, it’s hard not to question the narrative being pushed when we’re expected to believe that Joe Biden has been found to be sharp as a tack.

This wouldn’t be the first suspicious presidential physical, either. After the previous one, Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Tex.), the former White House physician who served in that position under both Trump and Obama, said that he believed Joe Biden’s cognitive issues were being covered up.

“Dr. O’Connor spent six pages talking about useless stuff that no one cares about and did not address the elephant in the room, which is, is this man cognitively fit to be our president?” he said during an appearance on The Ingraham Angle on Fox News. “Whenever President Trump had his physical done, I did a cognitive test on him. President Trump was the first president to ever have one done. And that was because the far-left and the liberal media demanded, they were relentless in their pursuit of me, in getting his physical done and including a cognitive test as part of that. We did that. And I did it because I was 100 percent sure […] that there wasn’t one single thing wrong with President Trump.”

And then there’s the case of John Fetterman, who continued his campaign for the U.S. Senate after having a massive stroke in May of last year. He spent many weeks absent from the campaign trail, and when he finally emerged, his appearances were few and far between. When he did make an appearance, we saw a man who could barely put together a coherent sentence. In an effort to quell the doubts about his fitness to serve, Fetterman promised to release his medical records… and then tried to pass off a doctor’s note from his primary care physician, Dr. Clifford Chen of Pittsburgh’s UPMC, as enough to settle the issue.

According to Dr. Chen, Fetterman “spoke intelligently without cognitive deficits,” and his speech “was normal and he continues to exhibit symptoms of an auditory processing disorder which can come across as hearing difficulty.”

“Overall, Lt. Governor Fetterman is well and shows strong commitment to maintaining good fitness and health practices. He has no work restrictions and can work full duty in public office,” Chen concluded.

But Chen’s note clearing Fetterman for duty was not all it seemed. It turned out that Dr. Chen is a big-time Democrat donor who also donated to Fetterman’s campaign. It seems clear, especially in light of Fetterman’s two recent hospital admissions, that Dr. Chen was full of it. In addition to Fetterman’s cognitive impairment, his apparent years-long battle with depression was never taken into account of his health in the aftermath of this stroke either. But hey, at least he got elected to the Senate, right? That’s the important thing!

But is it really? Did the people around John Fetterman and Joe Biden really care more about winning an election than their respective health? It sure looks that way. I used to think doctors put the health of their patients ahead of everything else, but sadly, thanks to what we’re seeing with Biden and Fetterman, I’m not sure I believe it anymore.

Cedars-Sinai Report: 30% more young people dying from heart attacks.

Cedars Sinai hospital dropped an atomic bomb of truth on us: 30% more young people are dying from heart attacks than before the pandemic.

The rise in heart attacks is so striking because the demographic it has hit is shocking: people from 25-44 years old. People in this age group are not generally known for dropping like flies from heart disease.

What’s to account for this alarming increase in deaths–not just heart attacks, but deaths from heart attacks, which are rare in this demographic?

Obviously, according to CBS News, it is failing to wear masks.

Yep. That is the most obvious cause. Couldn’t possibly be anything else. Like the alarming effects of the vaccine on the heart that has been documented many times. Especially in younger men.

This is absurd. If there were somehow evidence that people who did not get vaccinated were having more heart attacks than those who did, such speculation could make sense. Although we know that the vaccine does next to nothing to prevent infection, there is evidence that it does provide some protection from systemic infections that go beyond the respiratory system.

I wrote about that not long ago. It was none other than Anthony Fauci who fessed up to the fact that the vaccine doesn’t prevent infection or transmission of respiratory viruses, and that without EUAs they could never pass muster in the way other vaccines can.

Continue reading “”

Fauci: now he tells us.

What if I told you that Anthony Fauci knew all along that the COVID vaccine could not possibly prevent either infection with or transmission of COVID?

Not surprised? Neither am I.

Now that is a bit of a surprise and exactly the opposite of what he told everybody during the push to get everybody vaccinated.

