Category: Deceit O’ The Day

Biden Spent Billions to Prosecute 31 People

It’s already saving lives. There are fewer deaths occurring,

Joe Biden
President United States of America
June 16, 2023
The US passed a landmark gun deal one year ago. Is it working?

Really? How does he know? The FBI crime numbers cannot be trusted.

And from the same article:

The event comes as available data suggests the U.S. is seeing a year-over-year decline in murders nationwide. At the same time, mass shootings appear to be accelerating.

And the numbers they do claim are very telling:

At least 31 people have been charged in 17 cases under new federal straw purchasing and trafficking criminal offenses, data from federal prosecutors through April shows.

31?!!! And strawman purchases were already illegal. Out of probably 15 to 20 million sales they charged 31 people under, what they claim, is a new law. And they think this is success?

Denials stemming from enhanced background checks for people under 21 blocked more than 130 firearm purchases between November and April, Peter Carr, a spokesman for the Department of Justice, previously told USA TODAY.

How many of those 130 blocked purchases resulted in an increase in public safety? And how many of those block purchases resulted in a decrease in public safety?

And at what cost?

It created a $750 million funding pot to incentivize states to create “red flag laws,” closed the “boyfriend loophole” by adding convicted domestic violence abusers in dating relationships to the national criminal background check system, clarified the definition of a “federally licensed firearm dealer,” made it a federal crime to traffic in firearms, stiffened penalties for “straw purchases” made on behalf of people who aren’t allowed to own guns and enhanced background checks for buyers under 21.

The law also appropriated billions in funding for schools and mental health services. That includes $150 million for a national 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, $250 million for states and territories to enhance community mental health services, $500 million to increase the number of school-based mental health providers and $500 million to train school counselors, social workers and psychologists. It also set aside $250 million in funding for community-based violence prevention initiatives.

Billions were spent to prosecute 31 people and block sales to 130 people who, almost for certain, were not a threat to anyone.

And this is even with them playing their game by their rules instead of based on whether what they are doing is a violation of the Second Amendment, which it is.

They lie, they deceive, and they ignore the specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms.

Nashville Coverup Escalates: Tennessee’s Governor Must Cancel Special Session.

I was doing my usual Thursday morning stint on Tennessee Star Report radio, when host Michael Patrick Leahy read aloud the latest news from the Metro Nashville Police Department (MNPD) regarding the ongoing controversy concerning the dreadful slayings of six people, three of them 9-year-olds, at the Covenant School that has become something of a national scandal.

The Epoch Times’ Chase Smith has done an admirable job of reporting the content of the police statement, although suffice it to say that Leahy and I both were stunned at the extent of what appeared to us as an enduring and expanding coverup.

The most important parts of the claims by MNPD Assistant Chief Mike Hagar were that the investigation of the fatal shootings by Audrey Hale is still an “active, ongoing criminal investigation and an open matter” that wouldn’t be concluded for “12 months.”

This, although the sole perpetrator, Audrey Hale, is herself dead, shot in the midst of her heinous crimes on March 27, approaching two months ago. (I “misgender” her as “she,” although Hale identified and dressed as a male. Call me old fashioned, but unlike a certain new Supreme Court justice, I understand our sexes to have been determined for the 300,000 years of homo sapiens, and probably before, by the number of immutable X and Y chromosomes in the 30 trillion to 40 trillion cells in our bodies.)

As for the 12 months, in government speak that often expands to 24 or even 36 months and, most likely of all—in the grand tradition of the FBI, which may be calling the shots here anyway—to never.

Meanwhile, without public access to the “manifesto” and other documents, not to mention the most important of all, the toxicology report (I will explain), Gov. Bill Lee will convene a special session of the Tennessee General Assembly on Aug. 21 to, in the official word of TN.gov., “strengthen public safety and preserve constitutional rights.”

Covers its bases, no? Sounds good. But what’s really behind this is an attempt to push through Lee’s version of a so-called red flag law and probably some form of gun control, both of which most of those who voted for him would never subscribe to, and neither of which have ever been shown to be effective.

Indeed, with gun control, as in Chicago, it’s arguably the reverse. The more control, the more corpses.

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CAUGHT! Biden using fake data to gaslight Americans on mass shootings
Biden proves once again he’ll do anything to win his war on our guns.

Joe Biden has always struggled with the truth. Whenever he wanders off script and speaks extemporaneously, he invents personal anecdotes — boldfaced lies, actually — in which he assigns himself the starring role.

Whether he’s getting arrested in South Africa for trying to bust into Nelson Mandela’s prison cell, or bravely confronting AR-toting hunters in a Delaware swamp or going toe-to-toe with the arch-criminal, CornPop, no one actually believes him or takes his tall tales seriously. It’s just Joe being Joe, right?

But when Biden’s lies are actually signed and set into type, it’s a bit more serious. He loses his normal litany of excuses: he was tired, he was confused, he misread the teleprompter, he was sundowning.

In an editorial published Sunday in USA Today and reprinted in scores of other newspapers, the Fabulist-in-Chief dropped a whopper — even for someone who has lowered the presidential-truthfulness bar so significantly.

The editorial was titled, “President Biden: I’m doing everything I can to reduce gun violence, but Congress must do more.”

Most of Joe’s opus we’ve heard many times before. AR-15s are bad, so is anyone who owns one. Red flag laws and universal background checks will save the world. Congress needs to do more by banning “assault weapons” and standard-capacity magazines, and of course his ubiquitous: “For God’s sake, do something.”

But then there’s this: “We need to do more. In the year after the Buffalo tragedy, our country has experienced more than 650 mass shootings and well over 40,000 deaths due to gun violence, according to one analysis.”

The hyperlink whisks readers to the Gun Violence Archive — a blatantly anti-gun nonprofit we debunked years ago for their fake news.

Founded in 2013, the GVA has become the legacy media’s source of choice for mass shooting data because they hype the numbers. The GVA came up with its own broad definition of a mass shooting. Anytime four or more people are killed or even slightly wounded with a firearm, the GVA labels it a mass shooting, and politicians, gun control advocates and the legacy media treat their reports as if they’re pure gold. For example, according to the GVA there were 417 mass shootings in 2019. The FBI says there were 30, because it uses a much narrower and more realistic definition.

USA Today’s vaunted fact-checkers never balked at Biden’s use of the fake GVA data. They use it too, as does CNN, MSNBC and FOX News, so they didn’t question the President’s numbers, even though they equate to nearly two mass shootings per day. They were just happy he chose their struggling newspaper to publish his biased screed.

To be clear, if anyone actually believes Biden wrote this editorial himself, I’ve got an ocean-front property in Rehoboth Beach to sell them, complete with a $500,000 taxpayer-funded wall. Lately, Biden has difficulty even reading much less writing. He spars daily with the teleprompter, and the teleprompter usually wins. Of course, he didn’t write the editorial, but that doesn’t matter. It bears his byline: “Joe Biden is the 46th president of the United States,” so he gets the credit and/or the blame. That’s the way the presidency is supposed to work.

That Team Biden would have to juke the stats to buttress their latest anti-gun hit piece is no surprise. They’re getting desperate. No one is listening. Guns are still flying off the shelves, especially ARs, and Black females are now the largest gun-buying demographic, because they realize Biden’s rants are hollow and won’t protect them or their families.

Biden’s editorial should be seen as a warning: He will do anything it takes to win his war against our guns, including gaslighting the American people with fake news. That, too, is no surprise.

Massaging The Shooter Narrative

I was actually looking for some different information last night when I came across this article, but after scanning it quickly for what I WAS looking for, I had to save it for a chance to Fisk it later on.

The link goes to a New Orleans TV station WDSU, but the piece is identified in several places as straight out of the Associated Press feed, so I’m not going to crack on the station for this. They are merely the presentation vehicle.

The article is titled “Recent high-profile mass shootings in the United States” and what stopped me in my tracks wasn’t so much the litany of horror. That tears your heart out no matter when or where it happens or to whom or how.

No, what made me pause in the midst of that carnage was the verbiage. There’s a deliberate pattern in the recitation of evil that you can’t avoid, and it makes the underlying intent of the “reporting” all the more suspect for the very obviousness of what’s said and what isn’t.

Multiple innocent lives are gone – all taken by another human being (or beings) in every single case in this supposedly dispassionate register of tragedies. It’s what’s missing that gives one reason to carefully reread and see if you’ve missed something.

I’ll assure you now – you haven’t.

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Comment(s) O’ The Day
If it contained something bad for Republicans, it would have been leaked by now. Is that cynical of me? Yeah, and also correct.