Fauci lied, and now he is admitting it. In writing. In a peer-reviewed journal.

To be clear, Fauci is not claiming that the vaccines were utterly worthless. He still maintains that in certain specific cases–atypical, but the ones that generally kill you–the vaccines serve as a sort of pre-treatment. Not a great one, but a somewhat effective one. But he flat out admits that the claims about the vaccine possibly preventing infection and transmission are simply bogus and always were.

No, I am not exaggerating. He even admits that flu vaccines would never meet the standard to pass muster for use if they were for any other virus. Fascinating. And hardly how they are advertised.

Here’s the abstract of the piece published in Cell, a highly prestigious journal.

Viruses that replicate in the human respiratory mucosa without infecting systemically, including influenza A, SARS-CoV-2, endemic coronaviruses, RSV, and many other “common cold” viruses, cause significant mortality and morbidity and are important public health concerns.

Because these viruses generally do not elicit complete and durable protective immunity by themselves, they have not to date been effectively controlled by licensed or experimental vaccines.

In this review, we examine challenges that have impeded development of effective mucosal respiratory vaccines, emphasizing that all of these viruses replicate extremely rapidly in the surface epithelium and are quickly transmitted to other hosts, within a narrow window of time before adaptive immune responses are fully marshaled.

We discuss possible approaches to developing next-generation vaccines against these viruses, in consideration of several variables such as vaccine antigen configuration, dose and adjuventation, route and timing of vaccination, vaccine boosting, adjunctive therapies, and options for public health vaccination polices.

We haven’t gotten to the (not so) good part yet, but the bolded sentences tell you why these vaccines don’t work as advertised: the vaccines are delivered intramuscularly (you get a shot), which is intended to stimulate a systemic immunological response. You develop antibodies that circulate in the bloodstream.

Continue reading “”

Analysis: How Will SCOTUS Handle the Domestic Violence Restraining Order Gun Ban?

A federal appeals court has found disarming people under domestic violence restraining orders unconstitutional, setting up a showdown at the Supreme Court. How will the justices react?
A three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit unanimously vacated a Texas man’s conviction for possessing a gun while under a restraining order. They applied the standard the High Court handed down in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen and determined there was no historical analogue that matched the modern law’s purpose or methods.
“The Government fails to demonstrate that § 922(g)(8) ‘s restriction of the Second Amendment right fits within our Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation. The Government’s proffered analogues falter under one or both of the metrics the Supreme Court articulated in Bruen as the baseline for measuring ‘relevantly similar’ analogues: ‘how and why the regulations burden a law-abiding citizen’s right to armed self-defense,’” Judge Cory T. Wilson wrote for the panel in United States v. Rahimi. “As a result, § 922(g)(8) falls outside the class of firearm regulations countenanced by the Second Amendment.”
The ruling sets up a situation where a federal gun law is no longer in effect for Texas and Louisiana. The Department of Justice is unlikely to let that stand for long without asking the Supreme Court to intervene. And the Court tends to take the government’s appeals over everyone else.
I can see only two mitigating factors that might slow the case’s assent. The first is that there is still one more level of review available in the Fifth Circuit, specifically an en banc hearing in front of the entire court. The second is that a circuit split now exists on this issue, but the Fifth Circuit is the only appeals court to have heard a case on this issue in the wake of the Bruen decision.

Continue reading “”

White House Misled Public About FBI Search of Penn Biden Center.

The ongoing scandal involving Joe Biden’s mishandling of classified documents continues to get worse. Despite repeated claims of cooperation and transparency, sources close to the investigation reveal that the FBI conducted a search of the Penn Biden Center back in November.

This is a detail that neither the White House nor the Department of Justice had revealed before.

“The FBI searched the Penn Biden Center offices in mid-November, according to two sources familiar with the investigation, after lawyers for President Biden had found about 10 documents marked classified there on Nov. 2. The material originated from Mr. Biden’s time as vice president,” CBS News reports. “It is not clear whether FBI personnel found any additional classified or presidential material during the mid-November sweep.”

“The FBI search of the think tank was not previously disclosed by the White House, Mr. Biden’s personal attorneys, or the Department of Justice,” the report notes. “A Jan. 14 statement from the president’s personal attorney Bob Bauer referred to the government conducting ‘its inquiry, including taking possession of any documents and reviewing any surrounding material for further review and context.’”

The White House previously misled the public when White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre claimed that the search of Biden’s Wilmington, Del., home had been completed when the search was still underway.

“We are being fully cooperative with the Department of Justice throughout this process, as part of the President’s lawyers look through the places where documents could have been stored and the Counsel’s Office released, as you said, a statement explaining that,” Jean-Pierre said during the January 12 press briefing. “But that search was completed last night. And now, this is in the hands of the Justice Department.”

But, in reality, the search continued the following day, during which more documents were found.

So why not reveal the FBI search of the Penn Biden Center? It’s a good question, just like the question of why it took more than two months for the public even to learn that classified documents had been found there in the first place. The obvious answer to both of these questions is that the White House was not expecting this situation to be made public at all. It doesn’t take a genius to deduce that the leak of the story blindsided the White House, that they’ve been struggling to contain it ever since, and that they’ve been doing everything possible to cover up whatever they can.

FDA Sued for Withholding Safety Data on COVID Shots

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is being sued in federal court for withholding data on the safety analysis of Covid shots.

The new lawsuit was filed in a Washington D.C. federal court by the nonprofit Children’s Health Defense (CHD).

CHD contends that the FDA’s actions violate federal law.

“Numerous scientists, physicians, public health experts, and other concerned individuals have questioned the safety of COVID-19 injections, and many thousands of post-injection adverse events have been reported to the federal government,” the lawsuit argues.

Continue reading “”

So, those who want to ban guns from the citizenry are liars.
Yes, we know that.

Fact-Check: Mass Shootings Actually Increased During Federal ‘Assault Weapons’ Ban

A widely cited study used to push for more state ‘assault weapons’ bans is flawed and does not show that the 1994 federal ban saved lives.

“Assault weapons” ban proponents say that such bans will save lives. A recent opinion column published in the Chicago Sun-Times claims that the risk of dying in a mass shooting was 70 percent lower during the 1994-2004 federal assault weapons ban. The column was published while the Illinois state legislature was debating a state-wide assault weapons ban, which passed a few weeks ago.

The study on which that claim was based is flawed and its conclusions unreliable. Yet gun-control advocates such as the Giffords Law Center, Everytown for Gun Safety, and Sandy Hook Promise continue to use the study as they push for more assault weapons bans like the one in Illinois. Legislators, media reports, and opinion writers have cited the study, and the column published in the Chicago Sun-Times has appeared in several media outlets.

The study was produced by Charles DiMaggio, lead author; Michael Klein, the opinion column’s author; and seven other medical professionals. It examined data from three open-source mass shooting databases. The study identified 44 mass shootings from 1981 through 2017 in which four or more fatalities were reported (not including the shooter), resulting in 501 fatalities. It determined that 34 of these shootings were committed with so-called assault weapons, which accounted for 430 (86 percent) of the fatalities.

The study found that mass shooting deaths decreased during the years the federal ban was in effect. It claimed that had the federal ban been in effect for the entire period from 1981 through 2017, it might have prevented 314 of the 448 mass shooting deaths that occurred during the non-ban years.

Defining ‘Assault Weapons’

Measuring the effect of the federal assault weapons ban requires distinguishing mass shootings with assault weapons from mass shootings with non-banned weapons, such as handguns. After all, the point of an assault weapons ban is to reduce mass shootings with the banned firearms.