If they don’t want you to know about it, it’s because they don’t want you to think and feel the things you’d think and feel if you did know about it.

Nashville Police Deny Daily Wire’s Request For Trans Shooter’s Manifesto.

Nashville police have denied The Daily Wire‘s request for a copy of a manifesto or diary from the transgender killer who shot up a Christian school March 27, leaving six dead, including three 9-year-olds.

It has been 25 days since the shocking shooting spree, in which the killer — a woman who identified as a man and who this publication is not naming to avoid giving notoriety to shooters — carried out the massacre at the Covenant School before being gunned down by police. City Council members said shortly after the incident that there was a “manifesto” and that it would be released. But since then, state and local police have gotten “assistance” from the FBI in psychologically profiling the killer, which has been used as a reason to block release of the materials.

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Fauci’s legacy

Judicial Watch Obtains Docs Showing U.S. Funded Wuhan Lab Research From 2013-2020.

Nothing like rewarding scientists from a hostile foreign nation for creating catastrophe! According to documentation obtained by Judicial Watch through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, the U.S. government (NIH) didn’t just fund bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan lab leading up to the leak of COVID-19. The government gave another grant for work with the Wuhan lab in July 2020, long after COVID-19 likely leaked from the lab where it was probably created.

There is a lot of significant and interesting information in the Judicial Watch press release about the documentation. This includes EcoHealth Alliance’s initial “Application for Federal Assistance” submitted on June 5, 2013, which said it aimed to create mutant bat viruses and see how coronaviruses infect humans.

To understand the risk of zoonotic CoV [coronavirus] emergence, we propose to examine 1) the transmission dynamics of bat-CoVs across the human-wildlife interface; and 2) how this process is affected by CoV evolutionary potential, and how it might force CoV evolution. We will assess the nature and frequency of contact among animals and people in two critical human-animal interfaces: live animal markets in China and people who are highly exposed to bats in rural China.

The mention of live animal markets is very interesting since global elites tried to claim (and still do) that COVID-19 actually originated in a live animal market in Wuhan. Perhaps it did, but naturally or through this U.S.-funded Chinese lab program? Judicial Watch says:

EcoHealth Alliance’s $3.3 million grant to fund a project titled “Understanding the Risk of Coronavirus Emergence” was initially to run from October 1, 2013, to September 30, 2018. The first “Project/Performance Site Location” is the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Three other Chinese sites follow: East China Normal University in Shanghai, Yunnan Institute of Endemic Disease Control and Prevention in Dali, and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention of Guangdong in Guangzhou.

A 2013 EcoHealth grant application lists a scientist from the Chinese CDC, which is a Chinese government agency. In China, all labs are answerable to the CDC; but, in this case, the link between NIH funding and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) government seems disturbingly direct.

The various parts of the projects examined by Judicial Watch include DNA sequencing, “testing predictions of CoV inter-species transmission,” testing viruses of “varying pathogenicity” on “humanized mice,” and “the infectious clone of WIV1 was successfully constructed using reverse genetic methods.” Some scientists previously argued that COVID-19 was created in a lab and then reverse engineered to make the virus seem naturally evolved from bats.

A document dated July 13, 2020, detailed NIH funding (or rather funding from NIH’s NIAID, then headed by Anthony Fauci) and other information for a project titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.” It was for Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth. NIH increased funding to EcoHealth Alliance, including providing “funds for activity with Wuhan Institute of Virology in the amount of $76,301.” How can NIH possibly excuse this July 2020 grant? The U.S. government should not be funding research in China at all, since all labs are answerable to the anti-U.S. CCP government, but funding research at the Wuhan laboratory after the allegations that COVID-19 was created there and leaked from there is completely unacceptable.

This week, Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) released the “bombshell” COVID-19 origins report. It provided evidence to support the lab leak theory of COVID’s origins, with the help of U.S. government funding. Marshall estimated two leaks from the Wuhan lab, with the first one happening by September or October 2019, and possibly as early as July 2019 (a whole year before the Wuhan lab got another NIH grant). The documents obtained by Judicial Watch strengthen the evidence Marshall has.

So the U.S. government funded the research that likely created COVID-19 in a Chinese lab, and continued to fund research at that lab after COVID-19 had been wreaking havoc on the world. If only we could trust our government, and conspiracy theories didn’t keep turning out to be true.

So Called ‘Assault Weapons’ ~ When Words Are Used Instead of Guns To Disarm Us

Let’s start off at the very beginning, following the “Yellow Brick Road,” with a few definitions and essential information for those new gun owners, non-gun owners, and anti-gun critters. Please note I’m sorry if I insult those already in the know!
Definition of the word ASSAULT

assault – verb: a violent physical or verbal attack.

Definition of the word WEAPON

weapon – noun: something (such as a club, knife, gun, etc.) used to injure, defeat, or destroy someone or something.

Definition of a RIFLE

rifle – noun: a shoulder fired firearm with a rifled bore (spiral grooves in the bore).

Definition of a PISTOL

pistol – noun: a specifically handheld firearm whose chamber is integral with the barrel.

Definition of a SEMIAUTOMATIC FIREARM

semiautomatic firearm – noun: a firearm able to fire repeatedly through an automatic reloading process but requiring the trigger to be pulled for each successive shot (a semiautomatic rifle or pistol).

Definition of a MACHINE GUN

machine gun – noun: a firearm for sustained rapid fire, or burst,  on a single pull of the trigger. (a.k.a. an automatic weapon).

Definition of the phrase ASSAULT RIFLE

assault rifle – noun: any of various intermediate-range, magazine-fed military rifles that can be set for automatic or semiautomatic fire (a.k.a. Select Fire).

So where does the infamous Assault Weapon fit into the linguistic picture? It doesn’t! It’s essentially MADE UP! Here’s a brief history:

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NRA was the first National Gun Control Organization

There are many in the gun community that are angry with Trump for the bump stock ban. I have never blamed Trump for the travesty that was the bump stock ban, because I don’t think that he is the one who sold out gun owners. Let’s be honest here- the NRA greenlighted the bump stock ban. This is nothing new, the NRA was pro gun control for most of its history.

In the 1920s, the National Revolver Association, the arm of the NRA responsible for handgun training, proposed regulations later adopted by nine states, requiring a permit to carry a concealed weapon, five years additional prison time if the gun was used in a crime, a ban on gun sales to non-citizens, a one day waiting period between the purchase and receipt of a gun, and that records of gun sales be made available to police. Florida becoming the 26th state to get rid of concealed weapons carry as a crime meant getting rid of that NRA proposal after 100 years.

During the 1930’s, the NRA helped shape the National Firearms Act of 1934. President Franklin Roosevelt wanted to make gun control a feature of the New Deal. The NRA assisted Roosevelt in drafting National Firearms Act and the 1938 Gun Control Act, the first federal gun control laws. These laws placed heavy taxes and regulation requirements on firearms that were associated with crime, such as machine guns, sawed-off shotguns and silencers. Gun sellers and owners were required to register with the federal government and felons were banned from owning weapons. Not only was the legislation unanimously upheld by the Supreme Court in 1939, but Karl T. Frederick, the president of the NRA, testified before Congress stating, “I have never believed in the general practice of carrying weapons. I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.”

After the assasination of President John F. Kennedy on  Nov. 22, 1963 by Lee Harvey Oswald with an Italian military surplus rifle purchased from a NRA mail-order advertisement, NRA Executive Vice-President Franklin Orth agreed at a congressional hearing that mail-order sales should be banned stating, “We do think that any sane American, who calls himself an American, can object to placing into this bill the instrument which killed the president of the United States.”

The NRA also supported California’s Mulford Act of 1967, which had banned carrying loaded weapons in public in response to the Black Panther Party’s impromptu march on the State Capitol to protest gun control legislation on May 2, 1967.

Then came 1968. The assassinations of JFK, jr and Martin Luther King prompted Congress to enact the Gun Control Act of 1968. The act brought back some proposed laws from 1934, to include minimum age and serial number requirements, and extended the gun ban to include the mentally ill and drug addicts. In addition, it restricted the shipping of guns across state lines to collectors and federally licensed dealers. The only part of the proposed law that was opposed by the NRA was a national gun registry. In an interview in American Rifleman, Franklin Orth stated that despite portions of the law appearing “unduly restrictive, the measure as a whole appears to be one that the sportsmen of America can live with.”