There is no consistent legal definition of “assault weapon,” so one must look to how each law banning such firearms defines them. An “assault weapon” under the 1994 federal ban included both specific firearms by name and any semiautomatic firearm capable of accepting a detachable magazine and having two or more features such as a folding or telescoping stock, pistol grip, barrel shroud, flash hider, or threaded barrel. Subsequently enacted state and local bans typically require only one such additional feature.

To identify whether a mass shooting occurred with an assault weapon, the DiMaggio study’s authors made no attempt to determine whether the weapons used actually met the 1994 ban’s definition of “assault weapon.” Instead, they simply searched the databases’ text for “AK,” “AR,” “MCX,” “assault,” and “semiautomatic.” (Klein claimed in his column that the authors “chose to use the strict federal definition of an assault weapon,” but this methodology belies that statement.)

Although all assault weapons are semiautomatic, not all semiautomatics are assault weapons. A semiautomatic firearm fires only one round with each pull of the trigger and automatically loads the next round after firing. The federal ban did not apply to all semiautomatic firearms, as the study’s authors assumed, but only to those with detachable magazines and two or more of the specified features. The vast majority of semiautomatic handguns do not have the additional features required by the federal ban.

Study Includes Non-Banned, Common Handguns in Statistics

Using “semiautomatic” as a search identifier vastly overstated the number of mass shootings committed with so-called assault weapons. The study’s weapon data set for the 34 incidents shows that in at least 20 (almost 60 percent) of the shootings, non-banned semiautomatic handguns — in 9mm, .45, and other popular calibers — were wrongly identified as assault weapons. This obviously skewed the study’s results.

Common semiautomatic handguns should never be confused with “assault weapons.” No federal or state assault weapons ban has ever included such handguns.

Perhaps the study’s authors were confused about what constituted an “assault weapon.” This is unsurprising. The term “assault weapon” was popularized in the late 1980s not to address a particular problem, but to enliven a waning gun-control movement by confusing and scaring the public about firearms. A report from gun-control advocacy group The Violence Policy Center explains:

Assault weapons—just like armor-piercing bullets, machine guns, and plastic firearms—are a new topic. The weapons’ menacing looks, coupled with the public’s confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons—anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun—can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons.

The study’s misidentification error was pointed out in a public letter to column writer Klein and his study co-authors by University of Massachusetts Professor Louis Klarevas, a well-known academic expert on mass shootings and author of “Rampage Nation: Securing America from Mass Shootings.” After reviewing the study’s data set, Klarevas challenged the study’s conclusions based on this “large number of misclassifications.”

The authors responded: “We make no claim to have retroactively determined whether these guns would have been illegal under the original statutory language.” But both their study and Klein’s column are about the effectiveness of the 1994 federal assault weapons ban.

Ignoring the need for fidelity to what the statute actually banned in determining whether that statute was effective, they claimed that assault weapon definitions don’t really matter, but only the “main message” of the study, which is that “fewer people died in mass shooting incidents during the ban period.”

Continue reading “”

Another problem with Gun Violence Archive’s numbers

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

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

Take this editorial as just one example.

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

The Holocaust and slavery are two prime examples.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s not a full picture by any stretch.

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

New Biden Admin Program Will Hide Numbers of Illegal Immigrants Entering the Country.

If the Biden administration tells you illegal border crossings are down, don’t be fooled. Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) fellow Todd Bensman wrote a piece for Newsweek on Jan. 24 explaining how the new CBP One program doesn’t reduce the number of illegal migrants flooding the southern U.S. border; it simply “pre-approves” those migrants so Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Border Patrol can claim the numbers of illegal apprehensions and crossings are down. As Bensman said, “The illusion would impress Harry Houdini.”

December was the worst month ever in the border crisis, according to CBP statistics, but CBP seems eager to assure America on Biden’s behalf that the crisis is improving. “The American public will indeed see sharp declines in the monthly illegal apprehension statistics, starting with the January report which comes out next month,” Bensman said. But those declines are just a clever deception on the part of the Biden administration, not an increase of border security. Illegals will be entering America in numbers as large as ever. They will just be able to achieve a sort of legitimized status before entering through CBP One.