It wasn’t until a mini-revolt was staged at the 1977 NRA convention that there was a change in direction. A group of gun owners pushed back and deposed the old leaders in a move called the “Cincinnati Revolt.” Led by former NRA President Harlon Carter and Neal Knox, the revolt ended the tenure of Maxwell Rich as NRA executive vice president and introduced new bylaws. The Revolt at Cincinnati marked a huge change in direction for the NRA. The organization thereafter changed from “hunting, conservation, and marksmanship” and towards the defense of the right to keep and bear arms. The catalyst for this movement was that the NRA wanted to move its headquarters from Washington, DC to Colorado. The new headquarters in Colorado was to be an “Outdoors center” that was more about hunting and recreational shooting than it was the RKBA.

I became a member of the NRA about a decade later and remained an annual member, until I became a life member about 15 years later. I believed for years that the NRA was fighting the good fight for gun owners. It wasn’t.

The NRA was always influenced by a group of Fudds who supported hunting, but hated guns that weren’t for hunting. The bureaucrats who were a part of the NRA’s organization always tried to steer towards hunting, eventually caused the organization to morph into an organization that used the threat of Democrat gun bans for fundraising.

LaPierre was able to use the large flow of money to fund his luxurious life on the company dime, including over $13 million each year for travel and a postemployment golden parachute worth $17 million. LaPierre testified in the NRA’s bankruptcy hearings about his annual weeklong trips to the Bahamas on the company dime.

All they were good at was bargaining away gun rights to the Democrat gun banners in exchange for money and power. That’s why my political donations for the past 15 years went to other gun rights organizations, and yours should, too.

EDITED TO ADD:

Thanks to an anonymous poster, we get this quote, directly from the pages of the March 1968 edition of The American Rifleman, the NRA’s official monthly publication:

the NRA has consistently supported gun legislation which it feels would penalize misuse of guns without harassing law-abiding hunters, target shooters, and collectors”

NRA president Karl T. Frederick

Note that they make no mention of RKBA as anything other than support for the hobby of hunting. The article goes on to declare the NRA’s support for firearm registration, waiting periods, as well as prohibitions on sales of ammunition and firearms across state lines. The also express support for the prohibition of firearms to what they termed as :undesirables.”

The NRA is not, and apparently never has been, a true supporter of the Second Amendment and the Right to Keep and Bear Arms. They should rename it the National Hunting Association. It can collapse and die for all I care. We don’t need them.

The results of a ‘study’ often mirror the politics of who’s paying for it

That Kaiser Gun Study The Media Love Is Garbage

It’s become virtually impossible to find reliable data or polling on gun violence these days. A new Kaiser Family Foundation report being shared by virtually every major media outlet this week offers us a good example of why. The headlines report that “1 in 5 adults” in the United States claim that a “family member” has been “killed” by a gun. And, let’s just say, that’s a highly dubious claim.

There are 333 million people living in the United States, and somewhere around 259 million of them are over the age of 18. Twenty percent of those adults equals nearly 52 million people. There were more than 40,000 gun deaths in 2022, and around 20,000 of them were homicides — a slight dip from a Covid-year historic high that followed decades of lows. So, according to Kaiser’s polling, every victim of gun violence in the past few years had hundreds, if not thousands, of “family members.”

Now, to be fair, we can’t really run the numbers because Kaiser doesn’t define its terms or parameters. For example, what constitutes a “family member”? Is your second cousin a family member? Because if so, that creates quite the nexus of people. What about your stepbrother’s second cousin? Or how about your uncle who died in Iraq? Or how about that grandfather you never met who committed suicide in 1968? Kaiser could have asked people about their “immediate” relatives. The opacity is the point.

Then again, you can always spot a misleading firearms study by checking if the authors conflate suicides and murders. Kaiser does. The underlying problems leading to a homicide or a suicide are typically very different. So are the solutions. There are numerous countries with virtually no private gun ownership that have persistently high suicide rates. There isn’t any other societal problem in which Kaiser wouldn’t stress the distinction between criminality and mental health struggles.

But even if we count suicides, the claim is fantastical. As are many of the others. If we trust this poll, we would have to accept that around 50 million Americans were personally threatened with a gun. And that 54 percent of American adults — which can be extrapolated to mean 140 million adults — have personally or have a family member who has witnessed a shooting, been threatened by a gun, or been injured or killed by one. (Another 28 percent, or 72 million people, contend they have carried a gun in self-defense — which is also exceedingly unlikely.)