For our VIPs: Biden’s Big Lie About Border Security

The CBP One mobile app was launched back in October 2020, but, according to Bensman, it is being used in a new way. A new plan announced Jan. 5 tells the largest migrant groups, “up to 360,000 Haitians, Cubans, Venezuelans, and Nicaraguans each year” (and only those groups), to apply for “humanitarian parole” from outside the United States on CBP One. The United Nations (UN), Mexico, and many non-governmental organizations (NGOs) help the illegal migrants find a U.S. sponsor, create a “plausible” sob story, and collect application documents while they wait. And just like that, there are “big reductions” in those illegal border crossing numbers, while the crossings continue as constant as ever. Bensman wrote:

“The illusion provides the perfect propaganda opportunity for Biden’s government: fraudulently claim border security success as though foreign nationals had gone home or settled in some other country…

Under the illusion is this hard fact: the CBP One process does not enforce any of the U.S. immigration laws that actually deter mass migration by detaining and deporting. It does nothing to reduce the historic volume of foreign nationals who are pouring in nonstop.

Instead, the program channels those migrants directly into American cities that will, in growing numbers, declare emergencies and demand federal bailouts to handle the influx. It does nothing to alleviate the transformative impacts of mass migration on civil society.“

If anything, Bensman predicted, the new program will probably tempt even more illegal migrants to America. Henceforth illegals won’t have to spend thousands of dollars being smuggled across the border by criminal cartels, and they will get a coveted U.S. work permit. There are already thousands lining up for the “pre-legalization” CBP One program, Bensman said. Expect that number to increase.

CBP Commissioner Troy Miller reportedly boasted that the CBP One program announcement caused border crossings of illegal Venezuelan migrants to go from 1,100 a day to 100 a day. And the program will supposedly allow “only” 30,000 Venezuelans, Cubans, Haitians, and Nicaraguans per month (the fact that that’s meant to be an improvement is terrifying). But that’s all lacking the critical context, which is that the Biden administration plans to claim it fixed the border crisis while continuing to allow illegal aliens to pour into America.

Der apfel fält nicht weit vom baum (The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree)

Klaus Schwab’s Father Ran ‘National Socialist Model Company,’ Exploited Nazi Slave Labor.

Davos frontman Klaus Schwab’s daddy, Eugen Schwab, while the Third Reich was ravaging Europe in the 1930s and 40s, served as managing director of Escher Wyss Ravensburg, an engineering firm that constructed turbines and fighter plane parts for the regime.

While the elder Schwab worked in this capacity, the Nazis awarded Escher Wyss Ravensburg the prestigious title of “National Socialist Model Company” for all of its hard work in the service of the Führer.

To achieve this recognition, Escher-Wyss Ravensburg, under Eugen Schwab’s leadership, utilized Nazi slave labor and prisoners of war in its facilities.

Ravensburg itself, aside from the slave factory, was the site of numerous Nazi crimes against humanity, such as forced sterilization for the purpose of “racial improvement.” But to Eugen Schwab, that was just the cost of doing business with the Third Reich.

You want to make an omelet, you gotta break some eggs, right?

Klaus Schwab’s sanitized Wikipedia page contains none of the gruesome details of his daddy’s wartime activities, other than to say “his parents had moved from Switzerland to Germany during the Third Reich in order for his father to assume the role of director at Escher Wyss.”

Newsweek ran a corporate “fact check” in which they cherry-picked a falsely attributed image of Eugen in a Nazi uniform as a way to seem to disprove his connection to the Third Reich entirely. But deep into the article, Newsweek subtly admits that it’s all true — which almost no one will get to, thanks to short attention spans:

The posts shared online in May, 2022, claim Klaus Schwab’s father, Eugen Schwab, was a close ally of Hitler, and include a photo of the World Economic Forum leader alongside a man in Nazi uniform… the photo shared online is not of Eugen Schwab, but of Nazi general Walter Dybilasz… Klaus Schwab’s father, on the other hand, was the managing director of a subsidiary of Zurich-based engineering firm Escher Wyss. 

The history of Eugen’s relationship with Nazism in general is complex… Eugen Schwab was a member of some National Socialist organizations, but that alone does not prove any relationship to German high command or a belief in Nazi ideology. While the Escher Wyss branch in Ravensburg, Germany, (which Eugen managed) used prisoners of war and forced laborers, it is not clear whether the company was forced to do so by the Nazis or because of a lack of workers.

So, Eugen Schwab was an avowed National Socialist, and yes, okay, his firm did use Nazi slave labor. But, you see, that doesn’t mean he was a Nazi. And maybe Escher Wyss had to use slave labor to make their products for the Nazis because of a worker shortage.

This is a common tactic in corporate media: Take a false claim that circulates on the web (in this case, an image incorrectly identified as Eugen Schwab) and use that single post to discredit the entire factual connection between Schwab and the Nazis.

This took a study?

Study: The Case for Pediatric Gender Transitioning Is Built on Lies.

The transgender cult may be the most dangerous threat targeting today’s youth. Sadly, there are forces willing to go to extreme lengths to justify the barbaric brainwashing of kids.

In fact, it turns out that two famous Dutch studies that were the foundation of modern gender medicine are complete trash.

Last week, a group of American doctors published a paper criticizing the two studies that are considered the foundation of current pediatric gender medicine. These studies claim to have determined that patients’ mental health improved after they underwent gender transition procedures when, in reality, the methodology and conclusions of those studies were deeply flawed.

According to the new study, the widely-cited Dutch studies, which were published in 2011 and 2015 in the Journal of Sexual Medicine and Pediatrics, systematically excluded the experiences of participants who dropped out of the studies over time, creating a bias in favor of participants who reported positive experiences.

“The key problem in pediatric gender medicine is not the lack of research rigor in the past—it is the field’s present-day denial of the profound problems in the existing research, and an unwillingness to engage in high quality research requisite in evidence-based medicine,” the new study’s authors explain.

Related: The Rhetorical ‘Double-Bind’: How LGBTQ+++© Activists Rig the Discourse

“The field has a penchant for exaggerating what is known about the benefits of the practice, while downplaying the serious health risks and uncertainties,” the study reads. “As a result, a false narrative has taken root. It is that ‘gender-affirming’ medical and surgical interventions for youth are as benign as aspirin, as well-studied as penicillin and statins, and as essential to survival as insulin for childhood diabetes.”

The big problem with these bogus studies is that the medical community often cites them to justify so-called “gender-affirming care” for young people. Joe Biden’s assistant health secretary, Richard “Rachel” Levine, has falsely claimed that “there is no argument” about “gender-affirming care” among pediatricians and doctors who specialize in adolescents.

“The positive value of gender-affirming care for youth and adults is not in scientific or medical dispute,” Levine falsely claimed. Not only is there no consensus on this issue in the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Finland, and France have all dialed back on pushing transgender “treatments” for children. Why? Because they recognize the harm it does to kids. But the Biden administration has gone all in on pushing the transing of kids—including pushing for taxpayer dollars to fund these so-called “treatments.”

In recent weeks, experts have concluded that there is no biological evidence for gender identity, and another study has confirmed that so-called “gender-affirming care” for children has no medical benefits.

CDC Puts Anti-Gun Politics Over Science

As astute gun owners know, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has been engaged in gun control politics for decades. In the 1990s, their gun control activism most often took the form of funding anti-gun social “science” aimed at convincing Americans and policymakers to forego and diminish the right to keep and bear arms. Now further evidence has come out showing that the agency not only promotes junk science, but suppresses legitimate research into the benefits of gun ownership.