Kaiser’s “key findings” highlight many issues tied to anti-gun activist talking points. In the middle of polling, Kaiser conveniently switches up the definition of an “adult” from 18 and older to over 19, so it can regurgitate the claim that firearms are the leading cause of death among children. Kaiser wonders if your “health care provider” has talked to you about guns or gun safety. Did you know, Kaiser asks, that 6 in 10 parents with guns in their households say a gun is stored in the same location as ammunition?

What Kaiser doesn’t mention in its press-friendly “key findings” — and no media piece I’ve read mentions — is that 82 percent of those polled feel “very” or “somewhat safe” from gun violence in their own neighborhoods. Only 18 percent of Americans say they worry about gun violence on a daily or almost daily basis, while 43 percent say they worry about it “rarely” or “never.” So, you’re telling me, half of American adults have personally experienced gun violence themselves or toward someone in their family, but less than 20 percent worry about it often?

There are numerous other problems with Kaiser’s findings. Perhaps the most important, though, is the sample size. Granted, I’m no polling expert, but I suspect that the self-reported thoughts of 1,271 people — answering a bunch of poorly defined questions about a highly emotional and politically charged issue “online and by telephone” — should not be relied on with any certitude. And yet, there isn’t a single establishment media reporter writing about the report that exhibits a hint of skepticism.

The Louisville Shooter’s Inconvenient Social Media Being Conveniently Scrubbed

“Another Democrat killer,” Sebastian Gorka tweeted Monday as some of the Louisville shooter’s social media accounts came under scrutiny.

With credit to someone named Andy S., Gorka reposted the killer’s “anti-Trump and pro-lockdown posts on a Reddit under an account with the same name at his already nuked Twitter account.”

Louisville Shooter

The killer locked down his Twitter account “a bit back,” according to another user who claims “he RT’d and followed other stuff that’s more antifa/far left such as Vaush & antifa doxxing blog left coast right watch.” The amateur sleuth summed up the killer’s Twitter feed as “AOC fan, anti-trump, NRA hater, etc.”

The correct Twitter account seems to be “sturg__” and not the “csturg41” handle he used on Reddit and Instagram.

There’s nothing on the killer’s Reddit more recent than four months ago, but at least some of the lefty stuff he posted can still be seen here and here. Mostly, his Reddit is filled with sports, videogames, complaints about women, and parental issues.

But what was he posting to his more public accounts? We might never know.

UPDATE: Sure enough, Reddit scrubbed the csturg41 account just as I was wrapping up this column. Soon he’ll be as invisible as the Nashville trans shooter’s manifesto.

ASIDE: As a matter of personal policy, I don’t mention the names of mass shooters. Whatever fame/ignominy they seek in this life or the next, they won’t get any help from me. Remember their victims instead, please.

“Most of [the killer’s] accounts have been wiped,” according to Twitter user Darth Crypto. “I found songs he liked on SoundCloud, High School basketball pictures, family members, a Pokemon obsession, but nothing else.”

That matches what little I’ve been able to dig up. He also seems to have been active on a site called loveforquotes.com, but it’s been doing nothing but returning server errors when I try to dig into the “csturg41” links.

The killer also had an Instagram account, which has also been nuked. Nevertheless, at least one screencap survives, including threats made Monday morning right before the massacre.

Intel Point Alert posted that he “reportedly texted friend before shooting saying he was feeling suicidal and ‘would shoot up the bank’.”

The 25-year-old killer’s LinkedIn profile is still active and shows the obligatory “he/him” preferred pronouns. (No link because it displays his name.)

This is a developing story and I’ll post more as I’m able to find it — assuming there’s anything left to find.

BLUF
It’s always problematic conducting polls about individual rights or personal freedoms. As a few of my colleagues pointed out, our gun rights are not subject to popular opinions, and popular rights do not need constitutional protections.

“The bottom line is this,” one said. “Had the residents of 1963 Alabama been polled regarding integration of Birmingham schools, the results would have shown overwhelming opposition. That’s why rights are independent of public opinion.”

Fake News: Debunking the media’s favorite constitutional-carry poll
Poll claims majority of Floridians oppose unlicensed concealed carry.

By Lee Williams

A few weeks before the Florida legislature began debating an unlicensed concealed-carry bill, which Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law earlier this week, the legacy media started pimping a new public opinion poll that made some incredibly bold claims on the topic.