In mid-December, internet publication The Reload published an article titled, “Emails Show CDC Removed Defensive Gun Use Stats After Gun-Control Advocates Pressured Officials in Private Meeting.” The item detailed email correspondence between the CDC and anti-gun activists in which gun control supporters sought to suppress research from Florida State University Criminology Professor Gary Kleck indicating that Americans use firearms to defend themselves millions of times per year on the agency’s website.

[NRA-ILA Grassroots Alert readers are encouraged to read this important article from The Reload in its entirety by clicking on the link in the article title above.]

Describing the anti-gun lobbying influence effort on the CDC, the article stated,

The lobbying campaign spanned months and culminated with a private meeting between CDC officials and three advocates last summer, a collection of emails obtained by The Reload show. Introductions from the White House and Senator Dick Durbin’s (D., Ill.) office helped the advocates reach top officials at the agency after their initial attempt to reach out went unanswered. The advocates focused their complaints on the CDC’s description of its review of studies that estimated defensive gun uses (DGU) happen between 60,000 and 2.5 million times per year in the United States–attacking criminologist Gary Kleck’s work establishing the top end of the range.

Explaining how the CDC cooperated with the anti-gun pressure campaign, the item noted,

Despite initially standing behind the description in the defensive gun use section of its “fast facts” website on gun violence, the CDC backtracked after a previously-undisclosed virtual meeting with the advocates on September 15th, 2021.

“We are planning to update the fact sheet in early 2022 after the release of some new data,” Beth Reimels, Associate Director for Policy, Partnerships, and Strategic Communication at the CDC’s Division of Violence Prevention, said in one email to the three advocates on December 10th. “We will also make some edits to the content we discussed that I think will address the concerns you and other partners have raised.”

The research at issue is Professor Kleck’s findings in the 1993 National Self-Defense Survey, the results of which were published in a 1995 Journal of Law and Criminology article titled, “Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense with a Gun.” The article stated that survey data indicated that “each year in the U.S. there are about 2.2 to 2.5 million DGUs of all types by civilians against humans.”

After Kleck’s findings were published, the CDC conducted its own surveys of DGUs in its Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System survey from 1996 to 1998. However, the agency didn’t make its research public at the time – perhaps because the results did not conform to the CDC’s institutional anti-gun bias.

The CDC survey data finally came to light in 2018. Analyzing the CDC survey along with his own survey, Kleck found that the CDC data indicated that there are likely more than 1 million DGUs per year.

A subsequent survey, conducted in 2021 by Georgetown University Political Economist William English, placed the number of DGUs somewhere in between what the CDC and Kleck’s survey data indicated. In a research paper summarizing his findings, English noted,

The survey further finds that approximately a third of gun owners (31.1%) have used a firearm to defend themselves or their property, often on more than one occasion, and it estimates that guns are used defensively by firearms owners in approximately 1.67 million incidents per year.

In speaking to The Reload, Kleck referred to the CDC’s most recent actions against science as “blatant censorship.” The professor went on to say “CDC is just aligning itself with the gun-control advocacy groups… It’s just saying: ‘we are their tool, and we will do their bidding.’ And that’s not what a government agency should do.”

Explaining how CDC’s suppression hurts public understanding of the firearms issue, Kleck added, “You can’t understand any significant aspects of the gun-control debate once you eliminate defensive gun use… It becomes inexplicable why so many Americans oppose otherwise perfectly reasonable gun-control measurements. It’s because they think it’s gonna lead to prohibition, and they won’t have a gun for self-defense.”

On December 22, Senators Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) and Bill Cassidy (R-La.) wrote to the CDC demanding answers about the removal of DGU data from the CDC’s website. The letter stated,

Lobbying groups should not be able to influence your research and reporting. This is a dereliction of duty by the CDC. The CDC must return to providing transparent and data-driven reporting on DGUs, and to provide Congress and the American people with an explanation of why the CDC allowed gun control advocates to censor valid research and reporting conducted on the subject of defensive gun use.

NRA-ILA looks forward to the agency’s response to the senators and will continue to monitor this unacceptable anti-gun activism at the CDC moving forward.