The poll, which was conducted by the University of North Florida’s Public Opinion Research Lab, or PORL, alleged that a vast majority of Floridians rejected the very idea of unlicensed concealed carry. Only 22% of Floridians supported the legislation and 77% opposed the bill, PORL claimed.

“Not only is there bipartisan opposition to this ‘constitutional carry’ bill, but folks seem to feel passionately about it with the majority (67%) saying they strongly oppose the bill. Even among Republicans, most people are against carrying weapons without a permit,” Dr. Michael Binder, PORL faculty director and professor of political science, said in a March 9 press release announcing the poll.

As you can imagine, a feeding frenzy ensued. Armed with Binder’s poll numbers, the legacy media went absolutely nuts.

“As Floridians apparently know better than their elected officials, public health research overwhelmingly shows that relaxing firearm regulations contributes to increases in violent crime as well as firearm-related death and injury,” Caroline Light, who teached gender and ethnic studies at Harvard University, wrote in a column titled “Expect more violent crime if Florida passes permitless gun carry,” which was published by the Tampa Bay Times.

“Permitless carry bill closer to law despite new poll showing that it’s vastly unpopular in Florida,” wrote the Florida Phoenix.

The media onslaught didn’t stop even after Gov. DeSantis signed the bill into law.

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Study makes bizarre leap about guns and lethality of shootings

There’s always going to be some anti-gun study floating around. We’ve seen that time and time again, and the media will always be happy to report on that study with nary a word of criticism about, well, anything.

In fact, it’s almost amusing how little criticism these studies get.

The latest, in fact, doesn’t actually make a whole lot of sense. Why? Because it implies that guns have somehow become more lethal.

A new study has found that fatalities from gun violence in the U.S. have increased over time, with more victims dying at the scene of a shooting before they can be transferred to medical treatment facilities.

The research, which was published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, examined gun violence incidents from 1999 to 2021, including firearm deaths due to assaults, unintentional injuries and unknown intent.

Using data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, researchers discovered the proportion of deaths at the scene increased from about 52% in 1999, to almost 57% in 2021.

Nearly 49,000 people died from gun violence in the U.S. in 2021, according to the CDC.

The research letter summarizing the study said this increase in fatalities was likely due to several factors, including higher guns sales, social isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic, and a “lack of new federal firearm legislation.”

Now, the good news is that this study didn’t count suicides. That’s actually surprising because it’s a handy way to skew findings in an anti-gun direction. So it seems the numbers are pretty accurate.

Where I have a problem, though, is their findings. Higher gun sales and lack of regulation don’t make guns more lethal. In fact, during the time period the study looked at, there weren’t really any advancements in firearm technology that would account for any such thing.

We also know that so-called assault weapons started becoming popular prior to this time period as a result of the 1994 Assault Weapon Ban, so it’s unlikely that would play a role. The researchers do try to blame larger capacity magazines, which might play a role–if you can put more rounds on target, the chances of killing someone are increased–but I don’t see how they figure they made that case.

In fact, they seem to suggest they didn’t even really look at that sort of thing when they note, “Further investigation of the temporal and geospatial distributions of prehospital deaths, weapons used, patterns of injury, and variations by race and ethnicity and age is needed to guide effective interventions.”

So they reached a conclusion as to why this was a problem when they don’t know any of that other stuff?

I don’t know, seems a little sketchy, which is why I say this study kind of doesn’t make any sense.

Yet again, though, they seem to just know the problem is the lack of federal gun control laws while not comprehending literally anything else? Yeah, no wonder people are growing to distrust research more and more.

It’s only too bad no one in the media will look at these studies twice.

Cue Captain Renault

Fact check: Democrats distort the record on guns after Nashville shooting

One week after a shooter opened fire in a Nashville, Tennessee, Christian school and killed six people, including three children, Democrats have continued to press for an assault-style weapons ban they have sought for years.

Democrats accused their Republican counterparts of blocking legislation that would protect children at school from mass shootings, while GOP lawmakers insisted that further limits on gun ownership would not have stopped the Nashville attack or others like it.

And while Democrats still don’t have the votes yet to advance an assault-style weapons ban, they have relied on occasionally misleading rhetoric to push for one anyway.

Here is a fact check of some of the latest Democratic gun arguments.

“[We’ve had] more school shootings than days in the year so far in 2023.” — Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), CBS’s Face the Nation, April 2

This is a misleading claim from Murphy.

The Connecticut Democrat has long served as a voice for gun control advocacy due to the painful history of his home state, where a school shooter claimed the lives of more than two dozen people, most of them children under 7 years old, in 2012. Murphy was the congressman representing the district of the school at the time.

He appeared to cite statistics from the K-12 School Shooting Database, a data resource compiled by the Violence Project.

That database claims 95 shooting incidents have taken place at schools so far in the 93 days of this year.

But the claim is misleading because of just how broadly the group defines a shooting incident. The total includes any incident “when a gun is fired, brandished (pointed at a person with intent), or bullet hits school property, regardless of the number of victims, time, day, or reason,” according to the Violence Project.

That means, for example, that a gang-related shooting near a school during which a bullet strikes a sidewalk on a weekend, with no students present, would still count toward the total number of school shootings for the year.

Most people would provide a very different definition of a school shooting, and the type of shooting that occurred in Nashville is much rarer. According to the same dataset, only 105 school shooting incidents since the 1970s have involved “indiscriminate shooting.”

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Karine Jean-Pierre Responds to Question About Gun Confiscation With an Alarming Answer

When faced with a relatively easy question about President Joe Biden’s position on gun confiscation policies, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre wouldn’t give a straight answer.

Invoking repeatedly failed candidate Robert Francis O’Rourke’s 2019 presidential debate promise that “hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47,” a reporter asked Jean-Pierre, “Does the president support not just banning the sale and manufacture of semi-automatic weapons but further than that, confiscation?”

It’s a straightforward question: Does President Biden think legally owned firearms should be confiscated by the federal government? But Jean-Pierre wouldn’t say “yes” or “no” in what should be an easy answer.

Instead, Jean-Pierre ignored the question and retreated to the usual Democrat talking points about “weapons of war” that “should not be on the streets across the country in our communities, they should not be in schools, they should not be in grocery stores, they should not be in churches — that’s what the president believes.”

Jean-Pierre went on to claim Biden “has done more than any other president the first two years” to address what Democrats say is a crisis of “weapons of war” in America. “Now it’s time for Congress to do the work,” Jean-Pierre said. “And he’s happy to sign, once that happens, he’s happy to sign that legislation that says, ‘ok we’re going to remove assault weapons, we’re going to have an assault weapons ban.'”

Even though Karine Jean-Pierre wouldn’t say whether Biden supports gun confiscation for “assault weapons,” President Biden’s record on the subject is not a winning one, nor is Democrats’ obsession with eradicating “assault weapons” — a purposefully non-specific term usually paired with other buzzwords such as “military style” — a policy goal that’s been shown to limit instances of violence in which the perpetrator uses a firearm.

As we at Townhall have repeatedly noted, Biden’s frequent claim that the “assault weapons” ban he worked on as a U.S. senator was effective just doesn’t pass muster. Biden and his administration’s claim that it’s possible to get the specter of “assault weapons” off America’s streets is one this administration employs frequently while attempting to take advantage of tragedies. “But according to data provided by the Department of Justice, the ban cannot be credited with reducing violence or mass shootings,” Katie noted after Biden repeated the claim last May. Here’s what the DOJ found:

A 2004 Department of Justice funded study from the University of Pennsylvania Center of Criminology concluded the ban cannot be credited with a decrease in violence carried out with firearms. The report is titled “An Updated Assessment of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban: Impacts on Gun Markets and Gun Violence, 1994-2003.”

“We cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation’s recent drop in gun violence. And, indeed, there has been no discernible reduction in the lethality and injuriousness of gun violence, based on indicators like the percentage of gun crimes resulting in death or the share of gunfire incidents resulting in injury,” the summary of the report on the study’s findings states. “The ban’s impact on gun violence is likely to be small at best, and perhaps too small for reliable measurement. AWs [assault weapons] were used in no more than 8% of gun crimes even before the ban.”

If banning “assault weapons” didn’t reduce gun violence, nor reduce the lethality of gun violence, then passing a new ban or going as far as confiscating such firearms — something Karine Jean-Pierre wouldn’t rule out this week — won’t make a difference either and will only further infringe on the rights of Americans.